THE MAP OF EUROPE

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 12 August 1914, Page 5

THE MAP OF EUROPE

ITS UNDERLYING REALTIES

the £n? w y two - years as°' whe" rhlane felloe had some interesting things to say about the distribution of whTeV" EllK>pe M Pv° lt ions of his «rtide; it ■ ei<\ P»bhshed m the Pall Mai I SB??" 6 * ha- V? a + ber lng u P°n tile «tu-l ation that exists today. "It is characteristic of our time " he wrote, "tnat people are taught at ! school (and are daily reminded in their newspapers and in their books of reference) or esitaii, easily remembered labels wnien are not only not the realities of! the map of Europe, hv.t which actually I serve to confuse or hide those realiites. | It would be a good thing f or the in-! struct™ of pub ,j c opinion (and something which would make the immediate future or those Eastern parts a little less startling to us in thp West) Jf in _ stead of printing maps with the political boundaries, marked 'Russia,' 'Germany,' 'The Austrian Empire' 'Rumania,' ere. the geographers were onlvi to give i:.s mans of the following three kinds Sv.cn maps exist, but are eitherl , imperfect or rare, and never put before1 the mass of men. j . (1.) A map covered by languages,! i showing the various Slavonic languages I m various tints of the same color, lay I yellow; the main- German dialects in1 varying tints of another contrasting! color, say green: and in a third equally1 contrasting color (.say red), the curious-1 ly isolated patches many of them small, , where the Mongol tongues, Magyar and' Turkish are spoken. Then the Ruman-I lan ton fine would have to be put in in ! a fourth color—blue, for instance. THE ELEMENT OF LANGUAGE. "From such a map the Western ' reader, the English reader among others, would at least gather one element I (not the most important) in the politics! or any region—the element of lan^u-1 age. ° i "■Re would see the very great extent of Poland—a country as individual and as indestructible as Ireland—and he! "? url d sf\ the «'ay in which the revival ot Izech has thrust a great wedge of Siav speech into the very heart of the1 Germanics. He would see the Catholic! blavs, though they have to-day no inde-! pendent country to their name pressing the Germans westward and holding half! Central Europe. He would see what a I very large area the Serb occupies, judgby his language; covering all ]\'o<itenegro, all old Servia, and graspiii" "- ' ' very broad and deep and increasing £-r r . • ' ot what is still practically Austria's. Ho would see Rumania about doubled in! size, and having the Carpathians not tor a boundary, but as a backbone. THE GERMAN BASTION. He would learn that vorv necessary truth about Priir/sin, which *so very few! people appreciate, namely, that Prussia! is a bordei state, md Berlin something! very like a frontier town; a bastion ori outer German civilisation against the Slav already feeling the infiltration of i the Slav. It is true that Germanspeaking people line all the coast far up towards the north, and round what may be called "the corner of the Baltic," but the Slav speech comes now to within a short distance of the sea, and eastward presses close on the Older in the north, far beyond the Elbe in the south, while whole colonies still move westward intact into the coalfields of! \Y es tern Germ an y. CONTRASTING RELIGIONS. (2) But language is not the determining thing in political history. A stronger influence is religion. And I would have a second map in which this Eastern Europe, now in movement, should be .shown in some detail with the contrasting religions of all those regions which are just about to make new history. I would have the Greek and Latin Churches in different tints of the same color, say a light and a dark red. for they have so much in common. I would have the Protestant Churches. German for the most part, in a contrasting color, as a blue; the Jews in a third contrasting color, a green; and the Mahommedan patches in a fourth, quite diffeient —a white or black. A CURIOUS DISPERSION. A map of the eastern march of Europe so constructed Mould be astonishingly interesting, and again, like the! map of the languages, show you a real; clement in the situation, which yon would never dream of from the common atlases. You would see upon it the curious dispersion of Protestant Colonies throughout the Hungarian Plain: the very large body of Jews —nearly half of all the Jews of the world--scattered over Poland and the south of Russia. Yon would sec the profound, the spiritually impassable, moral frontier which still divides the German peoples one- from another, and you would understand why the Hnpsluirgs at Vienna can claim so much influencel over such varied populations. (3) But you would need a third map: a man showing the dr-nse industrial bolt of Silesia, the way in which th« German language in particular follows arms or "tentacles of industrial expansion, past or presenr, tmi] the way in which the great towns, such as Warsaw. ore springing up fill over this Eastern belt of country. I say "springing no though they are centuries old, for ~Wt\rsaw is for the most part like an A^ori- : enn city, so new is evervthinrr. ond so rapid has been its development."