The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  IRELAND

  The Irish, conscious of their unhappy past, have blamed everybody and everything for that terrible fate which made them a subject race for a longer period than any other nation. But there must have been a quality in their own mental make-up, a subtle defect of perception, which allowed the uninterrupted continuation of conditions that were well-nigh unique in the annals of history. And this weakness, for all I know, may have grown out of that very soil for which they were ever ready to the but rarely prepared to live.

  As soon as the Norman conquerors of England had put their recently acquired house more or less in order, they cast covetous glances across the Irish Sea which, like the North Sea, is really a submerged valley rather than a bona fide part of the ocean. Circumstances favoured their ambitious designs upon this rich island. The native chiefs were for ever quarrelling with each other. All efforts to turn the entire island into a single monarchy had failed. To the contemporaries of William the Conqueror, Ireland was “the trembling sod.” The country was full of wide-eyed priests eager to bring the blessings of Christianity unto the heathen of all the world, but there were no roads, there were no bridges, there were no means of communication of any sort. All those little elements that are of such tremendous importance in making ordinary daily life more agreeable and more harmonious had been conveniently overlooked. The centre of the island, being so much lower than the border regions, was a bog and stayed a bog. For marshes have an unfortunate habit of refusing to drain themselves, and when the human soul is filled with poetry the human hand is apt to neglect washing the dishes.

  The rulers of England and France, being mighty sovereigns, were on excellent terms with the powers that ruled the world at that time. When one of the warring Irish chieftains appealed to Henry II for aid against his more successful rivals (I have forgotten exactly how many there were of them at that moment), certain invisible wires were pulled in Rome, and Pope Adrian IV obligingly signed a piece of parchment which granted unto his English Majesty the hereditary lordship over Ireland. A Norman army, composed of two hundred knights and less than a thousand other troops, thereupon occupied Ireland and forced the feudal system upon a people who still dwelt amid the simple virtues and pleasures of a tribal system long since obsolete in the rest of the world. That was the beginning of a quarrel which officially at least did not end until only a few years ago, which even to-day may break into the front page news with the suddenness and the violence of a volcanic eruption.

  For the Irish landscape, like the Irish soul, lent itself ideally to a warfare of murder and ambush, a conflict in which high ideals and low deeds of treachery got themselves so hopelessly intermixed that it looked as if nothing short of the complete extermination of the original natives could settle the problem. Alas, these are no idle words. Upon several occasions the conquerors tried the experiment of wholesale slaughter and deportation, followed by the confiscation of all the worldly goods for the benefit of the King and his henchmen. What Cromwell, for example, did to the Irish after suppressing the rebellion of 1650, when the Irish with their marvellous sense of the unreal and their great intuitive gift for doing the wrong things at the wrong moment, had taken the side of Charles I, is still in the memory of many who were born centuries after that foul crime. As a result of this attempt to settle the Irish question definitely and for all time, the population of the island was reduced to 800,000, and the rate of starvation (the rate of living had never been very high) was raised to such proportions that those who could beg, borrow, or steal the money necessary for a short sea voyage moved hastily to foreign shores. The others remained behind, nursing their grievances, tending their cemeteries, and living on a diet of potatoes and hope.

  Geographically speaking, Ireland has always been part of northern Europe. Spiritually speaking, Ireland until very recently was situated somewhere in the heart of the Mediterranean. And even to-day, when the island has attained the rank of a Dominion and enjoys the same wide degree of self-government as Canada or Australia or South Africa, it continues to be a world apart. Instead of working for a united fatherland the people have divided themselves into two separate and mutually hostile parts. The southern and Catholic half, containing about 75% of the entire population, enjoys the status of a “sovereign independent democratic state” and has retained Dublin as its capital. Northern Ireland, consisting of six counties, inhabited almost exclusively by the descendants of Protestant immigrants, remains a part of the United Kingdom, and continues to send its representatives to the Parliament in London.

  For the first time in over a thousand years the fate of Ireland is in Irish hands. They now are at liberty to develop their ocean ports and turn Cork and Limerick and Galway into real harbours. They can experiment with those co-operative systems of agriculture which have proved such a success in Denmark. Their dairy products are able to compete on an equal basis with those of the rest of the world. As free and independent citizens they can at last play their part among the other nations of the world.

  But can they forget their past sufficiently to prepare intelligently for the future?

  Chapter XXII

  * * *

  RUSSIA, THE COUNTRY WHOSE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION PREVENTED HER FROM FINDING OUT WHETHER SHE WAS PART OF EUROPE OR OF ASIA

  Russia occupies one-seventh of all the dry land of our planet, it is more than twice as large as the whole of Europe, and three times as large as the United States, and it has as many inhabitants as the four biggest countries of Europe combined.

  The Russian State, more than any other country I can think of is a product of its physical background. It has never been quite able to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a part of Europe or of Asia. These mixed emotions caused a conflict of civilizations, and this conflict of civilizations is responsible for the present condition of affairs. All of which I hope to make clear with the help of a very simple map.

  But first let us try to answer the question, is Russia a European nation or an Asiatic one? For the sake of argument suppose that you belonged to the tribe of the Chukchi and were living on the shores of the Bering Strait and that you did not like the life you were leading (for which I would not blame you, for it is pretty poor pickings in that frozen corner of eastern Siberia) and suppose that you decided you would follow Horace Greeley’s advice and go west. And suppose that you were not much of a mountaineer and decided to stick to the flat plains of your childhood days. Well, you could walk west for a couple of years without any hindrances except that you would be forced to swim a dozen very wide rivers. In the end you would of course find yourself face to face with the Ural Mountains. But these Ural Mountains, which on all maps are shown as the dividing line between Asia and Europe, are not really much of an obstacle, for the first Russian explorers who moved into Siberia (fugitives from justice, but elevated to the dignity of ‘explorers’ as soon as they had found something valuable) carried their boats across the Urals.

  After leaving the Urals, another trek of half a year or so would bring you to the Baltic. You would therefore have wandered from the Pacific to the Atlantic (for the Baltic after all is merely a branch of the Atlantic) without ever having left fairly flat country. And all that country would have been part of a plain which covers almost one-third of Asia and one-half of Europe (for it connects with the great German plain which only stops when it reaches the North Sea) and which suffers from the tremendous physical disadvantage that it looks out only upon the Arctic Sea.

  EUROPE

  That was the curse of the old Russian Empire, which during hundreds of years spent most of its blood and treasure upon costly and useless efforts to reach ‘warm water’; and it is one of the greatest handicaps of the U.S.S.R. (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the political successors to the ancient and defunct house of Romanov) which is not unlike a structure consisting of eighty floors and eight thousand rooms, but with no other means of entrance or exit than two little windows connecting with the fire-escape of the third floor rear.

/>   The Russian ‘plain’ is forty times as large as France and one hundred and sixty times as large as England, and nearly three times as big as Europe, and it contains one-seventh of all the land of our entire planet. Its main river, the Lena, is as long as the Congo. Its second biggest river, the Ob, is as long as the Hwang-Ho. Of its lakes and inland seas, the Caspian in the west is twice as large as Lakes Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie combined. The Aral Sea in the centre is four thousand square miles larger than Lake Huron, while the Baikal Lake in the east is the largest fresh-water basin of Eurasia.

  The mountain peaks in the south, which cut this plain off from the rest of Asia, rise to a height which compares well with the highest summits of North America, for Mt McKinley in Alaska is 20,300 feet and Mt Elbruz in the Caucasus is 18,500 feet. The coldest spot on the surface of the earth is found in north-eastern Siberia, and the part of the plain that lies well within the Arctic Circle is as large as France, England, Germany, and Spain together.

  THE RUSSIAN LANDSCAPE

  In every possible way this region encourages extremes. No wonder therefore that the character of the people who inhabit these steppes and tundras has been so very definitely influenced by their natural surroundings and that they think and act according to a system or pattern which would be considered grotesque in any other part of the world. No wonder that after practising for centuries a most devout form of piety they suddenly outlawed God and banished Him and His name from the curriculum of their schools. No wonder that after submitting for hundreds of years to the rule of Tsars, whom they considered infallible and divinely inspired, they arose one day and destroyed their ruler, and thereupon accepted the tyranny of an impersonal economic doctrine which may promise to bring them great blessings in the future but which for the moment is as cruel and relentless and autocratic as any Tsar ever dared to be.

  THE OLD RUSSIAN TRADE-ROUTE

  The Romans had apparently never heard of Russia. The Greeks who went to the Black Sea for their grain (do you remember the story of the Golden Fleece?) just as we do to-day had there encountered certain tribes of wild men whom they called the ‘mare milkers’ and who, judging by a few pictures on vases that have come down to us, may well have been the ancestors of the modern Cossacks. But when the Russians made their definite appearance upon the horizon of history, they lived in the square formed by the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester in the south, the Vistula in the west, and the Pripet marshes and the Dnieper in the north and east. To the north, in the Baltic plains, lived their cousins, the Lithuanians and the Letts and the Prussians, for the latter, who have given their name to the leading German power of modern times, were originally a Slavic tribe. To the east of them lived the Finns who are now restricted to the territory that lies between the Arctic, the White Sea, and the Baltic, and to the south there were Celts and Germans or a mixture of both.

  A little later, when the Germanic tribes began their wanderings through central Europe, they found it convenient whenever they were in need of servants to raid the encampments of their northern neighbours. For these were a docile race and accepted whatever Fate brought them with a shrug of the shoulders and a silent “Well, such is life!”

  These northern neighbours seem to have had a name which to the Greeks sounded something like “Sclaveni.” The dealers in human flesh who raided the region of the Carpathians for their merchandise used to say that they had caught so many Slavs or slaves, until gradually the word ‘slave’ became a trade-name for all those unfortunate creatures who were the legal property of another. That those same Slavs or slaves should eventually have developed into the largest and most powerful centralized state of the modern world is one of the great jokes of history, but unfortunately the joke is on us. If our immediate ancestors had only been a little more far-sighted, we would never have found ourselves in our present predicament. As I shall try to explain to you in a very few words.

  The Slavs lived peacefully in their little triangle. They bred profusely. Soon they needed more land. The road to the west was blocked by powerful German tribes. Rome and Byzantium closed the gateways that led to the flesh-pots of the Mediterranean. There only remained the east, and so eastward they flocked in search of further territory. They crossed the Dniester and the Dnieper and did not stop until they reached the Volga, the Big River, the mother of all rivers, as the Russian peasant calls it, because with its superabundant fish-supply it was able to feed hundreds of thousands of people.

  This Volga, the longest of all European rivers, takes its origin far up in the north among the low hills of the central Russian plateau, those same hills which offered such splendid opportunities for the building of fortresses that most of the early Russian cities are to be found there. In order to reach the sea the Volga is obliged to skirt these mountains and to make a wide circle towards the east. It follows the outline of this ridge so carefully that the right bank is high and steep while the left bank is low and flat. The detour caused by the hills is considerable. In a straight line the distance from Tver, near where the Volga begins, to the Caspian Sea is only 1000 miles. But the road the river actually travels is 2300 miles long. As for the drainage or basin area of this biggest of all European rivers, it covers a territory as big as Germany, France, and England put together. But like everything else in Russia, this river must do something a little queer. The Volga is an eminently navigable river (before the Great War it had a fleet of its own of 40,000 little boats), but when it reaches the city of Saratov it has descended to sea-level. The last hundreds of miles flow below sea-level. This, however, is not as impossible as it sounds. For the Caspian Sea into which it flows, situated in the midst of its salty desert, has shrunk so considerably that it now lies eighty-five feet below the level of the Mediterranean. Another million years and it will rival the Dead Sea, which holds the record with 1310 feet below sea-level.

  Incidentally it is the Volga which is supposed to be the mother of all the caviare we eat. I purposely use the expression ’is supposed to be’ for very often the Volga is only the caviare’s step-mother and the tunny-fish rather than the sturgeon has been responsible for that far-famed Russian delicacy.

  Until the general introduction of the railways, rivers and oceans were the natural routes which men followed in search of trade or plunder. Cut off from the open sea by their Teutonic enemies of the west and their Byzantine competitors horn the south, the Russians were forced to depend upon their rivers as soon as they were obliged to look for more free land. And the history of Russia from the year 600 until the present day is for ever connected with the two big rivers, one the Volga, which I have just mentioned, and the other the Dnieper. But of the two, the Dnieper was by far the more important, for it was part of the main road that led from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and that was undoubtedly as old as the caravan route that led through the great German plain. Please look at the map and try to follow me there.

  Starting in the north we find that the Gulf of Finland is connected with Lake Ladoga by means of the Neva, the river on which Leningrad is situated. Then there is a small stream running due south from Lake Ladoga and which is known as the Volkhov, the connecting link between Lake Ladoga and Lake Ilmen. On the south side of Lake Ilmen we find the Lovat River. The distance between the Lovat River and the Duna River is not very great, and the country is flat enough to allow people to use it as a portage. Once he had overcome this difficulty, the traveller from the north could then float leisurely down the Dnieper until he finally reached the Black Sea, a few miles west of the Crimean Peninsula.

  Trade is no respecter of boundaries, and commerce is not very much interested in race. There were profits to be made by those who carried merchandise from the land of the Norsemen to that of the Byzantines, and that is why they came to establish themselves definitely in these parts of the world. During the first five or six hundred years of our era this was a trade-route, pure and simple, and it followed the depression between the hills of Galicia and Podolia (the outskirts of the Carpathians
) on the one side and the central Russian plateau on the other.

  But when this region got gradually filled up with Slavic immigrants, conditions changed. For then the trader became the political overlord and he ceased his endless wanderings and settled down to become the founder of a dynasty. The Russians, with all their brilliant qualities of mind, have never been very good administrators. They lack the more rigid mental precision of their Teutonic neighbours. Their soul is too full of doubt. Their mind is too often upon other things. And they are too fond of talk and speculation to be very good at a game that demands concentration and quick decisions. Hence the comparative ease with which a number of men were able to set themselves up as local potentates. Of course, at first their ambitions did not reach very far. But they needed a place to live in. And when they had built themselves a semi-royal residence, they needed homes for their retainers. That is the way most of the old Russian cities came into being.

  Cities, however, especially when they are young and vigorous, are apt to attract the attention of the outside world. Missionaries in Constantinople heard of this wonderful new opportunity to save souls. They paddled northward along the river Dnieper as the Norsemen had paddled southward several centuries before. They combined forces with the local rulers. The monastery became the annexe of the palace. The stage was set for the Russia of the Romanovs. Kiev in the south and the rich commercial city of Novgorod the Great (no relation to Nijni-Novgorod, which is situated on the Volga where the Oka joins it) became so opulent and famous that even western Europe heard of their existence.