The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  Time will show us what is to become of this strange experiment, this Asiatic mysticism combined with the European sense of actuality. But the Great Russian Plain has come to life and the rest of the world would do well to take notice, for Bolshevism may be only a dream, but Russia is a fact.

  Chapter XXIII

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  POLAND, THE COUNTRY THAT HAD LONG SUFFERED FROM BEING A CORRIDOR AND THEREFORE NOW HAS A CORRIDOR OF HER OWN

  Poland suffers from two great natural disadvantages. Its geographic position is most unfortunate, and its nearest neighbours are its fellow-Slavs of Russia. A real feeling of brotherhood is said to be a wonderful thing, but rarely as practised between nations of a similar race.

  We do not know where the Poles originally came horn. Like the Irish, whom they resemble in so many ways, the Poles are intensely patriotic, ever ready to die for their country but rarely willing to live and work for it. The record of the valorous deeds of their ancestors, as compiled by their own leading historians, makes the earliest Polish heroes stowaways on Noah’s Ark. But when the Poles are first mentioned in any reliable historical document, Charlemagne and his braves had been in their graves for almost two entire centuries. Some fifty years after the battle ol Hastings, however, the word ‘Poland’ began to mean something more than the name of a vague territory that was supposed to lie somewhere in the wilderness of the Far East.

  To the best of our present knowledge the Poles lived originally near the mouth of the Danube, were set upon by invaders from the east, were forced to pull up stakes, and moved eastward until they reached the Carpathian Mountains, They thereupon passed through the regions just evacuated by the other great branch ol the Slavic race, the Russians, and finally found a safe place ol refuge among the primeval forests and the marshes of that part ol the great European plain which is situated between the Oder and the Vistula.

  ICE

  WHAT LIES UNDERNEATH THE MAP OF THE ARCTIC OCEAN

  They could not possibly have chosen a worse situation. A man sitting on a chair in the middle of the main entrance to Euston Station enjoys about as much quiet and privacy as a farmer in this territory, which is in reality the front door of Europe and the only passageway at the disposal of those who wanted to go west to conquer the European lands bordering on the North Sea, or those who wanted to go east to plunder Russia. The constant necessity of being prepared to fight on two fronts at the same time gradually turned every Polish landowner into a professional soldier and made every castle into a fortress. As a result, the military side of life was stressed at the expense of everything else. And commerce never took hold in a country where a state of war was the normal condition of life.

  There were a few towns, but all of them were situated in the centre of the country and along the banks of the Vistula. Krakow, in the south, has been built where the Carpathian Mountains dissolved themselves into the plains of Galicia. Warsaw, in the middle of the Polish plain, and Danzig, near the mouth of the river, depended for their business life on foreign merchants. Further inland, however, the country was almost empty, for there were no other rivers until one reached the Dnieper, which was in Russian territory, and Kovno, the old capital of Lithuania, never grew beyond the status of a small princely residence.

  Such buying and selling as were absolutely necessary were in the hands of the Jews, who had fled to the outskirts of Europe when the Crusaders in their holy zeal had slaughtered the inmates of several of the better-known Ghettoes of the Rhine region. A few hardy Norsemen, such as had founded the Russian State, might have done the country no end of good. But they never came to this part of the world. Why should they? There was no convenient trade route running north and south or east and west, and there was no city of Constantinople at the other end of the long trail to reward them for the fatigue and the hardships of their trip.

  And so the Polish people were caught between the Germans, who hated them because, although they were fellow-Roman Catholics, they also were Slavs; and the Russians, who despised them because, although they were fellow-Slavs, they were not Greek Catholics; and the Turks, who loathed them, because they were both Christians and Slavs.

  If the energetic Lithuanian dynasty, which did so much for the country during the Middle Ages, had survived, things might have gone a great deal better, but in 1572 the Jagiellans died out and upon the death of the last king the nobles, grown rich during the many years of frontier fighting and the enjoyment of almost despotic rights on their vast but isolated estates, succeeded in turning the country into an elective monarchy. That elective monarchy lasted from 1572 until 1791, and when it was destroyed it had long since degenerated into a very painful joke.

  For the throne of Poland was simply sold to the highest bidder and no questions asked. Frenchmen and Hungarians and Swedes in turn were rulers of a kingdom which meant nothing to them except as a possible source of graft and revenue. When these monarchs omitted to surrender part of their spoils to their henchmen, the Polish nobles did what their Irish friends had done a thousand years before. They called in their neighbours to come and help them ‘get their rights.’ Those neighbours, Prussia and Russia and Austria, were only too happy to oblige, and Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation.

  In 1795, during the last of the three great divisions, Russia got 180,000 square miles with 6,000,000 people. Austria got 45,000 square miles with 3,700,000 people, and Prussia got 57,000 square miles with 2,500,000 people. This hideous wrong was not undone until one hundred and twenty-five years later. And then the Allies, in their fear of Russia, went to another extreme. They not only made the new Polish Republic much larger than it had any right to be, but furthermore, in order to give Poland a direct outlet to the sea, they established the so-called ‘Polish Corridor,’ a strip of land which runs from the old province of Posen to the Baltic Sea and which cuts Prussia into two parts which now have no longer any direct connexion with each other.

  It takes no profound knowledge of either geography or history to predict what will happen in connexion with this unfortunate corridor. It will remain an object of hatred and distrust between Germany and Poland until either country shall have grown strong enough to destroy the other, and then poor Poland will become once more what it has always been, a buffer state between Russia and Europe.

  In the first flush of victory it seemed a glorious achievement. But building spite-fences across each other’s territory is not going to bring the economic and social problems of our time nearer to their final solution.

  Chapter XXIV

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  CZECHOSLOVAKIA, A PRODUCT OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

  Of all the modern Slavic States, Czechoslovakia is by far the best situated from an economic point of view and in regard to the general state of culture of the majority of its cities. But it is an artificial State. It received its autonomy as a reward for having cut adrift from the Austrian Empire during the World War, and although it now consists of three parts, Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, it is hard to say whether it can survive as an independent entity.

  In the first place, the country is land-locked. In the second place, there is very little love lost between the Catholic Czechs and the Protestant Slovaks. The former, as part of the German-speaking Austrian kingdom, had always been in direct contact with the rest of the world. Whereas the latter, badly administered by their Hungarian masters, had never risen very far above the status of mean little peasants.

  As for the Moravians, whose country, situated between Bohemia and Slovakia, contains by far the most fertile agricultural part of the entire Czechoslovakian commonwealth, they are politically quite insignificant, and therefore take no part in the endless quarrels and feuds which have made the nine million Czechs treat the four million Slovaks in very much the same way as they were treated formerly by the Hungarians, whose respect for the rights of racial minorities is of very recent origin.

  Any one who wishes to study racial problems at their very worst is politely referred to central Europe. T
he situation is really quite hopeless. Czechoslovakia is not as had as many other countries. But Czechoslovakia, too, is composed of three different groups of Slavs who hate each other, and the problem is further complicated by the presence of about three million Germans, the descendants of certain Teutonic immigrants who during the Middle Ages had moved to Bohemia to help in the development of the mineral riches of the Erzgebirge and the Bohmerwald.

  Finally in 1526 Bohemia had gone the way of all central European ‘real estate,’ and had been acquired by the house of Habsburg. For the next 388 years Bohemia was an Austrian colony. It had not been treated badly. German schools and German universities and German thoroughness of method had made the Czechs almost the only people of purely Slavic origin who had known how to work at a job with some steadiness of purpose. But no subject race has ever liked its masters because they treated them rather kindly and occasionally sent them a present for Christmas. And since revenge seems to be a perfectly natural instinct, it need not surprise us that the Czechs, once they had gained their freedom, tried to turn the tables on their former rulers. Czech was made the official language of the country and German became merely one of the tolerated dialects, like the Hungarian of Slovakia, and the new generation of Czech children was bred on a literary diet of strictly Czech origin. Which was no doubt magnificent from a patriotic point of view. But whereas formerly every Bohemian infant with his knowledge of German had been able to make himself understood to at least a hundred million people, he now finds himself restricted to the few million who speak Czech, and the moment he pokes his head outside his own country he is lost, for who is going to take the trouble to learn a language which has no commercial value and no literature? The Czech Government, being composed of men high above the average of central European statesmanship, may gradually encourage a return to the old bilingual method. But they will have a hard time defending such a project against the professors of language who hate the idea of a universal tongue as a political demagogue loathes the prospect of a union of all parties.

  Bohemia was not only one of the rich agricultural parts of the old Habsburg monarchy but was also a highly industrial province with its iron and coal and its world-renowned ability in the difficult art of glass-making. Furthermore, the industrious Czech peasants have always been very clever at home industries (after twelve hours in the fields they must do something with their spare time), and Bohemian textiles and Bohemian rugs and Bohemian shoes are famous the world over. But the old territory into which these products could be imported free of duty—one of the few but very concrete advantages of the Habsburg rule—is now divided into half a dozen little principalities, each of which has surrounded itself with heavily spiked tariff walls in order to ruin the other fellow’s business. Whereas formerly a wagon-load of beer could travel from Pilsen to Fiume without being stopped on the way for a customs examination or without paying a penny of duty, it now must change wagons at three or four frontiers, is obliged to pay duty each time, and when it arrives after weeks of delay, the beer has long since turned sour!

  Self-determination for small nations may be an excellent thing from an idealistic point of view, but it does not seem to work out well when it comes in conflict with the brutal necessities of economic life. But as long as the people of 1933 prefer to do their thinking in terms of 1433, I suppose that we can do nothing about it.

  For the benefit of those who intend to travel in Czechoslovakia, I will add that Prague is no longer situated on the Moldau, which runs eventually into the Elbe, but that Praha is located on the Vltava; that Pilsen, where you went to drink beer, is now Plzen (where you still go to drink beer); and that those who did not drink but were tempted to overeat no longer take a cure at Carlsbad but at Karlovy-Vary, and that those who preferred Marienbad now patronize Marianske Lazne. But remember that when you take the train from Brunn to Pressburg, you must look for the carriages that go from Brunn to Bratislava, unless you ask a Hungarian conductor who has survived from the days when Slovakia was ruled by Budapest. He will give you a blank stare until you explain that what you really mean is Pozsony. All things considered, it is perhaps just as well that those Dutch and Swedish and French colonies in America did not last longer than they did.

  Chapter XXV

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  YUGOSLAVIA, ANOTHER PRODUCT OF THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

  The official name of this country is the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Of these three ethnical groups (‘tribes’ sounds too much like African natives and might offend them) the Serbs, who are the most important, live in the east along the banks of the Save, which joins the Danube at a point where the capital Belgrade has been built. The Croats live in the centre between the Drave, also a tributary of the Danube, and the Adriatic, while the Slovenes occupy the little triangle between the Drave, the Istrian peninsula, and Croatia. Modern Serbia however is composed of several other racial groups. It has absorbed Montenegro, the picturesque mountain State, famous for its four hundred years of war against the Turks, and affectionately remembered since the days we danced to the tune of “The Merry Widow” waltz. And it also has annexed a well-known remnant of the old Austrian Empire, the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, old Serbian territory, but taken away from Turkey by the Austrians, and the source of that ill-feeling between the Serbians and the Austrians which finally ended in the murder at Serajevo in 1914, the ostensible (although by no means the real) cause of the Great War.

  Serbia (the old habit is too strong—hereafter when I write ‘Serbia’ I really mean the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) is essentially a Balkan State and its history is essentially that of a country subjected to five hundred years of Moslem slavery. Since the war it has a sea-front on the Adriatic, but it remains cut off from its own sea-front by the Dinaric Alps. Even if it could build railways across the Dinaric Alps (and railways cost a lot of money) there would be no convenient harbours except perhaps Ragusa (or Dubrovnik, as it is now called), one of the great medieval distributing centres for colonial merchandise. It was the only Mediterranean city which refused to accept defeat after the discovery of the direct ocean routes to America and India, and it continued to send its far-famed Argosies (ships from Aragusa) to Calicut and Cuba until a foolish participation in the ill-fated expedition of the Armada deprived it of its last remaining squadrons.

  Unfortunately Dubrovnik offers few facilities to modern steamers. As for Fiume and Trieste, the natural outlets for Serbia, the Old Men of Versailles gave one of these cities to Italy and Italy took the other for herself, although, she really had no need for either as they would only compete with Venice, which aspired to regain its ancient and honourable position as mistress of the Adriatic. As a result, the grass now grows in the dockyards of Trieste and Fiume, while Serbia as of old must send Its agricultural products by one of three routes. It may send them down the Danube to the Black Sea, which is about as practical as if New York should export its merchandise to London by way of Lake Erie and the St Lawrence River. It may send them up the Danube to Vienna and from there through one of the mountain passes to Bremen, Hamburg, or Rotterdam, which is also an exceedingly expensive procedure. Or it may send them by rail to Fiume, where the Italians of course do their best to ruin their Slavic competitors.

  In this respect, therefore, nothing has been changed since the days before the Great War when Serbia was kept a land-locked State at the instigation of the Austrian Empire. It is a bit sad to reflect that pigs were primarily responsible for the outbreak of that terrible disaster. For Serbia had only one great article of export—pigs—and by putting impossible duties on pigs the Austrians and the Hungarians were able to ruin the only trade from which Serbia derived any profit at all. The dead Austrian Grand Duke was the pretext for the mobilization of all the armed forces of Europe. But the underlying cause of all the ill-feeling in the north-eastern corner of the Balkans was the duty on pigs.

  And speaking of pigs, pigs prosper on acorns. That is why pigs were so plentiful in the tr
iangle between the Adriatic and the Danube and the mountains of Macedonia. It is densely covered with oak forests, and there would be even more of them to-day if the Romans and the Venetians had not denuded these hills in a most irresponsible fashion to get wood for their vessels.

  What other resources besides pigs does the country have for feeding and clothing its 12,000,000 inhabitants? There is some coal and iron but there seems to be already for too much coal and iron in this world, and it would be very costly to carry it all the way by rail to one of the German ports, and as I have said before, Serbia has no decent harbour of her own.

  After the war Serbia got part of the great Hungarian plain, the so-called Voyvodika, which is good agricultural land. The valleys of the Drave and Save will provide it with enough grain and corn for its own people. The Morava valley connecting with that of the Vardar River is a good enough trade-route which connects northern Europe with Salonika on the Aegean Sea. It is really a branch of the great trunk lines connecting Nish (the birthplace of Constantine the Great and the spot where Frederick Barbarossa, on his ill-fated expedition to the Holy Land, was entertained for a while by the famous Serbian Prince Stephen) with Constantinople and Asia Minor.