The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  But, generally speaking, Serbia cannot look forward to a great future as an industrial State. Like Bulgaria it will have to remain a nation of fairly prosperous Slavic farmers. Who has ever been able to compare a six-foot peasant from Skoplje (or Uskub) or Mitrovitsa to a typical workman from Manchester or Sheffield will have some doubts whether such a fate is entirely without its compensations. Belgrade may for ever remain an amiable little country town like Oslo or Bern, but does it really want to compete in size with Birmingham or Chicago? Perhaps it does. The modern soul is a strange thing, and the Serbian peasant would not be the first to have his sound ancestral standard of values upset by the counterfeit cultural ideals of Hollywood,

  Chapter XXV

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  BULGARIA, THE SOUNDEST OF ALL BALKAN COUNTRIES, WHOSE KING BET ON THE WRONG HORSE DURING THE GREAT WAR AND SUFFERED THE CONSEQUENCES

  This is the last of the little principalities that grew out of the great Slavic invasion of some twenty centuries ago. It would be more important in size and number of inhabitants if during the World War it had not taken what ultimately proved to be the wrong side. But such things will happen even in the best-regulated nations. Better luck next time. On the Balkan peninsula, the ‘next time,’ when speaking of war, means a dozen or half a dozen years hence. We are apt to speak in a slightly contemptuous manner of these half-civilized Balkan people who are for ever fighting among each other. But do we ever realize with what sort of an inheritance of strife and cruelty and bloodshed and slavery and plunder and rape and arson the aver age Serbian or Bulgarian boy starts out upon his career through life?

  Of the earliest inhabitants of Bulgaria we know nothing. We have found their skeletons, but skulls do not talk. Were they perhaps related to those mysterious Albanians, the Illyrians ol Greek history, that mysterious race which speaks a tongue unlike that of any other people on earth, who ever since the beginning of history have maintained themselves among the Dinaric Alps along the coast of the Adriatic and who to-day form an independent State, ruled over by a native tribal leader who made himself their legitimate sovereign as soon as a Vienna tailor had provided him with a nice, new uniform in which to hold court at Tirano, the new capital of a nation of which 98% are illiterate? Or is this the home country of the Romani, who were also known as the Wlachs? We had better leave the solution of that puzzle to the philologists and confess that we do not know.

  But when we reach the era of the written chronicles, what endless invasions, wars, and calamities! There were, as I have already told you, two main routes leading from the gap between the Urals and the Caspian Sea to the west. One went northward of the Carpathians and led to the forests of the northern European plain. The other followed the Danube, and by means of the Brenner Pass carried the hungry savages to the heart of Italy. The Romans knew this and they therefore used the Balkans as their first line of defence against that ‘foreign scum,’ as they were pleased to call those despised barbarians who eventually were to destroy them. Lack of soldiers gradually forced them to retreat to their own peninsula and leave the Balkan peoples to their fate. When the great migrations had come to an end, not a trace remained of the original Bulgarians. The Slavs had assimilated them so completely that not a single word of the ancient Bulgarian tongue survives in the Slavic dialect spoken by the so-called Bulgarians of to-day.

  The position however of the new conquerors was exceedingly precarious. In the south they had to deal with Byzantium, that eastern remnant of the Roman Empire which was Roman in name only but Greek in purpose and structure. From the north and the west they were for ever threatened by raids on the part of the Hungarians and the Albanians. Next the Crusaders passed through their territory, an unholy army of holy men, the disinherited from all nations, ready to plunder Turk or Slav with equal ferocity. Finally the threat of an all-overpowering Turkish invasion and those last desperate appeals to Europe to come and protect the common soil of Christendom against the degrading touch of the infidel. And the sudden hush that spread through the land when fugitives from the Bosporus told how the Moslem Sultan had ridden his horse up the steps of Saint Sofia to desecrate the most holy of all the holy shrines of the Greek Church. Followed by the panic when the reddening sky of burning villages told of the steady advance of Turkish troops, marching westward through the blood-soaked valley of the Maritza. And thereafter four entire centuries of Turkish mis-rule. And then, at last, during the beginning of the last century, a first faint stirring of hope. A swineherd in Serbia started a rebellion, that was to make him a king. Next that terrible war of extermination between Greek and Ottoman, turned into a major European issue by a lame English poet who hobbled to his welcome death in the pestiferous village of Missolonghi. And then the beginning of that great struggle for liberty which was to last for another hundred years. Let us be lenient in judging our Balkan friends. They have been the leading actors in the tragedy of man’s martyrdom.

  Among the modern Balkan States, Bulgaria is one of the most important. It is composed of two very fertile regions, both of them excellently suited to all sorts of agriculture: the plain in the north between the high ridge of the Balkan Mountains and the Danube, and the plain of Philippopolis in the south between the Balkans and the Rhodope Mountains. This valley, protected on both sides, enjoys a mild, almost Mediterranean climate. It exports its products through the harbour of Burgas, on the Black Sea, just as the sterner products of the northern plain, grain and corn, are sent abroad by way of Varna.

  Otherwise there are very few towns, for the Bulgarians are essentially a peasant people. Sofia, the present capital, lies on the old trade-routes horn north to south and east to west. For almost four hundred years it was the residence of the Turkish governors who, from their fortified palace on the Struma river, ruled the whole of the Balkan peninsula, with the exception of Bosnia and Greece.

  When Europe finally became conscious of the plight of its fellow-Christians, delivered to the mercies of the Moslem invaders, Mr Gladstone and his followers did a great deal of talking about the Bulgarian atrocities; but the Russians were the first to take action. Twice their armies crossed the Balkan mountains. The fighting to force the Shipka Pass and to subdue the fortress of Plevna will be remembered as long as people realize that there have been a few wars which were absolutely unavoidable, if the world was to progress from slavery to comparative freedom.

  As a result of the last of these Slavic relief expeditions, the great Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877-78, Bulgaria was made an independent principality under a ruler of mixed Coburg and Bourbon origin. This meant that the patient and intelligent Bulgarian peasants got trained by people with a Teutonic sense of order. That may be responsible for the fact that to-day Bulgaria has the best schools of all the different Balkan States. The large landowners have completely disappeared. The peasant owns his own land as he does in Denmark and in France. The illiteracy percentage has been sharply reduced and everybody works. It is a simple country of farmers and lumbermen. It is a veritable reservoir of physical endurance and energy. Like Serbia, it may never be able to compete with the industrialized States of western Europe. But it may still be there when the others are gone.

  Chapter XXVII

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  RUMANIA, A COUNTRY WHICH HAS OIL AND A ROYAL FAMILY

  The list of the Slavic nations of the Balkans has come to an end. But there exists one other Balkan State which none of us is likely to forget, as it has a habit of crashing into the front pages of our newspapers with a frequency that is at times a bit painful. That is not the fault of the Rumanian peasants. They are born and till their fields and die very much as peasants are in the habit of doing all the world over. It is due to the incurable vulgarity and the unspeakable bad taste of that Anglo-German dynasty which some twenty years ago succeeded the highly respectable Prince Charles of Hohenzollern on the throne of a kingdom founded by the grace of God, Prince Bismarck, and a certain Benjamin Disraeli.

  It was in the year 1878 that these two gentlemen came toge
ther in Berlin and after paying their duties to the Deity decided to elevate Walachia (the land of the Wlachs) to the rank of an independent principality. If the present reigning family can be persuaded to remove itself to Paris, where people do not care how much dirty linen is washed, as long as it is done with French soap, Rumania may go far, for Nature has been extraordinarily kind to this great plain between the Carpathians, the Transylvanian Alps, and the Black Sea. Not only could it be turned into a granary as rich as that of the Russian Ukraine, of which it is the natural continuation, but the next richest oil deposits of Europe after the Russian oilfields in the Caucasus are to be found near the city of Ploesci, where the Transylvanian Mountains join the plains of Walachia.

  Unfortunately, the farms both of Walachia and Bessarabia between the Danube and the Prut are in the hands of large landowners, most of them absentee landlords who spend their revenues in Bucharest, the capital, or in Paris, but never among (he people whose labour makes them rich.

  As for the petroleum, the capital invested is usually owned abroad; and the same is true of the iron deposits of Sichenbergen or Transylvania, the enormous complex of mountains taken away from Hungary and given to Rumania in exchange for the more than highly doubtful services which the latter country had rendered the Allies during the Great War. But as Transylvania had originally been part of the old Roman province of Dacia, and had been made part of Hungary as late as the twelfth century, and as the Hungarians had treated the Rumanians of Transylvania very much as the Rumanians of old Rumania treat the Hungarian minority of Transylvania to-day, we might just as well forget about it. These hopeless and intricate national puzzles can never be solved until every idea of nationalism shall have disappeared from the face of the earth. At the moment of going to press there seems to be little chance that such a miracle will happen.

  According to the latest available statistics, the former Kingdom of Rumania counted 5,500,000 Rumanians and 500,000 Gypsies, Jews, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Armenians, and Greeks. The new Rumania, the so-called Greater Rumania, has 17,000,000 inhabitants, of which 73% are Rumanians, 11% Hungarians, 4.8% Ukrainians, 4.3% Germans, and 3.3% Russians in Bessarabia and the Dubrudja, the land south of the delta of the Danube. As all these races dislike each other most cordially, do not in any way belong to the same ethnographical stock, but happen to have been thrown together by the artificial decisions of a peace conference, the material is there for a first-rate civil war, unless the foreign creditors intervene to save their investments.

  Bismarck once said that the whole of the Balkans was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. One feels that in this, as in so many other things, the testy old founder of the last German Empire may have been right.

  Chapter XXVIII

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  HUNGARY, OR WHAT REMAINS OF HER

  The Hungarians, or Magyars as they prefer to call themselves, are very proud of the fact that they are the only people of Mongolian origin who were able to maintain themselves on European soil and to found a kingdom of their own, for their distant cousins, the Finns, were until very recently always a part of somebody else’s empire or kingdom. Perhaps the Hungarians in their present misery have stressed their great warlike qualities a little more than was strictly necessary. But no one can deny that as a bulwark against the Turks they have rendered a tremendously important service to the rest of Europe. The Pope recognized the value of this buffer state when he raised the Magyar chieftain, Stephen, to the rank of Apostolic King of Hungary.

  For when the Turks overran eastern Europe, it was the Hungarians who kept them within bounds. They were the first barrier, as Poland was to prove the second, when Hungary at last was overrun. Under the leadership of one John Hunyadi, a nobleman of Vladic origin, Hungary became in truth one of the few defenders of the faith who was entitled to that name. But those same wide plains on both sides of the Theiss (or Tisa) and Danube, which had so greatly attracted the Tartar horsemen that they had decided to settle down for good, were to prove the source of many internal evils.

  Wide open spaces make it comparatively easy for a few strong men to dominate their neighbours. For where can the poor peasants go when there is neither sea nor mountains? Hungary therefore became a country of large landowners. Far removed from the centre of government, the landowners maltreated their peasants so outrageously that soon the latter cared very little whether they were Magyar or Turk.

  When Sultan Suleiman the Great marched against the West in 1526, the last of the Hungarian kings could not collect more than 25,000 men when he tried to stop the Mohammedans. On the plain of Mohács this Hungarian army was completely annihilated. Twenty-four thousand out of a total of twenty-five thousand perished. The King himself was killed, together with all Iris advisers, and more than 100,000 Hungarians were dragged back to Constantinople to be sold to the slave-dealers of Asia Minor. The greater part of Hungary was annexed to Turkey. The rest was occupied by the Austrian Habsburgs, who then began a tug of war with the Mohammedans for the unhappy land until, the beginning of the eighteenth century when all Hungary became part of the Habsburg domains.

  Then, however, a new struggle for independence was started, the war against the German masters, and it continued for two entire centuries. The Hungarians fought with reckless bravery, and at last they were able to achieve a semblance of independence by recognizing the Emperor of Austria as Apostolic King of Hungary, and acquiring the status of a dominion.

  But no sooner had they obtained what they considered merely to be their own good right than they must start upon a policy of persecution against all those who were not of Magyar blood. This policy was so short-sighted and lacking in common sense that soon they were without a friend in the whole wide world. They noticed this during the Congress of Versailles, when the number of inhabitants of the ancient Apostolic kingdom was reduced from 21,000,000 to 8,000,000 and three-fourths of all its former territory bestowed upon deserving neighbours.

  This left Hungary a mere shadow of its old glorious self, a State not unlike Austria to-day, one big city without any hinterland. Hungary was never very much of an industrial country. The large landowners had had a prejudice against those ungainly chimneys that are an indispensable part of all well-regulated factories and they had not cared for the smell of smoke. As a result the Hungarian plain remained available for the purposes of agriculture, and Hungary to-day has the highest percentage of agricultural land of any country. Since most of this has always been under cultivation, the people should have been comparatively well off; yet the prevailing poverty has been so great that between 1896 and 1910 the country lost almost a million inhabitants through emigration.

  As for the subject races of the old kingdom, the Magyar minority knew so well how to make its subjects uncomfortable that they too moved away by the boatload and the trainful, to help in the development of the United States. We may as well give you a few figures, for what happened in Hungary happened to a lesser extent in practically all those countries where a small class of hereditary landlords had succeeded in making themselves supreme.

  Just before the beginning of the Turkish wars of the sixteenth century, the Hungarian plain had a population exceeding 5,000,000. The Turkish domination reduced that number to 3,000,000 in a little less than two centuries. When finally the Austrians had driven the Turks away from the Puszta (the Magyar name for the plain), Hungary was so sparsely populated that immigrants from all over central Europe hastened to occupy the deserted farms. But the Magyar nobles, considering themselves the dominant race, the fighting race par excellence, would grant unto those newcomers none of the rights which they themselves enjoyed. The subject races, therefore, who accounted for almost one-half of the total population, never were able to feel any real affection towards their adopted country.

  Was it any wonder that during the Great War they felt a lack of inner loyalty which in the end caused the dual monarchy to crumble to dust, like an old building shaken by an earthquake?

  Chapter XXIX

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  FINLAND, ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHAT HARD WORK AND INTELLIGENCE CAN ACHIEVE AMID HOSTILE NATURAL SURROUNDINGS

  There only remains one more country before we leave Europe. Turkey to-day retains little of her former European possessions except Constantinople (or Istanbul) and a small slice of the Thracian plain and we had therefore better save our Turkey for to-morrow. But the Finns are part of Europe, and very much so.

  They used to live all over Russia, but the more numerous Slavs pushed them northward until they reached that strip of dry land which connects Russia with Scandinavia. There they settled down, and there they have been ever since. The few Lapps who were living in the forests offered no difficulties, for they moved to Lapland in the Scandinavian peninsula, and were content to give European civilization a wide berth.

  As for Finland, it is unlike any other country in Europe. For tens of thousands of years it had been covered by glaciers. These scraped the original soil so completely away that to-day only six per cent. of the land is fit for cultivation. The moraines of the glaciers, the stones and the dirt carried down by these slow-running rivers of ice, had filled up the ends of a great many valleys. When the great thaw set in, these valleys were filled with water, and that was the origin of those endless lakes, great and small, with which Finland is dotted. These lakes, however, should not call forth the image of another Switzerland, for Finland is a low country and rarely rises above a height of 500 feet. The number of these lakes is around 40,000. Together with the marshland that stretches between them, they occupy 30% of the total area of the State. They are entirely surrounded by those valuable forests which cover or two-thirds of the total area, and which provide the greater part of the world with the woodpulp necessary for the manufacture of books and magazines. Part of this wood is manufactured into paper on the spot. But Finland has no coal. It has enough fast-running rivers to be able to develop considerable water-power. But the climate, which is not unlike that of Sweden, turns these rivers into ice for five months of every year, and then the power stations are, of course, unable to function. The wood therefore has to be carried away by ships. Helsinki (Helsingfors until the late war) is not only the political capital but also the chief export-harbour for Finnish lumber.