of them keep their original tongues. They form three distinct nations.
First of all there are the Greeks. We have not here to deal with them as
the representatives of that branch of the Roman Empire which adopted
their speech, but simply as one of the original elements in the
population of the Eastern peninsula. Known almost down to our own day by
their historical name of Romans, they have now fallen back on the name
of Hellênes. And to that name they have a perfectly good claim. If the
modern Greeks are not all true Hellênes, they are an aggregate of
adopted Hellênes gathered round and assimilated to a true Hellenic
kernel. Here we see the oldest recorded inhabitants of a large part of
the land abiding, and abiding in a very different case from the remnants
of the Celt and the Iberian in Western Europe. The Greeks are no
survival of a nation; they are a true and living nation, a nation whose
importance is quite out of its proportion to its extent in mere numbers.
They still abide, the predominant race in their own ancient and again
independent land, the predominant race in those provinces of the
continental Turkish dominion which formed part of their ancient land,
the predominant race through all the shores and islands of the Ægæan and
of part of the Euxine also. In near neighborhood to the Greeks still
live another race of equal antiquity, the Skipetar or Albanians. These,
as I believe is no longer doubted, represent the ancient Illyrians. The
exact degree of their ethnical kindred with the Greeks is a scientific
question which need not here be considered; but the facts that they are
more largely intermingled with the Greeks than any of the other
neighboring nations, that they show a special power of identifying
themselves with the Greeks, a power, so to speak, of becoming Greeks
and making part of the artificial Greek nation, are matters of practical
history. It must never be forgotten, that among the worthies of the
Greek War of Independence, some of the noblest were not of Hellenic but
Albanian blood. The Orthodox Albanian easily turns into a Greek; and the