histories of Eastern and of Western Europe; a set of causes which,
though exactly twelve hundred years old,[6] are still fresh and living,
and which are the special causes which have aggravated the special
difficulties of the last five hundred years. In Western Europe, though
we have had plenty of political conquests, we have had no national
migrations since the days of the Teutonic settlements--at least, if we
may extend these last so as to take in the Scandinavian settlements in
Britain and Gaul. The Teuton has pressed to the East at the expense of
the Slav and the Old-Prussian: the borders between the Romance and the
Teutonic nations in the West have fluctuated; but no third set of
nations has come in, strange alike to the Roman and the Teuton and to
the whole Aryan family. As the Huns of Attila showed themselves in
Western Europe as passing ravagers, so did the Magyars at a later day;
so did the Ottoman Turks in a day later still, when they besieged Vienna
and laid waste the Venetian mainland. But all these Turanian invaders
appeared in Western Europe simply as passing invaders; in Eastern Europe
their part has been widely different. Besides the temporary dominion of
Avars, Patzinaks, Chazars, Cumans, and a crowd of others, three bodies
of more abiding settlers, the Bulgarians, the Magyars, and the Mongol
conquerors of Russia, have come in by one path; a fourth, the Ottoman
Turks, have come in by another path. Among all these invasions we have
one case of thorough assimilation, and only one. The original Finnish
Bulgarians have, like Western conquerors, been lost among Slavonic
subjects and neighbors. The geographical function of the Magyar has been
to keep the two great groups of Slavonic nations apart. To his coming,
more than to any other cause, we may attribute the great historical gap
which separates the Slav of the Baltic from his southern kinsfolk. The
work of the Ottoman Turk we all know. These latter settlers remain
alongside of the Slav, just as the Slav remains alongside of the earlier
settlers. The Slavonized Bulgarians are the only instance of