MERELY for the sake of convenience I have divided the different countries of Europe into racial or cultural groups, and I have started my general discussion with those nations which still showed unmistakable evidences of having been Roman colonies ere they began an independent political existence of their own.

It is true that Rome had also conquered the Balkans and that in one country at least(Roumania)the Latin language has survived as the national tongue. But the great Mongolian, Slavic and Turkish invasions of the Middle Ages have so completely destroyed all evidence of Roman civilization in that part of the world that it would be decidedly erroneous to include the Balkan monarchies in the present discussion, wherefore I shall now bid farewell to the Mediterranean range-of-influence and proceed to that other form of civilization which was of Teutonic origin and which came to be centered around the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

There is(I have already told you that when I spoke of France)a vast semicircular plain which stretches all the way from the eastern Russian hills, where the Dnieper and the Dvina and the Neva and the Volga take their origin, to the Pyrenees. The southern part of that semi-circle was brought under Roman control a very short time after the Germanic tribes began their mysterious migrations towards the west.The eastern part, even then, seems to have been occupied by those nomadic Slavic masses which replenished themselves just as rapidly as they were killed off and which therefore, like the rabbits of Australia, were invincible.Thus the only part that was still available when the hungry Teutonic invaders appeared upon the scene was that big square which stretched from the Vistula on the east to the Rhine delta on the west.The Baltic was its northern limit and in the south a long line of Roman block-houses reminded all newcomers that they were entering upon a“forbidden territory”.

The western part of this region was mountainous. First there were the Ardennes and the Vosges, on the western bank of the river Rhine.Then, running due east and west, came the Black Forest, the Tyrolean Mountains, the Erz(or Iron Ore)Mountains(present day Bohemia),the Riesengebirge, and finally the Carpathians which stretched almost as far as the Black Sea.

The rivers in this territory were forced to flow due north. In order of their appearance from west to east there was first of all the Rhine, the most literary of rivers, over which people have fought and wept more copiously than over any other little mountain stream.For the Rhine is really a very modest little rivulet.The Amazon is over five times as long.The Mississippi and Missouri are six times its length, and even the Ohio, which we do not consider much of a river as rivers go in our part of the world, is five hundred miles longer.Then comes the Weser river, with the modern city of Bremen near its mouth.Then the Elbe, which has made Hamburg what it is today.Then the Oder, which gave rise to the city of Stettin, the export harbor for the products of the town of Berlin and its industrial hinterland.Finally there is the Weichsel or Vistula, with the city of Danzig which is now a free state, ruled by a commissioner appointed by the League of Nations.

Millions of years ago all this territory was covered with glaciers. When they retreated they left behind them a large, sandy waste which towards the North Sea and the Baltic degenerated into a trackless morass.Gradually these northern marshes developed a fringe of sand dunes, and these dunes reach almost all the way from the Flemish coast to Königsberg, the old Prussian capital near the Russian frontier.As soon as these dunes had developed, the marshes began to enjoy a certain protection from the tides of the ocean.That meant the beginning of vegetation and as soon as the soil had been prepared for timber, the forests appeared, those same forests which, converted into peat fields, provided our ancestors with an unlimited supply of fairly good fuel.

Both the North Sea and the Baltic, which are the northern and western frontiers of this plain, bear the name of“sea”as a courtesy title. They are really shallow ponds.The average depth of the North Sea is only sixty fathoms(a fathom is six feet)and its greatest depth is not more than 400 fathoms.The average depth of the Baltic is about thirty-six fathoms.The average depth of the Atlantic, on the other hand, is 2170 fathoms while that of the Pacific is 2240 fathoms.These figures show you that you had better think of the North Sea and the Baltic as submerged valleys.A slight elevation of the surface of the earth would once more turn them into dry land.

And now let us look at a map of the dry land of Germany. I mean the map as it is today and as it must have been more or less when human beings followed the retreating glaciers and settled down permanently in this part of the old continent.

These early immigrants were savages. They lived by catching wild animals and by raising a little grain.But they were savages with a very decided sense of beauty, and as their own territory was poor in those metals which could be used for ornaments, they had to send abroad for their gold and silver.

The following statement may come as a mild shock to many of my readers but all original trade-routes are luxury routes. All early contests between the races that inhabited different parts of the world were luxury contests.The Romans learned the main outlines of the geography of northern Europe from traders who had penetrated as far as the mysterious Baltic in search of amber—a sort of petrified resin which Roman matrons used to color their hair.The desire for that hard, concrete lump of limestone, which is sometimes found inside the body of an oyster and with which women delight to attract attention to the pretty curves of their ears or the slenderness of their fingers, has been responsible for more voyages of discovery in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean than any other cause, including the desire of many honest people to carry the Gospel unto the heathen.

The quest for ambergris, a substance found in the intestinal canals of sperm whales, and the result of what in plain English we would call a bilious attack on the part of the unfortunate whale, has driven more ships to the coasts of Brazil and Madagascar and the Moluccas than the search for herring or sardines or other forms of useful food. For ambergris could be used as a base for many perfumes that smelled deliciously of flowers and distant lands, whereas food was merely food and not half as interesting.

A change in fashions which made the women of the seventeenth century wear their corsets underneath their gowns and out of sight(twelve-course dinners were bad for the figure)was directly responsible for most of our knowledge of the Arctic. As soon as Paris had decided that hats should be adorned with aigrets, those hunters who went after the white herons to deprive them of their head plumes(regardless of the fact that this meant the extinction of one of the loveliest and noblest birds of all creation)penetrated further into the lagoons of our southern states than they had ever done before when they were merely in quest of their daily bread and butter.

I might continue the list for almost a dozen more pages. Whatever was rare and therefore expensive has always been an object of veneration to those who, by a wasteful demonstration of their riches, hoped to impress their less fortunate neighbors.Ever since the beginning of history, luxury rather than necessity has been the real pioneer of progress along the lines of exploration.And when we study the map of prehistoric Germany carefully we can still trace the old luxury routes, for in the main they are the same as those of medieval and modern times.

Take the conditions some three thousand years ago. The mountain ridges of the south, the Harz, the Erz Mountains and the Riesengebirge were situated hundreds of miles away from the sea.The plain that stretched northwards towards the North Sea and the Baltic had long since changed from marshland into dry land and was now thickly covered with forests.And Man, following in the wake of the glaciers, which had now retreated in the general direction of Scandinavia and Finland, had claimed this entire wilderness as his own.Among the hills of the south, the tribes which inhabited the valleys had found that it paid them to cut down their trees and sell them to the Romans who had occupied strategic positions along the Rhine and the Danube.For the rest, few of these early Teuton nomads and farmers had ever seen a Roman.One Roman expedition had tried to penetrate to the heart of their country, had been ambushed in a dark and water-logged valley and slaughtered off so completely that the experiment had never been tried again.That did not mean however that northern Germany was completely cut off from all contact with the rest of the world.

The great prehistoric trade-route from west to east, from the Iberian peninsula to the plains of Russia, followed the line from the Pyrenees to Paris, through the gaps of Poitiers and Tours, which I described in the chapter on France. It then skirted the Ardennes and from there followed the outskirts of the central European highlands until it reached the northern lowlands now occupied by the United Soviet Republics of Russia.On its course eastward this road was of course obliged to cross a great many rivers and it did this wherever it could find a convenient shallow place.Just as the city of Rome grew out of a ford across the Tiber, so a number of the earliest cities of northern Germany were but the continuation of prehistoric and early historic settlements which were located on the exact spot where today we would find a filling station and a general store.Hanover and Berlin and Magdeburg and Breslau had all of them got their start that way.Leipzig, although originally it was a village in the heart of Slavic lands, was also of commercial origin, for it was there that the mineral products from the Saxon mountains, such as silver and lead and copper and iron, were assembled before they were sent down the rivers and sold to the merchants patronizing the great European highway from east to west.

Of course, once this road reached the Rhine, water traffic began to compete seriously with the caravans used for the long overland haul. Water traffic has always been much cheaper and much more convenient than land traffic, and long before Caesar caught his first glimpse of the Rhine there must have been rafts used to carry merchandise from Strassburg(where the Rhine connected with the hinterland of Franconia, Bavaria and Württemberg)to Cologne and thence to the marshes of the Low Countries and eventually to Britain.

It is a far cry from Berlin to Jerusalem, but both cities obeyed the same geographical rule which insists that cities must arise wherever important trade-routes cross each other. Jerusalem was situated on the caravan route from Babylonia to Phoenicia and from Damascus to Egypt and was an important trade center long before the Jews had heard of its existence.Berlin, situated on a river where the routes from west to east and from north-west to south-east(from Paris to Petrograd and from Hamburg to Constantinople in modern terms)happened to meet, was bound to become a second Jerusalem.

All during the Middle Ages Germany consisted of a large number of semi-independent states but until 300 years ago there was nothing to indicate that some day this western part of the great European plain would develop into the leading nation of the world. Curiously enough the modern Germany grew almost directly out of the failure of the Crusading Movement.When it became certain that no new territory was to be conquered in western Asia(the Mohammedans had proved more than a match for the Christians)the disinherited classes of Europe began to look for other sources of agricultural wealth, Quite naturally they thought at once of the opportunities offered by the Slavic lands situated just across the Oder and the Vistula, which were inhabited by the wild and heathenish Prussians.One of the old crusading orders moved, lock, stock and barrel, from Palestine to east Prussia and transferred its business center from Acre in Galilea to Marienburg, thirty miles south of Danzig.For two hundred years these knights fought the Slavs and settled the farms of their victims with imported nobles and peasants from the west.In the year 1410 they suffered a terrific defeat at the hands of the Poles in the battle of Tannenberg, the same place where in 1914 Hindenburg annihilated the Russian armies.But somehow or other the order survived even this blow and when the Reformation occurred, they were still a body of considerable importance.

It so happened that at that time the order was ruled by a member of the Hohenzollern family. This particular Grand Master not only joined the Protestant cause but on the advice of Martin Luther he declared himself hereditary Duke of Prussia with Königsberg on the Gulf of Danzig as his capital.Early in the seventeenth century this duchy was acquired by another branch of the industrious and shrewd Hohenzollern tribe which ever since the middle of the fifteenth century had been administering the sandy wastes of Brandenburg.A hundred years afterwards(in.1701,to be precise)these Brandenburg upstarts felt themselves strong enough to aspire to something better than the rank of a mere“prince elector”and they began an agitation to get themselves recognized as kings.

The emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was willing. Dog as a rule does not eat dog and the Habsburgs were glad to render some small service to their good friends the Hohenzollerns.Weren't they both members of the same club?In 1871,the seventh Hohenzollern King of Prussia became the first Emperor of a United Germany.Forty-seven years later, the ninth King of Prussia and the third Emperor of modern Germany was forced to leave his throne and his country and that was the end of a vast holding company which began as a bankrupt remnant of crusading orders and finished as the strongest and most efficient power of the great age of industrialism and capitalism.

But now that it is all over and the last of the Hohenzollerns is chopping wood in Holland, we might as well be honest about it and confess that those ex-Tyrolean mountaineers were an astonishingly capable sort of men, or at least were clever enough to surround themselves with servants of extraordinary ability. For remember that their original territories had possessed no natural wealth of any sort.Prussia had ever been a land of farms and forests and sand and marshes.It did not produce a single article that was fit for export, the only means for any country to get a favorable balance of trade.

There was a slight change for the better when a German discovered a way by which sugar could be extracted from beets. But since cane sugar was still infinitely cheaper than beet-sugar and could be imported by the ship-load from the West Indies, all this meant very little money in the pockets of either Prussians or Brandenburgians.But when the Emperor Napoleon, after having lost his navy in the battle of Trafalgar, decided to destroy England by means of an“inverted blockade”there arose a sudden but very steady demand for the Prussian beet-sugar.At about the same time, German chemists established the value of potash and since Prussia had large potash deposits, the country could at last begin to work a little for the foreign market.

The Hohenzollerns, however, were always lucky. After the defeat of Napoleon, Prussia acquired the Rhine region.It was of no particular value until the industrial revolution put a premium upon the possession of coal and iron.Quite unexpectedly Prussia found herself possessed of some of the richest ore and coal fields of the entire world.And then at last the hard school of poverty of the previous five hundred years began to bear fruit.Poverty had already taught the Germans to be thorough and thrifty.It now showed them how to over-manufacture and under-sell all other nations.And when there was no longer room enough on land for the rapidly increasing number of little Teutons, they took to the sea and within less than half a century they were among the leaders of the countries which derive their revenue from the carrying trade.

Hamburg and Bremen, which had been of considerable importance when the North Sea was the center of civilization(a position it held until the discovery of America made the Atlantic the main road of commerce)were called back to life and seriously threatened the claim to exclusive eminence of London and the other British ports. A large ship canal was dug from the Baltic to the North Sea, the so-called Kiel Canal, which was opened in the year 1895.Canals also connected the Rhine and the Weser and the Oder and the Vistula and the Main and the Danube(only partly finished),providing a direct aquatic route between the North Sea and the Black Sea, and Berlin was given access to the Baltic by means of a canal that ran from the capital to Stettin.

Whatever human ingenuity could do to assure the majority of the people a fairly decent living wage was done, and before the Great War, the average German peasant and working man, while by no means rich, and accustomed to very strict discipline, was probably better housed and better fed and in a general way better protected against accidents and old age than any other group of people belonging to the same class anywhere else.

How all this was sacrificed by the unfortunate outcome of the Great War is a very sad story but it does not belong in the present volume. But as a result of her defeat, Germany lost the rich industrial districts of Alsace and Lorraine.She lost all her colonies, her commercial navy and part of the province of Schleswig-Holstein, which she herself had taken away from the Danes after the war of 1864.Several thousand miles of former Polish territory(but thoroughly Germanized by then)were once again separated from Prussia and returned to Poland, while a broad strip of land, following the course of the Vistula and running from Thorn to Gdynia and the Baltic, was put under Polish suzerainty, that this country might enjoy direct access to the open sea.Part of Silesia, which Frederick the Great had taken away from Austria in the eighteenth century, remained in German hands.But the more valuable mineral deposits were given to Poland, although the textile interests stayed under German control.

For the rest, Germany was stripped of everything it had acquired during the previous fifty years and its colonies in Asia and Africa were divided among other nations which had already more than their share and no surplus population with which to settle them.

Politically speaking, the Treaty of Versailles may have been an excellent document. From the point of view of applied geography, it makes one despair of the future of Europe.I am afraid that those sceptical neutrals who wanted to present Lloyd George and the late Monsieur Clemenceau with a handbook on elementary geography were not so very far wrong.