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Yet the fear of impending Slavic or Turkish attacks upon the eastern frontier, or other fears, frequently operated to secure the election of some prince who had sufficiently strong power of his own to stay the attack or remove the fear.
I do not believe that this is an end which Austria can much desire in view of her own Slavic subjects. She cannot wish to be the editor of the future in the Balkan peninsula, as she would have to be if she won a victory. I mention all these eventualities, in which I place no faith, for the sake of proving how slight the reasonable probability of a European war appears to be.
Whatever value we may set upon the Christianity of the Slovenes, Herzegovinians, Bulgarians and Roumanians, we certainly cannot call them heathens. They belong to the Roman Catholic, to the Greek, or to the Greek United Church, although their worship and religious conceptions are strongly tinged with reminiscences of Slavic paganism. Neither is a conquest, in the military sense, possible.
In the southwest, in Bedzin and Olkuz, there are coal deposits about 200 square miles in area. In the southern districts wheat is also grown in some abundance. The military value of this country is further enhanced by political conditions. Like the greater part of Galicia to the southward, it is peopled by the Poles, who form one of the important branches of the great Slavic family.
To the outside observer the old spirit seems utterly gone. How far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of the fear of the Slav, one cannot say. Looking at the map of Europe, one sees that the geographical relation of Germany to the great Slavic empire is not unlike the relation of Holland to Germany.
Bohemia, for instance, has a very large majority of Slavic population, eager to be recognized as such, and there are Slavic populations somewhat indiscriminately scattered throughout the dual-monarchy, especially in Hungary. These Slavic populations, however, differ widely in religious belief.
For a yoke it was and a most offensive and objectionable one. It turned the Slavic peasants into miserable slaves. No Russian could hope to survive un-less he was willing to creep before a dirty little yellow man who sat in a tent somewhere in the heart of the steppes of southern Russia and spat at him. It deprived the mass of the people of all feeling of honour and independence.
Professor Emily Greene Balch, who succeeded Miss Coman as head of the Department of Economics, is herself an authority on questions of immigration; her book, "Our Slavic Fellow Citizens", is an important contribution to the history of the subject, and has been cited in the German Reichstag as authoritative on Slavic immigration.
Even more striking than these instances is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the unrelated Ural-Altaic languages of the Volga region.
Truly, no one ever can guess the anger or the love that broods in a Slavic heart under a soldier's tunic, whether the soldier wisely plays at the guzla, as the correct Boris, or merely lounges, twirling his mustache with his manicured and perfumed fingers, like Michael, the indifferent.
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