THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 49 



THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 

 A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. 



{Lowell Institute Lectures, 1896.) 

 By WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY, Ph. D., 



ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ; LECTURER IN 

 ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. 



X.— GERMANY. 



GERMANTA! A word entirely foreign to the Teutonic speech 

 of northern Europe. Deutschland then, the country of the 

 Deutsch — not Dutch, for they are really Netherlander. What do 

 these words mean? What territories, what peoples do they compre- 

 hend? The Austrians speak as pure German as the Prussians; yet 

 the defeat of Koniggratz, barely a generation ago, left them outside 

 of Germany. On the other hand, the Polish peasants of eastern 

 Prussia, with their purely Slavic language, are accounted Germans 

 in good standing to-day.* 



Ambiguous linguistically, do these words, German or Deutsch, 

 imply any temperamental or religious unity? This can not be, for 

 the main participants in the Thirty Years' War — 



" Fighting for conciliation, 

 And hating each other for the love of God " — 



were Germans. Historians are accustomed to identify the division 

 line of belief in this conflict with that of racial origin. They are 

 pleased to make the independent, liberty-loving spirit of the Teu- 

 tonic race responsible for the Protestant Reformation. Let us not 

 be too sure about that. Such bold generalizations are often mislead- 

 ing. Racial boundaries are not so simple in outline. The Prussians 

 and the Prussian Saxons — Martin Luther was one — were anything 

 but pure Teutons racially; this did not prevent them from siding 

 with Prince Christian and Gustavus Adolphus. And then there 

 were the Bohemians who began the revolt, and the Swiss Calvinists, 

 and the rebels of the Peasants' War in Wiirtemberg ! None of these 

 were ethnically Teutons. Let us beware of such ascriptions of a 

 monopoly of virtue or intellect to any given race, however com- 

 forting they may be to us who are of Teutonic descent. Modern 

 Germany, to be sure, is half Catholic and half Protestant, but the 

 division was not of ethnic origin in any sense. Thus the word Ger- 

 man is even more nondescript religiously than linguistically. In 



* Fine map by von Fircks in Zeits. kon. preuss. statistischen Bureaus, Berlin, xxxiii, 

 1893, pp. 189-296. 



VOL. LII. — 5 



