September 23, 1922] 



NA TURE 



419 



In North-Western Europe that protective influence 

 was peculiarly necessary for one geographical reason, 

 as it was on the eastern margin of the continent for 

 another. It was necessary in the west especially, 

 because the sea-coasts, owing to the local wealth of 

 fish, early attracted population. But in many regions 

 those coasts, exposed to the oceanic type of climate in 

 its most pronounced form, were unsuited to cultiva- 

 tion. At the same time, on account of their sheltered 

 inlets, parts of those coasts were well fitted to breed 

 a seafaring folk. Unable, or able only io a very small 

 degree, to supplement their natural resources by culti- 

 vation, having at the same time command of the sea, 

 those seafarers tended constantly to raid the painfully 

 cleared and cultivated lands of their more fortunately 

 situated neighbours, who, time and again, found their 

 encircling woods a protection. We must suppose, 

 therefore, that the tendency to clear more and more 

 land would be checked by this need for the shelter of 

 the woods. 



But it seems to me that we may regard the growth 

 of feudalism, from one point of view, as an adaptive 

 device by which the growing agricultural settlements 

 obtained, at a price, the necessary protection. Feudal- 

 ism, in the form, for example, in which it grew up in 

 England before the coming of the Normans, was a 

 means of ensuring the existence of a kind of organisa- 

 tion which permitted clearing of forest land to go on 

 indefinitely, while diminishing the risk of perpetual 

 raiding. 



It was also, more especially in Eastern Europe, 

 something more, for it tended to fix the cultivator to 

 the land. The tendency to wander may be said to be 

 almost universal in the case of forest-dwellers carrying 

 on primitive agriculture. Its wide distribution is 

 due to the great difficulty of maintaining there the 

 fertility of the land, more especially when exhausting 

 crops, like the different kinds of grain and flax, are 

 grown. 



Feudalism helped in the solution of this problem by 

 checking the natural tendency of the cultivator to 

 abandon exhausted lands and move on to new ones. 

 But even apart from this particular device, the problem 

 of maintaining fertility had to be tackled early in the 

 West, because the relief made the forest far less con- 

 tinuous and uniform than in the East. It must have 

 been obvious quite early that it was not illimitable. 

 Conditions were different in the forest region of the 

 East, where the vast, almost uniform plains, the absence 

 of well-marked relief, and the breadth of the continent 

 made the forest a more permanent and unmanageable 

 element than in Western Europe. Here, therefore, 

 we find in suggestive combination two peculiar features. 

 The first is that the wandering instinct, the instinct 

 that brought the Slavs from their eastward forest 

 home far into Central and Southern Europe, still 

 persists. It is said to be quite well marked in parts 

 of Russia, despite all the artificial checks which existed 

 under the old regime. Part of the difficulty of the 

 Slav problem also lies in the fact that the effect of the 

 habit of small groups of wandering constantly from 

 one wooded tract to another is written large on the 

 ethnological map. 



The second peculiar feature is that feudalism, and 

 feudalism in a very harsh form, survived here far 



NO. 2760, VOL. I IO] 



longer than in Western Europe, and in fact, if not in 

 law, had scarcely disappeared when the war broke out. 

 I would suggest that the great significance of this form 

 of social policy here was that it helped to counteract 

 the effects of the natural conditions, that it was funda- 

 mentally an artificial device for rendering the popula- 

 tion stationary, and enabling it to adapt itself to the 

 local relief and associated phenomena. 



Now, whatever its value in earlier days, the present 

 chaos in Eastern Europe shows clearly enough that 

 ultimately it checked social evolution, and became a 

 serious menace. It was fundamentally the erection 

 of an artificial barrier round the rural community, and 

 led to the apparent loss of the power of slow adaptation 

 to changing conditions, alike on the part of the over- 

 lords and of the freed serfs. 



But in the eastern chaos another factor has to be 

 borne in mind. In the Old Russia, south of the 

 forested area, and extending both into what is and was 

 Rumania, lie the great treeless plains. Parts of these, 

 as the nineteenth century showed, are extraordinarily 

 fertile and well adapted for cereal production. But, 

 from the point of view adopted here, they suffered 

 from the enormous disadvantage that there is nothing 

 in the natural conditions to fix their inhabitants to 

 special areas, thus enabling them to acquire qualities 

 fitting them for life there ; nothing to give protection 

 from constant inroads from Asia. Literally wastes 

 for long centuries, these plains were for the most part 

 ultimately incorporated in Imperial Russia, and 

 deliberately colonised, often with colonists from a 

 distance. The colonists were brought from areas of 

 other characters, possessed traditions and aptitudes 

 due to long experience of different geographical con- 

 ditions, and were in the grip of a Government which 

 had itself evolved under those conditions. There was 

 thus no question of the possibility of the evolution of 

 a type of culture bearing the imprint of the local 

 conditions. 



In consequence Russia to-day — as well as to some 

 extent Rumania — is faced with a double problem. In 

 both regions parts of the constituent lands are fitted 

 for the mixed cultivation of the forest belt, and in them 

 the old social policy has shown itself unfitted for modern 

 conditions, and a new one has yet to be evolved. 

 Other parts, again, have never developed even an 

 imperfect social policy which was a response to their 

 own local environment. Their apparent prosperity, 

 till the outbreak of the war, was due to the fact that 

 they were, economically though not politically, of the 

 nature of colonies in relation to the industrialised West ; 

 they were, fundamentally speaking, the equivalents of 

 Imperial Rome's corn-producing lands in North Africa 

 and the Danubian plains. The chaos in Eastern 

 Europe is thus having a reflex disturbing effect upon 

 the West. The West has lost an important market, 

 but that is perhaps in itself less important than the 

 fact that over a large tract of European land man and 

 his environment have been thrown out of gear, a 

 catastrophic condition which inevitably disturbs 

 equilibrium elsewhere. Just as in the later days of 

 the Roman Empire disturbances in the marginal corn- 

 producing lands shook and ultimately overthrew the 

 centre, so are the centres of Western European civilisa- 

 tion to-day trembling under the impact of shocks 



