101 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



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, the breadth of the continent, made the forest a 

 more permanent, a more unmanageiable element than in Western 

 Europe. Here, therefore, we find in suggestive combination two 

 peculiar featm^es. 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 Eussia, despite all the artificial checks which existed under 

 the old rigiine. Part of the difficulty of the Slav problem also lies in 

 the fact that the effect of the habit of small groups of wandering con- 

 stantly 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 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 fundamentally an artificial device for 

 rendering the population 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 ban'ier round the rural community, and led 

 to the apparent loss of the power of slow adaptation to changing con- 

 ditions, alike on the part of the overlords and of the freed serfs. 



But in the eastern chaos another factor has to be borne in mind. 

 In the Old Eussia, south of the forested area, and extending both 

 into what is and was Eumania, lie the great treeless plains. Parts 

 of these, as the nineteenth centm-y show, are extraordinarily fertile 

 and well adapted for cereal production. But, from the point of view 

 adopted here, they suffer from the enormous disadvantage that there 

 is nothing in the natural conditions to fix their inhabitants to special 

 areas, thus enabling them to acqmre 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 Eussia, and deliberately 

 colonised, often with colonists from a distance. The colonists were 

 brought from areas of other characters, possessed traditions and apti- 

 tudes due to long experience of different geograpliical conditions, 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 evolu- 

 tion of a type of culture bearing the imprint of the local conditions. 



In consequence Eussia to-day — as well as to some extent 

 Eumania — 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, 



