November 21, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
The Recovery of Europe: By Hilaire Belloc 
I. 
EUROPE must recover : Now, what is Europe ? 
Europe which came within an ace of destruc- 
tion through the Prussian poison long absorbed 
and permitted, long increasing in effect, has, at 
an immense cost in vitality, cut out that growth. 
But in the effort Europe stands exhausted and must recover. 
If it does not do so, the operation will have killed the patient. 
Well, what is Europe ? 
We must answer that question exactly if we are to face 
the problem at all, let alone to solve it. Even if we are lucky 
enough to get statesmanship instead of demagogy, states- 
manship itself will fail unless it knows the factors of its 
task. 
What is Europe ? 
Europe is not a congeries of nations. That view of our 
civilisation is terribly dangerous in its crude simplicity, its 
vast ignorance of the complex reality. True, the religion of 
nationality has been the sustenance of this war. Without 
it the strain could never have been endured. Those in 
whom that emotion was weakest failed first, and those in 
whom it is strongest are now the ultimate victors. True, 
the general motive of nationalism has inspired its policy, 
and the chief desire of the victors to effect a full and final 
peace is expressed in terms of nationalism. They base their 
policy upon the idea of nationalities defined as far as may he 
and, once defined, free from alien government. Nevertheless, 
to regard Europe as a congeries of clearly marked nation- 
alities, a sort of tessellated map the boundary lines on which 
exactly contain highly individual States, and those States 
each equally conscious members of the European society, 
is to see something wliich is not there. To act on such a 
concept would be to build upon no real foundation, to mistake 
the nature of one's rnaterial. It would result in mishaps 
as fatal as the confusion of iron for wood in the design of 
a ship, or the fashioning of some comple.x instrument with- 
out regard to the varying degrees of expansion, of con- 
ductivity, of density in the various metals. 
Europe with her colonies is a certain culture developed 
in men not too dissimilar by racial descent to show one 
type — a type which all that is not European recognises 
at once as something different from the rest of the world 
— though it is now nearly half the world and much more than 
half the governing power of the world. 
This vast State which summed up all our origins and from 
which we all derive passed, about sixteen centuries ago, 
through a prodigious revolution in religion the first seeds 
of which had been sown three hundred years earlier, and the 
completion of which was not effected for fully a hundred 
more. This revolution in religion — that is in the whole habit 
of the mind and therefore in all the product of society — 
had the strange effect, through missionary zeal, of widely 
extending the old civilisation from which it sprang, although 
that civilisation was already fatigued and impoverished. 
Ireland, the Germanies, the Slav coimtries far to the north 
and east, Scandinavia, came by an unceasing process into 
the orbit and within the limits of what men called Christen- 
dom : the task was accomplished — save for a few barbarous 
exceptions — about a thousand years ago, and within that 
period the Europe we know has developed. 
This development has indeed produced nationalities as 
the marks of division : but not only nationalities, nor those 
nationalities equally well defined, nor — for the most part — 
lying within definite and undisputed geographical limits. 
If we put only the major divisions of that cotnplex which 
we call Europe, as those divisions stand to-day, we shall 
find, at least, five great categories of which each one is 
independent of the rest and makes a pross division at 
variance with all the others. ' 
I. We have first of all the nationalities. They vary in 
national consciousness from the intense national feeling of a 
Frenchman or an Englishman to the vague half-awakened 
traditions of Lithuania. They vary in definition of boundary 
from the perfect sea-limit of Great Britain to the hopeless 
puzzle of Thrace and its tea-board. They vary in test : 
language is nowhere a perfect test, but you have an extreme 
like the French language with its small outliers in the Nether- 
lands and certain Alpine valleys, and its small Basque and 
Breton exceptions at home, and another extreme like the 
Swiss with four languages and one jealously guarded national 
system, or a third type, the English, covering the whole Irish 
race save a small fraction, and the United States as a whole 
yet excluding the mass of the Welsh. Race is rarely a test, 
it is too vague : locality never. They vary in simplicity 
of site, from the British or French who nowhere (in Europe) 
overpass rigid frontiers to the Prussians who have a fragment 
east of Poland, the Saxons who have fragments hundreds 
of miles away from their own country in Transylvania, 
and I know not which of the German nations which has a 
fragment on the lower Volga, thither transplanted by a Ger- 
man sovereign of Russia. 
2. We have next the religions. Constantinople evan- 
gelised half the east, Rome all the west. The Orthodox 
and the Latin communions were separated for centuries by 
a belt of Lithuanian paganism not quite eliminated till 
four hundred years ago. The two churches have stood for 
centuries in a violent opposition which has increased with 
time, which is the great line of cleavage everywhere between 
the Baltic and the Balkans, and on which the Hapsburg 
dynasty reposed. For that tenacious institution was not 
a chance survival. It had a meaning. It was the organ oi 
the Catholic as opposed to the Orthodox Slav. As though 
this parting were not enough you have the great religious 
quarrel of the sixteenth century making a cross division in 
the west. Nor is it a single cross division of north and 
south. A third of Ireland is Protestant. The Huguenots of 
France, though not a twentieth of the nation in numbers, 
are very powerful through their wealth — and their power is 
in the south. The German speech is almost exactly divided 
between the two forms of thought as are the Netherlands 
and Switzerland in balance of power if not in numbers. 
This distinction was half forgotten during the wave of scep- 
ticism which swept the vocal classes in the eighteenth century, 
and came to a climax in the nineteenth. Even to-day there 
are provincial centres in which it is thought good manners 
to ignore it. But it works a contrast in custom and morals 
of a most profound sort throughout Europe. And this is 
but a part of the story. Ybu must add to the eastern and 
western division of Orthodox and Latin, to the northern and 
southern division of Catholic and Protestant, the intense force 
called anti-clericalism, a by-product of Catholic societies so 
strong in its action that for a generation it formed, with 
its opponents, the one living political quarrel of France, 
Italy and Spain, to which quarrel all other forms of political 
issue were subsidiary. 
RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS 
I shall show later how this factor of the various religious 
cleavages affects our issue. I will be content here with only 
two examples — amply sufficient. The Belgian clerical was 
" Flaminguant " — teutonist : opposed to the French tongue 
in Belgium and all its connotations; never suspecting what 
an awful issue such sympathies would raise, nor what an 
ironical fate awaited his great centre, Louvain. That is 
the first example. The second is this : One hears of the 
"Southern Slavs" — the " Yugo-Slavo" — as claiming to form 
one State. The claim is just. The language and race are 
the same, and the national aspiration is very real. But how 
many here know that half this people refuse to admit the 
priest of the other half, or that the difference in religious 
tradition between the two halves has led to the use of two 
alphabets? One half cannot read what the other half 
writes. One half prints its papers as we print ours, in the 
characters used in the article. The other prints them in 
quasi-Russian script and will tolerate no other letters. 
3. We have the languages and their dialects. These do 
not determine nationality — but how powerful they are both 
for the dissemination and the withholding of ideas ! And 
the frontiers of popular language are far more capricious, 
fari more numerous, and at the same time far more vague 
than their printed literature or the set speech of the wealthier 
classes would suggest. • 
4. Profoundly affecting the problem is yet another cross 
division : that lietween the agricultural and the industrial 
areas. It has become more acute under the pressure of war. 
The mind of the one is not the mind of the other. The 
towns of industry have the organisation and the voice, but 
the country has the resisting power. Whole communities 
