t of these territories have been Germanized, to the perfect
extinction of all Slavonic nationality and language, for several
centuries past; and if we except a few totally isolated remnants,
amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred thousand souls
(Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in Lusatia)[7], their
inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. But the case is
different along the whole of the frontier of ancient Poland, and in
the countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia and Moravia. Here
the two nationalities are mixed up in every district, the towns being
generally more or less German, while the Slavonic element prevails in
the rural villages, where, however, it is also gradually disintegrated
and forced back by the steady advance of German influence.

The reason of this state of things is this: ever since the time of
Charlemagne, the Germans have directed their most constant and
persevering efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least,
civilization of the east of Europe. The conquest of the feudal
nobility between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal colonies of the
military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia, only laid the
ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germanization
by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in Germany, as
in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and political
importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and
particularly the Western Slavonians (Poles and Tschechs), are
essentially an agricultural race; trade and manufactures never were in
great favor with them. The consequence was that, with the increase of
population and the origin of cities in these regions, the production
of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of German
immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against agricultural
produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, who, if they belong
to any nationality, are in these countries certainly rather Germans
than Slavonians. This has been, though in a less degree, the case in
all the east of Europe. The handicraftsman, the small shopkeeper, the
petty manufacturer, is a German up to this day in Petersburg, Pesth,
Jassy, and even Constantinople; while the money-lender, the publican,
the hawker--a very important man in these thinly populated
countries--is very generally a Jew, whose native tongue is a horribly
corrupted German. The importance of the German element i