the Balkans so often
at war?" is easy of answer. Given the existence on one peninsula of six
different races, four of which have past great traditions of Empire, and
there is certain to be uneasy house-keeping. But the inquiry has to be
pushed further. Why is it that this unhappy Peninsula should have been
made thus a scrap-heap for bits of nations, a refuge for sore-headed
remnants of Imperial peoples? The answer to that is chiefly
geographical.

A study of the map will show that when there was a great movement from
the north of Europe to the south, its easiest line of march was down the
valley of the Danube along the Balkan Peninsula. In prehistoric times
the peoples around the European shores of the Mediterranean brought to
accomplishment a very advanced type of civilisation. It owed its
foundations to Egypt or to the Semitic peoples, such as the Phoenicians,
the Tyrians, and the Carthaginians, whose race-home was Asia Minor.
Whilst this Mediterranean civilisation was being shaped in the south--in
the north, in the forests or plains along the shores of the Baltic and
of the North Sea, the fecund Teutonic people were swelling to a mighty
host and overflowing their boundaries. A flood of these people in time
came surging south searching for new lands. The natural course of that
flood was by the valley of the Danube to the Balkan Peninsula. Down that
peninsula they cut their path--not without bloodshed one may guess--and
founded the Grecian civilisation. Of this prehistoric movement there is
no written evidence; but it is accepted by anthropologists as certain.
Thus Sir Harry Johnston records, not as a surmise but as a fact:

The Nordic races, armed with iron or steel swords, spears and
arrow-heads, descended on the Alpine, Iberian, Lydian, and
Aegean peoples of Southern Europe with irresistible strength. It
was iron against bronze, copper, and stone; and iron won the
day.

Prehistoric invasions of the Balkan Peninsula brought in the
fair-haired, blue-eyed Greeks, the semi-barbarian conquerors of
the Mukenaian and Minoan kingdoms. Tribes nearly allied to the
Ancient Greeks diverged from them in Illyria, invaded the
Italian Peninsula, and became the ancestors of the Sabines,
Oscans, Latins, etc.

The parent ancestral speech of the German tribes about four to
five thousand years ago was probably closely approximated in
syntax, and in the form and pronunciatio