Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/176

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DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

we must deal in our Reconstruction. The map showing the distribution of languages tells in this instance even, more than the political map, for it shows three tongues of German speech and not merely two. The first lies north-eastward along the Baltic Shore; it represents a German conquest and forced Teutonisation of the later Middle Ages. By the coastwise water-way the Hanseatic Merchants of Lübeck and the Teutonic Knights, no longer occupied in Crusading, conquered all the shorelands to where now stands Petrograd. By subsequent history half of this strip of 'Deutschthum' was incorporated with the Berlin Monarchy, and the other half became the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Czardom. But the Baltic Provinces retained, to our days, their German merchant community of Riga, their German University of Dorpat, and their German Barons as landlords. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the German element was again to have ruled in these lands of Courland and Livonia.

The second pathway of the Germans was up the Oder River to its source in the Moravian Gate, the deep valley leading from Poland towards Vienna between the mountains of Bohemia on the one hand, and the Carpathian Mountains on the other hand. The German