are the Hungarian plain, Scandinavia, and Britain. Others again can
hardly be said to have a population of their own at all, but are simple
avenues of transmission, like Western Switzerland and the Hellespont
Region. I am speaking now, of course, about ancient times. The causes of
these recurrent movements are not clearly made out; but the movements
themselves, and the fact that they are of regional recurrence, are
matters of history.

Conspicuous among such movements are the westward drift from Asia into
peninsular Europe, in its three parallel columns, through tundra,
forest, and steppe; and the southward drifts, subsidiary to this, from
East Central Europe into the Balkan lands and round the head of the
Adriatic. The course of these drifts is laid out in detail, as we have
seen, by the physique of the regions; and therewith is determined the
kind of life which each set of folk must be living if it is to survive
the journey.

And here we come at once upon a new factor making strongly for a more
general uniformity of culture within peninsular Europe than its physical
character would at all prepare us to expect. For although individual men
often respond very rapidly to fresh surroundings, and can change their
mode of life almost as they change their clothes, societies react far
more slowly; at the pace, in fact, usually of their most obstinate
members. Confronted therefore with the opportunity, or the need, for a
change of habit, in the course of a migration for example, they must
either refuse it, like a shy horse, or (if they accept it) enter on
their new career imperfectly trained, and extemporizing adjustments here
and there in very unworkmanlike fashion. Only rarely does the statesman
or 'lawgiver' appear, just when he is wanted, to bring Israel up out of
Egypt into the desert, and out of the desert into the good land beyond