Carus, Paul

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SLAV AND GOTH, 569or ill-natured lamas, and they are especially worshiped with bloodysacrifices and red-colored substances:"Rowan tree and red threid,Gars the witches tyne their speid."—The Gazetteer of Sekhim, p. 356.Large stones in their natural position hold a high place amongthe sacred objects of the New Hebrides. Sometimes in the islandAurora a stone is smeared with new earth ; in Pentecost and Lepers'Island a stone is anointed with the juice of a young coconut (Cod-rington, Melanesian Anthropology and Folk-lore, p. 183).About American Indians, Mr. James W. Lynd says: "In theworship of their deities paint (with the Dakotas) forms an im-portant feature. Scarlet or red is the religious color for sacrifice,while blue is used by women in many of the ceremonies in which theyparticipate. The down of the female swan is colored scarlet andforms a necessary part of sacrifices" (C. Mallery, "Picture-writingof the American Indians" in Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnol-ogy, 1888-89).As to stone axes found in Italy, Mr. Angelo Mosso says:"Among the votive axes which were in use in the stone age I presentthree stone axes found in Apulia. All these three axes are coloredred by means of ferrous ochre, which adhere tenaciously to thesurface ; for this reason we must regard them as votive axes. Inthe tomb of Sgurgola were two arrows colored red with cinnabar"{Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization, p. 134).Taking into consideration all the facts we have mentioned, wemay safely conclude that the use of the fish-head in Japan is asurvival of primitive animal sacrifice, as we inferred at the start,and thus we may realize how long religious cults continue aftertheir original significance is lost, even though different meaningsare assigned to them to meet the altered requirements of the time.SLAV AND GOTH.BY THE EDITOR.THE Dziennik Chicagoski, the Polish Daily News of Chicago,has devoted to the June number of The Open Court an editorialreview in its issue of June 11, 1917, which while recognizing oursympathy with Poland condemns our attitude as being too favorablefor Germany. The author of this extensive review even goes570 THE OPEN COURT.SO far as to resent the suggestion made in the editorial article, "ThePoles and Their Gothic Descent," that the Poles may be in partdescendants of the ancient Goths. He rejects the very idea of theproposition, assuming that its author imagines the Poles should feelflattered at being of Gothic descent.Now I will say that the Slavs and the Teutons are so much alikein constitution and in the conditions of their origin that for anthro-pologists it is very difficult to distinguish the one from the otherexcept in extreme cases. As a rule it may be regarded as commonlyaccepted that the characteristics of the western Slavs bear a strongresemblance to those of the Teutons, while the eastern Slavs havemuch in common with the Tartars. I do not mention this for thepurpose of counting the western Slavs as superior to the easternSlavs, for the Tartars possess virtues of their own. It is wellknown in history that the Tartars in Asia have shown themselvesto be a strong and vigorous race and have furnished some of themost successful of the world's conquerors, among whom there havebeen men like Tamerlane.The Huns too were Asiatics and kin to the Tartars, and theycan boast of an Attila, although we must grant that even Attilawas not purely Hunnish, but that his mother was a Gothic princess.His bodyguards gave him the name of "Attila" which is not Hun-nish but Gothic, and is the diminutive of the term Atta, "father."The Lord's Prayer in Gothic begins with the words "Atta unsar."Now while the Huns and their descendants the Hungariansare not free from a Gothic admixture this may be much more trueof the Poles, and it seems to me no insult to speak of Gothic bloodin the eastern Slavs. Among the Germanic races the Goths havealways counted not only as noble and strong but also as being en-dowed with the finer civilizing qualities which enabled them togovern Italy with justice and wisdom.It is certainly not an offence to propose the idea of Gothicdescent. But if we regard the western Slavs as mixed with Ger-manic blood, the reverse is also true. The eastern Germans arestrongly affected by an intermixture with the Slavs and it is notconsidered a disadvantage to the Germans to have received theingredient of Slavic blood.The Germans have never been able to agree in building upa state. On the contrary they were always too democratic to beconstructive in political affairs, and it seems that large Teutonicstates have been formed only where the people were no longer ofpurely Gerjnan descent, as in the case of Austria and Prussia.SLAV AND GOTH. 571It is well known that the large majority of the Prussian noble-men (that are now called Junker) are of Slavic descent. The namesending- in -ow and also in -itz or -witz are Slavic as their word-formation indicates. Such names as Itzenplitz, Buelow, Quitzow,etc., etc., are Slavic names, and the truth of this fact is readilyacknowledged all over Germany, but I do not think that any oneof them takes offense that some of their forebears were Slavic.Even the very names so often mentioned now, Treitschke andNietzsche, are Slavic names. Their Slavic origin is a familiar fact,and Nietzsche is even known to have been an enthusiastic Slav.A family tradition relates that he came of Slavic nobility, and hetook pride in the idea that there formerly existed a Count Nietzsche,who being a Protestant suffered much from persecution by the ortho-dox Roman Poles and was expelled from his home. When in theCrimean war the news of French-English victories over the Rus-sians reached Nietzsche he was so moved at the outcome of thestruggles against Slavism that he burst into tears.So the fact that the blood of western Slavs is mixed with thatof the eastern Germans is as true in eastern Germany as in Poland,and the mixture cannot be disadvantageous to either Slavs or Ger-mans. Why the Polish to-day should resent the idea of a kinshipwith Germanic races is as unintelligible to me as the reverse wouldbe, that the Germans should resent the idea of having strong Slavicadmixtures in their eastern frontiers. The ruling families of theMecklenburg duchies go back in a direct male line to the Slavicprinces of the Obotrites, and so we may be justified in saying thatconsidering the fact that the beloved Queen Louise, the motherof William I, was a descendant of these Obotrite princes, Slavicblood runs in the veins of the German emperor as well as the bloodof Queen Victoria of England.The tangle of descent is pretty great, and I believe it wouldbe as wrong to object to Germanic descent as it is difficult forthe King of England to do so. He can do no more than renouncehis German titles when. he tries to shake off the taint of being aGerman by descent. But in spite of all his efforts he remains thesame. So the Poles remain the same, and when they settled in theland of the Goths they may very well have assimilated with theGoths as the Huns did before them.When proposing the theory of the partly Gothic descent of thePolish people I would have been glad to be refuted not by senti-mental objections but by arguments. Yet I shall content myselfwith saying that I look upon this statement as a symptom of572 THE OPEN COURl.the growing strength of national feeHng among the PoHsh people.It is a good sign and I regard a strong national feeling as an auguryfor the restoration of Poland, but I think it should not be used asan argument to darken the issues of investigations as to origin. Imust confess that my critic has not convinced me, but on the otherhand I hope that the conviction of related ancestry will bring thePolish inhabitants of Poland and their German liberators into closersympathy than ever—closer than when the Muscovite influence dic-tated the policies of Europe and rendered' the King of Prussia sub-servient to the Czar. There seems to be no question that theGerman government did much in those days to help in oppressingPoland at the behest of the Muscovite autocracy; but at presentGermany seems to be possessed of the best intention to give Polandhome rule and to gain the confidence and friendship of the Poles.It is true enough that the Prussian policy has in time gone bybeen anti-Polish, that they have tried to exterminate the Polishlanguage and have shown themselves hostile to Polish interests andtraditions. One of their methods which consisted in buying out thePolish landowners failed for the reason that the language of thegrowing generation was derived more from the Polish nurses inthe children's nurseries than from the children's own parents, andthe children of the owner of a large estate learned to speak Polishfrom the servants in the house and spoke it with more fluency thantheir own mother tongue. So it happened that the growing gen-erations even of the German landowners became Polish.Upon the whole we may consider the Prussian method of sup-pressing the Polish language a failure, and it is to be hoped the Ger-man government will not repeat its former mistake. At any rate theUniversity of Warsaw was opened in Polish and the Poles in Europeseemed to feel confident that a new era is dawning for Polandthrough its restoration by the Germans at the present time. Let ushope that it will be so. I am sure that Poland will prosper underthe new conditions and will develop an independent Poland notonly in Polish home rule but also in Polish art and Polish literature.MISCELLANEOUS.TRANSFINITE NUMBERS.Everybody knows and constantly uses the whole numbers 1, 2, 3, and soon ; and we use the word "infinite" for something which like the above seriesof numbers, has no end. In fact, however large a number is we can always

Slav and Goth.

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Slav and Goth.

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