degrees, and for the most part avoiding intermarriage with outsiders, became more and more identified, in national sentiment and aspirations, with their Greek coreligionists. Long propinquity, identity of creed, similarity of character, and the necessity of presenting a solid front to the common enemy, brought about a union which in many cases has resulted in the total, and in others in the partial, Hellenisation of the race. Thus the Kutzo-Vlachs of Etolia and Acarnania, once known as 'Little Vlachia,' and those of Thessaly, once known as 'Great Vlachia,' though still preserving their tribal appellations of Tzintzars and Karaguni, have to a large extent adopted the Greek language; while the other communities in Epirus and Macedonia use their Latin idiom, or what is left of it, for domestic purposes, but in education and commerce employ pure Greek.

So whole-hearted has this identification become that the protomartyr of the Hellenic War of Independence, the poet-patriot Rhigas of Pherae in Thessaly, was half a Vlach by birth, and many of the most eminent leaders in that struggle-Collettis, Zongas, Grivas, and others— were Kutzo-Vlachs. Indeed, D. Urquhart, writing as an eye-witness, states that this population' contributed to the Revolution, at various times, as many as ten thousand men.' The Hellenic sympathies of the race are further shown, not only by the prominent part which it played in the Hellenic renaissance, but even more clearly by the amount of wealth which it has since devoted to the embellishment of the Hellenic capital, the strengthening of the Hellenic forces of defence, and generally to the prosperity of free Greece and Greece irredenta. Many of the greatest benefactors of the Greek nation during the last seventy years have been representatives of the KutzoVlach race-such, for example, as Tositsas, Sturnaras, Baron Sina, who founded and endowed numerous Greek schools in Macedonia and built the Academy in Athens, and Averoff, a native of Metsovo, who a few years ago founded and endowed many Greek schools in Epirus, restored the Stadion at Athens and, on his death, presented to the Hellenic Kingdom its best warship-a vessel which rendered inestimable services to the Allies in their recent war with Turkey. It seems almost superfluous to add that some of the most highly distinguished

Greek poets and scholars-such as Zalocostas, Crystallis, Papageorgiou-are of Kutzo-Vlach origin.

It was not until some fifty years ago that the first attempt was made to check this normal assimilation of the Kutzo-Vlach element to the Hellenic. About 1850 the nationalist movement which had long agitated more advanced countries reached the provinces that constitute the modern kingdom of Rumania. One fruit of that movement was the ejection from the Rumanian dictionary of the Slavonic, Magyar, and other foreign words which predominated over the Latin at the rate of four to one, the substitution of the Roman for the Slavonic characters, and the systematic 'purification' of the national folklore from the Slavonic elements which permeated it. Side by side with this literary revival went on a political agitation aiming, not only at the liberation of those provinces, but also at the reclamation of all Roman' populations beyond their frontiers. The nearest field for this work was naturally Transylvania, and there the efforts of the Rumanian patriots towards the preservation of the Rumanian nationality clashed with the efforts made by the Magyar rulers towards its suppression. Hence a feud which, notwithstanding Rumania's close diplomatic relations with the Dual Monarchy since 1878, has lost none of its bitterness; and the exertions of the Bucharest League for the Cultural Unity of all Rumanians,' which finds a ruthless opponent in the Hungarian 'Cultural Leagues,' designed to bring about the Magyarisation of the Rumanian subjects of Hungary.

At the same time, Rumanian propagandists, not content with the task that lay close at hand, cast their eyes farther afield, and, in 1853, the Transylvanian patriot Eliadi Radule published his 'Souvenirs d'un proscrit,' wherein he apostrophised the southern KutzoVlachs as Rumanians of Macedonia,' and hailed as 'brethren,' 'children of Pindus,' blood of Italy,' all those chiefs in the Greek War of Independence who happened to be natives of Epirus, though some of them, like Marko Botzaris and Tzavallas, if they were not Greeks, were Albanians, and had as little to do with Pindus as with Italy. Under this poetic inspiration a Macedonian Committee' was founded at Bucharest in 1860, with the avowed object of working for the formation of a Greater

Rumania embracing Macedonia, Albania, Epirus and Thessaly. Five years later the crusade found its Peter the Hermit in Apostol Margharitis, a Kutzo-Vlach of Klissura, in Western Macedonia, who, though he had hitherto called himself a Greek, suddenly discovered that he was a Rumanian, and, having converted himself, conceived the idea of converting his neighbours through a scholastic propaganda. Execrated by the Greeks as an apostate, hailed by the Rumanians as an apostle, and furnished with funds contributed by the dreamers of the Danube, Margharitis set to work to wean the KutzoVlachs from the cause of Hellenism, to imbue them with a sense of their Rumanian nationality, and thus to pave the way for the realisation of the grandiose dream.

The Committee in its proclamations dwelt on the fact that the various branches of a nation cannot attain to full national consciousness save through a study of their history and an investigation into their origin. And so the origin of the Kutzo-Vlachs, always an interesting ethnographical problem, now assumed a practical significance the reality of which can only be appreciated by those who know to what extent the present inhabitants of the Near East live in the past, and how seriously they use abstract speculations as food for political aspirations and as a basis for territorial claims. No Italian politician has ever thought of demanding the annexation of Spain on the ground that the inhabitants of the Iberian speak a Latin idiom akin to that spoken by the inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula. France, despite an equally close kinship with the Latins' of the south, has hitherto refrained from pressing a political case founded on the dictionary. And the average Briton would be amused if he were told that he might aspire to the allegiance of the Bretons across the Channel. But in the East they order these matters differently.

According to one theory, widely held and supported by many learned writers, both Rumanian and German, the Kutzo-Vlachs are an off-shoot of the trans-Danubian Vlachs who crossed the river at some unknown time for some unknown reason and spread southwards, being, like the former, descendants of the Roman colonists and natives of Dacia. According to a rival theory, to which the no less learned Austrian scholar Robert Rösler gave

definite form and currency in his 'Rumanische Studien,' it is just the other way about. Dacia, colonised by Trajan, was completely evacuated by Aurelian (A.D. 273), and the Vlach nation, therefore, developed south of the Danube, until the 13th century, when a great branch of it traversed the river and settled in the Carpathian region. To the ordinary eye of the man of the world it is obvious enough that things do not happen like this in real life, and the student who knows something of the history of the Balkan Peninsula can only figure to himself migrations of races backwards and forwards for a thousand years-migrations brought about by incessant invasions and retreats, and accordingly devoid of all method, save the method of stern practical force whether of circumstance or of compulsion. Any pretence of fixing with mathematical precision and neatness these movements and countermovements savours of charlatanism, or betrays an ignorance of life and a lack of historic imagination worthy of a pedant.

The fact that emerges clearly out of the clouds of controversial dust is the very old one that both the Vlachs to the north and the Kutzo-Vlachs to the south of the Danube are a remnant of the Latinised population of the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, which, fleeing before the advancing waves of Slavs, Avars and Bulgars, sought refuge where refuge could be found. But whether the southern representatives of that remnant are directly related to the northern, or whether they are the product of the product of an entirely independent admixture of Latin and Balkan elements, is a theoretical question which all the ethnographic and linguistic labours of the last forty years have failed to settle, and one that for sober practical purposes appears scarce worth settling. A point much more deserving of consideration is that the Kutzo-Vlachs do not preserve the faintest memory of such a connexion. Their development, since the 10th century, at all events, has been wholly independent of their professed kinsmen on the other side of the Danube, and, even supposing that they were originally one people, that development has resulted in divergences the magnitude of which only patriotic prejudice can overlook or underrate.

To begin with, the speech of the Kutso-Vlachs, though

a Romance dialect, differs from the tongue spoken in Rumania as widely as Dutch differs from German, French from Italian, or Servian from Bulgarian, their own national appellation being Aramani, while that of the northern race is Rumani. Both dialects have undergone, in vocabulary and structure, profound foreign influences; but, whereas the Rumanian dialect has been especially affected by the speech of the Slavs, the Kutzo-Vlach has to a similar degree been affected by the speech of the Greeks. This fact, patent to anyone who has even casually compared the two dialects, is with equal candour and emphasis pointed out by no less an authority than M. N. Jorga, Professor of the University of Bucharest, who describes the Kutzo-Vlach speech as 'a Ruman dialect only in a wider sense.'

The folk-songs, legends, traditions, proverbs, social and religious customs of the Kutzo-Vlachs bear as deep an impress of Hellenic, as the corresponding features of trans-Danubian culture bear of Slavonic influence. In point of physique the contrast is equally striking; the Rumanians being mostly short of stature, thick-set, and heavy-featured, the Kutso-Vlachs mostly tall and slim with clear-cut features. A parallel contrast extends to character and pursuits. An essentially agricultural people, averse from trade and travel alike, and distinguished by no mental alertness, the Rumanians live rooted to the soil, leaving commerce and handicrafts to the Jews, Greeks and Armenians who dwell among them. The Kutzo-Vlachs, alert, versatile, and enterprising, fond of travel and of letters, are famous both as merchants and as craftsmen-particularly in silver-work-and eminently capable of holding their own against Jew, Greek or Armenian. They are decidedly a non-rural A few own estates in Macedonia and play the part of absentee landlords. But the existence of the bulk of the race is either pastoral or urban. In brief, it would be hard to find populations more diametrically opposed in type and temperament, in mental aptitudes and national ideals, than the Rumanians of the north and the Kutzo-Vlachs of the south.

race.

Nevertheless, the agitation for the redemption of these long-lost kinsmen, in its genesis a purely academic movement, was destined to assume a political aspect and