The same was true of the Slavs and the
slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of
Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine
culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have
gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the
steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.
Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long
established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case
the nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is correctly spoken
of as a "new," nation; but the term should always be used with a clear
sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and
what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation
just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities
compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phoenician race was in
every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. So,
nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with
England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and
culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean
for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that
the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished
many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean
that the ancestral history is the same in each case.
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