At the present moment the relation of German and Slav is of principal interest. During the period of Teutonic migrations, in the first few centuries of our era, the Slavs settled in the whole region from which Teutonic tribes had moved away. They occupied the whole of what is now eastern Germany. In the Middle Ages, with the growth of the German Empire, a slow backward movement set in. Germans settled as colonists in Slavic territory, and by degrees German speech prevailed over the Slavic. In Germany, survivals of the gradual process may be found in a few remote localities where Slavic speech still persists. As by contact with the more advanced Germans the cultural and economic conditions of the Slav improved, his resistance to Germanization became greater and greater,--earliest among the Czechs and Poles, later in the other Slavic groups. This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they lie to Germany. With the increased economic and cultural strength of the Slav, the German lost his ability to impose his mode of life upon him, and with it his power to assimilate the numerically stronger people in its own home. But by blood all these people, no matter what their speech, are the same. In short, _there is no war of races in Europe_; for in every single nationality concerned in the present struggle the various elements of the European population are represented, and arrayed against the same elements as grouped together in another nationality. The conflict has nothing whatever to do with racial descent. The so-called racial antipathies are feelings that have grown up on another basis and have been given a fictitious racial interpretation. If we deny the presence of racial contrasts, it may not be amiss to say a word on the fact that we may distinguish with more or less uncertainty individuals that belong to distinct nationalities. This common experience might seem contradictory to what has been said before; but we form concepts of national types partly from essential elements of the form of the body, partly from the mannerisms of wearing hair and beard, and also from the characteristic expressions and motions of the body, which are determined not so much by hereditary causes as by habit. On the whole, the latter are more impressive than the former; and among the nations that are concerned in the present struggle, no fundamental traits of the body occur that belong to one to the exclusion of the others.