The process of change, we realize, has progressed faster and farther in the west than in the east of Europe, which goes forward against the pressure of severe inhibitions that make its problems differ from our own. At times we are content to look down upon the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long ago at least as wild as they seem to be now. But we must also guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one. {9} We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe not as undeveloped West, but as diverse. In our changeful continent we may thus follow out one of the most varied and perilous of the stories of men, a story of hardly-won triumph over serious obstacles, triumph maintained for a while in the face of serious threats that never ceased. It is a story that leads us to the appreciation of Europe's precarious position of industrial and administrative leadership, with its implications of conflict and unsettlement that make our Chinese friends think of us as the White Peril. We may study our physical racial origins and see how every modern European people has come to be composed of moderately diverse elements, probably attaining some of their present characteristics during the marked changes of climate and opportunity accompanying the retreat of the glaciers at the close of the great Ice Age of Europe, and developing them further with changes of location and opportunity in subsequent times. We may see, as it were afar off, facts that will be clearer to the scientific men of fifty years hence, facts of the Mendelian inheritance of physical characters, leading, on the one hand, to the maintenance of types very little changed even through thousands of years, and on the other to the combination of diverse heritages from many sources, making an individual in many cases a mosaic of characteristics from different ancestral types. We may study the languages and religions of European peoples and see that in the days before writing and markets became features of local life, languages changed, albeit slowly, spreading in waves of civilization, with only a subordinate relation to the waves of racial type. And if languages spread in waves of civilization, this has been the case still more in matters of religion, though folk tradition has a remarkable power of resurgence that leads to the local adaptation of religious movements time after time. {10}