Apart from this northern Finn-route and subordinate {60} Finn-ways (Perm, Kazan, Samara) to the Volga, the westward roads have been along the loess, either that of the Polish platform or that of Wallachia and the Hungarian plain, and the defence of the west against pressure along these ways gathered chiefly around Vienna and around Poland (Cracow in earlier times and Warsaw later on). Austria, as we now know it, was once the Ostmark, the eastern march or frontier domain of the German-speaking peoples, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which has just collapsed after a long process of decay was the fruition of the organization that defended Western Europe from Asiatic pressure on the south-east. It was obviously not a nation-state, for besides its German and Magyar elements it included under its control the many Slavonic and partially Slavonic people of the hill frame around the middle Danube. Its day of greatness coincided with the holding up and the beginning of retreat of the Turkish pressure; its subsequent history is one of clever diplomacy aiming at maintaining a power created for a purpose that was now no more. The improbability of any renewal of effective pressure from Asia on the now so highly armed west of Europe did away with the _raison d'être_ of Vienna as a city of camp and court, and it will require a higher development of European unity to make Vienna take its definitive place as the nerve centre of the Continent's land-communications. For the present, therefore, the size and magnificence of Vienna seem to lack justification, and there is manifest distress. A far smaller city would do admirably for the capital of the small area henceforward to be called Austria, and the past traditions of Vienna expressed in palaces and luxuries are hardly what would naturally grow up around a modern railway centre. When, however, we realize the need for increased unity of Europe we cannot but feel how valuable the University Museums and Libraries of Vienna might be were they internationally developed so as to give Europe a natural culture-centre second only to Paris. The suggestion to make Vienna the {61} capital of the League of Nations revealed an over-emphasis on the military and diplomatic tradition of Vienna, an aspect of that city's life which it might be perilous to redevelop. But as we are concerned with the peoples of Europe rather than with the states, this slight mention of Vienna must suffice, and we may proceed to deal with the linguistic groups of Europe east of the Teutonic and Romance areas in the way in which we have touched upon those of the west.