In western Poland the peasantry are Polish for the most part, the townsfolk are Jews and Germans with a few Poles, and the aristocracy until 1914 was to some extent German. Farther east the aristocracy was Polish and largely anti-German, the peasantry Polish, and the intermediate people still largely German and Jew. Farther east still the middle class of the towns continued the same general character, but while the aristocracy was Polish, the peasantry was Lithuanian or White Russian or Ruthenian, according to district. One needs but to play upon the possible combinations among these elements to realize how difficult it is {66} to secure unity. It is often the natural fate of aristocracies to fade out unless they can recruit themselves from below, and that recruitment has usually meant the ultimate merging of the aristocracy in the tradition of the simple folk, the classic case being the merging of the Norman aristocracy of Britain in the Anglo-Celtic heritage of the commoners. But the merging of aristocracies would not bring unity because of the burgher element, largely German, and the labouring element, largely Jewish. Farther west the petit-bourgeois element of the market towns has often mediated differences between peasant elements of different regions, but as in Poland the former is not to any extent Polish, it is inconceivable that it should mediate between the Polish peasantry farther west and the Ruthenian and other elements farther east. In Rumania the difficulties are analogous, and so are those of Hungary. Parts of Yugoslavia seem fortunate in having a simpler problem. A mere catalogue of the peoples of East-Central Europe with appended notes would hardly justify the space it would need in this small book, especially as information of the kind is easily available in standard works of reference. It therefore seems more useful to sketch in broad outline the physical and vegetational facts of East-Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring out the essentials of the setting of human life and the variation of that setting with the region so that peoples of diverging outlook and traditions have grown up in those regions. The first and simplest physical fact is the immense broadening out of the European plain, which, in the region between the Rhine and Vistula, is practically Prussia alone, while farther east it has added to it the ancient land-elements of the north, so that its effective extent is from the White Sea to the Black Sea through degrees of latitude, and consequently through marked gradations of climate. The climatic facts are equally well known. The great extent of the land surface, and still more the fact that it {67} is but a small extension of the far greater land surface of the Asiatic interior, give it a condition of dense dry cold air through the winter.