Our memories from earliest years are stored largely in verbal forms, and as a consequence the language of our early youth has deep-seated associations, which remain as conscious or unconscious memories, the latter if we forget our early speech and learn a new language. That the old language is not completely lost seems to be proved by experiments in hypnosis, which show that the associations of that old language remain, and that therefore the associations with the second language learnt tend to remain incomplete unless a very special personal effort is made, made therefore by a supernormal mind, to overcome this difficulty. Common language-associations of early childhood are thus a most important link between men, promoting mutual understanding and easing intercourse and mutual confidence for the subnormal and normal, rather than supernormal, individuals who form the bulk of a population, and this helps us to see why the linguistic unit is so important in political matters, and unity of language is so often the basis of the successful state, which is consequently so difficult to organize in Eastern Europe. These reflections apply more particularly to the region formerly known politically as Russia, but they also apply to some extent {69} in South-east Europe, though the phenomena of language are there to some extent masked by others. The region commonly known as the Balkan Peninsula is to a very large extent high land, with opportunities for seasonal pasturage on the hills, and this, together with the unsettlement due to the strikingly contrasted life of the thin coastal fringe and to the pressures from Asia Minor and from the North, has impeded the evolution of the settled life, the market town, and the nation-state. The thin coastal fringe is a zone of Mediterranean life in which, already prior to classical times, hoe-culture and the tending of fruit trees had become one of the mainstays of life, but commerce was almost equally important. It is the home of the city-state, and in times of peace Greek became the chief language, with Latin, and later Italian, on the Adriatic coast. In times of disturbance the commercial element seems to have been partly submerged, and Slavonic or Slavonized elements have spread in, so that in Dalmatia it is possible to debate indefinitely the affinities of the people's social heritage, and much the same might be said of various portions of the north coast of the Aegean.