Nevertheless, long before the opening of the Christian era the Alpines of western Europe were thoroughly Nordicized, and in the centuries that followed, the old Nordic element in Spain, Italy, and France has been again and again strongly reinforced, so that these lands are now an integral part of the White World. In recent centuries Russia was again superficially Nordicized with a top dressing of Nordic nobility, chiefly coming from the Baltic provinces. Along with this process there was everywhere in Europe a resurgence among the submerged and forgotten Alpines and among the Mediterranean elements of the British Isles, while Bolshevism in Russia means the elimination of the Nordic aristocracy and the dominance of the half-Asiatic Slavic peasantry. * * * * * All wars thus far discussed have been race wars of Europe against Asia, or of the Nordics against Mediterraneans. The wars against the Mongols were necessary and vital; there was no alternative except to fight to the finish. But the wars of northern Europe against the south, from the racial point of view, were not only useless but destructive. Bad as they were, however, they left untouched to a large extent the broodland of the race in the north and west. Another class of wars, however, has been absolutely deadly to the Nordic race. There must have been countless early struggles where one Nordic tribe attacked and exterminated its rival, such as the Trojan War, fought between Achæans and Phrygians, both Nordics, while the later Peloponnesian War was a purely civil strife between Greeks and resulted in the racial collapse of Hellas. Rome, after she emerged triumphant from her struggle with the Carthaginians, of Mediterranean race, plunged into a series of civil wars which ended in the complete elimination of the native Nordic element in Rome. Her conquests also were destructive to the Nordic race; particularly so was that of Cæsar in Gaul, one of the few exceptional cases where the north was permanently conquered by the south. The losses of that ten-year conquest fell far more heavily upon the Nordic Celts in Gaul and Britain than on the servile strata of the population. In the same way the Saxon conquest of England destroyed the Nordic Brythons to a greater degree than the pre-Nordic Neolithic Mediterranean element. From that time on all the wars of Europe, other than those against the Asiatics and Saracens, were essentially civil wars fought between peoples or leaders of Nordic blood. Mediæval Europe was one long welter of Nordic immolation until the Wars of the Roses in England, the Hundred Years' War in the Lowlands, the religious, revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars in France, and the ghastly Thirty Years' War in Germany dangerously depleted the ruling Nordic race and paved the way for the emergence from obscurity of the servile races which for ages had been dominated by them.