by the "worshipers,"-if Snorri's virtually exclusive account is to be accepted without sophistication. The evidence accorded by the religious cults of Europe yields little that is conclusive, beyond throwing the whole loosejointed, proliferous European paganism out of touch with anything that can reasonably be called Aryan. And this in spite of the fact that all the available evidence is derived from the European cults as they stood after having been exposed to long centuries of Aryanisation. So that it may well be held that such systematisation of myths and observances as these European cults give evidence of, and going in the direction of a despotic monotheism, is to be traced to the influence of the intrusive culture of the Aryan or Aryanised invaders,—as is fairly plain in the instance of the Olympians.

(e) That the languages of early Europe, so far as known, belong almost universally to the Aryan family may seem an insurmountable obstacle to the view here spoken for. But the difficulties of the case are not appreciably lessened by so varying the hypothesis as to impute the Aryan speech to the dolicho-blond, or to any blond stock, as its original bearer. Indeed, the difficulties are increased by such an hypothesis, since the Aryan-speaking peoples of early times, as of later times, have in the main been communities made up of brunets without evidence of a blond admixture, not to speak of an exclusively blond people. (There is no evidence of the existence of an all-blond people anywhere, early or late.)

The early European situation, so far as known, offers no exceptional obstacles to the diffusion of an intrusive language. Certain mass movements of population, or rather mass movements of communities shifting their ground by secular progression, are known to have taken place, as, e.g., in the case of the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic

culture moving westward on the whole as it gained ground and spread by shifting and ramification outward from its first-known seat in the upper Danube valley. All the while, as this secular movement of growth, ramification and advance was going on, the Hallstatt-La Tène-Keltic peoples continued to maintain extensive trade relations with the Mediterranean seaboard and the Ægean on the one side and reaching the North-Sea littoral on the other side. In all probability it is by trade relations of this kind chiefly, no doubt, through trade carried on by itinerant merchants that the new speech made its way among the barbarians of Europe; and it is no far-fetched inference that it made its way, in the North at least, as a trade jargon. All this accords with what is going on at present under analogous circumstances. The superior merit by force of which such a new speech would make its way need be nothing more substantial than a relatively crude syntax and phonetics such as furthers the dissemination of English to-day in the form of Chinook jargon, Pidgin English, and Beach la Mar. Such traits, which might in some other light seem blemishes, facilitate the mutilation of such a language into a graceless but practicable trade jargon. With jargons as with coins the poorer (simpler) drives out the better (subtler and more complex). A second, and perhaps the chief, point of superiority by virtue of which a given language makes its way as the dominant factor in such a trade jargon, is the fact that it is the native language of the people who carry on the trade for whose behoof the jargon is contrived. The traders, coming in contact with many men, of varied speech, and carrying their varied stock of trade goods, will impose their own names for the articles bartered and so contribute that much to the jargon vocabulary,— and a jargon is at its inception little more than a vocabulary.

The traders at the same time are likely to belong to the people possessed of the more efficient technology, since it is the superior technology that commonly affords them their opportunity for advantageous trade; hence the new or intrusive words, being the names of new or intrusive facts, will in so far find their way unhindered into current speech and further the displacement of the indigenous language by the jargon.

Such a jargon at the outset is little else than a vocabulary comprising names for the most common objects and the most tangible relations. On this simple but practicable framework new varieties of speech will develop, diversified locally according to the kind and quantity of materials and linguistic tradition contributed by the various languages which it supplants or absorbs.

In so putting forward the conjecture that the several forms of Aryan speech have arisen out of trade jargons that have run back to a common source in the language of an intrusive proto-Aryan people, and developing into widely diversified local and ethnic variants according as the mutilated proto-Aryan speech (vocabulary) fell into the hands of one or another of the indigenous barbarian peoples, in this suggestion there is after all nothing substantially novel beyond giving a collective name to facts already well accepted by the philologists. Working backward analytically step by step from the mature results given in the known Aryan languages they have discovered and divulged with what prolixity need not be alluded to here that in their beginnings these several idioms were little else than crude vocabularies covering the commonest objects and most tangible relations, and that by time-long use and wont the uncouth strings of vocables whereby the beginners of these languages sought to express themselves have been worked down through a

stupendously elaborate fabric of prefixes, infixes and suffixes, etc., etc., to the tactically and phonetically unexceptionable inflected languages of the Aryan family as they stood at their classical best. And what is true of the European languages should apparently hold with but slight modification for the Asiatic members of the family. These European idioms are commonly said to be, on the whole, less true to the pattern of the inferentially known primitive Aryan than are its best Asiatic representatives; as would be expected in case the latter were an outgrowth of jargons lying nearer the center of diffusion of the proto-Aryan speech and technology.

As regards the special case of the early north-European communities of dolicho-blond hybrids, the trade between the Baltic and Danish waters on the one hand and the Danube valley, Adriatic and Ægean on the other hand is known to have been continued and voluminous during the neolithic and bronze ages,— as counted by the Scandinavian chronology. In the course of this traffic, extending over many centuries and complicated as it seems to have been with a large infiltration of the brachycephalic brunet type, much might come to pass in the way of linguistic substitution and growth.

AN EARLY EXPERIMENT IN TRUSTS1

ACCORDING to Much,2 following in the main the views of Penka, Wilser, De Lapouge, Sophus Müller, Andreas Hansen, and other spokesmen of the later theories touching Aryan origins, the area of characterisation of the West-European culture, as well as of that dolicho-blond racial stock that bears this culture, is the region bordering on the North Sea and the Baltic, and it's center of diffusion is to be sought on the southern shores of the Baltic. This region is in a manner, then, the primary focus of that culture of enterprise that has reshaped the scheme of life for mankind during the Christian era. Its spirit of enterprise and adventure has carried this race to a degree of material success that is without example in history, whether in point of the extent or of the scope of its achievements. Up to the present the culminating achievement of this enterprise is dominion in business, and its most finished instrument is the quasi-voluntary coalition of forces known as a Trust.

In its method and outward form this enterprise of the Indo-germanic racial stock has varied with the passage of time and the change of circumstances; but in its spirit and objective end it has maintained a singularly consistent character through all the mutations of name and external circumstance that have passed over it in the course of history.

In its earlier, more elemental expression this enterprise

1 Reprinted by permission from The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. XII, March, 1904.

2 MATTHAEUS MUCH, Die Heimat der Indogermanen.