An examination of the map shows how deficient Germany is
in good natural boundaries. The valley of the Danube affords an easy road to
the southeast, a road which the early rulers of Austria followed as far as
Vienna and the Hungarian frontier. Eastward along the Baltic no break occurs in
the great plain stretching from the North Sea to the Ural Mountains. It was in
this direction that German conquests and colonization during the Middle Ages
laid the foundation of modern Prussia.
THE GERMAN AND THE SLAV
The Germans, in descending upon the Roman Empire, had
abandoned much of their former territories to the Slavs. In the reign of
Charlemagne all the region between the Elbe and the Vistula belonged to Slavic
tribes. To win it back for Germany required several centuries of hard fighting.
The Slavs were heathen and barbarous, so that warfare with them seemed to be a
kind of crusade. In the main, however, German expansion eastward was a business
venture, due to the need for free land. It was the same need which in the
nineteenth century carried the frontiers of the United States from the
Alleghanies to the Pacific.
