Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/377

Rh we shall find that the same process has been at work. If we look to Great Britain only, we shall find that it has been carried out hardly less thoroughly. For all real political purposes, for everything which concerns a nation in the face of other nations, Great Britain is as thoroughly united as France is. A secession of Scotland or Wales is as unlikely as a secession of Normandy or Languedoc. The part of the island which is not thoroughly assimilated in language, the part which still speaks Welsh or Gaelic, is larger in proportion than the non-French part of modern France. But however much the northern Briton may, in a fit of antiquarian politics, declaim against the Saxon, for all practical political purposes he and the Saxon are one. The distinction between the southern and northern. English — for the men of Lothian and Fife must allow me to call them by this last name — is, speaking politically and without ethnological or linguistic precision, much as if France and Aquitaine had been two kingdoms united on equal terms, instead of Aquitaine being merged in France. When we cross into Ireland, we indeed find another state of things, and one which comes nearer to some of the phenomena of the East. Unluckily Ireland is not so firmly united to Great Britain as the different parts of Great Britain are to one another. Still even here the division arises quite as much from geographical and historical causes as from distinctions of race strictly so called. If Ireland had had no wrongs, still two great islands could never have been so throughly united as a continuous territory can be. On the other hand, in point of language, the discontented part of the United Kingdom is much less strongly marked off than that fraction of the contented part which remains non-assimilated. Irish is certainly not the language of Ireland in at all the same degree in which Welsh is the language of Wales. The Saxon has commonly to be denounced in the Saxon tongue.

If we pass further towards the East, we shall find as we go on, that the distinctions of race become more marked, and present nearer approaches to the state of things in the south-eastern lands to which we are passing. We mark by the way that, while the general national unity of the German Empire is greater than that of either France or Great Britain, it has discontented subjects in three corners, on its French, its Danish, and its Polish frontiers. It will be at once answered that the discontent of all three is the result of recent conquest, in two cases of very recent conquest indeed. But this is one of the very points to be marked; the strong national unity of the German Empire has been largely the result of assimilation; and these three parts, where recent conquest has not yet been followed by assimilation, are chiefly important because, in all three cases, the discontented territory is geographically continuous with a territory of its own speech. This does not prove that assimilation can never take place; but it will undoubtedly make the process longer and harder. But this very distinction will help us better to understand the special character of those parts of the world where no length of time seems to bring about thorough assimilation.

It is when we come into south-eastern Europe, that is, in a large part of the Austro-Hungarian and in the whole of the Ottoman dominions, that we come to those phenomena of geography, race, and language, which stand out in marked contrast with anything to which we are used in western Europe. We may perhaps better understand what those phenomena are, if we suppose a state of things which sounds absurd in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East. Let us suppose that in a journey through England we came successively to districts, towns, or villages, where we found one after another, first, Britons speaking Welsh; then Romans speaking Latin; then Saxons or Angles speaking an older form of our own tongue; then Scandinavians speaking Danish; then Normans speaking old French; lastly perhaps a settlement of Flemings, Huguenots, or Palatines, still remaining a distinct people and speaking their own tongue. Or let us suppose a journey through northern France, in which we found at different stages, the original Gaul, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon of Bayeux, the Dane of Coutance, each remaining a distinct people, all of them keeping the tongues which they first brought with them into the land. Let us suppose further that, in many of these cases, a religious distinction was added to a national distinction. Let us conceive one village Roman Catholic, another Anglican, others Nonconformist of various types, even if we do not call up any remnants of the worshippers of Jupiter or of Woden. All this seems absurd in any Western country, and absurd enough it is. But the absurdity of the West is the living reality of the East. There we may still find all the chief races which have ever occupied the country, still remaining 