of Normandy or Languedoc. The part of the island
which is not thoroughly assimilated in language, that part which still
speaks Welsh or Gaelic, is larger in proportion than the non-French part
of modern France. But however much either the northern or the western
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 the 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 which we shall come to in other parts of
the world. Ireland is, most unhappily, 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 can never be so
thoroughly 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 is not thoroughly 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.

In some other parts of Western Europe, as in the Spanish and
Scandinavian peninsulas, the coincidence of language and nationality is
stronger than it is in France, Britain, or even Italy. No one speaks
Spanish except in Spain or in the colonies of Spain. And within Spain
the proportion of those who do not speak Spanish, namely the Basque
remnant, is smaller than the non-assimilated element in Britain and
France. Here two things are to be marked: First, the modern Spanish
nation has been formed, like the French, by a great process of
assimilation; secondly, the actual national arrangements of the Spanish
peninsula are wholly due to historical causes, we might almost say
historical accidents, and those of very recent date. Spain and Portugal
are separate kingdoms, and we look on their i