rs and Southern Slavs can
throw the world into war to fulfil their nationalistic aspirations.
Until this nationalistic problem is solved no sure advance towards a
permanent peace is possible.

Undoubtedly the struggle of subject nationalities to be {275} free, and
of independent nations to annex their kin, has been a fruitful source
of strife during the last century. The sense of nationality has been
intensified by the nation's mobilisation of the economic interests of
its citizens; it has become almost pathological as a result of petty
nationalistic fragments competing for separate existence. Bulgarians,
Greeks and Serbians want the same tract in Macedonia; Roumanians,
Italians and Serbs wish to redeem their subject brethren in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire; France seeks to rescue the Francophile though
German-speaking Alsatians and Lothringians, and Germany would gladly
welcome the Dutch and Flemings back to their putative German
allegiance. There is no limit to these nationalistic claims; no room
for arbitration; no fixed principle to determine to which nation each
group shall be awarded. The result, quite apart from any action among
the Great Powers, seems war--inevitable and endless.[3]

{276}

It is impossible to withhold one's admiration for the inspiring fight
which oppressed peoples all over the world are making for their
independence. We thrill over the old story of the Grecian revolt
against Turkey, of the great risorgimento of Italy, of the long slow
struggle of Germany to achieve statehood. The century since the Vienna
Congress has marked an almost uninterrupted victory for the principle
of nationality. Yet though we sympathise with the aspirations of
Poles, Finns, Armenians and Bohemians, an unlimited independence cannot
always be desired. Nationalities are not sundered geographically, but
men of diverse stocks and traditions are interspersed, as though a
malign power had wished to make concord forever impossible. Ireland
cannot secure autonomy, to say nothing of independence of Great
Britain, without encountering Ulster's demand to be independent of
Ireland. Similarly a Great Roumania, a Greater Serbia, a Poland, an
independent Bohemia can be secured only by denying the equal rights of
lesser racial groups. To-day Hungarians misrule the Roumanians of
Transylvania; to-morrow a Greater Roumania may misrule the Transylvania
Hungarians. The principle of the independence of nationalities
collides