ion goes beyond that, and begins to suppress religions,
languages, and customs, it begins at that very moment to sow the seeds
of insurrection and revolution.

"My old teacher and colleague, Prof. Burgess, once defined a nation as
an ethnographic unit inhabiting a geographic unit. That is an
illuminating definition. If a nation is not an ethnographic unit, it
tries to become one by oppressing or amalgamating the weaker portions of
its people. If it is not a geographic unit, it tries to become one by
reaching out to a mountain chain or to the sea--to something which will
serve as a real dividing line between it and its next neighbors.

"The accuracy of this definition can hardly be denied, and we all know
what the violations of this principle have been in Europe. It is
unnecessary for me to point them out.

"Races rarely have been successfully mixed by conquest. The military
winner of a war is not always the real conqueror in the long run. The
Normans conquered Saxon England, but Saxon law and Saxon institutions
worked up through the new power and have dominated England's later
history. The Teutonic tribes conquered Rome, but Roman civilization, by
a sort of capillary attraction, went up into the mass above and
presently dominated the Teutons.

"The persistency of a civilization may well be superior in tenacity to
mere military conquest and control.

"The smallness of the number of instances in which conquering nations
have been able successfully to deal with alien peoples is extraordinary.
The Romans were unusually successful, and England has been successful
with all but the Irish, but perhaps no other peoples have been
successful in high degree in an effort to hold alien populations as
vassals and to make them really happy and comfortable as such.

"One of the war's chief effects on us will be to change our point of
view. Europe will be more vivid to us from now on. There are many public
men who have never thought much about Europe, and who have been far from
a realization of its actual importance to us. It has been a place to
which to go for a Summer holiday.

"But, suddenly, they find they cannot sell their cotton there or their
copper, that they cannot market their stocks and bonds there, that they
cannot send money to their families who are traveling there, because
there is a war. To such men the war must have made it apparent that
interdependence among nations is more than a mere phrase.

"All our trade a