reigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre's
reach and rule around the world.

There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and
scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the
larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is
graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive
teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and
religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused
boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are
still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's breast; but it
is not a war of extermination. His ardent nature is given to
martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British
battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one. The
history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it
back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of
the "Saxon" realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious
record, present and future. He cannot yet make up his mind to say
_We_ with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as
the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it. He
cannot as yet say _Our_ with them with such a sentiment of joint-
interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of
that empire unroll their vista before him. But the rains and the
dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land. The
lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of
green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.

What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the
Border-lands of Christendom! France was intersected with them for
centuries. Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any
that ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote poetry
and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old
landmarks of pigmy nationalities. It took nearly a thousand years
to complete the blending; to make the _we_ and the _our_ of one
great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men
of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long and fierce, and seemingly
endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate
boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the
sun.

There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming
and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language