mankind.

Let me repeat again that I do not assert there is an eternal map. It
does change; there have been times--the European settlement of America
and Siberia, for example, the Arabic sweep across North Africa, the
invasion of Britain by the Low German peoples--when it has changed very
considerably in a century or so; but at its swiftest it still takes
generations to change. The gentlemen who used to sit in conferences and
diets, and divide up the world ever and again before the nineteenth
century, never realised this. It is only within the last hundred years
that mankind has begun to grasp the fact that one of the first laws of
political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines
of the natural map of mankind.

Now the nineteenth century phrased this conception by talking about the
"principle of nationality." Such interesting survivals of the nineteenth
century as Mr. C.R. Buxton still talk of settling human affairs by that
"principle." But unhappily for him the world is not so simply divided.
There are tribal regions with no national sense. There are extensive
regions of the earth's surface where the population is not homogeneous,
where people of different languages or different incompatible creeds
live village against village, a kind of human emulsion, incapable of
any true mixture or unity. Consider, for example, Central Africa,
Tyrone, Albania, Bombay, Constantinople or Transylvania. Here are
regions and cities with either no nationality or with as much
nationality as a patchwork quilt has colour....

Now so far as the homogeneous regions of the world go, I am quite
prepared to sustain the thesis that they can only be tranquil, they can
only develop their possibilities freely and be harmless to their
neighbours, when they are governed by local men, by men of the local
race, religion and tradition, and with a form of government that, unlike
a monarchy or a plutocracy, does not crystallise commercial or national
ambition. So far I go with those who would appeal to the "principle of
nationality."

But I would stipulate, further, that it would enormously increase the
stability of the arrangement if such "nations" could be grouped together
into "United States" wherever there were possibilities of inter-state
rivalries and commercial friction. Where, however, one deals with a
region of mixed nationality, there is need of a subtler system of
adjustments. Such a system has already been worked o