t not lose her higher freedom; Trieste
must remain the needful mouth for southern Germany; Dalmatia must not
be cut off from the Slavonic mainland; Corsica would seem to have
sacrificed national feeling to personal hero-worship. But it is
certainly hard to see why Trent and Aquileia should be kept apart from
the Italian body. On the other hand, the revivified Italian kingdom
contains very little which is not Italian in speech. It is perhaps by
a somewhat elastic view of language that the dialect of Piedmont and
the dialect of Sicily are classed under one head; still, as a matter of
fact, they have a single classical standard, and they are universally
accepted as varieties of the same tongue. But it is only in a few
Alpine valleys that languages are spoken which, whether Romance or
Teutonic, are in any case not Italian. The reunion of Italy, in short,
took in all that was Italian, save when some political cause hindered
the rule of language from being followed. Of anything not Italian by
speech so little has been taken in that the non-Italian parts of Italy,
Burgundian Aosta and the Seven German Communes--if these last still
keep their Teutonic language--fall under the rule that there are some
things too small for laws to pay heed to.

But it must not be forgotten that all this simply means that in the
lands of which we have just been speaking the process of adoption has
been carried out on the largest scale. Nations, with languages as
their rough practical test, have been formed; but they have been formed
with very little regard to physical purity of blood. In short,
throughout western Europe assimilation has been the rule. That is to
say, in any of the great divisions of Western Europe, though the land
may have been settled and conquered over and over again, yet the mass
of the people of the land have been drawn to some one national type.
Either some one among the races inhabiting the land has taught the
others to put on its likeness, or else a new national type has arisen
which has elements drawn from several of those races. Thus the modern
Frenchman may be defined as produced by the union of blood which is
mainly Celtic with a speech which is mainly Latin, and with an
historical polity which is mainly Teutonic. That is, he is neither
Gaul, Roman, nor Frank, but a fourth type, which has drawn important
elements from all three. Within modern France this new national type
has so far assimilated all others as