to make everything else merely
exceptional. The Fleming of one corner, the Basque of another, even
the far more important Breton of a third corner, have all in this way
become mere exceptions to the general type of the country. If we pass
into our own islands we shall find that the same process has been at
work. If we look to Great Britain only, we shall find that, though the
means have not been the same, yet the end has been gained hardly less
thoroughly than in France. For all real political purposes, for
everything which concerns a nation in the face of other nations, Great
Britain is as thoroughly united as France is. Englishmen, Scotchmen,
Welshmen feel themselves one people in the general affairs of the
world. A secession of Scotland or Wales is as unlikely as a secession
of Normandy or Languedoc. The part of the island which is not
thoroughly assimilated in language, that part which still speaks Welsh
or Gaelic, is larger in proportion than the non-French part of modern
France. But however much either the northern or the western Briton
may, in a fit of antiquarian politics, declaim against the Saxon, for
all practical political purposes he and the Saxon are one. The
distinction between the southern and the northern English--for the men
of Lothian and Fife must allow me to call them by this last name--is,
speaking politically and without ethnological or linguistic precision,
much as if France and Aquitaine had been two kingdoms united on equal
terms, instead of Aquitaine being merged in France. When we cross into
Ireland, we indeed find another state of things, and one which comes
nearer to some of the phenomena which we shall come to in other parts
of the world. Ireland is, most unhappily, not so firmly united to
Great Britain as the different parts of Great Britain are to one
another. Still even here the division arises quite as much from
geographical and historical causes as from distinctions of race
strictly so called. If Ireland had had no wrongs, still two great
islands can never be so thoroughly united as a continuous territory can
be. On the other hand, in point of language, the discontented part of
the United Kingdom is much less strongly marked off than that fraction
of the contented part which is not thoroughly assimilated. Irish is
certainly not the language of Ireland in at all the same degree in
which Welsh is the language of Wales. The Saxon has commonly to be
denounced in the Saxon