se three parts, where recent conquest has not yet been followed
by assimilation, are chiefly important because in all three cases, the
discontented territory is geographically continuous with a territory of
its own speech outside the Empire. This does not prove that
assimilation can never take place, but it will undoubtedly make the
process longer and harder.

So again, wherever German-speaking people dwell outside the bounds of
the revived German State, as well as when that revived German State
contains other than German-speaking people, we ask the reason and we
can find it. Political reasons forbade the immediate annexation of
Austria, Tyrol, and Salzburg. Combined political and geographical
reasons, and, if we look a little deeper, ethnological reasons too,
forbade the annexation of Courland, Livonia, and Esthonia. Some reason
or other will, it may be hoped, always be found to hinder the
annexation of lands which, like Zuerich and Berne, have reached a higher
political level. Outlying brethren in Transsilvania or at Saratof
again come under the rule "_De minimis non curat lex_." In all these
cases the rule that nationality and language should go together yields
to unavoidable circumstances. But, on the other hand, where French or
Danish or Slavonic or Lithuanian is spoken within the bounds of the new
empire, the principle that language is the badge of nationality, that
without community of language nationality is imperfect, shows itself in
another shape. One main object of modern policy is to bring these
exceptional districts under the general rule by spreading the German
language in them. Everywhere, in short, wherever a power is supposed
to be founded on nationality, the common feeling of mankind
instinctively takes language as the test of nationality. We assume
language as the test of a nation, without going into any minute
questions as to the physical purity of blood in that nation. A
continuous territory, living under the same government and speaking the
same tongue, forms a nation for all practical purposes. If some of its
inhabitants do not belong to the original stock of blood, they at least
belong to it by adoption.

The question may now fairly be asked. What is the case in those parts
of the world where people who are confessedly of different races and
languages inhabit a continuous territory and live under the same
government? How do we define nationality in such cases as these? The
answer