ve nothing answering to this in the West. It needs no proof that the
speakers of Celtic and Basque in Gaul and in Spain do not hold the same
position in Western Europe which the Greeks, Albanians, and Roumans do
in Eastern Europe. In the East the most ancient inhabitants of the land
are still there, not as scraps or survivals, not as fragments of nations
lingering on in corners, but as nations in the strictest sense, nations
whose national being forms an element in every modern and political
question. They all have their memories, their grievances, and their
hopes; and their memories, their grievances, and their hopes are all of
a practical and political kind. Highlanders, Welshmen, Bretons, French
Basques, whatever we say of the Spanish brethren, have doubtless
memories, but they have hardly political grievances or hopes. Ireland
may have political grievances; it certainly has political hopes; but
they are not exactly of the same kind as the grievances or hopes of the
Greek, the Albanian, and the Rouman. Let Home Rule succeed to the extent
of setting up an independent king and parliament of Ireland, yet the
language and civilization of that king and parliament would still be
English. Ireland would form an English state, politically hostile, it
may be, to Great Britain, but still an English state. No Greek,
Albanian, or Rouman state would be in the same way either Turkish or
Austrian.

On these primitive and abiding races came, as on other parts of Europe,
the Roman conquest. That conquest planted Latin colonies on the
Dalmatian coast, where the Latin tongue still remains in its Italian
variety as the speech of literature and city life; it Romanized one
great part of the earlier inhabitants; it had the great political effect
of all, that of planting the Roman power in a Greek city, and thereby
creating a state, and in the end a nation, which was Roman on one side,
and Greek on the other. Then came the Wandering of the Nations, on
which, as regards men of our own race, we need not dwell. The Goths
marched at will through the Eastern Empire; but no Teutonic settlement
was ever made within its bounds, no lasting Teutonic settlement was ever
made even on its border. The part of the Teuton in the West was played,
far less perfectly indeed, by the Slav in the East. He is there what the
Teuton is here, the great representative of what we may call the modern
European races, those whose part in history began after the
establishm