g feeling its way.
We have seen by the example of Switzerland that it is possible to make
an artificial nation out of fragments which have split off from three
several nations. But the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is not a nation, not
even an artificial nation of this kind. Its elements are not bound
together in the same way as the three elements of the Swiss
Confederation. It does indeed contain one whole nation in the form of
the Magyars: we might say that it contains two, if we reckon the Czechs
for a distinct nation. Of its other elements, we may for the moment set
aside those parts of Germany which are so strangely united with the
crowns of Hungary and Dalmatia. In those parts of the monarchy which
come within the more strictly Eastern lands--the _Roman_ and the
_Rouman_,--we may so distinguish the Romance-speaking inhabitants of
Dalmatia and the Romance-speaking inhabitants of Transsilvania. The Slav
of the north and of the south, the Magyar conqueror, the Saxon
immigrant, all abide as distinct races. That the Ottoman is not to be
added to our list in Hungary, while he is to be added in lands farther
south, is simply because he has been driven out of Hungary, while he is
allowed to abide in lands farther south. No point is more important to
insist on now than the fact that the Ottoman once held the greater part
of Hungary by exactly the same right, the right of the strongest, as
that by which he still holds Macedonia and Epeiros. It is simply the
result of a century of warfare, from Sobieski to Joseph the Second,
which fixed the boundary which only yesterday seemed eternal to
diplomatists, but which now seems to have vanished. That boundary has
advanced and gone back over and over again. As Buda once was Turkish,
Belgrade has more than once been Austrian. The whole of the southeastern
lands, Austrian, Turkish, and independent, from the Carpathian Mountains
southward, present the same characteristic of permanence and
distinctness among the several races which occupy them. The several
races may lie, here in large continuous masses, there in small detached
settlements; but there they all are in their distinctness. There is
among them plenty of living and active national feeling; but while in
the West political arrangements for the most part follow the great lines
of national feeling, in the East the only way in which national feeling
can show itself is by protesting, whether in arms or otherwise,
against existing politic