s, and oppose
each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They
are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil
society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small
States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in
Western Europe. In Western Europe the principle of nationalities has
been a method not of disintegration, but of concentration. It has led
within the last fifty years to the establishment of two States of
first-class magnitude, Germany and Italy; and Louis Napoleon, who had
proclaimed the idea of national unification, was ruined by his own
policy, for the Germans destroyed his dynasty, and Italy gave him no
help. But in Austro-Hungary, on the contrary, the movement is not
toward centralisation--it is centrifugal and separatist; and if it
continues to increase in force it may threaten with dissolution an
ancient and powerful empire.

You will observe that since we entered, in our survey, the Austrian
territories, we have found ourselves within the jurisdiction of an
empire in the true sense of that word, which I take to mean the
dominion of one superior sovereignty over many subordinate races,
tribes, or petty States that obey its authority. I may be permitted to
regard the German emperor as the military head of a constitutional
federation, which is a different thing. Now I think it may be said
that from Austria eastward across South-Eastern Europe and Asia, from
Vienna to Pekin, the general form of government is not national but
imperial. Every government is holding together a number of different
groups, all jealous of each other, all of whom would fall apart and
probably fight among themselves, if they were not kept under by one
ruler over them. It may be affirmed, broadly, that the structure of
modern Europe, as represented by the massing of the populations into
great homogeneous nations within fixed limits, has now been completely
left behind in the West, and that from the shores of the Adriatic Sea
right across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, the real subdivisions of the
people, the bonds that unite and separate them into different groups,
are denoted by Race and Religion, sometimes by one, sometimes by the
other, occasionally by both.

Our first step over the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
proceeding south-east beyond the Danube and the Carpathian mountains,
brings us into the various principalities and provinces that were