y good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly
passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose
inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be
given, and it may fairly be asked.

In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the
bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English,
we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In
a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken
which differ alike from English and from French, but which are
strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of
a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the
settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other
tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find
islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as
French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the
English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems
so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people
which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did
not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by
force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part
of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually
became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave
to their connection with the land which their forefathers had
conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never
became French in feeling. This last case, that of the Norman Islands,
is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically
connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union
between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy,
where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography
together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a
Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong,
political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against
language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not
become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone
remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached
to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage.
Between States of the relative size of E