; and
Christendom is tremulous with their emotion. It is the same old
struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent
and reading people, with the history of British and French Border-
lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has
happened under the sun. Full that proportion of our English-
speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own
annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border-
lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole,
bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and
never ought to be subdued by human means or motives. To them,
naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething,
insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years
and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and
Wales. What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth
and nineteenth! Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to
touch that point with a cambric needle. It may seem unfeeling to
say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of
the last millenium. There is a patriotism that looks at the future
through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star. That
patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment. It was strong
in the Welshman's breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman's
half that distance back in the past. But it is a patriotism that
has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it
looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a
constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star.
Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a little
_nothing_.

These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future
history in the mirror of England's annals. They are quaking now
with the impetuous emotions of local nationality. They are
blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch
independence of centuries agone. But over those boundary wastes the
grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white
lambs shall lie in the sun.

My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever
saw. Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I
was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen
miles in one direction, and over twenty in another. It is doubtful
if so large a churchless space could