What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the Border-lands of Christendom! France was intersected with them for centuries. Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any that ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities. It took nearly a thousand years to complete the blending; to make the _we_ and the _our_ of one great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun. There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; 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_.