he would no longer claim for France “liberty as in Austria,” for which saying he suffered at the time three months’ imprisonment. It is said that the influence of the Tchecks dictates these confiscations, and this alone is sufficient to show the violence of the enmity between the races. The Viennese with whom I travel declare that this enmity is far less bitter than it was fifteen years ago. At that period, I tell them, I travelled across the country without meeting a single Austrian. I met with Magyars, Croatians, Saxons, Tchecks, Tyrolians, Poles, Ruthenians, Dalmatians, but never with Austrians. The common country was ignored, the race was all in all. At the present day, my fellow-travellers tell me this is very much subdued. You will find plenty of excellent Austrians, they say, to-day amongst the Magyars, and to-morrow amongst the Tchecks. The reader will permit a short digression here touching this nationality question. You meet with it everywhere in the dual Empire. It is the great preoccupation of the present, and it will be in fact the chief agent in determining the future of the population of the banks of the Danube and the Balkan peninsula. You Englishmen cannot well understand the full force of this feeling which is so strong in Eastern countries. England is for you your country, for which you live and for which, if needs, you die. This love of country is a religion which survives even when all other faith or religion has ceased to exist. It is the same in France. M. Thiers who, as a rule, so thoroughly grasped situations, never realized the immense force of these aspirations of races, which completely rearranged, before his eyes, the map of Europe on the nationality footing. Cavour and Bismarck were, however, well aware of this, and knew how to take advantage of this sentiment, in creating the unity of Italy and of Germany. One evening, Jules Simon took me to call on M. Thiers, in rue St. Honoré, who asked me to explain the Flemish movement in Belgium. I did so, and he seemed to consider the question as most unimportant, quite childish in fact, and very much behind the age. He was at once both right and wrong. He was right because true union is one of minds, not of blood. Christ’s saying is here admirably applicable: “Whosoever shall do the will of God the same is my brother and sister and mother” (St. Mark iii. 35). I grant that mixed nationalities which, without consideration of diversity of language and race, rest, as in Switzerland, on an identity of historical reminiscences, of civilization and liberty, are of a superior order; they are types and forerunners of the final fusion when all mankind will be but one great family, or rather a federation. But M. Thiers, being idealistic, like a true son of the French Revolution, was wrong in not taking into account things as they actually are, and the exigencies of the transitory situation.