This awakening of nationalities is the inevitable outcome of the development of democracy, of the press, and of literary culture. An autocrat may govern twenty different peoples without in the least troubling himself as to their language or race; but if once assemblies be introduced, everything is changed. Speech governs. Then what language is to be spoken? That of the people of course. Will you educate the young? It must be done in their mother tongue. Is justice to be administered? You cannot judge a man in a foreign language. You wish to represent him in Parliament and ask for his votes; the least he can claim in return is that he may understand what you say. And thus by degrees the language of the multitude gains ground and is adopted in Parliament, law-courts, and schools of every degree. In Finland, for instance, the struggle is between the Swedes, who form the well-to-do classes and live in the towns on the coast, and the rural population who are Finns. When visiting the country with the son of the eminent linguist, Castrén, who died while in Asia seeking out the origin of the Finn language, I found that the latter was more spoken than Swedish, even in the suburbs of large towns such as Abö and Helsingfors. All official inscriptions are in the two languages. The instruction in the communal schools is almost entirely in the Finn tongue. There are Finn gymnasiums, and even at the University, lectures in this language. There is also a national theatre, where I heard “Martha” sung in Finn. In Gallicia, Polish has completely replaced German; but the Ruthenians have also put in a claim for their idiom. In Bohemia the Tcheck dialect triumphs so completely that German is in danger of being wholly cast aside. At the opening of the Bohemian Diet, the Governor made a speech in Tcheck and one in German. At Prague a Tcheck University has recently been opened next to the German one. The clergy, the feudals, and the population are strongly in favor of this national movement. The Archbishop of Prague, the Prince of Schwarzenberg, although himself a German, appoints none but Tcheck priests, even in the North of Bohemia where Germans dominate.