With such leisurely progress I visited, during the latter part of ’38 and almost the whole of ’39, the principal centres of that mid-European republic which we now call Magiria, but which still went, at the time of my visit, by the name of Mittel-Europa. I went from Geneva to Munich, from Munich to Innsbruck, from Innsbruck to Vienna, from Vienna to Bayreuth and Prague, from Prague to Buda-Pest, from Buda-Pest back to Dresden and Leipzig, from Leipzig to Mainz, and so back again to Basle, without crossing a frontier, having my luggage examined, or being asked to produce a passport—I got tired of counting how often I must have submitted to such nuisances if I had done the same journey ten years earlier. I was not a mere sight-seer; I had a purpose in view. Although a travelling scholarship did not entail any conditions as to how you should occupy your time, there was still a feeling that you ought to produce, when it lapsed, a thesis of some sort to justify your intellectual existence. For myself, I determined to write a monograph, which I subsequently published and which gained me honorary admission to the Royal Geographical Society, on the constitution and the general conditions of life which I had observed in the then quite new country of Mittel-Europa. I hope my readers will not accuse me of unnecessary vanity if I print here some few paragraphs from it, which are not, after all, without their interest: it is instructive to read, at this distant date, the estimate which an impartial observer could then form of the prospects of that unique state, which had not then passed, as it has since passed triumphantly, the test of more than fifty years’ untroubled permanence. “Twenty years ago, when the break up of the ramshackle Empire of Austria-Hungary had brought into being a whole welter of incompetent states, at variance with one another and in themselves, at the very heart of Europe, it would have seemed well-nigh impossible that a single stroke of statesmanship should, in so brief a compass of time, solve all their problems and unite them afresh, this time upon acceptable terms and upon a real, living basis of common interest. Austria itself, shorn of its seaboard and apparently destitute of all hope of self-development; Hungary with its unquiet political agitations; Czecho-Slovakia with its national, its constitutional, its religious dissensions; Bavaria and Saxony, still loosely attached to the German confederation, yet ready upon the slightest pretext to part company with their uncongenial neighbours—it would have seemed impossible, a mere Utopian dream, that all these units should be merged in a single Republic, by the far-seeing genius, not of a politician, not of a religious leader, not of a national hero, but of a Tourists’ Agency—and that agency one which had its centre neither in Vienna nor in Prague nor in Munich, but—_tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento_—in the busy thoroughfare of Ludgate Circus.