Wherever you apply it, self-determination runs against minorities. Ireland has its Ulster, Bohemia its Germans, Poland its Germans and Lithuanians. There are minorities along every frontier. Some one remarked that there was need of a fifteenth point, the rights of minorities. The Conference found this out, and upon the newly established states of eastern Europe were imposed special treaties safeguarding the rights of minority peoples--Jews, Germans, Russians, etc.--whom past experience had shown to need such guarantees. Of these human elements in frontier-making we may begin by eliminating race, for in Europe race is a matter of no importance in drawing national lines. This point is emphasized, here and later, because there has been a great deal of loose talk about race, notably on the part of German writers. So far as it is an exact term at all, race is a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color, and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, most prevalent respectively in northern, central, and southern Europe. But in no country do they appear in pure or unmixed form. Migration and conquest have intermingled them to such an extent as to leave no sharp racial frontiers and to make the people of every country a mixture of two or three races. Thus the central or Alpine type is widely prevalent in the south and west of Germany, and the Teutonic type in the north and east of France. Furthermore these physical types are quite without political significance--no one cares whether his neighbors are tall or short, blonde or brunette, round-headed or long-headed. So far as Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious international discussion. Language, on the other hand, is a matter of prime importance. Speech is a fundamental element in creating consciousness of kind: the man in the street knows whether he can understand the speech of his neighbor, and has always had opprobrious epithets for those who speak an alien tongue, from the ‘barbarians’ of the Greeks and the ‘Welsh’ of the Teutonic Middle Ages to the ‘dagoes’ and ‘gringoes’ and ‘wops’ of current parlance. Even differences of dialect engender similar terms, as when the people of the Right Bank are called _Schwob_ in Alsace and the Alsatians are stigmatized as _Wacke_ by those beyond the Rhine.