The difficulties of such a task are obvious enough, and will appear more fully in the discussion of the individual problems that follows. It is well known that Austria has been from the earliest times an open inn to half the travelling nations of Europe and Asia; that her rich plains are covered with ethnographic sediment deposited by a score of successive invasions; that her mountains, which are generally not too high and are pierced by plenty of easy passes, have served, not so much as barriers separating races, but rather as rallying places for weak or fugitive peoples seeking a refuge. Neither the Austrian Alps, nor the Carpathians, nor the mountains of Bohemia form an ethnographic frontier. Not one of the Austrian races is separated from its neighbors by really clearly marked natural boundaries. The historic political or administrative divisions are usually equally unsatisfactory as a basis for marking off the several nationalities from each other. In Hungary the county divisions are largely of very recent date, and really represent gerrymanders, intended, not to separate races, but to mingle them in such a way as to produce wherever possible a Magyar majority. In Austria almost all the political divisions were very old, and represented simply the débris of feudalism--the duchies, counties, and margraviates that took shape in the Middle Ages, when political formations had nothing to do with the principle of nationality. Of the seventeen crownlands or provinces of Austria, fourteen contained two or more races jumbled together. But however artificial and incongruous these provincial divisions might seem when judged from the standpoint of nationality, their very age or long continuance added another element of difficulty: it opened the door to claims based on ‘historic rights.’ Almost every one of the Hapsburg races had once had an independent state of its own; and where was the race so forgetful of its glorious past as not to claim the whole of every province which had once belonged to it, no matter what the present ethnographic situation might be? Indeed, since ‘ethnographic rights’ and ‘historic rights’ were so frequently in conflict, it was a common phenomenon that each race should use the one argument or the other alternately, as suited its purposes in each particular case, without much regard for that consistency which Bismarck called “the virtue of small minds.” The Czecho-Slovaks, for instance, claimed the whole of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia by virtue of historic rights, regardless of the strong German and Polish majorities in various parts of those provinces. But when it came to the northwestern parts of Hungary, where they had no historic claim, and the Magyars a very good one, they shifted their argument completely to the basis of ethnographic statistics. One need not, however, be very severe on our allies for such inconsequences. There was “a deal of human nature” about most of