produced either Homer or the Parthenon. If England had remained exclusively in the hands of its original Mediterranean inhabitants, and if the Teutonic Nordics had not conquered it, or even if the Nordic Normans had not reinforced the Saxon strain, it is more than probable that the British Empire would not have achieved its triumphs. Geographical situation, conditions of soil and of climate, mountain barriers, navigable rivers and abundant seaports have a powerful, even a controlling environmental influence on the raw material supplied by heredity, but in the last analysis it is race that manifests itself by characteristic achievement. The prevailing lack of race consciousness in Europe compels us to disregard it as a basis for nationality. In the existing nations, races are generally scattered unevenly throughout the map, and are nearly always grouped in classes, as originally race was the basis of all class, caste and social distinctions. Race therefore being not available as a test of nationality, we are compelled to resort to language. As a matter of fact, language is the essential factor in the creation of national unity, because national aspirations find their best expression through a national language. At the close of the Great European War the question of national boundaries will undoubtedly come to the front and the data collected and set forth in this book will be useful to a thorough understanding of the problems involved. There is reason to believe that if, at the termination of the Franco-Prussian war, the international boundary in Alsace-Lorraine had been run in conformity with the linguistic facts, much of the bitter animosity of later years might have been avoided. Similar problems will press for solution during the next few years, and if a permanent peace is to be assured neither the Allies nor the Central Empires can afford to create new Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein problems by disregarding national aspirations as expressed and measured by a common language or literature. In the Balkan states the difficulty of finding any political boundaries that in any way correspond to race or language has heretofore been insuperable, but when the Congress of the Nations convenes, whether this year or next, or the year after, every member of it should be familiar with all facts that bear on the case, and above all with the meaning of such facts, and there exists today no book which covers these questions so fully, so accurately and so impartially as Mr. Leon Dominian’s “Frontiers of Language and Nationality.” THE FRONTIERS OF LANGUAGE AND NATIONALITY IN EUROPE CHAPTER I THE FOUNDATIONS