During the past century side by side with the tendency to form imperial or large national groups, such as the Pan-Germanic, Pan-Slavic, Pan-Rumanian or Italia Irredenta movements, there has appeared a counter movement on the part of small disintegrating “nationalities” to reassert themselves, such as the Bohemian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Irish, and Egyptian national revivals. The upheaval is usually caused, as in the cases of the Irish and the Serbians, by delusions of former greatness now become national obsessions, but sometimes it means the resistance of a small group of higher culture to absorption by a lower civilization. The reassertion of these small nationalities is associated with the resurgence of the lower races at the expense of the Nordics. Examples of a high type threatened by a lower culture are afforded by the Finlanders, who are trying to escape the dire fate of their neighbors across the Gulf of Finland—the Russification of the Germans and Swedes of the Baltic Provinces—and by the struggle of the Danes of Schleswig to escape Germanization. The Armenians, too, have resisted stoutly the pressure of Islam to force them away from their ancient Christian faith. This people really represents the last outpost of Europe toward the Mohammedan East and constitutes the best remaining medium through which Western ideals and culture can be introduced into Asia. In these as in other cases, the process of absorption from the viewpoint of the world at large is good or evil exactly in proportion to the relative value of the culture and race of the two groups. The world would be no richer in civilization with an independent Bohemia or an enlarged Rumania; but, on the contrary, an independent Hungarian nation strong enough to stand alone, a Finland self-governing or reunited to Sweden, or an enlarged Greece would add greatly to the forces that make for good government and progress. An independent Ireland worked out on a Tammany model is not a pleasing prospect. A free Poland, apart from its value as a buffer state, might be actually a step backward. Poland was once great, but the elements that made it so are scattered and gone and the Poland of to-day is a geographical expression and nothing more. The prevailing lack of true race consciousness is probably due to the fact that every important nation in Europe as at present organized, with the sole exception of the Iberian and Scandinavian states, possesses in large proportions representatives of at least two of the fundamental European subspecies of man and of all manner of crosses between them. In France to-day, as in Cæsar’s Gaul, the three races divide the nation in unequal proportions.