Never have I appreciated more fully than during the months I have lived in Germany the many advantages of an island people. No more detestable fate can exist than to be a border state of mixed population, snatched as the chances of fate and history may dictate from one domination to another. With the unhappy example of Ireland before our eyes, we are not lacking in experience of the difficulties which arise from the presence of two races and two religions in one country. When to these internal differences are added the ambitions and intrigues of warring Powers, each hungrily desirous of increasing its coast at the expense of its neighbors, the lot of the inhabitants of the debatable zone is seen to be unenviable indeed. National self-aggressiveness is always accentuated when unhappily yoked with the rival claims of another stock. Temperaments and points of view may be irreconcilable, but each side is forced to contend for its daily bread in the same area and to clash hourly or daily over the task. The problem in government presented by such a situation is at the best of times distracting. When inflamed by old memories of grievances and suffering, of wrongs given, wrongs endured, it becomes almost insoluble. Only a being from another planet endowed with infinite wisdom might be able to deal justly and impartially with so great a tangle. But the very fact that such a being would be remote from the passions surging round him, would rob him of knowledge essential to their understanding. The hard-worked phrase, self-determination, beloved by the sloppy-minded, never touches the root of real bi-racial difficulties. When two sets of people in one place wish to self-determine themselves in opposite senses, what then? Only along the lines, not of self-aggression, but of loyalty to a common ideal of justice and fair play, can reasonable men on both sides grope towards some sort of compromise. But almost invariably the actual course of events has been to destroy the very possibility of mutual forbearance. Hatred, sinister child of arrogance and injustice, stifles men and women within the evil circle it has forged. And the circle continues pitilessly to revolve, the oppressors of to-day being sometimes the oppressed of yesterday, but, whichever side is uppermost, the bond of hatred remaining close and unbroken.