which bound the idea of nationality to the idea of language only, and
joined political pretensions to it. There are some who advocate the
theory that existing States must cease, and the territories of the world
be divided anew by languages and nations, separated by tongues.

You are aware that this idea, if it were not impracticable, would be a
curse to humanity--a deathblow to civilization and progress, and throw
back mankind by centuries. It would be an eternal source of strife and
war: for there is a holy, almost religious tie, by which man's heart is
bound to his home, and no man would ever consent to abandon his native
land only because his neighbours speak another language than himself.
His heart claims that sacred spot where the ashes of his fathers
lie--where his own cradle stood--where he dreamed the happy dreams of
youth, and where nature itself bears a mark of his manhood's toil. The
idea were worse than the old migration of nations was. Nothing but
despotism would rise out of such a fanatical strife of all mankind.

And really it is very curious. Nobody of the advocates of this
mischievous theory is willing to yield to it for himself--but others he
desires to yield to it. Every Frenchman becomes furious when his Alsace
is claimed to Germany by the right of language--or the borders of his
Pyrenees to Spain--but there are some amongst the very men who feel
revolted at this idea, who claim of Germany that it should yield up
large territory because one part of the inhabitants speak a different
tongue, and would claim from Hungary to divide its territory, which God
himself has limited by its range of mountains and the system of streams,
as also by all the links of a community of more than a thousand years;
to cut off our right hand, Transylvania, and to give it up to the
neighbouring Wallachia, to cut out like Shylock one pound of our very
breast--the Banat--and the rich country between the Danube and