are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the English crown. We soon
learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems so strange. Those islands
are the remains of a state and a people which adopted the French tongue,
but which, while it remained one, did not become a part of the French
state. That people brought England by force of arms under the rule of
their own sovereigns. The greater part of that people were afterward
conquered by France, and gradually became French in feeling as well as
in language. But a remnant clave to their connection with the land which
their forefathers had conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the
French tongue, never became French in feeling. This last case, that of
the Norman islands, is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England
were politically connected, while language and geography pointed rather
to a union between Normandy and France. In the case of continental
Normandy, where the geographical tie was strongest, language and
geography together could carry the day, and the continental Norman
became a Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less
strong, political traditions and manifest interest carried the day
against language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did
not become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He
alone remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but
attached to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of
advantage. Between states of the relative size of England and the Norman
islands, the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the
part of the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember
that our forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the
Norman islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.

These instances, and countless others, bear out the position that, while
community of language is the most obvious sign of common nationality,
while it is the main element, or something more than an element, in the