CHAPTER XXIV

  Europe as it Should Be

Natural boundaries of nations in Europe.—­Peoples outside of the nations with whom they belong.—­The mixture of peoples in Austria-Hungary, and Russia.—­The British Isles.—­The Balkan states.—­Recent changes in the map.—­The wrongs done by mighty nations upon their weak neighbors bring no happiness.

We have several times shown you, in the course of this little history, maps drawn by kings and marked off by diplomacy and through bloodshed.  Let us now examine a map of Europe divided according to the race and language of its various peoples.  It often happens that the boundaries set by nature, like seas, high mountains, and broad rivers, divide one people from another.  It is natural that the people of Italy, for instance, hemmed in by the Alps to the north and by the water on all other sides, should grow to be like each other and come to talk a common language.

In the same way, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Switzerland have boundaries largely set by nature.  On this account, it is not surprising that the map of “Europe as it should be” which unites people of the same blood under the same government, agrees rather closely in some places with the map of Europe as it is.

The boundaries of the kingdom of Spain and those of the kingdom of Portugal fit pretty closely the countries inhabited by Spanish and Portuguese peoples.

There are a few Italians in France, also a few Walloons and Flemish.  Otherwise France is largely a unit.  Some of the French people are found in Switzerland and others in that part of the German Empire which was taken away from France after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

The Danes are not all living in Denmark.  A great many of them inhabit the two provinces of Schleswig and Holstein which were torn away from Denmark by Prussia in 1864.  The high mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula separate the Norwegians from the Swedes about as well as they divide the countries geographically.

The Hollanders make a nation by themselves, but part of the northwestern corner of the German Empire is also peopled by Dutch.  The territory around Aix-La-Chapelle, although part of the German Empire, is inhabited by Walloons, a Celtic people who speak a sort of French.  Belgium, small as it is, contains two different types of population, the Walloons and the Flemish.

The German Empire does not include all of the Germans.  A great many of these are to be found in Austria proper, Styria (sty’ria), and the northern Tyrol (ty’rol) (western counties of the Austrian Empire), as well as in the eastern half of Switzerland and the edges of Bohemia.  Germans are also to be found in parts of Hungary; and in the Baltic provinces of Russia there are over two million of them.

All of the Italians are not in the kingdom of Italy.  The Island of Corsica, which belongs to France, is inhabited by Italians.  The province of Trentino (tren ti’no) (the southern half of the Austrian Tyrol) is inhabited almost entirely by Italians, as is also Istria, which includes the cities of Trieste, Pola, and Fiume.  Certain islands off the coast of Dalmatia are also largely Italian in their population.