The republic of Switzerland is inhabited by French, Italians, and Germans.  Besides the languages of these three nations, a fourth tongue is spoken there.  In the valleys of the southeastern corner of Switzerland are found people who talk a corruption of the old Latin, which they call Romaunsch or Romansh.

Austria-Hungary, as has already been said, is a jumble of languages and nationalities.  This empire includes nearly a million Italians in its southwestern corner, and three million Roumanians in Transylvania.  It has as its subjects in Bosnia and Herzegovina several million Serbians.  In Slavonia (sla vo’ni a), Croatia (cro a’tia), and Dalmatia (dal ma tia), it has two or three million Slavs, who are closely related to the Serbians.  In the north, its government rules over several million Czechs (checks) (Bohemians and Moravians) who strongly desire to have a country of their own.  It controls also two million Slovaks, cousins of the Czechs, who also would like their independence.  In the county of Carniola (car ni o’la), there are one and a half million Slovenes, another Slavic people belonging either by themselves or with their cousins, the Croatians and Serbs.

The German Empire includes several hundred thousand Frenchmen, who want to get back under French control, a million or two Danes, who want once more to belong to Denmark, and several million Poles, who desire to see their country again united.

[Map:  Europe as It Should Be]

Russia rules over a mixture of peoples almost as numerous as those composing Austria-Hungary.  The Russians themselves are not one people.  The Red Russians or Ruthenians are quite different from the people of Little Russia, and they in turn are different from the people of Great Russia, to the north.  The Baltic provinces are peopled, not by Russians, but by two million Germans, an equal number of Letts and a somewhat greater number of Lithuanians.  North of Riga are to be found the Esthonians, cousins of the Finns.  North-west of Petrograd lies Finland, whose people, with the Esthonians, do not belong to the Indo-European family, and who would dearly love to have a separate government of their own.

[Illustration:  Polish children]

You have already been told in Chapter V that the country of the English, if limited by race, does not include Wales, Cornwall, or the north of Scotland, but instead takes in the north-eastern part of Ireland and the southern half of the former Scottish kingdom.

Turning to the Balkan states, we find our hardest task, for the reason that peoples of different nationalities are hopelessly mixed and jumbled.  There are Turks and Greeks mixed in with the Roumanians and Bulgarians in the Dobrudja.  Parts of southern Serbia and portions of Grecian Macedonia are inhabited by people of Bulgarian descent.  Transylvania, with the exception of the two little mixture islands mentioned before is inhabited by Roumanians.  The southern half of the Austrian province of Bukowina also ought to be part of Roumania, as should the greater part of the Russian state of Bessarabia.  Whereas Roumania now has a population of 7,000,000, there are between five and six million of her people who live outside her present boundaries.