political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind.  I find it, too, in Europe; the monarchs splash the water and break up the mirror in endless strange shapes; nevertheless, always it is tending back to its enduring forms; always it is gravitating back to a Spain, to a Gaul, to an Italy, to a Serbo-Croatia, to a Bulgaria, to a Germany, to a Poland.  Poland and Armenia and Egypt destroyed, subjugated, invincible, I would take as typical of what I mean by the natural map of mankind.

Let me repeat again that I do not assert there is an eternal map.  It does change; there have been times—­the European settlement of America and Siberia, for example, the Arabic sweep across North Africa, the invasion of Britain by the Low German peoples—­when it has changed very considerably in a century or so; but at its swiftest it still takes generations to change.  The gentlemen who used to sit in conferences and diets, and divide up the world ever and again before the nineteenth century, never realised this.  It is only within the last hundred years that mankind has begun to grasp the fact that one of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.

Now the nineteenth century phrased this conception by talking about the “principle of nationality.”  Such interesting survivals of the nineteenth century as Mr. C.R.  Buxton still talk of settling human affairs by that “principle.”  But unhappily for him the world is not so simply divided.  There are tribal regions with no national sense.  There are extensive regions of the earth’s surface where the population is not homogeneous, where people of different languages or different incompatible creeds live village against village, a kind of human emulsion, incapable of any true mixture or unity.  Consider, for example, Central Africa, Tyrone, Albania, Bombay, Constantinople or Transylvania.  Here are regions and cities with either no nationality or with as much nationality as a patchwork quilt has colour....

Now so far as the homogeneous regions of the world go, I am quite prepared to sustain the thesis that they can only be tranquil, they can only develop their possibilities freely and be harmless to their neighbours, when they are governed by local men, by men of the local race, religion and tradition, and with a form of government that, unlike a monarchy or a plutocracy, does not crystallise commercial or national ambition.  So far I go with those who would appeal to the “principle of nationality.”

But I would stipulate, further, that it would enormously increase the stability of the arrangement if such “nations” could be grouped together into “United States” wherever there were possibilities of inter-state rivalries and commercial friction.  Where, however, one deals with a region of mixed nationality, there is need of a subtler system of adjustments.  Such a system has already been worked out in the case