minority, to say nothing of fragments of Roumanians, etc.
The states of the Allies also are mixed, but for the most part in a different manner. Great Britain has considerable remnants of non-English nations, and so has even France of races which are not French; even Italy which is often proclaimed as an example of a national state, contains a Serbia has few Slav, German and Albanian fragments. Serbian minorities (Bulgarian and Albanian); even Montenegro, the smallest state, is mixed.
Russia is ethnologically a unique state. I speak of European Russia; the British Empire of course contains in its various trans-oceanic dominions and colonies many more nations and fragments of nations and races, but Great Britain is in the main English, whereas Continental Russia, though the Russians are in an overwhelming majority, contains many nations, of which several are numerous, and moreover nations which possess their own culture and traditions.[1]
3.—Comparing the national composition of the European states, we perceive a striking difference between the East and the West of Europe. If we bisect Europe by a line drawn from the Adriatic to the Baltic and extended up to the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, we find in the West nineteen nations; nine are embodied in twelve states (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland), the remainder are in the main, national splinters.[2]
The state-nations in the west are of all magnitudes: a
- ↑ On a special ethnographical map of Russia (Aïtoff, Peuples et Langues de la Russia, Annales de Géographie, 1906), one can enumerate eighty-five nations of some different races, and besides the author mentions nameless nationalities.
- ↑ Basques, Bretons, Welsh, Irish, Gaels, Romansch, Lapps—to be added to the Slavs, Albanians and Germans in Italy.
