LAND &? WATER 
November 21, 1918 
are coloured by i\\p predominance of the one type over the 
other. The industrial world is a herd, easily run by self- 
appointed leaders whose only anxiety is for their own position 
among a very few similar competitors. The agricultural 
world is organic. The former will accept any general rules 
imposed upon it. The very life of great towns makes such 
unquestioning obedience and mechanical submission at once 
possible and necessary. The latter will never obey these 
uniform and oppressive laws. 
5. But the cross division in Europe to-day of agricultural 
and industrial, profound as it is, does not produce the direct 
violent and immediate effects of the last great cross division, 
the most clearly expressed of all : the division between the 
capitalist minority and their wage-earners. That great modern 
quarrel has its faint counterpart even in agricultural Europe, 
where there is the contrast between the stable, owning peasantry 
on the one side and the great eastern estates on the other. 
But for much the most part the quarrel of owners and non- 
owners is a quarrel of the great towns and ports, including 
the coalfields upon which they depend for their strange 
modern growth. 
This cross-division is of such sharpness and separates 
interests so strong and so conscious that many confidently 
believed it at the outbreak of this war to outweigh nation- 
ality itself. That opinion erred : but not so widely that, 
under the strain of war and towards the end of it, the indus- 
trial quarrel overbore, in the defeated countries at least, 
the national claims. It threatened and threatens anarchy, 
and eren the victorious countries know how their industrial 
parts are moved to great changes to-day. 
Such are the difficulties of the great problem. Such are 
•the conflicting definitions of right and the conflicting motives 
with which we hare to deal. 
So much for the analysis or criticism of a tremendous task. 
What of the synthesis ? What of the accomplishment of 
a final stability ? 
The details of such an arrangement must be postponed 
to the second of these two articles. But we shall do well 
to begin by seeing the thing in its largest outlines. 
In the first place the guiding principle of the settlement, 
in spite of all the perplexities which disturb it, must be 
national sympathy and tradition. This is so obvious that 
even the hurried and superficial glance of the newspaper 
and the parliamentarian have long grasped it, and that 
even distant communities which can know little of Europe 
understand its importance. Indeed the trouble has been 
to prerent so simple and obvious a principle overriding all 
others, or obscuring the other principles of contrast and 
division which make what lies before us the awful thing it is. 
We must begin by nationality, because nationality has 
been the driving force guiding all this affair. Within the 
national boundaries as they shall be established the other 
divisions of language, or religion, even of race, and perhaps 
•f economic quarrel, may be arranged. But national the 
future of Europe must be. And the prime characteristic 
of its stability will be that national realities should be recog- 
nised. Even where boundaries cannot be exactly fixed ; 
even where, as in the greater part of the new experiments, 
disappointed minorities must necessarily be included within 
the frontiers of satisfied majorities ; even though you leave 
lay this principle of nationality a legacy of unsolved minor 
problems, still it is the principle which must guide the whole. 
Let me take a test case : the kingdom of Bohemia. 
Bohemia is a State clearly defined by nature and by 
Ihistory. It is a square territory enclosed entirely by three 
ranges of mountains to the north, east and west, and cut 
off, though not so thoroughly, to the south. It is the upper 
foasin of the Moldau and the Elbe. 
How far this quadrilateral, which has been permanently 
present in Europe as a political entity has also preserved its 
original race, we do not know. The fluctuations of language 
little concern us. Religion is almost homogeneous : but 
when it comes to national tradition you are presented with 
the following phenomenon : 
The metal-workers and the foresters of the northern 
mountain boundaries are largely German in tradition. They 
do not hold to a German national tradition, for there is no 
such thing, but they hold strongly to the German cultural 
tradition as against the Slav. Were it possible to map out 
in detail village by village, parish by parish, what is on the 
whole German in tradition and what is Bohemian, you would 
have an impossible frontier, not only ridiculousl}' tortuous, 
but indefensible materially and morally. It is not possible 
to do this. But even a rough attempt at it, the abandon- 
raent of the mountains, for instance, would land you nowhere. 
If you are to have a new State which is to be stable at all, 
wliich is to have a chance of authority, and through authority 
of settling its economic domestic disputes and of making 
something final, you must recognise the State of Bohemia, 
with its frontiers following the mountain chains, with its 
capital of Prague, with its connection eastward towards its 
Polish cousins, with all its traditions intact. That would 
involve the submission of certain Germanic minorities. 
That is inevitable. They are not the strongest elements 
in the State, and they are not the^best. On the other hand, 
they are by nature docile. Bohemia within its historic 
boundaries, Bohemia recognised and rehabilitated, would 
be a permanent factor in Europe. Any attempt to create 
a frontier geographically artificial, or recognising the Ger- 
manic effort of colonisation by force or infiltration in the past, 
would not achieve stability at all. 
I have only taken Bohemia as one example because it 
happens to be a complex and a difficult one. But the general 
principle stands. We must recognise the claims of nation- 
ality round which all this great war has been fought : we 
must take for the boundaries of those nationalities, in spite > 
of local anomalies, their traditional and historic boundaries. 
How shall opinion be expressed ? 
To say that it shall be expressed by the popular voice 
is to take two things for granted, which, as a fact, do not 
exist. The first is a popular conscience of geography — 
the power of millions of people to tell you with one voice 
exactly where their boundaries lie. The second is a popular 
initiative : the power of millions of people to frame the terms 
of the question upon which they shall vote. 
INSTINCTS OF THE MASS 
There is a danger of error here which you find running 
throughout all representative institutions : the idea that vast 
numbers of men can act as though they were small numbers. 
They cannot. Men cannot vote upon a matter which they 
have themselves determined. They can only accept or veto in 
large numbers clear proposals put before them by a few. There- 
fore you can only have a popular vote within a framework which 
the peace conference shall lay down. You could create an 
artificial majority anywhere, by artificially including in some 
naturally united district.an extraneous province. Such ques- 
tions as may be submitted to a popular vote must necessarily 
be submitted from above, and it is at once the chief and 
imperative duty of those who submit such questions to follow 
the natural and historic lines ; to follow the boundaries 
which sane history points out ; to lean towards the older 
tradition and against recent colonisation ; to neglect alto- 
gether the argument of "industrial efficiency" and the rest, 
with which cosmopolitan capital will try to muddy the 
waters. There is a. Bohemian State in Europe ; a Magyar 
State ; an Austrian State — the eastern mark ; a Poland ; 
a Rumania ; a Serbia, and so forth. 
All negative attempts to confuse those great simple issues 
by a discussion of uncertain, complex boundaries are perils 
to the final settlement. 
In this respect we must be particularly careful of the 
test of language, because it is a simple test, or rather 
because it is a mechanical one. It appeals strongly to men 
remote from the actual circumstances of any particular 
national problem. All political errors, or almost all, come 
from this attempt at mechanical simplification. We must 
remember that the test of language is subject to a hundred 
modifications. The statistics, to begin with, are modified 
by the nature of the government which drew them up, and 
by its object in drawing them up. Beyond this, more impor- 
tant is the fact that groups of languages do not correspond 
necessarily to national tradition at all. 
Religious divisions again can only be dealt with upon 
the basis of a supposed national unity. 
I take the case of the Masurian population, Polish in tradi- 
tion but, alone of the Poles, Protestant in faith. I take the 
Federal Republic of Switzerland, divided into Catholic and 
Protestant, as it is also divided by another cross-division 
into Latin and Germanic tongues. I take the curiously united 
region of Alsace. 
Treat any one of these as political units — which they are 
— and you get your answer at once. The Masurian popu- 
lation is Protestant but it is Polish. Alsace is a perfect 
medley of two religions, but it is united historically in its 
political character. 
In other words in this matter of religious difference the test 
of the unit is nationality. And to that test we must adhere. 
It is true that religion is also in many places a test of 
national survival, and of national definition. For instance, 
in all the western marches of Poland Catholicism is the test 
of Polish nationality, even after many generations of Prus- 
sian occupation and propaganda in language. Or again, 
the southern boundaries of the Kingdom of Holland, especially 
towards the sea, were established by the Protestant struggle 
