It took nearly a thousand years to complete the blending; to make the _we_ and the _our_ of one great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre.

Long and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun.
There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; and Christendom is tremulous with their emotion.

It is the same old struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent and reading people, with the history of British and French Border- lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has happened under the sun.

Full that proportion of our English- speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border- lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole, bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and never ought to be subdued by human means or motives.

To them, naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and Wales.