Happily there are now signs that improvement is too far advanced
to permit this policy to be any longer successful.
For the preceding reasons, it is in general a necessary condition of
free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide
in the main with those of nationalities. But several considerations
are liable to conflict in practice with this general principle. In the
first place, its application is often precluded by geographical
hindrances. There are parts even of Europe in which different
nationalities are so locally intermingled that it is not practicable
for them to be under separate governments. The population of Hungary
is composed of Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumans, and in some
districts Germans, so mixed up as to be incapable of local separation;
and there is no course open to them but to make a virtue of necessity,
and reconcile themselves to living together under equal rights and
laws. Their community of servitude, which dates only from the
destruction of Hungarian independence in 1849, seems to be ripening
and disposing them for such an equal union. The German colony of
East Prussia is cut off from Germany by part of the ancient Poland,
and being too weak to maintain separate independence, must, if
geographical continuity is to be maintained, be either under a
non-German government, or the intervening Polish territory must be
under a German one.
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