There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island.  The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate.  The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame.  The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman’s breast; but it is not a war of extermination.  His ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one.  The history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of the “Saxon” realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious record, present and future.  He cannot yet make up his mind to say We with all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it.  He cannot as yet say Our with them with such a sentiment of joint-interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him.  But the rains and the dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land.  The lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of green vegetation.  The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.

What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the Border-lands of Christendom!  France was intersected with them for centuries.  Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any that ever divided the British isle.  Local patriotism wrote poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities.  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