Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CREEDS AND NATIONALITIES CENTRAL EUROPE is at the present time a geographical expression which has so far acquired no political or constitutional character. But Austria, too, was once merely a geographical expression, and Prussia was a provincial term denoting only the most easterly portion of the kingdom. It is not so very long since it was said that Germany was only a geographical concept, and what a content this word has acquired in the interval! The word " Mid-Europe," which has not hitherto been used in history, has, at any rate, this great advantage, that it carries with it no associations of creed or nationality, and consequently does not from the outset awaken feelings of opposition. We shall have quite enough and more than enough to do with such feelings of opposition, for if ever any territory on the inhabited earth contained within itself a superfluity of passionate discords and frictions, it is this Central European country of ours! It may, indeed, be said that the more recently colonised countries, and especially the United States of America, have to deal with intermixtures of opinions and races of an even more marked and violent nature. But the inhabitants of such countries have essentially less traditional obstinacy. The ocean lies between them and their old home, and during the long voyage across they have made up their minds to accommodate themselves to new conditions. This ocean voyage is lacking for us in old Europe! Here it is not our ambition to be or to become the most modern country in the world, but on the contrary we are fervently defending old rights, old customs and old boundaries, whether they are good or bad. The very radicals with us are in this respect often themost conservative of all. But it would be an excellent thing if peopl...