few great, some of medium size, and the rest small ones; there is a kind of national equilibrium.
The East of Europe offers quite a different spectacle. There we have one great nation—in fact the largest nation in Europe, the rest are all smaller and small nations, some few possessing independent states of their own. But in Eastern Europe—and this applies especially to Russia—we have a very great variety of national and racial fragments.
The East and West differ also in respect of the number and size of states. Whereas the West has eighteen states, the East has only eight, two belonging partly to the West, partly to the East. For the West and East are not divided sharply and by a straight line; Germany and Austria belong both to the West and to the East.
4.—Speaking of the East and West of Europe and saying that both halves are not sharply cut, we find a peculiar ethnological zone in what is often called Central Europe. From Trieste—Salonica—Constantinople, up north to Danzig—Petrograd in a line not straight, but curved in the direction of Berlin, in whose neighborhood live the Slav Sorbs, is a greater number of smaller nations, which were and still are under the dominion of Germany, Austria, Turkey and Russia. This zone, composed of East Prussia, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans and the West of Russia, is the real and proper centre of national antagonism. Here the question of nationality and the language question are the political vis metrix. It was here that the present war broke out; here is the quarter from which come continual unrest and disburbance for the whole of Europe. This zone is the real kernel of the so-called Oriental question; this zone supplies the most urgent and clamant cause for remodelling the political organisation of Europe. In this zone the smaller nations are continually striving and fighting for liberty and independence. It is this zone which has confronted the statesmen of Europe with the problem of Small
