Women of all nations; a record of their characteristics, habits, manners, customs and influence . to an end, has been in anyway actively or racially antagonistic oneto the other. It is undoubtedly this absenceof internecine strife during past ages whichhas made possible the continued independentexistence of so small a State, though it hasmore than once formed the battlefield ofEurope. Probably one of the reasons, and not the least potent, for the absence of racial antagonism has been the fact A Common that both Walloons and Flem- Religion, • have a common religious but Two b °. Languages. beli
Women of all nations; a record of their characteristics, habits, manners, customs and influence . to an end, has been in anyway actively or racially antagonistic oneto the other. It is undoubtedly this absenceof internecine strife during past ages whichhas made possible the continued independentexistence of so small a State, though it hasmore than once formed the battlefield ofEurope. Probably one of the reasons, and not the least potent, for the absence of racial antagonism has been the fact A Common that both Walloons and Flem- Religion, • have a common religious but Two b °. Languages. belief — Roman Catholicism. This circumstance has removed one very fruitful and frequent source of the 735 73& WOMEN OF ALL NATIONS differences that arise between distinct racesinhabitmt; cue country. But although they have a common re-ligion, the Belgians, as we have said, speaktwo quite distinct languages. The Flem-ings speak Flemish, of a kind which hasscarcely changed since the Middle Ages;whilst the great majority of the Walloonsspeak French, although those of the Arden- TheWalloons. SOME BELGIAN TYPES AT OSTEND nes and a portion of the province of Liegestill use the old Romance tongue, few of the inhabitants who dwell on theGerman frontier in the province of Liegehave adopted the German tongue. One would have supposed that nowadays,at least, some attempt would have beenmade towards the unification of the lan-guage by making it either French orFlemish ; but, although the former is theofficial language, nearly half of the inhabi-tants still speak Flemish, about 43 per , whilst the remainder retain eitherthe Walloon language, or French andFlemish combined. Thus rather less than10 per cent, are bilinguists, and most ofthis small proportion are dwellers in Brusselsor in the province of Brabant, which forms,as it were, a buffer state between Flanders, with its Flemish influence, and theWalloon districts. As we have mentioned, the Walloons areby some ethnol
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