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NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
BY
SYDNEY HERBERT
ASSISTANT LECTURER, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES,
ABERYSTWYTH.
METHUEN & GO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.G.
LONDON
Published in
TO
MY MOTHER
482597
PREFACE
THE purpose of this preface is simply to acknowledge my indebtedness to those who have generously assisted me in the production of this little book. To Professors A. E. Zimmern and H. J. Fleure, of Aberyst- wyth, my heartiest thanks are due. How much- I owe to the former will be at once apparent to all who know his Nationality and Government, and he has increased the sum of my obligations to him by reading the MS. and advising me on many points. Professor Fleure read the first four chapters in MS., and I am greatly obliged for his criticisms and suggestions. He has pointed out to me what it is my duty to point out to the reader, namely, that in the earlier sections of Chapter IV the different stages of early social evolution are too sharply differ- entiated. The division between the hunting, pastoral, and agricultural stages are not, in
viii NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
fact, so clearly defined as I have made them appear. The pressure on my space has compelled me to sacrifice modifying details to sharpness of impression and contrast.
Besides the friends and colleagues above men- tioned, I must thank Miss R. M. Fleming very sincerely for the kindness with which she has always answered my numerous questions upon points of geography and ethnology.
For the sympathy and encouragement of my wife I have had cause to be deeply grateful whilst writing this book.
SYDNEY HERBERT
ABERYSTWYTH, November 1919
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
* I. THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY . . i
II. THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY— continued . 14
/ III. NATION-MAKING FORCES . . .42
IV. THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY . . 52
V V. NATIONALITY AND POLITICS (I) . . 88
' VI. NATIONALITY AND POLITICS (II) . .117
^ VII. NATIONALITY AND THE GREAT SOCIETY . 137
VHP. THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY . -155
INDEX . . . . . .171
NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY
THEdeclaration of war in August 1914 gave the signal for an outburst of controversy as unparalleled in scale as the war itself. Just as the Wars of Religion and of the French Revolution seem insignificant beside the conflict just ended, so the literature which sprang from them is as nothing, as regards volume, at any rate, to that which our bibliographers now vainly toil to catalogue and classify. Armageddon was the first introduction to serious political discussion for thousands of ordinary citizens. The pillars on which their world rested had crumbled in a night, and with almost pathetic eagerness they set themselves to understand the why and how of the catastrophe. And if the demand was un- precedented the supply was equally so ; poets and politicians, philosophers and economists, historians
AND ITS PROBLEMS
and novelists, flung themselves valiantly into the breach and strove, each from his own particular angle and point of view, to enlighten the public as to the nature and consequences of the war. In the subsequent discussion — a discussion which neither armistice nor peace treaty has brought to an end — every conceivable cause of conflict was examined, and every existing institution of civilization challenged or defended.
But various as were the standpoints from which these innumerable disputants began, and widely different as were the conclusions at which they arrived, a careful observer could note one inter- esting fact, which was that in almost all the dis- cussions, at some point or other, the word " Nationality " appeared, and the idea which it expressed was canvassed with more or less of vehemence. ' The principle of nationality " was passionately invoked by some ; " the rights of small nationalities " affirmed or denied with equal vigour by others.
There ought, therefore, to be little need to discuss the meaning of a term so widely used, for we might assume that whether friendly or hostile the critics would at least have arrived at some general agreement as to the nature of the idea under discussion. There is good precedent, indeed, for avoiding any attempt at precise de- finition ; Professor Ramsay Muir declares that
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 3
nationality " is an elusive idea, difficult to define, j It cannot be tested or analysed by formulae, such ^ as German professors love." x So eminent a j jurist and historian as Lord Bryce disclaims ability to define nationality.2 But one need not be a German professor to desire some tolerably clear understanding of an " idea-force " so potent as Nationality is said, alike by friends and foes, to be.3 Lord Bryce, indeed, offers some comfort by i assuring us that " we can recognize it (nation- p ality) when we see it," 4 but if our suppositions I observer has been really attentive he will ex- claim that this is unduly optimistic, for he will have noted in his study of the discussions aroused by the war that almost as majiyjmejynngs have been attached to the word " nationality " as there have been controversialists. Mr. Arnold Toynbee, ^ for example, who has done so much to enlighten us on the problems raised by the war, gives the term a definitely political content when he defines it as " a present will to co-operate in a political I organization." 5 Dr. Holland Rose, on the other I
1 Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism, p. 51.
2 Lord Bryce, Essays and Addresses in War-Time, p. 129. Cf . also Lord Morley, Notes on Politics and History, p. 76. " Though no term in politics is of more frequent use than Nation, it is not easy to define. There are almost as many accounts of it, as we have found in other terms of the political dialect."
8 Cf. Mr. W. L. George, " The price of nationality is war," quoted in Mr. Zangwill's Principle of Nationalities.
4 Work previously cited.
5 Arnold Toynbee, The New Europe, p. 61.
4 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
ihand, speaks of Nationality as " a spiritual con-"
•ception," x and is followed by Professor A. E.
[ Zimmern, who declares that " Nationality to me
is not a political question at all — not a question
of sovereign governments, armies, frontiers, and
foreign policy. ... It is primarily and_es5£nti-
ially a spiritual question, and, in^ particular^ a,n
j educational question. " 2 To a recent French
writer, again, jiationalitv^ is essentially a social
lorce, un milieu, social? Other variations on
this theme could be quoted, but those actually
given will suffice as being typical of the existing
confusion of thought on this subject, a confusion
which entirely justifies Mr. Israel Zangwill in de- J
i claring that " the principle of nationalities " is
« " one of those tropical jungles of thought in which
1 politics and journalism flourish." 4 We must
strive, then, to hack our way out of this jungle,
and arrive at some fairly definite conception of
the nature of nationality, taking comfort from the
thought that while Lord Bryce and Professor
Ramsay Muir have dwelt on the difficulty of the
task they have given us at the same time precious
indications which will greatly assist us on our
journey.
f What, then, is the nature of nationality ? A
1 J. Holland Rose, Nationality in Modern History, p. 153. * A. E. Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p. 65.
3 Rene Johannet, Le Principe des Nationality, p. 405.
4 Israel Zangwill, Principle of Nationalities, p. 28.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 5
personal anecdote, trivial in itself, may help us to the beginnings of an answer.
In November 1917 the author found himself in a hospital controlled by an allied army. He was treated with the utmost kindness and considera- tion, andiiad the good fortune to be able to make his wants and difficulties known in the language of his hosts. Yet, though drawn to them by a natural feeling of gratitude and by a conscious sentiment of solidarity originating in common effort in a common cause, there was still a barrier, a consciousness of difference, in a word. And when a bandaged figure appeared, and in English — rich Cockney English— hailed a fellow-soldier, the feeling of joy was immense, and scarcely to be expressed in words. Here was a solidarity {not based on political reasoning, nor even on gratitude, but on something more immediate, more primitive, perhaps. It was a spontaneous recognition of fellowship, a consciousness of kindTj
Now here, it is suggested, we have the basic principle of the idea of nationality. Two English- men are drawn together in an alien environment by a consciousness of likeness, of something pos- sessed in common, and in obeying this impulse they obey a force which originates all social groupings, and without which society could not exist. " This consciousness of kind," says Pro- fessor F. H. Giddings, " is the elementary, the
6 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
generic social fact ; it is sympathy, fellow-feeling in the literal as distinguished from the popular sense of the word." x And again, " The original and elementary fact in society is the consciousness of kind, tey this term I mean a state of conscious- ness inwhich any being, whether low or high in the scale of life, recognizes another conscious being as cf like kind with itself. ... In its widest ex- tension the consciousness of kind marks off the animate from the inanimate. Within the wide class of the animate it next marks off species and races. Within racial lines the consciousness of kind underlies the more definite ethnical and political groupings ; it is the basis of class dis- tinctions, of innumerable forms of alliance, of rules of intercourse, and of peculiarities of policy. Our conduct towards those whom we feel to be most like ourselves is instinctively and rationally different from our conduct towards others, whom we believe to Ije less like ourselves. ... In a word, it is about the consciousness of kind, as a determining principle, that all other motives or- ganize themselves in the evolution of social choice, social volition, or social policy." 2 Provisionally, then, and as a first step out of the jungle, we may define the idea of nationality, the conception of solidarity between the members of a social group
1 F. H. Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. x. a F. H. Giddings, work cited, p. 17 et seq.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 7
known as a nation, as a manifestation of that con- sciousness of kind in which all forms of social organization have their origin.
But here the reader will doubtless be inclined to intervene and urge that this does not carry us very far. If it be granted, he may say, that nationality is a manifestation of a primary social force, how does it differ from other manifestations of the same force ? Whence comes its peculiar character ? What, in short, marks off a nation from other social groups — from a state, for ex- ample, or a church, or a trade union ? Evidently, these are questions which must be answered if our inquiry is to achieve success, and they can probably best be answered if we first develop our definition a little further to give it more precision, and then proceed to consider, one by one, the special characteristics usually supposed to dis- tinguish a nation. But before embarking upon this inquiry it will be convenient to clear up one misunderstanding which is continually darkening counsel in this matter, namely, the confusion between " race " and " nationality." For we shall do well in all that follows to bear continually in mind the words with which Ernest Renan pre- faced a discourse on this subject which has become a classic. " Let us endeavour," he said, "to arrive at some precision in these difficult questions, where, at the beginning of our reasoning, the slightest
8 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
confusion as to the sense of words may produce the most fatal errors at the end of it." *
Much of the misunderstanding on this question of the relation of race to nationality would have been avoided if this warning had been borne in mind, and if the layman with a political or social plea to urge had been as cautious as the scientist whose laboriously established generalizations he exploits. True, the anthropologists, in whose province questions of race lie, have not themselves always been models of caution and precision when giving the results of their researches to the world ; they have sometimes written as if hypotheses were established facts, and, straying from their own territory into that of the politician or social reformer, have given the wicked occasion to blaspheme. During the last five years we have all seen " the results of anthropological science " paraded in the press or on the platform to prove some crude political dogma or other, with the result that the average man, faint but pursuing in the search for truth, assumes that those " results " are much more extensive and better established than they actually are. If he would look into the appendices to the books of Dr. T. Rice Holmes on early Gaul and Britain (to take the first example which comes to hand), he would find recorded,
1 Renan, " Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" Di scours et Confer- ences, p. 278.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 9
not clear-cut, satisfying formulae, but much division, even confusion of views and hypotheses. Mr. R. R. Marett even goes to the length of saying that " considered anthropologically — that is to say, in terms of pure theory — race or breed remains something which we cannot at present isolate, though we believe it to be there," and goes on to utter a very necessary warning against " premature exploitations of science." x Mr. Marett's position appears to be an extreme one, but we may usefully keep his warning carefully in mind as we proceed with our discussion.
Anthropologists have discovered that human beings may be classified into groups, the members of which all possess certain fairly well-marked physical characteristics. These groups are called
stocks" or "races, "and have received appro- priate names for purposes of classification and discussion. Thus the population of Europe is divided into three main stocks — Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic. Intermarriage between mem- bers of different stocks has, in the course of time, produced sub-races, but it is not necessary to our purpose that these should be enumerated here. The physical characteristics usually considered in
1 R. R. Marett, Anthropology, p. 92. For the whole of this section the reader should refer to Mr. John M. Robert- son's admirable book, The Germans, where the whole question of " race " is handled with as much humour as learning and argumentative skill.
10 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
this work of classification are stature, pigmenta- tion, and head-form, the last named being, as a rule, described by a cranial index-number. So far the matter presents no difficulties ; it is possible to criticize the methods employed by the science and to differ as to tests and classifications, but there is general agreement as to the value of the results achieved. But it has been further sug- gested that with these physical characteristics go certain congenital mental and moral character- istics, and here the scientific question becomes involved with political and social considerations. This is not a treatise on anthropology, and the whole subject cannot therefore be discussed in detail. It is sufficient to say that some statements of this hypothesis — for in the present state of knowledge it is nothing more — will obviously not bear criticism. /To explain, for example, the artistic achievements of the " Greek race " by some aesthetic capacity inherent in its members, is to err by assuming that all Greeks were of the same stock, which is exceedingly improbable, and to imitate the pre-scientific argument which ex- plained the narcotic effects of opium by " a dor- mitive property " in the drug ! ftJnfortunately, incautious scientists, and laymen' with a political axe to grind, have laid hold of the hypothesis and used it as a foundation for monstrous doctrines of ' ' racialism. ' ' Malice and ignorance have assumed
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 11
that national groups are racially homogeneous, and have fed base pride and baser hatred by these theories. The "French race" is decadent, the English sordid, the Irish treacherous, the Slav politically incapable, and so forth, ad nauseam.
Now, every one of these accusations might be true in themselves (though those who launch them would do well to remember Burke's famous saying as to the impossibility of drawing up an indictment against a whole people), yet the racial doctrine would not therefore be any nearer proof. For if ' the term " race " be used in its only scientific and rational sense, none of the national groups in question constitute races, since none of them are racially homogeneous, and it would, indeed, be j difficult to find a national group that is so. In our own islands representatives of all the three prin- cipal European stocks, as well as of certain of their variants, are to^be found. Dr. H. J. Fleure says of the Welsh population that " descendants of Stone Age inhabitants of valleys off the moor- lands, broad-headed folk who may be related to the ancient beaker-makers, and others who are probably coastal wanderers of the Bronze Age, besides sea-rovers, and probably Flemish artisans, not to mention Huguenot weavers, have more or less fused into a Welsh people, proud of its lan- guage and of its tradition, much older in part than
12 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
the language." * Were it not superfluous, similar evidence could be given as to the populations of England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and France. But the best example is that of the Hebrew nation. The popular notion as to the " pure bloodedness " of the Jews is entirely erroneous. Leaving on one side the doubtful question as to whether there was any mixture of stocks in the Palestinian com- munity, it is certain that from the time of Alex- ander the Great till the third century of our era there went on in the Mediterranean world a great work of prpselytism which brought the most diverse racial elements into the Jewish society. In the latter part of the fifteenth century one of the most important tasks of the Inquisition in Spain was to combat Jewish propaganda. " Purity of blood and doctrine was being tainted," says Major Martin Hume, " especially in the upper classes, by intermarriage with Jews. The contagion was spreading throughout society ; Judaism was the peculiar heresy of Spain." 2 It is obvious, then, that the Hebrews are not racially homogeneous, and it does not need a very wide experience to show how illusory is the idea of a uniform Jewish physical type.3 But the point need not be
1 H. J. Fleure, " The Racial History of the British People," in Geographical Review, March 1918.
2 Martin Hume, Spain : 14.79-1788, p. 16.
8 For the whole question of Jewish ethnography, see Renan, " Judaisme comme race et comme religion," in work pre- viously cited.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 13
laboured further ; enough has been said to prove that the use of the terms " race " and " nation " as synonymous is hopelessly unscientific, and in the absence of evidence to show that the psycho- logical impulse we have called the consciousness of kind is the monopoly of any one stock, we may safely dismiss the theory that race is a contributory factor in the development of the idea of nation- ality. We might, indeed, go further and urge that just those cases where there is most reason to suspect racial homogeneity in a population are the cases where the national idea has not yet been achieved ! But this would take us too far from / the main line of iur inquiry. i/^^j**^
Jr
•-.«*•'
*
CHAPTER II
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY— continued
THE preceding digression into the vexed question of Race has made it possible for us to proceed freely with our main task, which is to discover those special characteristics which distinguish the manifestation of conscious- ness of kind we call nationality from other mani- festations of the same psychological force.
Perhaps we shall best achieve our end if we try to answer a question which has already arisen in the course of the discussion. What marks off a nation from other social groups — from a state, for example, or a church, or a trade union ? If we examine the bond of union which unites the mem- bers of these forms of human association we shall be able to contrast them with those which hold together the individuals in a nation, and if the result does not give us a precise definition of what a nation is, it ought at any rate to show us what a \ nation is not. If we accomplish nothing but that we shall have taken a great step onwards towards our goal.
'THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 15
f Let us begin, then, with a state. Are state and_ j^ation identical ? The question of their relations is a subject to which we shall have to return, so we need not probe it to the bottom here, but a little reflection will enable us to answer, No. The link which binds the citizens^ of a state together [ is that of political allegiance, of submission .to a i common law. Now this is clearly not the case, or,/ to speak more exactly, need not be the case xwith the human beings who make up a nation. Eng- land and Scotland are united under one crown, • one Parliament makes laws for them both, but Scotsmen do not therefore feel themselves to be Englishmen. All the inhabitants of British India are governed by the King-Emperor ; he gives them their laws, and controls, through his ministers, the administration which carries those laws into effect. But does that fact make an Indian nation ? Certain itls that the idea of a common nationality has, arisen in India, and is daily making conquests of men's hearts and minds, but it has admittedly not gone very deeply yet. The wild Bhil who lives in the jungle, and who, not long since, was wont to offer up human sacrifices to his tribal gods, has nothing, or but very little, in common with the Bengali who has received a European education, wears European clothes, perhaps even plays European games, and is a devout theist after the manner of the Brahmo-Samaj . Nor is
16 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
there any bond save that of government which ties either of them to the fierce Pathan of the North-West frontier, who practises the blood- feud when he has the chance, and who, from the height of his aggressive Mohammedanism, looks down upon Bhil and Bengali as idolaters. An even better example for our purposes is that of the Hebrew nation. The Jews are scattered over * all the earth ; they are citizens of every state ; there is no state at present which is definitely Jewish, though that, it may be hoped, will soon ;no longer be the case, but who that reflects will, deny the existence of a Jewish nationality ? Clearly then, and without at this moment pre- judging the question as to whether common allegiance to a government is a force making for nationality, we may agree with Mr. G. L. Beer ^ that " state and nation are two fundamentally distinct concepts. ""TES^onSer is an exclusively politico-legal concept, and, roughly, is merely a definite segment of mankind united in one body politic. On the other hand, the nation is etymo- logically an ethnical, but more accurately, a cul- tural concept, and is a similar portion of humanity bound together by other than mere political ties." : If, moreover, a ^nation digersjadi cally from a state, it is certain that the difference between it and a ^church is equally great. ^A church is an 1 G. L. Beer, The English-Speaking Peoples, p. 43.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 17
association of believers who organize themselves • for the performance of the ritual prescribed by their cult, or for prayer and praise and mutual i ejdi^cation. All manner of social and even poli- tical activities may spring from this primary association, but that does not alter the fact that this latter is the essential raison d'etre of the church ; without it the church would cease to be. But a nation does not exist for religious purposes. As we all know, inside a national group innumerable forms of religious belief and organization may flourish. Marshal Foch and M. Clemenceau are as far apart as the poles in matters of religious philosophy, but that does not prevent them both being Frenchmen, any more than their differences of creed prevent Anglican and Baptist, Catholic and Unitarian, Wesleyan and Secularist, on occa- sion from " glorying in the name of Englishman. " Or, to take a final case, at first sight more doubtful, it is the fact that many Jews who have abandoned the traditional Jewish faith, still ardently and proudly affirm their Jewish nationality. But this last instance may suggest to our minds a similar reflection to that which arose when we were discussing the state, namely, that while religion does not of itself constitute nationality, it may perhaps _assist in its formation, and we reserve this point also for further discussion at
the appropriate time. For the present we must 2
18 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
proceed to inquire what difference there is between a nation and a trade union, this last being taken as a type of economic organization, though a co- operative society or a limited liability company would have suited our purpose equally well.
We have spoken of " economic organization/' thus foreshadowing the answer as to the nature
(of this form of association. _The members of a trade union have certain interests in common ; they desire to maintain or improve their rate of wages, to shorten their hours of labour, to secure healthier conditions of employment, and they band themselves together for these purposes, knowing that by mutual aid they may accomplish what they could not achieve as isolated individuals. ;In short, their purpose is collective bargaining. In the same way members of a co-operative society agree to make their purchases in common in order that they may secure for themselves the profits which would otherwise go to a private trader, and the shareholders of a company pool their capital in order that they may receive interest on it from the successful conduct of a commercial or industrial enterprise. In all these__forms of _ association economic advantage is the bond of union which unites the members, though it is, of course, true that many of them may be actuated by more idealistic motives. In this case also a radical difference from the nation appears. The members
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 19
of all these groups have a common economic interest, and their economic relations are neces- sarily intimate. Butjmembers of thesame national group may have conflicting interests^ In the days of the Land League the landlord who was shot from behind a hedge and the evicted tenant who shot him were often both Irishmen. French and English workmen often strike against French and English employers. Members of a co-operative society and the trader they organize to combat may all be of the same national group. Moreover, it is the case that men may have much more intimate economic relations with other nation- alities than their own. An example is the spec- tacle, common enough in backward rural com- munities, of a whole village indebted to .an alien money-lender. His economic relations with the peasants will be much more intimate than those which he has with his own people. Again, it is to be noted that members of an economic associa- tion may be of divers nationalities ; many great industrial and financial enterprises are perfectly cosmopolitan in composition, and the vision of an international association of working men has haunted the trade union world of Europe for half a century.
So far, nothing very positive has emerged from our discussion, but we hax^e arrived at this useful negative conclusion, namely, that nationality does
20 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
not depend upon, but transcends political allegiance (and, we might add, political opinions), religious belief, and economic interest. We may, therefore, proceed a step further and enlarge our previous definition to the following :_Nationality is a form JQ£ consciousness of kind which binds men together irrespective of their political allegiance or opinions, religious beliefs and economic interests. We have seen that it is possible that these, or some of them, may fortify the spirit of nationality, but it is certain that it does not originate with any of them. We must go further, then, in search of the factor from which it springs.
If we were asked for a rough-and-ready de- scription of a nation we should probably answer, \ " A group of people occupying a certain territory/' and we should be fortified in that belief by noting that Professor Zimmern introduces the geographi- cal idea into his own definition of nationality when he describes it as " a form of corporate conscious- ness of peculiar intensity, intimacy, and dignity, related to a definite home-country." 1 But a little further consideration would show us that Professor Zimmern' s definition differs from ours in this important respect, that we posited actual occupa- tion while he only relates his corporate conscious- ness to a particular territory. There are, then, two distinct questions for our consideration 1 A. E. Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p. 96.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 21
which may be stated in the following way : First, What part, if any, does occupation of a particular territory play in the formation of '\ nationality ; and second. Is
necessary to the, maintenance of nationality ? Let us take these in order and begin by discuss- ing what part geography plays in originating nationality.
Geography may influence a given population in two ways, directly and indirectly, by producing a consciousness of likeness between its members and a consciousness of difference between them- selves and the members of some other population. It is of the greatest importance to note this play of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative influences. We have already encountered it at the very beginning of our inquiry, and we shall meet it again frequently in the sequel, for it is a basic fact of social life of any kind. As Professor Giddings remarks, " The evolution of the con- sciousness of kind can go on only as fast as discriminations of differences of kind are made ; the sense of difference, therefore, is first present • in the mind, to be overcome by any growing sense of similarity." l Accepting this view as logical, it will be convenient to trace first the more obvious ways in which geography promotes the sense of difference.
1 F. H. Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 104.
22 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
Actual physical separation necessarily has this effect. Where there is no contact there is no possibility of the growth of sympathy. This is appreciated readily enough when seas or continents lie between social groups ; the insularity of the Englishman, his aloofness from the main streams of continental thought and feeling, have become proverbial. But the principle operates in much less obvious cases. The existence side by side in the Iberian Peninsula of two separate and distinct nationalities — the Spanish and the Portuguese — is, as Professor Oman has remarked, at first sight " one of the most inexplicable phenomena in modern history." 1 ( The racial stocks from which the two populations have descended are similar, if we leave out of account the late imported negro strain in certain parts of Portugal ; the Portuguese language does not differ more seriously from classical Castilian than does Catalarj ;* the religion of the two peoples is the same, and" for sixty years they were actually united in one political state. Nevertheless, the national groups are, and strongly feel themselves to be distinct, as numerous pro- verbs in both languages attest. The primary cause of this separation is geographical. The great rivers of the Peninsula which pass through both countries are not suitable for lines of com- munication owing to their torrential character.
1 C. Oman, History of the Peninsular War, vol. iii. p. 153.
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 23
As the authority just quoted points out, " Spain and Portugal turn their backs upon each other ; the smaller realm looks out upon the sea ; her strength and wealth lie upon the Atlantic coast : the inland that touches Spain is rugged and un- peopled, in many parts a mere waste of rock and heath. Nor, on the other hand, do Leon and New Castile look towards Portugal : the real ports of Madrid are Valencia and Alicante, not Lisbon, and that not from political reasons, but simply because those are the points where the sea can be reached with the minimum of mountain and desert to be passed through. The way down from the central tableland of Spain to the Mediterranean is less difficult than the way down to the Atlantic. Hence comes the fact that the high roads leading from Spain into Portugal are so surprisingly few, and that the two main alternative routes from Madrid to Lisbon run, the one much north, the other much farther south, than might have been expected. There is not now, and never has been, any straight road down the Tagus between the two capitals, obvious though the line looks upon the map." x Here, clearly, is the solution of our problem. rThe geographical influence making for separationnasrbeen more powerful than the forces making for union. A parallel case is that of Norway and Sweden. The great barren mountain
1 C. Oman, as previously cited.
24 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
range which runs the length of the Scandinavian Peninsula has always acted as a barrier between the two populations, setting up a sense of difference which resisted nearly a century of political union, and shows no present sign of diminution. A third instance is that of Finland and Russia. The ethnological and linguistic differences between the Russians and Finlanders have been fortified by the two barriers which separate them, namely, the great chain of lakes and a vast belt of pine forest, inhospitable to human occupation. -
So far we have only discussed geographical environment as a differentiating force ; let us now consider it as a consolidating agency.
The special characteristics of any human society are the product in the first instance of its natural surroundings, in which we must include not merely the relief of the land, but its position on the globe, its climate, rainfall, and so forth. These influences are fundamental, for upon them will depend the basic activities of the human- beings who inhabit the territory : their food, their clothing, their type of dwellings and methods of subsistence. And on .these things depend, as we realize in increasing measure, their forms of government, their family life, their intellectual culture, even their religion and morality. The principle can be best exemplified by extreme instances— cases where geographical environment
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 25
has been, as it were, too powerful for man, has imprisoned him, and forced upon him a social life that is essentially stationary. Such cases are to be seen in the human groups that live upon the great grass-lands of the steppes, and within the Arctic Circle. We know the life of the steppe- dweller as it was at the very dawn of history we know it as it is to-day, and in essence it h not changed. It cannot change, for those who live on the steppe must obey its unbending laws or cease to live. To begin with, there is but one way of wringing a livelihood from the steppe, and that is by pasturing animals upon it. With- out the domesticated, food-supplying animal the steppe is a desert not to be occupied by man. Flocks and herds are not only the indispensable means of existence, they are the sole means, for the climatic and relief conditions which produce the steppe make agriculture a practical impos- sibility. Now the herdsman's life under these conditions is a nomad's life ; the beasts upon which he depends must be for ever moving in search of food, and whether he will or no he must for ever be following them to fresh pastures. From this flow various consequences of the greatest importance. The nomad must travel light if he is to keep up with the shifting herds, hence his equipment must be reduced to the barely necessary. His arts and crafts will be of the
26 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
simplest, and directed almost entirely to purely utilitarian ends, for he has neither the choice of material nor the opportunity to develop them. His flocks must clothe as well as feed him. Architecture, with all its aesthetic and scientific potentialities, is a closed book to him, for he has no use for houses. The tent, that can be packed upon horse or camel-back, is his home. The mental and moral qualities of the agriculturalist are inaccessible to him ; he cannot develop the characteristic crafts, the weather-lore (perhaps the beginnings of science), the foresight, the patience of the tiller of the soil. His social organization will be simple and rigid ; the pastoral life does not permit of straggling, of individual freak or whim, for on the steppe to be separated from the herd is death. Hence the social group- ing of the nomad is always the same ; the family is patriarchal, the father is its despot, for he owns the herd and directs its movements, while the tribe is but the family writ large. Under such conditions there is no room, there is even no incentive, for social or political experiment. Simplicity and rigidity are the characteristics of morality as well as of social organization, for duties are few but imperative and extinction is the price of their non-fulfilment. The life of the steppe-dweller, in short, is perfectly adjusted to his environment, and adjustment means stagna-
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 27
tion. It is only when some natural catastrophe drives him from his habitat that he becomes capable of progress. Geographical environment is so powerful that types of men the most diverse are found leading a life that is similar in all essentials.1
The folk who live in the regions of eternal snow ^ and ice are equally prisoners of their environment. Their livelihood is even more precarious, since it depends upon the beasts they can kill and the fish they can catch. They, too, are cut off from the culture of the earth and the working of metals, and are deprived in consequence of all the artistic and social qualities which those arts induce. Their crafts will be as limited, and for the same reasons — the absence of materials and of stimulus to production. Their social organization, though it may differ in form from the nomad's, will be akin in spirit, because under such conditions simplicity and rigidity are essentials for survival.
These two extreme cases have been cited to show how geographical environment will stamp with its own impress the lives of the men who are submitted to it. In more favoured regions there will be a greater variety of social types, and consequently the possibility of progress, but the same principle holds good. It will be evident,
*Cf. J. L. Myres, The Dawn of History, ch. ii., and E. Demolins, Comment la route crce le type social, vol. i. ch. i.
28 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
then, how powerful an influence making for con- sciousness of kind is common submission to a particular geographical environment, for it con- ditions ways of life, and those, in turn, condition ways of thought and feeling. Equally, of course, this influence will be a differentiating one, making for recognition of unlikeness, since the habits of life and mind produced by one environment will differ from those produced by another. The Bedouin and the Esquimaux — to return to our dwellers on the steppe and in the Arctic — could they be confronted would be conscious only of how much they differed,
We have now reached a point where we should be able to answer the first of the two questions with which we began this section, namely, what part does occupation of a particular territory play in the formation of nationality ? We can safely say that it does play a part, and one of the utmost importance, for, so far as we can see, it is the i foundation on which all other influences must build. In a population occupying a particular portion of the earth's surface there will, in course of time, grow up a conscious solidarity directly connected with their natural environment, since it is this which is at once the source of the ways of life common to the society and of the habits of thought and feeling dominant in it. And in a thousand ways, as an examination of our own
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 29
sentiments will assure us; the land in which we live forms and moulds us till it becomes a part of ourselves and we of it. Nothing has been more interesting to the student of national psychology than to notice how, during the recent war, the minds and hearts of the exiled fighting men turned constantly to their homeland. In that crushing monotony which is the deadliest and most devastating feature of modern war, men turned instinctively for comfort and support to their memories of the lands from which they came. The reader who turns to any anthology of soldier-poets will recognize immediately the mood described, and will recognize also that though the mode of expression may be new, the mood itself is very old. " When I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning ! " is the unchanging cry of nationality.
Here, then, we arrive at our second positive conclusion, and incorporating a part of Professor \
Zimmern's definition with our own, we reach "f •"•* ~—f- ' r" - • jji * " '
the following result. Nationality is a form of
consciousness of kindf relatecTto ~a definite home- country, which binds men together irrespective of political allegiance and opinions, religious beliefs and economic interests.j We are now fairly on our way out of the jungle of which Mr. Zangwill spoke, but before we proceed we must examine the second of the tjlfo questions which
30 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
^Professor Zimmern's definition suggested to our minds. Is the continuous occupation of the original home - territory necessary to the maintenance of nationality ? When a people is separated from its country, will its national idea survive ?^ t History is for the student of social problems what the research laboratory is for the chemist. Unable to make direct experiments with the objects of his study, he must search the records of man's activities as the only possible substitute. Now, history provides us with an example of a people torn from its homeland and scattered over the face of the world for many centuries, in which the national idea has not only survived, but has, in course of time, become actually more intense. We speak, of course, of the Hebrew people. The way in which that people has maintained its religion through ages of unparalleled persecution and calculated degradation has been a frequent subject of enthusiastic eulogy, and it does, indeed, approach the miraculous. But what is even more wonderful is the persistence of the Jewish idea of nationality. Without any organ of collective self-expression — we speak, be it understood, of the Hebrew people as a whole ; particular com- munities of Jews had such organs, as, for example, the Congressus Judaicus of the Polish Jews — this amazing people almost justified its claim to divine election by the heroic resistance it offered to all
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 31
attempts to destroy its national individuality, and the persistence with which it envisaged its final restoration to complete nationhood, a dream which is now happily well on the way towards translation into fact. ] " Palestine," says a bril- liant contemporary writer of Jewish nationality, " has been the centre of the Jewish theory of life and of the Jews' outlook on the world. Their national tradition is built around it. Entering it, staying in it, being driven from it, returning to it, are the instigating motives of their historic narratives, of their prophetic books, of their psalms, their liturgy, their prayers, their collec- tive endeavour in the community of mankind. No people in history has identified itself in joy and in sorrow, and always in aspiration, so completely with a single land, and a land which the great majority of their generations have known only in prayer, in idea, in vision, for a thousand years." 1 Browning, with admirable art, dramatized the situation for us in " Holy-Cross Day."
" But now, while the scape-goats" leave our flock, And the rest sit silent and count the clock, Since forced to muse the appointed time On these precious facts and truths sublime, — Let us fitly employ it, under our breath, In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.
1 H.M. Kallen, International Journal of Ethics, January 1919.
32 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
' The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet, And again in his border see Israel set. When Judah beholds Jerusalem, The stranger-seed shall be joined to them : To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave. So the prophet saith and his sons believe/'
This persistence of Jewish nationality under circumstances of unlimited hardship provides us with an answer to our question. The national \ idea can survive the separation of those who hold • it from the habitat in which it originated. But whether it will always do so is a proposition mi more doubtful. It must be recognized that the Jewish case is in many ways exceptional. If Jewish nationality was subjected to unexampled attacks it had the immense support of being identified with religion ; the two until quite recent times were inextricably coupled together in the people's mind. It is probable that a similar cause has assisted the survival of national ideas among the Irish population of the United States. ,- Broadly speaking, then, we may say that nationality will survive transplanting if the idea of it be deeply rooted and circumstances are otherwise favourable. ^
Throughout the foregoing discussion, though it has led us to very important conclusions, we have only considered how geographical environment works towards differentiation and consolidation
\
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 33
from a statical point of view, as it were. We have not envisaged the process as going on in time, and it is clear that for the recognition of difference and likeness to rise to complete consciousness it must be the result of a long dynamic process, of a social evolution in which successive generations of men have reacted to their environment and to the influence of their neighbours, and have acted upon them in turn. In other words, the consideration of geographical influences in the formation of nationality leads us directly to the question of historical influences.
For it is clear that a nation must have a history ; that is a necessary part of the national Idea. Could a thousand men and women be chosen at random from the different countries of Europe and placed upon some uninhabited island of the South Pacific, they would not constitute a nation. Indeed, unless some strong discipline were im- posed upon them, they would scarcely be a social group, for consciousness of kind would scarcely exist between them. It would not be for a long time, till they had found the means best adapted to maintain life in their new environment, till that environment had stamped itself upon them, that they would be anything more than a hetero- geneous collection of individuals, simply inspired by the will to survive. But such a condition could not be permanent. The very pressure of the 3
34 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
urgent desire to live would impose some form of co-operation, and then a real social group or unit would be constituted, in which ways of life, and consequently of thought and feeling, would be dictated by geographical environment. Imagine this process continued over a long period of time, several generations, and a community would emerge between the members of which there would be psychological ties far stronger than any bonds of economic interest or political allegiance which might bind them to the outer world. This community would, in short, have acquired a history, a tradition. We have already met this conception of a national tradition in the eloquent passage on Jewish nationality quoted from Mr. Kallen, and we must now endeavour to analyse it and measure its influence and importance. /""""Man can never entirely escape from his past, uhe society in which he lives is the product of a long and toilsome evolution. Its history is a record of conflicts, efforts, achievements. If we examine the history of any one of the great national groups we find there the story of social struggles within the group ; struggles against other groups ; a continual destruction and re- \newal of institutions and beliefsj At one moment an individual appears to stamp the impress of his personality upon the life of his generation ; then, in the course of a lifetime, all trace of his influence
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 35
seems to have disappeared and been lost for ever. The great secular labour by which Henri IV, Richelieu, and their successors built up the im- posing fabric of the French monarchy seemed to be utterly lost when that monarchy was swept away in the years between 1789 and 1795. The Thirty Years War nearly blotted out German civilization ; learning, government, the arts, were all overthrown in sanguinary confusion. At the present time, what was once Russia is given over to anarchy, where all that previously existed ap- pears to be threatened with absolute extinction. On such a view we might say, " What has this weltering chaos to do with nationality ? Is not history, as Voltaire said, a record of the crimes, ] the follies, and the miseries of mankind ? " It is, in truth, all that and something more. It is also the record ofjjatient labours, of^self-sacrifice, of heroism. And the product of the whole is that very real, though impalpable thing, we call a najronaltraditiDji. Trie old saw as to being unable to see the wood for the trees has an application to historical science. If we concentrate on details the history of any nation will seem merely chaotic ; we must stand back, as it were, and envisage it as a whole before we can hope to discover order or meaning in it. But so studied that order will emerge ; in the apparent discord we shall discover a dominant harmony. This unity or harmony is
36 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
the basis on which national tradition rests. Con- - tinually undergoing modification, as the society it influences is modified by external or internal struggles, it yet unceasingly renews itself by absorbing the results of constructive effort, and continues its work of unconscious guidance. Its essence is incredibly difficult to seize and to ex- press. We can recognize its working more easily than we can describe it, and the matter is compli- cated by the fact that individuals and groups within the nation are always much less subject to its influence at a given moment than the general body. Thus it is easy, on a superficial view, to deny the reality or influence of tradition. But deeper consideration will show that it does exist and does act most powerfully upon men's minds and hearts, binding them together with links which, Though unseen, are more powerful than steel. So tradition, based upon the memory of common sufferings and common achievements, combined with the sentiment of the homeland (with which, in truth, it is inextricably inter- woven) to produce a collective consciousness, a recognition of kind, powerful enough at need to \ overcome the clashing of interests and jarring of \ opinions which goes on continually within the nation. . JHerejwe have the true spiritual fonnda- tions of nationality, and we may carry our task of definition yet a step further. '^A nation is a
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 37
social group, bound together by a consciousness of kind which springs from the tradition evoked by the group's historic past, and is directly related j to a definite home-countryfy
BuTriel'rTv eTnTrstligTeiTt b"the voice of criticism. $ " Millions of us," says Mr. John M. Robertson, " are at a given moment rapturous about the deeds of our non-ancestors, on the supposition that they were our ancestors, and in terms of a correlative aversion to the deeds of certain other ancients loosely supposed to have been the an- cestors of certain of our contemporaries. Thus the ostensible entity which plays so large a part in the common run of thought about history — the nation, considered as a continuous and personal- ized organism — is in large measure a metaphysical / dream, and the emotion spent on it partakes much of the nature of superstition." x To discuss the issue here raised by Mr. Robertson in the detail which it deserves would necessitate our entry into the philosophical controversy as to the nature of social groups — a controversy which has been raging since the days of the mediaeval Nominalists and Realists, and is, in our own time, revolu- tionizing political theory. Obviously we cannot embark upon so vast a 'question, but Mr. Robert- son's criticism is too serious to be altogether ignored.
1 John M. Robertson, The Evolution of States, p. 258.
38 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
Let us face it frankly, then, and admit, without attempts at evasion, that into the idea of nation- ality as ordinarily conceived, there enter many elements which are dangerous and irrational — : elements which foster false pride and an aggressive • attitude towards other national groups. To the part which national tradition should play in the organization of a healthy social life we shall have to refer again ; here we may content ourselves with saying that the unthinking acceptance of tradition as a sort of social oracle is irrational in theory and certain to be disastrous in practice. There is no place here, as Mr. Robertson rightly points out, for rhetoric about " salutary pre- judice." Mere prejudice is never salutary. All this may not merely be conceded but heartily affirmed. Attention has already been drawn — in regard to the problem of race — to the dangers which may arise when these matters are handled by the uncritical or the malevolent. To cherish^ a foolish pride in the achievements of the past whilst neglecting the improvement of moral standards in the present, to revive the memory of ancient wrongs as an excuse for perpetuating fresh ones, is an abominable offence, and worthy of all possible condemnation. On the other hand, Mr. Robertson would probably agree that any force which makes for genuine solidarity and for the elimination or attenuation of social strife is
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 39
good in itself, and that its cultivation is justified to the extent in which it performs this function. Now it can be shown, we believe, that nationality can so operate, and it is the business of all those who influence public opinion to strive to secure that it works in this fashion and no other. To purify the national tradition and uplift the national ideal are tasks which can be performed by men of genuine good-will, and no one has more powerfully contributed to this end than the critic whose views we have discussed.
This digression leads us by a natural transition to another aspect of nationality which it is important to emphasize, namely, the degree to which consciously exercised will enters into its composition. Hitherto we have rather envisaged men as passively receiving their nationality than as actively assuming it, but this latter element is clearly of importance. The value of the nation , as an instrument of social co-operation will be proportionate to the extent of the willing force which is behind it. For the idea of nationality^ to reach, its ideal stature, men must not only be conscious of their kind, but willing to translate that consciousness into action. Co-operation which is merely habitual and automatic is robbed of half its value as a school of social effort, will be vulnerable to attack, and easily undermined. There is a real truth, as Mr. G. L. Beer has pointed
40 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
out,1 in " the saying that a man belongs to the nation to which he thinks he belongs," though this, as is the case with most epigrams, tells only half the truth, since it seems to suggest that men bring their minds to this issue like sheets of blank paper, which is very obviously not the case. ^No one has better described these two aspects of nationality— reception and conscious choice — than Renan. " A nation/' he says, " is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which are, in truth, at bottom only one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. The one is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories ; the other is actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to make the best use of the indivisible heritage received." And again, " A nation is a great solidarity, constituted by the sentiment of the sacrifices men have made and of those they are willing to make in the future. It supposes a past ; it is summed up in the present . ' by a tangible fact : the consent, the desire clearly • expressed to continue the common life." 2
Here, then, we have arrived at the term of our inquiry ; our analysis of the nature of nationality ' is as complete as our restricted opportunities permit. But another aspect of the question im-
1 G. L. Beer, work cited, p. 48.
2 Renan, Discours ct Conferences, pp. 3°6 and 3°7«
THE NATURE OF NATIONALITY 41
poses itself upon our consideration. We have still to discuss what forces other than those already mentioned may go to the making of nations, and to decide whether, as we found to be the case with the homeland, they are neces- sary to the maintenance of the national idea.
CHAPTER III
NATION-MAKING FORCES
IT will be convenient to begin this section of our inquiry with the State or political government.
We have already touched upon this portion of the subject, and have rejected the identification of State and Nation. It is true, of course, that societies exist where the same population consti- tutes both. Typical examples are France and Italy. But it is the case that most states to-day are multi-national, and it is important to notice that the acquisition by the two nation^states just mentioned of large colonial empires is certain to transform their character in course of time. The French Republic now rules over large popu- lations which will probably never accept French civilization in its entirety, however profoundly they may be affected by it. But though the distinction between State and Nation must be borne continually in mind, the influence of govern- ment in encouraging national feeling and the growth of the national idea has been immense.
Let us take a few obvious examples. Of such,
42
NATION-MAKING FORCES 43
Switzerland is perhaps the most remarkable. In the Swiss Confederation as it exists to-day three languages — German, French, and Italian — are currently spoken and recognized by the State as official. Religious divisions, dating from the Reformation, are deeply marked, and play no small part in internal politics. Yet in spite of all this there is a deep and genuine national feeling. The Swiss feel themselves__tojbe a separate and distinct nationality from the German. Italian, and French. In the evolution of this national sense, government has played a powerful part. The grouping of the three original cantons for defence against the Hapsburgs made a nucleus round which other cantons and cities grouped themselves, and thus made possible the evolution of both state and nation. The gradual progress towards a firmly united federation of states preceded and encouraged the growth of a common national spirit, and Switzerland stands to-day as a most remarkable example of civic and national unity in diversity.^ France provides another interesting instance of how political union may foster national union. The work which was begun by the first Capetian kings when they sallied out from Paris to suppress the robber- barons of the vicinity found its term when the National Assembly swept away the last surviving institutions of the old provincialism and founded,
44 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
as Sieyes boasted to Napoleon, the French Nation. The most striking feature of this great secular effort is the way in which German-speaking Alsace, after its annexation by Louis XIV, was led to identify itself, not merely with the French state, but with the French people, till, in 1871, when it was temporarily torn away from France, there was no part of the country where the idea of nationality exercised more powerful influence. rfV- A third example of this process, which ought to \ be more clearly understood by British people than it actually is, is provided by the experience of our own Empire. Under its control and protection there have grown up communities which are at once states and nations ; they are bound to us by powerful ties of feeling, but, none the less, they are distinct and definite national groups. Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, are not merely transplanted Englishmen ; they differ from each other as they differ from us. Under less favourable circumstances the same principle is still operative. There is growing up a South African nation which may be bilingual but will nevertheless be a nation. The same process, as 1 trustworthy witnesses attest, has already begun in India, where the idea of a common nationality is slowly, with many checks and defeats, making headway against the innumerable divisions set up by caste and race and creed.
NATION-MAKING FORCES
45
prnrnntfri national union, ITI?,ny nfhprg__rfln be
cited where this result has not been achieved. Unity under the English Crown has not destroyed the sense of separate nationality in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In fact, we may say in re- gard to all three that the tendency to insist upon independent national identity increases rather than diminishes. The three Empires which dis- membered Poland were never able to annex the Poles spiritually. One of those Empires, that of Austria-Hungary, has recently been shattered beyond repair by an explosion of national feeling. Czarist Russia, in spite of overwhelming strength and complete lack of scruple, never succeeded in assimilating the Finlanders. The case of Spain and Portugal we have already noted, ffie may conclude, fViprfhgj^ jnQt..ag. th^ sgparatifrQ of a
•
peope under different stale all^iance^Baa.y,jiot •. su cceeol in , d es troying ~tlie~ .sense oi ..nationality, / so the union of sever aljia&Qnsu'ri fvue state, may! not suffice to create that sense. Whether sucli a union will so succeed appears to depend upon , many different circumstances, the most important /' of which is the existence or otherwise of a really strong national tradition in the groups which it is sought to combine.
From the influence of the political state in nation-building we pass to consider that of Ian-
46 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
guage. The reader, indeed, may have felt some surprise that this was not included as an essential factor in nationality. The reason for this omission will presently appear ; for the moment we may content ourselves with noting how language pro- motes consciousness of difference and of kind. The Jehovistic writer in Genesis embodied his recognition of this fact in the story of the tower- builders of Babel. ' Therefore is the name of it called Babel ; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth : and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of the earth." \Language obviously may act as a powerful barrier to the growth of solidarity ; | sympathy between individuals and groups which M are mutually incomprehensible is a plant of slow difficult growth. The revejse of this proposi-
u
t
,
tion is equally true ; when men can express their thoughts and feelings to their neighbours and be understood by them a foundation is laid on which a whole edifice of social solidarity can be built. All this is so obvious that we need not labour the matter. £But directly allied to these considera- tions is that of literature, and the part it plays in the formation of national tradition. \ A nation's V
• literature is at once the record of its past and the |
* expression of its hopes. It reveals the national 1 v soul, the collective mind, to us in all the stages of *j ^ their development. By its very existence it keeps f
NATION-MAKING FORCES 47
alive the flame of national being and hands from generation to generation the torch which is made i up of the memories of its sufferings, glories, and \aspirations. tf Fletcher of Saltoun saw profoundly into the workings of men's minds and the means whereby they are influenced when he exclaimed, " Let me make the people's songs and I care not who makes their laws." For a law is at best clumsy embodiment of the popular will, and at worst an outrage upon it, ^Ilt -grM.t
_
an, eirjaaatipja^a_£^
yealing-ils^r^uj^itiesjLo itself. And it is by literature rather than by any other means that the men of one generation stamp the impress of their personalities on the generations that suc- ceed them. Literary tradition is the most power- f ful of the forces working for the maintenance of M national tradition. | Consider how, at the very I birth of our national literature, two qualities are displayed which have been dominant notes in it ever since. Chaucer, on the one hand, expresses that jovial good humour, that delight and satisfaction in high spirits, which reappears again and again throughout the centuries, in Shakespeare, in Dickens, in Mr. Gilbert Chester- ton. Langland, on the other hand (if he were indeed the author of Piers Plowman), shows that quality of moral earnestness, of hunger and thirst after social righteousness, which has
48 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
always appeared when our literature was at its best, in Milton and Blake, in Shelley and Ruskin. Consider also how that attitude of smiling scepticism we find in Montaigne, that habit of mind which laughs at follies and super- stitions, and in laughing, slays them, has propa- gated itself throughout every generation in the noble literature of France. These considerations explain the fact that when the spirit of nation- ality has arisen in a community where it has long been dead or dormant, a revival of language and of literature has so often been the sign of its renaissance. When Adamantios Koraes made modern Greek a vehicle for literature, Greek nationality was on its way to re-establishment ; when Palacky rescued the Bohemian tongue from the obscurity in which it had lain since the disaster of the White Mountain, Czech nationality was reborn. Where there jsajiving t
> literaturejthere is a living nation^ W^ienjitera- .
L ture flags and dies, the spirit of nationality- wifi!
' not. Irmg: survive it.^_
I But important as these considerations are, they must not blind us to the fact that a truly national community can exist in which more than one language is spoken. WTe have already seen how, in Switzerland, the current use of three separate tongues does not injure solidarity. Indeed, the high level of culture and strenuous intellectual
NATION-MAKING FORCES 49
life which distinguishes modern Switzerland is undoubtedly due to her possession of these three gateways through which the thought and art of modern Europe can pass her frontiers. We have seen, too, how intensely French in spirit was Alsace despite its German tongue, and we may now point to Belgium, where the existence of Flemish and Walloon-speaking populations side by side, though it has been the occasion of lively domestic conflicts, has not impaired the will to national survival. On the other side of the argu- ment, we must not forget to emphasize the fact that identityL-Qr similarity of language does not ~--^-« -f
of itself signify identity of nationality. This is I proved by the example of the communities within the British Commonwealth, to take the case which touches us most nearly. The inhabitants of j Geneva speak French, but that does not make them / Frenchmen ; the population of the canton of j Ticino speaks Italian, but is not therefore of Italian nationality. Of the case of Spain and Portugal we have already said enough, and we may note that in the parallel instance of Norway and Sweden similarity of language was insufficient to hold the two nations in one political organization. It is necessary to insist upon these facts, even to tedium, for there is grave danger, as Renan pointed out a generation ago, in identifying language and nationality. A man may habitually speak 4
50 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
English and yet not feel himself an Englishman ; French, and yet not be a Frenchman ; German, and yet repudiate the German name. Into nationality, we must repeat, there_enters an ekm^n^jDf^a^t^^ssejit ; to take an outward and material sign as expressing this inward and spiritual will is to run the risk of inflicting grave injustice and committing an act of utter tyranny.
We have found that language and political institutions may, under certain circumstances, act as a unifying force, but that it is equally true to say that they do not always, or necessarily, so act. The same remark holds good of religion. We have already seen how, in the case of the Hebrew., people^ rdigiohjbecame almost jdgnlified with- nationali ty^and the case is by no means isolated. Buckle long ago pointed out how nationality and religion fought side by side in Scotland against English domination, and in certain parts of Eastern Europe to-day lines of religious and national cleavage are identical. The crusading~!pirit SLTOUJsM 111 Spam by the centuries of warfare against the Moorish invaders undoubtedly paved the way for the emergence of a national spirit. But while bearing these facts in mind we must regretfully admit that religion, which, more than all other influences, should bind men together, has only too often served to
NATION-MAKING FORCES 51
separate them. During the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men threw overboard every conception of nationality ; the churches became their only fixed centres of allegiance. Nor has religion ceased in our own day to be a disruptive force, as the case of Ireland, not to mention others in Eastern Europe, serves to remind us. But it is on the whole true to say v that the influence of religion in aiding or. hindering the growth of nationality grows steadily less. A . large part of the modern world has learned, very slowly and painfully, but, we may hope, for ever, the lesson of toleration. Just as the modern state admits men of all religions and of none to citizen- ship, so in the breast of the nation of to-day men of all shades of opinioh live and move and have their being. This is true even in those cases where nationality and religion have been most nearly identified. To discuss the causes of this development would carry us into a region foreign to the purposes of this book ; suffice it to say that it is only one aspect of the decline of theological influences in the life of the modern world.
The first stage of our progress is now complete. We have analysed the idea of nationality and discovered the qualities essential to it ; we have discussed the forces which promote its formation. We have now to consider its growth in history.
CHAPTER IV THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY
IN the preceding chapters it was assumed that nationality is the product of a long evolution, and attention was devoted to the forces — material or otherwise — which, operating on the primary psychological impulse towards recogni- tion of difference and kinship that we have taken as the basis of all social groupings, produce the national idea. But if our understanding of the process is to be complete, the course of this evolu- tion must be traced throughout history, at any rate in outline, and to this task the present chapter will be devoted.
For the prehistoric stages of human evolution we have two sources of knowledge : the remains, such as tools, weapons, and monuments, left by primitive man, and the methods of social organiza- tion practised at the present time by uncivilized races of men. From these two sources of informa- tion we can establish the fact that man, from the time of his origin, has been a social animal. His social nature and capacity for co-operation with
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 53
his fellows have made possible that growth of mental and moral qualities which, in turn, have made possible his achievement of such vast
\ progress in so many departments of life. In the earliest stages of that progress, if we may judge by the conditions of the most primitive of existing
| savages, the bond of union was but slight ; the rigours of the struggle with nature for a livelihood tended to limit the numbers of the group and to encourage the formation of fresh groups when pressure upon the means of subsistence became acute. As the authority here followed points out, this form of organization " appears to be mainly a group of people engaged in hunting together, a co-operative or communal society for the acquisi- tion of food supply. It would really be better to call it the ' pack ' ; for it far more resembles a hunting than a social organization. All its members are entitled to a share in the proceeds of the day's chase, and, quite naturally, they camp and live together. But they are not sharply divided, for other purposes, from other ' packs ' living in the neighbourhood. On the contrary, they frequently mingle with them ; and a social freemasonry extends over vast areas of the [Australian] continent." 1 At this stage of social development the differentiating force is that of the " totem." ' The totem group is, primarily, a 1 Edward Jenks, A History of Politics, p. 8.
54 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
body of persons, distinguished by the sign of some natural object, such as an animal or tree, who may not intermarry with one another." l Whether it be true or not, as some have held, that the members of the group believe themselves to be descended from the totem, is not a matter which primarily concerns us. What is evident is that conscious- ness of kind takes the form, at this stage, of a belief in physical kinship, and this, as we shall see, is the case throughout primitive society.
It would be possible to produce a scheme of human history in which every step along the path of progress would be marked by a revolution in the means whereby a livelihood can be gained, and this is practically the method adopted by Marx and his followers. Without discussing the many disputable questions involved in such a view, WE can at least agree that the next step forward in j evolution is bound up with the first great economic revolution in human history — the domestication of food-supplying animals. ^ A society which can only supply its needs by the chase is of necessity a static society. It may progress from the throwing-stone to the spear, the sling, and the bow, but the limits to its development will be sharply drawn by the poverty of its resources, and it will be incapable of the mental improve- ment which accompanies and depends upon a
1 Jcnks' work cited, p. 9.
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 55
more stable and more varied way of life. When men, therefore, achieved the domestication of useful animals, they effected a revolution which directly accounts for the next great step in social organization — the passage from the " pack " or "Jiorde " to the tribe.
Tbfijtribe is a form of social life as to which we have abundant information, for it cannot only be studied in existing examples, but we meet it at the very beginning of recorded history. The great literatures of antiquity — Hebrew, Greek, and Roman — are full of details concerning it, so that we can speak with some assurance in regard to it. We can say definitely that the psychological conception, the form of consciousness of kind, which binds together the members of a tribal V society, is that of kinship. The tribesmen believe themselves to be yood relations, descended from a common ancestor, and it is this belief which makes co-operation for social purposes possible between them. Other elements fortify and direct this co-operation : the geographical and economic factors previously discussed, for example, and, above all, the religious beliefs of the tribe. But the basic idea by which tribal society is governed is that of the kin.
Now it is clear that this idea is distinct from that of nationality — it is much less complex, for instance — but at the same time there is an obvious
56 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
resemblance. These facts of likeness and of difference must be insisted on, for there is always a tendency for the phraseology of the tribe to be applied to the nation. We speak of our " kin " when we mean fellow-citizens or fellow-nationals ; we speak of the bond of " blood " between our- selves and the inhabitants of our colonies and the United States. The habit is not entirely harm- less, for it tends to create those illusions to which Mr. J. M. Robertson referred in the criticism of nationality previously discussed. It tends also to disguise, and is therefore politically dangerous, the real differences in dominant thought, feeling, and tradition which mark those communities off from our own and from one another.
The next great stage in human development J is marked by the substitution of agriculture for the keeping of flocks and herds as the principal economic resource of society. As has already been pointed out, there are human groups which, imprisoned by their geographical environment, have never been able to take this prodigious step forward in economic method, and we have seen that such groups are necessarily condemned to an unprogressive condition, since the pastoral state does not permit of large developments, whether technical, aesthetic, or political. The step once having been taken, however, when circumstances permit, a social advance takes place which corre-
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 57
spends in importance to the technical advance which made it possible. It is the passage from a y tribal society, based on the idea of kinship, to ! a territorial society, based upon the permanent i occupation of a portion of the earth's surface.
The importance of this change for the purposes of our inquiry is immense. We have seen that the occupation of " a definite home-country " at some period of history is a necessary factor in the production of the idea of nationality, and this factor could not begin to operate till the pastoral tribal society had given birth to the agricultural territorial society. But a long and difficult history had still to be traversed before even the foreshadowings of nationality became apparent.
For such a society as that which we have described to come into existence and to attain any degree of complexity and stability certain specially favourable conditions were necessary. These were to be found in the Nile valley and in the delta formed by the Tigris and the Euphrates ; it is there, accorSingly, that we find the earliest examples of large-scale territorial societies. The creation of such societies implies a long process of evolution, and in the case of Egypt we can frame some conception of its stages. That it took the form of a welding-together by conquest and subsequent administration of a number of small independent communities into the Empire of the
58 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
Dynasties, seems to be established by the fact of the continuance under that empire of the pro- vinces or " nomes," ;each possessing its special local god. This is held by competent authority to indicate the previous existence of separate tribal societies for which the deities — usually animal in form — had served as totems. But with the histories of these empires we are not concerned ; what is important for our purpose is to note that neither Egypt nor Babylonia, neither Assyria nor Persia, developed the idea of nationality in our sense of the word. All four were essentially great military and theocratic states, held together by dynastic and religious bonds, and pursuing careers of conquest and exploitation by which masses of servile and alien population were brought under their control. Yet it is within the epoch covered by the rise and fall of these empires, and in communities closely associated with */>^ | them — Judaea and Greece — that we find the j first evidence, not perhaps of fully developed nationality, but at least of its clear fore- shado wings.
The patient labours of two generations of scholars have enabled us to follow the broad lines of the social evolution of the Jewish people. We see it beginning as a tribal federation, then pass- ing to a typical Oriental monarchy, which finally divides into two portions, one of which is over-
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 59
whelmed and absorbed by a conqueror. The other continues the work of consolidation, which is consummated by a revolution which transforms the kingdom into a City-state wherein all social life is made to centre round Jerusalem and its Temple. With this political revolution a religious transformation goes hand in hand. The old local cults and holy places are ruthlessly destroyed, and with them the last remnants of the ancient tribalism. The traditional literature is revised in the interests of the new regime, and a fresh code of legislation enforced. The result is a unitary society, intensely theocratic in spirit and organization, finding its binding force in religion and the territorial associations connected witl> that religion. Both these elements of unity are strengthened by a long exile from, and subse- quent restoration to, the ancestral home. Such is the record ; we have to ask ourselves whether we have here a clear case of the growth of a nationality.
To give a decided answer is not easy. What is certain is that the consciousness of kind among the Jews took then, and till long after, a pre- dominantly religious form. In the references to the holy city, to Jerusalem, in post-exilic litera- ture, the blending of the religious and national elements is obvious ; if the homeland is the sub- ject of profound emotion, it is because the home-
60 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
land is also the holy land, Zion. The very customs and habits of life which, in Hebrew society, formed so powerful a bond of union, derived their strength very largely from religious sanctions. This dual element appears at later stages of the history in the wars of the Maccabees and the desperate resistance to the Roman conqueror. It is, indeed, only in very recent times that the religious aspect has departed from the Jewish idea of nationality ; those who, within Jewry to-day, insist that it is a church and not a nation, do so because they are themselves hostile to the national idea. But this is the view of a minority, respectable for its sincerity and elevation of mind, but not otherwise important. Henceforward, it is fairly safe to prophesy, the Jewish nation will resemble most others in that it will include men of varying religious beliefs, whose con- \ sciousness of kind will be based upon nationality rather than dogma. In conclusion, then, we may repeat what has been previously remarked ; we have here a foreshadowing of nationality, a preparation for it, rather than the idea itself.
This, 'too, must be our judgment on the history of the Hellenic peoples. The general course of that history also has become clear to us in recent years. It began with the irruption of nomadic peoples into the Greek peninsula, which peoples
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 61
first shattered, then assimilated the remains of an older and, culturally speaking, higher /Egean civilization. From this dark age of Greece, which Professor Gilbert Murray picturesquely calls " the Chaos of the Migrations," there emerged the wonderful civilization we call specifically Greek, and with its blossoming there appeared also an approach to a national idea, that of the common kinship of all Hellenes. " If we wish," . writes Professor Murray, "for a central moment as representing this self-realization of Greece, I should be inclined to find it in the reign of Pisis- tratus (560-527 B.C.), when that monarch made, as it were, the first sketch of an Athenian empire based on alliances and took over to Athens the leadership of the Ionian race." l To this age the same high authority assigns first, the beginning of the process by which the Homeric poems con- quered their unique place in Greek intellectual life, and second, the religious reformation which cleansed and idealized the old barbarous cults and enthroned the Olympian deities of "classic " Greek mythology. Between these three influences there was obviously co-operation, each reacting upon and fortifying the others.
But this movement of " self-realization," which reached its point of greatest intensity after the Persian wars, never really conquered the Hellenic
1 Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 60.
*_ • * x f
62 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
heart and mind. The influences working in the other direction were too powerful. The founda- tion on which free Greek civilization rested was J the City-state, and so long as it remained free it was never able to broaden its basis. The very devotion with which men clung to the City — a devotion in large part religious — decisively de- feated the Hellenic spirit. The political failure which delivered Greece over to the Macedonian conqueror was the direct product of the moral failure. Men who were willing, to die for Sparta or for Athens refused to live for Hellas. The same situation on an infinitely larger scale faces the world to-day.
The spirit of the Roman civilization which succeeded to the Hellenic was entirely anti- national. Rome evolved from the status of a hill-fortress to that of the administrative and political centre of a vast cosmopolitan empire, but nationality was incompatible with either condition. The power of the Roman admini- strative machinery, the assimilative force of Graeco-Latin culture, the attraction of its military prestige, led to the progressive Romanization of the populations brought within its sway. That process did not, of course, enjoy an equal success in all parts of the Empire. Where ancient and deeply rooted civilizations were encountered, as in Egypt, or where Roman influence clashed with
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 63
religious belief, as in Judaea, populations might be conquered and controlled but not Latinized. Where, on the other hand, Roman penetration met neither an ancient social order nor a firmly held religion, after a brief resistance such as will usually be offered by the most undeveloped peoples to a conqueror, the populations made haste to a^ceplihoj^iHzation which followed in the train of the legions. Within a few generations of the conquest, Gaul was as thoroughly Latin as Italy. Seneca and Sidonius Apollinaris, to choose examples separated by a long period of time, were as Roman as Virgil and Horace, yet one hailed from Spain and the other from Gaul. Rome gave men peace and order, the material apparatus of civilized life, a limited degree of self-government, and a scientific system of law. She received in return a very deep and genuine devotion. But it was essentially a civic devotion, the feeling of a citizen for his state rather thai the simple human love of a native land and traditions.
It is important to notice also, in the intellectual sphere, that it was in the Roman Empire that the idea of universal religion conquered. The older cults had been local in their appeal ; their gods were gods of the tribe or the city. If, thanks to the prophets, Hebrew religion had risen above this level, it had never entirely shaken off the tribal
'">
,an^
its!
64 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
aspect. The God of Isaiah is a universal Lord, but is still the Holy One of Israel, and Jerusalem is His peculiar sanctuary. Nor was the prophetic level consistently maintained ; in the post-exilic period Judaism shrank again to the exclusive creed of a chosen people. But Christianity on the one hand, and Stoicism on the other, were \ universal in their appeal. To the one there was " neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond nor free " ; to the other nothing was alien which was human. It was not merely accidental that universalism in religion flourished within a universal empire ; the blending and levelling of many civilizations into one prepared the way for the faiths that considered man merely as man.
Not upon Rome, therefore, but upon its frag- • ments have the nations of the modern world been built. As Renan said, " It was the Germanic, invasion that introduced into the world the principle which, at a later time, served as^a basis for the existence of nationalities/1 1 This does not mean that the German tribes who finally over- threw the already tottering empire were moved by any nationalist aspirations, or even, as some have suggested, felt any special repugnance to its civilization. Exactly the reverse is the truth. The barbarians not only felt no hatred of Rome, 1 Renan, Discours et Conferences, p. 281.
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 65
but they asked nothing better than to imitate it, to assimilate such of its culture as they were capable of understanding, and to model their governments and ways of life upon it. The empire haunted their imaginations as it haunted those of the men of the Middle Ages. The invaders found a machine which was already running down ; they thrust themselves into it, and finally destroyed it. But the destruction was inadvertent and unin- tended. Charlemagne strove to rebuild the great edifice, and for a moment seemed to have suc- ceeded, but it was for a moment only. The spirit which made the empire had passed, even as the material means by which it had been organized had disappeared. The Church was the one uni- versal institution which could hold men's loyalty, and it sat, to borrow the historic phrase of Hobbes, crowned upon the grave of the empire it had sup- planted. After Charlemagne, civilization rolled with ever-increasing speed down the steep place over which he had held it suspended. " Each region, each province, each district, isolates itself from the neighbouring region, province, and dis- trict ; each family, and one might almost say each individual within each family, does the same. The bonds of the preceding age had crushed men's bodies, broken their nerves, overwhelmed their souls. All were now rejected. Man fortifies himself within his own circle, narrows his 'horizon, 5
66 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
concentrates upon his own immediate interests. . . . Law disappears and nothing is left but individual instances/1 1 Society seemed about
,: to dissolve into its original elements ; only that
iform of social organization we call feudalism
/saved it.
In feudal society men were held together by
! a double bond ;, their relation to a superior was materially expressed by their connexion with the soil. Hence it is that the idea of nationality did not appear in real force till mediaeval society was dying. Loyalty was above all local and personal. Men owed allegiance to a lord because of their holding of a certain portion of the earth's surface ; their moral horizon was limited by that fact. The men of the next village were certainly strangers, very possibly enemies, and this was even more true of the next county or duchy. Where men escaped from the feudal organization into the growing towns the same rule held good. The neighbouring city was almost certainly an enemy, while within the city walls loyalty to the guild or corporation came first. Yet it is in the feudal age that we see the modern nations spring- ing up,following and growing alongside the modern states. The Norman William conquers England, and with his iron will lays the foundation of an English state that will some day be also an
1 G. Hanotaux, La France en 1614, p. 106,
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 67
English nation. Hugues Capet and his successors set out to build up the French monarchy by bringing insubordinate feudatories to obedience, and so make possible the creation of the most conscious nationality in the world. Scotland, in its fierce resistance to an English overlord, provides one of the first examples of nationalism in action. So, as we traverse the Middle Ages, we find the idea of nationality appearing with ever more and more of permanence. Already in the age of Philip Augustus, French poets sang of " sweet France " ; of Scotland in the thirteenth century we have already spoken. Then we notice that the universities are organizing themselves on the basis of " nations, " where the scholars are grouped according to origin. Sometimes, it is true, " nation " in the mediaeval university meant what we should call " province " to-day, but often the division is upon genuinely national lines. If the Hundred Years War between France and England is as far as possible from being a national war in its origins, yet towards its close genuine nationality appears, splendid and triumphant, with Jeanne d'Arc. True, Frenchmen helped in her destruction just as throughout the war Frenchmen who thought of themselves primarily as Burgundians, Gascons, and Bretons had fought for the English invader, but we see in her life and death that nationality is alive and a growing
68 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
force, just as we see it in Villon's ballade, " Against the Enemies of France " :
" Prince, may the bright-winged brood of ^Eolus To sea-king Glaucus' wild wood cavernous Bear him bereft of peace and hope's least
glance,
For worthless is he to get good of us, Who could wish evil to the state of France." 1
In the same century national strife blazed into war at the other end of Europe, for it is now generally agreed that the Hussite movement in Bohemia was, in its origin, at least as much nationalist as religious. So, as the Middle Ages ' draw to their end, the note of nationality rings out ever more clearly and strongly, till in the book which marks at once the death of one era and the birth of another — Machiavelli's Prince — we recognize it in its completeness. " This op- portunity, then, for Italy at last to look on her deliverer, ought not to be allowed to pass away. With what love he would be received in all those Provinces which have suffered from the foreign inundation, with what thirst for vengeance, with what fixed fidelity, with what devotion, and what tears, no words of mine can declare. What gates would be closed against him ? What people would refuse him obedience ? What jealousy
1 Swinburne's translation.
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 69
would stand in his way ? What Italian but would yield him homage ? This barbarian tyranny stinks in all nostrils." *
A great English historian, seeking " the broad lines of difference between the mediaeval and the modern world," found that " in outward matters the great distinction is the frank recognition in the latter of nationality and all that it involves." 2 This, as we have seen, is correct. It was not till the society of the Middle Ages was on the high road to transformation that nationality became an active social force. T^t fiftr^y ™ its most characteristic periodjwas_^t.once ton partimlarist- and too universalist to permit^of_any large_de^- velopment of national feeling, too particularist in its social organization, too^ universalist in. its religious and political theories. The situation may be paralleled with that which existed in the Roman Empire when devotion was directed either to the city, which was less than a nation, or to the empire, which was more. But this must not mislead us into thinking that nationality emerged from the Middle Ages fully developed and ready to exercise its modern sway ; at the stage we have reached in our survey, nationality had become a factor in the life of European societies, but it was not yet a dominant factor,
1 The Prince, N. H. Thomson's translation, p. 197.
2 Creighton, Cambridge Modern History, vol. i. p. 2.
70 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
' and centuries were to pass before it became so. Other ideas, religious and political, still wielded immense power over the minds of men.
That great complex of events which we call the Reformation may serve as a proof of this argument. It brought the Middle Ages definitively to an end, since it destroyed their characteristic and essential idea — the religious unity of Christendom. The Reformation was at once a product of nationality and a factor in its development. It cannot be denied that national feeling contributed power- fully to its outbreak, or that when religious disunion had become firmly rooted in society this in turn contributed to the development of nation- ality by operating as a differentiating force. On the other hand, many motives, spiritual, political, and economic, played a greater part in the origination of the Reformation than the sense of nationality, and for a time, in certain communities, the growing feeling of solidarity was checked by the presence of religious difference. The series of wars, both civil and inter-state, which sprang from the Reformation were political and religious rather than national. In France and Germany this was especially the case. The history of the Wars of Religion shows us both Frenchmen and Germans seeking the aid of Englishmen, Spaniards, Swedes, and Italians in the pursuit of a theological vendetta against their fellow-countrymen. And
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 71
if, in the end, France issued from the struggle with a profounder sense of unity than she entered it, the reverse was true of Germany, where the very idea of nationality nearly perished along with civilization itself. Literature almost dis- appeared ; the national language was relegated to the illiterate masses. Such men of letters as survived employed Latin as their medium of ex- pression, while the aristocratic classes abandoned their own tongue for French. As a profound student of German national development says, " The Thirty Years War, far from uniting Germans in a common effort of resistance against the foreigner, had completed the work of division begun by the Reformation and continued by the Counter-Reformation. Religious rather than political, it had steadily become a European con- flict. Protestant Germany had applauded the victories of the Swedes and the French ; Catholic Germany had not condemned the excesses com- mitted by the Spaniards and Croats. The idea of a common country had been stifled by un- chained religious hates/' l This inertia lasted for nearly a century, and when intellectual life re- vived, it had its origin in influences coming from without the country.
On the other side of the account we must note the emergence of nationality in Holland and its
1 L. Levy-Bruhl, L'AUemagne debuts Leibniz, p. 8.
72 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
fortification in England. Out of the attempt to impose the Spanish Inquisition upon the Nether- lands arose the revolt of the Dutch under the leadership of William the Silent, a revolt which had for result the establishment of a new nation- state, rich in the memory of sufferings courage- ously borne and of resistance to an apparently overwhelming enemy. Originating in religious conflict, the Dutch rebellion passed into an asser- tion of national individuality on the one hand, and a demand for political liberty — what modern politicians would call ",serf-determination " — on the other. In the same struggle with Spain, •; English nationality was not born, but brought to manhood. The national uprising with which all classes and creeds met the threat of the Spanish Armada was a fitting prelude to the magnificent expression of nationality which appears in the literature of the succeeding age, and finds its noblest utterance in the words which Shakespeare put into the mouth of the dying Gaunt :
" This royal throne of kings, this sceptered
isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress, built by nature for herself, Against infection and the hand of war ; This happy breed of men, this little world ; This precious stone set in the silver sea,
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 73
Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."
The age which succeeded the Wars of Religion was not propitious to the growth of nationalities. It was an age of dynastic and aggressive wars, of reason of state ; in a word, it was the age of the Old Regime. Its dominating figures in politics were Louis XIV and Frederick the Great ; in intellectual effort, Voltaire. Here and there were national movements, in Portugal, Ireland, and Hungary, but these had no sequel, initiated no great step forward. The age was one of enlighten- ment, of progress in science, philosophy, and art, but it was an age which ignored nationality and trampled upon liberty. Its ideal ruler was the en- lightened despot, a Peter the Great or Charles III of Spain, who would govern with the aid of the " virtuous " and thrust his people along the path of civilization. Every prince, every states- man, kept before himself an ideal, that of aggrand- izement ; to extend the frontiers of the state, without scruple as to means, was the obvious duty of all who had the government of men. That populations had rights, much less wills, was an idea which entered into the calculations of no one, save here and there some idealist with
74 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
a disordered mind. The result of such a mental attitude was, as Albert Sorel in his masterly description of the political morality of this age points out, that " the dismemberment of a State " came to be considered " no longer as a transaction between rival pretensions and the enforced con- sequence of wars of succession, but as a normal resource of diplomacy, a means of preventing wars by satisfying in advance the ambitions which threatened to unchain them." l This system, as Sorel goes on to show, found its classical example in the partition of Poland between Prussia, Austria, and Russia, when the human beings who were the victims of this transaction were laboriously bargained over as if they had been so many beasts of the field. It was its crowning achievement, the outward and political sign of its inward and moral corruption.
This age in its decadence had many points of resemblance with that of Rome. If there existed no political or administrative unity, there was a remarkable uniformity in culture and a similar cosmopolitanism in philosophy. French thought and French art dominated the civilization of Europe. A whole literature grew up written in French by foreigners. The ruling classes every- where formed an immense freemasonry, speaking the same language, sharing the same tastes,
1 A. Sorel, L' Europe et la Revolution franfaise, vol. i. p. 39-
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 75
thinking the same thoughts. Voltaire wrote in 1767 that he saw with joy the formation in Europe of "an immense republic of cultivated minds." Five years laterv Rousseau, in his work on the government of Poland, deplored the same phe- nomenon. " To-day," he said, " there are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, English- men even ; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same morals, because none has received a national form from a particular institution." Rousseau himself was always a good Genevese, and very patriotic after his fashion, but he preached political and social doctrine of an abstract character, applying not to men who were the products of particular societies at a particular time, but to man considered in the abstract. It was an age, indeed, not of men, but of Man. Its greatest minds rejected nationality. Voltaire was as little of a nationalist as he well could be, and that by reason of intellectual conviction as well as personal taste. For him there were only two classes of men : the enlightened and the unen- lightened, and no country had a monopoly of either. The German thinkers echoed his opinion " What is a nation ? " cried Herder. " A great uncultivated garden, full of good and bad herbs Who would wish to undertake the defence en bloc of this multitude, where vices and follies are mixed
76 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
with merits and virtues ? What Don Quixote will go to break lances with other nations for this Dulcinea ? " l Lessing wrote that " the reputa- tion of a patriot is the last for which I should be ambitious, if patriotism must teach me to forget that I ought to be a citizen of the world." And again : " In a general way I have no idea of the love of country. ... At the most I regard it as an heroic weakness, which I am well content to be without/' 2 To sum up : the world on which the French Revolution was about to break was one in which nationality played but a small part ; some of the ablest minds rejected it entirely , whilst into the calculations of statesmen it scarcely entered.
It was as a result of the French Revolution and ofHhe wars which it initiated that the idea of nationality came to occupy the place of importance in human affairs that it holds to-day. This is generally conceded, but there is much division of opinion as to the precise fashion in which the Revolution operated to produce this result. It will be worth while, therefore, to discuss in detail the relation of the Revolution to the renaissance of the national idea.
Upon one point it is necessary to be clear. The philosophical doctrines which the Revolution
1 Quoted by Levy-Bruhl, work cited, p. 160.
2 Levy-Bruhl, p. 147.
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 77
strove to translate into political practice were not in themselves nationalistic. They arose in a society which, as we have seen, ignored or dis- counted nationality as an active principle, and they very naturally assumed a form harmonious with their environment. They were abstract statements of political ideals and were expounded as possessing an absolute value in all countries. They were not held to be applicable solely to Frenchmen living in the year 1789, but to all men who desired to be free and happy. They were concerned, like most eighteenth-century ideas, not with Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Germans, but with Man. Let us turn to the most interesting product of 1789, the document in which the Con- stituent Assembly summarized at once its philo- sophy and its aspirations. It is characteristic of the authors and of their age that this document should be an attempt " to set forth in a solemn Declaration the natural, the inalienable, the sacred rights," not of Frenchmen, but of " mankind." The contents of the Declaration are conceived in the same spirit. " All men are born and exist both free and equal as regards their rights." " The principle of all sovereignty resides essen- tially in the nation." " Liberty consists of being able to do whatsoever does not harm another man. Thus the exercise of the natural rights of the individual knows no limits save those which
78 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
assure to his fellow-members of society e'njoyment of the same rights as his own." " Law is the ex- pression of the general will. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or whether it punishes." " Free communication of thought and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man." Here there is no question of nationality ; it does not enter into the discussion. Certainly the word " nation " is used, but clearly in the sense of a political community. In short, the Declaration is exactly what it professes to be — a statement, unaffected by considerations of time and place, of the social and political rights of all mankind. How came it, then, that a Revolution which sought to embody such abstract and cosmopolitan doctrines in institutions should have given the signal for the resurrection of the nationalities ? The answer is twofold : directly, by shattering the framework of existing society and discrediting the principles upon which it was based ; and indirectly, by the attractive force exercised upon men by the revolutionary example of France. Let us elaborate this a little.
Democracy as a principle of government was practically non-existent in eighteenth-century Europe. It was generally believed, indeed, that democratic government could only exist in small communities. Most European states were auto- cratic in form, and where this was not the case, as
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 79
in Holland, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the Italian republics, the classes possessing political rights were sharply limited in number, and the government was in fact, if not in theory, oligar- chical. Against this state of things the French Revolution was a direct attack, and the forces it set in motion have been so far successful that there is to-day in Europe and America no government which does not, nominally, at any rate, derive its powers from the consent and choice of its citizens. It was by the introduction of this principle of consent into social institutions that the Revolu- tion stimulated the growth of the idea of nation- ality. Into that idea, as we have seen, the element ^ of active choice enters as a necessary and legiti- f mate part. No legal fiat can make a man a German or an Italian in anything else than law, and if that law be imposed upon him by force it will be resented as an oppression, thanks to that quickened sense of freedom with which the Re- volution endowed the modern world.
The revolutionary philosophy was abstract, a product of pure reason. But, as Sorel has pointed out, the actions of masses of men are never governed by pure reason. Men apply to them- selves the doctrines which are meant for the ideal being, Man, and interpret them in the light of their own passions, needs, and experiences. Hence the perpetual deception of those who de-
80 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
scend from the study to the market-place and offer their nicely reasoned syllogisms to those who dwell there. Such was the course taken by [the JFrench Revolution. Theoretically its doc- \ trine was super-national,; .practically,.. it. speedily 'took on a strongly national character. What , began as an assertion of political liberty speedily became an assertion of national unity. That great secular tradition of France had lost none of its power during the decline of the old regime ; when all the ancient barriers were broken down it redoubled its efficacy. The old provincial bound- aries were felt to be a hindrance' to the new current of life that surged so fiercely through the land, so they were swept away, and Languedoc, Poitou, Normandy, all the ancient provinces, were merged ^ in France. And when war began against " the* ? rnnlitirm rcf th° VJncV the tide of national feeling rose ever higher. The fall of the monarchy left an empty space which was speedily filled by France itself. There was a period when la patrie became the subject of a definite cult. This note of nationality reborn rings trumpet-like in the great orations of Danton and the Girondins ; it can be heard in the letters and journals of the humblest volunteers. France and the Revolution had become identified ; men's devotion to the first was proportionate to their enthusiasm for the second. This is the key to the Revolution's
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 81
triumph and to its disaster. The war of defence for the natal soil became a revolutionary crusade, and the crusade in turn became a war of conquest. War has a logic of its own that will not be denied. Who wills the end must consent to the means, and when victory had become the end for which men strove, they could not finally reject the military dictator. That it was Napoleon Bona- parte who filled the breach and swung the Re- volution from its course was due, in part at least, to pure accident. The premature death of Lazare Hoche probably saved him from that bad eminence and left the field clear for the Corsican. Under his rule the already existing tendencies towards mere exploitation and conquest were con- firmed and developed. To maintain his position Napoleon was compelled to maintain the conquests of the Republic, and those could only be pre- served by further conquests. So the fatal process went on till the colossus of the new Empire over- shadowed the whole of Europe. Coalition after coalition had been formed and shattered, and if Britain, defended by its narrow seas and wooden walls, still stood erect and menacing, she also stood alone. With the Peace of Tilsit the Napoleonic star reached its zenith.
But the lesson of those bitter years had been learned by at least a few. The old political principles of prescription and divine right had 6
82 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
been as powerless against French ideas as the armies of the old regime when pitted against the French column and the strategy which wielded it. A new principle must be invoked, and the ex- perience of France showed clearly what that principle must be. Nationality alone could supply the place of the fallen thrones and ancient allegiances, and to nationality the enemies of France perforce appealed. In Prussia, after Jena, Stein, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau utilized ideas and methods borrowed from France. Nothing in this period is more interesting than to see how these men appealed continuously to the example of the enemy. " It is necessary," wrote Scharn- horst in 1807, " to inculcate the sentiment of independence in the nation, to destroy the ancient forms, to break the bonds of prejudice, to guide the work of regeneration, and not to trouble it in its free development." Gneisenau, writing in the same year, was even more explicit. " One cause has contributed to carry France to this degree of power. The Revolution has evoked every social force and assured to each an appro- priate field of action. What a treasure of latent strength lies unused in the breast of nations ! In the souls of thousands and thousands of men dwells a genius depressed by exterior circum- stances. . . . The Revolution has brought into < play the whole national strength of the French
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 83
people, and if the European states wish to re- establish the old relations between nations, and the equilibrium which resulted from them, they must draw upon the same sources. If they appropriate to themselves the results of the Revolution, they will have the double advantage of opposing their national strength in all its power to foreign force, and of avoiding the perils of a domestic revolution which still menaces them because they have not known how to escape the dangers of violent upheaval by voluntary change."1 The gulf between this doctrine and the cosmo- politanism of Herder and Lessing is immense. Between this last and the theories of Fichte as set forth in his historic Discourses to the German Nation the distance is even greater. This is an extremely important work, since alongside with much of purely temporary and personal interest, it foreshadows the subsequent political and in- tellectual development of Germany. Fichte ap- pealed to all Germans irrespective of their political allegiance, and insisted upon the existence of a separate German nationality. This in itself was revolutionary doctrine, but Fichte went further, and, with a curious inversion of the humani- tarianism of his predecessors, insisted that devo- tion to Germany was also devotion to humanity,
1 Both these extracts are quoted by Godefroy Cavaignac, La Formation de la Prusse Contemporaine, vol. i. pp. 384 and 406.
84 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
since the qualities of the German people are ideal qualities which all mankind should desire to possess. This language has a sinister significance for our ears, but as a fighting doctrine, designed to nerve men for battle with the French colossus, it was admirably adapted to its purpose.
All these theories and projects received a prac- tical application in the uprising of the Spanish people against the French. That revolt marks the beginning of the end of the Napoleonic Empire. The invasion of Russia in 1812 was the last effort to avert collapse ; it failed, and the way was clear for the Liberation War of 1813. The mon- archs now appealed to the peoples. The day of ^* dynastic combinations and coalitions was over ; I that of the nations had dawned. Everywhere l the appeal was to liberty and nationality, and it was with these as their watchwords that the peoples went out to battle and to victory. After Leipzig there could be no question that the end had come, and when, in 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne and retired to Elba, it was certain that Europe was entering on a new epoch in its history. That epoch began with cruel disappointments tand deceptions. The statesmen who assembled at the Congress of Vienna cared little for either liberty or nationality ; the most important of them were definitely hostile to such ideas. They desired a return, as far as might be, to the old
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 85
regime, and for them the Congress was but an occasion for an exhibition of the ancient state- craft in which territories and the human beings who occupied them were divided out as thieves
I share their booty. Nationality and its claims were not so much defeated as ignored. The defenders of the Congress have often pointed out that the system it set up preserved Europe from, great wars for nearly half a century. To this de- * fence there are two answers. First, that if there were no general wars there were many revolts and revolutions which convulsed the continent from end to end ; and, secondly, that the century which followed the Congress was occupied with the undoing and obliteration of its work. A political system which has such results and meets with such a fate can hardly be called successful. The nature of that system can best be judged from the character of the man who was its chief defender, and of the state which was its key- stone. Metternich and Austria dominated .the situation on the Continent between 1815 and 1848. They were the leaders and architects of that " Holy Alliance " of the autocracies which has come to stand as the typical enemy of liberty and nationality. Metternich himself was essentially a product of the old regime ; a cynic, despite a constant parade of principles, and a mediocrity, despite a certain superficial culture.
86 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
He was essentially without vision and capacity for enthusiasm. He reflected very well the policy of the Austrian state, which was the subordination of all its constituent elements to the mainten- ance of the Hapsburg dynasty. That he should have been the bitter opponent of national ideas was a matter of course ; the Empire which he served was based upon the suppression of nation- ality. Such was the man and such the policy which governed Europe for a generation.
It does not enter into the plan of this work to trace in detail the reversal of that policy. It was always violently resisted by large sections of the populations subjected to it. First Greece, then Belgium, asserted and made good their right to separate national existence ; Poland never rested ; in Austria itself Czechs, Magyars, and Croats woke to a sense of national being and struggled to assert themselves. One by one the Balkan peoples were liberated from Turkish rule. United and independent Italy came to be ; a united German Empire was founded. And if, after 1878, nationality as an active social force seemed slumbering, its quiescence was only temporary. The separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905, the Balkan Wars of 1912, the persistence of nationalist agitations inside the Russian, Austrian, and German Empires, as well as in the United Kingdom, showed that nationality had not lost
I
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY 87
its power over men's minds, and only awaited a favourable opportunity to unchain incalculable forces upon the world.
That opportunity came with the Great War. There is no need to repeat an often-told tale. What concerns us is that to-day nationality is the question with which Europe is confronted. The conflicting claims of peoples of whose existence we were scarcely conscious six years ago now absorb the anxious attention of statesmen. As these pages are being written, the peoples dwelling about the Adriatic stand on the verge of war; Eastern Europe is full of the clamour of con- tending armies. If we examine the causes of this anarchy we find them summarized in one word- nationalism. Shall Fiume be Italian or Slav ? Shall there be a free and independent Esthonia ? The answers that we give will depend upon our general attitude towards nationalism, and before that can be decided we must discuss at length the problem of nationality and politics.
CHAPTER V
NATIONALITY AND POLITICS (I)
IN the opening chapter of this book reference was made to the political discussions excited by the war, and to the frequency with which they "i turned upon the question of Nationality. In this connexion another point of interest which deserves to be noted is that it was almost universally assumed that nationalism — the idea of nationality expressing itself in a political form — was necessarily liberal and progressive, and was therefore to be supported by all advocates of liberty and progress. Some dissentient voices there were, but in the main it is true to say that this assumption was scarcely seriously challenged. But was the assumption really correct ? Is the principle of nationality identical with that of liberty ? We must at least remember that, if the Allies declared themselves to be the champions of national rights and the restorers of oppressed nationalities, our German and Magyar enemies alleged that they were defending German and Hungarian nationality from destruction. We
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must remember also that thinkers whose opinions are entitled to the greatest respect have, in the past, seriously criticized the whole idea of nation* ality, especially in its political aspects. One such criticism by Mr. John M. Robertson has already been noticed in a previous chapter. Another example is provided by Mr. G. M. Trevelyan,* himself the historian of one great national move- ment, who has written that " the sentiment of nationalism, that simplest of all ideals which appeals to the largest quantity of brute force, has in its nature no political affinities either with / liberty on the one hand or with tyranny on the other ; it can be turned by some chance current/ of events, or by the cunning or clumsiness off statesmen, to run in any channel and to work any wheel." l The late Lord Acton, whose im- mense historical learning, philosophic powers, and lifelong devotion to the cause of human freedom give his opinions on political questions peculiar weight and authority, was even more drastic in / attack. He declared that " the theory 'of nation- ality is more absurd and more criminal than the \ theory of socialism," 2 and in another passage of the same famous essay he prophesied that " its [Nationality's] course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention
1 G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, p. 1 17.
2 Lord Acton, History of Freedom, p, 300.
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may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind. There is no principle of change, no phase of political speculation con- ceivable, more comprehensive, more subversive, " or more arbitrary than this. It is a confutation of democracy, because it sets limits to the exercise of the popular will, and substitutes for it a higher principle. It prevents not only the division, but the extension of the State, and forbids to terminate war by conquest, and to obtain a security for peace. Thus, after surrendering the individual to the collective will, the revolutionary system makes the collective will subject to conditions which are independent of it, and rejects all law, only to be controlled by an accident." r This catalogue of criticisms might doubtless be lengthened without much difficulty, but the foregoing are sufficiently comprehensive and will suffice for the purposes of our discussion. For it is clear that these attacks must be faced and considered if we are to arrive at any rational estimate of the worth of the national idea and of its importance for the future development of humanity.
These criticisms are primarily directed, it must be noted, against nationality as a political force. Neither Lord Acton nor Mr. Trevelyan denies the existence of nationality ; they do not even impugn its legitimacy within a certain sphere.
1 Lord Acton, work cited, p. 299.
\
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What the latter is concerned to deny is its necessarily progressive character, while the former protests against its invasion of the field of politics and the erection of it into a guiding principle of political organization. If they are right — and it may be said at once that in the view here taken they are right — how comes it that the opposing theory mentioned above has prevailed and at- tained to so great an influence ? Here, clearly, we come to the very heart of the question of which this book treats, and on the conclusions we establish will depend our whole attitude towards manifestations of the idea of nationality in the future.
The progressive associations which have come to cluster round the idea of nationality have their origins in a misinterpretation, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say in a partial misreading, of history. The two national movements of the nineteenth century which have become the " types," so to say, of such movements, are the Greek and the Italian. For reasons to be made clear in the sequel these two revolutionary upheavals have profoundly affected opinion, more especially English opinion, and have given it a false standard of judgment in these matters. Not only is the standard false, but it is often inconsistently applied. Men who are willing- after the event — to applaud the leaders of the
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movements in question, display nothing but hostility towards similar movements by which they are themselves challenged. Lauders of Mazzini and Garibaldi are not always ready to praise and sympathize with their would-be disciples when those disciples are Irishmen or Hindus. Nor is the state of mind of those who logically apply their principle of approval much more satisfactory, for they are liable . to find themselves called upon to excuse or defend movements and events which have outraged the moral sense of civilized mankind. Why are we to bless the Italian nationalism of Mazzini and curse the Pan-Turanianism of the young Turks ? Is there a difference in quality, or is it merely one of method ? Perhaps a careful examination ^ I of the Italian national movement will provide us with an answer.
Now the first point to be noted in this con- nexion is that the Italian Risorgimento was not in essence a nationalist movement at all, that is to say, that its nationalist quality was accidental rather than inherent. Let us briefly, even at the cost of some repetition, recall the facts. When the Napoleonic domination of Europe was brought to an end in 1814, and the Powers of Europe assembled at Vienna to redraw the map of the Continent, they were guided by no principles of liberty, nor were they informed by any generous
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national sympathies. The partition of Poland was confirmed and Italy partitioned afresh ; reduced, to use Metternich's historic phrase, to " a geographical expression.'V-That the inhabit- 1 ants might have any wishes of their own, or that, if so, those wishes deserved sympathetic con- sideration at the least, never seems to have occurred to the members of the Congress. When the representatives of the ancient republic of Genoa came to protest against the absorption of their city-state, rich in historic memories and traditions, by the kingdom of Piedmont, they received the cynical answer that " republics are no longer fashionable.", Sorthe Italian peninsula, after Austria had been gratified by the gift of Lombardy ^and Venetia, was parcelled out into seven states, and where the ancient ruling families still existed they were restored. Their return was the signal for a positive orgy of oppression and reaction. When Victor Emanuel of Piedmont returned to his capital, Turin, his first act was to restore to their positions all the surviving functionaries who had held office in 1789. Not content with this, all laws of a later date than 1800 were abolished by a Royal edict at one stroke. Francis IV of Modena improved upon this example by sweeping away all laws enacted after 1791 ! These monstrous acts symbolized the system of government which was now to prevail
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throughout the whole country. This is not a history of modern Italy, but some traits may be mentioned, since they bear upon the point under discussion.
Italy, under the system of government set up by the Congress of Vienna, possessed neither political nor religious liberty. It was not only the case that the people had no share in the making of the laws which governed them, but they were deprived of the most elementary personal rights. All the governments main- tained censorships of the press and of literature. In Modena the works of Dante were placed upon this political Index ! Florence was the one city in Italy where the dramas of Alfieri, which were rated amongst the finest achievements of modern Italian literature, could be performed on the stage. The Austrian government displayed a remarkable catholicity in repression. In Lom- bardy and Venetia the list of authors whose works came under the ban included Balzac, Bentham, Machiavelli, Victor Hugo, Hallam, and Rabelais. In no state was the liberty of the subject protected or regarded. Everywhere the political police swarmed and flourished. In the states of the Church three distinct and separate forces spied upon and harassed the unfortunate population. The administration of justice was often suspect ; in Piedmont the Royal prerogative
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was used to override the decisions of the courts, whilst in Naples, a generation after the Congress of Vienna, Mr. Gladstone found a system pre- vailing which he described in unforgettable words. "It is not mere imperfection, not cor- ruption in low quarters, not occasional severity that I am about to describe ; it is incessant systematic violation of the lav/ by the Power appointed to watch over and maintain it. ... It is the wholesale persecution of virtue when united with intelligence, operating upon such a scale that entire classes may with truth be said to be its object, so that the Government is in bitter and cruel, as well as utterly illegal, hostility to whatever in the nation really lives and moves and forms the mainspring of practical progress and improvement. ... I have seen and heard strong and too true expressions used, ' This is the nega- tion of God erected into a system of Govern- ment.' ' At the time these words were written (in 1851) there were estimated to be twenty thousand persons suffering imprisonment for political offences in the Neapolitan territories. Against offenders of this class, indeed, all the governments were pitiless. In the Austrian prisons political suspects were starved, flogged, and even drugged to extort confessions or inculpations of accom- plices. When, in 1830, Joseph Mazzini was arrested by the Piedmontese police, the Governor
96 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
of Genoa formulated the complaint against him to his father in this enlightening fashion. Mazzini " was gifted with some talent," said the worthy official, but was " too fond of walk- ing by himself at night absorbed in thought. What on earth has he at his age to think about ? We don't like young people thinking without our knowing the subject of their thoughts/' l And though the charge against him broke down from lack of evidence, he was offered the choice of exile or of internment in some petty town.
Under these circumstances it was not wonderful that religious liberty and equality were practically non-existent. In only one Italian state — the little Duchy of Parma — were Jews admitted to the public service. In Piedmont both Protestants and Jews were excluded from official posts, and as late as 1838 the offspring of marriages between persons of different religious views were regarded as illegitimate. In the same state, " the Church," says Mr. Bolton King, " bound a grievous burden on the whole national life. Every Piedmontese was driven to communicate at Easter ; shops were compulsorily closed on religious festivals ; Cabinet Ministers observed fast-days on pain of losing office ; twice a year classes were suspended at the universities for a week of religious observ-
1 Bolton King, Life of Mazzini (Everyman ed.), p. 18.
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ance." l If this were the condition of things in a state where the governors were laymen, it is not surprising to learn that the restoration of the Pope to his temporal possessions was immediately followed by the restoration of the Inquisition. The Roman government was entirely in the hands of the clergy'. Writing in 1838, Macaulay thus described the system : "I can conceive nothing more insupportable than the situation of a layman who should be a subject of the Pope. In this government there is no avenue to distinction for any but priests. Every office of importance, diplomatic, financial, and judicial, is beld by the clergy. A prelate, armed with most formidable powers, superintends the police of the streets. The military department is directed by a Com- mission, over which a Cardinal presides. Some petty magistracy is the highest promotion to which a lawyer can look forward ; and the greatest nobles of this singular State can expect nothing better than some place in the Pope's household, which may entitle them to walk in procession on the great festivals. . . . Here every man who takes a wife cuts himself off for ever from all dignity and power, and puts himself into the same position as a Catholic in England before the
1 Bolton King, History of Italian Unity, vol. i. p. 44. For the whole of this section readers should consult chapters iii. to v. of this admirable book,
7
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Emancipation Bill. The Church is therefore filled with men who are led into it merely by ambition, and who, though they might have been useful and respectable as laymen, are hypocritical and immoral as churchmen. . . . Corruption infects all the public offices. Old women above, liars and cheats below — that is the Papal administra-
(tion. The States of the Pope are, I suppose, the worst governed in the civilized world ; and the imbecility of the police, the venality of the public servants, the desolation of the country, and the wretchedness of the people, force themselves on the observation of the most heedless traveller." 1 This faithful description errs in one respect ; the rule of the Pope was not the worst in Italy. That " bad eminence " was reserved for Naples, for it was at once as corrupt and as inefficient as Rome, and more violent and savage in its despotism.
Now it is to be observed that against such a system a revolt was inevitable. The French Revolution had done its work too well for any European people to submit tamely to such a mockery of civilized government. It is equally certain that such a movement would have been Unitarian in its aims. The fragmented state of Italy hampered all economic and intellectual development by customs barriers and police
1 Trevelyan, Life of Macaulay, p. 361.
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regulations. Such a movement would have been national in the sense that its aim would have been at once to liberate and unite the Italian people ; it would not have been nationalist in the sense that the Risorgimento actually was. This char- acter was imposed upon the revolutionary struggle from without ; it arose directly from the presence of an Austrian government on Italian soil. Had Lombardy and Venetia been under the control of a native despot there would none the less have been a revolution, but its course and character would have been very different from that which actually took place.
The overwhelming influence exercised by Austria's position in Italy on the Risorgimento was not due to the peculiarly oppressive nature of its rule, for in many respects it was the best of the Italian governments. There is a general concurrence of testimony on this point. Taxation was heavy — it is said that from the two provinces one-fourth of the revenue of the whole .Austrian Empire was raised — but the administration was honest, and justice in all but political cases impartially rendered. The peasants were better off than those of Naples or Sicily, inasmuch as the Austrian government did, on occasion, protect them against oppression by grasping landowners. In education, according to Mr. Bolton King, " Lombardy was far ahead of the rest of Italy
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4
. . . perhaps abreast of any European country of the time." In principle, elementary education for both boys and girls was compulsory from six to twelve years of age, and if this law were not strictly carried out, it was at least the case that in Lombardy in 1834, "68 per cent, of the boys and 42 per cent, of the girls of school age attended." In the district of Bergamo " 90 per cent, of both sexes attended." Infant schools on the plan invented in Scotland by Robert Owen were introduced and subsidized by the government. There was a good system of secondary education, and the two universities of Padua and Pavia were flourishing and well attended. This state of things may be usefully compared with that obtaining in Piedmont, where " in 1845 hardly more than half of them [the communes] had schools, and the great majority of the artisans and peasants were illiterates." Nor were ad- ministration and education the only depart- ments of government in which the Austrian provinces compared favourably with the rest of Italy. " In local government they [Lombardy and Venetia] were the only states of Italy which enjoyed an effective system. All proprietors, including women, had the franchise, and the wide diffusion of landed property made this often nearly equivalent to household suffrage. . . . The com- munes supported the schools, the local police, the
NATIONALITY AND POLITICS 10T
by-roads, and occasionally the priest ; they con- trolled the local sanitation, the police, the parochial charities, and had powers, subject to the consent of the central authority, to carry out public works; the meetings or councils elected the school-teacher and the public doctor and midwife, who, here as elsewhere in Italy, were paid by every commune to attend the poor gratuitously. On the whole, the central authority made little use of its powers of control, and the spirit of local government was strong and self- assertive." Weighing these facts carefully, and bearing in mind the oppressive features of its rule as described above, we may still conclude that the lot of Lombard and Venetian under Austrian rule was, materially speaking, almost paradisaical compared with that of the Romagnuol or Sicilian. What, then, were the features of that rule which made it so odious ?
The answer is partly provided by a saying recorded of Metternich. " The Lombards/' he said, " must forget that they are Italians," and this summed up the Austrian government's policy towards its subjects. The establishment of Aus- trian rule was the signal for the suppression of pre-existing law, civil and criminal, and the introduction of Austrian law in its place. This was an attempt to force the native social life into a foreign mould, and a similar attack was made
NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
upon intellectual life. Not only were the uni- versities kept under strict police surveillance and many foreign professors appointed, but " Austrian handbooks were used in the primary schools, Austrian law and history were taught to the ex- clusion of Italian in the universities ; chemists were compelled to use the Austrian pharmacopeia." 1
Thus the institutions which should have fortified and cultivated the national spirit were turned to its destruction, and the roots of national culture poisoned. This, more than active tyranny, drove the " intellectuals " of Lombardy into the re- volutionary camp and provided the movements of 1848 and subsequent years with some of their noblest recruits.
But this was not all. The malign influence of Austria reached beyond the limits of the provinces it vainly strove to denationalize. The policy of Metternich, the statesman who ruled the Hapsburg monarchy in the generation after 1815, was one of aggressive conservatism. He realized clearly that Italy was the weak point in his system. Were there to be a successful revolution in any Italian state, were liberalism to secure a foothold anywhere in the peninsula, it was certain that the whole worm-eaten edifice of despotism would collapse and in its fall overthrow, not only Austrian rule in Lombardy and Venetia, but the
1 King, Italian Unity, vol. i. p. 52.
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whole dynastic system that radiated from Vienna. It was not only necessary, therefore, that the Italians of the subject provinces should be de- nationalized, but that Austria should be the watch-dog of tyranny for all Italy. The white- coated armies that lay entrenched in the four great fortresses of the Quadrilateral must not only hold the restless Milanese in check, but must be ready to march west or south against revolting Piedmontese or Neapolitans. In 1821 they were actually so used in both those states. In 1830 a rising in Central Italy, inspired by the July revolution in Paris, was suppressed by the same means, and though the Hapsburgs always osten- tatiously paraded their loyalty to the Catholic Church, this did not prevent the occupation of the Papal city of Ferrara when, in 1847, the reforming Pope Pius IX adopted a liberal policy highly obnoxious to the Viennese government. Nor did the evil end there. Other powers were willing to play the same profitable part of defenders of law and order. In 1849, when a Roman Republic had been established and the Pope driven into exile, Louis Napoleon, then President of the Second French Republic, and already aspiring to the dictatorship which subsequently made him Napoleon III, seized the opportunity to buy Catholic support at home by crushing the revolu- tion with armed force. At this date began that
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French military occupation of Rome which only 1 ceased in 1870.
When all the foregoing facts are borne in mind, it will be easily understood why the movement for Italian liberation had always a dual character, being at once a struggle for self-government and a nationalist upheaval. Every Italian who wished his country's good, whether he were a revolution- ary republican like Garibaldi or a constitutional reformer like Cavour, had to reckon with foreign intervention as a political possibility, so that every effort for progress inevitably took on the character of an anti-Austrian conspiracy. This dual tendency is admirably exemplified in the life and writings of the prophet of the Risorgi- mento — Joseph Mazzini.
The word " prophet " is used advisedly ; it is the only one which fitly characterizes Mazzini' s political teaching and the nature of his influence over other men. It is impossible to read the Duties of Man, Thoughts on Democracy, From the Council to God, without being forcibly reminded of the majestic lyricism of Amos and Isaiah. The role, too, that Mazzini played in the liberation of his country was essentially prophetic. He was the inspirer, the forerunner, who made straight the path for the statesmen and soldiers who came after him. He was neither a politician nor a general ; he was not even an efficient conspirator.
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His plots and plans mostly failed ; one by one the best of those who had heard his message and answered his call fell away from him and pursued the common end by other means. Italy was . liberated by three men : Napoleon III, Cavour, } and Garibaldi. He hated the two first and despised the last. His was the prophet's usual fate ; he sowed, and others reaped ; he planned, and others built. Since, too, it is the prophet's lot, when his work is done, to be more spoken of than studied, it will be worth while to devote some space to Mazzini's philosophy, for he, rather than Stein, Kossuth, or Parnell, represents nineteenth-century nationalism to men's minds to-day. This popular view does him less than justice ; he was something more than a nation- alist leader, j.ust as his social and political philo- sophy was something more than a theory or defence of nationality.
We speak of philosophy, but, in truth, the word " religion " would be more fitting. The doctrine of Mazzini is essentially religious ; what gives it its peculiar appeal is that every human question is viewed from a central and religious standpoint. Whether it be a matter of government, of the relations of the sexes, of education or co-operative associations, the same high test is applied. Minds of this type are always rare, and in his own generation the one man with whom Mazzini can
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be compared is Garrison. But this quite special character of his teaching must be borne steadily in mind if its content is to be understood.
" Life is a mission : human existence that portion of it which we have to accomplish here on earth. To discover, comprehend, and intel- lectually to master that fragment of the divine law which is accessible to human faculties, to translate it in action (as far as human powers allow), here, where God has placed us, is our aim, our duty We are each and all of us bound to strive to in- carnate in humanity that portion of eternal truth which it is granted to us to perceive ; to convert into an earthly reality so much of the ' kingdom of heaven ' ... as it is given to us to compre- hend. Thus doing, we are slowly elaborating in man the angel ; failing to do this, we shall have ! to retrace our path." l " Life is a mission." To this idea Mazzini was constantly recurring, alike in thought and action. We receive life as a gift from the Creator in order that we may perform duties, for this only is the true end of man. He refused ever to speak of " rights," for the mere assertion of these led ultimately, he held, to anarchy in politics and egotism in morals. " Rights belong equally to every individual ; the fact of living together in a community does not
1 Mazzini, The Duties of Man and other Essays (Everyman ed.), p. 315. All citations which follow are from this work, unless otherwise stated.
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create a single one. Society has greater strength not more rights, than the individual. How, then, are you going to prove to the individual that he must merge his will in the will of those who are his brothers, whether in the Country or in the wider fellowship of Humanity ? By means of the executioner, of the prison ? Societies existing up till now have used such means. But that is war, and we want peace ; that is tyrannical repression, and we want education." A society based upon individual rights would be, as he said of the theories of Montesquien and Rousseau (and he might have added of Bentham), " a mutual insurance society, and nothing more." The performance of duties, then, is his unvarying message, and the first of these duties, which men exist only to fulfil, is to Humanity.
" Your first duties, first not in point of time but of importance — because without understand- ing these you can only imperfectly fulfil the rest — are to Humanity." It is only by realizing himself as a part of Humanity that man can rise to his full moral stature ; only by working for its good can he hope to ameliorate his own condition. This ideal he held to be the necessary outcome of the Christian religion ; it was the great virtue of that religion in his eyes — and here he did some injustice, perhaps, to its forerunners — that it first proclaimed the fatherhood of God
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to all mankind. He recognized, too, the essential unity of modern civilization, which has been wrought by so many mental and material bonds into one body that injury to a part is injury to the whole. For any state or nation, then, to attempt to live a purely self-regarding life, con- cerning itself merely with its own affairs, was at once immoral and absurd. Service to Humanity is therefore the first of duties, and this provides us with a standard by which all activities can be tested. " Ask yourselves whenever you do an action in the sphere of your Country, or your family, If what I am doing were done by all and for all, would it advantage or injure Humanity? and if your conscience answers, It would injure Humanity, desist ; desist, even if it seem to you that an immediate advantage for your Country or your family would ensue from your action.'*
But Humanity is infinitely great, and the in- fluence that any one individual, however strong in intellect or power, can exert upon it is infinitely small. Isolated, man can do little or nothing in its service. He needs, therefore, some inter- mediate association in which he can act, which will multiply his personal powers and direct them to the great end which should be the goal of all human action. This intermediate association is the Nation.
Now here we approach what is for us the heart
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of the subject, and here, it must be said, is in some respects the least satisfactory part of Mazzini's teaching. It is not that the morality of it is at fault ; as we have seen, Mazzini would never have admitted that the larger interests of humanity can, on any pretext whatever, be subordinated to the lesser interests of the state or of the national group ; we may be equally certain that, had he lived to witness them, he would have characterized many practical applications of nationalist doctrine in our own day as infamous. The difficulty with which we are confronted is intellectual rather than ethical. The fact is that in spite of, perhaps we should say because of, his immense powers of imagination and sympathy, Mazzini was not really a systematic thinker. No one can read his biography or his writings without noticing how often he misinterpreted the signs of his time, and how often in practical affairs his judgment was at fault. He miscalculated, for example, the enormous vitality of the Roman Catholic Church ; he wrote, in 1870, in the very hour of Bismarck's triumph, that " Germany is the only country that deserves a republic " ; he never understood the Socialist movement or the part that it was called upon to play in European affairs. It would be an easy but unworthy task to catalogue his errors in regard to internal Italian policy. The prophet has always the defects of
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his qualities. We look to him for stimulus, for inspiration, rather than for a political programme. Many a man in our own day has been stirred to higher things and more courageous efforts in the service of his kind by the writings of Tolstoy, who has not accepted his social teachings in all their rigour. If, then, we find Mazzini's theories of nationality insufficient, often contradictory, we must take warning from the fact, and, while realizing how easy it is for even moral genius to go astray in this tangled maze, be the more grateful for a teaching that even when erroneous is never lacking in ethical beauty and elevation.
is not, we must repeat, in its moral con- ceptions that Mazzini's theory of nationality is erroneous, nor is it entirely so in its psychology. He rejected scornfully the racial doctrine. ' There is not a single spot in Europe," he said, " where an unmixed race can be detected; " and again, " France, the most powerful nationality of the modern world, is a mixture of Germans, Celts, and Romans/' 1 He realized, too, the essential character of the national idea and its psychological basis. " A Country is not a mere territory ; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation." Where his doctrine
1 King, Mazzini, p. 298.
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becomes fanciful and has in it dangerous possi- bilities is in his theory of special " missions " for the nations. " Special interests, special aptitudes, and before all special functions, a special mission to fulfil, a special work to be done in the cause of the advancement of humanity, seem to me the true, infallible characteristics of nationalities/' l This theory finds a curious parallel in that of certain Victorian economists who taught that there was " a natural division of labour," and \ imagined that certain countries would, for all time, be content to be " raw material " coun- tries, receiving all their manufactures from others. Both doctrines are without foundation in ac- tualities. Mazzini's was based on a strangely superficial view of national characteristics. Ac- cording to Mr. Bolton King, the " missions " assigned to the different nations were as follows : " England's function was ' industry and colonies,' Russia's was the civilization of Asia, Poland's ' the Slav initiative,' Germany's mark was thought, France's was action, Italy's thought in unison with action." 2 " While the German walks earth with his sight lost in the depths of heaven, and the Frenchman's eye rarely looks aloft, but scans earth's surface with its restless, penetrating glance, the Genius that guards the destinies of
1 King, Mazzini, p. 306,
2 Ibid. p. 306.
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Italy has been ever wont to pass swiftly from the ideal to the real, seeking from of old how earth and heaven may be joined together/' It was about this last topic that Mazzini'-s imagination played most sweepingly. " Twice Rome has been the metropolis, the temple of the European world ; the first time when our conquering eagles traversed the known world from end to end and prepared it for union by introducing civilized institutions ; the second time when, after the Northern con- querors had themselves been subdued by the potency of Nature, of great memories and of religious inspiration, the genius of Italy incar- nated itself in the Papacy and undertook the solemn mission — abandoned four centuries ago — of preaching the union of souls to the peoples of the Christian world. To-day a third mission is dawning for our Italy ; as much vaster than those of old as the Italian people, the free and united Country which you are going to found, will be greater and more powerful than Caesars or Popes. The presentiment of this mission agitates Europe and keeps the eye and the thought of the nations chained to Italy." This national Messianism— for we can hardly call it anything else — is not an uncommon phenomenon. Quinet and others held a similar theory as to Poland ; * Victor Hugo
1 Cf. H. A. L, Fisher, The Republican Tradition in Europe, P- 293.
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wrote of Paris in much the same strain as Mazzini employed in praise of Rome ; Marx and Engels, very German in spite of their cosmopolitan theories, wrote of their country in 1848 as destined to give the signal and example for a European social revolution. Its origin in Mazzini's mind is easily to be perceived. His life was one long record of devotion to, and martyrdom for, the cause of Italy's regeneration. Obviously he is the original of Browning's " Italian in England " :
" How very long since I have thought Concerning — much less wished for — aught Beside the good of Italy, For which I live and mean to die."
When, after forty years of conflict and disap- pointment, his life-pilgrimage was drawing to a close, he could still say, in words which give the key to his personality, " I love more deeply than I thought my poor dreamt-of Italy, my old vision of Savona [the place of his first imprisonment]. I want to see before dying another Italy, the ideal of my soul and life, start up from her three hundred years' grave : this is only the phantom, the mockery of Italy. And the thought haunts me, like the incomplete man in Frankenstein, seeking for a soul from its maker." l This is the mood which produces prophecy or poetry, if, 1 King, Mazzini, p. 218.
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indeed, we are to distinguish between them ; not clear-sighted political thought nor the careful solutions of political problems.
We have spoken of the dangerous possibilities latent in this doctrine, and they are, indeed, sufficiently obvious. In his revolt — a righteous and necessary revolt — against the school of political philosophy which could see in Italy nothing but " a geographical expression," Mazzini was led to the exposition of a counter-theory which, if seriously acted upon, would have struck at the very roots of freedom. To quote Acton again, " It is a confutation of democracy, because it sets limits to the exercise of the popular will, and substitutes for it a higher principle." It would have imprisoned every national group in its past, and limited the march of every nation. And in actual fact it led Mazzini into serious self-contradiction, as when, in 1847, ne refused to recognize the Irish as a veritable nationality ont\ the extraordinary ground that they did not " plead for any distinct principle of life or system of legislation, derived from native peculiarities, and contrasting radically with English wants and wishes," and that they did not claim for Ireland a " high special function." Mr. Bolton King's comment on this strange piece of special pleading is worth quotation. " On this," he says, " it may be noted that the first objection shows
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Mazzini's ill-acquaintance with Irish life and feeling, and that the second involves a condition which, save in his own theories, has not been asked of any nation." *
Mazzini's personality and philosophy are themes to which it would be both easy and delightful to devote many pages. But enough has been said to elucidate the arguments here advanced ; first, that the Italian Risorgimento was primarily a movement directed against definite social and political abuses, and had as its end the creation of responsible government on liberal lines ; second, that this movement was nationalist only because of certain special conditions which did not originate but only deflected it ; third, that the political teaching of Mazzini is essentially humanitarian and based upon a religious con- ception of universal application ; in so far as it treats of nationality it is in large part unhistorical and politically objectionable. As against the Italian movement, then, Lord Acton's argument is not valid, but it is equally invalid to invoke that movement as typical of nineteenth- century nationalism. This is equally true of the Greek War of Independence, which was rather a war for the overthrow of a system of religious, social, and political oppression than for the affirmation of a nationality's right to existence, In its
1 King, Mazzini, p. 107.
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beginnings, at any rate, the movement was anti- Turk rather than pro-Greek, as was proved by the naivete of Ypsilanti's appeal to the Rouman peasants of Moldavia, who, as the event proved, had far less resentment against the Turks — their nominal but far-off masters — than against the Phanariote Greeks, who exploited them politically and economically. If, again, we consider the nationalist movement with which English people are best acquainted, namely, the Irish, a brief survey will show that many other factors — re- ligious and economic, for example — beside national feeling have entered into it.
If, therefore, we wish to discuss the working of nationality as a political principle and discover how far the criticisms of it with which this chapter opened are justifiable, we must find a case or cases where political movements can be shown to be essentially nationalist in character. A survey of them should put us in possession of sufficient facts to enable us to form a judgment upon the whole question. Such cases are to be found, it is suggested, in the recent history of Hungary and Germany. We shall find therein nationality expressing itself in a purely political field, and shall be led directly to the consideration of the relations between nationality and the state, which is one of the most urgent questions of our day and generation.
CHAPTER VI
NATIONALITY AND POLITICS (II)
THE role which the Austrian Empire played in Europe after the overthrow of Napoleon, and the European settlement at the Vienna Congress, have been mentioned in an earlier chapter. But not many years had passed after that settlement before its anti- national policy was seriously challenged from within. The opposition came from three quarters —from Italy, Bohemia, and Hungary. The first of these movements has already been discussed in some detail ; the second, though most inter- esting and by no means as well known as it deserves to be, is not specially germane to our present discussion ; it is on the third that our attention must be fixed, for, from our point of view, it is peculiarly instructive.
The national revival in Hungary may be said to date from 1790, when the influence of the French Revolution first began to be felt. Its first manifestations were rather in the nature of resistance to the centralizing and Germanizing
"7
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policy of Joseph II than definitely political ; for that the time was not ripe. It was rather in literature that the awakened spirit of nationality found expression. But after 1815 a political nationalist movement sprang into existence and gained its first victory in 1825, when the passive resistance of the local authorities to the fiscal demands of the Imperial government compelled the summoning of the Diet or Parliament, which had not met for thirteen years. At this point a few words of explanation may serve to make the constitutional aspects of the struggle more com- prehensible.
Hungary had never been completely merged in the Hapsburg Empire, but had preserved its separate national existence and peculiar institu- tions. It still possessed its own Parliament, but this had retained its mediaeval character. It was an assembly of magnates or nobles, for society in Hungary was still feudal in character. The nobles, a numerous class, alone possessed political rights, and were exempt from direct taxation. The local bodies or counties were also entirely controlled by the nobility. The situation was further compli- cated by the fact that to the Diet (where, it may be noted, the debates were conducted in Latin) came delegates of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, which had for many centuries been politically united with Hungary. But just as the
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latter had maintained its separate identity within the Empire, Croatia had preserved its separate existence inside the Hungarian Kingdom. Croatia and Slavonia, as their representatives declared at a later date, were not " subject but associate kingdoms which have Hungary, not as mother, but merely as sister, and existed long before Hungary." l They retained their own separate estates for internal affairs, but, as has been said, sent delegates to the Magyar Diet for the dis- cussion of matters common to the kingdoms. Between the two peoples there was no bond | save the political. Speaking different languages, cherishing different traditions, they could only be united so long as they made head against a common enemy and mutually respected each other's identity.
This, however, the Magyars were not prepared to do. The revival of political activity in Hun- gary speedily brought two parties into existence, both of which were united in opposition to the government at Vienna, but were sharply divided on domestic issues. The reforming or Liberal party, of which the famous Louis Kossuth became the chief leader, demanded the modernization of the national institutions, the establishment of genuinely representative government, and the abolition of feudal privileges. To this programme
1 R. W. Seton- Watson, The Southern Slav Question, p. 28.
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the other party offered unbending opposition. Both, however, were strongly nationalist, and this attitude inevitably produced a conflict with the Croats. In Croatia also there had been a re- naissance of national feeling, of which the poet Gaj was the chief literary exponent, and this movement soon came into full collision with that which was spreading in Hungary. But the Magyar majority in the Diet was implacable, and simply overbore the protesting Croats. In 1840 the use of Latin in the sessions of the Diet was abolished, and when the Croats still persisted in its use their speeches were treated as if they had not been made. Three years laler Magyar was made the official language of administration, and was finally imposed as an obligatory subject upon the Croatian schools. Thus a triangular conflict was set up in which the Viennese government, the Magyar Diet at Pressburg, and the Croatian assembly at Agram were the protagonists.
In 1847 matters came to a crisis ; Hungary was ripe for revolution. The Diet which as- sembled in that year was overwhelmingly nation- alist in feeling. To the protests of the Croats that their nationality and legal privileges were being outraged, Kossuth insolently replied, " I know no Croatian nationality/' The inevitable reply was the introduction by the Croatian as- sembly of the national language into all schools
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and administrative offices. The next year the storm broke ; all continental Europe was swept by a tide of revolution. On every hand was heard the crash of falling governments. The Hapsburg Empire in particular was menaced. There was rebellion in Italy, in Bohemia, in Vienna itself ; Metternich himself was a fugitive. The Magyar nationalists were not slow to seize the opportunity ; when the Diet met in March it proceeded not only to carry out a revolutionary series of changes in the constitution, but to strike at all the non-Magyar nationalities in the kingdom. The very name of Croatia disappeared from the electoral laws, and it was reduced to the status of Hungarian counties ; in spite of the protests of the Roumanians, who formed the majority of the inhabitants, Transylvania was annexed to Hun- gary and its autonomy destroyed, while Kossuth threatened the recalcitrant Serbs of Hungary j with the sword. The result was inevitable ; the subject nationalities rallied to the support of the Viennese government, and in the war which followed the Magyars had no more formidable enemies. When Russian intervention finally crushed the revolt, it is true to say that " the de- feat of Kossuth's Magyars, in the eyes of Europe martyrs of liberty, was greeted by their subject races as the end of a detested tyranny." l Had
1 Auerbach, Les Nationality en Autriche-Hongrie, p. 239.
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Kossuth by a wise and generous policy rallied Croats, Serbs, and Roumanians to his support, the revolution would unquestionably have suc- ceeded, and succeeded not only in Hungary, but throughout Central Europe. The rally of the subject nationalities ensured the victory of the Hapsburg government, and that in turn led to the defeat of the forces of liberty in Italy, Bohemia, Austria, and Germany. Europe has had to wait seventy years and fight the most frightful war in history to repair the blunder of Kossuth, a blunder which was also a crime.
The defeat of the Magyars was followed by nearly twenty years of all-round oppression and degradation. The nationalities whose loyalty had saved the Empire suffered equally with those who had imperilled it. It was not till 1867, after Austria had been crushingly defeated by Prussia in the war of 1866, and driven out of both Germany and Italy, that the centralizing rule of Vienna was modified. The constitutional details (very com- plex, moreover) of the famous Compromise do not concern us here ; what is important for our purpose is its effect, and that may be summed up in a few words. It established the rule of two minorities. The ruling oligarchy in German- Austria secured their own predominance by handing over the subject nationalities to a Magyar oligarchy, an oligarchy which in half a
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century of power proved itself the most cruel and unscrupulous government known in modern history.
The nature of the policy pursued by that oligarchy is still very little understood in this country, in spite of the public-spirited endeavours of Dr. Seton-Watson before and during the war. Hence the amazing spectacle of a British news- paper allowing pro-Magyar articles to appear in its columns during the progress of a struggle for the outbreak of which the Hungarian government was equally responsible with that of Germany. To describe that policy in detail is unnecessary, but it may be briefly described as the systematic — and illegal — destruction of the subject nation- alities. By electoral corruption, by savage pro- secutions, by deprivation of elementary civic rights and of the means of education, by occasional massacre, the ruling caste endeavoured forcibly to convert Croats and Serbs and Roumans into Magyars. " Instigation against the Hungarian nation," in other words, protests against this iniquitous regime, was elevated into a crime and punished with relentless severity. We may conclude our account of the whole Magyar policy with a quotation from Dr. Seton-Watson. " The constitutional regime in Hungary has been no better than a whited sepulchre. It may be summed up as a crude and hasty attempt to trans-
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form the old polyglot Hungary — in which the nobility, or ruling class, was never purely Magyar, but recruited from all the various races, and in which the language of State and of justice and administration was not Magyar but Latin — into a new Magyar national State of the narrowest type. It is this unreasoning devotion to an impossible Magyar State-idea (a Magyar dllam eszme), the fanatical resolve to create a ' Magyar Imperium/ in which the Magyar should not be primus inter pares but a solitary image in the temple of Moloch, that has created a permanent fever in the body politic. . . . The rise of the German and Italian national states was in every way a natural growth, a union of fragments which obviously belonged together. The creation of a Magyar national state by forcible assimilation would be a monstrous crime against nature, an attempt to fight the stars in their courses." l
The interest of this record for us lies in the fact that it describes a purely nationalist movement ; the Magyars were not engaged in the business of securing liberty and justice, but in asserting their own national individuality at the expense of others. Hence the importance of this history for the purposes of our survey, for it was such a movement that we needed to analyse. In order, however, that our deductions may not seem to be 1 R. W. Seton-Watson, Roumania and the Great Wart p. 43*
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based upon too narrow a group of facts, we will proceed to discuss at length the very similar movement in Germany, the details of which are better known but will repay retelling.
The German national movement between 1815 and 1848 was similar in many respects to the Italian in the same period. It was dual in its aims, working on the one hand to unite all Ger- mans in one state and on the other to secure that that state should be liberal and self-governing. Also it was necessarily opposed to Austria, since that cosmopolitan empire was as hostile to free- dom and nationality in Germany as in Italy. On the other hand, the task of German liberation was made more difficult by the fact that there were not seven but thirty-eight states to be united, which meant, of course, that the vested interests in disunion were all the more powerful. 'Another point to be noted in the case of Germany is that there the social question emerged and served to complicate the national issue, whilst in Italy neither Mazzini and Young Italy nor Cavour had to reckon with competitors striving for a revolu- tion in the economic field. These two facts — the deep-rooted divisions within Germany itself and the diversion of reforming energy into social channels — serve perhaps to account for the fact that the national movement in Germany produced no dominating personality, no name which can
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for a moment be compared with that of Mazzini. Karl Marx, perhaps the greatest revolutionary intelligence of the nineteenth century, speedily broke with political liberalism and passed over to the Socialist camp. This absence of outstand- ing figures is the cause of the lack of interest usually displayed in the German movement. Mediocrity is never inspiring, however worthy the cause in which it has enlisted. If the name of Heinrich Heine be brought forward in answer to this criticism it must be said that Heine was much more a Liberal than a German. He spoke of himself as " a soldier in the liberation- war of humanity," in which the liberation of Germany was but an incident. Very cosmopolitan in his tastes and ideas, after the fashion oi the French philosophers of the eighteenth century who were his true masters, Heine had nothing but contempt for those who loved only Germany and the Germans. To him France was very obviously a second fatherland, and one which was essentially more congenial. Heine was never a representative figure in the German national movement.
That movement was always stronger intellectu- ally than politically. Deprived by the policy of Metternich, which was assiduously supported by the Czar and by Prussia, of most opportunities for direct political effort, the progressive groups
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strove to influence opinion by indirect and literary means. Stein, who found himself, after 1815, excluded from active participation in public affairs, and who, to the lasting disgrace of the government he had served so well, was at one time placed under police supervision, devoted his en- forced leisure to the task of organizing the pub- lication of the ancient historical literature of Germany. Savigny, Eichhorn, Dahlmann, Ger- vinus, the brothers William and Jacob Grimm, sought through the study of German law, litera- ture, language, and history, to strengthen the national tradition by basing it on the achievements of the past. " Almost all my works/' wrote Jacob Grimm, " are related directly or indirectly to the study of our ancient language, our ancient poetry, and our ancient law. To many, these researches may have appeared, and may still appear, fruitless ; for my own part, I have always considered them as a worthy and serious task which has our common country as its well-defined object, and teaches the love of it." l The war for the liberation and unity of Germany was, for the most part, waged by university professors and men of letters, and it was of these classes that the members of the Parliament of Frankfort was composed. This National Assembly, which was designed
1 Quoted by Levy-Bruhl, work before cited, p. 339.
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to do for Germany what its predecessor had done for France, met after the revolution of 1848. Metternich had fallen, and the Hapsburg dynasty was fighting for its life. The people of Berlin had forcibly compelled the King of Prussia to espouse the national cause. The way seemed clear for that union of Germans in one free state which the Viennese statesman had once described as an " abominable object." An active partici- pant in the revolutionary movement, who was afterwards to play a distinguished part in the politics of another land, has told us what were his ambitions for his country at this moment. " I was dominated by the feeling that at last the great opportunity had arrived for giving to the German people the liberty which was their birthright, and to the German Fatherland its unity and greatness." l These hopes were bitterly disappointed. The failure of the Frankfort Par- liament to achieve either unity or liberty — a failure which exercised a decisive and lamentable influence upon the course of European history — has often been made the occasion of contemptuous references to the unfittedness of idealists and theorists for political tasks. These reproaches are not without foundation ; the Parliament committed many blunders and showed great want of experience. But the true reproach falls else-
1 Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 113.
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where, upon the upholders of the system which had deprived the German people of political education, and upon the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy. Had the King of Prussia been true to his promise to put himself at the head of the liberation movement and merge Prussia in Germany, had he, in short, had the moral courage to do for Prussia and Germany what Cavour did for Piedmont and Italy, a liberalized and united state would have been in existence in 1850, a state which would have been free from Austrian domination on the one hand, and from French menace on the other. He lacked that courage, and he was heartily supported in his treachery by that Prussian military aristocracy which had collapsed a generation before at Jena, and of which Bismarck was the effective spokesman. Rotteck, a representative Liberal, had declared in 1832 that " I desire unity, but not otherwise than with liberty, and I prefer liberty without unity to unity without liberty. I do not wish for unity under the wings of the Austrian, or of the Prussian, eagle.'* 1 A speech of Bismarck's during the revolutionary period provided the Prussian answer : " We all wish that the Prussian eagle should spread out his wings as guardian and ruler from the Memel to the Donnersburg, but free will we have him, not bound by a new Regensburg
1 Quoted by Levy-Brulil, as cited, p. 456,
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Diet. Prussians we are and Prussians we will remain . . . and I hope to God we will still long remain Prussian when this sheet of paper [the constitution drawn up at Frankfort] is forgotten like a withered autumn leaf." In plain language, there was to be no unity save under the hegemony of Prussia.
How Bismarck carried his policy into effect is a story too well known to need to be told again. German unity was established in 1871, at the price of three wars and the cynical disregard of constitutional government. The German people chose empire rather than freedom, and sealed its choice by the crime of the annexation of Alsace- Lorraine. Many excuses were made for the crime, in Germany and elsewhere, all based upon a wilful disregard of the true nature of nationality. It was alleged that the annexed populations spoke German, and that their nationality, therefore, must agree with their speech ; that the provinces had formerly been attached to the Empire, and belonged of right to its successor. The fact that the populations had manifested their un- shakable devotion to France counted for nothing from this standpoint ; Germans they were in fact, and must be made so in political allegiance also. From the time of the annexation onwards, the Imperial government strove to impose its theory upon the people of Alsace-Lorraine ; by
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| force, by persuasion, by economic penetration. Whether this policy would in time have achieved its object is now, happily, no more than a matter for speculation ; what concerns us more closely is to note how the Bismarckian policy bears out Acton's view of the oppressive character of political nationalism. " After surrendering the individual to the collective will, the revolutionary system makes the collective will subject to the conditions which are independent of it, only to be controlled by an accident."
But Alsace and Lorraine do not provide the only example of German nationalism operating as a political principle. An even better instance is provided by the case of Prussian Poland. From 1873 onwards the Imperial government waged an incessant war upon the nationality of its Polish subjects, the initiation of this policy being due to Bismarck. In that year Polish was replaced by German in all elementary schools for the teaching of secular subjects, and ten years later this sub- stitution was applied to religious instruction also. In 1899 the climax of oppression was reached when school-teachers were forbidden to use the proscribed language in their own homes ! The stubborn resistance of the Poles to these measures led, in 1906, to " strikes " of school-children on a very large scale. In Posen alone 40,000 children " struck." The government handled the move-
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ment after its usual fashion ; it rained dismissals, fines, and sentences of imprisonment. The homes of scholars were invaded by the police, who seized Polish books and prosecuted their youthful owners. Nor did this policy of " Germanization " cease at the schools. The national language was prohibited in the judicial courts and administra- tive services. As a final stroke, strenuous efforts were made to drive the Poles from their country by economic pressure. In 1886 five millions were voted for the purchase of Polish estates on which German colonists were to be planted out. In 1909 powers of compulsory expropriation were taken by the government, which continued to devote millions to this end, eleven and a half being voted in 1913. All these measures met with the fate they deserved. The Poles organized them- selves in co-operative societies for agricultural credit, and as fast as Polish estates were purchased by the government, German land was bought by the Poles. Their " Sokols," nominally cultural associations, were, in fact, political organizations, and a solid group of Polish deputies was returned to the Reichstag unswervingly to oppose the governmental policy. So far from " Polonism " being destroyed, it was, by German admission a few years before the war, steadily advancing and conquering districts which had hitherto been purely German. That the anti-national policy i
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was a failure does not, of course, alter its essen- tially odious character.1
The examples of Germany and Hungary have been discussed in detail because they provide clear-cut instances of the tendency under dis- cussion, but others, equally convincing though more complex in nature, could be given. The attempts by the autocracy to " Russify " Fin- landers and Poles are matters of recent history, whilst Irishmen and Welshmen can recount the story of efforts at Anglicization and of their successful resistance to them. But we have enough evidence to justify the generalization that a political policy directed by purely nationalist aims is inevitably oppressive. Nation- alism allied with the modern theory of the State is the very definition of tyranny. That theory, which has descended to us from the Roman jurists through- the hands of mediaeval canonists and the political theorists of the Renaissance and the Reformation, has never been better described than by Acton. " The modern theory," he says, " which has swept away every authority except that of the State, and has made the sovereign power irresistible by multiplying those who share it, is the enemy of that common freedom in which religious freedom is included. It condemns, as
1 Cf. ch. xxii. of Mr. W. H. Dawson's Evolution of Modern Germany ; also Mr. Ralph Butler's New Eastern Europt.
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a state within the State, every inner group and community, class or corporation, administering its own affairs." l This theory, which has an arti- ficial unity for its end, is essentially despotic, since it regards a lesser society within the State as possessing no authority save that which the State has specifically conferred upon it, and, by reducing the community to a mere collection of unorganized individuals, leaves them ultimately at the mercy of power. This principle, to a greater or lesser degree, inspires all modern states. It was at work in Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the Roman Church, in the French Separation and Association laws, and though in this country its strict application is rendered difficult by various counteracting influences, it undoubtedly inspired the Osborne Judgment and the Free Church of Scotland decision. Hobbes gave it classical expression when he contemptuously compared lesser societies within the State to " worms within the entrails of a natural man."
It needs no long argument to prove the dangers which must arise when a State thus inspired is in the hands of men with nationalist aims- If they find another nationality existing in the State beside their own they will inevitably attack it in the name of unity. Its existence offends them both as statesmen and as nationalists. This
1 Lord Acton, The History of Freedom, p. 151.
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point of view has, curiously enough, been most clearly expressed by an American writer. " A nation," he says, " is a nation only when there is but one nationality ; and the attempt at estab- lishing a nationality within a nationality is more inconsistent and mischievous even than the estab- lishment of ' an empire within an empire.' " 1 This is the pure doctrine of Kossuth and Bismarck, and their application of it is the only method consistent with logic. How it works in practice we have seen, and we can readily agree with Ac ton's remarks in the essay so often quoted in this book that " the greatest adversary of the rights i of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. \ By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State, because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence." 2
1 Lieber, quoted by Krehbiel, Nationalism, War, and Society, footnote to p. I .
2 Acton, History of Freedom, p. 297.
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This question is not an academic one ; it is most current and vital. To-day the homogeneous national state is practically non-existent. The suggestion, so frequently made during the war, that boundary-lines should be drawn according to nationality, is one that would pass the wit of man to put into execution, and errs, moreover, by assuming that nationality can be established by some objective test such as language. The Peace Conference wrestled for months with this problem, but can hardly be said to have solved it. We can scarcely hope to be more fortunate, but our dis- cussion has had the negative value of clearing our minds of dangerous prepossessions as to the " progressive " character of nationalism, and has shown us one road along which lies no solution. Our own quite tentative suggestions may be reserved till we have considered another aspect of the subject.
CHAPTER VII NATIONALITY AND THE GREAT SOCIETY
DURING the last hundred years/' says Mr. Graham Wallas, " the external con- ditions of civilized life have been trans- formed by a series of inventions which have abolished the old limits to the creation of mechanical force, the carriage of men and goods, and communication by written and spoken word. One effect of this transformation is a general change of social scale. Men find themselves working and thinking and feeling in relation to an environment which both in its world-wide exten- sion and its intimate connexion with all sides of human existence, is without precedent in the history of the world." l The social product of this change Mr. Wallas calls the Great Society. What bearing has the coming of this " new era of human relationships," this "new stage-setting for the drama of life," on the problem of Nationality ? Most of us suffer from a deep-rooted mental
1 Graham Wallas, The Great Society, p. 6. 137
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conservatism which hinders us from attempting to see the world as it really is. Confronted by some novel stream of tendency in human affairs, we obstinately refuse to adjust ourselves to the new force, to strive to grasp its real import. Im- mersed in the routine affairs of daily life, we seldom emerge to the contemplation of the great movements which revolutionize our routines from one week to the other. But there is a limit even to mental lethargy. Increasingly we realize that the world has changed, that our philosophies and institutions no longer fit the facts or meet the needs of our time. Increasingly we criticize and canvass our old beliefs to see how much, if any, life remains in them.
But so far as the coming of the Great Society is concerned, this process of criticism and dis- cussion has not yet gone very far or very deep. If it be true, as a very able political thinker has said, that " we are working with a machinery adapted to deal with a civilization immensely less complex than our own," l it is because we have made no serious effort to reconstruct our social machinery, and that effort has not been made because we have failed to recognize the necessity for it. The venerable jest that the British Empire was made in a fit of absence of mind might be applied with much more truth to the
1 H. J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State, p. 184.
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whole material apparatus of modern civilization. When we have thought about the matter at all our attitude has either been one of unreasoning complacency or instinctive protest. If, then, we are to find an answer to our question, we must insist upon a clear understanding of the facts of the situation.
If we were asked to sum up in a few words the result of the mechanical revolution of the last hundred and fifty years, we might say that the> whole environment of the mass of mankind has; been profoundly altered, and that for innumer-^ able purposes the world has become a unit. When the Industrial Revolution began — midway through the eighteenth century — the over- whelming majority of men lived in an environ- ment which had not been radically changed for hundreds of years. Their world was still a world based upon the village community. There, generation after generation of men wrung a scanty living from the soil, practised traditional crafts, believed traditional faiths. Their ploughs, their houses, their creeds, altered little if at all from century to century.
This form of social organization has been re- placed by a civilization infinitely more mobile and complex. The very texture of life has been changed. We no longer produce for local and stable markets, but for a world-market, the needs
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and capacities of which vary from day to day. With this increase of complexity has come an enormous increase of interdependence. Every part of the economic system is now sensitive to a shock received by any other part. The shuttles of industry and commerce, as they pass to and fro, weaving the web of the world-market, pay no regard to frontiers. In a most literal and absolute sense we have become members of one another. A bankruptcy in Paris or New York ; a miners' strike in Yorkshire or South Wales, will alter profoundly the whole economic future of thousands of individuals in distant lands. Nor, in considering this growth of complexity, must we forget the prodigious increase in mobility already mentioned. In the age before steam and electricity had changed the face of the world, life was comparatively stable. The mass of men lived and died within sight of their birthplace. Move- ment and travel were necessary or possible only to a few. To-day the very reverse is the case, and we should not be merely paradoxical if we said that to live stably is a privilege which only the fortunate minority can achieve. Throughout the nineteenth century vast tides of humanity swept out to occupy the waste places of the earth, and down to the very eve of the war this movement showed no signs of slackening. Indeed, one of the strangest reactions of the war has been to
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produce a labour scarcity in the United States by making impossible the steady flow of emigrants from Europe. Within Europe itself there was similar mobility. In France, before the war, jealous patriots drew attention to the fact that French industries were becoming increasingly dependent upon alien labour. Belgians poured into the coal-mining and textile regions of the north-east, while Italians spread over the frontier into the ports and manufacturing centres of the Midi. In Germany, agriculture was becoming more and more dependent on Polish labour.
We have spoken of events before the war, but of this interdependence of modern societies the war furnished the best evidence. It seems in- credible, even though we have witnessed it, that the murder of one man, however highly placed, could fling a whole continent into a delirium of mutual slaughter. But, looking back upon events, we see that, given the will to war of any one great State in Europe, the rest followed fatally and inevitably. Just as the ripples spread in a pool where a stone has been thrown, till they reach its edge, so the conflict in Serbia spread till ^ it had reached China on the one extreme, the United States and Brazil on the other. Not even those states which clung to neutrality could escape. If they avoided the destruction of actual war, they could not avoid its economic reactions.
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Argentina, changed as by a miracle from a debtor to a creditor community, is one-half of the picture ; Switzerland, hemmed in by gigantic combatants, her economic life nearly strangled, is the other.
Here and there, before the war, a few thinkers of exceptionally clear vision had foreseen these possibilities, or something of them, but to most of us they came with the stunning shock of a revelation. Yet the facts were there, and we could all have judged them had we chosen. When, in 1911, representatives of the iron and steel industries of Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Russia, Spain, and the United States met at Brussels to form " an International Association to extend existing friendly relations between steel producers throughout the world," one delegate could say, " We are masters of the world now. Henceforth governments must take a back seat. They can no longer make war or peace, as we are united, and control iron and steel." In so saying he was guilty of only slight exaggeration. But we had not grasped the truth behind his rhetoric ; we did not see that as the world had become a unit for economic purposes, so it was becoming a unit for political purposes. The war was the price we paid for this failure of vision.
It behoves us, then, to amend our ways and strive to realize the trend of things. We may be
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certain that the economic and mechanical develop- ments we have been discussing will not slacken their pace or cease. The war, indeed, has given them an added impetus. During the last five years the air has been definitively conquered, and already enormous possibilities of aerial transport and communication are opening up for us. But these horizons are narrow and limited compared with those which recent discussions on the utiliza- tion of atomic energy suggest. It would be ridiculous for a writer who is not a scientist to prophesy, much less dogmatize, on such a subject, yet it is sufficiently obvious that the social changes consequent upon the application of steam-power to industry would be insignificant compared to those which would follow upon such an achievement.
We may be sure, also, that whatever technical revolutions the future holds in store for us, re- volutions in organization have been made in- evitable by the experience of the war. Sufficient attention has not been paid to the work done in this field, which is, of course, much too extensive to be described in detail here. But it is certain that the experience gained in the large-scale manipulation of commodities such as resulted from the food controls of the various states, the handling of the world's wool-clip by the British Government, the supply of food by the United
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States to Belgium and the war-ravaged districts of Europe, will not be lost sight of in the future. Indeed, we have emerged from war to find that primary food necessities have passed under the control of international trusts.
We may note, too, that the same principle holds good in the political field as in the economic. If certain great political organizations like the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires have dissolved into their constituent parts, the prin- cipal states of the world have pledged themselves to attempt to build up a League of Nations l which shall regulate, according to defined prin- ciples, affairs which have hitherto been abandoned to the initiative of single states. A similar tendency is to be observed within the British Empire, from all parts of which come suggestions for a better and more coherent organization to deal with matters that are of common concern to all its constituent parts. Here again it would be rash to prophesy, but it may safely be affirmed that the psychological revolution wrought by the war will sooner or later be expressed in political forms.
The magnitude of the social and political changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution may be fully admitted, but we have not yet
1 The title is obviousl} a misnomer ; what the Covenant actually contemplates is 9, League of States.
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discerned their bearing on the question of Nation- ality. To do this we must, since the problem is at bottom psychological, inquire if the moral and mental effects of the Revolution have been as profound as the material.
Clearly, there has been a great sweep towards social uniformity. Forms of social organization have been violently shaken by the establishment in their midst of an alien economic system. But that system is essentially uniform alike in its methods and results. Large-scale industry does not vary, save in minor details, whether it be operating in Pittsburg orEsseri,Bolton or Bombay. In face of it, the old traditional crafts collapse or live parasitically as luxury trades, with the consequent disappearance of all the mental and moral habits that go with the practice of such crafts. A machine-minder in Lancashire and a machine-minder in India will bring to their tasks very different traditions and outlooks upon life, but if they are to be successful and maintain themselves in the economic struggle, they must develop similar aptitudes and mentalities. India, indeed, presents an excellent example of the results of the impact of modern economic methods and transit systems upon an ancient community. Under the conditions and stresses set up by them, the traditional ways of life become first an in- convenience, then an absurdity. Caste visibly 10
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weakens before the onslaught of the cotton- factory and the crowded railway-carriage. Labour unions and co-operative associations already exist in India and open up all sorts of strange vistas to the mind of the speculative observer.
India, too, provides the classic example of that crumbling of old ways of thought which follows wherever the mechanism of the Great Society penetrates. Just as the great tidal waves of commodities sweep to and fro with small regard for political frontiers, so the sciences, the culture, the political theories that are, in part, cause, and, in part, product of the Great Society pass resist- lessly across oceans and continents, dissolving the mental habits and disciplines of a thousand years. The Babu of Bengal, with his sham European culture, put on in much the same fashion and for much the same reasons as his European patent- leather boots, has been a standing jest for a generation. Not, of course, that Bengal has a monopoly of the Babu ; he flourishes, we are told, in China and Japan ; Syria and Palestine — whose Jewry luxuriates in fifteen political parties- know him well. Sir Mark Sykes met him even in Kurdistan ! That great traveller and brilliant political thinker gave the perfect portrait of the type in his description of " Gosmabaleet " — " that peculiar and horrible sickness which attacks a certain percentage of inhabitants of interesting
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and delightful lands. The outward symptoms in the East are usually American spring-side boots and ugly European clothes. Internally it is productive of many evil vapours which issue from the lips in the form of catchwords such as ' the Rights of Man/ ' Leebarty,' ' Civilizations,' ' Baleetical Offences/ The origin of this disease is to be traced to an ill-assimilated education of American type ; the final stage is that in which the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable/' 1
But when the man of the older world does not receive the Great Society, but goes to it, the result is even more overwhelming. That tre- mendous wave of European emigrants to America of which we have already spoken, provides the perfect example of uprooted man. " The Melting Pot " has become another name for the United States, so tremendous is the assimilative force of its economic system. The cunning and the lucky become " hyphenated Americans/' Babus of the Western World, exaggerating their newly ac- quired vices. Every member of the Italian and Salonika Expeditionary Forces has met them, and knows their abominable dialect and odious patronage of their stay-at-home fellow-country- men. The dull and the unfortunate go to
1 Sir Mark Sykes, Dar-ul-Islam.
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swell the proletariat which herds in the labour ghettoes of Pittsburg and Chicago, or drifts to and fro across the Continent in a new form of nomadism.
The phrase just used, " uprooted man/' sums up in brief compass the typical human product of the Great Society. Divorced alike from nature and tradition, he is the slave of the dehumanized forces he has helped to create. He exists in all classes, for the cosmopolitan financier who has interests in every capital and is at home in all, is equal in this respect to the Lithuanian wage- earner in a Chicago packing-shed, or the Italian waiter who has drifted to London via Paris and Berlin. Their motives are primarily economic ; the nexus that binds them to their fellow-men is the cash nexus. The Great Society, in short, has gone far to produce that terrible phenomenon — the " economic man " ; we might say, without being purely paradoxical, that the economists, who heralded the coming of that society and were its first champions, have created man in the image of their doctrines.
Now the bearing of the foregoing upon the idea of nationality must be sufficiently obvious. It cannot seriously be denied that the unchecked operation of the industrial system and of the ideas inevitably associated with it are a grievous menace to the persistence of nationality. To-
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gether they destroy the material and moral foundations on which it rests. Nor can the experiences of the war be brought in as evidence to contradict this view. As has been said above, the Industrial Revolution has not yet developed the full force of its influence ; only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did it fairly lay its grip upon Western Europe and the United States. In Eastern Europe — that part of the Continent, be it noted, where nationalist ideas have most influence at present — its work has only begun. There the village community is still (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Wells) the normal social unit. To large parts of Asia, of course, the same remark applies with even greater force. But sooner or later in these areas there will arise the clash of forces which Mr. Shaw has so well depicted in John Bull's Other Island when he makes Larry Doyle say, " Think of me and my father ! He's a Nationalist and a Separatist. I'm a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever else metallurgical chemistry may be, it's not national. It's international. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not to separate them. The one real political conviction that our business has rubbed into us is that frontiers are hindrances and flags confounded nuisances. . . . My father wants to make St. George's Channel a frontier and hoist a
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green flag on College Green ; and I want to bring Galway within three hours of Colchester and twenty-four of New York. I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island. Then there's the religious difficulty. My Catholicism is the Cath- olicism of Charlemagne or Dante, qualified by a great deal of modern science and folk-lore which Father Dempsey would call the ravings of an Atheist. Well, my father's Catholicism is the Catholicism of Father Dempsey." The war may hasten or retard this clash of ideals, but that it will arise is inevitable.
The war, indeed, has emphasized a pre-existing tendency — itself a direct product of the Industrial Revolution — which is dangerous for nationality. The form of social revolt we call Bolshevism is frankly hostile to nationality, though it is to its chief apostle that we owe the phrase " self- determination." But for the Bolshevists, this idea is merely an instrument of war against the existing social order ; fundamentally, their doctrine is anti-national. They appeal to the uprooted men of the proletariat in all countries, calling upon them to abandon every lingering shred of loyalty to tradition. They point to a world in which the domination of economic forces increases daily, and call upon the proletarian to think of himself solely as, what, indeed, he tends
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to become, an economic man. Neither the theory nor the appeal are new. Seventy years ago Karl Marx formulated both in the historic Communist Manifesto. Some passages are worth recalling. ' The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones ; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of different lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intel- lectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more im-
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possible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world-literature.
;< The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of pro- duction ; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."
Such was the diagnosis of the world's disease. The remedy was that which the Bolshevists and their acolytes in all countries are once more urging upon the uprooted men. " The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite ! "
This, then, is the Frankenstein's man into which the Great Society has breathed the breath
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of life. The war did not create him. Professor Zimmern saw him at work in the United States — that typical product of the Industrial Revolution — three years before the German hosts poured into Belgium. " One of the chief difficulties with which the political Socialists have to contend is that so many members of the discontented element, who would naturally range themselves under their banner, are too unsettled to secure a vote — or only do so by accident through temporary and gratuitous residence at some lodging-house kept for the purpose by a political boss. . . . Such men, whether alien or native-born, have no interest in political reforms. . . . They represent most nations under the sun : or rather they represent none of them, but the Wanderlust of all the nations and the bitterness of the disinherited proletariat. They move to and fro in the country like the mercenary soldiers of the Middle Ages, with nothing to gain but by fighting society and ' nothing to lose but their chains.' " x It is not altogether surprising that after nearly five years of world-war the appeal of the cosmopolitan revolutionary should fall upon the willing ears of such men and their like in many countries, or that they should turn with bitterness upon the ideas which seem to have produced the war, and with a special ferocity upon the idea of nationality.
1 A, E. Zimmern, Sociological Review, July 1912.
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" The final stage is that in which the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable/'
The national idea, then, is approaching a crisis in its existence. On the one hand, it is being advocated with greater fervour than at any time in history. On the other, it is threatened by the gigantic " melting-pot " of the Great Society and of the revolutionary doctrines to which that Society has given birth. To a discussion of its possible future our final chapter must be devoted.
CHAPTER VIII THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY
WE have deferred till this final chapter several questions for which we need answers. Has nationality a future ? It has never loomed so large in the minds of men * as during these recent years of war, but is it not possible that the social forces which menace it may prove too powerful, and that the idea will wither at its roots and die ? And if it should survive, what role will it play in the social organization of the future ? We have discovered good reasons for distrusting its purely political expression, yet it cannot fail to influence political structure. What, then, should be the relation of *} nationality to the State ? What machinery can give it free play without permitting it to become tyrannical ?
If we are to be perfectly frank we must begin by admitting that we cannot give definite answers to these questions. Prophecy in social affairs is at once the most fascinating and most futile of
employments, and to reply to these questions in
155
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specific and dogmatic terms would partake of the nature of prophecy. All we can do is to suggest possibilities, to outline an ideal, and to bear steadily in mind the fact that the future of society has never been so impenetrable to our vision as it is to-day. Gigantic dangers threaten us, and no man of sense who has taken to heart the lessons of the last five years will care to dogmatize as to whether or no civilization will escape them. It may be that we are hurrying towards the ruin of the modern world ; it may be that a future of unequalled grandeur awaits us. We cannot tell. We can only balance possibilities and compare ideals, resting assured the while that if perils are to be averted nothing but sanity and clear thinking can achieve that end. Let us begin, then, by asking whether we desire the survival of nationality, for this is obviously fundamental, and on our reply all our other answers must be based.
We can best work towards a reply by an analogy. fWhat is it that gives its main value to social intercourse ? We cannot fail to answer, individuality. We feel that it is necessary and good that men should be themselves, should •develop their own natures, and not be the pale patterns and imitations of other menj) This development of the unique in personal qualities is the avowed aim of our educational systems,
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however far some of them may be from actually \ achieving that aim. /The full possession of char- acter, of personality, is the end for which we strive ; it is the final justification of all culture, of all aesthetic and intellectual effort. We rebel against any social machinery which threatens individuality ; its production is the great justifi- cation of liberty. We instinctively feel that institutions which threaten it, however great their other advantages may be, are to be resisted and condemned, since they tend to destroy some- thing through which alone their advantages have significance. The clash of individualities, tempera- ments, characters, call them what we will, is the source of all poetry, of all drama. They are to human life what the play of light and shade is to a work oLact. Their destruction or suppression
would rob life of its value and meaning J
Now this book will have been written in vain if it has not demonstrated that {nationality is to a social group what personality is to an individual. It is a complex product of heredity and environ- ment leading to differentiation. That being so, the justification for its persistence is clear. /Does anyone really desire that national differences should disappear, and all human groups should look alike, think alike, react to the same stimuli, respond to the same emotions ? There is a fundamental likeness between all men, and it is
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well that it should be so ; our needs are the same, we all perish for want of food or liberty or good government. But these basic things apart, we wish, as we say, "to be ourselves," and this is true of nations as of men. They, too, wish to be themselves, to retain their unique qualities, to make unhindered their peculiar contribution to the sum of human effort. The genuine cosmo- politan, to whom all nations are alike, is not an attractive figure. He is without a past, without the desire for a future ; he has no true task, since he is without preferences. We should desire the survival of nationality, then, feeling that its disappearance would rob life of colour and significance, and would ultimately involve .the undermining of personality itself./
This, in truth, is not mere theorizing in the void. We have seen what are the destructive possi- bilities of the Great Society, how it uproots and denationalizes men, leaving them without support from tradition, and holding out no hope for the future. Realizing this we cannot but see that for uprooted men the one force capable of effectually socializing them is nationality, with its insistence on the past and on the necessity for group-life in the present .rf^M en suffering from the full shock of American industrialism have felt this ; they have understood, like Professor A. E. Zimmern, that " you cannot make a Jew or an Italian or a
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 159
Pole into an inheritor of Puritan or Virginian c culture by waving a flag before his admiring eyes. But what you can achieve thereby is to kill in him what was the best thing he brought with him across the Atlantic, far more precious than the ^ bundle he guarded so carefully in the steerage — his own little spiritual inheritance. You can make him ashamed of Mazzini and Kossuth and the Vilna Gaon, of the songs and stories of his father and the teachings of his Rabbi, of the lump in his throat at the mention of the holy names of Rome, Poland, or Palestine/' *j As a Croatian in Chicago told the same observer : " There is only one thing that can save our people, and that is an education in Croatian Nationalism : we have only a few years in which to do it ; if we miss our chance, we are lost." " A Jewish American," said another exile, " is a mere amateur Gentile, doomed to be a parasite for ever," and a Vlach gave similar evidence. These men recog- nized the destructive possibilities inherent in the mechanism of the Great Society ; they found a safeguard and corrective in nationality.
And if they are right, if in nationality is to be i found our refuge from the social and spiritual f disintegration which follows on the heels of un- \ checked industrialism, the same principle holds : good of the moral dangers of the cosmopolitan
1 A. E. Zimmern, Sociological Review, July 1913.
160 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
revolution. Whatever may be the other faults of that movement, whatever may be its virtues and justifications, its attempt to destroy and under- mine nationality is an extraordinary and illogical folly. A social creed which has solidarity as its aim begins by attacking one of the few forces in the modern world which makes for solidarity ! The error is gross and palpable, and could only be made by men whose zeal has blinded their vision, so that they mistake effects for causes. It is not nationality which makes wars, but its perversion —a perversion due, as we have seen, to a radically false social philosophy. To exaggerate the evils of existing society is no way to mend it. Because men are economically uprooted, to uproot them spiritually is to destroy — not bourgeois prejudices —but the possibility of social life of any sort- This revolutionary cosmopolitanism starts from an unsound basis. It makes the error, an error which Mazzini unsparingly and rightly denounced, of attempting to unite men on a purely economic ground, and fails to realize that the satisfaction of merely material needs can never be a lasting social * bond. The need once satisfied, the link is broken, and nothing is left but a fortuitous concourse of human atoms. 'The mere conflict of private \ interests/' it has been said, " will never produce a well-ordered commonwealth of labour ; " 1 the
1 J. K. Ingram, History of Political Economy, p. 298.
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 161
wiping men's minds clear of everything but economic wants will never produce a common- wealth of any kind.
[jBut if we desire nationality to perform this spiritual function we must be clear as to the form we wish it to take. A merely political nationalism would simply add to the evils we wish to check, is actually adding to them at this moment. Political nationalism, as we have already said, is, under present conditions, and in so far as it aims at the creation of a multitude w/ of uni-national states, impossible. It is also unr desirable.^ It conflicts with the main trend of human affairs, which is away from isolation to- wards interdependence. [Nationalism is in politics what the peasant mind is in economics, a bitterly reactionary thing^J Its aim is not service and *"' co-operation, but exclusiveness and monopoly. It is concerned with keeping men apart rather • > ,^~ than bringing them together. The world needs not more tariff-walls and fortress-barriers, but fewer. The political problem of our day is two,- v^ fold. We have, on the one hand, to secute democracy, self-government ; on the other, administrative areas which correspond to the social needs of our civilization. Political nationalism, as we have seen, when carried to its logical conclusion, is fatal to the first, and
its effect on the second hardly needs to be dis- ii
162 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
cussed. To deliver up some port which serves half a continent, some way of communication, absolutely vital to the prosperity of half a dozen states, to a fraction of the population involved> is to condemn our economic life to irremediable disorder, and to make every form of social opT Jl pression profitable. The chaos of mutual de-
1 struction in which large parts of Europe are now weltering is due simply and solely to this per- version of the national idea. Clearly, it is not by such methods as these that nationality can serve our need.
I The conception of nationality must be divorced frorn^TRaFof the"S:tate? They answer to different needs, fulfil different functions. To thrust them into an enforced and unnatural marriage is to sin alike against reason and experience. The only issue of such a union will be, in the future as in the past, tyranny, hatred, and the spirit of revenge. From these diseases^Tthe world is perishing to-day, and they are strange doctors who would cure it by reinforcing its malady.
But if we have rejected, and decisively, the purely political theory of nationality, we must be prepared with some counter-theory. That is to be found, it is suggested, in a quotation which appeared in the opening chapter. It will bear repetition. " Nationality to me is not a political
\ question at all. ... It is primarily and essen-
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 163
tially a spiritual question, and, in particular, an | educational question." Let us continue the I passage, for its doctrine is very vital and germane to our inquiry. " It is a question for the parent, the teacher, the educational administrator, the missionary, the social worker, for all who are concerned with the life^and ideals of the young and with the spiritual welfare of the community. Nationality to me is bound up with the question of corporate life^ corporate growth, and corporate self- respect" 1 Here, surely, we have the answer to our question. The maintenance of nationality, in this view, cannot be achieved by drawing frontier- lines and setting up tariff-walls. It is not a thing which can be established by Acts of Parliament or the fiat of legislators. Abiding as it does in the heart and mind, it is only in the hearts and minds of men that it can be preserved. And hearts and minds are better reached by education - than by laws. /To fashion men nobly for noble ends should be the aim of social life, 'and what better instrument for this purpose can we find than national tradition ? To seek out what is • best and highest in the heritage of the past, to mould it into the very fabric of the living present, that is the task of the true nationalist, arid, if he • will but see it, the means are ready to his hand. There is literature, which conveys the finest
1 A. E. Zimmern, Nationality and Government , p. 65. j
v/
V
164 ' NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
thought and deepest feeling of the past ; there is art, which transmits its truest emotions ; there is history, which records its sufferings and achieve- ments. Fed on such food as this, the national spirit will rise high and ever higher ; it will tran- scend itself and hand on to coming generations a still more splendid tradition and example.^
Here, then, is a programme for our nationalists. Let them work in the schools and in the press ; in art, in music, and in literature. There it is that nationality will be preserved ; there it will be fortified and made more rich in content. Such a programme may lack meretricious splendour ; it > \ may hold out few prospects of careers to the ^^politically and socially ambitious, but those on whom the spirit of nationality has descended, those who are possessed by it and know its worth, will care little for such things. They will know that the humblest labours in this cause will bear their own reward, and that in achieving the immortality of the nation they will have achieved their own.
fThese things, then, a nationality must do if it desires to preserve itself and increase its spiritual < stature. It must look to its schools, to its arts (in the largest sense of the word), to its language or languages, to its social institutions!? Men will differ, of course, as to the practical ways and means by which these can best be served ; such
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 165
differences are at once inevitable and desirable. From the clashing of minds is born the spark of truth. What matters is the spirit in which dis- cussion, or even conflict, is pursued. If both sides inspire themselves with the good, and genuinely seek the better, then the best is certain to emerge. They both may cry with Faulconbridge :
" Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true."
The ideal of effort here set forth has nothing narrow and exclusive about it. That indeed is but "a fugitive and cloistered" culture which shrinks from contact with the outer world and ' strives to perpetuate itself in an impossible purity ; the inevitable fate of such a national culture is to • etiolate and die. Just as the mingling of diverse v races has given birth to vigorous national com- munities, so the contact of different cultures has produced a higher culture. Chaucer's genius was not weakened by acquaintance with the Romance literatures ; the French philosophers did not lose , but gain by sitting at the feet of Locke and Newr ton. Perhaps the most beneficent aspect of the Great Society is that its coming has so infinitely multiplied the possibility of these " culture- contacts." The lover of his nationality will not, then, reject the proffered gifts of other nations as v alien and unclean ; he will seek out what is best
166 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
among them, what supplements some weakness, what supplies some want, relying on the native strength of his own national spirit to absorb and put to good use all that is capable of assimilation.
" But/' the assentor to the foregoing argument may urge, " your ideal does not, after all, avoid politics. You speak of schools, of language, of literature, but what if, in a multi-national state, one nation strive to deprive another of trieSe means of self-preservation ? You have described how, in Hungary, in Poland, and in Italy, these were the very things which tyranny strove to destroy or to pervert. What guarantee is there that such crimes will not be repeated ? The Peace Treaties have added to the number of states within the borders of which there will be national minorities — Russians and Magyars in Rumania, Germans in Czecho-Slovakia and Poland, Tyrolians and Slavs in Italy. Is it not possible, nay, in the present exacerbated condition of national feeling, probable, that the old blunders may be
(repeated and exaggerated ? There must, then, be some political machinery by which national minorities may be protected against oppression. If the solution of the uni-national state be, as you have argued, impossible and undesirable, what other solution have you to offer ? " The criticism is just and the conclusion arrived
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 167
at unimpeachable. Political machinery for the* protection of nationalities there must be, but \ before describing both what is necessary and what exists for this purpose, one reservation must be made. The most elaborate political institutions, framed with the most just intentions, will produce evil rather than good if they are manipulated by men of ill-will. Figs are not to be gathered from thistles, nor will justice and freedom live in a community drunk with hate and the desire for vengeance. If the spirit of just laws be contra- dicted by the spirit of their administration, hypocrisy will be added to violence, and the last state of society will be worse than the first. All this is ethical commonplace, but, unfortunately, • the commonplace and everyday virtues are the last which states can be prevailed upon to practise. Nevertheless, until men learn that their own . liberties depend upon the respect they show for^ the liberties of others, political machinery, though planned with the utmost art, will be of small avail.
T~The true function of the state is to make liberty and social co-operation possible. The constitution of a multi-national state, therefore, must guar- antee adequate opportunities for cultural self- expression to all the nations within its borders. The use of the national tongues must be preserved, and must be accompanied by full educational and j
168 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
literary freedom?] Where, as is still the case in
some parts of Europe, religion is identified with
nationality, special safeguards to assure the
complete liberty of the cult may be required.
These suggestions are not, after all, Utopian.
The Swiss Republic is a living witness that this
programme can be put into execution without
anarchy or loss of civic unity. Nevertheless,
national feeling has reached such a passionate
height in so many parts of the Continent, there is
, such a heritage of hate, that the mere institution
of laws and constitutions in individual states is
not enough. A mountain of legal documents
will not prevent a nation imbued with the fatal
philosophy of sacro egoismo from oppressing
j another nation if its apparent interests point
\ ! that way. Some superior power is needed, some
* 1 court of appeal, which shall have the will and
I strength to enforce justice.
i An attempt has been made to provide such a
i power in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
I Article XI of that document declares it "to be
1 the friendly right of each member of the League
i to bring to the attention of the Assembly, or of
Jthe Council, any circumstance whatever affecting
international relations which threatens to disturb
international peace or the good understanding
between nations upon which peace depends."
There can be little doubt that it was with an eye
THE FUTURE OF NATIONALITY 169
to future possibilities of national conflicts that the Peace Conference drafted this Article, and this view is strengthened by the provisions of the Treaty recently concluded between Poland and the Allied and Associated Powers. This treaty1 contains a whole series of clauses specially de- signed for the protection of national minorities ; full freedom in regard to religion, language, and education is guaranteed to them. Moreover, by Article XII, " Poland agrees that the stipulations in the foregoing articles, so far as they affect persons belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities, constitute obligations of international concern, and shall be placed under the guaranty of the League of Nations." It is also agreed that any member of the League " shall have the right to bring to the attention of the Council any infraction, or any danger of infraction, of any of these obligations."
Here, it is suggested, we have the possibility of a solution of the political problem of nationality. A multi-national state has guaranteed liberty and equality to its constituent groups, and this guarantee has received the sanction of a supreme inter-state authority. Conscientiously used, thisi machinery should produce none but good resultsj But we must not ignore the dangerous possibilities of the situation. While the policies of states remain so divergent, while the economic conflict
v'
170 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
between them remains so acute, there is always the chance that institutions intended to preserve peace may be used against it. National minori- ies in a state may become, even unwillingly, he tools and cats'-paws of the state's enemies ; they may be used as a means of political black- mail. If this be the case, the world is destined :o travel once more the weary round of resent- ment, oppression, revenge, and universal conflict. In the last resort nothing but good sense and just principles will save it from that broad and( easy •oad which leads to destruction. \On the solution f two problems — the economic and the national —the future of the world depends. If we have courage and goodwill enough, we can solve them ; f through sloth or folly we fail, then, not in our
(day, perhaps, but in our children's, there will come the end of civilization, when —
" Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine ; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine ! Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos ! is restored ; Light dies before thy uncreating word ; V , Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all."-',
INDEX
Acton, Lord, 89, 90, 114, 115,
131, 133, 135 Agram, 120 Alfieri, 94 Alicante, 23
Alsace-Lorraine, 44, 49, 130 Argentina, 142 Armada, 72 Assyria, 58 Athens, 61,62 Austria, 45, 74, 85, 86, 99,
117, 122, 125
Babylonia, 58
Bedouin, 28
Beer, G. L., 16, 39
Belgium, 49, 86, 142, 144
Bentham, 107
Berlin, 128
Bismarck, 109, 129, 130, 131,
134. 135
Bohemia, 68, 117, 121 Brazil, 141 Browning, 31, 113 Brussels, 142 Bryce, Lord, 3, 4 Buckle, 50 Butler, Ralph, 133
Capet, Hugues, 67 Cavaignac, G., 83 Cavour, 104, 105, 125, 129 Charlemagne, 65 Charles III, 73 Chaucer, 47, 165 China, 141
Clemenceau, 17
Creighton, 69
Croatia, 118, 119, 120, 121
Dante, 94 Danton, 80 D'Arc, Jeanne, 67 Dawson, W. £.,133 Demolins, £.,27
Egypt, 57, 62
Elba, 84
Engels, 113
England, 12, 15, 66, 67, 79,
in
Esquimaux, 28 Esthonia, 87 Euphrates, 57
Fichte, 83
Finland, 24, 45
Fisher, H. A. L., 112
Fiume, 87
Fletcher of Saltoun, 47
Fleure, H. J., n
Florence, 94
Foch, Marshal, 17
France, 12, 42, 43, 67, 70, 71,
80, 82, no, in, 128, 141 Francis IV, 93 Frederick the Great, 73
Gaj, 1 20
Garibaldi, 92, 104, 105 Garrison, W. L., 106 Gaul, 63
171
172 NATIONALITY AND ITS PROBLEMS
Geneva, 49
Genoa, 93, 96
George, W. L., 3
Germany, 12, 70, 109, in,
116, 122, 125-33, HI Giddings, F. H., 5, 21 Gladstone, W. E., 95 Gneisenau, 82 Gr3ece, 58, 60, 62, 86, 115 Grimm, Jacob, 127
Hanotaux, G., 65
Hebrews, 12, 16, 17, 30, 50,
58, 60, 64, 96 Hbine, 126 Henri IV, 35 Herder, 75, 83 Hobbes, 65, 134 Hoche, Lazare, 81 Holland, 71, 79 Holmes, Dr. T. R., 8 Horace, 63 Hugo, Victor, 112 Hume, Martin, 12 Hungary, 73, 116-24, 133
India, 15, 144
Ingram, J. K., 160
Inquisition, 12
Ireland, 12, 15, 45, 51, 73
Italy, 42, 63, 86, 93-105,
112-4, 117, 121, 122, 125,
129
Jena, 82, 129 Jenks, Edward, 53, 54 Jerusalem, 59, 63 Johannet, Rene, 4 Judaea, 58, 63
Kallen, H. M., 31
King, Bolton, 96, 99, in,
114
Koraes, Adamantios, 48 Kossuth, 105, 119-22, 135,
159 Krehbisl, 135
Languedoc, 80
Laski, H. J., 138
League of Nations, 144, 168
Leon, 23
Lessing, 75, 83
Levy-Bruhl, L., 71, 76, 127,
129
Lieber, 135 Lisbon, 23 Lombardy, 93, 94, 99, 100,
102 Louis XIV, 44, 73
Macaulay, 97
Machiavelli, 68
Madrid, 23
Marett, R. R., 9
Marx, Karl, 54, 113, 126, 151
Mazzini, 92, 95, 96, 104-15,
125, 126, 159, 160 , Metternich, 85, 93, 101, 102,
126, 128 Modena, 93, 94 Montesquieu, 107 Morley, Lord, 3 Muir, Ramsay, 2, 4 Murray, Gilbert, 61 Myres, J. L., 27
Naples, 95, 98, 99 Napoleon I, 44, 81, 84, 117 Napoleon III, 103, 105 New Castile, 23 Nile, 57 Normandy, 80 Norway, 23, 49, 86
O nan, C., 22 Owen, Robert, 22
Padua, loo Palacky, 48 Palestine, 31 Paris, 43, 113 Parma, 96 Parnell, 105 Pa via, 100 Persia, 58
Peter the Great, 73 Philip Augustus, 67
INDEX
173
Piedmont, 93, 96, 129 Pius IX, 103 Poitou, 80
Poland, 45, 74, 75, 86, 93, in, 112, 131, 132, 159, 169 Portugal, 22, 23, 45, 49, 73 Posen, 131 Pressburg, 120 Prussia, 74, 82, 122, 129
Quinet, 112
Renan, 7, 12, 40, 49, 64
Richelieu, 35
Robertson, J. M., 9, 37, 38,
56,89 Rome, 62, 63, 64, 74, 98,
104, 112, 159 Rose, Dr. Holland, 3 Rotteck, 129 Rousseau, 75, 107 Russia, 24, 45, 74, 84, in
Savona, 113
Scharnhorst, 82
S^hurz, Carl, 128
Scotland, 12, 45, 67
Seneca, 63
Serbia, 141
Seton- Watson, R. W., 119,
123
Shakespeare, 47, 72, 165 Shaw, G, B., 149 Sicily, 99
Sidonius Apollinaris, 63 Sieyes, 44 Slavonia, 118, 119
Sorel, Albert, 74, 79 South Africa, 44 Spain, 12, 23, 45, 49, 50, 63 Stein, 82, 105, 127 Sweden, 23, 49, 86 Switzerland, 43, 48, 49^ 79,
1 68 Sykes, Sir Mark, 146
Ticino, 49 Tigris, 57 Tolstoy, no Toynbee, Arnold, 3 Trevelyan, G. M., 89, 90
United States, 32, 56, 141, 144, 147, 153
Valencia, 23
Venetia, 93, 94, 99, 100, 102 Victor Emmanuel, 93 Vienna, Congress of, 84, 92,
94,95 Villon, 68 Virgil, 63 Voltaire, 35, 73, 75
Wales, n, 45 Wallas, Graham, 137 Wells, H. G., 149 William the Silent, 72
Ypsilanti, 116
Zangwill, Israel, 4, 29, 30 Zimmern, A. E., 4, 20, 29 153, 158, 162
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