A PORTION of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it. Geographical1 limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation2, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past. None of these circumstances, however, are either indispensable, or necessarily sufficient by themselves. Switzerland has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions. Sicily has, throughout history, felt itself quite distinct in nationality from Naples, notwithstanding identity of religion, almost identity of language, and a considerable amount of common historical antecedents. The Flemish and the Walloon provinces of Belgium, notwithstanding diversity of race and language, have a much greater feeling of common nationality than the former have with Holland, or the latter with France. Yet in general the national feeling is proportionally weakened by the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it. Identity of language, literature, and, to some extent, of race and recollections, have maintained the feeling of nationality in considerable strength among the different portions of the German name, though they have at no time been really united under the same government; but the feeling has never reached to making the separate states desire to get rid of their autonomy. Among Italians an identity far from complete, of language and literature, combined with a geographical position which separates them by a distinct line from other countries, and, perhaps more than everything else, the possession of a common name, which makes them all glory in the past achievements in arts, arms, politics, religious primacy, science, and literature, of any who share the same designation, give rise to an amount of national feeling in the population which, though still imperfect, has been sufficient to produce the great events now passing before us, notwithstanding a great mixture of races, and although they have never, in either ancient or modern history, been under the same government, except while that government extended or was extending itself over the greater part of the known world.
Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided3 by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.
But, when a people are ripe for free institutions, there is a still more vital consideration. Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter4, the state. Their mutual5 antipathies6 are generally much stronger than jealousy7 of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved8 by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity9 in a joint10 resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest. Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. The military are the part of every community in whom, from the nature of the case, the distinction between their fellow-countrymen and foreigners is the deepest and strongest. To the rest of the people foreigners are merely strangers; to the soldier, they are men against whom he may be called, at a week's notice, to fight for life or death. The difference to him is that between friends and foes11 — we may almost say between fellow-men and another kind of animals: for as respects the enemy, the only law is that of force, and the only mitigation the same as in the case of other animals — that of simple humanity. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three-fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners will have no more scruple12 in mowing13 them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. An army composed of various nationalities has no other patriotism14 than devotion to the flag. Such armies have been the executioners of liberty through the whole duration of modern history. The sole bond which holds them together is their officers and the government which they serve; and their only idea, if they have any, of public duty is obedience15 to orders. A government thus supported, by keeping its Hungarian regiments16 in Italy and its Italian in Hungary, can long continue to rule in both places with the iron rod of foreign conquerors17.
If it be said that so broadly marked a distinction between what is due to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely to a human creature is more worthy18 of savages19 than of civilised beings, and ought, with the utmost energy, to be contended against, no one holds that opinion more strongly than myself. But this object, one of the worthiest20 to which human endeavour can be directed, can never, in the present state of civilisation21, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same government. In a barbarous state of society the case is sometimes different. The government may then be interested in softening22 the antipathies of the races that peace may be preserved and the country more easily governed. But when there are either free institutions or a desire for them, in any of the peoples artificially tied together, the interest of the government lies in an exactly opposite direction. It is then interested in keeping up and envenoming their antipathies that they may be prevented from coalescing23, and it may be enabled to use some of them as tools for the enslavement of others. The Austrian Court has now for a whole generation made these tactics its principal means of government; with what fatal success, at the time of the Vienna insurrection and the Hungarian contest, the world knows too well. Happily there are now signs that improvement is too far advanced to permit this policy to be any longer successful.
For the preceding reasons, it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities. But several considerations are liable to conflict in practice with this general principle. In the first place, its application is often precluded24 by geographical hindrances25. There are parts even of Europe in which different nationalities are so locally intermingled that it is not practicable for them to be under separate governments. The population of Hungary is composed of Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumans, and in some districts Germans, so mixed up as to be incapable26 of local separation; and there is no course open to them but to make a virtue27 of necessity, and reconcile themselves to living together under equal rights and laws. Their community of servitude, which dates only from the destruction of Hungarian independence in 1849, seems to be ripening28 and disposing them for such an equal union. The German colony of East Prussia is cut off from Germany by part of the ancient Poland, and being too weak to maintain separate independence, must, if geographical continuity is to be maintained, be either under a non-German government, or the intervening Polish territory must be under a German one. Another considerable region in which the dominant29 element of the population is German, the provinces of Courland, Esthonia, and Livonia, is condemned30 by its local situation to form part of a Slavonian state. In Eastern Germany itself there is a large Slavonic population: Bohemia is principally Slavonic, Silesia and other districts partially31 so. The most united country in Europe, France, is far from being homogeneous: independently of the fragments of foreign nationalities at its remote extremities32, it consists, as language and history prove, of two portions, one occupied almost exclusively by a Gallo-Roman population, while in the other the Frankish, Burgundian, and other Teutonic races form a considerable ingredient.
When proper allowance has been made for geographical exigencies33, another more purely34 moral and social consideration offers itself. Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge35 and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people — to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship36, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power — than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic37 of past times, revolving38 in his own little mental orbit, without participation39 or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander40 as members of the British nation.
Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the blending of their attributes and peculiarities41 in a common union, is a benefit to the human race. Not by extinguishing types, of which, in these cases, sufficient examples are sure to remain, but by softening their extreme forms, and filling up the intervals43 between them. The united people, like a crossed breed of animals (but in a still greater degree, because the influences in operation are moral as well as physical), inherits the special aptitudes44 and excellences45 of all its progenitors46, protected by the admixture from being exaggerated into the neighbouring vices47. But to render this admixture possible, there must be peculiar42 conditions. The combinations of circumstances which occur, and which effect the result, are various.
The nationalities brought together under the same government may be about equal in numbers and strength, or they may be very unequal. If unequal, the least numerous of the two may either be the superior in civilisation, or the inferior. Supposing it to be superior, it may either, through that superiority, be able to acquire ascendancy48 over the other, or it may be overcome by brute49 strength and reduced to subjection. This last is a sheer mischief50 to the human race, and one which civilised humanity with one accord should rise in arms to prevent. The absorption of Greece by Macedonia was one of the greatest misfortunes which ever happened to the world: that of any of the principal countries of Europe by Russia would be a similar one.
If the smaller nationality, supposed to be the more advanced in improvement, is able to overcome the greater, as the Macedonians, reinforced by the Greeks, did Asia, and the English India, there is often a gain to civilisation: but the conquerors and the conquered cannot in this case live together under the same free institutions. The absorption of the conquerors in the less advanced people would be an evil: these, must be governed as subjects, and the state of things is either a benefit or a misfortune, according as the subjugated51 people have or have not reached the state in which it is an injury not to be under a free government, and according as the conquerors do or do not use their superiority in a manner calculated to fit the conquered for a higher stage of improvement. This topic will be particularly treated of in a subsequent chapter.
When the nationality which succeeds in overpowering the other is both the most numerous and the most improved; and especially if the subdued52 nationality is small, and has no hope of reasserting its independence; then, if it is governed with any tolerable justice, and if the members of the more powerful nationality are not made odious53 by being invested with exclusive privileges, the smaller nationality is gradually reconciled to its position, and becomes amalgamated54 with the larger. No Bas-Breton, nor even any Alsatian, has the smallest wish at the present day to be separated from France. If all Irishmen have not yet arrived at the same disposition55 towards England, it is partly because they are sufficiently56 numerous to be capable of constituting a respectable nationality by themselves; but principally because, until of late years, they had been so atrociously governed, that all their best feelings combined with their bad ones in rousing bitter resentment57 against the Saxon rule. This disgrace to England, and calamity58 to the whole empire, has, it may be truly said, completely ceased for nearly a generation. No Irishman is now less free than an Anglo-Saxon, nor has a less share of every benefit either to his country or to his individual fortunes than if he were sprung from any other portion of the British dominions59. The only remaining real grievance60 of Ireland, that of the State Church, is one which half, or nearly half, the people of the larger island have in common with them. There is now next to nothing, except the memory of the past, and the difference in the predominant religion, to keep apart two races, perhaps the most fitted of any two in the world to be the completing counterpart of one another. The consciousness of being at last treated not only with equal justice but with equal consideration is making such rapid way in the Irish nation as to be wearing off all feelings that could make them insensible to the benefits which the less numerous and less wealthy people must necessarily derive61 from being fellow-citizens instead of foreigners to those who are not only their nearest neighbours, but the wealthiest, and one of the freest, as well as most civilised and powerful, nations of the earth.
The cases in which the greatest practical obstacles exist to the blending of nationalities are when the nationalities which have been bound together are nearly equal in numbers and in the other elements of power. In such cases, each, confiding62 in its strength, and feeling itself capable of maintaining an equal struggle with any of the others, is unwilling63 to be merged64 in it: each cultivates with party obstinacy65 its distinctive66 peculiarities; obsolete67 customs, and even declining languages, are revived to deepen the separation; each deems itself tyrannised over if any authority is exercised within itself by functionaries68 of a rival race; and whatever is given to one of the conflicting nationalities is considered to be taken from all the rest. When nations, thus divided, are under a despotic government which is a stranger to all of them, or which, though sprung from one, yet feeling greater interest in its own power than in any sympathies of nationality, assigns no privilege to either nation, and chooses its instruments indifferently from all; in the course of a few generations, identity of situation often produces harmony of feeling, and the different races come to feel towards each other as fellow-countrymen; particularly if they are dispersed69 over the same tract70 of country. But if the era of aspiration71 to free government arrives before this fusion72 has been effected, the opportunity has gone by for effecting it. From that time, if the unreconciled nationalities are geographically73 separate, and especially if their local position is such that there is no natural fitness or convenience in their being under the same government (as in the case of an Italian province under a French or German yoke), there is not only an obvious propriety74, but, if either freedom or concord75 is cared for, a necessity, for breaking the connection altogether. There may be cases in which the provinces, after separation, might usefully remain united by a federal tie: but it generally happens that if they are willing to forego complete independence, and become members of a federation76, each of them has other neighbours with whom it would prefer to connect itself, having more sympathies in common, if not also greater community of interest.
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1
geographical
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| adj.地理的；地区(性)的 | |
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humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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arbiter
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| n.仲裁人，公断人 | |
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mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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antipathies
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| 反感( antipathy的名词复数 )； 引起反感的事物； 憎恶的对象； （在本性、倾向等方面的）不相容 | |
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jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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aggrieved
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| adj.愤愤不平的，受委屈的；悲痛的；（在合法权利方面）受侵害的v.令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式)；令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式和过去分词) | |
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fidelity
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| n.忠诚，忠实；精确 | |
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joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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mowing
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| n.割草，一次收割量，牧草地v.刈，割( mow的现在分词 ) | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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regiments
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| （军队的）团( regiment的名词复数 )； 大量的人或物 | |
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conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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worthiest
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| 应得某事物( worthy的最高级 )； 值得做某事； 可尊敬的； 有（某人或事物）的典型特征 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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softening
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| 变软，软化 | |
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coalescing
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| v.联合，合并( coalesce的现在分词 ) | |
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precluded
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| v.阻止( preclude的过去式和过去分词 )；排除；妨碍；使…行不通 | |
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hindrances
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| 阻碍者( hindrance的名词复数 )； 障碍物； 受到妨碍的状态 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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ripening
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| v.成熟，使熟( ripen的现在分词 )；熟化；熟成 | |
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dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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partially
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| adv.部分地，从某些方面讲 | |
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extremities
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| n.端点( extremity的名词复数 )；尽头；手和足；极窘迫的境地 | |
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exigencies
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| n.急切需要 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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merge
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| v.(使)结合，(使)合并，(使)合为一体 | |
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citizenship
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| n.市民权，公民权，国民的义务(身份) | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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revolving
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| adj.旋转的，轮转式的；循环的v.（使）旋转( revolve的现在分词 )；细想 | |
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participation
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| n.参与，参加，分享 | |
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highlander
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| n.高地的人，苏格兰高地地区的人 | |
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peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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44
aptitudes
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| （学习方面的）才能，资质，天资( aptitude的名词复数 ) | |
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excellences
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| n.卓越( excellence的名词复数 )；（只用于所修饰的名词后）杰出的；卓越的；出类拔萃的 | |
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progenitors
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| n.祖先( progenitor的名词复数 )；先驱；前辈；原本 | |
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vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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ascendancy
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| n.统治权，支配力量 | |
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brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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51
subjugated
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| v.征服，降伏( subjugate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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amalgamated
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| v.（使）（金属）汞齐化( amalgamate的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）合并；联合；结合 | |
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disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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calamity
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| n.灾害，祸患，不幸事件 | |
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dominions
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| 统治权( dominion的名词复数 )； 领土； 疆土； 版图 | |
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grievance
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| n.怨愤，气恼，委屈 | |
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derive
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| v.取得；导出；引申；来自；源自；出自 | |
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confiding
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| adj.相信人的，易于相信的v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的现在分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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obstinacy
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| n.顽固；（病痛等）难治 | |
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distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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obsolete
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| adj.已废弃的，过时的 | |
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functionaries
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| n.公职人员，官员( functionary的名词复数 ) | |
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dispersed
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| adj. 被驱散的, 被分散的, 散布的 | |
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70
tract
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| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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71
aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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72
fusion
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| n.溶化；熔解；熔化状态，熔和；熔接 | |
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73
geographically
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| adv.地理学上，在地理上，地理方面 | |
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74
propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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concord
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| n.和谐；协调 | |
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federation
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| n.同盟，联邦，联合，联盟，联合会 | |
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