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. Geographical 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
humiliation, 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
hitherto 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
every thing 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
_primâ 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 decided
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 can not 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 arbiter, the state. Their mutual
antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the
government. That any one of them feels aggrieved 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 fidelity in a joint 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 favor of the
government against the rest. Above all, the grand and only reliable
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 enemies--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
scruple in mowing 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 patriotism 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
obedience to orders. A government thus supported, by keeping its
Hungarian regiments in Italy and its Italian in Hungary, can long
continue to rule in both places with the iron rod of foreign
conquerors.
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 worthy of savages than of civilized 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 worthiest to which
human endeavour can be directed, can never, in the present state of
civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of any
thing 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 softening 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 coalescing, 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 precluded by geographical
hindrances. 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 incapable of local separation;
and there is no course open to them but to make a virtue 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 ripening
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 dominant
element of the population is German, the provinces of Courland,
Esthonia, and Livonia, is condemned 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 partially so. The most united country in Europe,
France, is far from being homogeneous: independently of the fragments
of foreign nationalities at its remote extremities, 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 exigencies,
another more purely moral and social consideration offers itself.
Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge 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 civilized and cultivated
people--to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal
terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the
advantages of French protection, and the dignity and _prestige_ of
French power--than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of
past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without
participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The
same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as
members of the British nation.
Whatever really tends to the admixture of nationalities, and the
blending of their attributes and peculiarities 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 intervals 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 aptitudes and excellences of all its
progenitors, protected by the admixture from being exaggerated into
the neighboring vices. But, to render this admixture possible, there
must be peculiar 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
civilization, or the inferior. Supposing it to be superior, it may
either, through that superiority, be able to acquire ascendancy over
the other, or it may be overcome by brute strength and reduced to
subjection. This last is a sheer mischief to the human race, and one
which civilized 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,
re-enforced by the Greeks, did Asia, and the English India, there is
often a gain to civilization, but the conquerors and the conquered can
not 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 subjugated 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 subdued
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 odious by being invested
with exclusive privileges, the smaller nationality is gradually
reconciled to its position, and becomes amalgamated 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 disposition towards England, it is partly because
they are sufficiently 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
resentment against the Saxon rule. This disgrace to England and
calamity 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 dominions. The only remaining real
grievance 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 derive from being
fellow-citizens instead of foreigners to those who are not only their
nearest neighbors, but the wealthiest, and one of the freest, as well
as most civilized 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, confiding in its strength, and feeling
itself capable of maintaining an equal struggle with any of the
others, is unwilling to be merged in it; each cultivates with party
obstinacy its distinctive peculiarities; obsolete customs, and even
declining languages, are revived, to deepen the separation; each deems
itself tyrannized over if any authority is exercised within itself by
functionaries 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 dispersed over the same tract of country. But
if the era of aspiration to free government arrives before this fusion
has been effected, the opportunity has gone by for effecting it. From
that time, if the unreconciled nationalities are geographically
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 propriety, but, if either
freedom or concord 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 federation, each of them has
other neighbors with whom it would prefer to connect itself, having
more sympathies in common, if not also greater community of interest.