288 POLITICS 



goal had been the release of a people from alien governmental 

 control. But the events of the sixties revealed a new and widely 

 different aspect of the doctrine. Nationalism passed from defense 

 to aggression. Its chief end came to be, not the release of a people 

 from foreign rule, but the subjection of every people to its appro- 

 priate domestic rule. In the name of the nation politicians, theo- 

 retical and practical, demanded a re-ordering of the world. God 

 and nature and human reason and history were all triumphantly 

 shown to have decreed that in the homogeneous population inhabit- 

 ing a continuous territory should be the final and unquestionable 

 unit of political organization. " National unity " superseded the time- 

 honored " consent of the governed " as the justifying principle of sov- 

 ereign dominion. Love of liberty and of self-government, once the 

 noblest theme of poetry and philosophy, now became mere graceless 

 " particularism." In the name of the nation, Hanoverians, Saxons, 

 and Hessians were incorporated in the Prussian state; in the name 

 of the nation eleven million Southerners were harried into subjection 

 to the government at Washington. Political science mapped out 

 the whole world into geographic unities, in each of which it was 

 solemnly declared to be the end of all human destiny that some 

 ethnic unit should be neatly and eternally ensconced. 



There were difficulties in the practical application of this, as of 

 every other ultimate principle. Ethnic homogeneity was in last 

 analysis rather hard to define. Some clear objective test was needed 

 to determine where one nation ended and another began. Identity 

 of blood, of language, of religion, of traditions, of history, were all 

 duly tried and all alike found wanting. Nor was the bounding of 

 geographic unity any easier in practice. Alsace, we know, was 

 and doubtless still is German, because it is east of the Vosges, but 

 equally French because it is west of the Rhine. The Alps were un- 

 doubtedly ordained by God and nature to be the divider of nations; 

 but it is hazardous to assert the same of the scarcely less formidable 

 Rockies. Yet with all these difficulties perfectly apprehended, the 

 idea still persists that there is something peculiarly natural and 

 permanent and rational in the so-called national state. Switzer- 

 land and Russia and Austria-Hungary are all looked upon as rather 

 out of the orbit of the scientific student of politics because they do 

 not conform to the canons of ethnic and geographic unity. 



Without examining farther the characteristics of this peculiarly 

 nineteenth-century idea of nationality, let us look a moment at 

 the influence which the idea has had upon the development of the 

 conception of liberty. Pari passu with the realization of demo- 

 cratic ideals in governmental organization, there had developed the 

 antithesis of the two systems of thought familiar to us as socialism 

 and individualism. But vaguely and obscurely manifested during 



