Nationalism

Of all modern Irreconcileables, the Nationalists appear to be the most impracticable, and of all governments, popular governments seem least likely to cope with them successfully. 

Nobody can say exactly what Nationalism is, and indeed the dangerousness of the theory arises from its vagueness. 

It seems full of the seeds of future civil convulsion. 

As it is sometimes put, it appears to assume that men of one particular race suffer injustice if they are placed under the same political institutions with men of another race. 

But Race is quite as ambiguous a term as Nationality. 

The earlier philologists had certainly supposed that the branches of mankind speaking languages of the same stock were somehow connected by blood; but no scholar now believes that this is more than approximately true, for conquest, contact, and the ascendency of a particular literate class, have quite as much to do with community of language as common descent. 

Moreover, several of the communities claiming the benefit of the new theory are certainly not entitled to it. 

The Irish are an extremely mixed race, and it is only by a perversion of language that the Italians can be called a race at all. 

The fact is that any portion of a political society, which has had a somewhat different history from the rest of the parts, can take advantage of the theory and claim independence, and can thus threaten the entire society with dismemberment. 

Where royal authority survives in any vigour, it can to a certain extent deal with these demands. 

Almost all the civilised States derive their national unity from common subjection, past or present, to royal power; the Americans of the United States, for example, are a nation because they once obeyed a king. 

Hence too it is that such a miscellany of races as those which make up the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy can be held together, at all events temporarily, by the authority of the Emperor-King. 

But democracies are quite paralysed by the plea of Nationality. 

There is no more effective way of attacking them than by admitting the right of the majority to govern, but denying that the majority so entitled is the particular majority which claims the right. 

Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government.

A vigorous an interesting writer.