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BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

No. MCLVI.

FEBRUARY 1912.

VOL. CXCI.

WHAT IS NATIONALITY?

THERE is no idea which has made more way in Europe during the last fifty years than that of nationality, which asserts that it takes a great deal more to make a nation than mere political unity or a well-defined portion of the globe. We now recognise some far more subtle and sentimental bond of union, which makes a nation feel itself one in spirit, or in language, or in creed, or in a supposed descent from the same ancestors. This last is called the unity of race, and there has been a growing belief, especially among the smaller races in our great empires, that every so-called race should be independent of its neighbours and manage its own affairs. I need hardly say that this general description of nationality teems with ambiguities and difficulties. Not one of these elements in any nationality, even if it can be defined,

VOL. CXCI.-NO. MCLVI.

is decisive: there is hardly one which may not be in conflict with the rest. To an American citizen, I can conceive this problem of defining nationality may seem idle or unimportant. But this is only because that great people has solved the question by fusing a great number of what are called nationalities, so that they are not recognised as separate items in the United States, but all make up the American nation. It aspires to something like the chemical fusion of oxygen and hydrogen into water, where these constituent elements are no longer to be distinguished; whereas in the European empires the fusion is in most cases only mechanical, and the separate parts are often prominent enough. Nevertheless, we have seen in America an extension of that empire to inferior physical types, and we may conceive it extended to people like the

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Canadians of Quebec, where of one ruler over a vast area the problem of nationality were not so searching as those might assume grave import- of several petty local chiefs. ance. If there be now any Thus the process went on distinct nationality (apart from of absorbing nationalities into the Negroes) in the States, nations, which were confessedly it is probably that of the great political units governed Jews, and even these tend to by a single chief, and escapbecome fused like the rest in ing great dangers under his the great crucible of American protection. society.

But how different is it in Europe! The earliest solidarity after the dark ages of confusion was that of creed. Christian Europe felt a bond of unity against the heathen and the "foul paynim." Presently the royal houses, by intermarriages and bequests, came to create another great solidarity, while the populations were as yet strange to one another in languages and in habits; and so any Life of the Emperor Charles V. will show how there were royal connections from Hungary to Spain, from Sicily to Scotland, which made it possible for any prince, or even princess, to succeed to a duchy or principality over remote and foreign nationalities. The temptation to strengthen themselves by these alliances, and bring various sections of Europe under a common ruler, when rulers had real or even despotic power, led to the gradual crystallisation of large and not very homogeneous populations into kingdoms or empires, each of which confessedly embraced several nationalities, but embraced them for their good, as the armies of the king or emperor protected them, and the exactions

It is since the the rise of democratic ideas in government, and perhaps owing to them, that a contrary tendency has arisen. Not only the separate classes but the separate sections of the great empires of Europe have begun to feel that they have claims for separate consideration; that they are not to be fused in a great cosmopolitan cluster of Imperial societies, but that they have a right to regard themselves as separate from the beginning, separate in race or language or religion, and only coerced into a pretended unity by conquest or by the constraint of circumstances. The professed aim of these sections of empires which call themselves nationalities is to break up the great systems of Europe into smaller and smaller political units, and so to revert to that condition of the world from which modern Europe has been developed.

But when we consider the claims on which these pretensions are based, we shall be surprised at their weakness; and when we consider the probable consequences of their recognition, we cannot but feel alarm at the prospects of civilisation in the world. The first and simplest claim is that

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of race. "We are a distinct race," they say, "from our conquerors, and we have a right to recover our independence.' What do you mean by a distinot race, and how is it to be defined? If you mean purity of descent from homogeneous common ancestors, clear of contamination with adjoining people, then we may safely say that there are no even approximately pure races in Europe but the Gipsies and the Jews, and they have not, and probably will not, set up a claim to be separate nations. All the other nationalities which are now asserting the right to separate political organisation are notoriously mixed in race, and are generally supposed to owe their vigour to that very mixture. Let us take two prominent examples. The Hungarians (Magyars), who were for a long time a distinct nation, but have been under the control of Austria, from which they are eagerly freeing themselves, are really a small minority of Tartars, non-Aryan in blood, now mostly Protestant in creed, living as a dominant nationality among a vast crowd of Slovaks, who speak a wholly different language, profess the Roman Catholic creed, and are not at all at one in sympathies with their Magyar aristocracy. The claim therefore of the Hungarians to govern Hungary as an independent kingdom is not a claim based (as in Bohemia) on the homogeneity of the people that inhabit the country, but on the fact that a small minority in that country

claims to represent all the Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Gipsies, &c., who live among them. Yet the Hungarians put forth strongly the demand of nationality.

The Irish, who are so loud in their demands for a separate and independent political life, and for Ireland as a nation among the nations of the earth, are equally absurd when they assert this independence on the ground that they are a separate and distinct race. For no race was ever more mixed, and perhaps the least important element among them all is the Celtic stock from which most Irish patriots would derive the race.

First there were in Ireland those prehistoric races well known in the Celtic legends as Firbolgs, Tuatha de Danaan, &c., who were all over the country when the Celtic conquerors arrived, and who have left manifest traces in the types of the Irish people to the present day. These types are quite distinct from any Celtic type that we know. Then came the Celtic invaders, who conquered and intermarried with them, and imposed upon them their language, just as the Arab minority have imposed upon the Copts of Egypt their now universal Arabic. Then came Northmen, who built the principal cities of Ireland and settled on the coast, and who have also left clear traces of their type. Then, not to speak of Spanish traders in the West, we have English and Scottish settlements over all the country, supplying it with almost all

its wealth, energy, and intel- past, and lived all his life lect in recent centuries. And speaking and agitating for yet the Irish are making claims the cause of Ireland in Engfor separate nationality on the lish. The present revival, ground of being a Celtic race! therefore, even if it were not artificial, is unhistorical and illogical. It assumes that a nation must have a language distinct from its neighbours to be a separate nation; it assumes

that speaking an

obsolete tongue will foster patriotism. It only fosters isolation, and prevents the arguments of its speakers from obtaining a hearing in the great world. The same tendency now apparently successful in Bohemia is not really analogous, for Bohemian (Czech) was always the language of the lower classes, and was spoken by millions of them without intermission, when the

started from this solid ground sixty years ago.

The claim based on a separate language is equally unsound. Nations have often completely changed their tongue. I have just cited the signal instance of Egypt, where a tongue with perhaps the most ancient literature and script in the world, surviving on countless monuments, was effaced in a few centuries by the wholly foreign tongue of its conquerors. In Ireland from the sixteenth century till yesterday English was steadily replacing Irish all through the country. We had come to that condition when there were not 20,000 illiterate peasants in the West who could not talk English, and they literary revival of the language were all anxious that their children should learn it. The patriotic agitation against England for the last 200 years has been carried on in English, and by men with English blood in their veins. The Catholic officers and soldiers who left Ireland when William III. had conquered the country, and who remained for 100 years a distinct Irish corps in the service of France, noted for its splendid bravery in battles against the Englishthis corps always persisted in speaking English and in having the English red for its uniform. Even Dan O'Connell, who was perhaps the only leader who could pretend to a pure Irish depure Irish descent, and who talked Irish, confessed that its day was its day was

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Another basis assigned to nationality is creed. There are broad generalisations about religion which give colour to this idea. We hear that Latin races are prone to the Catholic form of faith, while Protestantism is akin to Teutonic races. I gravely doubt whether there is any truth in these vague statements. There were plenty of non-Latin races in the south and east of Europe (Styria, Carinthia, Bohemia, &c.) which were zealously Protestant for at least two centuries, and then became, under intelligent Jesuit persecution, equally zealous Catholics. And though there are many ignorant Irishmen who make creed a test of

nationality, it is certain that there are in Ireland thousands of Irishmen who are Protestants, and thousands of English who are Catholics. It is my deliberate opinion, and I have set down the evidence in my Epoch of Irish History,' that but for the Jesuit counterblast in 1590-2, all Ireland was rapidly becoming Protestant, and this with a selfish and idle missionary Church. Had the Anglican ministry shown one tithe of the zeal and the devotion of the Jesuits, who faced martyrdom every day in their crusade, this most Catholic country would have been as Protestant as Bohemia, the land of John Huss and his Church, is now Catholic. These considerations, to which I could add many more from the history of Europe, show clearly that creed is no test of nationality.

Neither does it mean confinement to a particular area, such as an island or a country separated from its neighbours by great rivers or chains of Alps. Groups of people have generally carried their nationality with them wherever they go, and though those who are scattered among another race intermarry with their neighbours, and often not only lose their old nationality but assume a new one, yet there are many cases where the old holds its sway and asserts itself in curious ways. A friend of mine on duty in a London hospital found a patient in his ward whose accent proved him at once to be a native of South Cork, where this medical student had been born and

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brought up. He at once expressed his sympathy for his suffering compatriot. But the patient protested, "I am no Irishman." "Do you mean to say you don't come from Co. Cork?" "I do." "And from Skibbereen?" "And your father before you, and your grandfather?" "Yes." "And you tell me you are no Irishman!" Whereupon the man raised himself with difficulty in his bed and said solemnly: "The children of Israel was 400 years in Egypt, and did anybody ever call them Egyptians?" He came from an old Cromwellian settlement of Englishmen, who still survive at Skibbereen, and are still distinct in type and habits. Strabo in the first century tells of the inhabitants of Posidonia (Pæstum, in Italy), once pure Greeks, but barbarised out and out by Lucanian conquerors, that on one day every year they met, with mourning and lamentation, to keep in memory their old manners and customs, which had long been abandoned. And so in myriad

cases.

The opposite, that of a population fused and lost among the people they conquered, is just as frequent; or again, the conquered people may be absorbed by the conquerors. The early inhabitants of Ireland, for example, were so dominated by the Celts that the whole country became apparently Celtic, and it was not till the days of modern research that the composite character of the Irish was even

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