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THE

II

"PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITY": "NATURAL RIGHTS" AND THE EVO

CATION OF NATIONALITY

THE

II

"PRINCIPLE OF

NATIONALITY":

"NATURAL RIGHTS" AND THE EVOCATION OF NATIONALITY

HAT nationality is a principle is a dis

TH

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covery comparatively recent. Its appropriation by dynasts, by hereditary and military oligarchs, and by traders, priests, and politicians is little more recent. Nationality was a fact before it became a principle, and it was an unrecognized condition before it became a fact. Before nations were, there were dynasties or states, that is, associations of men and women working out their lives generation after generation in service and obedience to masters whose claim to such service and obedience rested on force, tradition, and superstition. Who, particularly, these masters were, that exploited their persons and property, was a matter of indifference to the masses of Christian Europe throughout the greater part of Europe's history. And to the classes

it was even more indifferent whom they exploited. Lands and people changed owners as the toll of successful military piracy or as marriage portions, and the changes were regarded as part of the necessity that is resident in the nature of things. And necessity, as everybody nowadays has been assured, knows no law.

Nevertheless, this necessity began, on the whole and in the long run, to get abrogated. Its power of constituting the nature of things began to fail. The nature of things was altering, and the force bringing about the miraculous alteration was the force of nationality. Nationality itself, however, is no miracle, no artefact. It also is an aspect and constituent of the nature of things, long merely implicit and asleep, now wakened by democracy to power and to efficacy. The awakening was slow and indirect. Remote beginnings accrue to it from the religious reformation which transferred the seat of religious authority from the head of a church to the heart of each member of the church; a nearer cause was removal of the seat of sovereignty from the head of the

state to the citizenry of the state, the Puritan Revolution accomplishing this in fact in England by the trial and execution of the Cavalier king, proving thereby that the divinity which hedges about a king makes him none the less amenable to the laws of men, when men choose to assert themselves. The act was defended by opposing to the doctrine of the "divine right of kings the doctrine of the natural rights of man, and when the French Revolution, a century and more later, repeated the act, the latter doctrine had become commonplace. Our Declaration of Independence pronounces its essence: God had created all men equal and had endowed them "with certain inalienable rights." These, as against the dynastic privilege, had come to be taken as the necessity immanent in the nature of things. Necessarily, hence, the inequalities among men of class, of station, of privilege, of right, of property, of virtue — were contrary to the nature of things, artifices, inventions of priests and kings to perpetuate their rule. According to natural law and natural right all men are alike and all men

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