history its biography; language, literature, the arts, religion, are its mind. Together these form its culture, and culture in the nationality is character in the individual. During the nineteenth century one European people after another achieved nationality simply by becoming conscious for the first time, or by recalling afresh and cherishing these items of its beings, the Greeks, the Italians, the Germans, the various Balkan peoples subject to Turkey, the Hungarians and the Slavic races subject to Austria, the Norwegians, the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium, and the Finns and Ukrainians in Russia. The Jews have been its great exemplification from the days of Titus, the Irish since Cromwell's time, the Poles from the date of the final partition of Poland.

To-day there is hardly a single society of men in Europe, who share in the same memories and customs and speech, that has not established its nationality, and demanded for it freedom and opportunity. Where democracy prevailed the establishment took place spontaneously, as the ef

fect of freedom; in lands with tyrannical governments it eventuated as resistance to oppression under democratic inspiration. So deep-lying is it in the funded mentality of the human families of Europe, that it has become the governing concept in a theory of civilization and a programme of life. The democratic prophet of this theory is the great Mazzini; its dynastic promulgators are Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Treitschke, von Bülow. The latter formulate it in a mythology of race, and provide by that means metaphysical and moral sanctions for German imperialism; their work, indeed, is an admirable instance of how a fact, converted into a "principle" and applied consistently and regardlessly, may become its own bitterest enemy.

Against this German misapplication of the "principle of nationality" the democratic powers oppose their own sounder formulation. But how, concretely, it applies to the present situation, its needs and demands, they have not said. What does it offer the so diverse nationalities that are the population of Europe? Which of the

various components of nationality does it acknowledge as definitive? What must it safeguard and reënforce? What repress or extirpate? The Allies' declarations yield as yet no answer to these questions. They only deny the claims of imperialism, and those, only when they are German. But what is the relation of the "principle of nationality" to the imperialisms, if there be such, of England, or France, or Italy, or Russia, or the United States?

To ask such a question, any realpolitiker will say, is folly. The " principle of nationality" will mean at any peace conference only what the victors will let it mean, nothing more. But there are these other determinants of its meaning, nevertheless. There are the wishes and demands of the various nationalities; the implications and requirements of the fact of nationality as that appears as a force and a hope in the natural history of mankind. A lasting peace can rest only upon the harmony of all else with the latter. Now the least that can be said about the latter is that the association invoked in nationality is so pe

culiarly intimate as to command and demand the highest degree of loyalty and self-sacrifice from the associates. So intimate is the association that, in spite of both criticism and evidence, the idea that the basis of nationality is race, community of blood and ancestry, is shared by both democrats and dynasts. It has its propaganda even in America, in the archæological romancing of Mr. Madison Grant and the fictional eugenics of Mr. Seth Humphrey, while in Germany the blond ancestral Aryan man-god is the most inward shrine of the Teutomanic cult.

Scientific anthropology discounts the whole conception, but there is envisaged in it at least this fact that the claim of any large association of men to consanguinity is an indubitable sign of a wakeful sense of nationality. Common ancestry is indicated in the word itself, natio-nality, but purity of stock can obviously not be the basis of it. How diverse stocks, associating together, fuse through marriage, and become of "one" blood, cannot be said. Nationality falls between race and other more

external forms of associative unity. That racial quality underlies it and is near to it, must be granted, but it is false that racial quality is identical with it. Association may spring from the original and inward nature of men, from the instinct of the herd, from a hereditary or constitutional likemindedness; it may derive from the need of defence and offence in an unfavorable environment; it may rest upon both. Association of the first order is natural, internal; of the second order, external, artificial. The difference is as the difference between time and space. Thus, a man may change his surroundings; he cannot change his past. That is inalterable, and he is what he is because that is what that is. To abolish that, he would have to abolish himself. He may, for example, be at the same time an Irishman, a son, a father, an uncle, a cousin, a citizen, a church-member, a lawyer, a Republican, and a capitalist. Each of these words signifies a group to which he belongs. Most of them he may enter or leave without otherwise altering his nature and conditions. Others he enters