V NATIONALITY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE EUROPEAN STATE SYSTEM WH ́HEN, a year or two ago, President Wilson uttered his historic reproach of the "hyphenated American," he brought for an instant into the foreground of public opinion a little-considered quality of the existence of men which is basic to the solution of all problems of their relationships. Hyphenation is not political merely, it pervades the whole of life, increasing proportionately as civilization advances. Fundamentally it designates union and correlation, not separation, nor division. Every man is a hyphenate. Every man is the centre of an aggregate of relationships, which are normally coöperative and frequently conflicting. Every man's life is a constant compromise and choosing between alternatives so incompatible that all may not be completely satisfied at the same time. No man is, or can be, exclusively one thing and no other: son and husband, industrial baron and Christian, trust magnate and patriot, German and American, pacifist and munitions-maker, breadwinner and conscript, church-member and citizen a man may normally be all these at the same time. Then, suddenly, he may find himself confronted with the inexorable necessity of choosing between one and another. Each implies reciprocal rights and duties, each makes insistent and clamorous claims. Which shall be granted, which denied, instinct, tradition, habit, fear, imitation, standards of class and rank determine far more than intelligence. Yet at no point than in such choices is intelligence more needful or significant. What is important about the hyphenation of mankind is the classes into which it divides. Men are hyphenated by nature and by art. The relationships involved in the former are congenital and inalienable, internal to a man's character and coincident with his existence. The relationships involved in the latter are acquired or assumed; external to a man's character and existence, alienable, and not indispensable. Nationality is, we have seen, a hyphenation belonging to the nature of things; vocation, religion, citizenship are hyphenations created in the process of history. Men are born English or Jew or Chinese, and their association with men similarly born is involuntary and spontaneous. Men become farmers or carpenters or physicians, Christians or Mohammedans or Judaists or Buddhists, citizens of Russia or France or America, and their association with men similarly preoccupied is voluntary and directive, governed by considerations of advantage and the forces of circumstance. These associations men pass into and out of at need, or pleasure, or both. The others they cannot but remain in until they die. It is for the sake of those others, indeed, that vocation and religion and the state arose; to liberate their powers and to elaborate and enrich the idiom of their existence. Much of the trouble of civilized society derives from the fact that these artificial associations have overturned what |