Small nation

“ III.
7.—Smaller and Small National States could exist very well; in fact, they do exist—out of the twenty-eight states at the very most seven can be classified as great or greater; in other words, the small states outnumber the great by three to one. On a basis of mere size then we are not surprised to hear that there is only one great state, only one great nation entitled to world-power. ”

“ Why, it is asked, should we trouble ourselves about the preservation of small nationalities at all? "The State is power," and it is only the really powerful State, therefore, that can and ought to survive. ”

“ A small nation, defending itself against a large nation, thinks far more intensively than its great neighbor, who relies more on his numerical superiority. The current opinion of the cultural degree and accomplishment of nations is very inexact and unscientific. (According to measurements of even German anthropologists, the Czechs, and I believe the Croatians, show the highest skull and brain index.) ”

“ Some nation must be political leader of the international polity; why not England, whose extraordinary colonising and governing ability is so well known? I am tired to death of talk about "crushing militarism" and of wild dreams of "a union of small States." ”

“ Since the whole of Europe is disorganized let us profit by it to spring-clean the untidy house! For a long time injustices have been accumulating. The moment of settling the general account will be an opportunity of rectifying them. The duty of all of us who feel for the brotherhood of mankind is to stand for the rights of the small nations. ”

“ The small States, being very determined to exist and to obtain their natural or historical racial boundaries, the problem of permanent or any durable peace in Europe resolves itself into this: How can the small or smaller nations be protected from attack by some larger nation which believes that might makes right and is mighty in industries, commerce, finance, and the military and naval arts? ”

“ On the other hand, the small nations must not try to imitate the great; they must be satisfied to go their own way.
8.—Pleading for the independence of small nations, I am not ignorant of the sophistical objections masquerading as arguments, that the Lapps cannot form a state and the Kalmucks cannot have a university. The question is, whether nations, conscious of their nationality, and proving the possibility of political independence by their economic and cultural progress, and by their claims and efforts for liberty, can be independent. ”

“ The leading men of our country had called us to fight for human liberty and the rights of small nations, and if we rallied to that noble cause we would establish a claim on our own country and on humanity in favor of the dear land from which so many of us had sprung, and which all of us loved. ”

“ In this zone the smaller nations are continually striving and fighting for liberty and independence. It is this zone which has confronted the statesmen of Europe with the problem of Small Nations; and it is the Allies more especially whom this war is forcing to apply themselves to its solution.
The nations of this danger-zone have been free, but deprived of their independence; some are highly cultivated and their extent is considerable, they are the greatest among the small nations. ”

“ The rights of the small nations will be constantly encroached upon by the larger ones, even after the present world powers, like those that have preceded them, have broken down under the burden of their own expansion. ”

“ No one will subscribe to the doctrine of super-nations. The right of small nations to exist, even in the light of purely utilitarian reasons, as important factors in the onward march of the human race, needs no elaborate vindication. ”

“ By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small “independent” farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; ”

“ It is the utter impossibility of peace, in a territory made by nature a geographical unity, inhabited by a people, or peoples, of one lineage, one language, bound together in historical reminiscences, yet divided into petty sovereign States too small for any respectable nationalities themselves, and yet preventing any beneficent nationality as a whole. ”

“ The real test of national existence is ultimately a sentimental one. Does the nationality inhabiting a given country regard the government under which it lives as a true expression of its peculiar genius and will? Does the State, of which it forms a part, exist by its consent, or has it been imposed upon it by some alien authority or nationality? Is it a territorial unity, or has it been split up into sections by artificial frontiers? All these questions must be answered before we can say of any nationality that it is also a nation. ”

“ Individuals from all sections of our own country, bearing on them the imperial character of their nation, had transmitted it by the dark-skinned race, to vivify with liberty and self-government, the great slave-land of the world. ”

“ But from another aspect it may be said that when the emigrant of the remotest colony knows that, because he is a British citizen, the penny stamp upon his letter will carry the home news of father, mother, brother or sister over all the extent of a world-wide empire, such a fact will be more to the nation than the strength of many ironclads in the stronger national sentiment, the deeper feeling of national unity which it will evoke. ”

“ Let us remember that these things are occurring in a country of millions upon millions of acres of vacant lands, to be had almost for the asking, and where, even in the parts first colonized, density of population bears but a small relation to that of western Europe. Yet we daily assure ourselves and the world that we have the best government under the canopy of heaven, and the happiest land, hope and refuge of humanity. ”

“ It is of them, not of the Indians, that we have to think when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic have advanced into true nationhood.
For the purpose of determining whether any community ought to be deemed a nation, one must distinguish two things which are apt to be confounded. ”

“ It keeps itself constantly in hand—ready to approve, condemn, and command. It may be wrong, it may be tyrannical; but it is all-pervading, and constitutes, more than ever before, a strong band of nationality.
“After all, territory is but the body of a nation. The people who inhabit its hills and its valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life. In them dwells its hope of immortality. ”

“ Communities so remote from each other as those which compose the Empire, it is said again, 'cannot have those common interests which are necessary to give cohesion to a nation.' Let us consider the point. ”

“ And what if this powerful nation, vowed to war, were once firmly established in South or Central America? What of our boasted isolation then?
It is only because I believe that our people should be informed that I have consented to write this book. There are too many thinkers, writers and speakers in the United States; from now on we need the doers, the organisers, and the realists who alone can win this contest for us, for democracy and for permanent peace! ”

“ But this interest should be measured not merely by the degree of population in a state, or by geographical extent of territory, or by external power, but by population, territory and power combined—by moral worth and intellectual pre-eminence, by the scale of civilization to which the nation has attained. ”

“ But the European who measures the unpreparedness of the nation in the terms of the unpreparedness of his own, or any other European, country, not taking into account the colonial character of the population, the alertness and audacity of the national mind, the resourcefulness and confident self-reliance of the people, is likely to fall into error. ”

“ Is it not to be national and not sectional, independent and not colonial? Is it not to have a high conception of what this great new country should be, and to follow out that ideal with loyalty and truth? ”

“ I see one vast confederation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main,—and I see one people, and one language, and one law, and one faith, and, over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime. ”

“ But when this second nation is introduced, it is seen at once as a rickety monster, as an accountable being without free will, as a Sovereign without supremacy, as the pigmy creature of creator puny as itself; in a word, as a nation created for certain purposes only! ”

“ It is born like a little family from which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain time, under peculiar external circumstances, this nation, every individual of which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives itself a new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies, which enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the parent state. ”

“ While announcing to the nations of the world the new position which the people of this Republic have felt themselves called upon to assume, courtesy to their opinions seems to demand a brief accompanying statement of the causes which induced them, first to expatriate themselves from the land of their nativity, and to form settlements on this barbarous coast, and now to organize their government by the assumption of a sovereign and independent character. ”

“ The answer will be very different in different cases, according to the means by which the different national elements in such a territory have been brought together. They may form what I have already called an artificial nation, united by an act of its own free will. Or it may be simply a case where distinct nations, distinct in every thing which can be looked on as forming a nation, except the possession of an independent government, are brought together, by whatever causes, under a common ruler. ”

“ Our large spaces, our ease of movement, our freedom from the militaristic and excessively nationalistic traditions of the European Continent {13} influenced us in a like direction, as did also the merging of many peoples into one nation. ”

“ So that scores of thousands of French, of Italians, of Germans, of English, of Spaniards, coming not as their fathers came, in mailed forms to conquer savage foes—but under peaceful flags—a million and a half of men from all civilized lands of Europe, have come to share the peace, the plenty and the freedom of the young republic; and to contribute to her prosperity and wealth. Every guest at our board tonight may feel his pulses beat in unison with the sentiment of health and prosperity to the new land where his own kindred have found new homes and hopes. ”

“ PROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. ”

“ It is a problem with every town, state and nation. And now very conspicuously, it is a problem with three great groups, namely the Allies, The Central Empires and The Neutrals; in a word it is a great international problem. ”

“ These are the annexed or conquered regions with settled populations already having a national tradition and culture of their own. They are, to put it bluntly, the suppressed, the overlaid, nations. Now I am a writer rather prejudiced against the idea of nationality; my habit of thought is cosmopolitan; I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose. ”

“ Our experiment on this continent was intended to be something more than the creation of a nation on the old pattern, that should become big and strong, and rich and luxurious, divided into classes of the very wealthy and the very poor, of the enlightened and the illiterate. It was intended to be a nation in which the welfare of the people is the supreme object, and whatever its show among nations it fails if it does not become this. ”

“ But, though we may not hope to lay down a definition which shall clearly mark off the nation from all other human groups, we may usefully define the nation-state or nation in the most highly developed form that it has yet attained, and recognise that various [Pg 97] peoples partake of the nature of, or approach the type of, the nation in so far as they exhibit something of its essential character. ”

“ Undoubtedly the struggle of subject nationalities to be {275} free, and of independent nations to annex their kin, has been a fruitful source of strife during the last century. The sense of nationality has been intensified by the nation's mobilisation of the economic interests of its citizens ”

“ To suppose, that by sending out a colony, the nation established an independent power; that when, by indulgence and favour, emigrants are become rich, they shall not contribute to their own defence, but at their own pleasure ”

“ History, they argue, shows that small states are slowly but surely disappearing and serving as a material for the big ones. Compare the hundreds of small states in the Middle Ages and even in modern times—they are absorbed and swallowed up by the bigger ones ”

“ Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering over his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? ”