hic State
passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or
swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No
great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The
patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the
actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died
for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would
have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he
would have added his great name to imperialism.

The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial
State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has
no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.
The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in
literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century
belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in
Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,
above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four
centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In
the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were
inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the
rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy
into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics
of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these
ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.

Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents
itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,
and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of
1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to
Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.
Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was
a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely
from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great
figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]
The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German
publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of
history that the great _role_ which it has played is transient and
accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form