not go so far," explained his
interlocutor; "one nation can live under several different governments, and
again several nations can form a single state."[1] Both the Magyar and the
Serb wore right, though the latter was speaking of "nationality" and the
former of "nation." The conversation is in fact instructive in more
ways than one. It would be difficult to find a better definition of
_nationality_ than that given by the Serb speaker. A common language, a
common culture, and common customs: these are the outward and visible signs
which make a people conscious of its common race, which make it, in other
words, a nationality.

[Footnote 1: R.W. Seton-Watson, _The Southern Slav Question_, p. 46.]

The element of "consciousness" is all-important. There are, for example,
members of the Finnish race scattered all over northern Russia, but they
evince no consciousness of any kind that they are allied to the nationality
which inhabits the country of Finland. Again, it is only within recent
years that the Serbs and the Croats in the south-west corner of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire have begun to realise that the only things
which divide them one from the other are a difference of religion and a
difference of alphabet; and now that the realisation of this fact has
spread from the study to the market-place, we see the formation of a new
nationality, that of the Serbo-Croats. The researches of historians and
other learned men have done an immense deal to stimulate the development of
nationalities during the past century, but they are unable of themselves
to create them. The fact of kinship is not enough; community of language,
customs, and culture is not even enough; to be a real nationality a people
must be conscious of all these things, and not merely conscious, but
sufficiently conscious to preserve them and, if need be, to die for them.

Now the interesting thing for us about a nationality is that it is always
striving to become a _nation_. A nation, as we have seen, may be composed
of several nationalities; but such cases are rare, and are due to peculiar
geographical conditions, as for example in Switzerland and Great Britain,
or to external pressure, as in Belgium, which have as it were welded
together the different racial elements into a single whole. In general,
therefore, a nation is simply a nationality which has acquired
self-government; it is nationality _plus_ State. "Ireland a nation," the
warcry of the Irish Nati