onalist party, is a claim, not a statement of
fact; Ireland will become a nation when its desire for self-government
is satisfied. The case is instructive because it shows that it is not
necessary for a nationality to become a _sovereign_ State in order to be in
the full sense of the word a nation. It is perfectly possible, as our Serb
remarked, for several nations to form a single sovereign state; but as a
general rule all such nations will be allowed to manage their own internal
affairs. The self-governing Dominions of the British Empire and the Magyars
of Hungary are nations, though they are subordinate to their respective
imperial governments in questions of peace and war, treaty obligations,
etc.

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. The "national idea," therefore, which has been one of
the chief factors in modern history, is essentially an idea of development.
Its root is the conception of nationality, that is of a people consciously
united by race, language, and culture; and from this springs the larger
conception of nationhood, that is of a nationality possessing its own
political institutions, governed by its own consent, and co-extensive with
its natural boundaries. As we shall see later, political development
does not always stop at the Nation-State. Further growth, however, is
extra-national in character; it may either take the parasitical form of one
nation imposing its will and its "culture" upon other nations, or it may
assume the proportions of that highest type of polity yet known to mankind,
a commonwealth of nations freely associating together within the confines
of a single sovereign State.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Chapter IX. for further treatment of this.]

Sec.2. _The Birth of Nationalism: Poland and the French Revolution_.--With
these general principles in mind let us now consider the national idea at
work in the nineteenth century. Nations, in the sense just defined, have
of course long existed in Europe