. England, Scotland, and Switzerland are
nations whose life-histories date right back to the Middle Ages. Joan of
Are was a nationalist, and France has been a nation since the end of the
Hundred Years' War in 1453. Spain became a nation a few years later by the
expulsion of the Moors and the union of Castille and Aragon under Ferdinand
and Isabella. Holland, again, acquired her national freedom in her great
struggle against Spain in the sixteenth century. But it was not until the
end of the eighteenth century that nationalism became a real force in
Europe, an idea for which men died and in whose name monarchies were
overthrown. "In the old European system," writes Lord Acton, "the rights of
nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the
people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations,
regulated the frontiers, and the administration was conducted generally
without any reference to popular desires. Where all liberties were
suppressed, the claims of national independence were necessarily ignored,
and a princess, in the words of Fenelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding
portion."[1] The State was, in short, regarded as a purely territorial
affair; it was the property, the _landed_ property, of the monarch, who in
his capacity of owner controlled the destinies of the people who happened
to live upon that territory. Conquest or marriage might unite in the hands
of a single monarch the most diverse peoples and countries, the notorious
case of the kind being that of the Emperor Charles V., who in the sixteenth
century managed to hold sway over Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Naples,
and a large part of the New World.

[Footnote 1: _History of Freedom_, p. 273.]

The golden age of the dynastic principle was, however, the eighteenth
century, and the long and tedious wars of that period were nearly all
occasioned by the aggrandisement of some royal house. The idea of a nation
as a living organism, as something more than a collection of people
dwelling in the same country, speaking the same language and obeying
the same ruler, had not yet dawned upon the world. Apart from England,
Scotland, Switzerland, and Holland, no European nation had really become
conscious of its personality as distinct from that of its hereditary
monarch. And as we have seen, until nationality becomes keenly
self-conscious, the national idea remains unborn. Only some great internal
cataclysm or an overwhelm