mpact self-contained unit--a unit {48} which would lose its very
essence if it lost its independence of other states. Just as the one
emancipated economic activity from a mesh of antiquated traditions, so
the other emancipated nations from arbitrary subordination to alien
races or Governments, and turned them into nationalities with a right
to work out their own destiny.

Nationalism is, in fact, the counterpart among nations of what
individualism is within them. It has similar origins and tendencies,
similar triumphs and defects. For nationalism, like individualism,
lays its emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on their
subordination to common obligations, though its units are races or
nations, not individual men. Like individualism it appeals to the
self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of
unlimited expansion. Like individualism it is a force of immense
explosive power, the just claims of which must be conceded before it is
possible to invoke any alternative principle to control its operations.
For one cannot impose a supernational authority upon irritated or
discontented or oppressed nationalities any more than one can
subordinate economic motives to the control of society, until society
has recognized that there is a sphere which they may legitimately
occupy. And, like individualism, if pushed to its logical conclusion,
it is self-destructive. For as nationalism, in its brilliant youth,
begins as a claim that nations, because they are spiritual beings,
shall determine themselves, and passes too often into a claim that they
shall dominate others, so individualism begins by asserting the right
of men to {49} make of their own lives what they can, and ends by
condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few whom good
fortune or special opportunity or privilege have enabled most
successfully to use their rights. They rose together. It is probable
that, if ever they decline, they will decline together. For life
cannot be cut in compartments. In the long run the world reaps in war
what it sows in peace. And to expect that international rivalry can be
exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as
to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for
self-aggrandizement is a dream which has not even the merit of being
beautiful.

So the perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of
individualism is industrialism. And the