The plain fact is that the new lines of scientific and historical
inquiry which have been opened in modern times have had a distinct and
deep effect upon the politics of the age. The fact may be estimated in
many ways, but its existence as a fact cannot be denied. Not in a merely
scientific or literary point of view, but in one strictly practical, the
world is not the same world as it was when men had not yet dreamed of
the kindred between Sanscrit, Greek, and English, when it was looked on
as something of a paradox to hint that there was a distinction between
Celtic and Teutonic tongues and nations. Ethnological and philological
researches--I do not forget the distinction between the two, but for the
present I must group them together--have opened the way for new national
sympathies, new national antipathies, such as would have been
unintelligible a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago a man's
political likes and dislikes seldom went beyond the range which was
suggested by the place of his birth or immediate descent. Such birth or
descent made him a member of this or that political community, a subject
of this or that prince, a citizen--perhaps a subject--of this or that
commonwealth. The political community of which he was a member had its
traditional alliances and traditional enmities, and by those alliances
and enmities the likes and dislikes of the members of that community
were guided. But those traditional alliances and enmities were seldom
determined by theories about language or race. The people of this or
that place might be discontented under a foreign government; but, as a
rule, they were discontented only if subjection to that foreign
government brought with it personal oppression, or at least political
degradation. Regard or disregard of some purely local privilege or
local feeling went for more than the fact of a government being native
or foreign. What we now call the sentiment of nationality did not go for
much; what we call the sentiment of race went for nothing at all. Only a