is a matter only interesting to lunatics. It would have been wiser
for the English governing class to have called upon some other god.
All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of
being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for ever;
boasts of being unstable as water.

And England and the English governing class never did call on this
absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had
no other god to call on. All the most genuine Englishmen in history
would have yawned or laughed in your face if you had begun to talk
about Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to substitute the ideal
of race for the ideal of nationality, I really do not like to think
what they would have said. I certainly should not like to have
been the officer of Nelson who suddenly discovered his French
blood on the eve of Trafalgar. I should not like to have been
the Norfolk or Suffolk gentleman who had to expound to Admiral
Blake by what demonstrable ties of genealogy he was irrevocably
bound to the Dutch. The truth of the whole matter is very simple.
Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race.
Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society; it is
a product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product.
And there are men in the modern world who would think anything and do
anything rather than admit that anything could be a spiritual product.

A nation, however, as it confronts the modern world, is a purely
spiritual product. Sometimes it has been born in independence,
like Scotland. Sometimes it has been born in dependence,
in subjugation, like Ireland. Sometimes it is a large thing
cohering out of many smaller things, like Italy. Sometimes it
is a small thing breaking away from larger things, like Poland.