INDIAN NATIONALITY CHAPTER I NATIONALITY: ITS MEANING, APPLICATIONS AND VALUE I HISTORICAL Writers of future ages, especially historians of culture, will undoubtedly have to ascribe very considerable importance to the nineteenth century. Even contemporary observers, though their view is necessarily limited, can say with comparative safety that the nineteenth has contributed more to civilisation than any other century; and granted that the view of a presentday writer cannot extend beyond that frontier of time which will not exist for posterity, nevertheless such a writer with a casual glance can bring before his mind a list of very notable contributions to culture made by that century, contributions which will have an essential part in giving guidance to the future development of society. If one were asked to select the most important and most abiding elements of development in the nineteenth century, one would not be far wrong in answering in one word-Revolutions. Every schoolboy nowadays is familiar with the phrase Industrial Revolution.' That revolution has, in the space of a few generations, completely transformed our ways of living. It has profoundly affected the greatest and the smallest, the most cultured B and the most rude. That revolution, brought about by inventions and the use of machinery, with the resultant growth of big cities, huge industrial and commercial enterprises and easy trans-continental communication, is so familiar to us moderns that we readily forget that it is a modern development. It is an established fact, essentially a nineteenth-century product, and the modern world has been conditioned in most of its relations by it. The Industrial Revolution, too, has been a parent revolution-with a large and ever-increasing family of noisy, unruly small revolutions. Side by side has gone another revolution. Its origins were almost contemporaneous with the origins of the machinery revolution, and its course has been interlinked, both in causes and effects, with the other. But it has not had the honour or benefit of being definitely christened, and therefore clearly demarcated from other revolutions. It may well be called the Political Revolution; and this Political Revolution is nothing else than the introduction into the field of practical politics of the principle of nationality. Greek, Roman, English, and French Revolutions are mere incidents as compared with this master revolution. It has been practically a universal political earthquake, and the gigantic European struggle (as the physicists would say) was a semi-localised seismological disturbance of great magnitude. Revolutions, then, I think we are justified in saying, are the chief contributions of the nineteenth century to the course of culture on the one side, the Industrial Revolutionmachinery and its results-mainly material; on the other, the Political Revolution-nationality and its results— mainly spiritual. : The active principle of nationality is little over a century old but nationalities lived and fought before then. The peculiar geographical position of our own country led to national fusion centuries ago, though even to-day in the British nation are several clearly marked nationalities. Before the nineteenth century 3 several modern nations had been established on a basis of nationality-notably France, Holland, and Spain. But till the end of the eighteenth century nationalities as such were completely ignored in high politics. Kingdoms were regarded as so much territory, transferable at will by the owner-monarch. The old mediaeval notions. of Rulership and Ownership were conjoined in the dynastical wars of the eighteenth and previous centuries. Princesses carried monarchies as their wedding portions, with the result that under one monarch might be the most heterogeneous collection of races, creeds, and civilisations. Nationality-now a sacred spiritual principlewas then unborn; we may almost say that before the nineteenth century nations were not born. State battled with state, but behind the states was not the spontaneity of unified will-power which really makes a nation. How then did the principle of nationality emerge? Besides the general rise in enlightenment and the growth of individual independence characteristic of the last two centuries, there are two historical events which may be marked out as bringing about this new idea. The one was the Partition of Poland: the other the French Revolution. Both of these movements were intimately connected with the rights and position of dynasties. Poland had an elective kingship, but the neighbouring states had autocratic hereditary monarchies, which were, as her neighbours considered, endangered by the close contiguity of the democratic principle of election. Poland was therefore divided by an act which stands out as one of the most immoral in history. The division was followed by oppression, and oppression in the case of the Poles (and in many other cases) merely fanned the flame of nationality. The French Revolution was not primarily a matter of nationality; France was already settled on lines of nationality. The discontent was social primarily, but the national idea went hand in hand with the social. The Revolutionists showed scant respect for dynasties, testified by their beheading a king. They threw the old social order to the winds, and, in their new statement of principles of political life, they learned from Poland and declared for the rights of nationality. The theory of nationality in fact flowed directly from the theory of the Revolution. Rousseau's theory of the volonté générale implied the doctrine of the rights of nationality. John Stuart Mill held that one could hardly know what any portion of the human race should be free to do, if not to determine with whom to associate themselves in political union. Rousseauism gave impetus to both democracy and nationality, and the recognition of the triumph of democracy in France was at once a powerful fillip to nationality. At the time, the effects of the new spirit were meagre if not quite negative. Less than a generation later the Congress of Vienna re-mapped Europe with a ruler and set-square, irrespective of national boundaries. But France still led either by her own revolutions or by her sympathies. Greece, Bohemia, Italy, the Magyars fought, bled and won or lost on national principles. Though the national support for Italy and Greece especially could not be misjudged, England was a passive observer for years and years. In August 1914 the gospel of Mazzini was at last accepted in real earnest. Before proceeding to the national issues of the recent war, I must first try to settle a very vexed question, viz., What is nationality? Nationality is a very refractory term to bring within the limits of a clear definition. Several causes contribute to this difficulty. Firstly, the term is vague in itself. Nationality is not something fixed, something on which one can lay one's finger. Secondly, in scientific books and papers on the subject there is considerable confusion of terminology, especially regarding the words 'nation' and 'nationality.' long-standing confusion in English is, especially in text-books, often made more confounded by an additional source of trouble, which comes from Germany. In the German language there is a word nation which does not This express the meaning of the same English word. The English equivalent for the German nation is nationality. The English word nation, in spite of the old casual practice and the argued persistence of some writers (e.g., Willoughby in his 'Nature of the State'), has definitely a political signification, which the Germans denote by the word volk, which is usually translated into English as people. The English word people (as also the French peuple) has its nearest German equivalent in nation, the English word nation having its parallel in the German word usually translated people. The Germans have etymology on their side in the ethnic sense of their word nation (from natus, born). But the English language has given nation and nationality distinct meanings, and there is no reason to confuse issues simply because of etymology. Science demands as exact definitions as possible, and if on the one hand popular usage is vague and often wrong, on the other hand there is no reason to divorce scientific from popular usage in words, except (as in the present case to a certain extent) when absolutely necessary. In English there are several terms very near in meaning to nationality, and, as a preliminary, it is necessary to clear the air by mentioning them and marking them off from each other. The words I refer to especially are race, state (and government), and nation. Race is a term used to represent certain broad distinctions between men. We speak, for example, of an Englishman differing from a Chinaman by race. The science of races, Ethnology, has its own methods of determining races-craniometry, &c.-but for our present purposes we may simply say that race shows a broad distinction based on the features and languages of mankind. Race has no political signification. The term state is used to denote the sovereign unity of a number of people settled on a fixed territory and organised in one government. State is the idea of which government is the actual fact. Nation is very near in meaning to state: the former |