Hungary, Prussia-Germany and Russia—they who take the sword shall perish by the sword. We shall solve our own problem aright if we comprehend that the more humane we are the more national we shall be. The relationship between the nation and mankind, between nationality and internationality, between nationalism and humaneness of feeling is not that mankind as a whole and internationalism and humaneness are something apart from, against or above the nation and nationality, but that nations are the natural organs of mankind. The new order in Europe, the creation of new States, has shorn nationalism of its negative character by setting oppressed peoples on their own feet. To a positive nationalism, one that seeks to raise a nation by intensive work, none can demur. Chauvinism, racial or national intolerance, not love of one’s own people, is the foe of nations and of humanity. Love of one’s own nation does not entail non-love of other nations.
It is natural that, as a general rule, nationality should be determined by language, for language is an expression, albeit not the only expression of the national spirit. Since the eighteenth century, students of nationality have recognized that it is expressed rather in the whole of a nation’s intellectual effort and culture. Conscious fostering of nationality implies therefore a comprehensive policy of culture and education. Literature and art, philosophy and science, legislation and the State, politics and administration, moral, religious and intellectual style, have to be national. Now that we have won political independence and are masters of our fate, a policy conceived in the days of our bondage can no longer suffice. Emphasis was then laid upon our linguistic claims. Now our national programme must embrace the whole domain of culture. To the synthesis of culture towards which educated Europe is now striving, I have already referred. It is in countries of mixed race that this synthesis can best begin; and to all racial minorities among educated peoples a weighty and honourable task is thus assigned.
Democracy at Home.
We restored our State in the name of democratic freedom, and we shall only be able to preserve it through freedom increasingly perfected. In home affairs as in foreign, democracy must be our aim.
Democratic States have hitherto kept up, in greater or lesser degree, the spirit and the institutions of the old régime
