The second element is an organization, an institution, in other words, a state. The Poles have a common language, customs, traditions, and land, but they have no government of their own, and do not form a nation. A nation comes into being when a state is formed by a people. The state, if a true one, grows out of the life of the people, and is to the people what the body is to the soul. The state and the people form a unity. Moreover, the institution is just as real as the people and their desires, and with the people forms the objective basis of a nation. The third element is that of a common consciousness. This is built upon and implied in the conditions already named. A people and a state are both external and internal facts. The raw material of which they are formed is external and objective. But that raw material does not come to its full meaning until there is added to it a consciousness in which it is taken up in unity. There would really be no unified people and no state, as the expression of united political life, in spite of the external elements which are necessary to the being of people and state, unless there existed in the individuals’ minds a common consciousness or consciousness of community. The very existence of a common language testifies to the existence of a common consciousness, as do common customs, traditions, history, literature, and ideals. A land even is something which a people possesses, and which furnishes a common bond between the individuals of the group. There was a time when the land was literally a common possession, in the sense that there was no private property, but ownership is not the only way in which a people can have a common interest in the land; there may be many associations besides that of common ownership connected with it. Esthetic appreciation is one of them. Affection for the scenes of childhood is another. Esenwein, in describing the art of Gogol, the Russian author, uses the following phrases: “Rarely do power and delicacy unite in a stylist as they do in Gogol. For the one [power], we may find an origin in his love for the sun-steeped and snow-blown plains of his native Cossack country....”[177] What gifted writers have felt other more common folk have felt also.