Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
nation and government is imperfect in two ways. It is imperfect,
because, after all, though Hungary has a separate national government
in internal matters, yet it is not the Hungarian kingdom, but the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy of which it forms a part, which counts as a
power among the other powers of Europe. And the national character of
the Hungarian government is equally imperfect from the other side. It
is national as regards the Magyar; it is not national as regards the
Slave, the Saxon, and the Rouman. Since the liberation of part of
Bulgaria, no whole European nation is under the rule of the Turk. No
one nation of the southeast peninsula forms a single national
government. One fragment of a nation is free under a national
government, another fragment is ruled by civilized strangers, a third
is trampled down by barbarians. The existing States of Greece,
Roumania, and Servia are far from taking in the whole of the Greek,
Rouman, and Servian nations. In all these lands, Austrian, Turkish,
and independent, there is no difficulty in marking off the several
nations; only in no case do the nations answer to any existing
political power.
In all these cases, where nationality and government are altogether
divorced, language becomes yet more distinctly the test of nationality
than it is in Western lands where nationality and government do to some
extent coincide. And when nationality and language do not coincide in
the East, it is owing to another cause, of which also we know nothing
in the West. In many cases religion takes the place of nationality; or
rather the ideas of religion and nationality can hardly be
distinguished. In the West a man's nationality is in no way affected
by the religion which he professes, or even by his change from one
religion to another. In the East it is otherwise. The Christian
renegade who embraces Islam becomes for most practical purposes a Turk.
Even if, as in Crete and Bosnia, he keeps his Greek or Slavonic
language, he remains Greek or Slave only in a secondary sense. For the
first principle of the Mahometan religion, the lordship of the true
believer over the infidel, cuts off the possibility of any true
national fellowship between the true believer and the infidel. Even
the Greek or Armenian who embraces the Latin creed goes far toward
parting with his nationality as well as with his religion. For the
adoption of the Latin creed implies what is in some sort the adoption
of a new allegiance, the accepting of the authority of the Roman
bishop. In the Armenian indeed we are come very near to the phenomena
of the further East, where names like Parsee and Hindoo, names in
themselves as strictly ethnical as Englishman or Frenchman, have come
to express distinctions in which religion and nationality are
absolutely the same thing. Of this whole class of phenomena the Jew is
of course the crowning example. But we speak of these matters here
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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