Nationalization is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But sometimes a part breaks off from a nation and sets up and maintains its independence as a country. Thus a portion of the territory of Mexico was settled over from our States, and after a while these settlers tore themselves loose from Mexico and became the nation of Texas. We shall tell you more fully in another chapter how the separate colonies became nationalized into the United States, and what we say here of southern nationalization will illustrate to the reader that important transformation, to understand which is of especial moment to us in examining the brothers' war. But we must emphasize the characteristic feature of the nationalization of the south. I have searched the pages of history in vain for an example like it. The idiosyncrasy is that the south was homogeneous in origin, race, language, religion, institutions, and customs with the north, and yet she developed away from the north into a separate nation. I have long been accustomed to parallel the case of Ireland's repulsion from Great Britain, but I always had to admit that there was dissimilarity in everything except the strong drift towards independence and the struggle to win it;[25] for the Irish are largely different from the English in origin, race, language, religion, institutions, and customs. The more you consider it the more striking becomes this uniqueness of southern nationalization. Think of it for a moment. Thirteen adjacent colonies; each a dependency of the same nation; all settled promiscuously from every part and parcel of one mother country, and therefore the settlers rapidly becoming in time more like one another everywhere than the English were who at home were clinging to their several localities and dialects; governed alike; standing together against Indians, French, and Spanish, and after a while against the mother country;--where can you find another instance of so many common ties and tendencies, all prompting incessantly and mightily to union in a political whole, which is ever the goal of the nationalizing process. That the colonies did grow into a political whole is not at all wonderful to the historical student. The wonder is that after they had done this a number of them just like the others in the particulars above pointed out, which fuse adjacent communities into a nation, turn away from the old union and seek to form one of their own. The southern States all did the same thing with such practical unanimity that even the foreigner may know that the same cause was at work in every one of them. Manifestly there was a