his Polis-consciousness or a modern Jew the national _ijma_. The mother tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of dynastic history. Without the Capetian line there would have been no French language, but a Romance-Frankish in the north and a Provençal in the south. The Italian written-language is to be credited to the German Emperors and above all to Frederick II. The modern nations are primarily the populations of an old dynastic history. Yet in the nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit of written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties representing the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic-historical unit and as intellectual unit--the race party and the language party--but these are reflections that evoke too soon problems of politics that must await a later chapter. V At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people _before_ the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them, hold for it also--alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude. The people “awakens”--it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus and then does the waking-consciousness of the whole become manifested. All these individuals whose “we”-feeling yesterday went content with a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town are suddenly to-day men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very depths. It has become _historic_. And then even the unhistorical peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.