formation of nationality, the rule is open to exceptions of all kinds,
and that the influence of language is at all times liable to be
overruled by other influences. But all the exceptions confirm the rule,
because we specially remark those cases which contradict the rule, and
we do not specially remark those cases which do not conform to it.

In the cases which we have just spoken of, the growth of the nation as
marked out by language, and the growth of the exceptions to the rule of
language, have both come through the gradual, unconscious working of
historical causes. Union under the same government, or separation under
separate governments, have been among the foremost of those historical
causes. The French nation consists of the people of all that extent of
continuous territory which has been brought under the rule of the French
kings. But the working of the cause has been gradual and unconscious.
There was no moment when any one deliberately proposed to form a French
nation by joining together all the separate duchies and counties which
spoke the French tongue. Since the French nation has been formed, men
have proposed to annex this or that land on the ground that its people
spoke the French tongue, or perhaps only some tongue akin to the French
tongue. But the formation of the French nation itself was the work of
historical causes, the work doubtless of a settled policy acting through
many generations, but not the work of any conscious theory about races
and languages. It is a special mark of our time, a special mark of the
influence which doctrines about race and language have had on men's
minds, that we have seen great nations united by processes in which
theories of race and language really have had much to do with bringing
about their union. If statesmen have not been themselves moved by such
theories, they have at least found that it suited their purpose to make
use of such theories as a means of working on the minds of others. In
the reunion of the severed German and Italian nations, the conscious