whether willingly or unwillingly, under a common ruler, but without any
further tie of union. For all political purposes, the Swiss
Confederation is a nation, a nation capable of as strong and true
national feeling as any other nation. Yet it is a nation purely
artificial, one in no way defined by blood or speech. It thus proves the
rule in two ways. We at once feel that this artificially formed nation,
which has no common language, but each of whose elements speaks a
language common to itself with some other nation, is something different
from those nations which are defined by a universal or at least a
predominant language. We mark it as an exception, as something different
from other cases. And when we see how nearly this artificial nation
comes, in every point but that of language, to the likeness of those
nations which are defined by language, we see that it is a nation
defined by language which sets the standard, and after the model of
which the artificial nation forms itself. The case of the Swiss
Confederation and its claim to rank as a nation would be like the case
of those _gentes_, if any such there were, which did not spring even
from the expansion of an original family, but which were artificially
formed in imitation of those which did, and which, instead of a real or
traditional forefather, chose for themselves an adopted one.

In the Swiss Confederation, then, we have a case of a nation formed by
an artificial process, but which still is undoubtedly a nation in the
face of other nations. We now come to the other class, in which
nationality and language keep the connection which they have elsewhere,
but in which nations do not even in the roughest way answer to
governments. We have only to go into the Eastern lands of Europe to find
a state of things in which the notion of nationality, as marked out by
language and national feeling, has altogether parted company from the
notion of political government. It must be remembered that this state of