His exordium over, Mr. Choate proceeds to define and to discuss Nationality.  We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise, and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its germinal principle.  But when he says, that the sentiment of a national life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise of the reason and the will, we dissent.  It must be a matter of instinct, or it is nothing.  The examples of nationality which he cites are those of ancient Greece and modern Germany.  Now we affirm, that, with accidental exceptions, nationality has always been a matter of race, and was eminently so in the instances he quotes.  If we read rightly, the nationality which glows in the “Iliad,” and which it was, perhaps, one object of the poem to rouse or to make coherent, is one of blood, not territory.  The same is true of Germany, of Russia, (adding the element of a common religious creed,) and of France, where the Celtic sentiment becomes day by day more predominant.  The exceptions are England and Switzerland, whose intense nationality is due to insulation, and Holland, which was morally an island, cut off as it was from France by difference of language and antipathy of race, and from kindred Germany by the antagonism of institutions.  A patriotism by the chart is a monster that the world ne’er saw.  Men may fall in love with a lady’s picture, but not with the map of their country.  Few persons have the poetic imagination of Mr. Choate, that can vivify the dead lines and combine the complex features.  It seems to us that our own problem of creating a national sentiment out of such diverse materials of race, such sometimes discordant or even hostile traditions, and then of giving it an intenseness of vitality that can overcome our vast spaces and our differences of climate and interest, is a new problem, not easily to be worked out by the old methods.  Mr. Choate’s plan seems to consist in the old formula of the Fathers.  He would have us think of their sacrifices and their heroisms, their common danger and their common deliverance.  Excellent, as far as it goes; but what are we to do with the large foreign fraction of our population imported within the last forty years, a great proportion of whom never so much as heard even of the war of 1812?  Shall we talk of Bennington and Yorktown to the Germans, whose grandfathers, if they were concerned at all in those memorable transactions, were concerned on the wrong side?  Shall we talk of the constancy of Puritan Pilgrims to the Romanist Irishman, who knows more of Brian Boroo than of the Mayflower?