Sec.2. The Birth of Nationalism:  Poland and the French Revolution.—­With these general principles in mind let us now consider the national idea at work in the nineteenth century.  Nations, in the sense just defined, have of course long existed in Europe.  England, Scotland, and Switzerland are nations whose life-histories date right back to the Middle Ages.  Joan of Are was a nationalist, and France has been a nation since the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453.  Spain became a nation a few years later by the expulsion of the Moors and the union of Castille and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella.  Holland, again, acquired her national freedom in her great struggle against Spain in the sixteenth century.  But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that nationalism became a real force in Europe, an idea for which men died and in whose name monarchies were overthrown.  “In the old European system,” writes Lord Acton, “the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people.  The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers, and the administration was conducted generally without any reference to popular desires.  Where all liberties were suppressed, the claims of national independence were necessarily ignored, and a princess, in the words of Fenelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding portion."[1] The State was, in short, regarded as a purely territorial affair; it was the property, the landed property, of the monarch, who in his capacity of owner controlled the destinies of the people who happened to live upon that territory.  Conquest or marriage might unite in the hands of a single monarch the most diverse peoples and countries, the notorious case of the kind being that of the Emperor Charles V., who in the sixteenth century managed to hold sway over Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, and a large part of the New World.

[Footnote 1:  History of Freedom, p. 273.]

The golden age of the dynastic principle was, however, the eighteenth century, and the long and tedious wars of that period were nearly all occasioned by the aggrandisement of some royal house.  The idea of a nation as a living organism, as something more than a collection of people dwelling in the same country, speaking the same language and obeying the same ruler, had not yet dawned upon the world.  Apart from England, Scotland, Switzerland, and Holland, no European nation had really become conscious of its personality as distinct from that of its hereditary monarch.  And as we have seen, until nationality becomes keenly self-conscious, the national idea remains unborn.  Only some great internal cataclysm or an overwhelming disaster inflicted by a foreign power could evoke this consciousness in a nation; and fate ordained that the two methods should be tried simultaneously at opposite ends of Europe.  France, “standing on the top of golden hours,” and Poland, crushed, dismembered, downtrodden—­it would be difficult to say which of these contributed the more to the great national awakening in Europe.