[Footnote 1:  The neutralisation of sovereign States is very recent in origin.  Switzerland and Luxembourg are the only other instances.  The former was neutralised in 1815, the latter in 1867.]

[Footnote 2:  Cambridge Modern History, xi. 642.  See for the whole question of neutralised States, Lawrence, Principles of International Law, Sec.Sec. 246-248.]

As independent States, therefore, small nations can only survive, in the long run, if their neutrality is permanently guaranteed by some international authority, which is itself permanently capable of enforcing its decrees upon recalcitrant States.  Sovereignty and independence, however, are not, as we have seen, essential to full nationhood, provided the nation possesses a certain amount of “home-rule” and regards the government under which it lives as a true expression of its genius and will.  For example, from 1809 till the setting in of Russian reaction in 1899, the Finnish nation enjoyed all the privileges of complete nationhood except actual sovereignty.  There is, therefore, a future for small nations, either as autonomous proteges of great powers, like Russia, or as partners in some commonwealth of nations, like the British Empire.

But there is yet another consideration to be faced.  Why, it is asked, should we trouble ourselves about the preservation of small nationalities at all?  “The State is power,” and it is only the really powerful State, therefore, that can and ought to survive.  There is something laughable in the idea of a small State; it is weakness trying to pose as strength.  And as for nations which have lost their independence and have bowed to the yoke of the conqueror, their fate is incorporation.  How can they hope or expect to retain their separate existence and their peculiar culture when they have surrendered the power upon which these privileges depend?  “No nation can permit the Jews to have a double nationality”; and the same applies to Poles, Finns, Alsatians, Irishmen, and Belgians.[1] This is the point of view of Bernhardi, Treitschke, and the German Government.  This is the theory which is said to justify the practice of Prussianisation, Russianisation, Magyarisation, and so on.  It raises the whole question of the value and significance to civilisation of the existence of small nations.  Treitschke, of course, and his school are convinced that they possess neither value nor significance.  In small States there is developed that beggarly frame of mind which judges the State by the taxes that it raises; there is completely lacking in small States the ability of the great State to be just; all real masterpieces of poetry and art arose upon the soil of great nationalities—­such are a few of Treitschke’s dogmatic utterances on this subject.[2] But it is not merely the Germans who think small beer of small nationalities.  Listen to Sir John Seeley:  “The question whether large states or small states are best is not