have their customs, their religion, generally their language—­that most intimate bond—­and always the familiar outward scenes of earth and water, hill and plain and sky, breathing with memories.  Nationality enters into the soul of each man or woman who possesses it.  Mr. Chesterton has well described it as a sacrament.  It is a silent oath, an invisible mark.  Life receives from it a particular colour.  It is felt as an influence in action and in emotion, almost in every thought.  In freedom it sustains conduct with a proud assurance of community and reputation.  Under oppression, it may fuse all the pleasant uses of existence into one consuming impulse of fanatical devotion.  It has inspired the noblest literature and all the finest forms of art, and chiefly in countries where the flame of nationality burned strong and clear has the human mind achieved its greatest miracles of beauty, thought, and invention.

Nationality possesses that demonic and incalculable quality from which almost anything may be expected in the way of marvel, just as certain spiky plants that have not varied winter or summer for years in their habitual unattractiveness will suddenly shoot up a ten-foot spire of radiant blossom abounding in honey.  Partly by nationality has the human race been preserved from the dreariness of ant-like uniformity and has retained the power of variation which appears to be essential for the highest development of life.  With what pleasure, during our travels, we discover the evidences of nationality even in such things as dress, ornaments, food, songs, and dancing; still more in thought, speech, proverbs, literature, music, and the higher arts!  With what regret we see those characteristics swept away by the advancing tide of dominant monotony and Imperial dullness!  The loss may seem trivial compared with the loss of personal or political freedom, but it is not trivial.  It is a symptom of spiritual ruin.  How deep a degradation of intellect and personality is shown by the introduction of English music-hall songs among a highly poetic people like the Irish, or by the vulgar corruption of India’s superb manufactures and forms of art under the blight of British commerce!  You know the Persian carpets, of what magical beauty they are in design and colour.  When I was on the borders of Persia in 1907 the Persian carpet merchants were selling one kind of carpet with a huge red lion being shot by a sportsman in the middle of it to please the English, and another kind decorated with a Parisian lady in a motor to please the Russians.  From those carpets one may realise what the English Government’s acquiescence in the subjection of Persia really involves.