er of the diverse elements of which they are composed; but France
with her great African Empire, and Russia with her multitudinous
populations, from Poland to the Pacific, from Finland to the Caucasus, are
equally composite. In each of these great States nations have been united
under a common law; and where the wisdom of the central government has not
"broken the bruised reed or quenched the smoking flax" of national life,
the nations have been not only willing but anxious to join in the work
of their State. Nations, like men, were made not to compete but to work
together; and it is so easy, so simple, to win their good-hearted devotion.
It takes all sorts of men, says the old proverb, to make a world. It takes
all sorts of nations to make a modern State. "The combination of different
nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the
combination of men in society. ... It is in the cauldron of the State that
the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity
of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another.... If we take the
establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end
of civil society, we must conclude that those States are substantially the
most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various
distinct nationalities without oppressing them." So wrote Lord Acton,
the great Catholic historian, fifty years ago, when the watchwords of
Nationality were on all men's lips, adding, in words that were prophetic of
the failure of the Austrian and the progress of the British Commonwealth
of Nations: "The coexistence of several nations under the same State _is a
test_ as well as the best security _of its freedom_. It is also one of the
chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and
providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the
national unity which is the ideal of modern liberalism."[1]

[Footnote 1: Essay on Nationality, in _The History of Freedom and other
Essays_, pp. 290, 298.]

Of the Great Powers which between them control the destinies of
civilisation Great Britain is at once the freest, the largest, and the
most various. If the State is a "cauldron" for mingling "the vigour, the
knowledge, and the capacity" of the portions of mankind--or if, to use an
apter metaphor, it is a body whose perfection consists in the very variety
of the functions of its several members