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?

It will be many generations before we become so fused as to have a
common past, and the conciliation and forbearance which Mr. Choate
recommends to related sections of country will be more than equally
necessary to unrelated races. But while we are waiting for a past in
which we can all agree, Mr. Choate sees danger in the disrespect which
he accuses certain _anonymi_ of entertaining for the past