dubious ingredients; but loyalty to them does not
necessarily mean the uncritical and unprotesting acceptance of the
national limitations and abuses. Nationality is a political and social
ideal as well as the great contemporary political fact. Loyalty to the
national interest implies devotion to a progressive principle. It
demands, to be sure, that the progressive principle be realized without
any violation of fundamental national ties. It demands that any national
action taken for the benefit of the progressive principle be approved
by the official national organization. But it also serves as a ferment
quite as much as a bond. It bids the loyal national servants to fashion
their fellow-countrymen into more of a nation; and the attempt to
perform this bidding constitutes a very powerful and wholesome source of
political development. It constitutes, indeed, a source of political
development which is of decisive importance for a satisfactory theory of
political and social progress, because a people which becomes more of a
nation has a tendency to become for that very reason more of a
democracy.

The assertion that a people which becomes more of a nation becomes for
that very reason more of a democracy, is, I am aware, a hazardous
assertion, which can be justified, if at all, only at a considerable
expense. As a matter of fact, the two following chapters will be devoted
chiefly to this labor of justification. In the first of these chapters I
shall give a partly historical and partly critical account of the
national principle in its relation to democracy; and in the second I
shall apply the results, so achieved, to the American national principle
in its relation to the American democratic idea. But before starting
this complicated task, a few words must be premised as to the reasons
which make the attempt well worth the trouble.

If a people, in becoming more of a nation, become for that very reason
more of a democracy, the realization of the democratic purpose is not
rendered any easier, but democracy is provided with a simplified, a
consistent, and a practicable programme. An alliance is established
thereby between the two dominant political and social forces in modern
life. The suspicion with which aggressive advocates of the national
principle have sometimes regarded democracy would be shown to have only
a conditional justification; and the suspicion with which many ardent
democrats have regarded aggressive nationalism