ve risen
and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of
Commons have gone on undisturbed.

RACE AND LANGUAGE

From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London,
Macmillan & Co., 1871

Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the
working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups
in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has
grown,--how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to
mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and
qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large
classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say
unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one
only; and that that test is language.

It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined
by the merely political arrangements which group men under various
governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes
of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this
standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe
for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer
to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without
their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national
divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political
divisions. That is to say, _prima facie_ a nation and a government
should coincide. I say only _prima facie_, for this is assuredly no
inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be
otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good
reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a
government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the
less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That
is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it
as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause;
so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by
asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation
should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of
governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of
nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing,
something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government
should as f