h
other's nationality. In Switzerland, nationhood, being democratic, is
the safeguard and insurance of nationality.

Contrast Swiss nationhood with Austro-Hungarian nationhood.
Austria-Hungary is the immediate and direct occasion of the great war
by reason of the fact that, although she is a mosaic of nationalities
like Switzerland, her government, instead of being a democracy, has
in the long run been directed toward the control and exploitation of
many nationalities by one or two. Hungary contains a population of
seven million Magyars among twelve million Slavs; yet the Hungarians,
having the economic and political upper hand, have sought to Magyarize
by force and trickery this almost doubly greater and culturally equal
population. They have tried to compel Magyar forms and standards in
language, in literature, in history, the arts, the sciences, religion,
law, in every intimate or remote concern of the daily life and
national genius of their Slavic subjects. The result has been the
steady disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian mosaic, the increasing
use of force to hold it together, the corresponding increase of
restlessness among the subject-peoples, plot and counterplot, the
assassination of the Archduke, and the attack on Serbia, which
precipitated the war. In this war Austria has come off worst of all
the combatants, and for the same reason: the attempt to maintain the
unity of a nation of nationalities by the force of one of them instead
of by the democratic cooeperation of all. In Austria-Hungary,
nationality, having been exploited and suppressed, has been the enemy
and destroyer of nationhood.

_America A Commonwealth of Nationalities_

In this country the whole spirit of those institutions which
constitute American nationhood makes for the liberation and harmonious
cooeperation of nationalities. This spirit is also a part of the
Hebraic spirit, a part of the explicit program of our prophets, those
champions and vindicators of social justice and international
righteousness and peace; and this, significantly, is the spirit that
literally inspired the democracy of our America.

For the democracy of America had its first articulate voicing in the
Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans of New England. These men and women,
devoted to the literature of the Old Testament, and upheld by the
ancestral memories of the Jews, were moved to undertake their great
American adventure by the ideal of nationality. It was not b