unity of the nation is
the necessary condition, to which every other influence must defer, and
against which no obligation enjoys authority, and all resistance is
tyrannical. The nation is here an ideal unit founded on the race, in
defiance of the modifying action of external causes, of tradition, and
of existing rights. It overrules the rights and wishes of the
inhabitants, absorbing their divergent interests in a fictitious unity;
sacrifices their several inclinations and duties to the higher claim of
nationality, and crushes all natural rights and all established
liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself.[331] Whenever a single
definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the
advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any
speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public
authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and
provokes no sincere opposition. In supporting the claims of national
unity, governments must be subverted in whose title there is no flaw,
and whose policy is beneficent and equitable, and subjects must be
compelled to transfer their allegiance to an authority for which they
have no attachment, and which may be practically a foreign domination.
Connected with this theory in nothing except in the common enmity of the
absolute state, is the theory which represents nationality as an
essential, but not a supreme element in determining the forms of the
State. It is distinguished from the other, because it tends to diversity
and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity; because it aims not
at an arbitrary change, but at careful respect for the existing
conditions of political life, and because it obeys the laws and results
of history, not the aspirations of an ideal future. While the theory of
unity makes the nation a source of despotism and revolution, the theory
of liberty regards it as the bulwark of self-government, and the
foremost limit to the excessive power of the State. Private rights,
which are sacrificed to the unity, are preserved by the union of
nations. No power can so efficiently resist the tendencies of
centralisation, of corruption, and of absolutism, as that community
which is the vastest that can be included in a State, which imposes on
its members a consistent similari