uthority, without necessarily
losing their cherished habits, their customs, or their laws. The new
idea of freedom made room for different races in one State. A nation was
no longer what it had been to the ancient world,--the progeny of a
common ancestor, or the aboriginal product of a particular region,--a
result of merely physical and material causes,--but a moral and
political being; not the creation of geographical or physiological
unity, but developed in the course of history by the action of the
State. It is derived from the State, not supreme over it. A State may in
course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should
constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation. The
nation derives its rights and its power from the memory of a former
independence.

The Church has agreed in this respect with the tendency of political
progress, and discouraged wherever she could the isolation of nations;
admonishing them of their duties to each other, and regarding conquest
and feudal investiture as the natural means of raising barbarous or
sunken nations to a higher level. But though she has never attributed to
national independence an immunity from the accidental consequences of
feudal law, of hereditary claims, or of testamentary arrangements, she
defends national liberty against uniformity and centralisation with an
energy inspired by perfect community of interests. For the same enemy
threatens both; and the State which is reluctant to tolerate
differences, and to do justice to the peculiar character of various
races, must from the same cause interfere in the internal government of
religion. The connection of religious liberty with the emancipation of
Poland or Ireland is not merely the accidental result of local causes;
and the failure of the Concordat to unite the subjects of Austria is the
natural consequence of a policy which did not desire to protect the
provinces in their diversity and autonomy, and sought to bribe the
Church by favours instead of strengthening her by independence. From
this influence of religion in modern history has proceeded a new
definition of patriotism.

The difference between nationality and the State is exhibited in the
nature of patriotic attachment. Our connection with the race is merely
natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are
ethical. One is a community of affections and instincts infinitely
important and powerful in savage life