e geographical, we must always mean the
moral and political, country.... The truth is, that France is out of
itself--the moral France is separated from the geographical. The master
of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look
for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and
intention of public law (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to
deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and
conclude), they are in Flanders and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain,
Italy, and England. There are all the princes of the blood, there are
all the orders of the State, there are all the parliaments of the
kingdom.... I am sure that if half that number of the same description
were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly anything that I
should call the people of England."[332] Rousseau draws nearly the same
distinction between the country to which we happen to belong and that
which fulfils towards us the political functions of the State. In the
_Emile_ he has a sentence of which it is not easy in a translation to
convey the point: "Qui n'a pas une patrie a du moins un pays." And in
his tract on Political Economy he writes: "How shall men love their
country if it is nothing more for them than for strangers, and bestows
on them only that which it can refuse to none?" It is in the same sense
he says, further on, "La patrie ne peut subsister sans la liberte."[333]

The nationality formed by the State, then, is the only one to which we
owe political duties, and it is, therefore, the only one which has
political rights. The Swiss are ethnologically either French, Italian,
or German; but no nationality has the slightest claim upon them, except
the purely political nationality of Switzerland. The Tuscan or the
Neapolitan State has formed a nationality, but the citizens of Florence
and of Naples have no political community with each other. There are
other States which have neither succeeded in absorbing distinct races in
a political nationality, nor in separating a particular district from a
larger nation. Austria and Mexico are instances on the one hand, Parma
and Baden on the other. The progress of civilisation deals hardly with
the last description of States. In order to maintain their integrity
they must attach themselves by confederations, or family alliances, to
greater Powers, and thus lose something of their independence. Their
tendency is to isolate and shut off