erate with each
other more willingly than other people; desire to be under the same
government, and desire that it should be a government by themselves or a
portion of themselves exclusively." He then proceeds to state that the
feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes.
Sometimes it is the identity of race and descent; community of language
and community of religion greatly contribute to it; geographical limits
are one of its causes; but the strongest of all is identity of political
antecedents: the possession of a national history and consequent
community of recollections--collective pride and humiliation, pleasure
and regret--connected with the same incidents in the past.

The only point to be noted further in reference to the foregoing federal
unions, is that the same feeling of nationality which, in the United
States, Switzerland, and the German Empire, produced a closer legal bond
of union, in the case of Austria-Hungary operated to dissolve the
amalgamation formed in 1849 of the two States, and to produce a federal
union of States in place of a single State.

One conclusion seems to follow irresistibly from any review of the
construction of the various States above described: that the stability
of a nation bears no relation whatever to the legal compactness or
homogeneity of its component parts. Russia and France, the most compact
political societies in Europe, do not, to say the least, rest on a
firmer basis than Germany and Switzerland, the inhabitants of which are
subjected to the obligations of a double nationality. Above all, no
European nation, except Great Britain, can for a moment bear comparison
with the United States in respect of the devotion of its people to their
Constitution.

An imperial union, though resembling somewhat in outward form a federal
union, differs altogether from it both in principle and origin. Its
essential characteristic is that one community is absolutely dominant
while all the others are subordinate. In the case of a federal union
independent States have agreed to resign a portion of their powers to a
central Government for the sake of securing the common safety. In an
imperial union the dominant or imperial State delegates to each
constituent member of the union such a portion of local government as
the dominant State considers the subordinate member entitled to,
consistently with the integrity of the empire. The British Empire
furnishes the best example