rtyrs to lost causes.

This doctrine may seem harsh, and untenable even, to those sickly
philanthropists who are always weeping over extinct or oppressed
nationalities; but nationality in modern civilization is a fact, not a
right antecedent to the fact. The repugnance felt to this assertion
arises chiefly from using the word nation sometimes in a strictly
political sense, and sometimes in its original sense of tribe, and
understanding by it not simply the body politic, but a certain relation
of origin, family, kindred, blood, or race. But God has made of one
blood, or race, all the nations of men; and, besides, no political
rights are founded by the law of nature on relations of blood, kindred,
or family. Under the patriarchal or tribal system, and, to some
extent, under feudalism, these relations form the basis of government,
but they are economical relations rather than civil or political, and,
under Christian and modern civilization, are restricted to the
household, are domestic relations, and enter not the state or body
politic, except by way of reminiscence or abuse. They are protected by
the state, but do not found or constitute it. The vicissitudes of
time, the revolutions of states and empires, migration, conquest, and
intermixture of families and races, have rendered it impracticable,
even if it were desirable, to distribute people into nations according
to their relations of blood or descent.

There is no civilized nation now existing that has been, developed from
a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most mixed are the most
civilized. The nearer a nation approaches to a primitive people of
pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it is from civilization. All
civilized nations are political nations, and are founded in the fact,
not on rights antecedent to the fact. A hundred or more lost
nationalities went to form the Roman empire, and who can tell us how
many layers of crushed nationalities, superposed one upon another,
serve for the foundation of the present French, English, Russian,
Austrian, or Spanish nationalities? What other title to independence
and sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any European
nation? Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one can say how
many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to be as it has, or
can have. Whether those nationalities have been justly extinguished or
not, is no question for the statesman; it is the secret of Pro