arge minority forming a
visible element in the general body. The three languages are all of
them alike recognized as national languages, though, as if to keep up
the universal rule that there should be some exceptions to all rules, a
fourth language still lives on within the bounds of the Confederation,
which is not admitted to the rights of the other three, but is left in
the state of a fragment or a survival.[3] Is such an artificial body
as this to be called a nation? It is plainly not a nation by blood or
by speech. It can hardly be called a nation by adoption. For, if we
chose to say that the three elements have all agreed to adopt one
another as brethren, yet it has been adoption without assimilation.
Yet surely the Swiss Confederation is a nation. It is not a mere
power, in which various nations are brought together, whether
willingly, or unwillingly, under a common ruler, but without any
further tie of union. For all political purposes the Swiss
Confederation is a nation, a nation capable of as strong and true
national feeling as any other nation. Yet it is a nation purely
artificial, one in no way defined by blood or speech. It thus proves
the rule in two ways. We at once feel that this artificially formed
nation, which has no common language, but each of whose elements speaks
a language common to itself with some other nation, is something
different from those nations which are defined by a universal or at
least a predominant language. We mark it as an exception, as something
different from other cases. And when we see how nearly this artificial
nation comes, in every point but that of language, to the likeness of
those nations which are defined by language, we see that it is a nation
defined by language which sets the standard, and after the model of
which the artificial nation forms itself. The case of the Swiss
Confederation and its claim to rank as a nation would be like the case
of those _gentes_, if any such there were, which did not spring even
from the expansion of an original family, but which were artificially
formed in imitation of those which did, and which, instead of a real or
traditional forefather, chose for themselves an adopted one.

In the Swiss Confederation, then, we have a case of a nation formed by
an artificial process, but which still is undoubtedly a nation in the
face of other nations. We now come to the other class, in which
nationality and language keep the connection