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Nationality.

By G. Marcus.

That was the week of epilogues and preludes, of finales and overtures, so that for sheer centuries a man could not see his own day. What the nineteenth saeculum, whose dying was made so hard for it, has brought and left behind, and what is to be hoped and feared of the twentieth — upon all this every prophet, backward-turned and forward-turned alike, delivered his oracle; and if anyone should now possess the temerity to make himself, for his simple domestic use, a single verse out of these thousand oracles, he would presumably fare like the proverbial cow before the barn door. Or, to figure the situation between the two centuries yet more plainly, like Buridan's ass between the two bundles of hay. It is simply very much harder to strike the balance of a century that has run out, or to divine the physiognomy of one to come, than to come to terms in leading articles or feuilletons with the mood of the day. And whereas the epilogue or the necrology, as also at the coffin of a single man, can at least appeal to definite facts, magnify what is praiseworthy, and glide over what is blameworthy with a timid De mortuis nil nisi bene, at the cradle of a newborn child every prognosis is an empty game. The past one may misunderstand more or less thoroughly; into the future there penetrates "no created spirit."

If it has now been said that the nineteenth century bequeaths to the twentieth a draft upon the social revolution, one need not honour that draft without more ado. Social revolutions may accomplish themselves in very various fashions, and of the greatest of them even those who lived through them, the very men who made them, had not so much as an inkling. According as the historian surveys a narrower or a wider horizon, he will discern more or less mighty social revolutions in the flowering of art of the fifteenth century, in the Reformation of the sixteenth, in the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth, in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth, and in the overwhelming upsurge of the natural sciences during the nineteenth. Every century works an upheaval in the views of men, in their forms and conditions of life, for the greatest of all revolutionaries is time; but as little as anyone in the passage from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century divined what the discovery of America would signify for mankind, so little can anyone at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth presume to prophesy the character of the coming revolution.

With the preludes and the overtures, then, nothing is to be done. How does it stand with the epilogues and the finales? There, so far as our survey reaches, the prepotency of the nationalities-idea has been thrust into the foreground with particular weight. That is correct. Napoleon III. possessed himself of the nationalities-idea because he needed a means of diverting the rising flood that was rolling up against his Empire; he thought of the small nationalities not out of sympathy with them, but in order to keep the French in the delusion that they were the high-minded protectors of all peoples that "labour and are heavy laden." But this frivolous game with the prestige of France turned in the end against himself. Upon the ruins of his rule there arose the two great national unitary States, Germany and Italy, and the awakened craving of the small peoples for national independence sought its advocates thenceforward elsewhere than in France; the Poles, who had entangled themselves too deeply in the French illusion, found none at all any more. Russia took up the cause of the Balkan States; Roumania had its support in Germany. One must set this, and some things besides, before one's eyes in order to understand how the Magyars rose, and how the Czechs to this day shake at the foundations of the Austrian monarchy. The successes of the nationalities-idea had for their presupposition the preponderance of the continental policy of jealousy and rivalry; when the great European States turned from this to colonial policy, the fulfilment of the last nationalist desires became a question of that great civilising programme