the United States would be regarded as part of the British Empire because a large proportion of their inhabitants happen to be of British descent.  The word “race” brings us somewhat nearer to the point, but even this will not satisfy us when we remember that the Slavonic race, for example, consists of a large number of nationalities, such as the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs, the Serbs, the Montenegrins, etc., or that the English (as distinguished from the other three nations of the United Kingdom) belong to the same Teutonic race as the Germans.  Nevertheless, a belief, whether well grounded or not, in a common racial origin is one of the root principles of the idea of nationality.

“What is a nation?” the great Magyar nationalist, Kossuth, asked a Serb representative at the Hungarian Diet of 1848.  The reply was:  “A race which possesses its own language, customs, and culture, and enough self-consciousness to preserve them.”  “A nation must also have its own government,” objected Kossuth.  “We do not go so far,” explained his interlocutor; “one nation can live under several different governments, and again several nations can form a single state."[1] Both the Magyar and the Serb wore right, though the latter was speaking of “nationality” and the former of “nation.”  The conversation is in fact instructive in more ways than one.  It would be difficult to find a better definition of nationality than that given by the Serb speaker.  A common language, a common culture, and common customs:  these are the outward and visible signs which make a people conscious of its common race, which make it, in other words, a nationality.

[Footnote 1:  R.W.  Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, p. 46.]

The element of “consciousness” is all-important.  There are, for example, members of the Finnish race scattered all over northern Russia, but they evince no consciousness of any kind that they are allied to the nationality which inhabits the country of Finland.  Again, it is only within recent years that the Serbs and the Croats in the south-west corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have begun to realise that the only things which divide them one from the other are a difference of religion and a difference of alphabet; and now that the realisation of this fact has spread from the study to the market-place, we see the formation of a new nationality, that of the Serbo-Croats.  The researches of historians and other learned men have done an immense deal to stimulate the development of nationalities during the past century, but they are unable of themselves to create them.  The fact of kinship is not enough; community of language, customs, and culture is not even enough; to be a real nationality a people must be conscious of all these things, and not merely conscious, but sufficiently conscious to preserve them and, if need be, to die for them.