corruption.  Hungary, sullen and discontented, waited for Austria’s calamity as her opportunity, and it came after the battle of Sadowa.  Austria had just emerged from a fearful conflict, and Count Beust[65] felt that unless some resolute effort was made to meet the views of the constitutional party in Hungary, the dismemberment of the empire must be the result.  Now, what was the course he took?  Was it a tightening of the bonds between Austria and Hungary?  On the contrary, to maintain the unity of the empire he dissolved its union and restored to Hungary its ancient constitutional privileges.  Austria and Hungary each had its own Parliament for local purposes.  To manage the imperial concerns of peace and war, and the foreign relations, a controlling body, called the Delegations, was established, consisting of 120 members, of whom half represent and are chosen by the Legislature of Austria, and the other half by that of Hungary; the Upper House of each country returning twenty members, and the Lower House forty.[66] Ordinarily the delegates sit and vote in two Chambers, but if they disagree the two branches must meet together and give their final vote without debate, which is binding on the whole empire.[67]

The question arises, What is the magnetic influence which induces communities of men to combine together in federal unions?  Undoubtedly it is the feeling of nationality; and what is nationality?  Mr. Mill says,[68] “a portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others; which make them co-operate 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.