We have seen that in almost every conflict between English and Irish ideas the latter have had the justification of success.  This holds good also as regards our long insistence on nationality as a principle of political organisation.  In various passages of the nineteenth century it seemed to be gravely compromised.  Capital, its mobility indefinitely increased by the improved technique of exchange, became essentially a citizen of the world.  The earth was all about it where to choose; its masters, falsely identifying patriotism with the Protectionism then dominant, struck at both, and the Free Trade movement philosophised itself into cosmopolitanism.  Labour, like capital, showed a rapid tendency to become international or rather supernational.  “The workers,” proclaimed Marx, “have no fatherland.”  While this was the drift of ideas in the economic sphere, that in the political was no more favourable.  Belgium seemed on the point of extinction, Italy was a mere geographical expression, Hungary was abject and broken.  In the narrower but even more significant sphere of British colonial policy the passion for centralisation had not yet been understood in all its folly.  Downing Street still functioned as the Dublin Castle of the Empire.  The possibility of the overseas possessions developing that rich, strong individuality which characterises them to-day would have been dismissed with horror.  The colour and texture of men’s thought on these subjects has undergone a notable transformation.  Cosmopolitanism of the old type is a slain hallucination.  Capital in our time is not content to be a patriot, it is a Jingo.  As to labour, if we turn to its politics we find Herr Bebel declaring that the German socialist is first of all a German, and Mr Ramsay MacDonald pledging his adherents to support any war necessary for the assertion of English prestige.  If we turn to its theoretical sociology we find the national idea rehabilitated and triumphant.

Such intellectual reconstructions do not, as a rule, begin in England, or find in English their characteristic formulae.  Mr Blatchford might indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant literature of German Social Democracy that the most scientific expression of the new spirit is to be sought.  Truly Marx has been indeed translated.  His abstract and etiolated internationalism has been replaced by the warm humanity of writers like, say, David or Pernerstorfer.  The principle of nationality is Vindicated by the latter in a noble passage.  I quote it from Sombart’s “Socialism and the Social Movement.”

“Nationality in its highest form is ... a precious possession.  It is the highest expression of human civilisation in an individual form, and mankind is the richer for its appearance.  Our purpose is not only to see to it that men shall be housed and fed and clothed in a manner worthy of human beings, but also that they may become humanised by participation in the culture of centuries,