This feeling of nationality
may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the
effect of 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. None of these circumstances, however, are either
indispensable, or necessarily sufficient by themselves. Switzerland
has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of
different races, different languages, and different religions.
Sicily has, throughout history, felt itself quite distinct in
nationality from Naples, notwithstanding identity of religion,
almost identity of language, and a considerable amount of common
historical antecedents. The Flemish and the Walloon provinces of
Belgium, notwithstanding diversity of race and language, have a much
greater feeling of common nationality than the former have with
Holland, or the latter with France. Yet in general the national
feeling is proportionally weakened by the failure of any of the causes
which contribute to it. Identity of language, literature, and, to some
extent, of race and recollections, have maintained the feeling of
nationality in considerable strength among the different portions of
the German name, though they have at no time been really united
under the same government; but the feeling has never reached to making
the separate states desire to get rid of their autonomy.
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