Free institutions are next to
impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a
people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak
different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the
working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences
which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the
different sections of the country. An altogether different set of
leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another.
The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them.
One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are
circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same
system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears
more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the
common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much
stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels
aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine
another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel
that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance;
the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may
reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding
for the favour of the government against the rest.
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