294
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
the actual sovereIgn. "In an address to France," said Burke, "in an attempt to treat with it, or in considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political, country. . . . The truth is, that France is out of itself-the moral France is separated from the geogra phicaL The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public law (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude), they are in Flanders and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the State, there are all the parliaments of the kingdom. . . . I am sure that if half that number of the same description were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly anything that I should call the people of England." 1 Rousseau draws nearly the same distinction between the country to which we happen to belong and that which fulfils towards us the political functions of the State. In the E11lile he has a sentence of which it is not easy in a translation to convey the point: (, Qui n'a pas une patrie a du lTIoins un pays." And in his tract on Political Economy he writes: "How shall men love their country if it is nothing more for them than for strangers, and bestows on them only that which it can refuse to none?" It is in the same sense he says, further on, (( La patrie ne peut subsister sans la liberté." 2 The nationality formed by the State, then, is the only one to which we owe political duties, and it is, therefore, the only one which has political rights. The Swiss are
1 Burke's ., Remarks on the Policy of the Allies II (Works, v. 26, 29, 30), 2 æuvres, i. 593, 595, ii. 717, Bossuet, in a passage of great beauty on the love of country, does not attain to the political definition of the word: II La société humaine demande qu' on aime la terre où l' on habite ensemble, ou la regarde comme une mère et une nourrice commune, . . . Les hommes en effet se sentent liés par quelque chose de fort, lorsqu'ils songent, que la même terre qui les a portés et nourris étant vivants, les recevra dans son sein quand ils seront morts" (II Politique tirée de l'Ecriture Sainte," æUV1'es, x, 317).
