The word "natio" points to kinship and a body of kinsmen as the primary idea and fact marked by "nationality." "Nation," like dêmos, carries us back to the groups of kinsmen in which social communion all the world over is found to begin, But the "nations" of modern Europe have left these little groups so far behind that their culture has either forgotten the nationality of common kinship, or learned to treat it as an ideal splendidly false. Old ideas of common descent have been weakened in European progress by many causes. As the barbarian invaders settled down, ties of communal brotherhood tended to be displaced by ties of locality, just as among the Hebrews "Sons of Israel" had given way to the "Sacred Land." Sir Henry Maine, in his Early History of Institutions,[1] has admirably described this process by which "the land begins to be the basis of society instead of kinship;" and in a familiar passage of his Ancient Law he has traced a corresponding development of territorial from tribal sovereignty. Feudalism, linking personal obligations with the ownership of land, played a prominent part in this development. Moreover, the feudal seigneurs in another way aided in weakening the old sentiments of kinship; like the Roman patricians, they united ideas of privilege and descent, and prevented conceptions of common kinship from being popularised. Feudalism, indeed, based as it was upon the life or death or coming of age of an individual, could not but undermine corporate ideas of clanship and kinship. Christianity, again, but in a very different manner from feudalism, weakened European ideas of national kinship, turning the hopes of the scholar and the serf alike to that great democracy of Christian brotherhood before which all earthly distinctions of national as well as
- ↑ pp. 73, sqq.
