development only in the last century. For our present purpose no attempt need be made to separate these two tendencies into different currents. The rise of nationality and the progress of human enfranchisement may be taken to be but different phases of the same thing, and it is, in fact, impossible to disentangle their history. Nationality has been at once the product and the instrument of the revolution—if we may use the latter word as a name for the whole great movement of revolt against the mediaeval order, and not in its conventional sense as the name for one phase of this movement, the political revolution that began in the eighteenth century. With almost equal truth it might be said that the revolution has been at once the product and the instrument of nationality. As we have seen already, the modern nation State is a comparatively new political phenomenon. It is only with the first beginning of the revolt against the mediæval order that national feeling in its modern sense first appears on the scene. It is only towards the close of the Middle Ages that anything that can really be called a nation begins to emerge; only at the end of the fifteenth century that the newly-formed national Powers distinctly take the lead in Europe, and only much later that national patriotism can be matched against religion as a political force. Indeed, it was only during the nineteenth century, after the storms of the French Revolution had awoke the peoples of Europe to a consciousness of their corporate existence, that the principle of nationality gained that complete ascendancy which has put an end for ever to the dream that one nation State can really absorb another or any essential portion of another.
We are now, accordingly, in a better position to understand the meaning of the national ideal. With the progress of the long revolution it has gone on growing in power and depth and significance. Each step of enfranchisement has increased the facilities for the formation and expression of the national will, and given clearness and intensity to its volitions, till, in its modern form, the
