If we want to state the problem still more clearly and concisely, let us
put it this way: What real force is it which has produced this living in common
of millions of men under a sovereignty of public authority which we know as
France, England, Spain, Italy, or Germany? It was not a previous community of
blood, for each of those collective bodies has been filled from most
heterogeneous blood-streams. Neither was it a linguistic unity, for the peoples
to-day brought together under one State spoke, or still speak, different
languages. The relative homogeneousness of race and tongue which they to-day
enjoy- if it is a matter of enjoyment- is the result of the previous political
unification. Consequently, neither blood nor language gives birth to the
national State, rather it is the national State which levels down the
differences arising from the red globule and the articulated sound. And so it
has always happened. Rarely, if ever, has the State coincided with a previous
identity of blood and language. Spain is not a national State to-day because
Spanish is spoken throughout the country,[7] nor were Aragon and Catalonia national States because at a certain
period, arbitrarily chosen, the territorial bounds of their sovereignty
coincided with those of Aragonese or Catalan speech. We should be nearer the
truth if, adapting ourselves to the casuistry which every reality offers scope
for, we were to incline to this presumption: every linguistic unity which
embraces a territory of any extent is almost sure to be a precipitate of some
previous political unification.[8] The State has always been the great dragoman.
[7]It is not
even true in actual fact that all Spaniards speak Spanish, or all English
English, or all Germans High-German.
[8]Account is
not taken, of course, of such cases as Koine [Greek of the Hellenistic era -
note by ellopos.net] and lingua franca, which are
not national, but specifically international, languages.
