It was for Rome to command and not to obey; for the rest, to obey and
not to command. In this way the State is materialised within the pomoerium, the
urban body physically limited by walls. But the new peoples bring in a less
material interpretation of the State. Since it is a plan of a common enterprise,
its reality is purely dynamic; something to be done, the community in action. On
this view everyone forms a part of the State, is a political subject who gives
his support to the enterprise; race, blood, geographical position, social class-
all these take a secondary place. It is not the community of the past which is
traditional, immemorial- in a word, fatal and unchangeable- which confers a
title to this political fellowship, but the community of the future with its
definite plan of action. Not what we were yesterday, but what we are going to be
to-morrow, joins us together in the State. Hence the ease with which political
unity in the West leaps over all the limits which shut in the ancient State. For
the European, as contrasted with the homo antiquus, behaves like a man facing
the future, living consciously in it, and from its view-point deciding on his
present conduct.
Such a political tendency will advance inevitably towards still ampler
unifications, there being nothing in principle to impede it. The capacity for
fusion is unlimited. Not only the fusion of one people with another, but what is
still more characteristic of the national State: the fusion of all social
classes within each political body. In proportion as the nation extends,
territorially and ethnically, the internal collaboration becomes more unified.
The national State is in its very roots democratic, in a sense much more
decisive than all the differences in forms of government. It is curious to observe that when defining the nation by
basing it on community in the past, people always end by accepting as the best
the formula of Renan, simply because in it there is added to blood, language and
common traditions, a new attribute when we are told that is a "daily
plebiscite." But is the meaning of this expression clearly understood? Can
we not now give it a connotation of opposite sign to that suggested by Renan,
and yet a much truer one?-
