Alpha Book

The national states of
England, France, and Spain did not appear unmistakably with their
national boundaries, national consciousness, national literature, until
the opening of the sixteenth century; and it was long afterwards that
in Italy and Germany the national idea supplanted the older notions of
world empire or of city-state or of feudalism. The national state has
proved everywhere a far more powerful political organization than any
other: its functions have steadily increased, now at the expense of
feudalism, now at the expense of the church; and such increase has been
as constant under industrial democracy of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as under the benevolent despotism of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. But in measure as government has enlarged its
scope, the governed have worked out and applied protective principles
of personal liberties. The Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution,
the American Revolution, the uprisings of oppressed populations
throughout the nineteenth century, would be quite inexplicable in other
than modern times.


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