The whole matter roots in the fact of nationality. Nationality is to
political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring,
namely, of the mechanism. The two principles of organisation have this
in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant
of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them
in a precise formula. That I am a person I know; but what is a person?
That Ireland is a nation I know; but what is a nation? "A community of
memories and hopes," says Anatole France; but that applies to a football
club. Something for which a man will die, says Mr T. M. Healy: but men
will die for strange reasons; there was a French poet who shot himself
because the trees were always green in the spring and never, for a
change, blue or red. A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea
of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics' of sociology. Each
of these formulas possesses a certain relative truth, but all of them
together come short of the whole truth. Nationality, which acts better
perhaps than it argues, is one of the great forces of nature and of
human nature that have got to be accepted.
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