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Updated: October 22, 2025
The will-to-dominion of virile nations exulting in their nationhood; the desire to obtain a more abundant supply of luxuries than had earlier been available, and to make profits therefrom; the zeal of peoples to impose their mode of civilisation upon as large a part of the world as possible; the existence in the Western world of many elements of restlessness and dissatisfaction, adventurers, portionless younger sons, or religious enthusiasts: these have been the main operative causes of this huge movement during the greater part of the four centuries over which it has extended.
They determined on a public levee, to which were summoned whatever there was of respectability, authority, genius and worth in the island, which recognised the wisdom, justice and holiness of the struggle for Nationhood. All the corporations, every delegation which derived public authority from the popular voice, besides citizens of the unincorporated towns, answered the summons with alacrity.
It has fostered the rise of a sense of nationhood in the young communities of the new lands, and in the old and decaying civilisations of the most ancient historic countries. It has given a freedom of development to self-government such as history has never before known.
A parvenu among the great states having only attained the dignity of nationhood in the mid-nineteenth century Germany has shown none of that 'genius for equality' which is the secret of good manners and of friendship among nations as among individuals. Her conversation, at home and abroad, had the vulgar self-assertiveness of the parvenu, and turned always and wholly upon her own greatness.
He did a great deal to arrest the outflow of the nation's best blood by emigration, and, if he had no strong or striking policy on matters educational and industrial, he gave manhood to the people, he developed character in them, he gave them security in their lands and homes, and, if the unhappy cataclysm of his later days had not be-fallen, he would unquestionably have given them a measure of self-government from which they could march onward to the fullest emancipation that the status of nationhood demands.
Before self-determination can operate there must be a "self" capable of making decisions and carrying them into practice. Identification of the "self," or "nationhood" as it was called in this era, involved bitter domestic struggle, internal reorganization and consolidation.
Art came upon Holland after heroic wars in which the Dutchmen vehemently asserted their nationhood, defending their country against the Spaniard, even to the point of letting in the sea upon the invaders. Art came upon England when England was most adventurous, after the victories of Marlborough.
Yet from time to time men have arisen among them who not only have given intimate views of a new civilisation, but have added something to the permanent stock of what Matthew Arnold used to call 'the best that is known and thought in the world. Even when the independent nationhood of the United States was still but an aspiration, Benjamin Franklin had familiarised Europe with much that has since been recognised as inherent in the modes of thought and manners of the Western race.
Paying tribute to the memory of men like Tone, lifting up the language of Ireland from the mire, linking up the present with the old days of true patriotic endeavour these are the doings that will eventually bring our land from the mazes of humbug into the clear dawn that heralds Nationhood."
The massive Roman Universal State, stretching for centuries across parts of three continents, had broken up into a multitude of tiny semi-sovereign, semi-independent fragments. Some of the fragments as leagues, alliances and coalitions were reaching nationhood. New dawn was illuminating the Dark Ages.
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