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Updated: October 22, 2025
The National Idea in Belgium and the Problem of Small Nations. The problem of the Netherlands, which it will be convenient to deal with first, introduces us to an aspect of nationhood which we have hitherto not touched upon.
"In supporting Home Rule for Ireland we abandon no principle of Irish nationhood as laid down by the fathers in the Irish movement for independence, from Wolfe Tone and Emmett to John Mitchell, and from Mitchell to Kickham and Parnell." "Our ultimate goal is the national independence of our country."
Deduct what they carried with them from England ready-made, their common English Language, and that same Constitution, or rather elixir of constitutions, their inveterate and now, as it were, inborn reverence for the Constable's Staff; two quite immense attainments, which England had to spend much blood, and valiant sweat of brow and brain, for centuries long, in achieving; and what new elements of polity or nationhood, what noble new phasis of human arrangement, or social device worthy of Prometheus or of Epimetheus, yet comes to light in America?
His 'Whispering in the Wattle Boughs' does not express the voices of the forest, but the echoes of a sad youth, the yearnings of an exile; his 'Song of Autumn' is not a song of autumn, but a forecast of his own death a forecast that was fulfilled. If he ever felt any enthusiasm for the future nationhood of Australia, he did not express it.
The orator of the day rightly, in our opinion, described that hallowed spot in Bodenstown as one of the holiest places in Ireland to-day, from the nationalist standpoint, holding as it does the ashes of the man who, without friends, money or influence to help him, and by sheer force of character, intensity of purpose and earnestness, prevailed upon the greatest emperor-general the world has ever seen Napoleon Bonaparte, to make a descent on Ireland, in order to aid our starved, tortured, and persecuted people to shake off the shackles that kept them in slavery, and elevate Ireland once more to the dignity of full, free, and untrammelled nationhood.
The process was typified in the British Colonies of North America between 1770 and 1789 which produced the United States of North America. Asians and Africans who gained their independence after 1945 faced a double problem: the establishment of nationhood, and regional consolidation. The British colonies in North America won their independence as a loose confederation of sovereign states.
By partitioning Bengal he had struck both at the dignity of the Bengalee "nation" and at the nationhood of the Indian Motherland, in whose honour the old invocation to the goddess Kali, "Bande Materam," or "Hail to the Mother," acquired a new significance and came to be used as the political war-cry of Indian Nationalism.
Sir Charles, too, was wont to stress the strategic importance of the Canadian Pacific Railway as Canada's contribution to the defence of the Empire. His arguments had much force, but they were obviously the product of a time of transition, uneasy answers to the promptings of the slow-rising spirit of nationhood. Action, or inaction, corresponded to words.
There followed these memorable words: "We believe profoundly that the time has come when the sheltered existence which we have given India cannot be prolonged without damage to her national life; that we have a richer gift for her people than any that we have yet bestowed on them; that nationhood within the Empire represents something better than anything India has hitherto attained; that the placid, pathetic contentment of the masses is not the soil on which such Indian nationhood will grow, and that in deliberately disturbing it we are working for her highest good."
Mr Chamberlain submitted a memorandum showing that the United Kingdom spent annually for military and naval purposes 29s 3d per head while Canada spent 2s, New Zealand 3s 4d, and Australia 4s and urged that it was inconsistent with the dignity of nationhood that the Dominions should thus leave the mother country to bear the whole or almost the whole cost of defence.
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