Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/306

280 The increase in bilinguality and multilinguality, attempts at the construction of an artificial language, the organisation of the literature of translation, interest in the affairs of the entire world (an interest gratified by the daily press)—all these things afford proof of the increasing unification of the differentiated and still differentiating nations.

The discovery and utilisation of the steam engine and its application to facilitate communication, served during the nineteenth century, not merely to promote freedom of movement within individual countries (after the peasantry previously chained to the soil had everywhere been freed), but they rendered it possible to effect national migrations which in respect of their extent and the importance of their consequences were nowise interior to the so-called national migrations which marked the closing days of the Roman empire. This matter is of importance, not in relation to America alone, but equally so in relation to Russia and to the colonisation of her home territories and of Siberia.

The eighteenth century, as the century of the enlightenment and of humanitarianism, solemnly proclaimed the rights of man, and in the ensuing epoch an advance was made towards the codification of the language and nationality. Beyond question this development was associated with increasing democratisation. In multilingual states the idea of nationality took a democratic form in contrast with the unifying and denationalising centralist tendencies of aristocratic and theocratic absolutism.

State and nation have never as yet been coterminous ideas. No national state has hitherto existed in Europe. I mean that if we except such political curios as Liechtenstein there is no instance in which all the members of a state belong to a single nation. Even little Montenegro is multilingual. Italy and Serbia respectively contain people who are not Italians and Serbs. Still, the idea of nationality becomes more and more vigorously state-constructive.

As a rule the extant multilingual states of Europe consist to a preponderant extent of a single stock. In Russia, however, the percentage of nonrussians is very large, and some of the nonrussian peoples of Russia are highly civilised, standing in respect of culture upon a loftier plane than the Russians proper. In Hungary the Magyars, though in a minority, are politically dominant, Switzerland has its own peculiar characteristics