Page:The voice of an oppressed people.pdf/17

Rh social entity which counts in the political world. But today we are forced to acknowledge the existence of nations and we are obliged to make a distinction between states and nations; and that of course involves a true grasp of the incongruity of political and ethnographical boundaries. An Englishman, speaking of his nation, identifies the nation and the state. Not so the Serb or the Bohemian, because to his experience state and nation do not coincide, his nation being spread over several states, or sharing a state with other nations. We Slavs very keenly discriminate the state from the nation; but the Englishman will do the same if he uses expressions such as "the spirit" or "the culture" of the German and English nations.

In the Statesman's Yearbook for 1915 we find in Europe twenty-eight states, if we treat Austria-Hungary and Germany each as a single state; we must count fifty-three states if we separate Hungary from Austria and divide Germany into her twenty-five federal units.

If we take one of the few better ethnological maps of Europe—alas, a German one—we find sixty-two nations or nationalities. In other words, in Europe we have more than twice as many nations as states, and that means that the existing states are nationally minced, and that states must be composed of more than one nation. And that means further that there are in Europe far more dependent than independent nations; only seventeen nations are independent, or rather possess their own state organizations; but portions even of these independent nations are dependent upon other states. In fact, there are only a few states which do not contain more than one nation—only seven out of the twenty-eight. But if there are seven national states, that does not mean that these seven states are formed by seven nationalities; for some states contain the same nationality, and in other cases the same nationality is divided among different states.

And be it noted at once, these national states (national in