Excerpt from Wales Her Origins Struggles and Later History Institutions and Manners

On no historical subject is the modern mind, saturated as it is with a superficial philosophy of Imperialism, so apt to go astray, and with dire consequences, as on the question of nationality. Sometimes the term 'nation' is used even by statesmen and philosophers with a mere territorial or geographical significance, and made to include such widely divergent and utterly unrelated phenomena as, for instance, the Tyrolese and the Germans, at other times it is used synonymously with the much more modem and artificial term 'state.' The reason for this confusion is obvious. A nation, like most of the simple and elemental things of our experience, does not readily admit of definition, although the phenomenon itself is perfectly easy to recognize. When we take into consideration the nations of the West as we know them to-day, in a more or less complex state of development, we find it almost impossible to discover anything in the nature of a common denominator, a deciding characteristic for all of them. A common racial origin, a distinct language, political independence, peculiar and definite customs and traditions, a homeland with an unbroken and independent history, religious affinity, military unity, have all of them been suggested as distinguishing characteristics, but on application to concrete instances all of them fail. A modern poet came nearer the truth than all the philosophers when he said that "a community of memories and of hopes" is the common characteristic of all nations, but even this loose and spiritual definition requires, if not modification, at least restatement.

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