Pictures of Transylvania [antikvár]

What is a nation ? Is it merely a certain number of human beings submitted to one government? Can you make a nation by drawing with your pencil a new boundary-line on the map and calling „nation" those who live within the territory thus combined ? Theoretically nobody would venture to declare this feasible; theoretically everybody knows, or at least feels, that a nation is something more than this; that its making requires the constant operation of unifying forces, moral and economic; that a nation is not a nation because it has one government, but that it has rather one government because it is a nation. Every attempt to make a nation by artificial contrivances — and this has been tried over and over again in the course of centuries and is attempted even now — has aKvays failed and must always fail, just as „homunculus" in Göthe's Faust, the individual man born of chemical experiments, failed. Only the spontaneous working of organic forces can shape a mass of human beings into a nation. These forces are manifold: moral, cultural, economic. Racial affinity is one of them, but in many cases it is counteracted by agencies that prove more powerful. There have always been and there are still nations including