Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/257

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THE FREEDOM OF MEN
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Nationality movement? Nationality had no great hold in the Middle Ages, or indeed in Modern Times until the nineteenth century. It has arisen as the modern States have not only increased in size, but have also grasped wider functions within the Community. Nationalist movements are based on the restlessness of intelligent young men who wish for scope to live the life of ideas and to be among those who 'can' because they are allowed to do. In the old Greek and in the Mediæval World, Society was so loosely knit that there was plenty of scope in any considerable town. Is it not that fact which makes town-history so interesting until we come to the eighteenth century and then so banal? Take up the history of one of our more significant British cities, and see whether that be not true. When you come to the last few generations it becomes mere statistic of material growth; at the best the town becomes specialised in some important way, but it ceases to be a complete organism. All its institutions are second-rate, because its best people have gone away, unless it have some one establishment or industry of more than local fame, and that establishment or industry usually crushes rather than develops real local life.

Why were Athens and Florence the won-