Nationality is to political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring, namely, of the mechanism.

The two principles of organisation have this in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them in a precise formula.

That I am a person I know; but what is a person?
That Ireland is a nation I know; but what is a nation?
"A community of memories and hopes," says Anatole France; but that applies to a football club.

Something for which a man will die, says Mr T.M.Healy: but men will die for strange reasons; there was a French poet who shot himself because the trees were always green in the spring and never, for a change, blue or red.

A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics' of sociology.