Free LNAT practice test

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longueur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word 'nationalism', but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation – that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty. By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'. But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word 'nationalism' for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

One of the greatest dangers which now confronts us is the increasing demand for ill-considered legislation, and the increasing readiness of would-be reformers to rely on authority rather than on public sentiment for securing their ends. When the republic was first founded, we had more to fear from the law breakers than from the law makers, from the absence of authority than from its over-exercise. People believed in individual liberty and even sometimes inclined to carry that idea to extremes. But this love of liberty has gradually given place to a zeal for standardization. The new democracy, in the words of Lord Farrer, is passionately benevolent and passionately fond of power. Today, it is from the law maker rather than from the law breaker that our American traditions of self-government have most to fear.

A century and a half ago our country was sparsely settled by men who prized personal liberty. The newborn nation was made up of separate commonwealths with distinct social and religious traditions, so that home rule was demanded as a matter of course. The constitution of the United States and its first ten amendments represented an effort to combine the needed minimum of centralized administration with the maximum of freedom for different localities and individuals to act in their own ways. Regulatory legislation by Congress was disliked and avoided.

As the country grew older these conditions gradually changed. Increasing density of population of itself brought more occasions for law making. The garbage heap which a man can put where he pleases when he has no neighbors within miles becomes a menace to public comfort and health when the country about him is closely settled; and the same sort of thing holds true with moral nuisances as well as material ones. The growth of large factories and large organizations of capital gave this increasing population harder industrial problems to deal with than their fathers had faced. As railroad transportation developed, these problems of industrial control became national instead of local.

All these things have given our legislative assemblies, and particularly our national Congress, more work to do than was imposed upon them in an earlier period. They are asked to pass a hundred times as many laws to-day as they were a century ago. The practical discussion by which these laws are put into shape has for the most part to be done in committee. The very mass of the work given them makes this course the only possible one. This leaves the representatives relatively little time or strength for legislative debate in the old sense of the term.

This change in the work of our legislatures has been attended with a corresponding change in our political ethics — in the standards to which we expect our representatives in the legislature to conform. At the time of the adoption of our Constitution it was assumed that Congress would be a deliberative body, which could subject to critical scrutiny the acts of the administration and the various lines of national policy proposed; and as a result of such deliberation would decide intelligently what was best for the people as a whole. I do not mean that Congress ever quite rose to this height. The unscrupulous politician we have had always with us, and he was just as unscrupulous in 1789 as he is in 1925 — probably a little more so. But our ideals of what he ought to do were different from what they are to-day. The representative was supposed to be a trustee for the public interest, not an agent of those who sent him to Congress. He went to Washington to make up his mind as to what was best; and if, as the result of a debate, he had seen new light which his constituents did not have when they sent him to Congress, he would have scorned the idea of being bound by their instructions or their expressed wishes.

It would be unfair to put the chief blame for this change of ideals upon the members of our legislative assemblies themselves. There has been a corresponding change in the demands of the people in the several districts. The number of men is very small indeed who will applaud a congressman for voting according to his personal convictions instead of for voting in the way that some of his constituents have demanded.