THE HUMAN NATURE AND MORALS OF THE CASE

But is the same in any sense true, despite Admiral Mahan, of the individual of a big State as compared to the individual of a small one? Does anyone think of paying deference to the Russian mujik because he happens to belong to one of the biggest empires territorially? Does anyone think of despising an Ibsen or a Björnsen, or any educated Scandinavian or Belgian or Hollander, because they happen to belong to the smallest nations in Europe? The thing is absurd, and the notion is simply due to inattention. Just as we commonly overlook the fact that the individual citizen is quite unaffected materially by the extent of his nation's territory, that the material position of the individual Dutchman as a citizen of a small State will not be improved by the mere fact of the absorption of his State by the German Empire, in which case he will become the citizen of a great nation, so in the same way his moral position remains unchanged; and the notion that an individual Russian is "dignified and enlarged" each time that Russia conquers some new Asiatic outpost, or Russifies a State like Finland, or that the Norwegian would be "dignified" were his State conquered by Russia and he became a Russian, is, of course, sheer sentimental fustian of a very mischievous order. This is the more emphasized when we remember that the best men of Russia are looking forward wistfully, not to the enlargement, but to the dissolution, of the unwieldy giant—"stupid with the stupidity of giants, ferocious with their ferocity"—and the rise in its stead of a multiplicity of self-contained, self-knowing communities, "whose members will be united together by