There is no civilized nation now existing that has been,
developed from a common ancestor this side of Adam, and the most
mixed are the most civilized. The nearer a nation approaches to
a primitive people of pure unmixed blood, the farther removed it
is from civilization. All civilized nations are political
nations, and are founded in the fact, not on rights antecedent to
the fact. A hundred or more lost nationalities went to form the
Roman empire, and who can tell us how many layers of crushed
nationalities, superposed one upon another, serve for the
foundation of the present French, English, Russian, Austrian, or
Spanish nationalities? What other title to independence and
sovereignty, than the fact, can you plead in behalf of any
European nation? Every one has absorbed and extinguished--no one
can say how many--nationalities, that once had as good a right to
be as it has, or can have. Whether those nationalities have been
justly extinguished or not, is no question for the statesman; it
is the secret of Providence. Failure in this world is not always
a proof of wrong; nor success, of right. The good is sometimes
overborne, and the bad sometimes triumphs; but it is
consoling, and even just, to believe that the good oftener
triumphs than the bad.
In the political order, the fact, under God, precedes the law.
The nation holds not from the law, but the law holds from the
nation.
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