For there is a separate race, with its own patois, in Monaco. You would never spot it in the somewhat Teutonic cosmopolitanism of the Condamine and Monte Carlo tradesmen and hotel servants. It is not apparent in the impassive _croupiers_ of the Casino. But within a few hundred yards, in half a dozen streets and lanes, the physiognomy, the mentality, the language of the people make you realize that regarding Monaco as a separate country is not wholly a polite fiction to relieve the French Government of the responsibility for the Casino. These people are different, children as well as grown-ups. They are neither French nor Italian, Provençal nor Catalan, but as distinct as mountain Basques are from French and Spanish. It is not a racial group distinction, as with the Basques. In blood, the Monégasques are affiliated to their Provençal and Italian neighbors.
What one sees in the old town of Monaco is a confirmation of the assertion of many historians that nationality, in our modern political sense of the word, and patriotism, as a mass instinct shared by millions, are phenomena of the nineteenth century. Steam transportation, obligatory primary education, universal military service, are the factors that have developed national consciousness, and the exigencies and opportunities and advantages of the industrial era have furnished the motive for binding people together in great political organisms. Today if there were no outside interests working against the solidarity of human beings leading a commonwealth existence in the same country, the political organism would soon make the race rather than the race the political organism.
San Remo and Menton and Monaco are Riviera towns all within a few miles of each other. People of the same origin have three political allegiances. In half an hour your automobile will traverse the territories of three nations. Italians and French fight under different flags and were within an ace of being lined against each other in the war. Monégasques do not fight at all. Taxes and tariff boundaries, schools and military obligations, make the differences between the three peoples. Put them all under the same dispensation and where would be your races?