It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of a nation. The call that comes to a people’s heart from the soil that gave them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how infinitely pathetic! The land of one’s country may be so bleak, so bare, so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs of one’s country may be the simplest staves that ever shaped themselves into music, yet they search our hearts as the loftiest compositions never can. The language of one’s country (even the dialect of one’s district) may be the crudest corruption that ever lived on human lips, yet it lights up dark regions of our consciousness which the purest of the classic tongues can never reach. Do we not all feel this, whatever the qualities or defects of our native speech--every Scotsman, every Irishman, every Welshman, nay, every Yorkshireman, every Lancashireman, every Devonshireman, when he hears the word and the tone which belong to his own people only? There are phrases in the Manx and the Anglo-Manx of my own little race which I can never hear spoken without the sense of something tingling and throbbing between my flesh and my skin. Why? Because it is the home-speech of my own island, and whatever she is, whatever fate may befall her, however she may treat me, she is my mother and I am her son.
Such is the mighty and mysterious thing which we call a nation’s soul. Nobody can explain it, nobody can account for it, but woe to the presumptuous empire which tries to wipe it out. It can never be wiped out. Crushed and trodden on it may be, as Austria has crushed and trodden on the soul of Austrian Poland, and as Germany has crushed and trodden on the soul of Prussian Poland, when they have fallen so low in the scale of civilized peoples as to flog Polish school children for refusing to learn their catechism and say their prayers in a language which they cannot understand. But to kill the soul of a nation is impossible. The German Chancellor could not do that when he violated the body of Belgium. And though Warsaw has fallen the fatuous Prince Leopold of Bavaria, with his preposterous proclamations, cannot kill the soul of Poland.
