18 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE PASSING OF THE NATION 19 its own product as directly answers its needs, and exchanging the balance with similar producing organizations for such useful articles as it does not itself produce. And this view is undoubtedly justified by the historic origins of the modern nation.
The conception of the Nation, in our sense of the word, is of comparatively recent date. During the Middle Ages there was no such thing in Christian Europe. When order emerged in Europe from the chaos of the great migration, by the establishment of the feudal system, European Society was, on the one hand, broken up into innumerable small fragments; and, on the other hand, these innumerable fragments of humanity formed one whole, referred to, collectively, as Christendom.
The economy of this society was, on the one hand, uniformbeing predominantly agricultural; and, on the other hand, fragmentary each fragment being self sustaining and therefore independent of the others. And this economy stamped its character upon the people and fashioned its political, moral and mental organization. The masses of the lower strata of the population were broken up into small local groups having local characteristics and customs, as well as separate dialects and religious rites and observances. And each local group formed a political entity. the feudal Lord being sovereign as far as his serfs and feudations were concerned. Whatever allegiance there was, was due to him who was the real Lord the over lord claiming allegiance only indirectly. On the other hand, the upper crust the feudal nobility and the clergy, the possessors of power and the carriers of whatever intellectual life there was then in Europe formed one family with a common culture and common institutions; they had one religion, one language, one literature and one political allegiance. This unity of all Christendom in everything that was not merely local custom was symbolized by the Pope and the Emperor one representing the spiritual and the other the political unity of all Christian Europe.
Toward the close of the Middle Ages, with the beginning of the development of our modern commercial and industrial era the breaking up of the old feudal order and the substitution therefor of what has come to be known as the bourgeois or capitalist economic system this social and political aspect of Europe began to change. On the one hand the local differences began to disappear, making great bodies of people spread over large areas more akin to each other in manners, customs, religious observances, language and modes of thought. On the other hand, the spiritual and political unity of the upper crust of Christendom began to break up. Capitalism needed larger economic units for its development. The small groups therefore began to coalesce and amalgamate into larger units which would permit of the larger economic life which was the characteristic of the new era. But this very process of coalescence and centralization into larger economic units had as a necessary corollary a process of separation and division, differentiating the larger groups, when formed, from each other. The same process that made people within a certain territory more akin to each other, of necessity made them more different and distinct from people outside this territory, inhabiting some other great district, whose dwellers were acquiring a homogeneous character of their own.
This double process of coalescence and division usually found its natural boundaries in some well defined geographical characteristics of the European Continent. The sea and the great mountain ranges normally marked the outlines of the several divisions into which Europe was to break up. The dwellers within these boundaries were separated from the rest of Europe and started on the road towards the formation of a separate political, economic, social and linguistic group towards the formation of a Modern Nation, Thus arose the nations of Modern Europe, each with its own language and separate and distinct social, political and economic life: England, France, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Italy and Germany.
With the breaking up of the homogeneity of Europe and the formation of separate nations, each constituting a separate political state, there began to develop separate and distinct national cultures in place of the common European culture which pre vailed during the Middle Ages. The first great manifestation