H
Hong Kong Chinese
Guest
I need someone to translate this paragraph into plain English. Many thanks in advance.
The link:http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=1125We are now perhaps in a position to distinguish the idea of country from certain other kindred notions —state, nation, society. The state is simply a collectivity gathered under a sovereign authority or government which rules over the territory inhabited by that collectivity. It may include several nations or parts of nations. To understand that the State is not only a different notion from that of country but may not correspond with it at all, we have but to think of Poland, Ireland, and Alsace-Lorraine in 1914. For most of the people of those three territories their country was something wholly different from the State or States of which they formed a part. A country, a patrie, is the long growth of centuries, a State may be formed over night. The distinction between country (patrie, fatherland) and nation is perhaps not so easy to make plain. Commonly they are the same entity but looked at from a different point of view. The nation is a nation whether looked at by friend or foe, citizen or foreigner; it is a patrie only to the individuals who compose it and perhaps not to all of these. In the Ireland of not so long ago there were individuals not a few who, though undoubtedly Irish by nationality, spoke of "this country" and "our country" and meant— Great Britain. There were Czechs and Poles of that type in the Austria of before the last War. I am not blaming but merely calling attention to a fact. Again there are emigrants, thoroughly loyal citizens of their new country, who still look back with longing and regret to the "old country," their true fatherland, which they have quitted forever. And again there are those whose love and loyalty go both to their "petite patrie" (Brittany, the Basque Country, Bavaria) and to the greater country of which it forms a par
