Politics & Power Quote by Goldwin Smith

A Victorian historian declaring "Above all nations is humanity" is picking a fight with the defining religion of his age: nationalism. Goldwin Smith wrote in a period when the modern nation-state was hardening into something like a moral absolute, justified by flags, empire, and the pseudo-science of racial hierarchy. His line is a deliberate inversion of that hierarchy. It doesn’t merely plead for kindness across borders; it demotes the nation from supreme object of loyalty to a contingent arrangement, a useful tool at best, a lethal idol at worst.

The phrasing is compact and almost legalistic. "Above" implies rank and obligation: when duties collide, the higher claim wins. Smith is trying to install a kind of ethical constitution for modern politics, where the human is the ultimate sovereign. That’s a radical move in an era when humanitarian language often served as imperial cover. The subtext reads as a warning: if you sanctify the nation, you will find endless reasons to excuse cruelty - war becomes destiny, exploitation becomes "civilization", borders become alibis.

As a historian, Smith is also leveraging a longer view. Nations rise, redraw themselves, and disappear; humanity persists. The line works because it feels like a simple moral axiom, but it’s really an argument about historical scale and moral scale aligning. In a world busy inventing national myths, he insists the only myth worth keeping is the one that makes strangers count.