[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.

[100] Bismarck (J.W.  Headlam), p. 269.

Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed unless it consisted of a homogeneous nation.  But Bismarck’s policy of the artificial assimilation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical facts.  ‘God,’ he said, ’divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth....  Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design.  Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked out—­at least as far as Europe is concerned—­by the course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical conditions.’[101]

[101] Life, and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written 1858), p. 275.

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, ’reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.’[102] Mazzini attacked the ‘cosmopolitans,’ who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological impossibility.  No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual human beings.  Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for this reason:  ‘The cosmopolitan,’ he then said, ’alone in the midst of the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual faculties—­which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their activity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim ... has but two paths before him.  He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.’[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to God, ’Help me my God!  My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.’[104]

[102] Canning, Life by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818).

[103] Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8.

[104] Ibid., vol. iv. p. 274.

For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the individual man and the unimaginable multitude of the human race.  A man could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like himself ’speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and educated by the same historical tradition,’[105] and could be thought of as a single national entity.  The nation was ’the intermediate term between humanity and the individual,’[106] and man could only attain to the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of homogeneous nations.  ’Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens of the nation,’[107] and again, ’The pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct existence.’[108]