A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the area of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type, whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into non-European territory.  Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside Europe.  Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by ‘the scramble for the world.’  Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa, and that the ‘pact of humanity’ would ultimately be ‘signed’ by homogeneous and independent ‘nations,’ who would cover the whole land surface of the globe.  But he never indicated the political forces by which that result was to be brought about.  The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary stage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality to Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself.

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked forward, as Mazzini did, to a ‘pact of humanity,’ which should include even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as existing between any State and the States or populations outside its boundaries.  ‘The only sound principle of action,’ he said, ’for a great State is political egoism.’[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck’s death German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the defenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the Social-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns.

[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J.W.  Headlam, Bismarck, p. 83.

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire.  From the publication of Seeley’s Expansion of England in 1883 till the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a ‘Blood,’ an ‘Island Race,’ consisting of homogeneous English-speaking individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the other inhabitants of the Empire as ’the white man’s burden’—­the necessary material for the exercise of the white man’s virtues.  The idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that it would come peacefully and inevitably as a