towards
which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur
of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that
it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.

Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to
trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's
life more auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be
ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State
system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,
not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the
distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the
bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,
made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the
cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of
municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew
the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age. For this,
Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the
stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the
political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,
shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not
from papal, but from imperial Rome.

The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,
of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle
of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as
humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.
Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but
recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other
continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,
and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the
side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.

Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality
and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against
each other. Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,
of which the Nation is the constituent unit. Ancient Hellas presents a
similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but
the City. There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a
conflict of principles similar to this which now