small communities like Athens,
Florence, Holland, and Elizabethan England, our religion to an
insignificant people who inhabited a narrow strip of land in the Eastern
Mediterranean. And small nations are as valuable to the world to-day as
they have ever been. Denmark has enriched our educational experience by the
establishment of her famous high schools, which we can hardly imagine her
doing had she been a province of Prussia; Norway has given us the greatest
of modern dramatists, Henrik Ibsen; and Belgium has not only produced
Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, but is industrially the most highly developed
country on the continent. The world cannot afford to do without her small
peoples, who must be either independent or autonomous if they are to find
adequate expression for their national genius, if they are to obtain proper
conditions in which "to live, think, love, and labour for the benefit of
all." Can we guarantee to them this freedom? That is one of the great
questions which this war will settle.[4]

[Footnote 1: See _Selections from Treitschke_, translated by A.L. Gowans,
pp. 17-20, 58-61.]

[Footnote 2: See _Selections from Treitschke_, pp. 17-20, 58-61.]

[Footnote 3: _The Expansion of England_, p. 349. See also p. 1, "Some
countries, such as Holland and Sweden, might pardonably regard their
history as in a manner wound up."]

[Footnote 4: See J.M. Robertson, _Introduction to English Politics_, pp.
251-390; Mr. H.A.L. Fisher's pamphlet on _The Value of Small States_, in
which, however, the distinction between _states_ and _nations_ is not
made clear; and the article on "Nationalism and Liberalism" in _The Round
Table_, December 1914.]

Sec.5. _The National Idea in Italy: The Ideal Type_.--Let us now turn to
Italy, a country which has in the past been as much of a European Tom
Tiddler's ground as Belgium, though for rather different reasons. Italy
is inhabited by a race speaking a common language and observing a common
religion, she has historical memories as glorious as those of any other
country in the world, and her natural boundaries are almost as well-defined
as those of Great Britain; yet it was not until the latter half of the
nineteenth century that she managed to become a nation. The chief reason
why she remained a "geographical expression" long after England, France,
and Spain had acquired national unity was the fact that she was until
comparatively recent times an example of the less containing the g