y-two years ago in an English
review by the greatest democrat of his time. In April 1852 Mazzini
published in the _Westminster Review_ an appeal to England to intervene on
the Continent in favour of the revolutionary movements in progress there
since 1848. The following is an extract from that article:

"The menace of the foreigner weighs upon the smaller States; the last
sparks of European liberty are extinguished under the dictatorial veto of
the retrograde powers. England--the country of Elizabeth and Cromwell--has
not a word to say in favour of the principle to which she owes her
existence. If England persist in maintaining this neutral, passive, selfish
part, she will have to expiate it. A European transformation is inevitable.
When it shall take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty
places at once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided,
the peoples will remember that England had stood by, an inert, immovable,
sceptical witness of their sufferings and efforts.... England will find
herself some day a third-rate power, and to this she is being brought by a
want of foresight in her statesmen. The nation must rouse herself and shake
off the torpor of her Government."

Mr. Ponsonby appealing in the name of the people to Sir Edward Grey to
stand aloof from European war; Mazzini appealing in the name of the people
to the respectable, peaceable, middle classes of England to forsake
Cobden's pacifist doctrines and throw England's sword into the scale of
European revolution--it is a strange contrast which serves to remind us
that the word "democracy," so lightly bandied about by political parties,
has many different meanings and has stood for many different policies. It
may be roughly said that it stood for internationalism in 1792, when France
claimed as her mission the liberation of all nations under the tricolor;
it stood for nationalism in 1848 in the mouth of Mazzini, Kossuth and the
German constitutional party; to-day it again stands for internationalism
in the more advanced countries of Europe, but are we justified as yet in
calling this more than a phase in the development of democratic doctrine?
It is a very difficult question, which it would be presumptuous to try to
answer offhand; all we have tried to show here is that, on the whole, the
assumption as to the peaceful tendencies of a democratic foreign policy is
a doubtful one, on which we must to some extent reserve our judgment.