arianism 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]

[105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858).

[106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273.

[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274
(written 1849).

[108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 1