5 (written 1836).

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a
great and invaluable part in the development of the political
consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is
becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the
problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini,
that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a
reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous national
States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]
Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicity
of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the
greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into
homogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction
of the high mountains,' but were intermingled from village to village;
and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, for
instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples
of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties,
that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous population of patriotic
Magyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to
the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece
... to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier
against the European encroachments of Russia.'[110] In Macedonia to-day
bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure
tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival
populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the
purposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains.
Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the
Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, there
must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants
belonging to widely different national types.

[109] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 275.

[110] _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. vi. p. 258.

Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity created by 'blood and
iron' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of the
nineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the assumption
that the members of the dominant nationality would always vehemently
desire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that the
Social-Democrats,