who are a not inconsiderable proportion of the
Prussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or
Danish fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their own
national characteristics, Prince Buelow's Bismarckian dictum the other
day, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominance
of an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The
same change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, and
both the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned that
Anglicisation of Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as a
necessary part of English policy.

A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the
area of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type,
whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension
during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into
non-European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor
Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take
into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside
Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual
preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by
'the scramble for the world.' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely
expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa,
and that the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' by
homogeneous and independent 'nations,' who would cover the whole land
surface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces by
which that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of
Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary
stage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality to
Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself.

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked
forward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity,' which should include
even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the
attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as
existing between any State and the States or populations outside its
boundaries. 'The only sound principle of action,' he said, 'for a great
State is political egoism.'[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck's death
German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the
defenceless inha