tic
enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the
right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched
in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national
life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political
existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt
shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as
France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings
and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states
offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with
European unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is to
live as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed most
persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in
subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization
as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple
internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions
and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress
by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many
reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in
regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to
be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home.
Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human
effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must
be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against
theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan
items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of
European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It
lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which
supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured
for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and
pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full
force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal
structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have
absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual
fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and
derivative institutions