Dante’s hopes in Henry VII were doomed to disappointment. The disappointment did not shake his faith in the Holy Roman Empire as a panacea for all the temporal ills of a Christendom distracted by individual and national self-seeking and aggression. If we turn to the First Book of the _Monarchia_, wherein Dante develops his Political Theory, we shall find that, at first reading, the actual person of the Emperor seems essential; just as, at first sight, he seems to rule out Democracy, together with Oligarchy and Tyranny, as a “perverted form of Government.”[60] Here we must remember Dante’s environment. His personal experience of the chances of freedom and justice in his native city would give him an instinctive bias against a non-monarchial form of government. Whether the system by which Florence ruled itself in the opening years of the fourteenth century is technically to be styled Democracy or Oligarchy, or a compound of the two, it was certainly, in practice, for Dante, a Hydra-headed Tyranny of the worst description. Further, it may be well to realise that _personal_ authority was the only type of Suzerainty, the only form in which a paramount and impartial Sway, or a world-wide Court of Appeal had appeared on his mental horizon. It has been said of Mazzini’s Republicanism that it did not rule out “Imperialism” in the sense familiar to British minds, of “The White’s Man’s Burden.” He approved of the British _Raj_ in India, and pictured his own free Italy of the future as possibly destined to spread the blessings of her own historic civilisation by a similar rule over pupil-peoples. May it be claimed in like manner for Dante, whose writings so profoundly inspired Mazzini and his fellow patriots of the _Risorgimento_, that though he is in a sense a thorough-going Imperialist, yet his Imperialism is, at bottom, not inconsistent with a more modern aspiration for a “World made safe for Democracy,” and kept safe by a “League of Nations”? Dante is Imperialist; but if we enquire of him what is the _raison-d’-être_ of Empire, he will answer: “It is the temporal well-being of mankind.” This “well-being” consists in the fulfilment of the purpose of man’s earthly life; the true and unobstructed self-expression of that personal freedom of choice—that prerogative of self-determination—which God has given to man as His divinest gift: unique and universal endowment of His intelligent creatures—that “Liberty of Will” which is so nobly hymned by Beatrice in the _Paradiso_ (v. 19-24)— Lo maggior don che Dio per sua larghezza Fesse creando, ed a la sua bontate Più conformato, e quel ch’ e’ più apprezza, Fu de la volontà la libertate, Di che le creature intelligenti, E tutte e sole, fuoro e son dotate. In his Political Theory, as in his Mystic Pilgrimage, Dante is the Apostle of Liberty. Libertà va cercando, ch ’è si cara, Come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta.