Human Nature in Politics: Third EditionWallas, Graham
Science
Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition
Wallas, Graham
Political ethics; Politics, Practical
[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.
[100] _Bismarck_ (J.W. Headlam), p. 269.
Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed
unless it consisted of a homogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of
the artificial assimilation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to
him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the
reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the
existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical
facts. 'God,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei
upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the
Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked
out--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great
rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical
conditions.'[101]
[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written
1858), p. 275.
Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength
the humanitarianism 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.
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