For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the individual man and the unimaginable multitude of the human race. A man could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like himself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and educated by the same historical tradition,'[105] and could be thought of as a single national entity. The nation was 'the intermediate term between humanity and the individual,'[106] and man could only attain to the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of homogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens of the nation,'[107] and again, 'The pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct existence.'[108] [105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858). [106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273. [107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274 (written 1849). [108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 15 (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