No wonder that Mazzini should have realised what Rousseau could never see. The ethical nature of what goes under the name of “Nation” is a Mazzinian concept. When Hegel speculatively proclaimed this it had been already intuitively conceived, artistically expressed and religiously observed by the men to whom Mazzini’s ardent faith was like an electric current. The Mazzinian articles of faith were few, and had never been theoretically worked out. This helped their adoption by people who would never have grasped the import of a huge system. Whilst Rosmini and Gioberti were read by the few, Mazzini was on the lips and throbbed in the hearts of the many, so that the war he waged against materialism and individualism was effective. His mystic feeling spreads in young hearts as easily now as it did then. Lads take to sacrifice far more easily than men of a more mature age and Mazzini’s declarations all proclaimed self-sacrifice, self-effacement, even his idea of liberty. At the very time in which the Anglo-French idea of political reality was introduced in Italy, to rouse the country once more into life with the magic word liberty, this young man, a poet, an inspired prophet, was ready with a new meaning for that word. According to Mazzini the individual is merely the representation we have of our own self when we look at it as one amongst many and see it limited to the short span of time between the birth and the death of its body, whereas the self which can conceive of liberty, and therefore realise it, is the self everyone of us feels when in the silent recess of Mind we have a right to claim, a feeling to express, an intuition to cast into sound or colour, and a faith through which we link ourselves to the political, family, artistic and religious reality that has given us the consciousness of such right or aroused in us such family, artistic, or religious sense. To him political liberty could only mean for Italians the liberty of shaking off foreign rule and creating the nation. It was not and could not be the liberty to attend one’s private affairs as one wished, for this last meaning of the word had been elaborated in his country through Humanism and the Renaissance, and it was not only obsolete, but was the cause of Italy’s corruption and decay.