Thank God, however, “_le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connaît pas_,” and some of these men, Corradini above all, were men with great hearts and deep souls. Out of faith and love of their country they realised what their conception of political reality would have kept them from seeing, namely that the root of all the evil was that the people of Italy had almost allowed the stifling of their souls. Religion in some provinces had been, so to speak, extirpated by the anti-Catholic democrats, republicans and radicals; both religion and patriotism had been lulled to sleep by the Socialists. The only political cell still living and strong was the family. The Nationalists were beset by another cause of sterility, the men these leaders recruited ... did they share their religious and truly patriotic motives? All did not, and that was the misery of it. Yet Corradini and some others were men of faith, just as much as Cavour and Mazzini had been; they could get men to join them in holding aloft a torch whose flame flickered in the cold twilight of Garibaldi’s Italy. They kept the sacred fire of Rome burning, and openly preached self-sacrifice, whilst great artists and sceptic scholars invited the youth of the upper class to enjoy life and shut themselves up in selfish existence. The Nationalists were men of faith, and as everything is possible to him that believeth, they kept working for their cause a certain number of followers who had joined them in the hope that better openings would be obtained for the export of Italian products and for Italian emigrants if a strong Nationalist foreign policy could be substituted for the existing weak one. For the Nationalists the nation was a transcendent reality, objectively considered as to the individual. Such conception is not peculiar to Italy by any means; yet it was modified in its Italianisation, but always in a way that made it more and more a policy for the gentry. A good deal of culture (I don’t mean philosophy, but a true sense of history and a sound judgment) was at the basis of it, and this did not tend to make it a popular movement. To sacrifice oneself to something transcendent, to an historical construction, is not for the mob: not even for the lower middle classes, absorbed as they are by the problems of daily life.