Actuation, realisation, concrete life, whatever the field we move in, whether we consider politics, artistic creation, or natural life, it requires two elements, the one universal, the other particular. Now history shows that the universal element spreads, notwithstanding frontiers and the will of men. Its force of expansion is a quality common to all ideas; but the particular is not to be imported, and it is as impossible to introduce it in foreign lands as it is to confine the other to any land. Hence the political applications of the same theories in different countries differ from each other as do the countries themselves. These differences, economic, political, religious, intellectual, in a word the historical differences existing between two countries determine the differences that the same theory will undergo when it is adopted by the people of different nations. The Italian patriots at the end of the eighteenth century were very few, and all, without exception, intellectuals. Some belonged to the higher or lower aristocracy, some belonged to the upper middle class, but all were scholars, men of the widest reading. It would be difficult to find nowadays a body of men so well informed. For one thing, production has increased immensely and life has lost the leisure that allowed intellectual tastes to be satisfied. The fact remains that at the close of that century Italy could boast of men aware of its inferior position, of its non-existence as a nation. Such men were ready to try anything, and did try to imitate the French revolution in so far as they could by founding the small republics that lasted one season or two, dying away like plants of distant countries, when they are planted in our soil. Their zeal, however, was not sterile, they failed in their immediate purpose, because they wanted to introduce not only ideas but the actual form in which these were expressed. A constitution, a battle, the plan of a town, a project of economic reform, each of these things is an expression endowed with an æsthetic value varying with the degree of perfection attained by the man who worked it out, and gave the idea that prompted him a suitable realisation. But the essential quality of the æsthetic creator is to be on a particular theme, the voice of his time and of the body of men he represents in his act of creation. The men of the revolution were by no means fair representatives of the people of France; but when they drew up the constitution they certainly realised on the whole the desiderata of most Frenchmen. Giving expression, giving form to the ideas that had agitated the whole century, they did it in the only way that could be a French way in those days.