That was the era in which the great nations of Europe were taking their definitive personal physiognomy. (England, as has been said, had already the features that were going to be the family likeness to be reproduced all over the Anglo-Saxon world by her sons.) As De Sanctis points out, the European races were building up the “Patria” so fondly dreamed by Machiavelli for his own people, a “Patria” which was to be a political unity, fortified and cemented by religious, moral, and cultural elements. At this same time Italy not only failed to build up a “Patria,” but was losing her independence, her liberty, and her beloved and treasured pre-eminence in the historical world. Not that such a catastrophe was realised except by the keen mind of Machiavelli. It was unconscious, it was bound to be unconscious, since it happened just because national consciousness had vanished. How could it have assumed national shape? The name of Italy was to become a geographical expression, for its inhabitants were not citizens, they were mere inhabitants, subjects by natural determination of this or that petty Prince. The geographical name of a region becomes the name of a nation through the very long or extremely short process of formation of national consciousness that permits of all its inhabitants coming on the historical stage of the world as a person, through the manifestation of a personal will in foreign politics, which are the country’s assertion as a personal conscience. Thus a people is acknowledged as a nation by the rest of the world the moment when, through an action, the final scope of which is purely national, it asserts itself as a living organism able to manifest a will and act upon it. What Machiavelli had termed the _corruttela_ of Italy was the absence of national and religious consciousness, and he had pointed a way out of it.