look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual personality. All these elements in so far as they are natural are evidently extraneous to our personality. We do dwell within this peninsula cloistered by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the Mediterranean. But if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere across the Atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula, we have preserved our nationality: Italy has crossed the ocean in our wake. Not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion, by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the same soul to the sound of one Name, to the colours of one flag, to the summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers. And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a nation. It is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness of that collective personality to which we feel we belong. Nationality consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a nation's character. But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its existence is not even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free and independent states and to secure recognition of a _de facto_ political personality on the strength of an assumed _de jure_ existence.