ABSTRACT
Balkan Peninsula. It was a religious passion with large numbers of Poles. It had contributed to the failure of the union of Holland and Belgium. But the two countries where it produced the most striking political and military results were Germany and Italy. Germany since the Middle Ages had been divided and subdivided, and her vague constitution, which embraced Czechs, some Poles, and other non-German elements, gave no satisfaction to the national desire for unity. In Italy a sense of common nationality was rooted in the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment and the cultural revival after 1775 and was stimulated by Napoleonic reorganisation. But since 1815 her seven separate states had been restored and Lombardy-Venetia annexed by Austria. We have seen how the Risorgimento (the word means resurrection and is properly applied to the period before political unification) was deepened by the failure of the revolutionary year, 1848. Italianism had been awakened in classes not normally politically alive. There were indeed differences of origin and temperament in the peninsula. The Lombard and the Sicilian were separated from one another by a wide difference of language and of historic development. But nationality, it is now clear to us, is rather a question of feeling than of objective fact. And the past greatness of the peoples of Italy, the dim memories of the Roman Empire, the poems of Dante, the art and science of the Renaissance, all served to keep alive the feeling that the Italians were a single and a great people. Moreover the large and powerful state had come to seem more attractive than the sturdy regionalism that chiefly marked the period before the revolutions of 1848. Mazzini had always an important influence on the Italian mind. To him and to his followers the claim of Italian nationality was not only a matter of history and pride but of passionate and almost religious belief. Italy united, free, democratic and republican was the one absorbing passion of his life; an ideal to be pursued at all costs and by all means. He held by each element of his programme. It was as important to him that Italy should be democratic and republican as that it should be united and free. He could not bring himself to accept the gift of unity and freedom at the hand of the Emperor of the French or of the King of Sardinia. We must add that he was able to look beyond nationality, and dreamed of the free nations of Europe voluntarily organising themselves into a greater association for peaceful co-operation.
