No, it was a road of quagmires and quicksands into which Depretis and
Crispi led Italy. The less she knows and thinks of Empire the better for
her and for mankind. Latin self-consciousness, if it has its faults of
rhetoric, at least enables Young Italy to see that Empire is not to be
bought without an ethic of blood and iron, which is foreign to the home
ethic. Imperialism is only for races strong or stupid enough to run a
double standard. Italy has given her blood prodigally enough for the
right to be Italy, but she has given it of her own free will. And
volunteer armies, self-inspired, are the only sort that a true
civilisation can tolerate. Despicable is the nation which sends
mercenaries to do its fighting. The soldier like the priest—whose black
robe makes the eternal ground-bass of Italy—is one of the unfortunate
differentiations of humanity—a type that should never have been
evolved. Specialisation—division of labour—is all very well when it
gives us doctors, carpenters, engineers, lawyers, but every man must do
his own praying and his own fighting. It is comforting to find Young
Italy as set against soldiers as against priests.
Though United Italy has followed the normal path of nationhood—large
army, large navy, large taxes, and my country right or wrong—there is
still a saving remnant to justify Mazzini’s prophetic faith in his
people. And, indeed, one does not know where else to look for “the
saviours of the world.” The French—once the favourites in the
rôle—have too hobbledehoyish a devotion to the sex-joke, the Germans
are too tamed, the Americans too untamed, the Spaniards and Russians too
brutalised by bull-fights or _pogroms_, the English too inconsequent.
Possibly the New Zealanders may be the first to build the model State,
possibly some people of Latin America, that land of sociology and
secular education. But these are too remote for their results to leaven
the Old World, and on the whole the Italians with their ancient
civilisation and their renewed youth appear least unfitted to lead
humanity onwards.
But the notion that the Millennium can be reached through a people with
a mission, inspiring as it may yet prove to Italy, is a notion not
without its limitations and drawbacks. It may easily degenerate into
aggression as with the English or into inactive vanity as with the Jews.
True that the Jews—the original missionary people, in whom the families
of the earth were to be blessed—have made the Millennium possible by
their creation of the Bourse. In their Bank of Amsterdam, founded in
1609 by the refugees from Spain and Portugal, the infinitely complex
system of international finance took its rise. Professor Sombart, the
German professor of economics, credits the Jews with the entire
invention of the apparatus of the Stock Exchange. And the Stock
Exchange, in criss-crossing with threads of gold all these noisy
nationalities, is turning war into a ridiculous destruction of one’s own
wealth. In the security necessary for international investments lies the
prime hope of the world’s peace. But it was an evolution whose form was
not foreseen by the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah predicted that the peoples
would beat their swords into ploughshares; he should have said shares in
ploughs.
The success of Esperanto—likewise invented by a Jew—the spread of
World Congresses, and even of World Sports, constitute, like Science and
Art, a valuable corrective to the excesses of Nationalism, which has
been sadly overdone in the reaction against the cosmopolitanism of the
eighteenth century. Nationality, born as it is of historical,
biological, and geographical differences, is a natural division of human
groups, though a division devoid of the rigidity which patriots pretend,
inasmuch as all nationalities are constantly intermarrying both
physically and spiritually. But Nationalism—as Bernard Shaw has pointed
out—is a disease. It is a morbid state due to defect of the organs of
Nationality—to wit, territory and liberty. In health we are not
conscious of our organs, it is dyspepsia not digestion that forces
itself upon our attention. Nationalism rages in Poland or in Ireland as
it once raged in Italy. But for Italy, which has won back territory and
liberty, to continue at fever heat would be sickness, not health. Even
too much self-admonition to do noble things for national reasons rather
than for their own sakes is a morbid self-consciousness. To make history
too consciously is to make histrionics.