Note (return) — Chapter IV

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.'[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans,' who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, 'alone in the midst of the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual faculties—which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their activity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim ... has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, prays to God, 'Help me my God! My boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide.'[104]