It was an old idea, of course, for it had been embodied in that shadowy "Holy Roman Empire" which was the medieval dream of Rome the Great; but its form was new, and now for the first time it became a dream of the future rather than a dream of the past.
What men did not see then, and still for the most part fail to see, is that the human race can only work out these three ideas properly in a certain order.

Democracy and nationhood may, as in the case of Italy, be acquired by a people at the same moment; but without the realisation of the national idea it is hardly possible to conceive of democratic government for any country.

The national idea, therefore, precedes the social idea, as Mazzini rightly insists.

Still more must it precede the international idea.

By this it is not meant that every nation in the world must have grown to self-consciousness and have possessed itself of freedom before we come within sight of a world-concert and world-peace.