Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/20

 is necessary for the well-being of the world, primarily in order to set a check upon illegitimate national aspirations and the greed of kingdoms for increase of territory, and to provide a supreme court of arbitration. In its essence, the world regime of his imagination was a Europe in which the individual characteristics and rights of races, nations, and states would be preserved and developed in the freedom and peace required for the realisation of the goal of civilisation: freedom and peace secured by an Empire which, translated into modern language, becomes a supreme international tribunal of arbitration, armed with authority to compel the quarrels of princes and peoples to be submitted to it, and with power to enforce its impartial decisions for the temporal welfare of humanity. The traditions of such a tribunal, in Dante's eyes, would be Italian, its centre of necessity—by divine predestination, as he would deem—Rome. Thus it was the leading part of Italy in a restored European unity of civilisation in peace and freedom to which Dante's thoughts were directed, rather than towards her political unity as a nation; but he indicated that unity as part of her heritage in the sacred name of Rome, and—though perhaps more dimly—foreshadowed the ideal to which we are now looking as the League of Nations 4). 8