conception is the most coherent and truest form and is therefore the
most moral, because it sees a people realised in the consciousness and
will of the few or even of one only; an ideal which moves to its
realisation in the consciousness and will of all. By "all" is meant
all who derive their justification as a nation, ethnically speaking,
from their nature and history, and who follow the same line of
spiritual formation and development as one single will and
consciousness--not as a race nor as a geographically determined
region, but as a progeny that is rather the outcome of a history which
perpetuates itself; a multitude unified by an idea embodied in the
will to have power and to exist, conscious of itself and of its
personality.


10. Conception of the State.

This higher personality is truly the nation, inasmuch as it is the
State. The nation does not beget the State, according to the decrepit
nationalistic concept which was used as a basis for the publicists of
the national States in the Nineteenth Century. On the contrary, the
nation is created by the State, which gives the people, conscious of
their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence.
The right of a nation to its independence is derived not from a
literary and ideal consciousness of its own existence, much less from
a _de facto_ situation more or less inert and unconscious, but from an
active consciousness, from an active political will disposed to
demonstrate in its right; that is to say, a kind of State already in
its pride (_in fieri_). The State, in fact, as a universal ethical
will, is the creator of right.