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306 The Ideal of Human UnityAustria, a non-national empire, is broken to pieces, it perishesfor good; there is no innate tendency to recover the outwardunity, because there is no real inner oneness; there is only apolitically manufactured aggregate. On the other hand, a realnational unity broken up by circumstances will always preservea tendency to recover and reassert its oneness. The Greek Empirehas gone the way of all empires, but the Greek nation,after many centuries of political non-existence, again possessesits separate body, because it has preserved its separate ego andtherefore really existed under the covering rule of the Turk. Sohas it been with all the races under the Turkish yoke, becausethat powerful suzerainty, stern as it was in many respects, neverattempted to obliterate their national characteristics or substitutean Ottoman nationality. These nations have revived andhave reconstituted or are attempting to reconstitute themselvesin the measure in which they have preserved their real nationalsense. The Serbian national idea attempted to recover and hasrecovered all territory in which the Serb exists or predominates.Greece attempted to reconstitute herself in her mainland, islandsand Asiatic colonies, but could not reconstitute the old Greecebecause many parts had become Bulgarian, Albanian and Turkand no longer Hellenic. Italy became an external unity againafter so many centuries because, though no longer a State, shenever ceased to be a single people.This truth of a real unity is so strong that even nationswhich never in the past realised an outward unification, to whichFate and circumstance and their own selves have been adverse,nations which have been full of centrifugal forces and easilyoverpowered by foreign intrusions, have yet always developeda centripetal force as well and arrived inevitably at organisedoneness. Ancient Greece clung to her separatist tendencies, herself-sufficient city or regional states, her little mutually repellentautonomies; but the centripetal force was always there manifestedin leagues, associations of States, suzerainties like theSpartan and Athenian. It realised itself in the end, first, imperfectlyand temporarily by the Macedonian overrule, then, bya strange enough development, through the evolution of the