to live upon that territory. Conquest or marriage might unite in the hands
of a single monarch the most diverse peoples and countries, the notorious
case of the kind being that of the Emperor Charles V., who in the sixteenth
century managed to hold sway over Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Naples,
and a large part of the New World.

[Footnote 1: _History of Freedom_, p. 273.]

The golden age of the dynastic principle was, however, the eighteenth
century, and the long and tedious wars of that period were nearly all
occasioned by the aggrandisement of some royal house. The idea of a nation
as a living organism, as something more than a collection of people
dwelling in the same country, speaking the same language and obeying
the same ruler, had not yet dawned upon the world. Apart from England,
Scotland, Switzerland, and Holland, no European nation had really become
conscious of its personality as distinct from that of its hereditary
monarch. And as we have seen, until nationality becomes keenly
self-conscious, the national idea remains unborn. Only some great internal
cataclysm or an overwhelming disaster inflicted by a foreign power could
evoke this consciousness in a nation; and fate ordained that the two
methods should be tried simultaneously at opposite ends of Europe. France,
"standing on the top of golden hours," and Poland, crushed, dismembered,
downtrodden--it would be difficult to say which of these contributed the
more to the great national awakening in Europe.

Poland was the first and greatest martyr of the nationalist faith. By its
constitution, which was that of an oligarchical republic with an elective
king, Poland was placed beyond the pale of a Europe ruled upon dynastic
principles. Its very existence was an insult to the accepted ideals
of legitimacy and hereditary monarchy, and it was impossible for any