split up like a jig-saw puzzle into over three hundred different States,
each with its petty prince or grand-duke. Her poets and philosophers might
sing of liberty and dream Utopian dreams, and here and there an experiment
in popular government might be tried by some princeling who had caught
the liberal fashion; but her political fabric, together with the rivalry
between Prussia and Austria, kept her disunited and strangled all real
hopes of reform. In short, the first and most crying need of Europe was not
the abolition of antiquated constitutions, but the redrawing of anomalous
frontiers.

The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people proclaimed in France
presupposed the doctrine of the solidarity of the people proclaimed by the
dismembered nations of Europe. France could set its house in order; but
Belgium, Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, etc., had as yet no house of
their own. The house had to be built before it could be furnished on the
latest democratic lines; and before it could be even built, the ground had
to be wrested from the hands of absentee landlords or cleared of the little
dynastic State-shanties which cumbered it. The Polish nationalists became
the backbone of the republican movement in Europe; the French republicans
proclaimed the independence of nations as one of their cardinal principles.
Thus the social idea and the national idea were originally intimately
connected. They were the twin children of Poland and the French Revolution,
and in their cradle it was hard to tell them apart, so strongly were the
features of each stamped with the likeness of Liberty.

For a time it seemed that the new ideas would carry all before them. Even
before France had herself abolished the monarchy, Belgium threw off the
Austrian rule and declared for a republic. And when in 1792 France found
herself at war with the Austrian and Prussian governments, and in the
following year with practically all the governments of Europe, her