ming to the assistance of Austria in her suppression of the
liberties of Hungary. It was a healthy instinct in the English people that
led them to break up the Concert of Europe in 1818--"a system which not
only threatened the liberties of others, but might, in the language of
the orators of the Opposition, in time present the spectacle of Cossacks
encamped in Hyde Park to overawe the House of Commons";[1] and, if the
prevailing "internationalism" has not quite blinded their eyes to-day,
they will scrutinise with the greatest possible care any new proposals to
re-erect the Concert of Europe as a permanent and authoritative tribunal.
What the world needs at present is more nationalism and more democracy. And
it is only after these two great nineteenth-century movements have worked
themselves out to the full, at least on the continent of Europe, that
mankind will be able safely to make experiments towards the realisation of
the third and crowning principle, the principle of a European Commonwealth.

[Footnote 1: _Cambridge Modern History_, vol. x. p. 16.]

[Illustration: EUROPE IN 1815]

The national problems which the Congress of Vienna bequeathed to posterity
may be seen at a glance by looking at a political map of Europe in 1815.
The entire centre of the Continent from Ostend to Palermo, and from
Koenigsberg to Constantinople, was left a political chaos. And it is not too
much to say that the history of Europe from 1814 to 1914 is the history of
the settlement of this vast area. The only State whose frontiers have not
altered during this period is Switzerland, and even that country seized the
opportunity which a disturbed Europe offered her in 1848, to substitute a
unified federal system for the constitution imposed upon her in 1815.
The rest of the area falls into six sections: (1) The kingdom of the
Netherlands, containing the two distinct and often antagonistic nations,
Belgium and Holland; (2) the German nationality split up into no less
than thirty-eight[2] sovereign States, loosely held together in a
"confederation"; (3) the Italian nationality, distributed under eight
independent governments, including four duchies, two kingdoms, the Papal
States, and the provinces under Austrian rule; (4) the Polish nationality,
divided up between the three Powers, Prussia, Russia, and Austria; (5) the
Austrian Empire, comprising a dozen distinct nationalities; and (6) the
Ottoman Empire, in which at least five different Christ