been face to face ever since; and European history thereafter may, in
its broadest aspect, be considered as an attempt to establish a fruitful
relation between them. In the beginning it looked as if democracy would,
so far as it prevailed, be wholly destructive of national institutions
and the existing international organization. The insurgent democrats
sought to ignore and to eradicate the very substance of French national
achievement. They began by abolishing all social and economic privileges
and by framing a new polity based in general upon the English idea of a
limited monarchy, partial popular representation, and equal civil
rights; but, carried along by the momentum of their ideas and incensed
by the disloyalty of the king and his advisers and the threat of
invasion they ended by abolishing royalty, establishing universal
suffrage and declaring war upon every embodiment, whether at home or
abroad, of the older order. The revolutionary French democracy
proclaimed a creed, not merely subversive of all monarchical and
aristocratic institutions, but inimical to the substance and the spirit
of nationality. Indeed it did not perceive any essential distinction
between the monarchical or legitimist and the national principles; and
the error was under the circumstances not unnatural. In the European
political landscape of 1793 despotic royalty was a much more conspicuous
fact than the centuries of political association in which these
monarchies had been developed. But the eyes of the French democrats had
been partially blinded by their own political interests and theories.
Their democracy was in theory chiefly a matter of abstract political
rights which remitted logically in a sort of revolutionary anarchy. The
actual bonds whereby men were united were ignored. All traditional
authority fell under suspicion. Frenchmen, in their devotion to their
ideas and in their distrust of every institution, idea, or person
associated with the Old Regime, hacked at the roots of their national
cohesion and undermined the foundations of social order.

To a disinterested political philosopher of that day the antagonism
between the principle of political authority and cohesion, as
represented by the legitimate monarchies, and the principle of popular
Sovereignty represented by the French democracy, may well have looked
irretrievable. But events soon proved that such an inference could not
be drawn too quickly. It is true that the French d