broad. Revolution is
a malady, a frenzy, an interruption of the nation's growth, sometimes
fatal to its existence, often to its independence. In this case
revolution, by making the nation subject to others, may be the occasion
of a new development. But it is not conceivable that a nation should
arbitrarily and spontaneously cast off its history, reject its
traditions, abrogate its law and government, and commence a new
political existence.

Nothing in the experience of ages, or in the nature of man, allows us to
believe that the attempt of France to establish a durable edifice on the
ruins of 1789, without using the old materials, can ever succeed, or
that she can ever emerge from the vicious circle of the last seventy
years, except by returning to the principle which she then repudiated,
and by admitting, that if States would live, they must preserve their
organic connection with their origin and history, which are their root
and their stem; that they are not voluntary creations of human wisdom;
and that men labour in vain who would construct them without
acknowledging God as the artificer.

Theorists who hold it to be a wrong that a nation should belong to a
foreign State are therefore in contradiction with the law of civil
progress. This law, or rather necessity, which is as absolute as the law
that binds society together, is the force which makes us need one
another, and only enables us to obtain what we need on terms, not of
equality, but of dominion and subjection, in domestic, economic, or
political relations. The political theory of nationality is in
contradiction with the historic nation. Since a nation derives its ideas
and instincts of government, as much as its temperament and its
language, from God, acting through the influences of nature and of
history, these ideas and instincts are originally and essentially
peculiar to it, and not separable from it; they have no practical value
in themselves when divided from the capacity which corresponds to them.
National qualities are the incarnations of political ideas. No people
can receive its government from another without receiving at the same
time the ministers of government. The workman must travel with the work.
Such changes can only be accomplished by submission to a foreign State,
or to another race. Europe has seen two great instances of such
conquests, extending over centuries,--the Roman Empire, and the
settlement of the barbarians in the West. This it