and descent gave no
claim. Where they could not permanently inherit they endeavoured, by
intrigues, to prevail at each election, and after contending in support
of candidates who were their partisans, the neighbours at last appointed
an instrument for the final demolition of the Polish State. Till then no
nation had been deprived of its political existence by the Christian
Powers, and whatever disregard had been shown for national interests and
sympathies, some care had been taken to conceal the wrong by a
hypocritical perversion of law. But the partition of Poland was an act
of wanton violence, committed in open defiance not only of popular
feeling but of public law. For the first time in modern history a great
State was suppressed, and a whole nation divided among its enemies.

This famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism,
awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right
into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. "No wise or
honest man," wrote Edmund Burke, "can approve of that partition, or can
contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all
countries at some future time."[327] Thenceforward there was a nation
demanding to be united in a State,--a soul, as it were, wandering in
search of a body in which to begin life over again; and, for the first
time, a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust--that
their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its
right to constitute an independent community. Before that claim could be
efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its
opponents,--before it gained energy, after the last partition, to
overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt
which previous disorders had brought upon Poland,--the ancient European
system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place.

The old despotic policy which made the Poles its prey had two
adversaries,--the spirit of English liberty, and the doctrines of that
revolution which destroyed the French monarchy with its own weapons; and
these two contradicted in contrary ways the theory that nations have no
collective rights. At the present day, the theory of nationality is not
only the most powerful auxiliary of revolution, but its actual substance
in the movements of the last three years. This, however, is a recent
alliance, unknown to the first French Revolution. The modern th