eory of
nationality arose partly as a legitimate consequence, partly as a
reaction against it. As the system which overlooked national division
was opposed by liberalism in two forms, the French and the English, so
the system which insists upon them proceeds from two distinct sources,
and exhibits the character either of 1688 or of 1789. When the French
people abolished the authorities under which it lived, and became its
own master, France was in danger of dissolution: for the common will is
difficult to ascertain, and does not readily agree. "The laws," said
Vergniaud, in the debate on the sentence of the king, "are obligatory
only as the presumptive will of the people, which retains the right of
approving or condemning them. The instant it manifests its wish the work
of the national representation, the law, must disappear." This doctrine
resolved society into its natural elements, and threatened to break up
the country into as many republics as there were communes. For true
republicanism is the principle of self-government in the whole and in
all the parts. In an extensive country, it can prevail only by the union
of several independent communities in a single confederacy, as in
Greece, in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and in America; so that a
large republic not founded on the federal principle must result in the
government of a single city, like Rome and Paris, and, in a less degree,
Athens, Berne, and Amsterdam; or, in other words, a great democracy must
either sacrifice self-government to unity, or preserve it by federalism.

The France of history fell together with the French State, which was the
growth of centuries. The old sovereignty was destroyed. The local
authorities were looked upon with aversion and alarm. The new central
authority needed to be established on a new principle of unity. The
state of nature, which was the ideal of society, was made the basis of
the nation; descent was put in the place of tradition, and the French
people was regarded as a physical product: an ethnological, not
historic, unit. It was assumed that a unity existed separate from the
representation and the government, wholly independent of the past, and
capable at any moment of expressing or of changing its mind. In the
words of Sieyes, it was no longer France, but some unknown country to
which the nation was transported. The central power possessed authority,
inasmuch as it obeyed the whole, and no divergence was permitted fro