m
the universal sentiment. This power, endowed with volition, was
personified in the Republic One and Indivisible. The title signified
that a part could not speak or act for the whole,--that there was a
power supreme over the State, distinct from, and independent of, its
members; and it expressed, for the first time in history, the notion of
an abstract nationality. In this manner the idea of the sovereignty of
the people, uncontrolled by the past, gave birth to the idea of
nationality independent of the political influence of history. It sprang
from the rejection of the two authorities,--of the State and of the
past. The kingdom of France was, geographically as well as politically,
the product of a long series of events, and the same influences which
built up the State formed the territory. The Revolution repudiated alike
the agencies to which France owed her boundaries and those to which she
owed her government. Every effaceable trace and relic of national
history was carefully wiped away,--the system of administration, the
physical divisions of the country, the classes of society, the
corporations, the weights and measures, the calendar. France was no
longer bounded by the limits she had received from the condemned
influence of her history; she could recognise only those which were set
by nature. The definition of the nation was borrowed from the material
world, and, in order to avoid a loss of territory, it became not only an
abstraction but a fiction.

There was a principle of nationality in the ethnological character of
the movement, which is the source of the common observation that
revolution is more frequent in Catholic than in Protestant countries. It
is, in fact, more frequent in the Latin than in the Teutonic world,
because it depends partly on a national impulse, which is only awakened
where there is an alien element, the vestige of a foreign dominion, to
expel. Western Europe has undergone two conquests--one by the Romans and
one by the Germans, and twice received laws from the invaders. Each time
it rose again against the victorious race; and the two great reactions,
while they differ according to the different characters of the two
conquests, have the phenomenon of imperialism in common. The Roman
republic laboured to crush the subjugated nations into a homogeneous and
obedient mass; but the increase which the proconsular authority obtained
in the process subverted the republican government, and the reac