rary to the idea of nationality. They taught that certain general
principles of government were absolutely right in all States; and they
asserted in theory the unrestricted freedom of the individual, and the
supremacy of the will over every external necessity or obligation. This
is in apparent contradiction to the national theory, that certain
natural forces ought to determine the character, the form, and the
policy of the State, by which a kind of fate is put in the place of
freedom. Accordingly the national sentiment was not developed directly
out of the revolution in which it was involved, but was exhibited first
in resistance to it, when the attempt to emancipate had been absorbed in
the desire to subjugate, and the republic had been succeeded by the
empire. Napoleon called a new power into existence by attacking
nationality in Russia, by delivering it in Italy, by governing in
defiance of it in Germany and Spain. The sovereigns of these countries
were deposed or degraded; and a system of administration was introduced
which was French in its origin, its spirit, and its instruments. The
people resisted the change. The movement against it was popular and
spontaneous, because the rulers were absent or helpless; and it was
national, because it was directed against foreign institutions. In
Tyrol, in Spain, and afterwards in Prussia, the people did not receive
the impulse from the government, but undertook of their own accord to
cast out the armies and the ideas of revolutionised France. Men were
made conscious of the national element of the revolution by its
conquests, not in its rise. The three things which the Empire most
openly oppressed--religion, national independence, and political
liberty--united in a short-lived league to animate the great uprising by
which Napoleon fell. Under the influence of that memorable alliance a
political spirit was called forth on the Continent, which clung to
freedom and abhorred revolution, and sought to restore, to develop, and
to reform the decayed national institutions. The men who proclaimed
these ideas, Stein and Goerres, Humboldt, Mueller, and De Maistre,[328]
were as hostile to Bonapartism as to the absolutism of the old
governments, and insisted on the national rights, which had been invaded
equally by both, and which they hoped to restore by the destruction of
the French supremacy. With the cause that triumphed at Waterloo the
friends of the Revolution had no sympathy, for they