the national aspirations,
and they were revived in a more complete and cultivated form by Manin.
The policy of the Austrian Government, which failed during the ten years
of the reaction to convert the tenure by force into a tenure by right,
and to establish with free institutions the condition of allegiance,
gave a negative encouragement to the theory. It deprived Francis Joseph
of all active support and sympathy in 1859, for he was more clearly
wrong in his conduct than his enemies in their doctrines. The real cause
of the energy which the national theory has acquired is, however, the
triumph of the democratic principle in France, and its recognition by
the European Powers. The theory of nationality is involved in the
democratic theory of the sovereignty of the general will. "One hardly
knows what any division of the human race should be free to do, if not
to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings
they choose to associate themselves."[330] It is by this act that a
nation constitutes itself. To have a collective will, unity is
necessary, and independence is requisite in order to assert it. Unity
and nationality are still more essential to the notion of the
sovereignty of the people than the cashiering of monarchs, or the
revocation of laws. Arbitrary acts of this kind may be prevented by the
happiness of the people or the popularity of the king, but a nation
inspired by the democratic idea cannot with consistency allow a part of
itself to belong to a foreign State, or the whole to be divided into
several native States. The theory of nationality therefore proceeds from
both the principles which divide the political world,--from legitimacy,
which ignores its claims, and from the revolution, which assumes them;
and for the same reason it is the chief weapon of the last against the
first.

In pursuing the outward and visible growth of the national theory we are
prepared for an examination of its political character and value. The
absolutism which has created it denies equally that absolute right of
national unity which is a product of democracy, and that claim of
national liberty which belongs to the theory of freedom. These two views
of nationality, corresponding to the French and to the English systems,
are connected in name only, and are in reality the opposite extremes of
political thought. In one case, nationality is founded on the perpetual
supremacy of the collective will, of which the