first and lent the Poles its encouragement; but when Russia took up arms on behalf of the Polish reactionary party, and the country turned to Prussia to aid it in defending the constitution, the treacherous Frederick William not only declined to do so, but began to send his troops to occupy Polish territory. The upshot was the further dismemberment of Poland known as the Second Partition (1793). "No sophistry in the world," writes Mr. Nisbet Bain, "can extenuate the villainy of the Second Partition. The theft of territory is its least offensive feature. It is the forcible suppression of a national movement of reform, the hurling back into the abyss of anarchy and corruption of a people who, by incredible efforts and sacrifices, had struggled back to liberty and order, which makes this great political crime so wholly infamous. Yet here again the methods of the Russian Empress were less vile than those of the Prussian King. Catherine openly took the risk of a bandit who attacks an enemy against whom he has a grudge; Frederick William II. came up, when the fight was over, to help pillage a victim whom he had sworn to defend."[1] After this the end came rapidly. The heroic patriot Kosciuszko headed a popular rising against Russia; but after a remarkable resistance to the combined forces of the three partitioning powers, the insurrection was finally suppressed in torrents of blood. The crowned bandits nearly quarrelled between themselves over the booty, but eventually in 1795 Austria, Russia, and Prussia signed a treaty which left nothing of Poland on the map at all.

[Footnote 1: Slavonic Europe, p. 404.]

The effect upon the subsequent history of the world of this crime against humanity, carried out by the three most absolute dynasties in Europe, was incalculable. "The annihilation of the Polish nationality has probably done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were first founded. To trace its effects in all their various ramifications would lead us a long way. It is sufficient here to notice that the destruction of Poland, like the destruction of Jerusalem, produced a "dispersion," and that as the Jews of the dispersion have discharged a peculiar office in the economy of the world as usurers and financiers, so, too, have the Poles of the dispersion as agents and vectors of revolution. In all the republican movements of the Continent the Poles have taken a leading part. They are to be found in the Saxon riots of '48; in the Berlin barricades; in the struggle for the Republic in Baden; in the Italian and Hungarian wars of liberation; in the Chartist movement, and in the French Commune. Homeless and fearless, schooled in war and made reckless by calamity, they have been the nerve of revolution wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune."[1] And what Mr. Fisher, in this passage, puts in a concrete fashion, Lord Acton has expressed with equal emphasis, if more abstractly. "This famous measure," he writes of the final partition, "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 date.' 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."[2]

[Footnote 1: The Republican Tradition in Europe, pp. 212-213.]

[Footnote 2: History of Freedom, p. 276.]

[Illustration: Present State Boundaries—THE PARTITION OF POLAND.]

The last sentence reminds us that, while in the East the dynastic principle was displaying with cynical indifference its true character to the world, events were occurring in the West which threatened to shake its very foundations. If Poland was the first martyr of the national idea, Revolutionary France was its first evangelist, for the new gospel which France preached was the gospel of Liberty, and nationalism is an extension, a variant of this gospel. In France itself, at the time of the Revolution, the doctrine of Liberty was interpreted in its individual and constitutional sense, which involved the abolition of class privileges and of political institutions that conflicted with or did not adequately express what Rousseau called the "general will." There was no national question to be settled in France, and she could therefore devote herself exclusively to the development of the "social idea," the establishment of democratic government, the foundation of a republic, and in general the determination of what should be the relations between the individual and the State, a question which in course of time led on to the problem of Socialism.

But indirectly the French Revolution did an enormous deal to promote the national idea in Europe. In the first place, the execution of Louis XVI. and the proclamation of the Republic administered a blow to the theory of legitimacy upon which the dynastic principle rested, from which it never recovered. If the French nation could rise and abolish its native dynasty, was there not hope that some day the Italian, Hungarian, and Polish nations might also rise and throw off the still more objectionable yoke of their foreign rulers? In the second place, the Revolution in and for itself produced a tremendous effect upon the rest of Europe, and in every country men awoke from the long sleep of feudalism to the desire of sweeping away antiquated constitutions and rebuilding them upon a democratic basis.

It is, however, sufficient to glance at a map of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century to see why these dreams could not be at once realised. Of what real value were ideals of democratic reform to the peoples dwelling in Italy, Germany, or the Austrian Empire? Look, for example, at Germany, split up like a jig-saw puzzle into over three hundred different States, each with its petty prince or grand-duke. Her poets and philosophers might sing of liberty and dream Utopian dreams, and here and there an experiment in popular government might be tried by some princeling who had caught the liberal fashion; but her political fabric, together with the rivalry between Prussia and Austria, kept her disunited and strangled all real hopes of reform. In short, the first and most crying need of Europe was not the abolition of antiquated constitutions, but the redrawing of anomalous frontiers.

The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people proclaimed in France presupposed the doctrine of the solidarity of the people proclaimed by the dismembered nations of Europe. France could set its house in order; but Belgium, Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, etc., had as yet no house of their own. The house had to be built before it could be furnished on the latest democratic lines; and before it could be even built, the ground had to be wrested from the hands of absentee landlords or cleared of the little dynastic State-shanties which cumbered it. The Polish nationalists became the backbone of the republican movement in Europe; the French republicans proclaimed the independence of nations as one of their cardinal principles. Thus the social idea and the national idea