In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is
endless and unresting. The moment of collision between an old and a
new principle of human action is a revolution. Such a turning-point is
the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848. Two
forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet
indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed
to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the
principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under
various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces
of the present age. The freedom of the nation was the form into which
the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simonianism
preserved for a time the old tradition. But the devotees of
Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after
anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of
Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,
and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,
but for France, for Germany, or for Italy. Patriotism was taking the
place of Humanism.

To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism
throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the
astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the
Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the
barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the
Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all
Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of
the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or
even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792. Louis Napoleon,
entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put
it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason
of Gorgei, the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy
imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the
change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the
_Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_. For the principle of
Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the
second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German
Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more
potently and continuously than any other sing