isfortune."[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, an