d 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