s a consequence of national growth and the international system. Their
authority at all times was keyed up to the pitch of a great emergency.
It was supposed to be the immediate expression of the common weal. The
common weal was identified with the security of society and the state.
The security of the state dictated the supreme law. The very authority,
consequently, which was created to preserve order and the Balance of
Power gradually became an effective cause of internal and external
disorder. It became a source not of security, but of individual and
social insecurity, because a properly organized machinery for exercising
such a power and redeeming such a vast responsibility had not as yet
been wrought.

The rulers of the continental states in the eighteenth century explained
and excused every important action they took by what was called "La
Raison d'Etat"--that is, by reasons connected with the public safety
which justified absolute authority and extreme measures. But as a matter
of fact this absolute authority, instead of being confined in its
exercise to matters in which the public safety was really concerned, was
wasted and compromised chiefly for the benefit of a trivial domestic
policy and a merely dynastic foreign policy. At home the exercise of
absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really
raised questions of public safety. In their foreign policies the
majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable
limits of their own aggressive power. Those limits were imposed from
without; and when several states could combine in support of an act of
international piracy, as in the case of the partition of Poland, Europe
could not be said to have any effective system of public law. The
partition of Poland, which France could and should have prevented, was
at once a convincing exposure of the miserable international position to
which France had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible
testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political system of the
eighteenth century.

II

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded under this
fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic, but wholly royalist and
aristocratic, European political system. For the first time in the
history of European nations a national organization and tradition was
confronted by a radical democratic purpose and faith. The two ideas have