emocracy, by breaking
so violently the bonds of national association, perpetuated a division
between their political organization and the substance of their national
life, which was bound in the end to constitute a source of weakness. Yet
the revolutionary democracy succeeded, nevertheless, in releasing
sources of national energy, whose existence had never before been
suspected, and in uniting the great body of the French people for the
performance of a great task. Even though French national cohesion had
been injured in one respect, French national efficiency was temporarily
so increased that the existing organization and power of the other
continental countries proved inadequate to resist it. When the French
democracy was attacked by its monarchical neighbors, the newly aroused
national energy of the French people was placed enthusiastically at the
service of the military authorities. The success of the French armies,
even during the disorders of the Convention and the corruption of the
Directory, indicated that revolutionary France possessed possibilities
of national efficiency far superior to the France of the Old Regime.

Neither the democrats nor Napoleon had, in truth, broken as much as they
themselves and their enemies believed with the French national
tradition; but unfortunately that aspect of the national tradition
perpetuated by them was by no means its best aspect. The policy, the
methods of administration, and the actual power of the Committee of
Public Safety and of Napoleon were all inherited from the Old Regime.
Revolutionary France merely adapted to new conditions the political
organization and policy to which Frenchmen had been accustomed; and the
most serious indictment to be made against it is that its excesses
prevented it from dispensing with the absolutism which social disorder
and unwarranted foreign aggression always necessitate. The Revolution
made France more of a nation than it had been in the eighteenth century,
because it gave to the French people the civil freedom, the political
experience, and the economic opportunities which they needed, but it did
not heal the breach which the Bourbons had made between the political
organization of France and its legitimate national interests and
aspirations. France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation
divided against itself,--a nation which had perpetuated during a
democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to
the l