tions. These traditions constituted the
substance of the political and social bond. They provided the forms
which enabled the people of any group to realize a joint purpose or, if
necessary, to discuss serious differences. In their absence the very
foundation of permanent political cohesion was lacking. For a while the
protection of these groups against domestic and foreign enemies
demanded, as we have seen, the exercise of an absolute political
authority and the severe suppression of any but time-honored individual
or class interests; but when comparative order had been secured, a
higher standard of association gradually came to prevail. Differences of
conviction and interest among individuals and classes, which formerly
were suppressed or ignored, could no longer be considered either as so
dangerous to public safety as to demand suppression or as so
insignificant as to justify indifference. Effective association began to
demand, that is, a new adjustment among the individual and class
interests, traditions, and convictions which constituted the substance
of any particular state; and such an adjustment could be secured only by
an adequate machinery of consultation and discussion. Cohesion could no
longer be imposed upon a people, because they no longer had any
sufficient reason to submit to the discipline of such an imposition. It
had to be reached by an enlarged area of political association, by the
full expression of individual and class differences, and finally by the
proper adjustment of those differences in relation to the general
interest of the whole community.

As soon as any European state attained, by whatever means, a
representative government, it began to be more of a nation, and to
obtain the advantages of a more nationalized political organization.
England's comparative domestic security enabled her to become more of a
nation sooner than any of her continental neighbors; and her national
efficiency forced the French to cultivate their latent power of national
association. In France the government finally succeeded in becoming
nationally representative without much assistance from any regular
machinery of representation; but under such conditions it could not
remain representative. One of its defects as a nation to-day is its lack
of representative institutions to which Frenchmen have been long
accustomed and which command some instinctive loyalty. Stimulated by
French and English example, the other Europe