t the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic
armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The
war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the
uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to
impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic
to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in
spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic
institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after
their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and
later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action.

The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged
revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the
old idea of a monarch governing his various "peoples," and the whole
history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the
principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up
with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed
suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence,
the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details
of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme,
etc.)--these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which
that older society had fought to restore.

On the other hand, the advance of all this was much slower, much more
disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had Napoleon not
failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and fallen for
ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular
characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by
the will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.

We may sum up, then, and say that the political effect of the battle of
Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for the Allies: that
their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century has reversed;
but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted
in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of society
and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had set
out to establish.

* * * * *

There is a side question attached to all this, with which I shall
conclude, because it forms the be