the monarchical or legitimist and the national principles; and the error was under the circumstances not unnatural.  In the European political landscape of 1793 despotic royalty was a much more conspicuous fact than the centuries of political association in which these monarchies had been developed.  But the eyes of the French democrats had been partially blinded by their own political interests and theories.  Their democracy was in theory chiefly a matter of abstract political rights which remitted logically in a sort of revolutionary anarchy.  The actual bonds whereby men were united were ignored.  All traditional authority fell under suspicion.  Frenchmen, in their devotion to their ideas and in their distrust of every institution, idea, or person associated with the Old Regime, hacked at the roots of their national cohesion and undermined the foundations of social order.

To a disinterested political philosopher of that day the antagonism between the principle of political authority and cohesion, as represented by the legitimate monarchies, and the principle of popular Sovereignty represented by the French democracy, may well have looked irretrievable.  But events soon proved that such an inference could not be drawn too quickly.  It is true that the French democracy, 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