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 logic of its new political and social ideas.  It remained, that is, a nation whose political organization and policy had not been adapted to its domestic needs, and one which occupied on anomalous and suspected position in the European international system.

On the other hand, French democracy and Imperialism had directly and indirectly instigated the greater national efficiency of the neighboring European states.  Alliances among European monarchs had not been sufficient to check the Imperial ambitions of Napoleon, as they had been sufficient to check the career of Louis XIV, because behind a greater general was the loyal devotion and the liberated energy of the French people; but when outrages perpetrated on the national feelings of Germans and Spaniards added an enthusiastic popular support to the hatred which the European monarchs cherished towards a domineering upstart, the fall of Napoleon became only a question of time.  The excess and the abuse of French national efficiency and energy, consequent upon its sudden liberation and its perpetuation of an illogical but natural policy of national aggression, had the same effect upon Europe as English aggression had upon the national development of France.  Napoleon was crushed under a popular uprising, comparable to that of the French people, which had been the condition of his own aggrandizement.  Thus, in spite of the partial antagonism between the ideas of the French Revolutionary democracy and the principle of nationality the ultimate effect of the Revolution both in France and in Europe was to increase the force and to enlarge the area of the national movement.  English national sentiment was enormously stimulated by the strenuous wars of the Revolutionary epoch.  The embers of Spanish national feeling were blown into spasmodic life.  The peoples of Italy and Germany had been possessed by the momentum of a common political purpose, and had been stirred by promises of national representation.  Even France, unstable though its political condition was, had lost none of the results of the Revolution for which it had fought in the beginning; and if the Bourbons were restored, it was only on the implicit condition that the monarchy should be nationalized.  The Revolutionary democracy, subversive as were its ideas, had started a new era for the European peoples of national and international construction.