It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually find its way into the schools and universities.  Before this change had been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself.  Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the principle of nationality.  It seized on the school as the means to hold the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.

In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little about matters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in which their subjects conversed and read.  Even the French did not try to touch the German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could become a centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Court of Berlin.  All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was the first deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and the university into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cult of the Empire.  Since then there is scarcely a government (always except that of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on the native and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has not followed in his path.  In particular when the state is founded on the nation the school is used to develop in the children the full consciousness of nationality.  That institution that was for so long the home of European unity has become the most useful agent for the perpetuation and exaggeration of national differences.  It is in the school that the immigrant to the United States is taught to reverence the institutions of his new fatherland, and from generation to generation the school labours to keep alive the memory of the half-forgotten struggle of the new republic and the British monarchy.  In France each successive government has used the school to force on the nation its interpretation of the national history and ideals.  And the victories of Prussian armies were cemented and confirmed by the official exposition of the Prussian state and the cult of the Hohenzollern.  To the school is transferred the conflict between the doctrines of authority and the revolution, of the secular state and of the Kingdom by the Grace of God.  Every nation rightly struggling to be free has seen in the school the instrument for securing the allegiance of the young, and the school has become the centre of political struggle.  In Trieste and in Poland, in Alsace and in Macedonia, we find kings and politicians contending for the minds and souls of children, and it is in the school, the college, and the university that has been prepared the conflict that is now devastating Europe.

What has been done in the nineteenth century has really been only to carry into effect the change which was long overdue and was implicit in earlier years.  The national culture and national authors have at length forced their way into the schools, and the result has been that institutions which originally in reality, and for so long in appearance, were the vehicles for the expression of the common European civilization, have been almost entirely won over to the cause of the national expression.