[322] Acte pour la Constitution Fédérative de l'Allemagne du 8 Juin, 1815, Art. XI. par. 4: Archives Diplomatiques, Vol. IV. p. 15. Such are authentic, well-defined examples. This is not all. It is in the order of Providence, that individuals, families, tribes, and nations should tend, by means of association, to a final Unity. A law of mutual attraction, or affinity, first exerting its influence upon smaller bodies, draws them by degrees into well-established fellowship, and then, continuing its power, fuses the larger bodies into nations; and nations themselves, stirred by this same sleepless energy, are now moving towards that grand system of combined order which will complete the general harmony:-- "Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."[323] History bears ample testimony to the potency of this attraction. Modern Europe, in its early periods, was filled with petty lordships, or communities constituting so many distinct units, acknowledging only a vague nationality, and maintaining, as we have already seen, the "liberty" to fight with each other. The great nations of our day have grown and matured into their present form by the gradual absorption of these political bodies. [323] Æneid, Lib. VI. 726, 727. Territories, once possessing an equivocal and turbulent independence, feel new power and happiness in peaceful association. Spain, composed of races dissimilar in origin, religion, and government, slowly ascended by progressive combinations among principalities and provinces, till at last, in the fifteenth century, by the crowning union of Castile and Aragon, the whole country, with its various sovereignties, was united under one common rule. Germany once consisted of more than three hundred different principalities, each with the _right of war_. These slowly coalesced, forming larger principalities; till at last the whole complex aggregation of states, embracing abbeys, bishoprics, archbishoprics, bailiwicks, counties, duchies, electorates, margraviates, and free imperial cities, was gradually resolved into the present Confederation, where each state expressly renounces the _right of war_ with its associates. France has passed through similar changes. By a power of assimilation, in no nation so strongly marked, she has absorbed the various races and sovereignties once filling her territory with violence and conflict, and has converted them all to herself. The Roman or Iberian of Provence, the indomitable Celtic race, the German of Alsace, have all become Frenchmen,--while the various provinces, once inspired by such hostile passions, Brittany and Normandy, Franche-Comté and Burgundy, Gascony and Languedoc, Provence and Dauphiné, are now blended in one powerful, united nation. Great Britain, too, shows the influence of the same law. The many hostile principalities of England were first merged in the Heptarchy; and these