Suppose Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Iberia adjusted on this principle, would their power have remained so equalized as to leave France secure of preponderance? If Germany had been so reconstructed, to the certain advantage of Prussia, was there not a risk of exposing France to a shock which might have proved fatal? According to the theory of natural limits, the aggrandizement which France could have demanded in compensation for protection and successful warfare would have been reduced to some additions towards the Alps, the Pyrenees, and in Flanders; to a few thousand square kilometres, and perhaps three or four millions of inhabitants. Towards the Rhine, we cannot see what the Empire could have claimed without contradicting the theory itself. Germany has maintained that Alsace and half of Lorraine, incorporated with French soil, are German, and has forced them to a legal annexation to her territory. Now, were these slender acquisitions, so disproportioned to the acquisitions of neighboring countries, worth the cost of turning Europe upside down, and subjecting France to a chance of political and military ruin? Louis Napoleon rejoiced in the thought of one day resuscitating the fair name of Italy, extinguished for many years, and restoring it to provinces so long deprived of it. This sounds well; but was this resurrection to end in a united kingdom, or in the simple emancipation from foreign rule? And granted that unity could not be prevented, and that it should prove equal to the imaginary union of Spain and Portugal, was it really advantageous to create alongside of France, from a platonic love of nationality, two new states of twenty-five millions of souls each, capable of supplanting her later in the Mediterranean.[22] And if Prussia, taking advantage of the loss of Italy and Hungary to her rival Austria, had united in a single political and military body the scattered members of Germany, would it have been useful and hopeful for France to feel herself pressed on the other side by a kingdom or empire of fifty millions of inhabitants, a military race of the first order? Moreover, what would have become of the Roman Pontiff in this renovation of countries, governments, and juridical laws. The Pope is a great moral power, the greatest in the world. If his independence were to give way before the principle of nationality, what would become of his religious liberty, so necessary to the public quiet of consciences. Could a pope, subject to an Italy constructed in any way soever, increase the light, peace, and tranquillity of France and the rest of Europe? Would the palace of the Vatican, changed into a prison, have accorded with the imagined splendors of the Tuileries?