The political history of Europe in the nineteenth century is chiefly the history of the national actions that have sprung from increase of national self-consciousness resulting from the spread of education, from the improvement of means of communication within each people and from increase of intercourse between nations. The opening pages were the wars in which the French people, suddenly aroused to an intense national consciousness, successfully resisted and drove back all the other European powers. Of other leading events the formation of modern Italy and of modern Germany, of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, were results of the awakening of national self-consciousness[86]. The resistance of the Japanese to the Russians and their victory over them were in the fullest sense the immediate outcome of the idea of the Japanese nation in the minds of all its people, leading to a strong collective volition for the greater power, glory, and advancement of the nation. The recent unrest in China is recognised on all hands to be the expression of a dawning national self-consciousness. In Europe, Poland, Finland, Hungary, and Ireland exemplify its workings very clearly in recent years. The Magyars were not oppressed by the Austrians. They, economically and individually, had nothing material to gain by a separation from Austria; and in separating themselves they would have risked much, their lives, and their material welfare; yet the idea of the Magyar nation impelled them to it. The Poles of Germany were not rebellious because they were ill-treated and their affairs maladministered. If they could and would have cast out from their minds the idea of the Polish nation, they might have comfortably shared in the marvellously advancing material prosperity of Germany. But they were severely treated by the Germans, because they were moved by this idea and this sentiment; and the bad treatment it brought upon them did but render the idea more vividly, more universally, present to the consciousness of all, even of the little children at school, and, by inflaming the passions which have their root in the national sentiment, strengthened that sentiment. But for the idea of the Boer nation and the dawning national sentiment, the late Boer war would never have occurred; and that sentiment was, as in the case of the Japanese in their late war, the principal source of the great energy displayed by the Boers and of such success as they achieved. Even in India, the proposal to divide Bengal has suddenly discovered among the Bengalese, the most submissive part of the population, the part which has seemed most devoid of national spirit, the existence and the importance as a political factor of the idea of the Bengalese as a people and of sentiments centred upon that idea.