In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is endless and unresting. The moment of collision between an old and a new principle of human action is a revolution. Such a turning-point is the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848. Two forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces of the present age. The freedom of the nation was the form into which the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simonianism preserved for a time the old tradition. But the devotees of Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves, and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity, but for France, for Germany, or for Italy. Patriotism was taking the place of Humanism. To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792. Louis Napoleon, entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason of Gorgei, the _coup d'état_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the _Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_. For the principle of Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century. It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave the volumes of Palacky's _History of Bohemia_ a power like that of a war-song. Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its course in Hungary to a glorious close--the Magyar nation. Even in Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of