Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors, and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of 1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era. Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3] The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of history that the great _rôle_ which it has played is transient and accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State. Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's life more auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny, not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon, made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age. For this, Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself, shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not from papal, but from imperial Rome. The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden, of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived. Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption, and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.