The French Nation in the Revolution burst the chrysalis of irresponsible government beneath which it had grown to organic life, but like a true heir it took over the Royal Government’s ideal: “Peace within and piracy without.” France had already begun aggression abroad before she had accomplished self-government at home, and in delivering herself to Napoleon she sacrificed her liberty to her ambition. Napoleon’s only enduring achievements outside France were the things he set himself to prevent, the realization, by a forceful reaction against force, of German and Italian nationality. Nationalism was converted to violence from the outset, and the struggle for existence between absolute governments has merely been replaced by a struggle between nationalities, equally blind, haphazard, and non-moral, but far more terrific, just because the virtue of self-government is to focus and utilize human energy so much more effectively than the irresponsible government it has superseded. Naturally the result of this planless strife has been no grouping of Europe on a just and reasonable national basis. France and England, achieving racial frontiers and national self-government early, inherited the Earth before Germany and Italy struggled up beside them, to take their leavings of markets and colonial areas. But the government that united Germany had founded its power on the partition of Poland, and in the second Balkan War of 1913 we saw a striking example of the endless chain of evil forged by an act of national injustice. [Sidenote: Intranational oppression has been a chief cause of war.] The Hungarians used the liberty they won in 1867 to subject the Slavonic population between themselves and the sea, and prevent its union with the free principality of Serbia of the same Slavonic nationality. This drove Serbia in 1912 to follow Hungary’s example by seizing the coast of the non-Slavonic Albanians; and when Austria-Hungary prevented this (a right act prompted by most unrighteous motives), Serbia fought an unjust war with Bulgaria and subjected a large Bulgarian population, in order to gain access to the only seaboard left her, the friendly Greek port of Salonika. Hungary and Serbia are nominally national states: but more than half the population in Hungary, and perhaps nearly a quarter in Serbia, is alien, only held within the state by force against its will. The energy of both states is perverted to the futile and demoralizing work of “Magyarizing” and “Serbizing” subject foreign populations, and they have not even been successful. The resistance of Southern Slav nationalism on the defensive to the aggression of Hungarian nationalism has given the occasion for the present catastrophe.