This complete military success of the Allies' campaign was, again, equivalent to a success in their immediate political object, which was the overthrow of Napoleon's personal power, the re-establishment of the Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before. Had the effect of this battle and that campaign been permanent, one could speak of their success as complete; but when we discuss that largest issue of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which Waterloo so decisively concluded really effected its object, considering that that object was the permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent re-establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled to arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary with the varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because the drama is not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of all, singularly modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo. It is obvious, at the first glance we take of European history during, say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy in Waterloo year, that the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action. The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the old idea of a monarch governing his various "peoples," and the whole history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence, the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme, etc.)--these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which that older society had fought to restore.