ABSTRACT
The Austrian Empire, the China of Europe, has been on the brink of destruction. Governments, attacked and overthrown, have ten, twenty times recovered strength, drawn closer their alliances, overrun the half of Europe with their armies, annihilated revolutions, effaced by the sword, the scaffold, prison and exile, entire generations of revolutionary, spirits, and crushed, as they term it, the hydra of disorder and anarchy. There are in Europe two great questions; or, rather, the question of the transformation of authority, that is to say, of the Revolution, has assumed two forms: the question which all have agreed to call social, and the question of nationalities. The first is more exclusively agitated in France, the second in the midst of the other peoples of Europe. It is probable that the European initiative, that which will give a new impulse to intelligence and to events, will spring from the question of nationalities.
