ABSTRACT

Napoleon III’s claim that the Empire meant peace was soon submitted to another test. And again the ideas and personal interests of the Emperor were largely responsible for hostilities which took French armies once more to the well-known battle-ground of North Italy. The new war was in many ways a great contrast to the Crimean War. It was settled by two important battles, and produced nothing like the long agonies of the trench war round Sebastopol. It was, moreover, the first war clearly fought for that principle of nationality which was the one great and novel feature of the international difficulties of the nineteenth century. Nationality was the enthusiasm, almost the superstition, of the time. It was the continuation of the process that had been going on ever since the Reformation. As all agencies of human unity fell into the background or were destroyed—the Empire had disappeared, the Church had lost its old political influence—the State had become the all-important unit of organisation. It recognised no superior and admitted no control. But the more important and powerful the State became the more important was it to consider on what basis the power of the State rested. The movement towards constitutionalism which had been led by England was more than two hundred years old and had achieved great victories. It was widely claimed and often granted that the State should be identified with the people and that Government and people should be in active partnership. Now another question arose behind that. Who were the people that should form a state? Was any collection of individuals equally well adapted for state life? Men awoke with a new clearness and self-consciousness to the sense of nationality. This new sense appeared most strongly not among those nations which had already won a large measure of national independence and unity, not among the French or the English or the Spaniards; but among those who were still without a national state, and who, as a result of historical development, found themselves mixed up with other nationalities in the same state.