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 thing before it. South American republics were established, European monarchies were to be thrown down, and the Popedom finally extinguished. Then set in a powerful reaction. It is not possible now to trace this step by step, but some of the great central facts of recent history have burnt themselves into the consciousness of mankind. The American Civil War showed that the old Liberal theory, that war was a game at which kings played with the lives of their subjects, was no longer tenable. Republicans, it was seen, could shoot each other down in the most wholesale fashion on a mere question of State Rights. The South American colonies, after they had cut themselves adrift from Spain and Portugal, "those effete old sacerdotal nations," went on in much the same ignominious fashion as before. But, above all, France, which alone among the nations of Europe had entirely broken with her past, pursued, under republican institutions, the old traditional policy of bloodshed tempered by epigram; while, mainly owing to the instability of her institutions, the direful and direct result of the Revolution, she has been entirely overwhelmed by her hereditary foe, who, to complete the contrast, has been enabled to