Page:The League of Nations in history.djvu/9

 with monarchical Europe, and under the stress of War became as militarist as its opponents. Europe was to be forcibly converted to belief in the doctrines of the Revolution, and the forcible conversion became in the hands of Napoleon a military conquest, with peace dependent upon acquiescence in his arbitrary will. The problem of peace by consent seemed as far from solution as in the days of the Roman Empire.

But nationality had, since the Middle Ages, acquired a strength which even Napoleon could not destroy. No national State has been permanently crushed by force of arms, save Poland, since the national State was evolved; and the moral of the Napoleonic wars is that peace must depend for its security and its permanence not upon conquest but upon consent between indestructible nations. Europe took some steps towards the realization of this condition after Napoleon's fall, but the success of its efforts was impaired by discord over the means by which peace was to be enforced and over the articles of the European association. The Restoration was not merely one of peace after the Napoleonic wars but one of legitimist government after the Revolution and the régime of Napoleonic upstarts; and the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 was distracted by the two diverse aspects of the problem before it. It was a Congress of princes, not of peoples, and most Sovereigns were not unnaturally convinced, after