...Are we advancing towards anarchy or towards a new mode of things, towards dissolution or towards a transformed life? All ask themselves this question; all could resolve it, if the point of view of each man were not narrowed by his position in some one of the adverse camps; by the now prevailing habit of judging of the depth, the intensity, and the direction of the European current by the passing ebullitions of the surface; and by a prejudice, presently to be defined, which for half-a-century has influenced almost all appreciations of the political situation.

And yet this question must be solved. It is a vital one. It necessarily contains a rule for our actions....Let us, then, endeavour to distinguish all that there is of permanent from all that is merely accessory and transitory in the crisis; all that will remain, and which demands satisfaction, from that which is only a momentary ebullition, the dross or scum of metal in fusion. The question now is, how to carry forward the balance of the past half-century to the credit of the half-century to come. I shall endeavour to do this as rapidly as possible; not as summarily, however, as their Excellencies the ambassadors of France, Austria, Russia, and of the thirty-five or thirty-six States of Germany. Their Excellencies have very recently made a discovery which would remarkably simplify our solution if we could believe them upon their word. According to them, there are in London four or five persons who are the cause of all the disturbances of the Continent. They walk abroad, and all Europe is agitated; they associate themselves for an obiect, whatever it may be, and the whole of Europe associates itself with them. England has only to abandon her noblest privilege, that of exercising a free hospitality, and to drive these men across the ocean, and Europe would sleep in peace under the baton of Austria, the knout of Russia, the cavalletto of the Pope. Pity that Lord Granville should not have reached to the height of their Excellencies! Pity that for such a peace he should scruple to violate English law and English honour.

No; the agitation in Europe is not the work of a few individuals, of a few refugees, be they who they may; and there is something in this opinion sad and ridiculous at the same time: I say sad, because it evidently shows the inability of the "masters of the world" to comprehend the crisis. Individuals are only powerful at the present day, so far as they are the exponents of the condition and collective aspirations of large bodies of men. For sixty years Europe has been convulsed by a series of political struggles which have assumed all aspects by turns; which have raised every conceivable flag, from that of pure despotism to that of anarchy; from the organisation of the bourgeoise in France and elsewhere as the dominant caste, to the jacqueries of the peasants of Gallicia. Thirty revolutions have taken place. Two or three royal dynasties have been engulfed in the abyss of popular fury. Nations have risen, like Greece, from the tomb where they had been for ages buried; others, like Poland, have been erased from the map. Forgotten, almost unknown races, the Sclavonian race, the Roumaine race, silent until now, have disinterred their traditionary titles, and demanded to be represented in the Congress of Nations. Kings and Queens have gone to die in exile. The Austrian Empire, the China of Europe, has been on the brink of destruction. A Pope, drawn along by the popular current, has been obliged to bless a national insurrection, and then to fly in disguise from the capital of the Christian world. Vienna has twice been covered with barricades. Rome has seen the republican banner float above the Vatican. Governments, attacked and overthrown, have ten or twenty times recovered strength, drawn closer their alliances, overrun the half of Europe with their armies, annihilated revolutions, effaced entire generations of revolutionary spirits by the sword, the scaffold, exile, or imprisonment, and crushed, as they term it, the hydra of disorder and anarchy. The heads of the hydra have sprung up again fifty for one; the struggle has recommenced at the foot of the scaffold of those who initiated it; the idea has gained strength beneath the hammer on the anvil; we are now, three years after an European restoration, three months after the triumph of order in France, calculating upon and arming for new struggles; and we are told that all this is the work of a few individuals, transmitting from one to another, every ten years, the inheritance of a subversive idea! As well might the conquest of the world by Christianity be attributed to the underground labour of a secret society. Christian truth emerged from the catacombs, because the whole world was thirsting for it. The ancient unity was broken; a new one was necessary. Between these two unities chaos reigned, in which humanity cannot live. It reigns now, because amidst the ruins of an unity in which mankind no longer has faith, a new unity is being elaborated. If a few men have power with the multitudes, it is because these men embody this unity in themselves better than others do. And though you may destroy them to-day, others will replace them to-morrow.

Europe no longer possesses unity of faith, of mission or of aim. Such unity is a necessity in the world. Here, then, is the secret of the crisis.... Europe - I might say the world, for Europe is the lever of the world - no longer believes in the sanctity of royal races; she may still accept them here and there as a guarantee of stability, as a defence against the encroachments of some other dangerous element; but she no longer believes in the principle, in any special virtue residing in them, in a divine right consecrating and protecting them....Europe no longer believes in aristocracy, the royalty of several; she no longer believes in the inevitable physical transmission, in the perpetual inheritance of virtue, intelligence, and honour: she believes in it no longer, either scientifically or practically. ... Europe no longer believes in the Papacy; she no longer believes that it possesses the right, mission, or capacity of spiritual education or guidance; she no longer believes, in the immediate revelation, in the direct transmission of the designs and laws of Providence, by virtue of election, to any individual whatsoever;... Europe no longer believes in privilege, be it what it may; except in that which no one can destroy, because it comes from God - the privilege of genius and virtue; she desires wealth, but she despises or hates it in the persons of those who possess it, when it is not the price of labour, or when it arrogates to itself rights of political monopoly.

Now look at the actual organisation of Europe - is it not altogether based upon privilege, by whatever name it may be known? How, then, can one wonder at the struggle which is engendered within it?... But around this holy aspiration towards the emancipation of oppressed classes and peoples, around this great social thought which ferments in all men's minds, there has arisen such an uproar of discordant and irritated voices; such a jumbling together of petty systems, of fragmentary conceptions, representing in reality nothing but individualities excited by vanity and morbid exaltation; that the aspiration itself, the primitive thought, has become obscure to our eyes. We have mistaken the glare of meteors for the true and steadfast light; we have forgotten what is principal in what is accidental and accessory; we have turned from eternal TRUTH for the possible realities of a day. ...

...there exists a general prejudice, alluded to some pages back, which radically vitiates the judgments brought to bear upon the European crisis. The error consists in this, that in seeking an insight into the issue of the crisis, and the tendencies which will govern its latest stage, attention is directed exclusively to France. Some seventy years ago we used to judge all republican ideas by our historical recollections of Sparta and Athens; now we judge all that is called liberty, equality, or association by the meaning given, or thought to be given, to these words in France. From continually fixing our eyes upon Paris, we are no longer capable of seeing or comprehending the rest of Europe ...

... 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 heart of the other peoples of Europe. I say, which all have agreed to call social, because, generally speaking, every great revolution is so far social, that it cannot be accomplished either in the religious, political, or any other sphere, without affecting social relations, the sources and the distribution of wealth; but that which is only a secondary consequence in political revolutions is now the cause and the banner of the movement in France. The question there is now, above all, to establish better relations between labour and capital, between production and consumption, between the workman and the employer.

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. The social question may, in effect, although with difficulty, be partly resolved by a single people; it is an internal question for each... The question of nationality can only be resolved by destroying the treaties of 1815, and changing the map of Europe and its public Law. The question of Nationalities, rightly understood, is the Alliance of the Peoples; the balance of powers based upon new foundations; the organisation of the work that Europe has to accomplish.

We should be wrong, however, to separate the two questions; they are indissolubly connected. The men who plead the cause of the Nationalities well know that revolutions, necessarily supporting themselves on the masses, ought to satisfy their legitimate wants; they know that a revolution is sacred whenever it has for its object the progress of the millions; but that it is an unpardonable crime when it has only for its object the interest of a minority, of a caste, or of a monopoly; they know that the problem now to be resolved is, the association of all the faculties and all the forces of humanity towards a common end, and that no movement can at the present time be simply political.

In Italy, in Hungary, in the states composing the empire of Austria, in Poland, in Germany, the social question presents nothing of a threatening, subversive, or anarchical nature. There is no hostile, profoundly reactionary sentiment between class and class; no exaggerated abnormal development of concentrated industry; no agglomerated misery rendering urgent the instant application of the remedy; no reckless putting forth of systems and solutions.... The chief exceptions are found in France. There, the question which with the other peoples is secondary, and rather the means than the end, has acquired a preponderating importance and peculiar characteristics. The special condition of existing interests; the existence of large manufacturing centres; the shamelessness with which the bourgeoisie has confiscated to its own advantage two revolutions made by the people; the absence of the question of national unity, - so absorbing for the other nations, and already irrevocably conquered in France, - the enthusiasm, to a certain extent factitious and transient, with which the French mind seizes upon every novelty, have all contributed in that country to give to the social idea a character of exclusiveness and exaggeration which it is unlikely to assume elsewhere.

French Socialism has forcibly stirred men's minds; it has raised up a number of problems of detail of which there was no suspicion before, and of which the solution will have a certain importance in the future; it has - and this is a positive benefit - excited a searching European inquiry into the condition of the working classes; it has uncovered the hidden sores of the system founded upon the spirit of caste and monopoly; it has incited the bourgeoisie to a reaction so ferocious and absurd that its condemnation as a governing caste, is consequently assured at no distant period. But it has falsified and endangered the great social European idea, raised up innumerable obstacles to its progress, and aroused against it furious enemies, where it ought naturally to have found friends - in the small bourgeoisie; it has kept numbers of intelligent men from entertaining the urgent question of liberty; it has divided, broken up into fractions, the camp of democracy, for which, if united, an ample field of conquests, already morally won, was assured. The French socialists deny this; but for every impartial mind the state into which France has fallen must be an argument which admits of no reply.

France is still profoundly materialist... but it was not for a material interest that the people of Vienna fought in 1848; in weakening the empire they could only lose power. It was not for an increase of wealth that the people of Lombardy fought in the same year; the Austrian Government had endeavoured in the year preceding to excite the peasants against the landed proprietors, as they had done in Gallicia; but everywhere they had failed. They struggled, they still struggle, as do Poland, Germany, and Hungary, for country and liberty; for a word inscribed upon a banner, proclaiming to the world that they also live, think, love, and labour for the benefit of all. They speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination, in order to elaborate and express their idea; to contribute their stone also to the great pyramid of history. It is something moral which they are seeking; and this moral something is in fact, even politically speaking, the most important question in the present state of things. It is the organisation of the European task. It is no longer the savage, hostile, quarrelsome nationality of two hundred years ago which is invoked by these peoples. ...The nationality of the peoples...can only be founded by a common effort and a common movement; sympathy and alliance will be its result. In principle, as in the ideas formerly laid down by the men influencing every national party, nationality ought only to be to humanity that which the division of 'labour is in a workshop - the recognised symbol of association; the assertion of the individuality of a human group called by its geographical position, its traditions, and its language, to fulfil a special function in the European work of civilisation.

The map of Europe has to be re-made. This is the key to the present movement; herein lies the initiative. Before acting, the instrument for action must be organised; before building, the ground must be one's own. The social idea cannot be realised under any form whatsoever before this reorganisation of Europe is effected; before the peoples are free to interrogate themselves; to express their vocation, and to assure its accomplishment by an alliance capable of substituting itself for the absolutist league which now reigns supreme.

Take the map of Europe. Study it synthetically in its geographical structure, in the great indications fumished by the lines of mountains and rivers, in the symmetrical arrangement of its parts. Compare the previsions of the future which this examination suggests, with the existing collocation of the principal races and idioms. Open the page of history, and seek for the signs of vitality in the different populations, resulting from the ensemble of their additions; listen, in short, to the cry which rises from the conscience of these populations through their struggles and their martyrs. Then observe the official governmental map, such as has been sanctioned by the treaties of 1815. In the contrast between the two, you will find the definitive answer to the terrors and complaints of diplomatists. Here also is the secret of the future world.

It is in these thirteen or fourteen groups, now dismembered into fifty divisions, almost all weak and powerless in comparison with five of them possessing an irresistibly preponderating force. It is in this Germany, now divided into thirty-five or thirty-six States; a prey alternately to the ambition of Prussia and Austria, and which acknowledges no other divisions than those of pure Teutonic nationality in the south and of Saxony in the north, united on the line of the Maine. It is in this immense race, whose outposts extend as far as Central Germany in Moravia, which has not yet uttered its national cry to Europe, and which aspires to utter it - in heroic Poland, whom we have so much admired only to forget her at the moment of her downfallen - the Sclavonia of the south, extending its branches along the Danube, and destined to rally itself in a vast confederation, probably under the initiative of Hungary - in the Roumaine race, an Italian colony planted by Trajan in the lower basin of the Danube, which would appear to be called upon to serve as a bridge of communication between the Sclavonian and the Greco-Latin races. It is in Greece, which has not risen from the tomb where it lay buried for ages to become a petty German viceroyalty, but to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier against the European encroachments of Russia. It is in Spain and Portugal, destined sooner or later to be united as an Iberian peninsula. It is in the ancient land of Odin, Scandinavia, of which Sweden must some day complete the unity. It is, above all, in Italy, a predestined nation, which cannot resolve the question of its independence without overthrowing the empire and the papacy at the same time, and planting upon the Capitol and the Vatican the banner of the inviolability of the human soul for the whole world.