Jeniffer electronic book

At home the exercise of
absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really
raised questions of public safety. In their foreign policies the
majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable
limits of their own aggressive power. Those limits were imposed from
without; and when several states could combine in support of an act of
international piracy, as in the case of the partition of Poland, Europe
could not be said to have any effective system of public law. The
partition of Poland, which France could and should have prevented, was
at once a convincing exposure of the miserable international position to
which France had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible
testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political system of the
eighteenth century.

II
THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded under this
fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic, but wholly royalist and
aristocratic, European political system.


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