Their power of fruitful national association depended more upon loyalty
to their particular local political tradition and habits than upon any
ideal perfection in their new and experimental machinery for
distributing political responsibility and securing popular
representation. A national policy and organization is, consequently,
essentially particular; and, what is equally important, its particular
character is partly determined by the similarly special character of the
policy and organization of the surrounding states. The historical
process in which each of the European nations originated included, as
an essential element, the action and reaction of these particular states
one upon the other. Each nation was formed, that is, as part of a
political system which included other nations. As any particular state
became more of a nation, its increasing power of effective association
forced its neighbors either into submission or into an equally efficient
exercise of national resistance. Little by little it has been discovered
that any increase in the loyalty and fertility of a country's domestic
life was contingent upon the attainment of a more definite position in
the general European system; and that, on the other hand, any attempt to
escape from the limitations imposed upon a particular state by the
general system was followed by a diminished efficiency in its machinery
of national association.
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