And as we have seen, until nationality becomes keenly self-conscious, the national idea remains unborn.

Only some great internal cataclysm or an overwhelming disaster inflicted by a foreign power could evoke this consciousness in a nation; and fate ordained that the two methods should be tried simultaneously at opposite ends of Europe.

France, "standing on the top of golden hours," and Poland, crushed, dismembered, downtrodden--it would be difficult to say which of these contributed the more to the great national awakening in Europe.
Poland was the first and greatest martyr of the nationalist faith.

By its constitution, which was that of an oligarchical republic with an elective king, Poland was placed beyond the pale of a Europe ruled upon dynastic principles.

Its very existence was an insult to the accepted ideals of legitimacy and hereditary monarchy, and it was impossible for any particular house to acquire it in the honest way of marriage.