Her poets and philosophers might sing of liberty and dream Utopian dreams, and here and there an experiment in popular government might be tried by some princeling who had caught the liberal fashion; but her political fabric, together with the rivalry between Prussia and Austria, kept her disunited and strangled all real hopes of reform.

In short, the first and most crying need of Europe was not the abolition of antiquated constitutions, but the redrawing of anomalous frontiers.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people proclaimed in France presupposed the doctrine of the solidarity of the people proclaimed by the dismembered nations of Europe.

France could set its house in order; but Belgium, Germany, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, etc., had as yet no house of their own.

The house had to be built before it could be furnished on the latest democratic lines; and before it could be even built, the ground had to be wrested from the hands of absentee landlords or cleared of the little dynastic State-shanties which cumbered it.

The Polish nationalists became the backbone of the republican movement in Europe; the French republicans proclaimed the independence of nations as one of their cardinal principles.
Thus the social idea and the national idea were originally intimately connected.