Democracy is a spirit and an atmosphere, and its essence is trust in the moral instincts of the people. Yet, when all is said, the Congress of Vienna represents an important milestone along the road of progress. Thus the development of the national idea in Italy is almost a model of what chase credit cards online a development should be, and we have dwelt somewhat at length upon it for that very reason. Finally, in quite another region of Europe, Norway, which had been joined in an anomalous union with Sweden since 1814, satisfied her national aspirations unopposed by becoming an independent Constitutional Monarchy in 1905. The soul of the German people," says a recent German writer, "has always lain very deep down, and has seldom come to the surface to become the spirit of the time and to inspire the movements of the world. Some such expansion of German influence was inevitable from the facts of her economic development since 1871. To the German Government and to the ordinary educated German the Social Democratic party, though it numbers in its voting ranks over 4 million German workmen and others, does not represent German opinion at all: it represents something un-German and anti-German--a public enemy. For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual System which has distorted her whole subsequent development. He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as a young man he translated Stuart Mill's _Essay on Liberty_ into Serb, and for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris.
Thus Russia presents the strange spectacle of a mediaeval State existing in the twentieth century, and she is still in some particulars what Western Europe was in the Middle Ages. This is an excellent introduction to the subject, recording as it does the general impressions of an acute and sympathetic observer; it does not, of course, pretend to be comprehensive, and says nothing, for example, of the Jews, Poles, Finns, etc. For Britain the central problem must inevitably be: What is to be the position of the German Navy if we are successful in this war?