confederation of Europe a byword, and nationalism enlisted under Canning's standard of 'Every nation for itself, and God for us all'. Governments had to purge themselves of autocracy before the nations would favour their combination; peoples might combine themselves, but they had no love for a combination of masters.
It was, however, no easy thing for democracies to combine. We have seen that the destruction of autocracy in Russia does not produce popular unanimity even within a single State; still less has the reduction of Turkey in Europe conduced to harmony among the Balkan peoples. Autocracy was restored again in Austria after 1848 because its various races fought one another instead of combining against their common master, and it recovered in Germany because the German tribes could not unite on a basis of Parliamentary selfgovernment.
Such efforts as were made in the latter half of the nineteenth century to internationalize Europe were due to sectional impulse. There was the attempt of governments and diplomatists, without much popular backing, to create and maintain a Concert of Europe; there was the middle-class and commercial movement towards Free Trade; and there was the International Socialist tendency which was directed not so much against war as against capitalism. The only political system which approached the idea of a League of
