At home the exercise of absolute authority was not limited to matters and occasions which really raised questions of public safety.

In their foreign policies the majority of the states had little idea of the necessary and desirable limits of their own aggressive power.

Those limits were imposed from without; and when several states could combine in support of an act of international piracy, as in the case of the partition of Poland, Europe could not be said to have any effective system of public law.

The partition of Poland, which France could and should have prevented, was at once a convincing exposure of the miserable international position to which France had been reduced by the Bourbons, and the best possible testimony to the final moral bankruptcy of the political system of the eighteenth century.
II THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT In 1789 the bombshell of the French Revolution exploded under this fabric of semi-national and semi-despotic, but wholly royalist and aristocratic, European political system.

For the first time in the history of European nations a national organization and tradition was confronted by a radical democratic purpose and faith.