The case of the German people in their latterday attitude toward dynastic vagaries may afford a term of comparison.

These appear yet incapable of distinguishing between national shame and dynastic ambition.
By a different course and on lines more nearly parallel with the life-history of the German peoples, the English-speaking peoples have reached what is for the present purpose much the same ground as the French, in that they too have made the shift from the dynastic State to the national commonwealth.

The British started late, but the discipline of servitude and unmitigated personal rule in their case was relatively brief and relatively ineffectual; that is to say, as compared with what their German cousins had to endure and to learn in the like connection.
So that the British never learned the lesson of dynastic loyalty fully by heart; at least not the populace; whatever may be true for the privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of privilege and irresponsible mastery.

Here as in the French case it was the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen, that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion and an easy matter--as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of matters of that magnitude.

It is now some two and a half centuries since this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking community.