As regards Mr. Gladstone's instances of the success of Home-rule,
Mr. Balfour pointed out that it was only by ransacking history for exceptional cases that Mr. Gladstone proved his point. The history of France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, was a history of the absorption of small States into great, an absorption which had always been considered one of the most advantageous changes in the story of national life ; and he quoted Mr. John Morley's eulogy on the French Revolution for doing what the French Monarchy had been unable to do,—namely, obliterating the differences between the different nationalities and communities of which the French nation was composed, teaching the French no longer to call themselves Alsatians, Bretons, Normans, Pro- vencals, Gaseous, but simply Frenchmen. The National Assembly extinguished these provincial rivalries, and so tended in the direction in which all political progress in Europe has tended,—towards fusion, and against particularism.
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