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Updated: June 4, 2025
There we saw Partition Treaties damned, and the whole given away, Confederations without Allies, Allies without Quota's, Princes without Armies, Armies without Men, and Men without Money, Crowns without Kings, Kings without Subjects, more Kings than Countries, and more Countries than were worth fighting for.
These sixty-two nations were subdivided into several hundreds of tribes; and these petty agglomerations were distributed amongst rival confederations or leagues, which disputed one with another the supremacy over such and such a portion of territory. Amongst the Kymrians of the West, the Armoric league bound together the tribes of Brittany and lower Normandy.
Very different from this was the embryonic growth of political society in ancient Greece and Italy. There the aggregation of clans into tribes and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as we have seen, in the City.
Evidently the urgent need to create kingdoms or confederations larger than any such single States as the natural map supplies, is manifest to both sides. If Germany, Italy and Russia can come to any sort of general agreement in these matters, their arrangements will be a matter of secondary importance to the Western Allies saving our duty to Serbia and Montenegro and their rulers.
The first plan of campaign drawn up at Paris aimed at driving a solid wedge of French troops between the two Confederations and inducing or compelling the South to join France; it was hoped that Saxony would follow. As a matter of fact, very many of the South Germans and Saxons disliked Prussian supremacy; Catholic Bavaria looked askance at the growing power of Protestant Prussia.
Great things may then be done in the name of the federal government, but in reality that government will have ceased to exist. In both these cases, the power which acts in the name of the confederation becomes stronger, the more it abandons the natural state and the acknowledged principles of confederations.
Its novelty lay in the duality of the form of government which it created a nation dealing directly with its citizens and yet composed of sovereign states and in its system of checks and balances. The world had seen confederations of states. It was familiar with nations subdivided into provinces or other administrative units. It had known experiments in pure democracy.
As in the horseback diets of Poland, a single opposing vote could put a stop to every thing, so that it only remained to vote by sabre-strokes, so Confederations, recognizing the right of separation, would have no other resort than brute force, for no great nation can allow itself to be killed without defending itself.
The first measure to this effect was the signing of the triple league between Holland, Sweden, and England, at The Hague, on the 13th of January, 1668. But this proved to be one of the most futile confederations on record.
The reason is that confederations have usually been formed by independent states, which entertained no real intention of obeying the central government, and which very readily ceded the right of commanding to the federal executive, and very prudently reserved the right of non-compliance to themselves.
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