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+Project Gutenberg's History of Modern Europe 1972-1878, by C. A. Fyffe
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: History of Modern Europe 1972-1878
+
+Author: C. A. Fyffe
+
+Release Date: April 25, 2014 [EBook #6589]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE 1972-1878 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tom Allen, Charles Franks, David Gundry and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY
+
+OF
+
+MODERN EUROPE
+
+1792-1878
+
+
+BY
+
+C. A. FYFFE, M.A.
+
+Barrister-at-Law; Fellow of University College, Oxford;
+Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society
+
+
+POPULAR EDITION
+
+With Maps
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+In acceding to the Publishers' request for a re-issue of the "History of
+Modern Europe," in the form of a popular edition, I feel that I am only
+fulfilling what would have been the wish of the Author himself. A few
+manuscript corrections and additions found in his own copy of the work have
+been adopted in the present edition; in general, however, my attention in
+revising each sheet for the press has been devoted to securing an accurate
+reproduction of the text and notes as they appeared in the previous
+editions in three volumes. I trust that in this cheaper and more portable
+form the work will prove, both to the student and the general reader, even
+more widely acceptable than heretofore.
+
+HENRIETTA F. A. FYFFE.
+
+London, November, 1895.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
+
+
+The object of this work is to show how the States of Europe have gained the
+form and character which they possess at the present moment. The outbreak
+of the Revolutionary War in 1792, terminating a period which now appears
+far removed from us, and setting in motion forces which have in our own day
+produced a united Germany and a united Italy, forms the natural
+starting-point of a history of the present century. I have endeavoured to
+tell a simple story, believing that a narrative in which facts are chosen
+for their significance, and exhibited in their real connection, may be made
+to convey as true an impression as a fuller history in which the writer is
+not forced by the necessity of concentration to exercise the same rigour
+towards himself and his materials. The second volume of the work will bring
+the reader down to the year 1848: the third, down to the present time.
+
+London, 1880.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF THE FIRST VOLUME. [1]
+
+
+In revising this volume for the second edition I have occupied myself
+mainly with two sources of information--the unpublished Records of the
+English Foreign Office, and the published works which have during recent
+years resulted from the investigation of the Archives of Vienna. The
+English Records from 1792 to 1814, for access to which I have to express my
+thanks to Lord Granville, form a body of firsthand authority of
+extraordinary richness, compass, and interest. They include the whole
+correspondence between the representatives of Great Britain at Foreign
+Courts and the English Foreign Office; a certain number of private
+communications between Ministers and these representatives; a quantity of
+reports from consuls, agents, and "informants" of every description; and in
+addition to these the military reports, often admirably vivid and full of
+matter, sent by the British officers attached to the head-quarters of our
+Allies in most of the campaigns from 1792 to 1814. It is impossible that
+any one person should go through the whole of this material, which it took
+the Diplomatic Service a quarter of a century to write. I have endeavoured
+to master the correspondence from each quarter of Europe which, for the
+time being, had a preponderance in political or military interest, leaving
+it when its importance became obviously subordinate to that of others; and
+although I have no doubt left untouched much that would repay
+investigation, I trust that the narrative has gained in accuracy from a
+labour which was not a light one, and that the few short extracts which
+space has permitted me to throw into the notes may serve to bring the
+reader nearer to events. At some future time I hope to publish a selection
+from the most important documents of this period. It is strange that our
+learned Societies, so appreciative of every distant and trivial chronicle
+of the Middle Ages, should ignore the records of a time of such surpassing
+interest, and one in which England played so great a part. No just
+conception can be formed of the difference between English statesmanship
+and that of the Continental Courts in integrity, truthfulness, and public
+spirit, until the mass of diplomatic correspondence preserved at London has
+been studied; nor, until this has been done, can anything like an adequate
+biography of Pitt be written.
+
+The second and less important group of authorities with which I have busied
+myself during the work of revision comprises the works of Hueffer, Vivenot,
+Beer, Helfert, and others, based on Austrian documents, along with the
+Austrian documents and letters that have been published by Vivenot. The
+last-named writer is himself a partizan, but the material which he has
+given to the world is most valuable. The mystery in which the Austrian
+Government until lately enveloped all its actions caused some of these to
+be described as worse than they really were; and I believe that in the
+First Edition I under-estimated the bias of Prussian and North-German
+writers. Where I have seen reasons to alter any statements, I have done so
+without reserve, as it appears to me childish for any one who attempts to
+write history to cling to an opinion after the balance of evidence seems to
+be against it. The publication of the second volume of this work has been
+delayed by the revision of the first; but I hope that it will appear before
+many months more. I must express my obligations to Mr. Oscar Browning, a
+fellow-labourer in the same field, who not only furnished me with various
+corrections, but placed his own lectures at my disposal; and to Mr. Alfred
+Kingston, whose unfailing kindness and courtesy make so great a difference
+to those whose work lies in the department of the Record Office which is
+under his care.
+
+London, 1883.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME. [2]
+
+
+In writing this volume I have not had the advantage of consulting the
+English Foreign Office Records for a later period than the end of 1815. A
+rule not found necessary at Berlin and some other foreign capitals still
+closes to historical inquirers the English documents of the last seventy
+years. Restrictions are no doubt necessary in the case of transactions of
+recent date, but the period of seventy years is surely unnecessarily long.
+Public interests could not be prejudiced, nor could individuals be even
+remotely affected, by the freest examination of the papers of 1820 or 1830.
+
+The London documents of 1814-1815 are of various degrees of interest and
+importance. Those relating to the Congress of Vienna are somewhat
+disappointing. Taken all together, they add less to our knowledge on the
+one or two points still requiring elucidation than the recently-published
+correspondence of Talleyrand with Louis XVIII. The despatches from Italy
+are on the other hand of great value, proving, what I believe was not
+established before, that the Secret Treaty of 1815, whereby Austria gained
+a legal right to prevent any departure from absolute Government at Naples,
+was communicated to the British Ministry and received its sanction. This
+sanction explains the obscure and embarrassed language of Castlereagh in
+1820, which in its turn gave rise to the belief in Italy that England was
+more deeply committed to Austria than it actually was, and probably
+occasioned the forgery of the pretended Treaty of July 27, 1813, exposed in
+vol. i. of this work, p. 538, 2nd edit. [3] The papers from France and
+Spain are also interesting, though not establishing any new conclusions.
+
+While regretting that I have not been able to use the London archives later
+than 1815, I believe that it is nevertheless possible, without recourse to
+unpublished papers, to write the history of the succeeding thirty years
+with substantial correctness. There exist in a published form, apart from
+documents printed officially, masses of first-hand material of undoubtedly
+authentic character, such as the great English collection known by the
+somewhat misleading name of Wellington Despatches, New Series; or again,
+the collection printed as an appendix to Prokesch von Osten's History of
+the Greek Rebellion, or the many volumes of Gentz' Correspondence belonging
+to the period about 1820, when Gentz was really at the centre of affairs.
+The Metternich papers, interesting as far as they go, are a mere selection.
+The omissions are glaring, and scarcely accidental. Many minor collections
+bearing on particular events might be named, such as those in Guizot's
+Memoires. Frequent references will show my obligation to the German series
+of historical works constituting the Leipzig Staatengeschichte, as well as
+to French authors who, like Viel-Castel, have worked with original sources
+of information before them. There exist in English literature singularly
+few works on this period of Continental history.
+
+A greater publicity was introduced into political affairs on the Continent
+by the establishment of Parliamentary Government in France in 1815, and
+even by the attempts made to introduce it in other States. In England we
+have always had freedom of discussion, but the amount of information made
+public by the executive in recent times has been enormously greater than it
+was at the end of the last century. The only documents published at the
+outbreak of the war of 1793 were, so far as I can ascertain, the well-known
+letters of Chauvelin and Lord Grenville. During the twenty years' struggle
+with France next to nothing was known of the diplomatic transactions
+between England and the Continental Powers. But from the time of the Reform
+Bill onwards the amount of information given to the public has been
+constantly increasing, and the reader of Parliamentary Papers in our own
+day is likely to complain of diffusiveness rather than of reticence.
+Nevertheless the perusal of published papers can never be quite the same
+thing as an examination of the originals; and the writer who first has
+access to the English archives after 1815 will have an advantage over those
+who have gone before him.
+
+The completion of this volume has been delayed by almost every circumstance
+adverse to historical study and production, including a severe
+Parliamentary contest. I trust, however, that no trace of partisanship or
+unrest appears in the work, which I have valued for the sake of the mental
+discipline which it demanded. With quieter times the third volume will, I
+trust, advance more rapidly.
+
+LONDON, October, 1886.
+
+NOTE.--The third volume was published in 1889.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+FRANCE AND GERMANY AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.
+
+Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--
+Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and
+Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by the
+Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--Austria--
+Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II.--Policy
+of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis II.--Prussia--
+Government of Frederick William II.--Social Condition of Prussia--Secondary
+States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free Cities--Knights--Weakness of
+Germany
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE WAR, DOWN TO THE TREATIES OF BASLE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE
+DIRECTORY.
+
+French and Austrian Armies on the Flemish Frontier--Prussia enters the
+War--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10 at
+Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the War--Brunswick, checked at
+Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of
+France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands--
+Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments--
+Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the
+Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected
+by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the
+Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendee--Revolutionary System of
+1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic
+Army--Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from
+the War--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of
+Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendemiaire--Constitution of
+1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the Spirit of Europe up to
+1795
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ITALIAN CAMPAIGNS: TREATY OF CAMPO FORMIO.
+
+Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition
+of the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the
+Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in
+Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--
+Castiglione--Moreau and Jourdan in Germany--Their retreat--Secret Treaty
+with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the
+idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the
+Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in
+Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to
+Austria--Genoa--Coup d'etat of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo
+Formio--Victories of England at Sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+FROM THE CONGRESS OF RASTADT TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CONSULATE.
+
+Congress of Rastadt--The Rhenish Provinces ceded--Ecclesiastical States of
+Germany suppressed--French Intervention in Switzerland--Helvetic
+Republic--The French invade the Papal States--Roman Republic--Expedition to
+Egypt--Battle of the Nile--Coalition of 1798--Ferdinand of Naples enters
+Rome--Mack's defeats--French enter Naples--Parthenopean Republic--War with
+Austria and Russia--Battle of Stockach--Murder of the French Envoys at
+Rastadt--Campaign in Lombardy--Reign of Terror at Naples--Austrian designs
+upon Italy--Suvaroff and the Austrians--Campaign in Switzerland--Campaign
+in Holland--Bonaparte returns from Egypt--Coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire--
+Constitution of 1799--System of Bonaparte in France--Its effect on the
+influence of France abroad
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FROM MARENGO TO THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS.
+
+Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England--The War continues--Massena
+besieged in Genoa--Moreau invades Southern Germany--Bonaparte crosses the
+St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians--Battle of
+Marengo--Austrians retire behind the Mincio--Treaty between England and
+Austria--Austria continues the War--Battle of Hohenlinden--Peace of
+Luneville--War between England and the Northern Maritime League--Battle
+of Copenhagen--Murder of Paul--End of the Maritime War--English Army
+enters Egypt--French defeated at Alexandria--They capitulate at Cairo and
+Alexandria--Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at
+London, followed by Peace of Amiens--Pitt's Irish Policy and his
+retirement--Debates on the Peace--Aggressions of Bonaparte during the
+Continental Peace--Holland, Italy, Switzerland--Settlement of Germany
+under French and Russian influence--Suppression of Ecclesiastical States
+and Free Cities--Its effects--Stein--France under the Consulate--The
+Civil Code--The Concordat
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE EMPIRE, TO THE PEACE OF PRESBURG.
+
+England claims Malta--War renewed--Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and
+blockades the Elbe--Remonstrances of Prussia--Cadoudal's Plot--Murder
+of the Duke of Enghien--Napoleon Emperor--Coalition of 1805--Prussia
+holds aloof--State of Austria--Failure of Napoleon's Attempt to gain
+Naval Superiority in the Channel--Campaign in Western Germany--
+Capitulation of Ulm--Trafalgar--Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and
+the Allies--The French enter Vienna--Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with
+Prussian Ultimatum--Battle of Austerlitz--Haugwitz signs a Treaty of
+Alliance with Napoleon--Peace--Treaty of Presburg--End of the Holy
+Roman Empire--Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte--Battle of Maida--The
+Napoleonic Empire and Dynasty--Federation of the Rhine--State of
+Germany--Possibility of maintaining the Empire of 1806
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+DEATH OF PITT, TO THE PEACE OF TILSIT.
+
+Death of Pitt--Ministry of Fox and Grenville--Napoleon forces Prussia into
+war with England, and then offers Hanover to England--Prussia resolves on
+war with Napoleon--State of Prussia--Decline of the Army--Southern Germany
+with Napoleon--Austria neutral--England and Russia about to help Prussia,
+but not immediately--Campaign of 1806--Battles of Jena and Auerstaedt--Ruin
+of the Prussian Army--Capitulation of Fortresses--Demands of Napoleon--The
+War continues--Berlin Decree--Exclusion of English goods from the
+Continent--Russia enters the war--Campaign in Poland and East
+Prussia--Eylau--Treaty of Bartenstein--Friedland--Interview at
+Tilsit--Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander--Secret Articles--English
+expedition to Denmark--The French enter Portugal--Prussia after the Peace
+of Tilsit--Stein's Edict of Emancipation--The Prussian Peasant--Reform of
+the Prussian Army, and creation of Municipalities--Stein's other projects
+of Reform, which are not carried out
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+SPAIN, TO THE FALL OF SARAGOSSA.
+
+Spain in 1806--Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy--He
+affects to be Ferdinand's Protector--Dupont's Army enters Spain--Murat in
+Spain--Charles abdicates--Ferdinand King--Savary brings Ferdinand to
+Bayonne--Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign--Spirit of the
+Spanish Nation--Contrast with Germany--Rising of all Spain--The Notables
+at Bayonne--Campaign of 1808--Capitulation of Baylen--Wellesley lands in
+Portugal--Vimieiro--Convention of Cintra--Effect of the Spanish Rising on
+Europe--War Party in Prussia--Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt--Stein
+resigns, and is proscribed--Napoleon in Spain--Spanish Misgovernment--
+Campaign on the Ebro--Campaign of Sir John Moore--Corunna--Napoleon
+leaves Spain--Siege of Saragossa--Successes of the French
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WAR OF 1809: THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE--SPAIN, TO THE BATTLE OF SALAMANCA.
+
+Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German
+Nation--Patriotic movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North
+Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of
+the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in
+Vienna--Attempts of Doernberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second passage
+of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for
+Events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but
+retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of
+Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich--
+Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and
+Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, Le Valais, and the
+North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: its benefits and wrongs--The
+Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia
+imminent--Wellington in Portugal; Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's
+Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign
+of 1811--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN, TO THE TREATY OF KALISCH.
+
+War approaching between France and Russia--Policy of Prussia--Hardenberg's
+Ministry--Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon--Austrian Alliance--
+Napoleon's Preparations--He enters Russia--Alexander and Bernadotte--Plan
+of Russians to fight a battle at Drissa frustrated--They retreat on
+Witepsk--Sufferings of the French--French enter Smolensko--Battle of
+Borodino--Evacuation of Moscow--Moscow fired--The Retreat from Moscow--
+French at Smolensko--Advance of Russian Armies from North and South--Battle
+of Krasnoi--Passage of the Beresina--The French reach the Niemen--York's
+Convention with the Russians--The Czar and Stein--Russian Army enters
+Prussia--Stein raises East Prussia--Treaty of Kalisch--Prussia declares
+War--Enthusiasm of the Nation--Idea of German Unity--The Landwehr
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+WAR OF LIBERATION, TO THE PEACE OF PARIS.
+
+The War of Liberation--Bluecher crosses the Elbe--Battle of Luetzen--The
+Allies retreat to Silesia--Battle of Bautzen--Armistice--Napoleon intends
+to intimidate Austria--Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria--Metternich's
+Policy--Treaty of Reichenbach--Austria offers its Mediation--Congress of
+Prague--Austria enters the War--Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the
+Allies--Campaign of August--Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach,
+and Kulm--Effect of these Actions--Battle of Dennewitz--German Policy of
+Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy--Frustrated
+hopes of German Unity--Battle of Leipzig--The Allies reach the Rhine--
+Offers of Peace at Frankfort--Plan of Invasion of France--Backwardness of
+Austria--The Allies enter France--Campaign of 1814--Congress of
+Chatillon--Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies--The Allies advance
+on Paris--Capitulation of Paris--Entry of the Allies--Dethronement of
+Napoleon--Restoration of the Bourbons--The Charta--Treaty of Paris--
+Territorial effects of the War, 1792-1814--Every Power except France had
+gained--France relatively weaker in Europe--Summary of the permanent
+effects of this period on Europe
+
+END OF VOL. I. (ORIGINAL EDITION).
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE RESTORATION.
+
+The Restoration of 1814--Norway--Naples--Westphalia--Spain--The Spanish
+Constitution overthrown: victory of the clergy--Restoration in France--The
+Charta--Encroachments of the nobles and clergy--Growing hostility to the
+Bourbons--Congress of Vienna--Talleyrand and the Four Powers--The Polish
+question--The Saxon question--Theory of Legitimacy--Secret alliance
+against Russia and Prussia--Compromise--The Rhenish Provinces--Napoleon
+leaves Elba and lands in France--His declarations--Napoleon at Grenoble,
+at Lyons, at Paris--The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against
+France--Murat's action in Italy--The Acte Additionnel--The Champ de
+Mai--Napoleon takes up the offensive--Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras,
+Waterloo--Affairs at Paris--Napoleon sent to St. Helena--Wellington and
+Fouche--Arguments on the proposed cession of French territory--Treaty of
+Holy Alliance--Second Treaty of Paris--Conclusion of the work of the
+Congress of Vienna--Federation of Germany--Estimate of the Congress of
+Vienna and of the Treaties of 1815--The Slave Trade
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE PROGRESS OF REACTION.
+
+Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of
+Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy,
+England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the
+New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of
+the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the
+Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the
+Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the
+first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in
+Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and
+privilege--Schmalz' Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at
+large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines
+to repression--Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing
+influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of
+Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in
+Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of
+the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE MEDITERRANEAN MOVEMENTS OF 1820.
+
+Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820--Spain from
+1814 to 1820--The South American Colonies--The Army at Cadiz: Action
+of Quiroga and Riego--Movement at Corunna--Ferdinand accepts the
+Constitution of 1812--Naples from 1815 to 1820--The Court-party, the
+Muratists, the Carbonari--The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at
+Naples--Constitutional movement in Portugal--Alexander's proposal with
+regard to Spain--The Conference and Declaration of Troppau--Protest of
+England--Conference of Laibach--The Austrians invade Naples and restore
+absolute Monarchy--Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails--Spain from
+1820 to 1822--Death of Castlereagh--The Congress of Verona--Policy of
+England--The French invade Spain--Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and
+violence of the reaction--England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish
+Colonies by France, and subsequently recognises their independence--
+Affairs in Portugal--Canning sends troops to Lisbon--The Policy of
+Canning--Estimate of his place in the history of Europe
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+GREECE AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.
+
+Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church
+--Communal System--The AEgaean Islands--The Phanariots--Greek intellectual
+revival: Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece
+with the French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetaeria Philike--Hypsilanti's
+Attempt in the Danubian Provinces: its failure--Revolt of the Morea:
+Massacres: Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople
+--Attitude of Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt:
+Affairs at Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of
+Chios--Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the
+Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and
+invades the Murea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian
+proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:
+Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--
+Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death
+of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and
+1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold
+accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,
+King of Greece
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE MOVEMENTS OF 1830.
+
+France before 1830--Reign of Charles X.--Ministry of Martignac--Ministry
+of Polignac--The Duke of Orleans--War in Algiers--The July Ordinances--
+Revolution of July--Louis Philippe King--Nature and effects of the July
+Revolution--Affairs in Belgium--The Belgian Revolution--The Great
+Powers--Intervention, and establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium--Affairs
+of Poland--Insurrection at Warsaw--War between Russia and Poland--Overthrow
+of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution--Affairs of Italy--
+Insurrection in the Papal States--France and Austria--Austrian
+Intervention--Ancona occupied by the French--Affairs of Germany--Prussia;
+the Zollverein--Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony--The Palatinate--Reaction in
+Germany--The exiles in Switzerland: Incursion into Savoy--Dispersion of the
+Exiles--France under Louis Philippe: Successive risings--Period of
+Parliamentary activity--England after 1830: The Reform Bill
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+SPANISH AND EASTERN AFFAIRS.
+
+France and England after 1830--Affairs of Portugal--Don Miguel--Don Pedro
+invades Portugal--Ferdinand of Spain--The Pragmatic Sanction--Death of
+Ferdinand: Regency of Christina--The Constitution--Quadruple
+Alliance--Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal--Carlos enters
+Spain--The Basque Provinces--Carlist War: Zumalacarregui--The Spanish
+Government seeks French assistance, which is refused--Constitution of
+1837--End of the War--Regency of Espartero--Isabella Queen--Affairs of
+the Ottoman Empire--Ibrahim invades Syria; his victories--Rivalry of
+France and Russia at Constantinople--Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar
+Skelessi--Effect of this Treaty--France and Mehemet Ali--Commerce of the
+Levant--Second War between Mehemet and the Porte--Ottoman disasters--The
+Policy of the Great Powers--Quadruple Treaty without France--Ibrahim
+expelled from Syria--Final Settlement--Turkey after 1840--Attempted
+reforms of Reschid Pasha
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+EUROPE BEFORE 1848.
+
+Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace--Italy and Austria--Mazzini--The
+House of Savoy--Gioberti--Election of Pius IX.--Reforms expected--
+Revolution at Palermo--Agitation in Northern Italy--Lombardy--State of
+the Austrian Empire--Growth of Hungarian national spirit--The Magyars
+and Slavs--Transylvania--Parties among the Magyars--Kossuth--The Slavic
+national movements in Austria--The government enters on reforms in
+Hungary--Policy of the Opposition--The Rural system of Austria--
+Insurrection in Galicia: the nobles and the peasants--Agrarian
+edict--Public opinion in Vienna--Prussia--Accession and character of
+King Frederick William IV.--Convocation of the United Diet--Its
+debates and dissolution--France--The Spanish Marriages--Reform
+movement--Socialism--Revolution of February--End of the Orleanist
+Monarchy
+
+END OF VOL. II. (ORIGINAL EDITION).
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+THE MARCH REVOLUTION, 1848.
+
+Europe in 1789 and in 1848--Agitation in Western Germany before and
+after the Revolution at Paris--Austria and Hungary--The March Revolution
+at Vienna--Flight of Metternich--The Hungarian Diet--Hungary wins its
+independence--Bohemian movement--Autonomy promised to Bohemia--
+Insurrection of Lombardy--Of Venice--Piedmont makes war on Austria--A
+general Italian war against Austria imminent--The March Days at
+Berlin--Frederick William IV.--A National Assembly promised--
+Schleswig-Holstein--Insurrection in Holstein--War between Germany and
+Denmark--The German Ante-Parliament--Republican Rising in Baden--Meeting
+of the German National Assembly at Frankfort--Europe generally in March,
+1848--The French Provisional Government--The National Workshops--The
+Government and the Red Republicans--French National Assembly--Riot of
+May 15--Measures against the National Workshops--The Four Days of
+June--Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon--He is elected to the Assembly--Elected
+President
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+THE PERIOD OF CONFLICT, DOWN TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SECOND FRENCH
+EMPIRE.
+
+Austria and Italy--Vienna from March to May--Flight of the Emperor
+--Bohemian National Movement--Windischgraetz subdues Prague--Campaign around
+Verona--Papal Allocution--Naples in May--Negotiations as to Lombardy--
+Reconquest of Venetia--Battle of Custozza--The Austrians enter
+Milan--Austrian Court and Hungary--The Serbs in Southern Hungary--Serb
+Congress at Carlowitz--Jellacic--Affairs of Croatia--Jellacic, the Court
+and the Hungarian Movement--Murder of Lamberg--Manifesto of October 3--
+Vienna on October 6--The Emperor at Olmuetz--Windischgraetz conquers
+Vienna--The Parliament at Kremsier--Schwarzenberg Minister--Ferdinand
+abdicates--Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament--Unitary Edict--Hungary
+--The Roumanians in Transylvania--The Austrian Army occupies Pesth--
+Hungarian Government at Debreczin--The Austrians driven out of
+Hungary--Declaration of Hungarian Independence--Russian Intervention--The
+Hungarian Summer Campaign--Capitulation of Vilagos--Italy--Murder of
+Rossi--Tuscany--The March Campaign in Lombardy--Novara--Abdication of
+Charles Albert--Victor Emmanuel--Restoration in Tuscany--French
+Intervention in Rome--Defeat of Oudinot--Oudinot and Lesseps--The French
+enter Rome--The Restored Pontifical Government--Fall of Venice--Ferdinand
+reconquers Sicily--Germany--The National Assembly at Frankfort--The
+Armistice of Malmoe--Berlin from April to September--The Prussian Army--Last
+Days of the Prussian Parliament--Prussian Constitution granted by
+Edict--The German National Assembly and Austria--Frederick William IV.
+elected Emperor--He refuses the Crown--End of the National Assembly--
+Prussia attempts to form a separate Union--The Union Parliament at
+Erfurt--Action of Austria--Hesse-Cassel--The Diet of Frankfort
+restored--Olmuetz--Schleswig-Holstein--Germany after 1849--Austria after
+1851--France after 1848--Louis Napoleon--The October Message--Law Limiting
+the Franchise--Louis Napoleon and the Army--Proposed Revision of the
+Constitution--The Coup d'Etat--Napoleon III. Emperor
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+THE CRIMEAN WAR.
+
+England and France in 1851--Russia under Nicholas--The Hungarian
+Refugees--Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places--Nicholas
+and the British Ambassador--Lord Stratford de Redcliffe--Menschikoff's
+Mission--Russian troops enter the Danubian Principalities--Lord Aberdeen's
+Cabinet--Movements of the Fleets--The Vienna Note--The Fleets pass the
+Dardanelles--Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope--Declaration of
+War--Policy of Austria--Policy of Prussia--The Western Powers and the
+European Concert--Siege of Silistria--The Principalities evacuated--
+Further objects of the Western Powers--Invasion of the Crimea--Battle of
+the Alma--The Flank March--Balaclava--Inkermann--Winter in the
+Crimea--Death of Nicholas--Conference of Vienna--Austria--Progress of the
+Siege--Plans of Napoleon III.--Canrobert and Pelissier--Unsuccessful
+Assault--Battle of the Tchernaya--Capture of the Malakoff--Fall of
+Sebastopol--Fall of Kars--Negotiations for Peace--The Conference of
+Paris--Treaty of Paris--The Danubian Principalities--Continued discord in
+the Ottoman Empire--Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+THE CREATION OF THE ITALIAN KINGDOM.
+
+Piedmont after 1849--Ministry of Azeglio--Cavour Prime Minister--Designs
+of Cavour--His Crimean Policy--Cavour at the Conference of Paris--Cavour
+and Napoleon III.--The Meeting at Plombieres--Preparations in Italy--Treaty
+of January, 1859--Attempts at Mediation--Austrian Ultimatum--Campaign of
+1859--Magenta--Movement in Central Italy--Solferino--Napoleon and
+Prussia--Interview of Villafranca--Cavour resigns--Peace of Zuerich--Central
+Italy after Villafranca--The Proposed Congress--"The Pope and the
+Congress"--Cavour resumes office--Cavour and Napoleon--Union of the Duchies
+and the Romagna with Piedmont--Savoy and Nice added to France--Cavour on
+this cession--European opinion--Naples--Sicily--Garibaldi lands at
+Marsala--Capture of Palermo--The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily--Cavour and
+the Party of Action--Cavour's Policy as to Naples--Garibaldi on the
+mainland--Persano and Villamarina at Naples--Garibaldi at Naples--The
+Piedmontese Army enters Umbria and the Marches--Fall of Ancona--Garibaldi
+and Cavour--The Armies on the Volturno--Fall of Gaeta--Cavour's Policy
+with regard to Rome and Venice--Death of Cavour--The Free Church in the
+Free State
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+GERMAN ASCENDENCY WON BY PRUSSIA.
+
+Germany after 1858--The Regency in Prussia--Army-reorganisation--King
+William I.--Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament--Bismarck--The
+struggle continued--Austria from 1859--The October Diploma--Resistance of
+Hungary--The Reichsrath--Russia under Alexander II.--Liberation of the
+Serfs--Poland--The Insurrection of 1863--Agrarian measures in Poland--
+Schleswig-Holstein--Death of Frederick VII.--Plans of Bismarck--Campaign
+in Schleswig--Conference of London--Treaty of Vienna--England and Napoleon
+III.--Prussia and Austria--Convention of Gastein--Italy--Alliance of
+Prussia with Italy--Proposals for a Congress fail--War between Austria and
+Prussia--Napoleon III.--Koeniggraetz--Custozza--Mediation of Napoleon
+--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects for compensation to
+France--Austria and Hungary--Deak--Establishment of the Dual System in
+Austria-Hungary
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY.
+
+Napoleon III.--The Mexican Expedition--Withdrawal of the French and death
+of Maximilian--The Luxemburg Question--Exasperation in France against
+Prussia--Austria--Italy--Mentana--Germany after 1866--The Spanish
+Candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern--French declaration--Benedetti and
+King William--Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees--The telegram
+from Ems--War--Expected Alliances of France--Austria--Italy--Prussian
+plans--The French army--Causes of French inferiority--Weissenburg--Woerth--
+Spicheren--Borny--Mars-la-Tour--Gravelotte--Sedan--The Republic proclaimed
+at Paris--Favre and Bismarck--Siege of Paris--Gambetta at Tours--The Army
+of the Loire--Fall of Metz--Fighting at Orleans--Sortie of Champigny--The
+Armies of the North, of the Loire, of the East--Bourbaki's ruin--
+Capitulation of Paris and Armistice--Preliminaries of Peace--Germany--
+Establishment of the German Empire--The Commune of Paris--Second Siege--
+Effects of the war as to Russia and Italy--Rome
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+EASTERN AFFAIRS.
+
+France after 1871--Alliance of the Three Emperors--Revolt of Herzegovina--
+The Andrassy Note--Murder of the Consuls at Salonika--The Berlin
+Memorandum--Rejected by England--Abdul Aziz deposed--Massacres in
+Bulgaria--Servia and Montenegro declare War--Opinion in England--Disraeli--
+Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt--Servian Campaign--Declaration of the
+Czar--Conference at Constantinople--Its Failure--The London Protocol--
+Russia declares War--Advance on the Balkans--Osman at Plevna--Second Attack
+on Plevna--The Shipka Pass--Roumania--Third Attack on Plevna--Todleben--
+Fall of Plevna--Passage of the Balkans--Armistice--England--The Fleet
+passes the Dardanelles--Treaty of San Stefano--England and Russia--Secret
+Agreement--Convention with Turkey--Congress of Berlin--Treaty of
+Berlin--Bulgaria
+
+
+MAPS.
+
+EUROPEAN STATES IN 1792
+
+CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1812
+
+
+
+
+MODERN EUROPE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1792--Its immediate causes--
+Declaration of Pillnitz made and withdrawn--Agitation of the Priests and
+Emigrants--War Policy of the Gironde--Provocations offered to France by
+the Powers--State of Central Europe in 1792--The Holy Roman Empire--
+Austria--Rule of the Hapsburgs--The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph
+II.--Policy of Leopold II.--Government and Foreign Policy of Francis
+II.--Prussia--Government of Frederick William II.--Social condition or
+Prussia--Secondary States of Germany--Ecclesiastical States--Free
+Cities--Knights--Weakness of Germany
+
+
+On the morning of the 19th of April, 1792, after weeks of stormy agitation
+in Paris, the Ministers of Louis XVI. brought down a letter from the King
+to the Legislative Assembly of France. The letter was brief but
+significant. It announced that the King intended to appear in the Hall of
+Assembly at noon on the following day. Though the letter did not disclose
+the object of the King's visit, it was known that Louis had given way to
+the pressure of his Ministry and the national cry for war, and that a
+declaration of war against Austria was the measure which the King was about
+to propose in person to the Assembly. On the morrow the public thronged the
+hall; the Assembly broke off its debate at midday in order to be in
+readiness for the King. Louis entered the hall in the midst of deep
+silence, and seated himself beside the President in the chair which was now
+substituted for the throne of France. At the King's bidding General
+Dumouriez, Minister of Foreign Affairs, read a report to the Assembly upon
+the relations of France to foreign Powers. The report contained a long
+series of charges against Austria, and concluded with the recommendation of
+war. When Dumouriez ceased reading Louis rose, and in a low voice declared
+that he himself and the whole of the Ministry accepted the report read to
+the Assembly; that he had used every effort to maintain peace, and in vain;
+and that he was now come, in accordance with the terms of the Constitution,
+to propose that the Assembly declare war against the Austrian Sovereign. It
+was not three months since Louis himself had supplicated the Courts of
+Europe for armed aid against his own subjects. The words which he now
+uttered were put in his mouth by men whom he hated, but could not resist:
+the very outburst of applause that followed them only proved the fatal
+antagonism that existed between the nation and the King. After the
+President of the Assembly had made a short answer, Louis retired from the
+hall. The Assembly itself broke up, to commence its debate on the King's
+proposal after an interval of some hours. When the House re-assembled in
+the evening, those few courageous men who argued on grounds of national
+interest and justice against the passion of the moment could scarcely
+obtain a hearing. An appeal for a second day's discussion was rejected; the
+debate abruptly closed; and the declaration of war was carried against
+seven dissentient votes. It was a decision big with consequences for France
+and for the world. From that day began the struggle between Revolutionary
+France and the established order of Europe. A period opened in which almost
+every State on the Continent gained some new character from the aggressions
+of France, from the laws and political changes introduced by the conqueror,
+or from the awakening of new forces of national life in the crisis of
+successful resistance or of humiliation. It is my intention to trace the
+great lines of European history from that time to the present, briefly
+sketching the condition of some of the principal States at the outbreak of
+the Revolutionary War, and endeavouring to distinguish, amid scenes of
+ever-shifting incident, the steps by which the Europe of 1792 has become
+the Europe of today.
+
+[First threats of foreign Courts against France, 1791.]
+
+The first two years of the Revolution had ended without bringing France
+into collision with foreign Powers. This was not due to any goodwill that
+the Courts of Europe bore to the French people, or to want of effort on the
+part of the French aristocracy to raise the armies of Europe against their
+own country. The National Assembly, which met in 1789, had cut at the roots
+of the power of the Crown; it had deprived the nobility of their privilees,
+and laid its hand upon the revenues of the Church. The brothers of King
+Louis XVI., with a host of nobles too impatient to pursue a course of
+steady political opposition at home, quitted France, and wearied foreign
+Courts with their appeals for armed assistance. The absolute monarchs of
+the Continent gave them a warm and even ostentatious welcome; but they
+confined their support to words and tokens of distinction, and until the
+summer of 1791 the Revolution was not seriously threatened with the
+interference of the stranger. The flight of King Louis from Paris in June,
+1791, followed by his capture and his strict confinement within the
+Tuileries, gave rise to the first definite project of foreign intervention.
+[4] Louis had fled from his capital and from the National Assembly; he
+returned, the hostage of a populace already familiar with outrage and
+bloodshed. For a moment the exasperation of Paris brought the Royal Family
+into real jeopardy. The Emperor Leopold, brother of Marie Antoinette,
+trembled for the safety of his unhappy sister, and addressed a letter to
+the European Courts from Padua, on the 6th of July, proposing that the
+Powers should unite to preserve the Royal Family of France from popular
+violence. Six weeks later the Emperor and King Frederick William II. of
+Prussia met at Pillnitz, in Saxony. A declaration was published by the two
+Sovereigns, stating that they considered the position of the King of France
+to be matter of European concern, and that, in the event of all the other
+great Powers consenting to a joint action, they were prepared to supply an
+armed force to operate on the French frontier.
+
+[Declaration of Pillnitz withdrawn.]
+
+Had the National Assembly instantly declared war on Leopold and Frederick
+William, its action would have been justified by every rule of
+international law. The Assembly did not, however, declare war, and for a
+good reason. It was known at Paris that the manifesto was no more than a
+device of the Emperor's to intimidate the enemies of the Royal Family.
+Leopold, when he pledged himself to join a coalition of all the Powers, was
+in fact aware that England would be no party to any such coalition. He was
+determined to do nothing that would force him into war; and it did not
+occur to him that French politicians would understand the emptiness of his
+threats as well as he did himself. Yet this turned out to be the case; and
+whatever indignation the manifesto of Pillnitz excited in the mass of the
+French people, it was received with more derision than alarm by the men who
+were cognisant of the affairs of Europe. All the politicians of the
+National Assembly knew that Prussia and Austria had lately been on the
+verge of war with one another upon the Eastern question; they even
+underrated the effect of the French revolution in appeasing the existing
+enmities of the great Powers. No important party in France regarded the
+Declaration of Pillnitz as a possible reason for hostilities; and the
+challenge given to France was soon publicly withdrawn. It was withdrawn
+when Louis XVI., by accepting the Constitution made by the National
+Assembly, placed himself, in the sight of Europe, in the position of a free
+agent. On the 14th September, 1791, the King, by a solemn public oath,
+identified his will with that of the nation. It was known in Paris that he
+had been urged by the emigrants to refuse his assent, and to plunge the
+nation into civil war by an open breach with the Assembly. The frankness
+with which Louis pledged himself to the Constitution, the seeming sincerity
+of his patriotism, again turned the tide of public opinion in his favour.
+His flight was forgiven; the restrictions placed upon his personal liberty
+were relaxed. Louis seemed to be once more reconciled with France, and
+France was relieved from the ban of Europe. The Emperor announced that the
+circumstances which had provoked the Declaration of Pillnitz no longer
+existed, and that the Powers, though prepared to revive the League if
+future occasion should arise, suspended all joint action in reference to
+the internal affairs of France.
+
+[Priests and emigrants keep France in agitation.]
+
+The National Assembly, which, in two years, had carried France so far
+towards the goal of political and social freedom, now declared its work
+ended. In the mass of the nation there was little desire for further
+change. The grievances which pressed most heavily upon the common course of
+men's lives--unfair taxation, exclusion from public employment, monopolies
+among the townspeople, and the feudal dues which consumed the produce of
+the peasant--had been swept away. It was less by any general demand for
+further reform than by the antagonisms already kindled in the Revolution
+that France was forced into a new series of violent changes. The King
+himself was not sincerely at one with the nation; in everything that most
+keenly touched his conscience he had unwillingly accepted the work of the
+Assembly. The Church and the noblesse were bent on undoing what had already
+been done. Without interfering with doctrine or ritual, the National
+Assembly had re-organised the ecclesiastical system of France, and had
+enforced that supremacy of the State over the priesthood to which,
+throughout the eighteenth century, the Governments of Catholic Europe had
+been steadily tending. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was
+created by the National Assembly in 1790, transformed the priesthood from a
+society of landowners into a body of salaried officers of the State, and
+gave to the laity the election of their bishops and ministers. The change,
+carried out in this extreme form, threw the whole body of bishops and a
+great part of the lower clergy into revolt. Their interests were hurt by
+the sale of the Church lands; their consciences were wounded by the system
+of popular election, which was condemned by the Pope. In half the pulpits
+of France the principles of the Revolution were anathematised, and the
+vengeance of heaven denounced against the purchasers of the secularised
+Church lands. Beyond the frontier the emigrant nobles, who might have
+tempered the Revolution by combining with the many liberal men of their
+order who remained at home, gathered in arms, and sought the help of
+foreigners against a nation in which they could see nothing but rebellious
+dependents of their own. The head-quarters of the emigrants were at
+Coblentz in the dominions of the Elector of Treves. They formed themselves
+into regiments, numbering in all some few thousands, and occupied
+themselves with extravagant schemes of vengeance against all Frenchmen who
+had taken part in the destruction of the privileges of their caste.
+
+[Legislative Assembly. Oct. 1791.]
+
+[War policy of the Gironde.]
+
+Had the elections which followed the dissolution of the National Assembly
+sent to the Legislature a body of men bent only on maintaining the
+advantages already won, it would have been no easy task to preserve the
+peace of France in the presence of the secret or open hostility of the
+Court, the Church, and the emigrants. But the trial was not made. The
+leading spirits among the new representatives were not men of compromise.
+In the Legislative Body which met in 1791 there were all the passions of
+the Assembly of 1789, without any of the experience which that Assembly had
+gained. A decree, memorable among the achievements of political folly, had
+prohibited members of the late Chamber from seeking re-election. The new
+Legislature was composed of men whose political creed had been drawn almost
+wholly from literary sources; the most dangerous theorists of the former
+Assembly were released from Parliamentary restraints, and installed, like
+Robespierre, as the orators of the clubs. Within the Chamber itself the
+defenders of the Monarchy and of the Constitution which had just been given
+to France were far outmatched by the party of advance. The most conspicuous
+of the new deputies formed the group named after the district of the
+Gironde, where several of their leaders had been elected. The orator
+Vergniaud, pre-eminent among companions of singular eloquence, the
+philosopher Condorcet, the veteran journalist Brissot, gave to this party
+an ascendancy in the Chamber and an influence in the country the more
+dangerous because it appeared to belong to men elevated above the ordinary
+regions of political strife. Without the fixed design of turning the
+monarchy into a republic, the orators of the Gironde sought to carry the
+revolutionary movement over the barrier erected against it in the
+Constitution of 1791. From the moment of the opening of the Assembly it was
+clear that the Girondins intended to precipitate the conflict between the
+Court and the nation by devoting all the wealth of their eloquence to the
+subjects which divided France the most. To Brissot and the men who
+furnished the ideas of the party, it would have seemed a calamity that the
+Constitution of 1791, with its respect for the prerogative of the Crown and
+its tolerance of mediaeval superstition, should fairly get underway. In
+spite of Robespierre's prediction that war would give France a strong
+sovereign in the place of a weak one, the Girondins persuaded themselves
+that the best means of diminishing or overthrowing monarchical power in
+France was a war with the sovereigns of Europe; and henceforward they
+laboured for war with scarcely any disguise. [5]
+
+[Notes of Kaunitz, Dec. 21, Feb. 17.]
+
+Nor were occasions wanting, if war was needful for France. The protection
+which the Elector of Treves gave to the emigrant army at Coblentz was so
+flagrant a violation of international law that the Gironde had the support
+of the whole nation when they called upon the King to demand the dispersal
+of the emigrants in the most peremptory form. National feeling was keenly
+excited by debates in which the military preparations of the emigrants and
+the encouragement given to them by foreign princes were denounced with all
+the energy of southern eloquence. On the 13th of December Louis declared to
+the Electors of Treves and Mainz that he would treat them as enemies unless
+the armaments within their territories were dispersed by January 15th; and
+at the same time he called upon the Emperor Leopold, as head of the
+Germanic body, to use his influence in bringing the Electors to reason. The
+demands of France were not resisted. On the 16th January, 1792, Louis
+informed the Assembly that the emigrants had been expelled from the
+electorates, and acknowledged the good offices of Leopold in effecting this
+result. The substantial cause of war seemed to have disappeared; but
+another had arisen in its place. In a note of December 21st the Austrian
+Minister Kaunitz used expressions which implied that a league of the Powers
+was still in existence against France. Nothing could have come more
+opportunely for the war-party in the Assembly. Brissot cried for an
+immediate declaration of war, and appealed to the French nation to
+vindicate its honour by an attack both upon the emigrants and upon their
+imperial protector. The issue depended upon the relative power of the Crown
+and the Opposition. Leopold saw that war was inevitable unless the
+Constitutional party, which was still in office, rallied for one last
+effort, and gained a decisive victory over its antagonists. In the hope of
+turning public opinion against the Gironde, he permitted Kaunitz to send a
+despatch to Paris which loaded the leaders of the war-party with abuse, and
+exhorted the French nation to deliver itself from men who would bring upon
+it the hostility of Europe. (Feb. 17.) [6] The despatch gave singular proof
+of the inability of the cleverest sovereign and the most experienced
+minister of the age to distinguish between the fears of a timid cabinet and
+the impulses of an excited nation. Leopold's vituperations might have had
+the intended effect if they had been addressed to the Margrave of Baden or
+the Doge of Venice; addressed to the French nation and its popular Assembly
+in the height of civil conflict, they were as oil poured upon the flames.
+Leopold ruined the party which he meant to reinforce; he threw the nation
+into the arms of those whom he attacked. His despatch was received in the
+Assembly with alternate murmurs and bursts of laughter; in the clubs it
+excited a wild outburst of rage. The exchange of diplomatic notes continued
+for a few weeks more; but the real answer of France to Austria was the
+"Marseillaise," composed at Strasburg almost simultaneously with Kaunitz'
+attack upon the Jacobins. The sudden death of the Emperor on March 1st
+produced no pause in the controversy. Delessart, the Foreign Minister of
+Louis, was thrust from office, and replaced by Dumouriez, the
+representative of the war-party.
+
+[War declared, April 20th, 1792.]
+
+Expostulation took a sharper tone; old subjects of complaint were revived;
+and the armies on each side were already pressing towards the frontier when
+the unhappy Louis was brought down to the Assembly by his Ministers, and
+compelled to propose the declaration of war.
+
+[Pretended grounds of war.]
+
+[Expectation of foreign attack real among the French people; not real among
+the French politicians.]
+
+It is seldom that the professed grounds correspond with the real motives of
+a war; nor was this the case in 1792. The ultimatum of the Austrian
+Government demanded that compensation should be made to certain German
+nobles whose feudal rights over their peasantry had been abolished in
+Alsace; that the Pope should be indemnified for Avignon and the Venaissin,
+which had been taken from him by France; and that a Government should be
+established at Paris capable of affording the Powers of Europe security
+against the spread of democratic agitation. No one supposed the first two
+grievances to be a serious ground for hostilities. The rights of the German
+nobles in Alsace over their villagers were no doubt protected by the
+treaties which ceded those districts to France; but every politician in
+Europe would have laughed at a Government which allowed the feudal system
+to survive in a corner of its dominions out of respect for a settlement a
+century and a half old: nor had the Assembly refused to these foreign
+seigneurs a compensation claimed in vain by King Louis for the nobles of
+France. As to the annexation of Avignon and the Venaissin, a power which,
+like Austria, had joined in dismembering Poland, and had just made an
+unsuccessful attempt to dismember Turkey, could not gravely reproach France
+for incorporating a district which lay actually within it, and whose
+inhabitants, or a great portion of them, were anxious to become citizens of
+France. The third demand, the establishment of such a government as Austria
+should deem satisfactory, was one which no high-spirited people could be
+expected to entertain. Nor was this, in fact, expected by Austria. Leopold
+had no desire to attack France, but he had used threats, and would not
+submit to the humiliation of renouncing them. He would not have begun a war
+for the purpose of delivering the French Crown; but, when he found that he
+was himself certain to be attacked, he accepted a war with the Revolution
+without regret. On the other side, when the Gironde denounced the league of
+the Kings, they exaggerated a far-off danger for the ends of their domestic
+policy. The Sovereigns of the Continent had indeed made no secret of their
+hatred to the Revolution. Catherine of Russia had exhorted every Court in
+Europe to make war; Gustavus of Sweden was surprised by a violent death in
+the midst of preparations against France; Spain, Naples, and Sardinia were
+ready to follow leaders stronger than themselves. But the statesmen of the
+French Assembly well understood the interval that separates hostile feeling
+from actual attack; and the unsubstantial nature of the danger to France,
+whether from the northern or the southern Powers, was proved by the very
+fact that Austria, the hereditary enemy of France, and the country of the
+hated Marie Antoinette, was treated as the main enemy. Nevertheless, the
+Courts had done enough to excite the anger of millions of French people who
+knew of their menaces, and not of their hesitations and reserves. The man
+who composed the "Marseillaise" was no maker of cunningly-devised fables;
+the crowds who first sang it never doubted the reality of the dangers which
+the orators of the Assembly denounced. The Courts of Europe had heaped up
+the fuel; the Girondins applied the torch. The mass of the French nation
+had little means of appreciating what passed in Europe; they took their
+facts from their leaders, who considered it no very serious thing to plunge
+a nation into war for the furtherance of internal liberty. Events were soon
+to pass their own stern and mocking sentence upon the wisdom of the
+Girondin statesmanship.
+
+[Germany follows Austria into the war.]
+
+[State of Germany.]
+
+After voting the Declaration of War the French Assembly accepted a
+manifesto, drawn up by Condorcet, renouncing in the name of the French
+people all intention of conquest. The manifesto expressed what was
+sincerely felt by men like Condorcet, to whom the Revolution was still too
+sacred a cause to be stained with the vulgar lust of aggrandisement. But
+the actual course of the war was determined less by the intentions with
+which the French began it than by the political condition of the States
+which bordered upon the French frontier. The war was primarily a war with
+Austria, but the Sovereign of Austria was also the head of Germany. The
+German Ecclesiastical Princes who ruled in the Rhenish provinces had been
+the most zealous protectors of the emigrants; it was impossible that they
+should now find shelter in neutrality. Prussia had made an alliance with
+the Emperor against France; other German States followed in the wake of one
+or other of the great Powers. If France proved stronger than its enemy,
+there were governments besides that of Austria which would have to take
+their account with the Revolution. Nor indeed was Austria the power most
+exposed to violent change. The mass of its territory lay far from France;
+at the most, it risked the loss of Lombardy and the Netherlands. Germany at
+large was the real area threatened by the war, and never was a political
+community less fitted to resist attack than Germany at the end of the
+eighteenth century. It was in the divisions of the German people, and in
+the rivalries of the two leading German governments, that France found its
+surest support throughout the Revolutionary war, and its keenest stimulus
+to conquest. It will throw light upon the sudden changes that now began to
+break over Europe if we pause to make a brief survey of the state of
+Germany at the outbreak of the war, to note the character and policy of its
+reigning sovereigns, and to cast a glance over the circumstances which had
+brought the central district of Europe into its actual condition.
+
+[Since 1648, all the German States independent of the Emperor.]
+
+[Holy Roman Empire.]
+
+Germany at large still preserved the mediaeval name and forms of the Holy
+Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a
+multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria,
+combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in
+name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up
+by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and
+Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to
+the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second
+order, such as Saxony and Bavaria, had neither the security of strength nor
+the free energy often seen in small political communities; whilst in the
+remaining petty States of Germany, some hundreds in number, all public life
+had long passed out of mind in a drowsy routine of official benevolence or
+oppression. In theory there still existed a united Germanic body; in
+reality Germany was composed of two great monarchies in embittered rivalry
+with one another, and of a multitude of independent principalities and
+cities whose membership in the Empire involved little beyond a liability to
+be dragged into the quarrels of their more powerful neighbours. A German
+national feeling did not exist, because no combination existed uniting the
+interests of all Germany. The names and forms of political union had come
+down from a remote past, and formed a grotesque anachronism amid the
+realities of the eighteenth century. The head of the Germanic body held
+office not by hereditary right, but as the elected successor of Charlemagne
+and the Roman Caesars. Since the fifteenth century the imperial dignity had
+rested with the Austrian House of Hapsburg; but, with the exception of
+Charles V., no sovereign of that House had commanded forces adequate to the
+creation of a united German state, and the opportunity which then offered
+itself was allowed to pass away. The Reformation severed Northern Germany
+from the Catholic monarchy of the south. The Thirty Years' War, terminating
+in the middle of the seventeenth century, secured the existence of
+Protestantism on the Continent of Europe, but it secured it at the cost of
+Germany, which was left exhausted and disintegrated. By the Treaty of
+Westphalia, A.D. 1648, the independence of every member of the Empire was
+recognised, and the central authority was henceforth a mere shadow. The
+Diet of the Empire, where the representatives of the Electors, of the
+Princes, and of the Free Cities, met in the order of the Middle Ages, sank
+into a Heralds' College, occupied with questions of title and precedence;
+affairs of real importance were transacted by envoys from Court to Court.
+For purposes of war the Empire was divided into Circles, each Circle
+supplying in theory a contingent of troops; but this military organisation
+existed only in letter. The greater and the intermediate States regulated
+their armaments, as they did their policy, without regard to the Diet of
+Ratisbon; the contingents of the smaller sovereignties and free cities were
+in every degree of inefficiency, corruption, and disorder; and in spite of
+the courage of the German soldier, it could make little difference in a
+European war whether a regiment which had its captain appointed by the city
+of Gmuend, its lieutenant by the Abbess of Rotenmuenster, and its ensign by
+the Abbot of Gegenbach, did or did not take the field with numbers fifty
+per cent. below its statutory contingent. [7] How loose was the connection
+subsisting between the members of the Empire, how slow and cumbrous its
+constitutional machinery, was strikingly proved after the first inroads of
+the French into Germany in 1792, when the Diet deliberated for four weeks
+before calling out the forces of the Empire, and for five months before
+declaring war.
+
+[Austria.]
+
+[Catholic policy of the Hapsburgs.]
+
+The defence of Germany rested in fact with the armies of Austria and
+Prussia. The Austrian House of Hapsburg held the imperial title, and
+gathered around it the sovereigns of the less progressive German States.
+While the Protestant communities of Northern Germany identified their
+interests with those of the rising Prussian Monarchy, religious sympathy
+and the tradition of ages attached the minor Catholic Courts to the
+political system of Vienna. Austria gained something by its patronage; it
+was, however, no real member of the German family. Its interests were not
+the interests of Germany; its power, great and enduring as it proved, was
+not based mainly upon German elements, nor used mainly for German ends. The
+title of the Austrian monarch gave the best idea of the singular variety of
+races and nationalities which owed their political union only to their
+submission to a common head. In the shorter form of state the reigning
+Hapsburg was described as King of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia, and
+Galicia; Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Duke of Styria,
+Carinthia, and Carniola; and Princely Count of Hapsburg and Tyrol. At the
+outbreak of the war of 1792 the dominions of the House of Austria included
+the Southern Netherlands and the Duchy of Milan, in addition to the great
+bulk of the territory which it still governs. Eleven distinct languages
+were spoken in the Austrian monarchy, with countless varieties of dialects.
+Of the elements of the population the Slavic was far the largest, numbering
+about ten millions, against five million Germans and three million Magyars;
+but neither numerical strength nor national objects of desire coloured the
+policy of a family which looked indifferently upon all its subject races as
+instruments for its own aggrandisement. Milan and the Netherlands had come
+into the possession of Austria since the beginning of the eighteenth
+century, but the destiny of the old dominions of the Hapsburg House had
+been fixed for many generations in the course of the Thirty Years' War. In
+that struggle, as it affected Austria, the conflict of the ancient and the
+reformed faith had become a conflict between the Monarchy, allied with the
+Church, and every element of national life and independence, allied with
+the Reformation. Protestantism, then dominant in almost all the Hapsburg
+territories, was not put down without extinguishing the political liberties
+of Austrian Germany, the national life of Bohemia, the spirit and ambition
+of the Hungarian nobles. The detestable desire of the Emperor Ferdinand,
+"Rather a desert than a country full of heretics," was only too well
+fulfilled in the subsequent history of his dominions. In the German
+provinces, except the Tyrol, the old Parliaments, and with them all trace
+of liberty, disappeared; in Bohemia the national Protestant nobility lost
+their estates, or retained them only at the price of abandoning the
+religion, the language, and the feelings of their race, until the country
+of Huss passed out of the sight of civilised Europe, and Bohemia
+represented no more than a blank, unnoticed mass of tillers of the soil. In
+Hungary, where the nation was not so completely crushed in the Thirty
+Years' War, and Protestantism survived, the wholesale executions in 1686,
+ordered by the Tribunal known as the "Slaughter-house of Eperies,"
+illustrated the traditional policy of the Monarchy towards the spirit of
+national independence. Two powers alone were allowed to subsist in the
+Austrian dominions, the power of the Crown and the power of the Priesthood;
+and, inasmuch as no real national unity could exist among the subject
+races, the unity of a blind devotion to the Catholic Church was enforced
+over the greater part of the Monarchy by all the authority of the State.
+
+[Reforms of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.]
+
+Under the pressure of this soulless despotism the mind of man seemed to
+lose all its finer powers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
+which no decade passed in England and France without the production of some
+literary masterpiece, some scientific discovery, or some advance in
+political reasoning, are marked by no single illustrious Austrian name,
+except that of Haydn the musician. When, after three generations of torpor
+succeeding the Thirty Years' War, the mind of North Germany awoke again in
+Winckelmann and Lessing, and a widely-diffused education gave to the middle
+class some compensation for the absence of all political freedom, no trace
+of this revival appeared in Austria. The noble hunted and slept; the serf
+toiled heavily on; where a school existed, the Jesuit taught his schoolboys
+ecclesiastical Latin, and sent them away unable to read their
+mother-tongue. To this dull and impenetrable society the beginnings of
+improvement could only be brought by military disaster. The loss of Silesia
+in the first years of Maria Theresa disturbed the slumbers of the
+Government, and reform began. Although the old provincial Assemblies,
+except in Hungary and the Netherlands, had long lost all real power, the
+Crown had never attempted to create a uniform system of administration: the
+collection of taxes, the enlistment of recruits, was still the business of
+the feudal landowners of each district. How such an antiquated order was
+likely to fare in the presence of an energetic enemy was clearly enough
+shown in the first attack made upon Austria by Frederick the Great. As the
+basis of a better military organisation, and in the hope of arousing a
+stronger national interest among her subjects, Theresa introduced some of
+the offices of a centralised monarchy, at the same time that she improved
+the condition of the serf, and substituted a German education and German
+schoolmasters for those of the Jesuits. The peasant, hitherto in many parts
+of the monarchy attached to the soil, was now made free to quit his lord's
+land, and was secured from ejectment so long as he fulfilled his duty of
+labouring for the lord on a fixed number of days in the year. Beyond this
+Theresa's reform did not extend. She had no desire to abolish the feudal
+character of country life; she neither wished to temper the sway of
+Catholicism, nor to extinguish those provincial forms which gave to the
+nobles within their own districts a shadow of political independence.
+Herself conservative in feeling, attached to aristocracy, and personally
+devout, Theresa consented only to such change as was recommended by her
+trusted counsellors, and asked no more than she was able to obtain by the
+charm of her own queenly character.
+
+[Joseph II., 1780-1790.]
+
+With the accession of her son Joseph II. in 1780 a new era began for
+Austria. The work deferred by Theresa was then taken up by a monarch whose
+conceptions of social and religious reform left little for the boldest
+innovators of France ten years later to add. There is no doubt that the
+creation of a great military force for enterprises of foreign conquest was
+an end always present in Joseph's mind, and that the thirst for
+uncontrolled despotic power never left him; but by the side of these
+coarser elements there was in Joseph's nature something of the true fire of
+the man who lives for ideas. Passionately desirous of elevating every class
+of his subjects at the same time that he ignored all their habits and
+wishes, Joseph attempted to transform the motley and priest-ridden
+collection of nations over whom he ruled into a single homogeneous body,
+organised after the model of France and Prussia, worshipping in the spirit
+of a tolerant and enlightened Christianity, animated in its relations of
+class to class by the humane philosophy of the eighteenth century. In the
+first year of his reign Joseph abolished every jurisdiction that did not
+directly emanate from the Crown, and scattered an army of officials from
+Ostend to the Dniester to conduct the entire public business of his
+dominions under the immediate direction of the central authority at Vienna.
+In succeeding years edict followed edict, dissolving monasteries,
+forbidding Church festivals and pilgrimages, securing the protection of the
+State to every form of Christian worship, abolishing the exemption from
+land-tax and the monopoly of public offices enjoyed by the nobility,
+transforming the Universities from dens of monkish ignorance into schools
+of secular learning, converting the peasant's personal service into a
+rent-charge, and giving him in the officer of the Crown a protector and an
+arbiter in all his dealings with his lord. Noble and enlightened in his
+aims, Joseph, like every other reformer of the eighteenth century,
+underrated the force which the past exerts over the present; he could see
+nothing but prejudice and unreason in the attachment to provincial custom
+or time-honoured opinion; he knew nothing of that moral law which limits
+the success of revolutions by the conditions which precede them. What was
+worst united with what was best in resistance to his reforms. The bigots of
+the University of Louvain, who still held out against the discoveries of
+Newton, excited the mob to insurrection against Joseph, as the enemy of
+religion; the Magyar landowners in Hungary resisted a system which
+extinguished the last vestiges of their national independence at the same
+time that it destroyed the harsh dominion which they themselves exercised
+over their peasantry. Joseph alternated between concession and the extreme
+of autocratic violence. At one moment he resolved to sweep away every local
+right that fettered the exercise of his power; then, after throwing the
+Netherlands into successful revolt, and forcing Hungary to the verge of
+armed resistance, he revoked his unconstitutional ordinances (January 28,
+1790), and restored all the institutions of the Hungarian monarchy which
+existed at the date of his accession.
+
+[Leopold II., 1790-1792.]
+
+A month later, death removed Joseph from his struggle and his sorrows. His
+successor, Leopold II., found the monarchy involved as Russia's ally in an
+attack upon Turkey; threatened by the Northern League of Prussia, England,
+and Holland; exhausted in finance; weakened by the revolt of the
+Netherlands; and distracted in every province by the conflict of the
+ancient and the modern system of government, and the assertion of new
+social rights that seemed to have been created only in order to be
+extinguished. The recovery of Belgium and the conclusion of peace with
+Turkey were effected under circumstances that brought the adroit and
+guarded statesmanship of Leopold into just credit. His settlement of the
+conflict between the Crown and the Provinces, between the Church and
+education, between the noble and the serf, marked the line in which, for
+better or for worse, Austrian policy was to run for sixty years. Provincial
+rights, the privileges of orders and corporate bodies, Leopold restored;
+the personal sovereignty of his house he maintained unimpaired. In the more
+liberal part of Joseph's legislation, the emancipation of learning from
+clerical control, the suppression of unjust privilege in taxation, the
+abolition of the feudal services of the peasant, Leopold was willing to
+make concessions to the Church and the aristocracy; to the spirit of
+national independence which his predecessor's aggression had excited in
+Bohemia as well as in Hungary, he made no concession beyond the restoration
+of certain cherished forms. An attempt of the Magyar nobles to affix
+conditions to their acknowledgment of Leopold as King of Hungary was
+defeated; and, by creating new offices at Vienna for the affairs of Illyria
+and Transylvania, and making them independent of the Hungarian Diet,
+Leopold showed that the Crown possessed an instrument against the dominant
+Magyar race in the Slavic and Romanic elements of the Hungarian Kingdom.
+[8] On the other hand, Leopold consented to restore to the Church its
+control over the higher education, and to throw back the burden of taxation
+upon land not occupied by noble owners. He gave new rigour to the
+censorship of the press; but the gain was not to the Church, to which the
+censorship had formerly belonged, but to the Government, which now employed
+it as an instrument of State. In the great question of the emancipation of
+the serf Leopold was confronted by a more resolute and powerful body of
+nobility in Hungary than existed in any other province. The right of the
+lord to fetter the peasant to the soil and to control his marriage Leopold
+refused to restore in any part of his dominions; but, while in parts of
+Bohemia he succeeded in maintaining the right given by Joseph to the
+peasant to commute his personal service for a money payment, in Hungary he
+was compelled to fall back upon the system of Theresa, and to leave the
+final settlement of the question to the Diet. Twenty years later the
+statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was
+the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a
+better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was
+the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the
+flogging-board continued to form a part of every Hungarian manor.
+
+[Death of Leopold, March 1, 1792.]
+
+[Francis II., 1792.]
+
+Of the self-sacrificing ardour of Joseph there was no trace in Leopold's
+character; yet his political aims were not low. During twenty-four years'
+government of Tuscany he had proved himself almost an ideal ruler in the
+pursuit of peace, of religious enlightenment, and of the material
+improvement of his little sovereignty. Raised to the Austrian throne, the
+compromise which he effected with the Church and the aristocracy resulted
+more from a supposed political necessity than from his own inclination. So
+long as Leopold lived, Austria would not have wanted an intelligence
+capable of surveying the entire field of public business, nor a will
+capable of imposing unity of action upon the servants of State. To the
+misfortune of Europe no less than of his own dominions, Leopold was carried
+off by sickness at the moment when the Revolutionary War broke out. An
+uneasy reaction against Joseph's reforms and a well-grounded dread of the
+national movements in Hungary and the Netherlands were already the
+principal forces in the official world at Vienna; in addition to these came
+the new terror of the armed proselytism of the Revolution. The successor of
+Leopold, Francis II., was a sickly prince, in whose homely and
+unimaginative mind the great enterprises of Joseph, amidst which he had
+been brought up, excited only aversion. Amongst the men who surrounded him,
+routine and the dread of change made an end of the higher forms of public
+life. The Government openly declared that all change should cease so long
+as the war lasted; even the pressing question of the peasant's relation to
+his lord was allowed to remain unsettled by the Hungarian Diet, lest the
+spirit of national independence should find expression in its debates. Over
+the whole internal administration of Austria the torpor of the days before
+Theresa seemed to be returning. Its foreign policy, however, bore no trace
+of this timorous, conservative spirit. Joseph, as restless abroad as at
+home, had shared the ambition of the Russian Empress Catherine, and
+troubled Europe with his designs upon Turkey, Venice, and Bavaria. These
+and similar schemes of territorial extension continued to fill the minds of
+Austrian courtiers and ambassadors. Shortly after the outbreak of war with
+France the aged minister Kaunitz, who had been at the head of the Foreign
+Office during three reigns, retired from power. In spite of the first
+partition of Poland, made in combination with Russia and Prussia in 1772,
+and in spite of subsequent attempts of Joseph against Turkey and Bavaria,
+the policy of Kaunitz had not been one of mere adventure and shifting
+attack. He had on the whole remained true to the principle of alliance with
+France and antagonism to Prussia; and when the revolution brought war
+within sight, he desired to limit the object of the war to the restoration
+of monarchical government in France. The conditions under which the young
+Emperor and the King of Prussia agreed to turn the war to purposes of
+territorial aggrandisement caused Kaunitz, with a true sense of the fatal
+import of this policy, to surrender the power which he had held for forty
+years. It was secretly agreed between the two courts that Prussia should
+recoup itself for its expenses against France by seizing part of Poland. On
+behalf of Austria it was demanded that the Emperor should annex Bavaria,
+giving Belgium to the Elector as compensation. Both these schemes violated
+what Kaunitz held to be sound policy. He believed that the interests of
+Austria required the consolidation rather than the destruction of Poland;
+and he declared the exchange of the Netherlands for Bavaria to be, in the
+actual state of affairs, impracticable. [10] Had the coalition of 1792 been
+framed on the principles advocated by Kaunitz, though Austria might not
+have effected the restoration of monarchial power in France, the alliance
+would not have disgracefully shattered on the crimes and infamies attending
+the second partition of Poland.
+
+From the moment when Kaunitz retired from office, territorial extension
+became the great object of the Austrian Court. To prudent statesmen the
+scattered provinces and varied population of the Austrian State would have
+suggested that Austria had more to lose than any European Power; to the men
+of 1792 it appeared that she had more to gain. The Netherlands might be
+increased with a strip of French Flanders; Bavaria, Poland, and Italy were
+all weak neighbours, who might be made to enrich Austria in their turn. A
+sort of magical virtue was attached to the acquisition of territory. If so
+many square miles and so many head of population were gained, whether of
+alien or kindred race, mutinous or friendly, the end of all statesmanship
+was realised, and the heaviest sacrifice of life and industry repaid.
+Austria affected to act as the centre of a defensive alliance, and to fight
+for the common purpose of giving a Government to France which would respect
+the rights of its neighbours. In reality, its own military operations were
+too often controlled, and an effective common warfare frustrated, at one
+moment by a design upon French Flanders, at another by the course of Polish
+or Bavarian intrigue, at another by the hope of conquests in Italy. Of all
+the interests which centred in the head of the House of Hapsburg, the least
+befriended at Vienna was the interest of the Empire and of Germany.
+
+[Prussia.]
+
+Nor, if Austria was found wanting, had Germany any permanent safeguard in
+the rival Protestant State. Prussia, the second great German Power and the
+ancient enemy of Austria, had been raised to an influence in Europe quite
+out of proportion to its scanty resources by the genius of Frederick the
+Great and the earlier Princes of the House of Hohenzollern. Its population
+was not one-third of that of France or Austria; its wealth was perhaps not
+superior to that of the Republic of Venice. That a State so poor in men and
+money should play the part of one of the great Powers of Europe was
+possible only so long as an energetic ruler watched every movement of that
+complicated machinery which formed both army and nation after the prince's
+own type. Frederick gave his subjects a just administration of the law; he
+taught them productive industries; he sought to bring education to their
+doors [11]; but he required that the citizen should account himself before
+all the servant of the State. Every Prussian either worked in the great
+official hierarchy or looked up to it as the providence which was to direct
+all his actions and supply all his judgments. The burden of taxation
+imposed by the support of an army relatively three times as great as that
+of any other Power was wonderfully lightened by Frederick's economy: far
+more serious than the tobacco-monopoly and the forage-requisitions, at
+which Frederick's subjects grumbled during his life-time, was the danger
+that a nation which had only attained political greatness by its obedience
+to a rigorous administration should fall into political helplessness, when
+the clear purpose and all-controlling care of its ruler no longer animated
+a system which, without him, was only a pedantic routine. What in England
+we are accustomed to consider as the very substance of national life,--the
+mass of political interest and opinion, diffused in some degree amongst all
+classes, at once the support and the judge of the servants of the
+State,--had in Prussia no existence. Frederick's subjects obeyed and
+trusted their Monarch; there were probably not five hundred persons outside
+the public service who had any political opinions of their own. Prussia did
+not possess even the form of a national representation; and, although
+certain provincial assemblies continued to meet, they met only to receive
+the instructions of the Crown-officers of their district. In the absence of
+all public criticism, the old age of Frederick must in itself have
+endangered the efficiency of the military system which had raised Prussia
+to its sudden eminence. [12] The impulse of Frederick's successor was
+sufficient to reverse the whole system of Prussian foreign policy, and to
+plunge the country in alliance with Austria into a speculative and
+unnecessary war.
+
+[Frederick William II., 1786.]
+
+[Alliance with Austria against France, Feb., 1792.]
+
+On the death of Frederick in 1786, the crown passed to Frederick William
+II., his nephew. Frederick William was a man of common type, showy and
+pleasure-loving, interested in public affairs, but incapable of acting on
+any fixed principle. His mistresses gave the tone to political society. A
+knot of courtiers intrigued against one another for the management of the
+King; and the policy of Prussia veered from point to point as one unsteady
+impulse gave place to another. In countries less dependent than Prussia
+upon the personal activity of the monarch, Frederick William's faults might
+have been neutralised by able Ministers; in Prussia the weakness of the
+King was the decline of the State. The whole fabric of national greatness
+had been built up by the royal power; the quality of the public service,
+apart from which the nation was politically non-existent, was the quality
+of its head. When in the palace profusion and intrigue took the place of
+Frederick the Great's unflagging labour, the old uprightness, industry, and
+precision which had been the pride of Prussian administration fell out of
+fashion everywhere. Yet the frivolity of the Court was a less active cause
+of military decline than the abandonment of the first principles of
+Prussian policy. [13] If any political sentiment existed in the nation, it
+was the sentiment of antagonism to Austria. The patriotism of the army,
+with all the traditions of the great King, turned wholly in this direction.
+When, out of sympathy with the Bourbon family and the emigrant French
+nobles, Frederick William allied himself with Austria (Feb. 1792), and
+threw himself into the arms of his ancient enemy in order to attack a
+nation which had not wronged him, he made an end of all zealous obedience
+amongst his servants. Brunswick, the Prussian Commander-in-Chief, hated the
+French emigrants as much as he did the Revolution; and even the generals
+who did not originally share Brunswick's dislike to the war recovered their
+old jealousy of Austria after the first defeat, and exerted themselves only
+to get quit of the war at the first moment that Prussia could retire from
+it without disgrace. The very enterprise in which Austria had consented
+that the Court of Berlin should seek its reward--the seizure of a part of
+Poland--proved fatal to the coalition. The Empress Catherine was already
+laying her hand for the second time upon this unfortunate country. It was
+easy for the opponents of the Austrian alliance who surrounded King
+Frederick William to contrast the barren effort of a war against France
+with the cheap and certain advantages to be won by annexation, in concert
+with Russia, of Polish territory. To pursue one of these objects with
+vigour it was necessary to relinquish the other. Prussia was not rich
+enough to maintain armies both on the Vistula and the Rhine. Nor, in the
+opinion of its rulers, was it rich enough to be very tender of its honour
+or very loyal towards its allies. [14]
+
+[Social system of Prussia.]
+
+In the institutions of Prussia two opposite systems existed side by side,
+exhibiting in the strongest form a contrast which in a less degree was
+present in most Continental States. The political independence of the
+nobility had long been crushed; the King's Government busied itself with
+every detail of town and village administration; yet along with this
+rigorous development of the modern doctrine of the unity and the authority
+of the State there existed a social order more truly archaic than that of
+the Middle Ages at their better epochs. The inhabitants of Prussia were
+divided into the three classes of nobles, burghers, and peasants, each
+confined to its own stated occupations, and not marrying outside its own
+order. The soil of the country bore the same distinction; peasant's land
+could not be owned by a burgher; burgher's land could not be owned by a
+noble. No occupation was lawful for the noble, who was usually no more than
+a poor gentleman, but the service of the Crown; the peasant, even where
+free, might not practise the handicraft of a burgher. But the mass of the
+peasantry in the country east of the Elbe were serfs attached to the soil;
+and the noble, who was not permitted to exercise the slightest influence
+upon the government of his country, inherited along with his manor a
+jurisdiction and police-control over all who were settled within it.
+Frederick had allowed serfage to continue because it gave him in each
+manorial lord a task-master whom he could employ in his own service. System
+and obedience were the sources of his power; and if there existed among his
+subjects one class trained to command and another trained to obey, it was
+so much the easier for him to force the country into the habits of industry
+which he required of it. In the same spirit, Frederick officered his army
+only with men of the noble caste. They brought with them the habit of
+command ready-formed; the peasants who ploughed and threshed at their
+orders were not likely to disobey them in the presence of the enemy. It was
+possible that such a system should produce great results so long as
+Frederick was there to guard against its abuses; Frederick gone, the
+degradation of servitude, the insolence of caste, was what remained. When
+the army of France, led by men who had worked with their fathers in the
+fields, hunted a King of Prussia amidst his capitulating grandees from the
+centre to the verge of his dominions, it was seen what was the permanent
+value of a system which recognised in the nature of the poor no capacity
+but one for hereditary subjection. The French peasant, plundered as he was
+by the State, and vexed as he was with feudal services, knew no such
+bondage as that of the Prussian serf, who might not leave the spot where he
+was born; only in scattered districts in the border-provinces had serfage
+survived in France. It is significant of the difference in self-respect
+existing in the peasantry of the two countries that the custom of striking
+the common soldier, universal in Germany, was in France no more than an
+abuse, practised by the admirers of Frederick, and condemned by the better
+officers themselves.
+
+[Minor States of Germany.]
+
+[Ecclesiastical States.]
+
+In all the secondary States of Germany the government was an absolute
+monarchy; though, here and there, as in Wuertemberg, the shadow of the old
+Assembly of the Estates survived; and in Hanover the absence of the
+Elector, King George III., placed power in the hands of a group of nobles
+who ruled in his name. Society everywhere rested on a sharp division of
+classes similar in kind to that of Prussia; the condition of the peasant
+ranging from one of serfage, as it existed in Mecklenburg, [15] to one of
+comparative freedom and comfort in parts of the southern and western
+States. The sovereigns differed widely in the enlightenment or selfishness
+of their rule; but, on the whole, the character of government had changed
+for the better of late years; and, especially in the Protestant States,
+efforts to improve the condition of the people were not wanting. Frederick
+the Great had in fact created a new standard of monarchy in Germany. Forty
+years earlier, Versailles, with its unfeeling splendours, its glorification
+of the personal indulgence of the monarch, had been the ideal which, with a
+due sense of their own inferiority, the German princes had done their best
+to imitate. To be a sovereign was to cover acres of ground with state
+apartments, to lavish the revenues of the country upon a troop of
+mistresses and adventurers, to patronise the arts, to collect with the same
+complacency the masterpieces of ancient painting that adorn the Dresden
+Gallery, or an array of valuables scarcely more interesting than the chests
+of treasure that were paid for them. In the ecclesiastical States, headed
+by the Electorates of Mainz, Treves, and Cologne, the affectations of a
+distinctive Christian or spiritual character had long been abandoned. The
+prince-bishop and canons, who were nobles appointed from some other
+province, lived after the gay fashion of the time, at the expense of a land
+in which they had no interest extending beyond their own lifetime. The only
+feature distinguishing the ecclesiastical residence from that of one of the
+minor secular princes was that the parade of state was performed by monks
+in the cathedral instead of by soldiers on the drill-ground, and that even
+the pretence of married life was wanting among the flaunting harpies who
+frequented a celibate Court. Yet even on the Rhine and on the Moselle the
+influence of the great King of Prussia had begun to make itself felt. The
+intense and penetrating industry of Frederick was not within the reach of
+every petty sovereign who might envy its results; but the better spirit of
+the time was seen under some of the ecclesiastical princes in the
+encouragement of schools, the improvement of the roads, and a retrenchment
+in courtly expenditure. That deeply-seated moral disease which resulted
+from centuries of priestly rule was not to be so lightly shaken off. In a
+district where Nature most bountifully rewards the industry of man,
+twenty-four out of every hundred of the population were monks, nuns, or
+beggars. [16]
+
+[Petty States. Free Cities. Knights.]
+
+Two hundred petty principalities, amongst which Weimar, the home of Goethe,
+stood out in the brightest relief from the level of princely routine and
+self-indulgence; fifty imperial cities, in most of which the once vigorous
+organism of civic life had shrivelled to the type of the English rotten
+borough, did not exhaust the divisions of Germany. Several hundred Knights
+of the Empire, owing no allegiance except to the Emperor, exercised, each
+over a domain averaging from three to four hundred inhabitants, all the
+rights of sovereignty, with the exception of the right to make war and
+treaties. The districts in which this order survived were scattered over
+the Catholic States of the south-west of Germany, where the knights
+maintained their prerogatives by federations among themselves and by the
+support of the Emperor, to whom they granted sums of money. There were
+instances in which this union of the rights of the sovereign and the
+landlord was turned to good account; but the knight's land was usually the
+scene of such poverty and degradation that the traveller needed no guide to
+inform him when he entered it. Its wretched tracks interrupted the great
+lines of communication between the Rhine and further Germany; its hovels
+were the refuge of all the criminals and vagabonds of the surrounding
+country; for no police existed but the bailiffs of the knight, and the only
+jurisdiction was that of the lawyer whom the knight brought over from the
+nearest town. Nor was the disadvantage only on the side of those who were
+thus governed. The knight himself, even if he cherished some traditional
+reverence for the shadow of the Empire, was in the position of a man who
+belongs to no real country. If his sons desired any more active career than
+that of annuitants upon the family domains, they could obtain it only by
+seeking employment at one or other of the greater Courts, and by
+identifying themselves with the interests of a land which they entered as
+strangers.
+
+Such was in outline the condition of Germany at the moment when it was
+brought into collision with the new and unknown forces of the French
+Revolution. A system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy
+had produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany resulted
+in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascendancy of all that
+was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political disorganisation, the decay
+of public spirit, and the absence of a national idea, are the signs of
+impending downfall, Germany was ripe for foreign conquest. The obsolete and
+dilapidated fabric of the Empire had for a century past been sustained only
+by the European tradition of the Balance of Power, or by the absence of
+serious attack from without. Austria once overpowered, the Empire was ready
+to fall to pieces by itself: and where, among the princes or the people of
+Germany, were the elements that gave hope of its renovation in any better
+form of national life?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+French and Austrian armies on the Flemish frontier--Prussia enters the
+war--Brunswick invades France--His Proclamation--Insurrection of Aug. 10
+at Paris--Massacres of September--Character of the war--Brunswick, checked
+at Valmy, retreats--The War becomes a Crusade of France--Neighbours of
+France--Custine enters Mainz--Dumouriez conquers the Austrian Netherlands
+--Nice and Savoy annexed--Decree of the Convention against all Governments
+--Execution of Louis XVI.--War with England, followed by war with the
+Mediterranean States--Condition of England--English Parties, how affected
+by the Revolution--The Gironde and the Mountain--Austria recovers the
+Netherlands--The Allies invade France--La Vendee--Revolutionary System of
+1793--Errors of the Allies--New French Commanders and Democratic Army--
+Victories of Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru--Prussia withdrawing from the War
+--Polish Affairs--Austria abandons the Netherlands--Treaties of
+Basle--France in 1795--Insurrection of 13 Vendemiaire--Constitution of
+1795--The Directory--Effect of the Revolution on the spirit of Europe up
+to 1795.
+
+
+[Fighting on Flemish frontier, April, 1792.]
+
+[Prussian army invades France, July, 1792. Proclamation.]
+
+The war between France and Austria opened in April, 1792, on the Flemish
+frontier. The first encounters were discreditable to the French soldiery,
+who took to flight and murdered one of their generals. The discouragement
+with which the nation heard of these reverses deepened into sullen
+indignation against the Court, as weeks and months passed by, and the
+forces lay idle on the frontier or met the enemy only in trifling
+skirmishes which left both sides where they were before. If at this crisis
+of the Revolution, with all the patriotism, all the bravery, all the
+military genius of France burning for service, the Government conducted the
+war with results scarcely distinguishable from those of a parade, the
+suggestion of treason on the part of the Court was only too likely to be
+entertained. The internal difficulties of the country were increasing. The
+Assembly had determined to banish from France the priests who rejected the
+new ecclesiastical system, and the King had placed his veto upon their
+decree. He had refused to permit the formation of a camp of volunteers in
+the neighbourhood of Paris. He had dismissed the popular Ministry forced
+upon him by the Gironde. A tumult on the 20th of June, in which the mob
+forced their way into the Tuileries, showed the nature of the attack
+impending upon the monarchy if Louis continued to oppose himself to the
+demands of the nation; but the lesson was lost upon the King. Louis was as
+little able to nerve himself for an armed conflict with the populace as to
+reconcile his conscience to the Ecclesiastical Decrees, and he surrendered
+himself to a pious inertia at a moment when the alarm of foreign invasion
+doubled revolutionary passion all over France. Prussia, in pursuance of a
+treaty made in February, united its forces to those of Austria. Forty
+thousand Prussian troops, under the Duke of Brunswick, the best of
+Frederick's surviving generals, advanced along the Moselle. From Belgium
+and the upper Rhine two Austrian armies converged upon the line of
+invasion; and the emigrant nobles were given their place among the forces
+of the Allies.
+
+On the 25th of July the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the Emperor and
+the King of Prussia, issued a proclamation to the French people, which, but
+for the difference between violent words and violent deeds, would have left
+little to be complained of in the cruelties that henceforward stained the
+popular cause. In this manifesto, after declaring that the Allies entered
+France in order to deliver Louis from captivity, and that members of the
+National Guard fighting against the invaders would be punished as rebels
+against their king, the Sovereigns addressed themselves to the city of
+Paris and to the representatives of the French nation:--"The city of Paris
+and its inhabitants are warned to submit without delay to their King; to
+set that Prince at entire liberty, and to show to him and to all the Royal
+Family the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations
+imposes on subjects towards their Sovereigns. Their Imperial and Royal
+Majesties will hold all the members of the National Assembly, of the
+Municipality, and of the National Guard of Paris responsible for all events
+with their heads, before military tribunals, without hope of pardon. They
+further declare that, if the Tuileries be forced or insulted, or the least
+violence offered to the King, the Queen, or the Royal Family, and if
+provision be not at once made for their safety and liberty, they will
+inflict a memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to
+military execution and total overthrow, and the rebels guilty of such
+crimes to the punishment they have merited." [17]
+
+[Insurrection August 10, 1972.]
+
+This challenge was not necessary to determine the fate of Louis. Since the
+capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National
+Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the
+capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and
+sword, Paris had learnt to look for the will of France within itself. As
+the columns of Brunswick advanced across the north-eastern frontier, Danton
+and the leaders of the city-democracy marshalled their army of the poor and
+the desperate to overthrow that monarchy whose cause the invader had made
+his own. The Republic which had floated so long in the thoughts of the
+Girondins was won in a single day by the populace of Paris, amid the roar
+of cannons and the flash of bayonets. On the 10th of August Danton let
+loose the armed mob upon the Tuileries. Louis quitted the Palace without
+giving orders to the guard either to fight or to retire; but the guard were
+ignorant that their master desired them to offer no resistance, and one
+hundred and sixty of the mob were shot down before an order reached the
+troops to abandon the Palace. The cruelties which followed the victory of
+the people indicated the fate in store for those whom the invader came to
+protect. It is doubtful whether the foreign Courts would have made any
+serious attempt to undo the social changes effected by the Revolution in
+France; but no one supposed that those thousands of self-exiled nobles who
+now returned behind the guns of Brunswick had returned in order to take
+their places peacefully in the new social order. In their own imagination,
+as much as in that of the people, they returned with fire and sword to
+repossess themselves of rights of which they had been despoiled, and to
+take vengeance upon the men who were responsible for the changes made in
+France since 1789. [18] In the midst of a panic little justified by the
+real military situation, Danton inflamed the nation with his own passionate
+courage and resolution; he unhappily also thought it necessary to a
+successful national defence that the reactionary party at Paris should be
+paralysed by a terrible example. The prisons were filled with persons
+suspected of hostility to the national cause, and in the first days of
+September many hundreds of these unfortunate persons were massacred by
+gangs of assassins paid by a committee of the Municipality. Danton did not
+disguise his approval of the act. He had made up his mind that the work of
+the Revolution could only be saved by striking terror into its enemies, and
+by preventing the Royalists from co-operating with the invader. But the
+multitudes who flocked to the standards of 1792 carried with them the
+patriotism of Danton unstained by his guilt. Right or wrong in its origin,
+the war was now unquestionably a just one on the part of France, a war
+against a privileged class attempting to recover by force the unjust
+advantages that they had not been able to maintain, a war against the
+foreigner in defence of the right of the nation to deal with its own
+government. Since the great religious wars there had been no cause so
+rooted in the hearts, so close to the lives of those who fought for it.
+Every soldier who joined the armies of France in 1792 joined of his own
+free will. No conscription dragged the peasant to the frontier. Men left
+their homes in order that the fruit of the poor man's labour should be his
+own, in order that the children of France should inherit some better
+birthright than exaction and want, in order that the late-won sense of
+human right should not be swept from the earth by the arms of privilege and
+caste. It was a time of high-wrought hope, of generous and pathetic
+self-sacrifice; a time that left a deep and indelible impression upon those
+who judged it as eye-witnesses. Years afterwards the poet Wordsworth, then
+alienated from France and cold in the cause of liberty, could not recall
+without tears the memories of 1792. [19]
+
+[Brunswick checked at Valmy, Sept. 20.]
+
+[Retreat of Brunswick.]
+
+The defence of France rested on General Dumouriez. The fortresses of Longwy
+and Verdun, covering the passage of the Meuse, had fallen after the
+briefest resistance; the troops that could be collected before Brunswick's
+approach were too few to meet the enemy in the open field. Happily for
+France the slow advance of the Prussian general permitted Dumouriez to
+occupy the difficult country of the Argonne, where, while waiting for his
+reinforcements, he was able for some time to hold the invaders in check. At
+length Brunswick made his way past the defile which Dumouriez had chosen
+for his first line of defence; but it was only to find the French posted in
+such strength on his flank that any further advance would imperil his own
+army. If the advance was to be continued, Dumouriez must be dislodged.
+Accordingly, on the 20th of September, Brunswick directed his artillery
+against the hills of Valmy, where the French left was encamped. The
+cannonade continued for some hours, but it was followed by no general
+attack. The firmness of the French under Brunswick's fire made it clear
+that they would not be displaced without an obstinate battle; and,
+disappointed of victory, the King of Prussia began to listen to proposals
+of peace sent to him by Dumouriez. [20] A week spent in negotiation served
+only to strengthen the French and to aggravate the scarcity and sickness
+within the German camp. Dissensions broke out between the Prussian and
+Austrian commanders; a retreat was ordered; and to the astonishment of
+Europe the veteran forces of Brunswick fell back before the mutinous
+soldiery and unknown generals of the Revolution, powerless to delay for a
+single month the evacuation of France and the restoration of the fortresses
+which they had captured.
+
+[The Convention meets. Proclaims Republic, Sept. 21.]
+
+[The war becomes a crusade of democracy.]
+
+In the meantime the Legislative Assembly had decreed its own dissolution in
+consequence of the overthrow of the monarchy on August both, and had
+ordered the election of representatives to frame a constitution for France.
+The elections were held in the crisis of invasion, in the height of
+national indignation against the alliance of the aristocracy with the
+foreigner, and, in some districts, under the influence of men who had not
+shrunk from ordering the massacres in the prisons. At such a moment a
+Constitutional Royalist had scarcely more chance of election than a
+detected spy from the enemy's camp. The Girondins, who had been the party
+of extremes in the Legislative Assembly, were the party of moderation and
+order in the Convention. By their side there were returned men whose whole
+being seemed to be compounded out of the forces of conflict, men who,
+sometimes without conscious depravity, carried into political and social
+struggles that direct, unquestioning employment of force which has
+ordinarily been reserved for war or for the diffusion of religious
+doctrines. The moral differences that separated this party from the Gironde
+were at once conspicuous: the political creed of the two parties appeared
+at first to be much the same. Monarchy was abolished, and France declared a
+Republic (Sept. 21). Office continued in the hands of the Gironde; but the
+vehement, uncompromising spirit of their rivals, the so-called party of the
+Mountain, quickly made itself felt in all the relations of France to
+foreign Powers. The intention of conquest might still be disavowed, as it
+had been five months before; but were the converts to liberty to be denied
+the right of uniting themselves to the French people by their own free
+will? When the armies of the Republic had swept its assailants from the
+border-provinces that gave them entrance into France, were those provinces
+to be handed back to a government of priests and nobles? The scruples which
+had condemned all annexation of territory vanished in that orgy of
+patriotism which followed the expulsion of the invader and the discovery
+that the Revolution was already a power in other lands than France. The
+nation that had to fight the battle of European freedom must appeal to the
+spirit of freedom wherever it would answer the call: the conflict with
+sovereigns must be maintained by arming their subjects against them in
+every land. In this conception of the universal alliance of the nations,
+the Governments with which France was not yet at war were scarcely
+distinguished from those which had pronounced against her. The
+frontier-lines traced by an obsolete diplomacy, the artificial guarantees
+of treaties, were of little account against the living and inalienable
+sovereignty of the people. To men inflamed with the passions of 1792 an
+argument of international law scarcely conveyed more meaning than to Peter
+the Hermit. Among the statesmen of other lands, who had no intention of
+abandoning all the principles recognised as the public right of Europe, the
+language now used by France could only be understood as the avowal of
+indiscriminate aggression.
+
+[The neighbors of France.]
+
+The Revolution had displayed itself in France as a force of union as well
+as of division. It had driven the nobles across the frontier; it had torn
+the clergy from their altars; but it had reconciled sullen Corsica; and by
+abolishing feudal rights it had made France the real fatherland of the
+Teutonic peasant in Alsace and Lorraine. It was now about to prove its
+attractive power in foreign lands. At the close of the last century the
+nationalities of Europe were far less consolidated than they are at
+present; only on the Spanish and the Swiss frontier had France a neighbour
+that could be called a nation. On the north, what is now the kingdom of
+Belgium was in 1792 a collection of provinces subject to the House of
+Austria. The German population both of the districts west of the Rhine and
+of those opposite to Alsace was parcelled out among a number of petty
+principalities. Savoy, though west of the chain of the Alps and French in
+speech, formed part of the kingdom of Piedmont, which was itself severed by
+history and by national character from the other States of Northern Italy.
+Along the entire frontier, from Dunkirk to the Maritime Alps, France
+nowhere touched a strong, united, and independent people; and along this
+entire frontier, except in the country opposite Alsace, the armed
+proselytism of the French Revolution proved a greater force than the
+influences on which the existing order of things depended. In the Low
+Countries, in the Principalities of the Rhine, in Switzerland, in Savoy, in
+Piedmont itself, the doctrines of the Revolution were welcomed by a more or
+less numerous class, and the armies of France appeared, though but for a
+moment, as the missionaries of liberty and right rather than as an invading
+enemy.
+
+[Custine enters Mainz, Oct. 20.]
+
+No sooner had Brunswick been brought to a stand by Dumouriez at Valmy than
+a French division under Custine crossed the Alsatian frontier and advanced
+upon Spires, where Brunswick had left large stores of war. The garrison was
+defeated in an encounter outside the town; Spires and Worms surrendered to
+Custine. In the neighbouring fortress of Mainz, the key to Western Germany,
+Custine's advance was watched by a republican party among the inhabitants,
+from whom the French general learnt that he had only to appear before the
+city to become its master. Brunswick had indeed apprehended the failure of
+his invasion of France, but he had never given a thought to the defence of
+Germany; and, although the King of Prussia had been warned of the
+defenceless state of Mainz, no steps had been taken beyond the payment of a
+sum of money for the repair of the fortifications, which money the
+Archbishop expended in the purchase of a wood belonging to himself and the
+erection of a timber patchwork. On news arriving of the capture of Spires,
+the Archbishop fled, leaving the administration to the Dean, the
+Chancellor, and the Commandant. The Chancellor made a speech, calling upon
+his "beloved brethren" the citizens to defend themselves to the last
+extremity, and daily announced the overthrow of Dumouriez and the
+approaching entry of the Allies into Paris, until Custine's soldiers
+actually came into sight. [21] Then a council of war declared the city to
+be untenable; and before Custine had brought up a single siege-gun the
+garrison capitulated, and the French were welcomed into Mainz by the
+partisans of the Republic (Oct. 20). With the French arms came the French
+organisation of liberty. A club was formed on the model of the Jacobin Club
+of Paris; existing officers and distinctions of rank were abolished; and
+although the mass of the inhabitants held aloof, a Republic was finally
+proclaimed, and incorporated with the Republic of France.
+
+[Dumouriez invades the Netherlands.]
+
+[Battle of Jemappes, Nov. 6.]
+
+The success of Custine's raid into Germany did not divert the Convention
+from the design of attacking Austria in the Netherlands, which Dumouriez
+had from the first pressed upon the Government. It was not three years
+since the Netherlands had been in revolt against the Emperor Joseph. In its
+origin the revolt was a reactionary movement of the clerical party against
+Joseph's reforms; but there soon sprang up ambitions and hopes at variance
+with the first impulses of the insurrection; and by the side of monks and
+monopolists a national party came into existence, proclaiming the
+sovereignty of the people, and imitating all the movements of the French
+Revolution. During the brief suspension of Austrian rule the popular and
+the reactionary parties attacked one another; and on the restoration of
+Leopold's authority in 1791 the democratic leaders, with a large body of
+their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the
+outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French
+connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion,
+the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked
+by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary
+France. [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for a French invasion.
+Dumouriez crossed the frontier. The border fortresses no longer existed;
+and after a single battle won by the French at Jemappes on the 6th of
+November, [23] the Austrians, finding the population universally hostile,
+abandoned the Netherlands without a struggle.
+
+[Nice and Savoy annexed.]
+
+[Decree of Dec. 15.]
+
+The victory of Jemappes, the first pitched battle won by the Republic,
+excited an outburst of revolutionary fervour in the Convention which deeply
+affected the relations of France to Great Britain, hitherto a neutral
+spectator of the war. A manifesto was published declaring that the French
+nation offered its alliance to all peoples who wished to recover their
+freedom, and charging the generals of the Republic to give their protection
+to all persons who might suffer in the cause of liberty (Nov. 19). A week
+later Savoy and Nice were annexed to France, the population of Savoy having
+declared in favour of France and Sardinia. On the 15th of December the
+Convention proclaimed that social and political revolution was henceforth
+to accompany every movement of its armies on foreign soil. "In every
+country that shall be occupied by the armies of the French Republic"--such
+was the substance of the Decree of December 15th--"the generals shall
+announce the abolition of all existing authorities; of nobility, of
+serfage, of every feudal right and every monopoly; they shall proclaim the
+sovereignty of the people, and convoke the inhabitants in assemblies to
+form a provisional Government, to which no officer of a former Government,
+no noble, nor any member of the former privileged corporations shall be
+eligible. They shall place under the charge of the French Republic all
+property belonging to the Sovereign or his adherents, and the property of
+every civil or religious corporation. The French nation will treat as
+enemies any people which, refusing liberty and equality, desires to
+preserve its prince and privileged castes, or to make any accommodation
+with them."
+
+[England arms.]
+
+[The Schelde.]
+
+[Execution of Louis XVI., Jan. 21, 1793.]
+
+This singular announcement of a new crusade caused the Government of Great
+Britain to arm. Although the decree of the Convention related only to
+States with which France was at war, the Convention had in fact formed
+connections with the English revolutionary societies; and the French
+Minister of Marine informed his sailors that they were about to carry fifty
+thousand caps of liberty to their English brethren. No prudent statesman
+would treat a mere series of threats against all existing authorities as
+ground for war; but the acts of the French Government showed that it
+intended to carry into effect the violent interference in the affairs of
+other nations announced in its manifestoes. Its agents were stirring up
+dissatisfaction in every State; and although the annexation of Savoy and
+the occupation of the Netherlands might be treated as incidental to the
+conflict with Austria and Sardinia, in which Great Britain had pledged
+itself to neutrality, other acts of the Convention were certainly
+infringements of the rights of allies of England. A series of European
+treaties, oppressive according to our own ideas, but in keeping with the
+ideas of that age, prohibited the navigation of the River Schelde, on which
+Antwerp is situated, in order that the commerce of the North Sea might flow
+exclusively into Dutch ports. On the conquest of Belgium the French
+Government gave orders to Dumouriez to send a flotilla down the river, and
+to declare Antwerp an open port in right of the law of nature, which
+treaties cannot abrogate. Whatever the folly of commercial restraints, the
+navigation of the Schelde was a question between the Antwerpers and the
+Dutch, and one in which France had no direct concern. The incident, though
+trivial, was viewed in England as one among many proofs of the intention of
+the French to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring States at their
+pleasure. In ordinary times it would not have been easy to excite much
+interest in England on behalf of a Dutch monopoly; but the feeling of this
+country towards the French Revolution had been converted into a passionate
+hatred by the massacres of September, and by the open alliance between the
+Convention and the Revolutionary societies in England itself. Pitt indeed,
+whom the Parisians imagined to be their most malignant enemy, laboured
+against the swelling national passion, and hoped against all hope for
+peace. Not only was Pitt guiltless of the desire to add this country to the
+enemies of France, but he earnestly desired to reconcile France with
+Austria, in order that the Western States, whose embroilment left Eastern
+Europe at the mercy of Catherine of Russia, might unite to save both Poland
+and Turkey from falling into the hands of a Power whose steady aggression
+threatened Europe more seriously than all the noisy and outspoken
+excitement of the French Convention. Pitt, moreover, viewed with deep
+disapproval the secret designs of Austria and Prussia. [24] If the French
+executive would have given any assurance that the Netherlands should not be
+annexed, or if the French ambassador, Chauvelin, who was connected with
+English plotters, had been superseded by a trustworthy negotiator, it is
+probable that peace might have been preserved. But when, on the execution
+of King Louis (Jan. 21, 1793), Chauvelin was expelled from England as a
+suspected alien, war became a question of days. [25]
+
+[Holland and Mediterranean States enter the war.]
+
+[War with England, Feb. 1st, 1793.]
+
+Points of technical right figured in the complaints of both sides; but the
+real ground of war was perfectly understood. France considered itself
+entitled to advance the Revolution and the Rights of Man wherever its own
+arms or popular insurrection gave it the command. England denied the right
+of any Power to annul the political system of Europe at its pleasure. No
+more serious, no more sufficient, ground of war ever existed between two
+nations; yet the event proved that, with the highest justification for war,
+the highest wisdom would yet have chosen peace. England's entry into the
+war converted it from an affair of two or three campaigns into a struggle
+of twenty years, resulting in more violent convulsions, more widespread
+misery, and more atrocious crimes, than in all probability would have
+resulted even from the temporary triumph of the revolutionary cause in
+1793. But in both nations political passion welcomed impending calamity;
+and the declaration of war by the Convention on February 1st only
+anticipated the desire of the English people. Great Britain once committed
+to the struggle, Pitt spared neither money nor intimidation in his efforts
+to unite all Europe against France. Holland was included with England in
+the French declaration of war. The Mediterranean States felt that the navy
+of England was nearer to them than the armies of Austria and Prussia; and
+before the end of the summer of 1793, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, and
+the Papal States had joined the Coalition.
+
+[French wrongly think England inclined to revolution.]
+
+The Jacobins of Paris had formed a wrong estimate of the political
+condition of England. At the outbreak of the war they believed that England
+itself was on the verge of revolution. They mistook the undoubted
+discontent of a portion of the middle and lower classes, which showed
+itself in the cry for parliamentary reform, for a general sentiment of
+hatred towards existing institutions, like that which in France had swept
+away the old order at a single blow. The Convention received the addresses
+of English Radical societies, and imagined that the abuses of the
+parliamentary system under George III. had alienated the whole nation. What
+they had found in Belgium and in Savoy--a people thankful to receive the
+Rights of Man from the soldiers of the Revolution--they expected to find
+among the dissenting congregations of London and the factory-hands of
+Sheffield. The singular attraction exercised by each class in England upon
+the one below it, as well as the indifference of the nation generally to
+all ideals, was little understood in France, although the Revolutions of
+the two countries bore this contrast on their face. A month after the fall
+of the Bastille, the whole system of class-privilege and monopoly had
+vanished from French law; fifteen years of the English Commonwealth had
+left the structure of English society what it had been at the beginning.
+But political observation vanished in the delirium of 1793; and the French
+only discovered, when it was too late, that in Great Britain the Revolution
+had fallen upon an enemy of unparalleled stubbornness and inexhaustible
+strength.
+
+[The Whigs not democratic.]
+
+[Political condition of England.]
+
+In the first Assembly of the Revolution it was usual to speak of the
+English as free men whom the French ought to imitate; in the Convention it
+was usual to speak of them as slaves whom the French ought to deliver. The
+institutions of England bore in fact a very different aspect when compared
+with the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and when compared with the
+democracy of 1793. Frenchmen who had lived under the government of a Court
+which made laws by edict and possessed the right to imprison by
+letters-patent looked with respect upon the Parliament of England, its
+trial by jury, and its freedom of the press. The men who had sent a king to
+prison and confiscated the estates of a great part of the aristocracy could
+only feel compassion for a land where three-fourths of the national
+representatives were nominees of the Crown or of wealthy peers. Nor, in
+spite of the personal sympathy of Fox with the French revolutionary
+movement, was there any real affinity between the English Whig party and
+that which now ruled in the Convention. The event which fixed the character
+of English liberty during the eighteenth century, the Revolution of 1688,
+had nothing democratic in its nature. That revolution was directed against
+a system of Roman Catholic despotism; it gave political power not to the
+mass of the nation, which had no desire and no capacity to exercise it, but
+to a group of noble families and their retainers, who, during the reigns of
+the first two Georges, added all the patronage and influence of the Crown
+to their social and constitutional weight in the country. The domestic
+history of England since the accession of George III. had turned chiefly
+upon the obstinate struggle of this monarch to deliver himself from all
+dependence upon party. The divisions of the Whigs, their jealousies, but,
+above all, their real alienation from the mass of the people whose rights
+they professed to defend, ultimately gave the King the victory, when, after
+twenty years of errors, be found in the younger Pitt a Minister capable of
+uniting the interests of the Crown with the ablest and most patriotic
+liberal statesmanship. Bribes, threats, and every species of base influence
+had been employed by King George to break up the great Coalition of 1783,
+which united all sections of the Whigs against him under the Ministry of
+Fox and North; but the real support of Pitt, whom the King placed in office
+with a minority in the House of Commons, was the temper of the nation
+itself, wearied with the exclusiveness, the corruption, and the
+party-spirit of the Whigs, and willing to believe that a popular Minister,
+even if he had entered upon power unconstitutionally, might do more for the
+country than the constitutional proprietors of the rotten boroughs.
+
+[Pitt Minister, 1783.]
+
+[Effect of French Revolution on English Parties.]
+
+From 1783 down to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt, as a Tory
+Minister confronted by a Whig Opposition, governed England on more liberal
+principles than any statesman who had held power during the eighteenth
+century. These years were the last of the party-system of England in its
+original form. The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in
+which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig
+as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It
+created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of
+Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have
+contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the
+preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread
+of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs
+by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to
+foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of
+Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two
+sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the
+violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the
+other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of
+civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy
+influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of
+popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.
+
+[Burke's "Reflections," Oct. 1790.]
+
+[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]
+
+The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said
+to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was
+bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The
+charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation
+which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title
+of "Reflections on the French Revolution." In this survey of the political
+forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in
+past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the
+constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression
+of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice
+more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that
+the politicians and societies of England who had given it their sympathy
+had given their sympathy to measures and to theories opposed to every
+principle of 1688. Above all, he laid bare that agency of riot and
+destructiveness which, even within the first few months of the Revolution,
+filled him with presentiment of the calamities about to fall upon France.
+Burke's treatise was no dispassionate inquiry into the condition of a
+neighbouring state: it was a denunciation of Jacobinism as fierce and as
+little qualified by political charity as were the maledictions of the
+Hebrew prophets upon their idolatrous neighbours; and it was intended, like
+these, to excite his own countrymen against innovations among themselves.
+It completely succeeded. It expressed, and it heightened, the alarm arising
+among the Liberal section of the propertied class, at first well inclined
+to the Revolution; and, although the Whigs of the House of Commons
+pronounced in favour of Fox upon his first rupture with Burke, the tide of
+public feeling, rising higher with every new outrage of the Revolution,
+soon invaded the legislature, and carried the bulk of the Whig party to the
+side of the Minister, leaving to Fox and his few faithful adherents the
+task of maintaining an unheeded protest against the blind passions of war,
+and the increasing rigour with which Pitt repressed every symptom of
+popular disaffection.
+
+[The Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention.]
+
+[The Gironde and the Commune of Paris.]
+
+The character of violence which Burke traced and condemned in the earliest
+acts of the Revolution displayed itself in a much stronger light after the
+overthrow of the Monarchy by the insurrection of August 10th. That event
+was the work of men who commanded the Parisian democracy, not the work of
+orators and party-leaders in the Assembly. The Girondins had not hesitated
+to treat the victory as their own, by placing the great offices of State,
+with one exception, in the hands of their leaders; they instantly found
+that the real sovereignty lay elsewhere. The Council of the Commune, or
+Municipality, of Paris, whose members had seized their post at the moment
+of the insurrection, was the only administrative body that possessed the
+power to enforce its commands; in the Ministries of State one will alone
+made itself felt, that of Danton, whom the Girondins had unwillingly
+admitted to office along with themselves. The massacres of September threw
+into full light the powerlessness of the expiring Assembly. For five
+successive days it was unable to check the massacres; it was unable to
+bring to justice the men who had planned them, and who called upon the rest
+of France to follow their example. With the meeting of the Convention,
+however, the Girondins, who now regarded themselves as the legitimate
+government, and forgot that they owed office to an insurrection, expected
+to reduce the capital to submission. They commanded an overwhelming
+majority in the new chamber; they were supported by the middle class in all
+the great cities of France. The party of the Mountain embraced at first
+only the deputies of Paris, and a group of determined men who admitted no
+criticism on the measures which the democracy of Paris had thought
+necessary for the Revolution. In the Convention they were the assailed, not
+the assailants. Without waiting to secure themselves by an armed force, the
+orators of the Gironde attempted to crush both the Municipality and the
+deputies who ruled at the Clubs. They reproached the Municipality with the
+murders of September; they accused Robespierre of aiming at the
+Dictatorship. It was under the pressure of these attacks that the party of
+the Mountain gathered its strength within the Convention, and that the
+populace of Paris transferred to the Gironde the passionate hatred which it
+had hitherto borne to the King and the aristocracy. The gulf that lay
+between the people and those who had imagined themselves to be its leaders
+burst into view. The Girondins saw with dismay that the thousands of hungry
+workmen whose victory had placed them in power had fought for something
+more tangible than Republican phrases from Tacitus and Plutarch. On one
+side was a handful of orators and writers, steeped in the rhetoric and the
+commonplace of ancient Rome, and totally strange to the real duties of
+government; on the other side the populace of Paris, such as centuries of
+despotism, privilege, and priestcraft had made it: sanguinary, unjust,
+vindictive; convulsed since the outbreak of the Revolution with every
+passion that sways men in the mass; taught no conception of progress but
+the overthrow of authority, and acquainted with no title to power but that
+which was bestowed by itself. If the Girondins were to remain in power,
+they could do so only by drawing an army from the departments, or by
+identifying themselves with the multitude. They declined to take either
+course. Their audience was in the Assembly alone; their support in the
+distant provinces. Paris, daily more violent, listened to men of another
+stamp. The Municipality defied the Government; the Mountain answered the
+threats and invectives of the majority in the Assembly by displays of
+popular menace and tumult. In the eyes of the common people, who after so
+many changes of government found themselves more famished and more
+destitute than ever, the Gironde was now but the last of a succession of
+tyrannies; its statesmen but impostors who stood between the people and the
+enjoyment of their liberty.
+
+Among the leaders of the Mountain, Danton aimed at the creation of a
+central Revolutionary Government, armed with absolute powers for the
+prosecution of the war; and he attacked the Girondins only when they
+themselves had rejected his support. Robespierre, himself the author of
+little beyond destruction, was the idol of those whom Rousseau's writings
+had filled with the idea of a direct exercise of sovereignty by the people.
+It was in the trial of the King that the Gironde first confessed its
+submission to the democracy of Paris. The Girondins in their hearts desired
+to save the King; they voted for his death with the hope of maintaining
+their influence in Paris, and of clearing themselves from the charge of
+lukewarmness in the cause of the Revolution. But the sacrifice was as vain
+as it was dishonourable. The populace and the party of the Mountain took
+the act in its true character, as an acknowledgment of their own victory. A
+series of measures was brought forward providing for the poorer classes at
+the expense of the wealthy. The Gironde, now forced to become the defenders
+of property, encountered the fatal charge of deserting the cause of the
+people; and from this time nothing but successful foreign warfare could
+have saved their party from ruin.
+
+[Defeat and treason of Dumouriez, March, 1793.]
+
+Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of
+Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and
+materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against
+Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen
+upon his lieutenant, Miranda, at Maestricht, and driven the French army
+before them. Dumouriez returned, in order to fight a pitched battle before
+Brussels. He attacked the Austrians at Neerwinden (March 18), and suffered
+a repulse inconsiderable in itself, but sufficient to demoralise an army
+composed in great part of recruits and National Guards. [26] His defeat
+laid Flanders open to the Austrians; but Dumouriez intended that it should
+inflict upon the Republic a far heavier blow. Since the execution of the
+King, he had been at open enmity with the Jacobins. He now proposed to the
+Austrian commander to unite with him in an attack upon the Convention, and
+in re-establishing monarchy in France. The first pledge of Dumouriez's
+treason was the surrender of three commissioners sent by the Convention to
+his camp; the second was to have been the surrender of the fortress of
+Conde. But Dumouriez had overrated his influence with the army. Plainer
+minds than his own knew how to deal with a general who intrigues with the
+foreigner. Dumouriez's orders were disregarded; his movements watched; and
+he fled to the Austrian lines under the fire of his own soldiers. About
+thirty officers and eight hundred men passed with him to the enemy.
+
+[Defeats on the North and East. Revolt of La Vendee, March, 1793.]
+
+[The Commune crushes the Gironde, June 2.]
+
+The defeat and treason of Dumouriez brought the army of Austria over the
+northern frontier. Almost at the same moment Custine was overpowered in the
+Palatinate; and the conquests of the previous autumn, with the exception of
+Mainz, were lost as rapidly as they had been won. Custine fell back upon
+the lines of Weissenburg, leaving the defence of Mainz to a garrison of
+17,000 men, which, alone among the Republican armies, now maintained its
+reputation. In France itself civil war broke out. The peasants of La
+Vendee, a district destitute of large towns, and scarcely touched either by
+the evils which had produced the Revolution or by the hopes which animated
+the rest of France, had seen with anger the expulsion of the parish priests
+who refused to take the oath to the Constitution. A levy of 300,000 men,
+which was ordered by the Convention in February, 1793, threw into revolt
+the simple Vendeans, who cared for nothing outside their own parishes, and
+preferred to fight against their countrymen rather than to quit their
+homes. The priests and the Royalists fanned these village outbreaks into a
+religious war of the most serious character. Though poorly armed, and
+accustomed to return to their homes as soon as fighting was over, the
+Vendean peasantry proved themselves a formidable soldiery in the moment of
+attack, and cut to pieces the half-disciplined battalions which the
+Government sent against them. On the north, France was now assailed by the
+English as well as by the Austrians. The Allies laid siege to Conde and
+Valenciennes, and drove the French army back in disorder at Famars. Each
+defeat was a blow dealt to the Government of the Gironde at Paris. With
+foreign and civil war adding disaster to disaster, with the general to whom
+the Gironde had entrusted the defence of the Republic openly betraying it
+to its enemies, the fury of the capital was easily excited against the
+party charged with all the misfortunes of France. A threatening movement of
+the middle classes in resistance to a forced loan precipitated the
+struggle. The Girondins were accused of arresting the armies of the
+Republic in the midst of their conquests, of throwing the frontier open to
+the foreigner, and of kindling the civil war of La Vendee. On the 31st of
+May a raging mob invaded the Convention. Two days later the representatives
+of France were surrounded by the armed forces of the Commune; the
+twenty-four leading members of the Gironde were placed under arrest, and
+the victory of the Mountain was completed. [27]
+
+[Civil War. The Committee of Public Safety.]
+
+The situation of France, which was serious before, now became desperate;
+for the Girondins, escaping from their arrest, called the departments to
+arms against Paris. Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyons, rose in
+insurrection against the tyranny of the Mountain, and the Royalists of the
+south and west threw themselves into a civil war which they hoped to turn
+to their own advantage. But a form of government had now arisen in France
+well fitted to cope with extraordinary perils. It was a form of government
+in which there was little trace of the constitutional tendencies of 1789,
+one that had come into being as the stress of conflict threw into the
+background the earlier hopes and efforts of the Revolution. In the two
+earlier Assemblies it had been a fixed principle that the representatives
+of the people were to control the Government, but were not to assume
+executive powers themselves. After the overthrow of Monarchy on the 10th
+August, the Ministers, though still nominally possessed of powers distinct
+from the representative body, began to be checked by Committees of the
+Convention appointed for various branches of the public service; and in
+March, 1793, in order to meet the increasing difficulties of the war, a
+Committee of Public Safety was appointed, charged with the duty of
+exercising a general surveillance over the administration. In this
+Committee, however, as in all the others, the Gironde were in the majority;
+and the twenty-four members who composed it were too numerous a body to act
+with effect. The growing ascendancy of the Mountain produced that
+concentration of force which the times required. The Committee was reduced
+in April to nine members, and in this form it ultimately became the supreme
+central power. It was not until after the revolt of Lyons that the
+Committee, exchanging Danton's influence for that of Robespierre, adopted
+the principle of Terror which has made the memory of their rule one of the
+most sinister in history. Their authority steadily increased. The members
+divided among themselves the great branches of government. One directed the
+army, another the navy, another foreign affairs; the signature of three
+members practically gave to any measure the force of law, for the
+Convention accepted and voted their reports as a matter of course.
+
+[Commissioners of the Convention]
+
+Whilst the Committee gave orders as the supreme executive, eighty of the
+most energetic of the Mountain spread themselves over France, in parties of
+two and three, with the title of Commissioners of the Convention, and with
+powers over-riding those of all the local authorities. They were originally
+appointed for the purpose of hastening on the levy ordered by the
+Convention in March, but their powers were gradually extended over the
+whole range of administration. Their will was absolute, their authority
+supreme. Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers
+were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local
+machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the
+scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest.
+They censured and dismissed the generals; one of them even directed the
+movements of a fleet at sea. What was lost by waste and confusion and by
+the interference of the Commissioners in military movements was more than
+counterbalanced by the vigour which they threw into all the preparations of
+war, and by the unity of purpose which, at the price of unsparing
+bloodshed, they communicated to every group where Frenchmen met together.
+
+[Local revolutionary system of 1793]
+
+But no individual energy could have sustained these dictatorships without
+the support of a popular organisation. All over France a system of
+revolutionary government sprang up, which superseded all existing
+institutions just as the authority of the Commissioners of the Convention
+superseded all existing local powers. The local revolutionary
+administration consisted of a Committee, a Club, and a Tribunal. [28] In
+each of 21,000 communes a committee of twelve was elected by the people,
+and entrusted by the Convention, as the Terror gained ground, with
+boundless powers of arrest and imprisonment. Popular excitement was
+sustained by clubs, where the peasants and labourers assembled at the close
+of their day's work, and applauded the victories or denounced the enemies
+of the Revolution. A Tribunal with swift procedure and powers of life and
+death sat in each of the largest towns, and judged the prisoners who were
+sent to it by the committees of the neighbouring district. Such was the
+government of 1793--an executive of uncontrolled power drawn from the
+members of a single Assembly, and itself brought into immediate contact
+with the poorest of the people in their assemblies and clubs. The balance
+of interests which creates a constitutional system, the security of life,
+liberty, and property, which is the essence of every recognised social
+order, did not now exist in France. One public purpose, the defence of the
+Revolution, became the law before which all others lost their force.
+Treating all France like a town in a state of siege, the Government took
+upon itself the duty of providing support for the poorest classes by
+enactments controlling the sale and possession of the necessaries of life.
+
+[Law of the Maximum]
+
+The price of corn and other necessaries was fixed; and, when the traders
+and producers consequently ceased to bring their goods to market, the
+Commissioners of the Convention were empowered to make requisition of a
+certain quantity of corn for every acre of ground. Property was thus placed
+at the disposal of the men who already exercised absolute political power.
+"The state of France," said Burke, "is perfectly simple. It consists of but
+two descriptions, the oppressors and the oppressed." It is in vain that the
+attempt has been made to extenuate the atrocious and senseless cruelties of
+this time by extolling the great legislative projects of the Convention, or
+pleading the dire necessity of a land attacked on every side by the
+foreigner, and rent with civil war. The more that is known of the Reign of
+Terror, the more hateful, the meaner and more disgusting is the picture
+unveiled. France was saved not by the brutalities, but by the energy, of
+the faction that ruled it. It is scarcely too much to say that the cause of
+European progress would have been less injured by the military overthrow of
+the Republic, by the severance of the border provinces from France and the
+restoration of some shadow of the ancient _regime_, than by the traditions
+of horror which for the next fifty years were inseparably associated in
+men's minds with the victory of the people over established power.
+
+[French disasters, March-Sept., 1793.]
+
+The Revolutionary organisation did not reach its full vigour till the
+autumn of 1793, when the prospects of France were at their worst. Custine,
+who was brought up from Alsace to take command of the Army of the North,
+found it so demoralised that he was unable to attempt the relief of the
+fortresses which were now besieged by the Allies. Conde surrendered to the
+Austrians on the 10th of July; Valenciennes capitulated to the Duke of York
+a fortnight later. In the east the fortune of war was no better. An attack
+made on the Prussian army besieging Mainz totally failed; and on the 23rd
+of July this great fortress, which had been besieged since the middle of
+April, passed back into the hands of the Germans. On every side the
+Republic seemed to be sinking before its enemies. Its frontier defences had
+fallen before the victorious Austrians and English; Brunswick was ready to
+advance upon Alsace from conquered Mainz; Lyons and Toulon were in revolt;
+La Vendee had proved the grave of the forces sent to subdue it. It was in
+this crisis of misfortune that the Convention placed the entire male
+population of France between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five at the
+disposal of the Government, and turned the whole country into one great
+camp and arsenal of war. Nor was there wanting a mind equal to the task of
+giving order to this vast material. The appointment of Carnot, an officer
+of engineers, to a seat on the Committee of Public Safety placed the
+military administration of France in the hands of a man who, as an
+organiser, if not as a strategist, was soon to prove himself without equal
+in Europe.
+
+[The Allies seek each their separate ends.]
+
+Nevertheless, it was to the dissensions and to the bad policy of the Allies
+more than to the energy of its own Government that France owed its safety.
+The object for which the Allies professed to be carrying on the war, the
+establishment of a pacific Government in France, was subordinated to
+schemes of aggrandisement, known as the acquisition of just indemnities.
+While Prussia, bent chiefly on preventing the Emperor from gaining Bavaria
+in exchange for Belgium, kept its own army inactive on the Rhine, [29]
+Austria, with the full approval of Pitt's Cabinet, claimed annexations in
+Northern France, as well as Alsace, and treated the conquered town of Conde
+as Austrian territory. [30] Henceforward all the operations of the northern
+army were directed to the acquisition of frontier territory, not to the
+pursuit and overthrow of the Republican forces. The war was openly
+converted from a war of defence into a war of spoliation. It was a change
+which mocked the disinterested professions with which the Allies had taken
+up arms; in its military results it was absolutely ruinous. In face of the
+immense levies which promised the French certain victory in a long war, the
+only hope for the Allies lay in a rapid march to Paris; they preferred the
+extreme of division and delay. No sooner had the advance of their united
+armies driven Custine from his stronghold at Famars, than the English
+commander led off his forces to besiege Dunkirk, while the Austrians, under
+Prince Coburg, proceeded to invest Cambray and Le Quesnoy. The line of the
+invaders thus extended from the Channel to Brunswick's posts at Landau, on
+the border of Alsace; the main armies were out of reach of one another, and
+their strength was diminished by the corps detached to keep up their
+communications. The French held the inner circle; and the advantage which
+this gave them was well understood by Carnot, who now inspired the measures
+of the Committee. In steadiness and precision the French recruits were no
+match for the trained armies of Germany; but the supply of them was
+inexhaustible, and Carnot knew that when they were thrown in sufficient
+masses upon the enemy their courage and enthusiasm would make amends for
+their inexperience. The successes of the Allies, unbroken from February to
+August, now began to alternate with defeats; the flood of invasion was
+first slowly and obstinately repelled, then swept away before a victorious
+advance.
+
+[York driven from Dunkirk Sept. 8.]
+
+It was on the British commander that the first blow was struck. The forces
+that could be detached from the French Northern army were not sufficient to
+drive York from before Dunkirk; but on the Moselle there were troops
+engaged in watching an enemy who was not likely to advance; and the
+Committee did not hesitate to leave this side of France open to the
+Prussians in order to deal a decisive stroke in the north. Before the
+movement was noticed by the enemy, Carnot had transported 30,000 men from
+Metz to the English Channel; and in the first week of September the German
+corps covering York was assailed by General Houchard with numbers double
+its own. The Germans were driven back upon Dunkirk; York only saved his own
+army from destruction by hastily raising the siege and abandoning his heavy
+artillery. The victory of the French, however, was ill followed up.
+Houchard was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and he paid with his
+life for his mistakes. Custine had already perished, unjustly condemned for
+the loss of Mainz and Valenciennes.
+
+[Commands given to men of the people.]
+
+[Jourdan's victory at Wattignies, Oct 15.]
+
+It was no unimportant change for France when the successors of Custine and
+Houchard received their commands from the Committee of Public Safety. The
+levelling principle of the Reign of Terror left its effect on France
+through its operation in the army, and through this almost alone. Its
+executions produced only horror and reaction; its confiscations were soon
+reversed; but the creation of a thoroughly democratic army, the work of the
+men who overthrew the Gironde, gave the most powerful and abiding impulse
+to social equality in France. The first generals of the Revolution had been
+officers of the old army, men, with a few exceptions, of noble birth, who,
+like Custine, had enrolled themselves on the popular side when most of
+their companions quitted the country. These generals were connected with
+the politicians of the Gironde, and were involved in its fall. The victory
+of the Mountain brought men of another type into command. Almost all the
+leaders appointed by the Committee of Public Safety were soldiers who had
+served in the ranks. In the levies of 1792 and 1793 the officers of the
+newly-formed battalions were chosen by the recruits themselves. Patriotism,
+energy of character, acquaintance with warfare, instantly brought men into
+prominence. Soldiers of the old army, like Massena, who had reached middle
+life with their knapsacks on their backs; lawyers, like the Breton Moreau;
+waiters at inns, like Murat, found themselves at the head of their
+battalions, and knew that Carnot was ever watching for genius and ability
+to call it to the highest commands. With a million of men under arms, there
+were many in whom great natural gifts supplied the want of professional
+training. It was also inevitable that at the outset command should
+sometimes fall into the hands of mere busy politicians; but the character
+of the generals steadily rose as the Committee gained the ascendancy over a
+knot of demagogues who held the War Ministry during the summer of 1793; and
+by the end of the year there was scarcely one officer in high command who
+had not proved himself worthy of his post. In the investigation into
+Houchard's conduct at Dunkirk, Carnot learnt that the victory had in fact
+been won by Jourdan, one of the generals of division. Jourdan had begun
+life as a common soldier fifteen years before. Discharged at the end of the
+American War, he had set up a draper's shop in Limoges, his native town. He
+joined the army a second time on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and
+the men of his battalion elected him captain. His ability was noticed; he
+was made successively general of brigade and general of division; and, upon
+the dismissal of Houchard, Carnot summoned him to the command of the Army
+of the North. The Austrians were now engaged in the investment of Maubeuge.
+On the 15th of October Jourdan attacked and defeated their covering army at
+Wattignies. His victory forced the Austrians to raise the siege, and
+brought the campaign to an end for the winter.
+
+[Lyons, Toulon, La Vendee, conquered Oct.-Dec. 1793.]
+
+Thus successful on the northern frontier, the Republic carried on war
+against its internal enemies without pause and without mercy. Lyons
+surrendered in October; its citizens were slaughtered by hundreds in cold
+blood. Toulon had thrown itself into the hands of the English, and
+proclaimed King Louis XVII. It was besieged by land; but the operations
+produced no effect until Napoleon Bonaparte, captain of artillery, planned
+the capture of a ridge from which the cannon of the besiegers would command
+the English fleet in the harbour. Hood, the British admiral, now found his
+position hopeless. He took several thousands of the inhabitants on board
+his ships, and put out to sea, blowing up the French ships which he left in
+the harbour. Hood had received the fleet from the Royalists in trust for
+their King; its destruction gave England command of the Mediterranean and
+freed Naples from fear of attack; and Hood thought too little of the
+consequences which his act would bring down upon those of the inhabitants
+of Toulon whom he left behind. [31]
+
+The horrors that followed the entry of the Republican army into the city
+did not prevent Pitt from including among the subjects of congratulation in
+the King's Speech of 1794 "the circumstances attending the evacuation of
+Toulon." It was perhaps fortunate for the Royalists in other parts of
+France that they failed to receive the assistance of England. Help was
+promised to the Vendeans, but it arrived too late. The appearance of Kleber
+at the head of the army which had defended Mainz had already turned the
+scale. Brave as they were, the Vendeans could not long resist trained
+armies. The war of pitched battles ended on the Loire with the year 1793.
+It was succeeded by a war of merciless and systematic destruction on the
+one side, and of ambush and surprises on the other.
+
+[Prussia withdrawing from the war on account of Polish affairs.]
+
+At home the foes of the Republic were sinking; its invaders were too much
+at discord with one another to threaten it any longer with serious danger.
+Prussia was in fact withdrawing from the war. It has been seen that when
+King Frederick William and the Emperor concerted the autumn campaign of
+1792, the understanding was formed that Prussia, in return for its efforts
+against France, should be allowed to seize part of western Poland, if the
+Empress Catherine should give her consent. With this prospect before it,
+the thoughts of the Prussian Government had been from the first busied more
+with Poland, where it hoped to enter into possession, than with France,
+where it had only to fight Austria's battles. Negotiations on the Polish
+question had been actively carried on between Berlin and St. Petersburg
+during the first months of the war; and in January, 1793, the Empress
+Catherine had concluded a Treaty of Partition with King Frederick William,
+in virtue of which a Prussian army under General Mollendorf immediately
+entered western Poland. It was thought good policy to keep the terms of
+this treaty secret from Austria, as it granted a much larger portion of
+Poland to Prussia than Austria was willing that it should receive. Two
+months passed before the Austrian Sovereign learnt how he had been treated
+by his ally. He then denounced the treaty, and assumed so threatening an
+attitude that the Prussians thought it necessary to fortify the territory
+that they had seized. [32] The Ministers who had been outwitted by the
+Court of Berlin were dismissed; Baron Thugut, who from the first had
+prophesied nothing but evil of the Prussian alliance, was called to power.
+The history of this statesman, who for the next eight years directed the
+war-policy of Austria, and filled a part in Europe subordinate only to
+those of Pitt and Bonaparte, has until a recent date been drawn chiefly
+from the representations of his enemies. Humbly born, scornful and
+inaccessible, Thugut was detested by the Viennese aristocracy; the French
+emigrants hated and maligned him on account of his indifference to their
+cause; the public opinion of Austria held him responsible for unparalleled
+military disasters; Prussian generals and ambassadors, whose reports have
+formed the basis of Prussian histories, pictured him as a Satanic
+antagonist. It was long believed of Thugut that while ambassador at
+Constantinople he had sold the Austrian cypher to the French; that in 1794
+he prevented his master's armies from winning victories because he had
+speculated in the French funds; and that in 1799 he occasioned the murder
+of the French envoys at Rastadt, in order to recover documents
+incriminating himself. Better sources of information are now opened, and a
+statesman, jealous, bitter, and over-reaching, but not without great
+qualities of character, stands in the place of the legendary criminal. It
+is indeed clear that Thugut's hatred of Prussia amounted almost to mania;
+it is also clear that his designs of aggression, formed in the school of
+the Emperor Joseph, were fatally in conflict with the defensive principles
+which Europe ought to have opposed to the aggressions of France. Evidence
+exists that during the eight years of Thugut's ministry he entertained,
+together or successively, projects for the annexation of French Flanders,
+Bavaria, Alsace, part of Poland, Venice and Dalmatia, Salzburg, the Papal
+Legations, the Republic of Genoa, Piedmont, and Bosnia; and to this list
+Tuscany and Savoy ought probably to be added. But the charges brought
+against Thugut of underhand dealings with France, and of the willing
+abandonment of German interests in return for compensation to Austria in
+Italy, rest on insufficient ground. Though, like every other politician at
+Vienna and Berlin, he viewed German affairs not as a matter of nationality
+but in subordination to the general interests of his own Court, Thugut
+appears to have been, of all the Continental statesmen of that time, the
+steadiest enemy of French aggression, and to have offered the longest
+resistance to a peace that was purchased by the cession of German soil.
+[33]
+
+[Victories of Hoche and Pichegru at Woerth and Weissenburg, Dec. 23, 26.]
+
+Nevertheless, from the moment when Thugut was called to power the alliance
+between Austria and Prussia was doomed. Others might perhaps have averted a
+rupture; Thugut made no attempt to do so. The siege of Mainz was the last
+serious operation of war which the Prussian army performed. The mission of
+an Austrian envoy, Lehrbach, to the Prussian camp in August, 1793, and his
+negotiations on the Polish and the Bavarian questions, only widened the
+breach between the two Courts. It was known that the Austrians were
+encouraging the Polish Diet to refuse the cession of the provinces occupied
+by Prussia; and the advisers of King Frederick William in consequence
+recommended him to quit the Rhine, and to place himself at the head of an
+army in Poland. At the headquarters of the Allies, between Mainz and the
+Alsatian frontier, all was dissension and intrigue. The impetuosity of the
+Austrian general, Wurmser, who advanced upon Alsace without consulting the
+King, was construed as a studied insult. On the 29th of September, after
+informing the allied Courts that Prussia would henceforth take only a
+subordinate part in the war, King Frederick William quitted the army,
+leaving orders with the Duke of Brunswick to fight no great battle. It was
+in vain that Wurmser stormed the lines of Weissenburg (Oct. 13), and
+victoriously pushed forward into Alsace. The hopes of a Royalist
+insurrection in Strasburg proved illusory. The German sympathies shown by a
+portion of the upper and middle classes of Alsace only brought down upon
+them a bloody vengeance at the hands of St. Just, commissioner of the
+Convention. The peasantry, partly from hatred of the feudal burdens of the
+old _regime_, partly from fear of St. Just and the guillotine, thronged to
+the French camp. In place of the beaten generals came Hoche and Pichegru:
+Hoche, lately a common soldier in the Guards, earning by a humble industry
+little sums for the purchase of books, now, at the age of twenty-six, a
+commander more than a match for the wrangling veterans of Germany;
+Pichegru, six years older, also a man sprung from the people, once a
+teacher in the military school of Brienne, afterwards a private of
+artillery in the American War. A series of harassing encounters took place
+during December. At length, with St. Just cheering on the Alsatian peasants
+in the hottest of the fire, these generals victoriously carried the
+Austrian positions at Woerth and at Weissenburg (Dec. 23, 26). The Austrian
+commander declared his army to be utterly ruined; and Brunswick, who had
+abstained from rendering his ally any real assistance, found himself a
+second time back upon the Rhine. [34]
+
+[Pitt's bargain with Prussia, April, 1794.]
+
+[Revolt of Kosciusko. April, 1794.]
+
+[Moellendorf refuses to help in Flanders.]
+
+The virtual retirement of Prussia from the Coalition was no secret to the
+French Government: amongst the Allies it was viewed in various lights. The
+Empress Catherine, who had counted on seeing her troublesome Prussian
+friend engaged with her detested French enemy, taunted the King of Prussia
+with the loss of his personal honour. Austria, conscious of the antagonism
+between Prussian and Austrian interests and of the hollow character of the
+Coalition, would concede nothing to keep Prussia in arms. Pitt alone was
+willing to make a sacrifice, in order to prevent the rupture of the
+alliance. The King of Prussia was ready to continue the struggle with
+France if his expenses were paid, but not otherwise. Accordingly, after
+Austria had refused to contribute the small sum which Pitt asked, a bargain
+was struck between Lord Malmesbury and the Prussian Minister Haugwitz, by
+which Great Britain undertook to furnish a subsidy, provided that 60,000
+Prussian troops, under General Moellendorf, were placed at the disposal of
+the Maritime Powers. [35] It was Pitt's intention that the troops which he
+subsidised should be massed with Austrian and English forces for the
+defence of Belgium: the Prussian Ministry, availing themselves of an
+ambiguous expression in the treaty, insisted on keeping them inactive upon
+the Upper Rhine. Moellendorf wished to guard Mainz: other men of influence
+longed to abandon the alliance with Austria, and to employ the whole of
+Prussia's force in Poland. At the moment when Haugwitz was contracting to
+place Moellendorf's army at Pitt's disposal, Poland had risen in revolt
+under Kosciusko, and the Russian garrison which occupied Warsaw had been
+overpowered and cut to pieces. Catherine called upon the King of Prussia
+for assistance; but it was not so much a desire to rescue the Empress from
+a momentary danger that excited the Prussian Cabinet as the belief that her
+vengeance would now make an absolute end of what remained of the Polish
+kingdom. The prey was doomed; the wisdom of Prussia was to be the first to
+seize and drag it to the ground. So large a prospect offered itself to the
+Power that should crush Poland during the brief paralysis of the Russian
+arms, that, on the first news of the outbreak, the King's advisers urged
+him instantly to make peace with France and to throw his whole strength
+into the Polish struggle. Frederick William could not reconcile himself to
+making peace with the Jacobins; but he ordered an army to march upon
+Warsaw, and shortly afterwards placed himself at its head (May, 1794). When
+the King, who was the only politician in Prussia who took an interest in
+the French war, thus publicly acknowledged the higher importance of the
+Polish campaign, his generals upon the Rhine made it their only object to
+do nothing which it was possible to leave undone without actually
+forfeiting the British subsidy. Instead of fighting, Moellendorf spent his
+time in urging other people to make peace. It was in vain that Malmesbury
+argued that the very object of Pitt's bargain was to keep the French out of
+the Netherlands: Moellendorf had made up his mind that the army should not
+be committed to the orders of Pitt and the Austrians. He continued in the
+Palatinate, alleging that any movement of the Prussian army towards the
+north would give the French admittance to southern Germany. Pitt's hope of
+defending the Netherlands now rested on the energy and on the sincerity of
+the Austrian Cabinet, and on this alone.
+
+[Battles on the Sambre, May-June, 1794.]
+
+After breaking up from winter quarters in the spring of 1794, the Austrian
+and English allied forces had successfully laid siege to Landrecies, and
+defeated the enemy in its neighbourhood. [36] Their advance, however, was
+checked by a movement of the French Army of the North, now commanded by
+Pichegru, towards the Flemish coast. York and the English troops were
+exposed to the attack, and suffered a defeat at Turcoing. The decision of
+the campaign lay, however, not in the west of Flanders, but at the other
+end of the Allies' position, at Charleroi on the Sambre, where a French
+victory would either force the Austrians to fall back eastwards, leaving
+York to his fate, or sever their communications with Germany. This became
+evident to the French Government; and in May the Commissioners of the
+Convention forced the generals on the Sambre to fight a series of battles,
+in which the French repeatedly succeeded in crossing the Sambre, and were
+repeatedly driven back again. The fate of the Netherlands depended,
+however, on something beside victory or defeat on the Sambre. The Emperor
+had come with Baron Thugut to Belgium in the hope of imparting greater
+unity and energy to the allied forces, but his presence proved useless.
+Among the Austrian generals and diplomatists there were several who desired
+to withdraw from the contest in the Netherlands, and to follow the example
+of Prussia in Poland. The action of the army was paralysed by intrigues.
+"Every one," wrote Thugut, "does exactly as he pleases: there is absolute
+anarchy and disorder." [37] At the beginning of June the Emperor quitted
+the army; the combats on the Sambre were taken up by Jourdan and 50,000
+fresh troops brought from the army of the Moselle; and on the 26th of June
+the French defeated Coburg at Fleurus, as he advanced to the relief of
+Charleroi, unconscious that Charleroi had surrendered on the day before.
+Even now the defence of Belgium was not hopeless; but after one council of
+war had declared in favour of fighting, a second determined on a retreat.
+It was in vain that the representatives of England appealed to the good
+faith and military honour of Austria. Namur and Louvain were abandoned; the
+French pressed onwards; and before the end of July the Austrian army had
+fallen back behind the Meuse. York, forsaken by the allies, retired
+northwards before the superior forces of Pichegru, who entered Antwerp and
+made himself master of the whole of the Netherlands up to the Dutch
+frontier. [38]
+
+[England disappointed by the Allies.]
+
+Such was the result of Great Britain's well-meant effort to assist the two
+great military Powers to defend Europe against the Revolution. To the aim
+of the English Minister, the defence of existing rights against democratic
+aggression, most of the public men alike of Austria and Prussia were now
+absolutely indifferent. They were willing to let the French seize and
+revolutionise any territory they pleased, provided that they themselves
+obtained their equivalent in Poland. England was in fact in the position of
+a man who sets out to attack a highway robber, and offers each of his arms
+to a pickpocket. The motives and conduct of these politicians were justly
+enough described by the English statesmen and generals who were brought
+into closest contact with them. In the councils of Prussia, Malmesbury
+declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and
+cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the
+head quarters of Moellendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I
+have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings,
+it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it
+an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any
+impeachment of good sense to be cheated by." To the Austrian commander the
+Duke of York addressed himself with royal plainness: "Your Serene Highness,
+the British nation, whose public opinion is not to be despised, will
+consider that it has been bought and sold." [39]
+
+[French reach the Rhine, Oct., 1794.]
+
+[Pichegru conquers Holland, Dec., 1794.]
+
+The sorry concert lasted for a few months longer. Coburg, the Austrian
+commander, was dismissed at the peremptory demand of Great Britain; his
+successor, Clerfayt, after losing a battle on the Ourthe, offered no
+further resistance to the advance of the Republican army, and the campaign
+ended in the capture of Cologne by the French, and the disappearance of the
+Austrians behind the Rhine. The Prussian subsidies granted by England
+resulted in some useless engagements between Moellendorf's corps in the
+Palatinate and a French army double its size, followed by the retreat of
+the Prussians into Mainz. It only remained for Great Britain to attempt to
+keep the French out of Holland. The defence of the Dutch, after everything
+south of the river Waal had been lost, Pitt determined to entrust to abler
+hands than those of the Duke of York; but the presence of one high-born
+blunderer more or less made little difference in a series of operations
+conceived in indifference and perversity. Clerfayt would not, or could not,
+obey the Emperor's orders and succour his ally. City after city in Holland
+welcomed the French. The very elements seemed to declare for the Republic.
+Pichegru's army marched in safety over the frozen rivers; and, when the
+conquest of the land was completed, his cavalry crowned the campaign by the
+capture of the Dutch fleet in the midst of the ice-bound waters of the
+Texel. The British regiments, cut off from home, made their way eastward
+through the snow towards the Hanoverian frontier, in a state of prostrate
+misery which is compared by an eye-witness of both events to that of the
+French on their retreat in 1813 after the battle of Leipzig. [40]
+
+[Treaties of Basle with Prussia, April 5, and Spain, July 22, 1795.]
+
+The first act of the struggle between France and the Monarchies of Europe
+was concluded. The result of three years of war was that Belgium, Nice, and
+Savoy had been added to the territory of the Republic, and that French
+armies were in possession of Holland, and the whole of Germany west of the
+Rhine. In Spain and in Piedmont the mountain-passes and some extent of
+country had been won. Even on the seas, in spite of the destruction of the
+fleet at Toulon, and of a heavy defeat by Lord Howe off Ushant on the 1st
+of June, 1794, the strength of France was still formidable; and the losses
+which she inflicted on the commercial marine of her enemies exceeded those
+which she herself sustained. England, which had captured most of the French
+West Indian Islands, was the only Power that had wrested anything from the
+Republic. The dream of suppressing the Revolution by force of arms had
+vanished away; and the States which had entered upon the contest in levity,
+in fanaticism, or at the bidding of more powerful allies, found it
+necessary to make peace upon such terms as they could obtain. Holland, in
+which a strong Republican party had always maintained connection with
+France, abolished the rule of its Stadtholder, and placed its resources at
+the disposal of its conquerors. Sardinia entered upon abortive
+negotiations. Spain, in return for peace, ceded to the Republic the Spanish
+half of St. Domingo (July 22, 1795). Prussia concluded a Treaty at Basle
+(April 5), which marked and perpetuated the division of Germany by
+providing that, although the Empire as a body was still at war with France,
+the benefit of Prussia's neutrality should extend to all German States
+north of a certain line. A secret article stipulated that, upon the
+conclusion of a general peace, if the Empire should cede to France the
+principalities west of the Rhine, Prussia should cede its own territory
+lying in that district, and receive compensation elsewhere. [41]
+
+[Austria and England continue the war, 1795.]
+
+Humiliating such a peace certainly was; yet it would probably have been the
+happiest issue for Europe had every Power been forced to accept its
+conditions. The territory gained by France was not much more than the very
+principle of the Balance of Power would have entitled it to demand, at a
+moment when Russia, victorious over the Polish rebellion, was proceeding to
+make the final partition of Poland among the three Eastern Monarchies; and,
+with all its faults, the France of 1795 would have offered to Europe the
+example of a great free State, such as the growth of the military spirit
+made impossible after the first of Napoleon's campaigns. But the dark
+future was withdrawn from the view of those British statesmen who most
+keenly felt the evils of the present; and England, resolutely set against
+the course of French aggression, still found in Austria an ally willing to
+continue the struggle. The financial help of Great Britain, the Russian
+offer of a large share in the spoils of Poland, stimulated the flagging
+energy of the Emperor's government. Orders were sent to Clerfayt to advance
+from the Rhine at whatever risk, in order to withdraw the troops of the
+Republic from the west of France, where England was about to land a body of
+Royalists. Clerfayt, however, disobeyed his instructions, and remained
+inactive till the autumn. He then defeated a French army pushing beyond the
+Rhine, and drove back the besiegers of Mainz; but the British expedition
+had already failed, and the time was passed when Clerfayt's successes might
+have produced a decisive result. [42]
+
+[Landing at Quiberon, June 27, 1795.]
+
+[France in 1795.]
+
+A new Government was now entering upon power in France. The Reign of Terror
+had ended in July, 1794, with the life of Robespierre. The men by whom
+Robespierre was overthrown were Terrorists more cruel and less earnest than
+himself, who attacked him only in order to save their own lives, and
+without the least intention of restoring a constitutional Government to
+France. An overwhelming national reaction forced them, however, to
+represent themselves as the party of clemency. The reaction was indeed a
+simple outburst of human feeling rather than a change in political opinion.
+Among the victims of the Terror the great majority had been men of the
+lower or middle class, who, except in La Vendee and Brittany, were as
+little friendly to the old _regime_ as their executioners. Every class in
+France, with the exception of the starving city mobs, longed for security,
+and the quiet routine of life. After the disorders of the Republic a
+monarchical government naturally seemed to many the best guarantee of
+peace; but the monarchy so contemplated was the liberal monarchy of 1791,
+not the ancient Court, with its accessories of a landed Church and
+privileged noblesse. Religion was still a power in France; but the peasant,
+with all his superstition and all his desire for order, was perfectly free
+from any delusions about the good old times. He liked to see his children
+baptised; but he had no desire to see the priest's tithe-collector back in
+his barn: he shuddered at the summary marketing of Conventional
+Commissioners; but he had no wish to resume his labours on the fields of
+his late seigneur. To be a Monarchist in 1795, among the shopkeepers of
+Paris or the farmers of Normandy, meant no more than to wish for a
+political system capable of subsisting for twelve months together, and
+resting on some other basis than forced loans and compulsory sales of
+property. But among the men of the Convention, who had abolished monarchy
+and passed sentence of death upon the King, the restoration of the Crown
+seemed the bitterest condemnation of all that the Convention had done for
+France, and a sentence of outlawry against themselves. If the will of the
+nation was for the moment in favour of a restored monarchy, the Convention
+determined that its will must be overpowered by force or thwarted by
+constitutional forms. Threatened alternately by the Jacobin mob of Paris
+and by the Royalist middle class, the Government played off one enemy
+against the other, until an ill-timed effort of the emigrant noblesse gave
+to the Convention the prestige of a decisive victory over Royalists and
+foreigners combined. On the 27th of June, 1795, an English fleet landed the
+flower of the old nobility of France at the Bay of Quiberon in southern
+Brittany. It was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that
+these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks
+after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry,
+led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this
+invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the
+money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own
+leaders. Before the nobles had settled who was to command and who was to
+obey, General Hoche surprised their fort, beat them back to the edge of the
+peninsula where they had landed, and captured all who were not killed
+fighting or rescued by English boats (July 20). The Commissioner Tallien,
+in order to purge himself from the just suspicion of Royalist intrigues,
+caused six hundred prisoners to be shot in cold blood. [43]
+
+[Project of Constitution, 1795.]
+
+At the moment when the emigrant army reached France, the Convention was
+engaged in discussing the political system which was to succeed its own
+rule. A week earlier, the Committee appointed to draw up a new constitution
+for France had presented its report. The main object of the new
+constitution in its original form was to secure France against a recurrence
+of those evils which it had suffered since 1792. The calamities of the last
+three years were ascribed to the sovereignty of a single Assembly. A vote
+of the Convention had established the Revolutionary Tribunal, proscribed
+the Girondins, and placed France at the mercy of eighty individuals
+selected by the Convention from itself. The legislators of 1795 desired a
+guarantee that no party, however determined, should thus destroy its
+enemies by a single law, and unite supreme legislative and executive power
+in its own hands. With the object of dividing authority, the executive was,
+in the new draft-constitution, made independent of the legislature, and the
+legislature itself was broken up into two chambers. A Directory of five
+members, chosen by the Assemblies, but not responsible except under actual
+impeachment, was to conduct the administration, without the right of
+proposing laws; a Chamber of five hundred was to submit laws to the
+approval of a Council of two hundred and fifty Ancients, or men of middle
+life; but neither of these bodies was to exercise any influence upon the
+actual government. One director and a third part of each of the legislative
+bodies were to retire every year. [44]
+
+[Constitution of 1795. Insurrection of Vendemiaire, Oct. 4.]
+
+The project thus outlined met with general approval, and gained even that
+of the Royalists, who believed that a popular election would place them in
+a majority in the two new Assemblies. Such an event was, however, in the
+eyes of the Convention, the one fatal possibility that must be averted at
+every cost. In the midst of the debates upon the draft-constitution there
+arrived the news of Hoche's victory at Quiberon. The Convention gained
+courage to add a clause providing that two-thirds of the new deputies
+should be appointed from among its own members, thus rendering a Royalist
+majority in the Chambers impossible. With this condition attached to it,
+the Constitution was laid before the country. The provinces accepted it;
+the Royalist middle class of Paris rose in insurrection, and marched
+against the Convention in the Tuileries. Their revolt was foreseen; the
+defence of the Convention was entrusted to General Bonaparte, who met the
+attack of the Parisians in a style unknown in the warfare of the capital.
+Bonaparte's command of trained artillery secured him victory; but the
+struggle of the 4th of October (13 Vendemiaire) was the severest that took
+place in Paris during the Revolution, and the loss of life in fighting
+greater than on the day that overthrew the Monarchy.
+
+[The Directory, Oct., 1795.]
+
+The new Government of France now entered into power. Members of the
+Convention formed two-thirds of the new legislative bodies; the one-third
+which the country was permitted to elect consisted chiefly of men of
+moderate or Royalist opinions. The five persons who were chosen Directors
+were all Conventionalists who had voted for the death of the King; Carnot,
+however, who had won the victories without sharing in the cruelties of the
+Reign of Terror, was the only member of the late Committee of Public Safety
+who was placed in power. In spite of the striking homage paid to the great
+act of regicide in the election of the five Directors, the establishment of
+the Directory was accepted by Europe as the close of revolutionary
+disorder. The return of constitutional rule in France was marked by a
+declaration on the part of the King of England of his willingness to treat
+for peace. A gentler spirit seemed to have arisen in the Republic. Although
+the laws against the emigrants and non-juring priests were still
+unrepealed, the exiles began to return unmolested to their homes. Life
+resumed something of its old aspect in the capital. The rich and the gay
+consoled themselves with costlier luxury for all the austerities of the
+Reign of Terror. The labouring classes, now harmless and disarmed, were
+sharply taught that they must be content with such improvement in their lot
+as the progress of society might bring.
+
+[What was new to Europe in the Revolution.]
+
+[Absolute governments of 18th century engaged in reforms.]
+
+At the close of this first period of the Revolutionary War we may pause to
+make an estimate of the new influences which the French Revolution had
+brought into Europe, and of the effects which had thus far resulted from
+them. The opinion current among the French people themselves, that the
+Revolution gave birth to the modern life not of France only but of the
+Western Continent generally, is true of one great set of facts; it is
+untrue of another. There were conceptions in France in 1789 which made
+France a real contrast to most of the Continental monarchies; there were
+others which it shared in common with them. The ideas of social, legal, and
+ecclesiastical reform which were realised in 1789 were not peculiar to
+France; what was peculiar to France was the idea that these reforms were to
+be effected by the nation itself. In other countries reforms had been
+initiated by Governments, and forced upon an unwilling people. Innovation
+sprang from the Crown; its agents were the servants of the State. A
+distinct class of improvements, many of them identical with the changes
+made by the Revolution in France, attracted the attention in a greater or
+less degree of almost all the Western Courts of the eighteenth century. The
+creation of a simple and regular administrative system; the reform of the
+clergy; the emancipation of the Church from the jurisdiction of the Pope,
+and of all orders in the State from the jurisdiction of the Church; the
+amelioration of the lot of the peasant; the introduction of codes of law
+abolishing both the cruelties and the confusion of ancient practice,--all
+these were purposes more or less familiar to the absolute sovereigns of the
+eighteenth century, whom the French so summarily described as benighted
+tyrants. It was in Austria, Prussia, and Tuscany that the civilising energy
+of the Crown had been seen in its strongest form, but even the Governments
+of Naples and Spain had caught the spirit of change. The religious
+tolerance which Joseph gave to Austria, the rejection of Papal authority
+and the abolition of the punishment of death which Leopold effected in
+Tuscany, were bolder efforts of the same political rationalism which in
+Spain minimised the powers of the Inquisition and in Naples attempted to
+found a system of public education. In all this, however, there was no
+trace of the action of the people, or of any sense that a nation ought to
+raise itself above a state of tutelage. Men of ideas called upon
+Governments to impose better institutions upon the people, not upon the
+people to wrest them from the Governments.
+
+[In France, the nation itself acted.]
+
+In France alone a view of public affairs had grown up which impelled the
+nation to create its reforms for itself. If the substance of many of the
+French revolutionary changes coincided with the objects of Austrian or of
+Tuscan reform, there was nothing similar in their method. In other
+countries reform sprang from the command of an enlightened ruler; in France
+it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and aimed at the
+creation of local authority to be exercised by the citizens themselves. The
+source of this difference lay partly in the influence of England and
+America upon French opinion, but much more in the existence within France
+of a numerous and energetic middle class, enriched by commerce, and keenly
+interested in all the speculation and literary activity of the age. This
+was a class that both understood the wrongs which the other classes
+inflicted or suffered, and felt itself capable of redressing them. For the
+flogged and over-driven peasant in Naples or Hungary no ally existed but
+the Crown. In most of those poor and backward States which made up
+monarchical Europe, the fraction of the inhabitants which neither enjoyed
+privilege nor stood in bondage to it was too small to think of forcing
+itself into power. The nobles sought to preserve their feudal rights: the
+Crown sought to reduce them; the nation, elsewhere than in France, did not
+intervene and lay hands upon power for itself, because the nation was
+nothing but the four mutually exclusive classes of the landlords who
+commanded, the peasants who served, the priests who idled, and the soldiers
+who fought. France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent
+in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none;
+a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great
+interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the
+wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power.
+
+[Movements against governments outside France.]
+
+Liberty, the right of the nation to govern itself, seemed at the outset to
+be the great principle of the Revolution. The French people themselves
+believed the question at issue to be mainly between authority and popular
+right; the rest of Europe saw the Revolution under the same aspect. Hence,
+in those countries where the example of France produced political
+movements, the effect was in the first instance to excite agitation against
+the Government, whatever might be the form of the latter. In England the
+agitation was one of the middle class against the aristocratic
+parliamentary system; in Hungary, it was an agitation of the nobles against
+the Crown; on the Rhine it was an agitation of the commercial classes
+against ecclesiastical rule. But in every case in which the reforming
+movement was not supported by the presence of French armies, the terrors
+which succeeded the first sanguine hopes of the Revolution struck the
+leaders of these movements with revulsion and despair, and converted even
+the better Governments into engines of reaction. In France itself it was
+seen that the desire for liberty among an enlightened class could not
+suddenly transform the habits of a nation accustomed to accept everything
+from authority. Privilege was destroyed, equality was advanced; but instead
+of self-government the Revolution brought France the most absolute rule it
+had ever known. It was not that the Revolution had swept by, leaving things
+where they were before: it had in fact accomplished most of those great
+changes which lay the foundation of a sound social life: but the faculty of
+self-government, the first condition of any lasting political liberty,
+remained to be slowly won.
+
+[Reaction.]
+
+Outside France reaction set in without the benefit of previous change. At
+London, Vienna, Naples, and Madrid, Governments gave up all other objects
+in order to devote themselves to the suppression of Jacobinism. Pitt, whose
+noble aims had been the extinction of the slave-trade, the reform of
+Parliament, and the advance of national intercourse by free trade,
+surrendered himself to men whose thoughts centred upon informers, Gagging
+Acts, and constructive treasons, and who opposed all legislation upon the
+slave-trade because slaves had been freed by the Jacobins of the
+Convention. State trials and imprisonments became the order of the day; but
+the reaction in England at least stopped short of the scaffold. At Vienna
+and Naples fear was more cruel. The men who either were, or affected to be,
+in such fear of revolution that they discovered a Jacobinical allegory in
+Mozart's last opera, [45] did not spare life when the threads of anything
+like a real conspiracy were placed in their hands. At Vienna terror was
+employed to crush the constitutional opposition of Hungary to the Austrian
+Court. In Naples a long reign of cruelty and oppression began with the
+creation of a secret tribunal to investigate charges of conspiracy made by
+informers. In Mainz, the Archbishop occupied the last years of his
+government, after his restoration in 1793, with a series of brutal
+punishments and tyrannical precautions.
+
+These were but instances of the effect which the first epoch of the
+Revolution produced upon the old European States. After a momentary
+stimulus to freedom it threw the nations themselves into reaction and
+apathy; it totally changed the spirit of the better governments, attaching
+to all liberal ideas the stigma of Revolution, and identifying the work of
+authority with resistance to every kind of reform. There were States in
+which this change, the first effect of the Revolution, was also its only
+one; States whose history, as in the case of England, is for a whole
+generation the history of political progress unnaturally checked and thrown
+out of its course. There were others, and these the more numerous, where
+the first stimulus and the first reaction were soon forgotten in new and
+penetrating changes produced by the successive victories of France. The
+nature of these changes, even more than the warfare which introduced them,
+gives its interest to the period on which we are about to enter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Triple attack on Austria--Moreau, Jourdan--Bonaparte in Italy--Condition of
+the Italian States--Professions and real intentions of Bonaparte and the
+Directory--Battle of Montenotte--Armistice with Sardinia--Campaign in
+Lombardy--Treatment of the Pope, Naples, Tuscany--Siege of Mantua--
+Castiglione, Moreau and Jourdan in Germany Their retreat--Secret Treaty
+with Prussia--Negotiations with England--Cispadane Republic--Rise of the
+idea of Italian Independence--Battles of Arcola and Rivoli--Peace with the
+Pope at Tolentino--Venice--Preliminaries of Leoben--The French in
+Venice--The French take the Ionian Islands and give Venice to
+Austria--Genoa--Coup d'etat of 17 Fructidor in Paris--Treaty of Campo
+Formio--Victories of England at sea--Bonaparte's project against Egypt.
+
+
+[Armies of Italy, the Danube, and the Main, 1796.]
+
+With the opening of the year 1796 the leading interest of European history
+passes to a new scene. Hitherto the progress of French victory had been in
+the direction of the Rhine: the advance of the army of the Pyrenees had
+been cut short by the conclusion of peace with Spain; the army of Italy had
+achieved little beyond some obscure successes in the mountains. It was the
+appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the latter force, in
+the spring of 1796, that first centred the fortunes of the Republic in the
+land beyond the Alps. Freed from Prussia by the Treaty of Basle, the
+Directory was now able to withdraw its attention from Holland and from the
+Lower Rhine, and to throw its whole force into the struggle with Austria.
+By the advice of Bonaparte a threefold movement was undertaken against
+Vienna, by way of Lombardy, by the valley of the Danube, and by the valley
+of the Main. General Jourdan, in command of the army that had conquered the
+Netherlands, was ordered to enter Germany by Frankfort; Moreau crossed the
+Rhine at Strasburg: Bonaparte himself, drawing his scanty supplies along
+the coast-road from Nice, faced the allied forces of Austria and Sardinia
+upon the slopes of the Maritime Apennines, forty miles to the west of
+Genoa. The country in which he was about to operate was familiar to
+Bonaparte from service there in 1794; his own descent and language gave him
+singular advantages in any enterprise undertaken in Italy. Bonaparte was no
+Italian at heart; but he knew at least enough of the Italian nature to work
+upon its better impulses, and to attach its hopes, so long as he needed the
+support of Italian opinion, to his own career of victory.
+
+[Condition of Italy.]
+
+Three centuries separated the Italy of that day from the bright and
+vigorous Italy which, in the glow of its Republican freedom, had given so
+much to Northern Europe in art, in letters, and in the charm of life. A
+long epoch of subjection to despotic or foreign rule, of commercial
+inaction, of decline in mind and character, had made the Italians of no
+account among the political forces of Europe. Down to the peace of
+Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 their provinces were bartered between the Bourbons
+and the Hapsburgs; and although the settlement of that date left no part of
+Italy, except the Duchy of Milan, incorporated in a foreign empire, yet the
+crown of Naples was vested in a younger branch of the Spanish Bourbons, and
+the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Archduke Francis made Tuscany an
+appanage of the House of Austria. Venice and Genoa retained their
+independence and their republican government, but little of their ancient
+spirit. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Austrian influence was
+dominant throughout the peninsula, Marie Caroline, the Queen and the ruler
+of Ferdinand of Naples, being the sister of the Emperor Leopold and Marie
+Antoinette. With the exception of Piedmont, which preserved a strong
+military sentiment and the tradition of an active and patriotic policy, the
+Italian States were either, like Venice and Genoa, anxious to keep
+themselves out of danger by seeming to hear and see nothing that passed
+around them, or governed by families in the closest connection with the
+great reigning Houses of the Continent. Neither in Italy itself, nor in the
+general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was
+anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry
+at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like
+that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the
+side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had
+become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the
+personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable wrong,
+only entered the Italian character at a later date.
+
+[Revival after 1740.]
+
+Yet, in spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of
+decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth
+century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had
+brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been
+years of progress and revival. In Lombardy the government of Maria Theresa
+and Joseph awoke life and motion after ages of Spanish torpor and misrule.
+Traditions of local activity revived; the communes were encouraged in their
+works of irrigation and rural improvement; a singular liberality towards
+public opinion and the press made the Austrian possessions the centre of
+the intellectual movement of Italy. In the south, progress began on the day
+when the last foreign Viceroy disappeared from Naples (1735), and King
+Charles III., though a member of the Spanish House, entered upon the
+government of the two Sicilies as an independent kingdom. Venice and the
+Papal States alone seemed to be untouched by the spirit of material and
+social improvement, so active in the rest of Italy before the interest in
+political life had come into being.
+
+Nor was the age without its intellectual distinction. If the literature of
+Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century had little that recalled
+the inspiration of its splendid youth, it showed at least a return to
+seriousness and an interest in important things. The political economists
+of Lombardy were scarcely behind those of England; the work of the Milanese
+Beccaria on "Crimes and Punishments" stimulated the reform of criminal law
+in every country in Europe; an intelligent and increasing attention to
+problems of agriculture, commerce, and education took the place of the
+fatuous gallantries and insipid criticism which had hitherto made up the
+life of Italians of birth and culture. One man of genius, Vittorio Alfieri,
+the creator of Italian tragedy, idealised both in prose and verse a type of
+rugged independence and resistance to tyrannical power. Alfieri was neither
+a man of political judgment himself nor the representative of any real
+political current in Italy; but the lesson which he taught to the Italians,
+the lesson of respect for themselves and their country, was the one which
+Italy most of all required to learn; and the appearance of this manly and
+energetic spirit in its literature gave hope that the Italian nation would
+not long be content to remain without political being.
+
+[Social condition.]
+
+[Tuscany.]
+
+Italy, to the outside world, meant little more than the ruins of the Roman
+Forum, the galleries of Florence, the paradise of Capri and the Neapolitan
+coast; the singular variety in its local conditions of life gained little
+attention from the foreigner. There were districts in Italy where the
+social order was almost of a Polish type of barbarism; there were others
+where the rich and the poor lived perhaps under a happier relation than in
+any other country in Europe. The difference depended chiefly upon the
+extent to which municipal life had in past time superseded the feudal order
+under which the territorial lord was the judge and the ruler of his own
+domain. In Tuscany the city had done the most in absorbing the landed
+nobility; in Naples and Sicily it had done the least. When, during the
+middle ages, the Republic of Florence forced the feudal lords who
+surrounded it to enter its walls as citizens, in some cases it deprived
+them of all authority, in others it permitted them to retain a jurisdiction
+over their peasants; but even in these instances the sovereignty of the
+city deprived the feudal relation of most of its harshness and force. After
+the loss of Florentine liberty, the Medici, aping the custom of older
+monarchies, conferred the title of marquis and count upon men who preferred
+servitude to freedom, and accompanied the grant of rank with one of
+hereditary local authority; but the new institutions took no deep hold on
+country life, and the legislation of the first Archduke of the House of
+Lorraine (1749) left the landed aristocracy in the position of mere country
+gentlemen. [46] Estates were not very large: the prevalent agricultural
+system was, as it still is, that of the _mezzeria_, a partnership between
+the landlord and tenant; the tenant holding by custom in perpetuity, and
+sharing the produce with the landlord, who supplied a part of the stock and
+materials for farming. In Tuscany the conditions of the _mezzeria_ were
+extremely favourable to the tenant; and if a cheerful country life under a
+mild and enlightened government were all that a State need desire, Tuscany
+enjoyed rare happiness.
+
+[Naples and Sicily.]
+
+[Piedmont.]
+
+Far different was the condition of Sicily and Naples. Here the growth of
+city life had never affected the rough sovereignty which the barons
+exercised over great tracts of country withdrawn from the civilised world.
+When Charles III. ascended the throne in 1735, he found whole provinces in
+which there was absolutely no administration of justice on the part of the
+State. The feudal rights of the nobility were in the last degree
+oppressive, the barbarism of the people was in many districts extreme. Out
+of two thousand six hundred towns and villages in the kingdom, there were
+only fifty that were not subject to feudal authority. In the manor of San
+Gennaro di Palma, fifteen miles from Naples, even down to the year 1786 the
+officers of the baron were the only persons who lived in houses; the
+peasants, two thousand in number, slept among the corn-ricks. [47] Charles,
+during his tenure of the Neapolitan crown, from 1735 to 1759, and the
+Ministers Tanucci and Caraccioli under his feeble successor Ferdinand IV.,
+enforced the authority of the State in justice and administration, and
+abolished some of the most oppressive feudal rights of the nobility; but
+their legislation, though bold and even revolutionary according to an
+English standard, could not in the course of two generations transform a
+social system based upon centuries of misgovernment and disorder. At the
+outbreak of the French Revolution the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was, as
+it still in a less degree is, a land of extreme inequalities of wealth and
+poverty, a land where great estates wasted in the hands of oppressive or
+indolent owners, and the peasantry, untrained either by remunerative
+industry or by a just and regular enforcement of the law, found no better
+guide than a savage and fanatical priesthood. Over the rest of Italy the
+conditions of life varied through all degrees between the Tuscan and the
+Neapolitan type. Piedmont, in military spirit and patriotism far superior
+to the other Italian States, was socially one of the most backward of all.
+It was a land of priests, nobles, and soldiers, where a gloomy routine and
+the repression of all originality of thought and character drove the most
+gifted of its children, like the poet Alfieri, to seek a home on some more
+liberal soil.
+
+[Professions and real intentions of the Directory and Bonaparte, 1796.]
+
+During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by
+French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of
+associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A
+certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at
+Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government
+had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities
+the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like
+that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had
+passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the
+Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican
+passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting
+in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The
+politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the
+Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the
+Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered
+Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the
+deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted
+treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with
+brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in
+which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further
+question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be
+conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no
+understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory
+wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return
+for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an
+Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian
+Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic,
+serving as a military outwork for France.
+
+[Bonaparte separates the Austrian and Sardinian Armies, April, 1796.]
+
+[Armistice and peace with Sardinia.]
+
+The campaign of 1796 commenced in April, in the mountains above the
+coast-road connecting Nice and Genoa. Bonaparte's own army numbered 40,000
+men; the force opposed to it consisted of 38,000 Austrians, under Beaulieu,
+and a smaller Sardinian army, so placed upon the Piedmontese Apennines as
+to block the passes from the coast-road into Piedmont, and to threaten the
+rear of the French if they advanced eastward against Genoa. The Piedmontese
+army drew its supplies from Turin, the Austrian from Mantua; to sever the
+two armies was to force them on to lines of retreat conducting them farther
+and farther apart from one another. Bonaparte foresaw the effect which such
+a separation of the two armies would produce upon the Sardinian Government.
+For four days he reiterated his attacks at Montenotte and Millesimo, until
+he had forced his own army into a position in the centre of the Allies;
+then, leaving a small force to watch the Austrians, he threw the mass of
+his troops upon the Piedmontese, and drove them back to within thirty miles
+of Turin. The terror-stricken Government, anticipating an outbreak in the
+capital itself, accepted an armistice from Bonaparte at Cherasco (April
+28), and handed over to the French the fortresses of Coni, Ceva, and
+Tortona, which command the entrances of Italy. It was an unworthy
+capitulation for Turin could not have been taken before the Austrians
+returned in force; but Bonaparte had justly calculated the effect of his
+victory; and the armistice, which was soon followed by a treaty of peace
+between France and Sardinia, ceding Savoy to the Republic, left him free to
+follow the Austrians, untroubled by the existence of some of the strongest
+fortresses of Europe behind him.
+
+[Bridge of Lodi, May 10.]
+
+In the negotiations with Sardinia Bonaparte demanded the surrender of the
+town of Valenza, as necessary to secure his passage over the river Po.
+Having thus led the Austrian Beaulieu to concentrate his forces at this
+point, he suddenly moved eastward along the southern bank of the river, and
+crossed at Piacenza, fifty miles below the spot where Beaulieu was awaiting
+him. It was an admirable movement. The Austrian general, with the enemy
+threatening his communications, had to abandon Milan and all the country
+west of it, and to fall back upon the line of the Adda. Bonaparte followed,
+and on the 10th of May attacked the Austrians at Lodi. He himself stormed
+the bridge of Lodi at the head of his Grenadiers. The battle was so
+disastrous to the Austrians that they could risk no second engagement, and
+retired upon Mantua and the line of the Mincio. [48]
+
+[Bonaparte in Milan. Extortions.]
+
+Bonaparte now made his triumphal entry into Milan (May 15). The splendour
+of his victories and his warm expressions of friendship for Italy excited
+the enthusiasm of a population not hitherto hostile to Austrian rule. A new
+political movement began. With the French army there came all the partisans
+of the French Republic who had been expelled from other parts of Italy.
+Uniting with the small revolutionary element already existing in Milan,
+they began to form a new public opinion by means of journals and patriotic
+meetings. It was of the utmost importance to Bonaparte that a Republican
+party should be organised among the better classes in the towns of
+Lombardy; for the depredations of the French army exasperated the peasants,
+and Bonaparte's own measures were by no means of a character to win him
+unmixed goodwill. The instructions which he received from the Directory
+were extremely simple. "Leave nothing in Italy," they wrote to him on the
+day of his entry into Milan, "which will be useful to us, and which the
+political situation will allow you to remove." If Bonaparte had felt any
+doubt as to the meaning of such an order, the pillage of works of art in
+Belgium and Holland in preceding years would have shown him that it was
+meant to be literally interpreted. Accordingly, in return for the gift of
+liberty, the Milanese were invited to offer to their deliverers twenty
+million francs, and a selection from the paintings in their churches and
+galleries. The Dukes of Parma and Modena, in return for an armistice, were
+required to hand over forty of their best pictures, and a sum of money
+proportioned to their revenues. The Dukes and the townspeople paid their
+contributions with good grace: the peasantry of Lombardy, whose cattle were
+seized in order to supply an army that marched without any stores of its
+own, rose in arms, and threw themselves into Pavia, killing all the French
+soldiers who fell in their way. The revolt was instantly suppressed, and
+the town of Pavia given up to pillage. In deference to the Liberal party of
+Italy, the movement was described as a conspiracy of priests and nobles.
+
+[Venice.]
+
+[Battle on the Mincio, May 29.]
+
+The way into Central Italy now lay open before Bonaparte. Rome and Naples
+were in no condition to offer resistance; but with true military judgment
+the French general declined to move against this feeble prey until the army
+of Austria, already crippled, was completely driven out of the field.
+Instead of crossing the Apennines, Bonaparte advanced against the Austrian
+positions upon the Mincio. It suited him to violate the neutrality of the
+adjacent Venetian territory by seizing the town of Brescia. His example was
+followed by Beaulieu, who occupied Peschiera, at the foot of the Lake of
+Garda, and thus held the Mincio along its whole course from the lake to
+Mantua. A battle was fought and lost by the Austrians half-way between the
+lake and the fortress. Beaulieu's strength was exhausted; he could meet the
+enemy no more in the field, and led his army out of Italy into the Tyrol,
+leaving Mantua to be invested by the French. The first care of the
+conqueror was to make Venice pay for the crime of possessing territory
+intervening between the eastern and western extremes of the Austrian
+district. Bonaparte affected to believe that the Venetians had permitted
+Beaulieu to occupy Peschiera before he seized upon Brescia himself. He
+uttered terrifying threats to the envoys who came from Venice to excuse an
+imaginary crime. He was determined to extort money from the Venetian
+Republic; he also needed a pretext for occupying Verona, and for any future
+wrongs. "I have purposely devised this rupture," he wrote to the Directory
+(June 7th), "in case you should wish to obtain five or six millions of
+francs from Venice. If you have more decided intentions, I think it would
+be well to keep up the quarrel." The intention referred to was the
+disgraceful project of sacrificing Venice to Austria in return for the
+cession of the Netherlands, a measure based on plans familiar to Thugut as
+early as the year 1793. [49]
+
+[Armistice with Naples, June 6.]
+
+[Armistice with the Pope, June 23.]
+
+The Austrians were fairly driven out of Lombardy, and Bonaparte was now
+free to deal with southern Italy. He advanced into the States of the
+Church, and expelled the Papal Legate from Bologna. Ferdinand of Naples,
+who had lately called heaven and earth to witness the fury of his zeal
+against an accursed horde of regicides, thought it prudent to stay
+Bonaparte's hand, at least until the Austrians were in a condition to renew
+the war in Lombardy. He asked for a suspension of hostilities against his
+own kingdom. The fleet and the sea-board of Naples gave it importance in
+the struggle between France and England, and Bonaparte granted the king an
+armistice on easy terms. The Pope, in order to gain a few months' truce,
+had to permit the occupation of Ferrara, Ravenna, and Ancona, and to
+recognise the necessities, the learning, the taste, and the virtue of his
+conquerors by a gift of twenty million francs, five hundred manuscripts, a
+hundred pictures, and the busts of Marcus and Lucius Brutus. The rule of
+the Pope was unpopular in Bologna, and a Senate which Bonaparte placed in
+power, pending the formation of a popular Government gladly took the oath
+of fidelity to the French Republic. Tuscany was the only State that
+remained to be dealt with. Tuscany had indeed made peace with the Republic
+a year before, but the ships and cargoes of the English merchants at
+Leghorn were surely fair prey; and, with the pretence of punishing insults
+offered by the English to the French flag, Bonaparte descended upon
+Leghorn, and seized upon everything that was not removed before his
+approach. Once established in Leghorn, the French declined to quit it. By
+way of adjusting the relations of the Grand Duke, the English seized his
+harbour of Porto Ferraio, in the island of Elba.
+
+[Battles of Lonato and Castiglione, July, Aug., 1796.]
+
+Mantua was meanwhile invested, and thither, after his brief incursion into
+Central Italy, Bonaparte returned. Towards the end of July an Austrian
+relieving army, nearly double the strength of Bonaparte's, descended from
+the Tyrol. It was divided into three corps: one, under Quosdanovich,
+advanced by the road on the west of Lake Garda; the others, under Wurmser,
+the commander-in-chief, by the roads between the lake and the river Adige.
+The peril of the French was extreme; their outlying divisions were defeated
+and driven in; Bonaparte could only hope to save himself by collecting all
+his forces at the foot of the lake, and striking at one or other of the
+Austrian armies before they effected their junction on the Mincio. He
+instantly broke up the siege of Mantua, and withdrew from every position
+east of the river. On the 30th of July, Quosdanovich was attacked and
+checked at Lonato, on the west of the Lake of Garda. Wurmser, unaware of
+his colleague's repulse, entered Mantua in triumph, and then set out,
+expecting to envelop Bonaparte between two fires. But the French were ready
+for his approach. Wurmser was stopped and defeated at Castiglione, while
+the western Austrian divisions were still held in check at Lonato. The
+junction of the Austrian armies had become impossible. In five days the
+skill of Bonaparte and the unsparing exertions of his soldiery had more
+than retrieved all that appeared to have been lost. [50] The Austrians
+retired into the Tyrol, beaten and dispirited, and leaving 15,000 prisoners
+in the hands of the enemy.
+
+Bonaparte now prepared to force his way into Germany by the Adige, in
+fulfilment of the original plan of the campaign. In the first days of
+September he again routed the Austrians, and gained possession of Roveredo
+and Trent. Wurmser hereupon attempted to shut the French up in the
+mountains by a movement southwards; but, while he operated with
+insufficient forces between the Brenta and the Adige, he was cut off from
+Germany, and only escaped capture by throwing himself into Mantua with the
+shattered remnant of his army. The road into Germany through the Tyrol now
+lay open; but in the midst of his victories Bonaparte learnt that the
+northern armies of Moreau and Jourdan, with which he had intended to
+co-operate in an attack upon Vienna, were in full retreat.
+
+[Invasion of Germany by Moureau and Jourdan, June-Oct. 1796.]
+
+[The Archduke Charles overpowers Jourdan.]
+
+Moreau's advance into the valley of the Danube had, during the months of
+July and August, been attended with unbroken military and political
+success. The Archduke Charles, who was entrusted with the defence of the
+Empire, found himself unable to bring two armies into the field capable of
+resisting those of Moreau and Jourdan separately, and he therefore
+determined to fall back before Moreau towards Nuremberg, ordering
+Wartensleben, who commanded the troops facing Jourdan on the Main, to
+retreat in the same direction, in order that the two armies might throw
+their collected force upon Jourdan while still at some distance north of
+Moreau. [51] The design of the Archduke succeeded in the end, but it opened
+Germany to the French for six weeks, and showed how worthless was the
+military constitution of the Empire, and how little the Germans had to
+expect from one another. After every skirmish won by Moreau some
+neighbouring State abandoned the common defence and hastened to make its
+terms with the invader. On the 17th of July the Duke of Wuertemberg
+purchased an armistice at the price of four million francs; a week later
+Baden gained the French general's protection in return for immense supplies
+of food and stores. The troops of the Swabian Circle of the Empire, who
+were ridiculed as "harlequins" by the more martial Austrians, dispersed to
+their homes; and no sooner had Moreau entered Bavaria than the Bavarian
+contingent in its turn withdrew from the Archduke. Some consideration was
+shown by Moreau's soldiery to those districts which had paid tribute to
+their general; but in the region of the Main, Jourdan's army plundered
+without distinction and without mercy. They sacked the churches, they
+maltreated the children, they robbed the very beggars of their pence.
+Before the Archduke Charles was ready to strike, the peasantry of this
+country, whom their governments were afraid to arm, had begun effective
+reprisals of their own. At length the retreating movement of the Austrians
+stopped. Leaving 30,000 men on the Lech to disguise his motions from
+Moreau, Charles turned suddenly northwards from Neuburg on the [***] August,
+met Wartensleben at Amberg, and attacked Jourdan at this place with greatly
+superior numbers. Jourdan was defeated and driven back in confusion towards
+the Rhine. The issue of the campaign was decided before Moreau heard of his
+colleague's danger. It only remained for him to save his own army by a
+skilful retreat. Jourdan's soldiers, returning through districts which they
+had devastated, suffered heavier losses from the vengeance of the peasantry
+than from the army that pursued them. By the autumn of 1796 no Frenchman
+remained beyond the Rhine. The campaign had restored the military spirit of
+Austria and given Germany a general in whom soldiers could trust; but it
+had also shown how willing were the Governments of the minor States to
+become the vassals of a foreigner, how little was wanting to convert the
+western half of the Empire into a dependency of France.
+
+[Secret Treaty with Prussia, Aug. 5.]
+
+With each change in the fortunes of the campaign of 1796 the diplomacy of
+the Continent had changed its tone. When Moreau won his first victories,
+the Court of Prussia, yielding to the pressure of the Directory,
+substituted for the conditional clauses of the Treaty of Basle a definite
+agreement to the cession of the left bank of the Rhine, and a stipulation
+that Prussia should be compensated for her own loss by the annexation of
+the Bishopric of Muenster. Prussia could not itself cede provinces of the
+Empire: it could only agree to their cession. In this treaty, however,
+Prussia definitely renounced the integrity of the Empire, and accepted the
+system known as the Secularisation of Ecclesiastical States, the first step
+towards an entire reconstruction of Germany. [52] The engagement was kept
+secret both from the Emperor and from the ecclesiastical princes. In their
+negotiations with Austria the Directory were less successful. Although the
+long series of Austrian disasters had raised a general outcry against
+Thugut's persistence in the war, the resolute spirit of the Minister never
+bent; and the ultimate victory of the Archduke Charles more than restored
+his influence over the Emperor. Austria refused to enter into any
+negotiation not conducted in common with England, and the Directory were
+for the present foiled in their attempts to isolate England from the
+Continental Powers. It was not that Thugut either hoped or cared for that
+restoration of Austrian rule in the Netherlands which was the first object
+of England's Continental policy. The abandonment of the Netherlands by
+France was, however, in his opinion necessary for Austria, as a step
+towards the acquisition of Bavaria, which was still the cherished hope of
+the Viennese Government. It was in vain that the Directory suggested that
+Austria should annex Bavaria without offering Belgium or any other
+compensation to its ruler. Thugut could hardly be induced to listen to the
+French overtures. He had received the promise of immediate help from the
+Empress Catherine; he was convinced that the Republic, already anxious for
+peace, might by one sustained effort be forced to abandon all its
+conquests; and this was the object for which, in the winter of 1796, army
+after army was hurled against the positions where Bonaparte kept his guard
+on the north of the still unconquered Mantua. [53]
+
+[Malmesbury sent to Paris, Oct., 1796.]
+
+In England itself the victory of the Archduke Charles raised expectations
+of peace. The war had become unpopular through the loss of trade with
+France, Spain, and Holland, and petitions for peace daily reached
+Parliament. Pitt so far yielded to the prevalent feeling as to enter into
+negotiations with the Directory, and despatched Lord Malmesbury to Paris;
+but the condition upon which Pitt insisted, the restoration of the
+Netherlands to Austria, rendered agreement hopeless; and as soon as Pitt's
+terms were known to the Directory, Malmesbury was ordered to leave Paris.
+Nevertheless, the negotiation was not a mere feint on Pitt's part. He was
+possessed by a fixed idea that the resources of France were exhausted, and
+that, in spite of the conquest of Lombardy and the Rhine, the Republic must
+feel itself too weak to continue the war. Amid the disorders of
+Revolutionary finance, and exaggerated reports of suffering and distress,
+Pitt failed to recognise the enormous increase of production resulting from
+the changes which had given the peasant full property in his land and
+labour, and thrown vast quantities of half-waste domain into the busy hands
+of middling and small proprietors. [54]
+
+Whatever were the resources of France before the Revolution, they were now
+probably more than doubled. Pitt's belief in the economic ruin of France,
+the only ground on which he could imagine that the Directory would give up
+Belgium without fighting for it, was wholly erroneous, and the French
+Government would have acted strangely if they had listened to his demand.
+
+[Bonaparte creates a Cispadane Republic, Oct., 1796.]
+
+Nevertheless, though the Directory would not hear of surrendering Belgium,
+they were anxious to conclude peace with Austria, and unwilling to enter
+into any engagements in the conquered provinces of Italy which might render
+peace with Austria more difficult. They had instructed Bonaparte to stir up
+the Italians against their Governments, but this was done with the object
+of paralysing the Governments, not of emancipating the peoples. They looked
+with dislike upon any scheme of Italian reconstruction which should bind
+France to the support of newly-formed Italian States. Here, however, the
+scruples of the Directory and the ambition of Bonaparte were in direct
+conflict. Bonaparte intended to create a political system in Italy which
+should bear the stamp of his own mind and require his own strong hand to
+support it. In one of his despatches to the Directory he suggested the
+formation of a client Republic out of the Duchy of Modena, where
+revolutionary movements had broken out. Before it was possible for the
+Government to answer him, he published a decree, declaring the population
+of Modena and Reggio under the protection of the French army, and deposing
+all the officers of the Duke (Oct. 4). When, some days later, the answer of
+the Directory arrived, it cautioned Bonaparte against disturbing the
+existing order of the Italian States. Bonaparte replied by uniting to
+Modena the Papal provinces of Bologna and Ferrara, and by giving to the
+State which he had thus created the title of the Cispadane Republic. [55]
+
+[Idea of free Italy.]
+
+The event was no insignificant one. It is from this time that the idea of
+Italian independence, though foreign to the great mass of the nation, may
+be said to have taken birth as one of those political hopes which wane and
+recede, but do not again leave the world. A class of men who had turned
+with dislike from the earlier agitation of French Republicans in Italy
+rightly judged the continued victories of Bonaparte over the Austrians to
+be the beginning of a series of great changes, and now joined the
+revolutionary movement in the hope of winning from the overthrow of the old
+Powers some real form of national independence. In its origin the French
+party may have been composed of hirelings and enthusiasts. This ceased to
+be the case when, after the passage of the Mincio, Bonaparte entered the
+Papal States. Among the citizens of Bologna in particular there were men of
+weight and intelligence who aimed at free constitutional government, and
+checked in some degree the more numerous popular party which merely
+repeated the phrases of French democracy. Bonaparte's own language and
+action excited the brightest hopes. At Modena he harangued the citizens
+upon the mischief of Italy's divisions, and exhorted them to unite with
+their brethren whom he had freed from the Pope. A Congress was held at
+Modena on the 16th of October. The representatives of Modena, Reggio,
+Bologna, and Ferrara declared themselves united in a Republic under the
+protection of France. They abolished feudal nobility, decreed a national
+levy, and summoned a General Assembly to meet at Reggio two months later,
+in order to create the Constitution of the new Cispadane Republic. It was
+in the Congress of Modena, and in the subsequent Assembly of Reggio (Dec.
+23), that the idea of Italian unity and independence first awoke the
+enthusiasm of any considerable body of men. With what degree of sincerity
+Bonaparte himself acted may be judged from the circumstance that, while he
+harangued the Cispadanes on the necessity of Italian union, he imprisoned
+the Milanese who attempted to excite a popular movement for the purpose of
+extending this union to themselves. Peace was not yet made with Austria,
+and it was uncertain to what account Milan might best be turned.
+
+[Rivoli, Jan. 14, 15, 1797.]
+
+[Arcola, Nov. 15-17.]
+
+Mantua still held out, and in November the relieving operations of the
+Austrians were renewed. Two armies, commanded by Allvintzy and Davidovich,
+descended the valleys of the Adige and the Piave, offering to Bonaparte,
+whose centre was at Verona, a new opportunity of crushing his enemy in
+detail. Allvintzy, coming from the Piave, brought the French into extreme
+danger in a three days' battle at Arcola, but was at last forced to retreat
+with heavy loss. Davidovich, who had been successful on the Adige, retired
+on learning the overthrow of his colleague. Two months more passed, and the
+Austrians for the third time appeared on the Adige. A feint made below
+Verona nearly succeeded in drawing Bonaparte away from Rivoli, between the
+Adige and Lake Garda, where Allvintzy and his main army were about to make
+the assault; but the strength of Allvintzy's force was discovered before it
+was too late, and by throwing his divisions from point to point with
+extraordinary rapidity, Bonaparte at length overwhelmed the Austrians in
+every quarter of the battle-field. This was their last effort. The
+surrender of Mantua on the 2nd February, 1797, completed the French
+conquest of Austrian Lombardy. [56]
+
+[Peace of Tolentino, Feb. 19, 1797.]
+
+The Pope now found himself left to settle his account with the invaders,
+against whom, even after the armistice, he had never ceased to intrigue.
+[57] His despatches to Vienna fell into the hands of Bonaparte, who
+declared the truce broken, and a second time invaded the Papal territory. A
+show of resistance was made by the Roman troops; but the country was in
+fact at the mercy of Bonaparte, who advanced as far as Tolentino, thirty
+miles south of Ancona. Here the Pope tendered his submission. If the Roman
+Court had never appeared to be in a more desperate condition, it had never
+found a more moderate or a more politic conqueror. Bonaparte was as free
+from any sentiment of Christian piety as Nero or Diocletian; but he
+respected the power of the Papacy over men's minds, and he understood the
+immense advantage which any Government of France supported by the
+priesthood would possess over those who had to struggle with its hostility.
+In his negotiations with the Papal envoys he deplored the violence of the
+French Executive, and consoled the Church with the promise of his own
+protection and sympathy. The terms of peace which he granted, although they
+greatly diminished the ecclesiastical territory were in fact more
+favourable than the Pope had any right to expect. Bologna, Ferrara, and the
+Romagna, which had been occupied in virtue of the armistice, were now ceded
+by the Papacy. But conditions affecting the exercise of the spiritual power
+which had been proposed by the Directory were withdrawn; and, beyond a
+provision for certain payments in money, nothing of importance was added to
+the stipulations of the armistice.
+
+The last days of the Venetian Republic were now at hand. It was in vain
+that Venice had maintained its neutrality when all the rest of Italy joined
+the enemies of France; its refusal of a French alliance was made an
+unpardonable crime. So long as the war with Austria lasted, Bonaparte
+exhausted the Venetian territory with requisitions: when peace came within
+view, it was necessary that he should have some pretext for seizing it or
+handing it over to the enemy. In fulfilment of his own design of keeping a
+quarrel open, he had subjected the Government to every insult and wrong
+likely to goad it into an act of war. When at length Venice armed for the
+purpose of protecting its neutrality, the organs of the invader called upon
+the inhabitants of the Venetian mainland to rise against the oligarchy, and
+to throw in their lot with the liberated province of Milan. A French
+alliance was once more urged upon Venice by Bonaparte: it was refused, and
+the outbreak which the French had prepared instantly followed. Bergamo and
+Brescia, where French garrisons deprived the Venetian Government of all
+power of defence, rose in revolt, and renounced all connection with Venice.
+The Senate begged Bonaparte to withdraw the French garrisons; its
+entreaties drew nothing from him but repeated demands for the acceptance of
+the French alliance, which was only another name for subjection. Little as
+the Venetians suspected it, the only doubt now present to Bonaparte was
+whether he should add the provinces of Venetia to his own Cispadane
+Republic or hand them over to Austria in exchange for other cessions which
+France required.
+
+[Preliminaries of Leoben, April 18.]
+
+Austria could defend itself in Italy no longer. Before the end of March the
+mountain-passes into Carinthia were carried by Bonaparte. His army drove
+the enemy before it along the road to Vienna, until both pursuers and
+pursued were within eighty miles of the capital. At Leoben, on the 7th of
+April, Austrian commander asked for a suspension of arms. It was granted,
+and negotiations for peace commenced. [58] Bonaparte offered the Venetian
+provinces, but not the city of Venice, to the Emperor. On the 18th of April
+preliminaries of peace were signed at Leoben, by which, in return for the
+Netherlands and for Lombardy west of the river Oglio, Bonaparte secretly
+agreed to hand over to Austria the whole of the territory of Venice upon
+the mainland east of the Oglio, in addition to its Adriatic provinces of
+Istria and Dalmatia. To disguise the act of spoliation, it was pretended
+that Bologna and Ferrara should be offered to Venice in return. [59]
+
+[French enter Venice.]
+
+But worse was yet to come. While Bonaparte was in conference at Leoben, an
+outbreak took place at Verona, and three hundred French soldiers, including
+the sick in the hospital, perished by popular violence. The Venetian Senate
+despatched envoys to Bonaparte to express their grief and to offer
+satisfaction; in the midst of the negotiations intelligence arrived that
+the commander of a Venetian fort had fired upon a French vessel and killed
+some of the crew. Bonaparte drove the envoys from his presence, declaring
+that he could not treat with men whose hands were dripping with French
+blood. A declaration of war was published, charging the Senate with the
+design of repeating the Sicilian Vespers, and the panic which it was
+Bonaparte's object to inspire instantly followed. The Government threw
+themselves upon his mercy. Bonaparte pretended that he desired no more than
+to establish a popular government in Venice in the place of the oligarchy.
+His terms were accepted. The Senate consented to abrogate the ancient
+Constitution of the Republic, and to introduce a French garrison into
+Venice. On the 12th of May the Grand Council voted its own dissolution.
+Peace was concluded. The public articles of the treaty declared that there
+should be friendship between the French and the Venetian Republics; that
+the sovereignty of Venice should reside in the body of the citizens; and
+that the French garrison should retire so soon as the new Government
+announced that it had no further need of its support. Secret articles
+stipulated for a money payment, and for the usual surrender of works of
+art; an indefinite expression relating to an exchange of territory was
+intended to cover the surrender of the Venetian mainland, and the union of
+Bologna and Ferrara with what remained of Venice. The friendship and
+alliance of France, which Bonaparte had been so anxious to bestow on
+Venice, were now to bear their fruit. "I shall do everything in my power,"
+he wrote to the new Government of Venice, "to give you proof of the great
+desire I have to see your liberty take root, and to see this unhappy Italy,
+freed from the rule of the stranger, at length take its place with glory on
+the scene of the world, and resume, among the great nations, the rank to
+which nature, destiny, and its own position call it." This was for Venice;
+for the French Directory Bonaparte had a very different tale. "I had
+several motives," he wrote (May 19), "in concluding the treaty:--to enter
+the city without difficulty; to have the arsenal and all else in our
+possession, in order to take from it whatever we needed, under pretext of
+the secret articles; ... to evade the odium attaching to the Preliminaries
+of Leoben; to furnish pretexts for them, and to facilitate their
+execution."
+
+[French seize Ionian islands.]
+
+[Venice to be given to Austria.]
+
+As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu
+and the other Ionian Islands. "You will start," he wrote to General
+Gentili, "as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of
+all the Venetian establishments in the Levant.... If the inhabitants
+should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and
+in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens,
+and Sparta." This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now,
+though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian
+territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy. It
+was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte
+had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian
+envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from
+the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine,
+offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but
+the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded. Whatever causes subsequently
+prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him
+even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice. "We have to-day had our first
+conference on the definitive treaty," he wrote to the Directory, on the
+night of the 26th of May, "and have agreed to present the following
+propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the
+Emperor; ... the maintenance of the Germanic Body; ... Venice for the
+Emperor. Venice," he continued, "which has been in decadence since the
+discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the rise of Trieste and Ancona, can
+scarcely survive the blows we have just struck. With a cowardly and
+helpless population in no way fit for liberty, without territory and
+without rivers, it is but natural that she should go to those to whom we
+give the mainland." Thus was Italy to be freed from foreign intervention;
+and thus was Venice to be regenerated by the friendship of France!
+
+[Genoa.]
+
+In comparison with the fate preparing for Venice, the sister-republic of
+Genoa met with generous treatment. A revolutionary movement, long prepared
+by the French envoy, overthrew the ancient oligarchical Government; but
+democratic opinion and French sympathies did not extend below the middle
+classes of the population; and, after the Government had abandoned its own
+cause, the charcoal-burners and dock-labourers rose in its defence, and
+attacked the French party with the cry of "Viva Maria," and with figures of
+the Virgin fastened to their hats, in the place where their opponents wore
+the French tricolour. Religious fanaticism won the day; the old Government
+was restored, and a number of Frenchmen who had taken part in the conflict
+were thrown into prison. The imprisonment of the Frenchmen gave Bonaparte a
+pretext for intervention. He disclaimed all desire to alter the Government,
+and demanded only the liberation of his countrymen and the arrest of the
+enemies of France. But the overthrow of the oligarchy had been long
+arranged with Faypoult, the French envoy; and Genoa received a democratic
+constitution which place the friends of France in power (June 5).
+
+[France in 1797.]
+
+While Bonaparte, holding Court in the Villa of Montebello, continued to
+negotiate with Austria upon the basis of the Preliminaries of Leoben,
+events took place in France which offered him an opportunity of interfering
+directly in the government of the Republic. The elections which were to
+replace one-third of the members of the Legislature took place in the
+spring of 1797. The feeling of the country was now much the same as it had
+been in 1795, when a large Royalist element was returned for those seats in
+the Councils which the Convention had not reserved for its own members.
+France desired a more equitable and a more tolerant rule. The Directory had
+indeed allowed the sanguinary laws against non-juring priests and returning
+emigrants to remain unenforced; but the spirit and traditions of official
+Jacobinism were still active in the Government. The Directors themselves
+were all regicides; the execution of the King was still celebrated by a
+national _fete_; offices, great and small, were held by men who had risen
+in the Revolution; the whole of the old gentry of France was excluded from
+participation in public life. It was against this revolutionary class-rule,
+against a system which placed the country as much at the mercy of a few
+directors and generals as it had been at the mercy of the Conventional
+Committee, that the elections of 1797 were a protest. Along with certain
+Bourbonist conspirators, a large majority of men were returned who, though
+described as Royalists, were in fact moderate Constitutionalists, and
+desired only to undo that part of the Revolution which excluded whole
+classes of the nation from public life. [60]
+
+[Opposition to the Directory.]
+
+Such a party in the legislative body naturally took the character of an
+Opposition to the more violent section of the Directory. The Director
+retiring in 1797 was replaced by the Constitutionalist Barthelemy,
+negotiator of the treaty of Basle; Carnot, who continued in office, took
+part with the Opposition, justly fearing that the rule of the Directory
+would soon amount to nothing more than the rule of Bonaparte himself. The
+first debates in the new Chamber arose upon the laws relating to emigrants;
+the next, upon Bonaparte's usurpation of sovereign power in Italy. On the
+23rd of June a motion for information on the affairs of Venice and Genoa
+was brought forward in the Council of Five Hundred. Dumolard, the mover,
+complained of the secrecy of Bonaparte's action, of the contempt shown by
+him to the Assembly, of his tyrannical and un-republican interference with
+the institutions of friendly States. No resolution was adopted by the
+Assembly; but the mere fact that the Assembly had listened to a hostile
+criticism of his own actions was sufficient ground in Bonaparte's eyes to
+charge it with Royalism and with treason. Three of the Directors, Barras,
+Rewbell, and Lareveillere, had already formed the project of overpowering
+the Assembly by force. Bonaparte's own interests led him to offer them his
+support. If the Constitutional party gained power, there was an end to his
+own unshackled rule in Italy; if the Bourbonists succeeded, a different
+class of men would hold all the honours of the State. However feeble the
+Government of the Directory, its continuance secured his own present
+ascendency, and left him the hope of gaining supreme power when the public
+could tolerate the Directory no longer.
+
+[Coup d'etat, 17 Fructidor (Sept. 3).]
+
+The fate of the Assembly was sealed. On the anniversary of the capture of
+the Bastille, Bonaparte issued a proclamation to his army declaring the
+Republic to be threatened by Royalist intrigues. A banquet was held, and
+the officers and soldiers of every division signed addresses to the
+Directory full of threats and fury against conspiring aristocrats.
+"Indignation is at its height in the army," wrote Bonaparte to the
+Government; "the soldiers are asking with loud cries whether they are to be
+rewarded by assassination on their return home, as it appears all patriots
+are to be so dealt with. The peril is increasing every day, and I think,
+citizen Directors, you must decide to act one way or other." The Directors
+had no difficulty in deciding after such an exhortation as this; but, as
+soon as Bonaparte had worked up their courage, he withdrew into the
+background, and sent General Augereau, a blustering Jacobin, to Paris, to
+risk the failure or bear the odium of the crime. Augereau received the
+military command of the capital; the air was filled with rumours of an
+impending blow; but neither the majority in the Councils nor the two
+threatened Directors, Carnot and Barthelemy, knew how to take measures of
+defence. On the night of the 3rd September (17 Fructidor) the troops of
+Augereau surrounded the Tuileries. Barthelemy was seized at the Luxembourg;
+Carnot fled for his life; the members of the Councils, marching in
+procession to the Tuileries early the next morning, were arrested or
+dispersed by the soldiers. Later in the day a minority of the Councils was
+assembled to ratify the measures determined upon by Augereau and the three
+Directors. Fifty members of the Legislature, and the writers, proprietors,
+and editors of forty-two journals, were sentenced to exile; the elections
+of forty-eight departments were annulled; the laws against priests and
+emigrants were renewed; and the Directory was empowered to suppress all
+journals at its pleasure. This coup d'etat was described as the suppression
+of a Royalist conspiracy. It was this, but it was something more. It was
+the suppression of all Constitutional government, and all but the last step
+to the despotism of the chief of the army.
+
+[Peace signed with Austria, Oct. 17.]
+
+The effect of the movement was instantly felt in the negotiations with
+Austria and with England. Lord Malmesbury was now again in France, treating
+for peace with fair hopes of success, since the Preliminaries of Leoben had
+removed England's opposition to the cession of the Netherlands, the
+discomfiture of the moderate party in the Councils brought his mission to
+an abrupt end. Austria, on the other hand, had prolonged its negotiations
+because Bonaparte claimed Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces in addition to
+the cessions agreed upon at Leoben. Count Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian
+ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had protected his master's interests only
+too well in the last partition of Poland, was now at the head of the
+plenipotentiaries in Italy, endeavouring to bring Bonaparte back to the
+terms fixed in the Preliminaries, or to gain additional territory for
+Austria in Italy. The Jacobin victory at Paris depressed the Austrians as
+much as it elated the French leader. Bonaparte was resolved on concluding a
+peace that should be all his own, and this was only possible by
+anticipating an invasion of Germany, about to be undertaken by Augereau at
+the head of the Army of the Rhine. It was to this personal ambition of
+Bonaparte that Venice was sacrificed. The Directors were willing that
+Austria should receive part of the Venetian territory: they forbade the
+proposed cession of Venice itself. Within a few weeks more, the advance of
+the Army of the Rhine would have enabled France to dictate its own terms;
+but no consideration either for France or for Italy could induce Bonaparte
+to share the glory of the Peace with another. On the 17th of October he
+signed the final treaty of Campo Formio, which gave France the frontier of
+the Rhine, and made both the Venetian territory beyond the Adige and Venice
+itself the property of the Emperor. For a moment it seemed that the Treaty
+might be repudiated at Vienna as well as at Paris. Thugut protested against
+it, because it surrendered Mantua and the Rhenish Provinces without gaining
+for Austria the Papal Legations; and he drew up the ratification only at
+the absolute command of the Emperor. The Directory, on the other hand,
+condemned the cession of Venice. But their fear of Bonaparte and their own
+bad conscience left them impotent accessories of his treachery; and the
+French nation at large was too delighted with the peace to resent its baser
+conditions. [61]
+
+[Treaty of Campo Formio, Oct. 17.]
+
+By the public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the Emperor ceded to
+France the Austrian possessions in Lombardy and in the Netherlands, and
+agreed to the establishment of a Cisalpine Republic, formed out of Austrian
+Lombardy, the Venetian territory west of the Adige, and the districts
+hitherto composing the new Cispadane State. France took the Ionian Islands,
+Austria the City of Venice, with Istria and Dalmatia, and the Venetian
+mainland east of the Adige. For the conclusion of peace between France and
+the Holy Roman Empire, it was agreed that a Congress should meet at
+Rastadt; but a secret article provided that the Emperor should use his
+efforts to gain for France the whole left bank of the Rhine, except a tract
+including the Prussian Duchies of Cleve and Guelders. With humorous
+duplicity the French Government, which had promised Prussia the Bishopric
+of Muenster in return for this very district, now pledged itself to Austria
+that Prussia should receive no extension whatever, and affected to exclude
+the Prussian Duchies from the Rhenish territory which was to be made over
+to France. Austria was promised the independent Bishopric of Salzburg, and
+that portion of Bavaria which lies between the Inn and the Salza. The
+secular princes dispossessed in the Rhenish Provinces were to be
+compensated in the interior of the Empire by a scheme framed in concert
+with France.
+
+[Austria sacrifices Germany.]
+
+The immense advantages which the Treaty of Campo Formio gave to France--its
+extension over the Netherlands and the Rhenish Provinces, and the virtual
+annexation of Lombardy, Modena, and the Papal Legations under the form of a
+client republic--were not out of proportion to its splendid military
+successes. Far otherwise was it with Austria. With the exception of the
+Archduke's campaign of 1796, the warfare of the last three years had
+brought Austria nothing but a series of disasters; yet Austria gained by
+the Treaty of Campo Formio as much as it lost. In the place of the distant
+Netherlands and of Milan it gained, in Venice and Dalmatia, a territory
+touching its own, nearly equal to the Netherlands and Milan together in
+population, and so situated as to enable Austria to become one of the naval
+Powers of the Mediterranean. The price which Austria paid was the
+abandonment of Germany, a matter which, in spite of Thugut's protests,
+disturbed the Court of Vienna as little as the betrayal of Venice disturbed
+Bonaparte. The Rhenish Provinces were surrendered to the stranger; German
+districts were to be handed over to compensate the ejected Sovereigns of
+Holland and of Modena; the internal condition and order of the Empire were
+to be superseded by one framed not for the purpose of benefiting Germany,
+but for the purpose of extending the influence of France.
+
+[Policy of Bonaparte.]
+
+As defenders of Germany, both Prussia and Austria had been found wanting.
+The latter Power seemed to have reaped in Italy the reward of its firmness
+in prolonging the war. Bonaparte ridiculed the men who, in the earlier
+spirit of the Revolution, desired to found a freer political system in
+Europe upon the ruins of Austria's power. "I have not drawn my support in
+Italy," he wrote to Talleyrand (Oct. 7), "from the love of the peoples for
+liberty and equality, or at least but a very feeble support. The real
+support of the army of Italy has been its own discipline, ... above all,
+our promptitude in repressing malcontents and punishing those who declared
+against us. This is history; what I say in my proclamations and speeches is
+a romance.... If we return to the foreign policy of 1793, we shall do so
+knowing that a different policy has brought us success, and that we have no
+longer the great masses of 1793 to enrol in our armies, nor the support of
+an enthusiasm which has its day and does not return." Austria might well,
+for the present, be left in some strength, and France was fortunate to have
+so dangerous an enemy off her hands. England required the whole forces of
+the Republic. "The present situation," wrote Bonaparte, after the Peace of
+Campo Formio, "offers us a good chance. We must set all our strength upon
+the sea; we must destroy England; and the Continent is at our feet."
+
+[Battles of St. Vincent, Feb. 14, 1797, and Camperdown, Oct. 6.]
+
+It had been the natural hope of the earlier Republicans that the Spanish
+and the Dutch navies, if they could be brought to the side of France, would
+make France superior to Great Britain as a maritime Power. The conquest of
+Holland had been planned by Carnot as the first step towards an invasion of
+England. For a while these plans seemed to be approaching their fulfilment,
+Holland was won; Spain first made peace, and then entered into alliance
+with the Directory (Aug. 1796). But each increase in the naval forces of
+the Republic only gave the admirals of Great Britain new material to
+destroy. The Spanish fleet was beaten by Jarvis off St. Vincent; even the
+mutiny of the British squadrons at Spithead and the Nore, in the spring and
+summer of 1797, caused no change in the naval situation in the North Sea.
+Duncan, who was blockading the Dutch fleet in the Texel when his own
+squadron joined the mutineers, continued the blockade with one ship beside
+his own, signalling all the while as if the whole fleet were at his back;
+until the misused seamen, who had lately turned their guns upon the Thames,
+returned to the admiral, and earned his forgiveness by destroying the Dutch
+at Camperdown as soon as they ventured out of shelter.
+
+[Bonaparte about to invade Egypt.]
+
+It is doubtful whether at any time after his return from Italy Bonaparte
+seriously entertained the project of invading England. The plan was at any
+rate soon abandoned, and the preparations, which caused great alarm in the
+English coast-towns, were continued only for the purpose of disguising
+Bonaparte's real design of an attack upon Egypt. From the beginning of his
+career Bonaparte's thoughts had turned towards the vast and undefended
+East. While still little known, he had asked the French Government to send
+him to Constantinople to organise the Turkish army; as soon as Venice fell
+into his hands, he had seized the Ionian Islands as the base for a future
+conquest of the Levant. Every engagement that confirmed the superiority of
+England upon the western seas gave additional reason for attacking her
+where her power was most precarious, in the East. Bonaparte knew that
+Alexander had conquered the country of the Indus by a land-march from the
+Mediterranean, and this was perhaps all the information which he possessed
+regarding the approaches to India; but it was enough to fix his mind upon
+the conquest of Egypt and Syria, as the first step towards the destruction
+of the Asiatic Empire of England. Mingled with the design upon India was a
+dream of overthrowing the Mohammedan Government of Turkey, and attacking
+Austria from the East with an army drawn from the liberated Christian races
+of the Ottoman Empire. The very vagueness of a scheme of Eastern conquest
+made it the more attractive to Bonaparte's genius and ambition. Nor was
+there any inclination on the part of the Government to detain the general
+at home. The Directory, little concerned with the real merits or dangers of
+the enterprise, consented to Bonaparte's project of an attack upon Egypt,
+thankful for any opportunity of loosening the grasp which was now closing
+so firmly upon themselves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Congress of Rastadt--The Rhenish Provinces ceded--Ecclesiastical States of
+Germany suppressed--French intervention in Switzerland--Helvetic Republic--
+The French invade the Papal States--Roman Republic--Expedition to Egypt--
+Battle of the Nile--Coalition of 1798--Ferdinand of Naples enters
+Rome--Mack's defeats--French enter Naples--Parthenopean Republic--War with
+Austria and Russia--Battle of Stockach--Murder of the French Envoys at
+Rastadt--Campaign in Lombardy--Reign of Terror at Naples--Austrian designs
+upon Italy--Suvaroff and the Austrians--Campaign in Switzerland--Campaign
+in Holland--Bonaparte returns from Egypt--Coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire--
+Constitution of 1799--System of Bonaparte in France--Its effect on the
+influence of France abroad.
+
+
+[Congress of Rastadt, Nov. 1797.]
+
+The public articles of the Treaty of Campo Formio contained only the terms
+which had been agreed upon by France and Austria in relation to Italy and
+the Netherlands: the conditions of peace between France and the Germanic
+Body, which had been secretly arranged between France and the two leading
+Powers, were referred by a diplomatic fiction to a Congress that was to
+assemble at Rastadt. Accordingly, after Prussia and Austria had each signed
+an agreement abandoning the Rhenish Provinces, the Congress was duly
+summoned. As if in mockery of his helpless countrymen, the Emperor informed
+the members of the Diet that "in unshaken fidelity to the great principle
+of the unity and indivisibility of the German Empire, they were to maintain
+the common interests of the Fatherland with noble conscientiousness and
+German steadfastness; and so, united with their imperial head, to promote a
+just and lasting peace, founded upon the basis of the integrity of the
+Empire and of its Constitution." [62] Thus the Congress was convoked upon
+the pretence of preserving what the two greater States had determined to
+sacrifice; while its real object, the suppression of the ecclesiastical
+principalities and the curtailment of Bavaria, was studiously put out of
+sight.
+
+[Rivalry of the Germans.]
+
+The Congress was composed of two French envoys, of the representatives of
+Prussia and Austria, and of a committee, numbering with their secretaries
+seventy-four persons, appointed by the Diet of Ratisbon. But the recognised
+negotiators formed only a small part of the diplomatists who flocked to
+Rastadt in the hope of picking up something from the wreck of the Empire.
+Every petty German sovereign, even communities which possessed no political
+rights at all, thought it necessary to have an agent on the spot, in order
+to filch, if possible, some trifling advantage from a neighbour, or to
+catch the first rumour of a proposed annexation. It was the saturnalia of
+the whole tribe of busybodies and intriguers who passed in Germany for men
+of state. They spied upon one another; they bribed the secretaries and
+doorkeepers, they bribed the very cooks and coachmen, of the two omnipotent
+French envoys. Of the national humiliation of Germany, of the dishonour
+attaching to the loss of entire provinces and the reorganisation of what
+remained at the bidding of the stranger, there seems to have been no sense
+in the political circles of the day. The collapse of the Empire was viewed
+rather as a subject of merriment. A gaiety of life and language prevailed,
+impossible among men who did not consider themselves as the spectators of a
+comedy. Cobenzl, the chief Austrian plenipotentiary, took his travels in a
+fly, because his mistress, the _citoyenne_ Hyacinthe, had decamped with all
+his carriages and horses. A witty but profane pamphlet was circulated, in
+which the impending sacrifice of the Empire was described in language
+borrowed from the Gospel narrative, Prussia taking the part of Judas
+Iscariot, Austria that of Pontius Pilate, the Congress itself being the
+chief priests and Pharisees assembling that they may take the Holy Roman
+Empire by craft, while the army of the Empire figures as the "multitude who
+smote upon their breasts and departed." In the utter absence of any German
+pride or patriotism the French envoys not only obtained the territory that
+they required, but successfully embroiled the two leading Powers with one
+another, and accustomed the minor States to look to France for their own
+promotion at the cost of their neighbours. The contradictory pledges which
+the French Government had given to Austria and to Prussia caused it no
+embarrassment. To deceive one of the two powers was to win the gratitude of
+the other; and the Directory determined to fulfil its engagement to Prussia
+at the expense of the bishoprics, and to ignore what it had promised to
+Austria at the expense of Bavaria.
+
+[Rhenish Provinces.]
+
+[Ecclesiastical States suppressed.]
+
+A momentary difficulty arose upon the opening of the Congress, when it
+appeared that, misled by the Emperor's protestations, the Diet had only
+empowered its Committee to treat upon the basis of the integrity of the
+Empire (Dec. 9). The French declined to negotiate until the Committee had
+procured full powers: and the prospects of the integrity of the Empire were
+made clear enough a few days later by the entry of the French into Mainz,
+and the formal organisation of the Rhenish Provinces as four French
+Departments. In due course a decree of the Diet arrived, empowering the
+Committee to negotiate at their discretion: and for some weeks after the
+inhabitants of the Rhenish Provinces had been subjected to the laws, the
+magistracy, and the taxation of France, the Committee deliberated upon the
+proposal for their cession with as much minuteness and as much impartiality
+as if it had been a point of speculative philosophy. At length the French
+put an end to the tedious trifling, and proceeded to the question of
+compensation for the dispossessed lay Princes. This they proposed to effect
+by means of the disestablishment, or secularisation, of ecclesiastical
+States in the interior of Germany. Prussia eagerly supported the French
+proposal, both with a view to the annexation of the great Bishopric of
+Muenster, and from ancient hostility to the ecclesiastical States as
+instruments and allies of Catholic Austria. The Emperor opposed the
+destruction of his faithful dependents; the ecclesiastical princes
+themselves raised a bitter outcry, and demonstrated that the fall of their
+order would unloose the keystone of the political system of Europe; but
+they found few friends. If Prussia coveted the great spoils of Muenster, the
+minor sovereigns, as a rule, wore just as eager for the convents and abbeys
+that broke the continuity of their own territories: only the feeblest of
+all the members of the Empire, the counts, the knights, and the cities,
+felt a respectful sympathy for their ecclesiastical neighbours, and foresaw
+that in a system of annexation their own turn would come next. The
+principle of secularisation was accepted by the Congress without much
+difficulty, all the energy of debate being reserved for the discussion of
+details: arrangements which were to transfer a few miles of ground and half
+a dozen custom-houses from some bankrupt ecclesiastic to some French-bought
+duke excited more interest in Germany than the loss of the Rhenish
+Provinces, and the subjection of a tenth part of the German nation to a
+foreign rule.
+
+[Austria determines on war, 1798.]
+
+One more question was unexpectedly presented to the Congress. After
+proclaiming for six years that the Rhine was the natural boundary of
+France, the French Government discovered that a river cannot be a military
+frontier at all. Of what service, urged the French plenipotentiaries, were
+Strasburg and Mainz, so long as they were commanded by the guns on the
+opposite bank? If the Rhine was to be of any use to France, France must be
+put in possession of the fortresses of Kehl and Castel upon the German
+side. Outrageous as such a demand appears, it found supporters among the
+venal politicians of the smaller Courts, and furnished the Committee with
+material for arguments that extended over four months. But the policy of
+Austria was now taking a direction that rendered the resolutions of the
+Congress of very little importance. It had become clear that France was
+inclining to an alliance with Prussia, and that the Bavarian annexations
+promised to Austria by the secret articles of Campo Formio were to be
+withheld. Once convinced, by the failure of a private negotiation in
+Alsace, that the French would neither be content with their gains of 1797,
+nor permit Austria to extend its territory in Italy, Thugut determined upon
+a renewal of the war. [63] In spite of a powerful opposition at Court,
+Thugut's stubborn will still controlled the fortune of Austria: and the
+aggressions of the French Republic in Switzerland and the Papal States, at
+the moment when it was dictating terms of peace to the Empire, gave only
+too much cause for the formation of a new European league.
+
+[French intervention in Switzerland.]
+
+At the close of the last century there was no country where the spirit of
+Republican freedom was so strong, or where the conditions of life were so
+level, as in Switzerland; its inhabitants, however, were far from enjoying
+complete political equality. There were districts which stood in the
+relation of subject dependencies to one or other of the ruling cantons: the
+Pays de Vaud was governed by an officer from Berne; the valley of the
+Ticino belonged to Uri; and in most of the sovereign cantons themselves
+authority was vested in a close circle of patrician families. Thus,
+although Switzerland was free from the more oppressive distinctions of
+caste, and the Governments, even where not democratic, were usually just
+and temperate, a sufficiently large class was excluded from political
+rights to give scope to an agitation which received its impulse from Paris.
+It was indeed among communities advanced in comfort and intelligence, and
+divided from those who governed them by no great barrier of wealth and
+prestige, that the doctrines of the Revolution found a circulation which
+they could never gain among the hereditary serfs of Prussia or the
+priest-ridden peasantry of the Roman States. As early as the year 1792 a
+French army had entered the territory of Geneva, in order to co-operate
+with the democratic party in the city. The movement was, however, checked
+by the resolute action of the Bernese Senate; and the relations of France
+to the Federal Government had subsequently been kept upon a friendly
+footing by the good sense of Barthelemy, the French ambassador at Berne,
+and the discretion with which the Swiss Government avoided every occasion
+of offence. On the conquest of Northern Italy, Bonaparte was brought into
+direct connection with Swiss affairs by a reference of certain points in
+dispute to his authority as arbitrator. Bonaparte solved the difficulty by
+annexing the district of the Valteline to the Cisalpine Republic; and from
+that time he continued in communication with the Swiss democratic leaders
+on the subject of a French intervention in Switzerland, the real purpose of
+which was to secure the treasure of Berne, and to organise a government,
+like that of Holland and the Cisalpine Republic, in immediate dependence
+upon France.
+
+[Helvetic Republic, April 12.]
+
+[War between France and Swiss Federation, June, 1798.]
+
+At length the moment for armed interference arrived. On the 15th December,
+1797, a French force entered the Bishopric of Basle, and gave the signal
+for insurrection in the Pays de Vaud. The Senate of Berne summoned the Diet
+of the Confederacy to provide for the common defence: the oath of
+federation was renewed, and a decree was passed calling out the Federal
+army. It was now announced by the French that they would support the
+Vaudois revolutionary party, if attacked. The Bernese troops, however,
+advanced; and the bearer of a flag of truce having been accidentally
+killed, war was declared between the French Republic and the Government of
+Berne. Democratic movements immediately followed in the northern and
+western cantons; the Bernese Government attempted to negotiate with the
+French invaders, but discovered that no terms would be accepted short of
+the entire destruction of the existing Federal Constitution. Hostilities
+commenced; and the Bernese troops, supported by contingents from most of
+the other cantons, offered a brave but ineffectual resistance to the
+advance of the French, who entered the Federal capital on the 6th of March,
+1798. The treasure of Berne, amounting to about L800,000, accumulated by
+ages of thrift and good management, was seized in order to provide for
+Bonaparte's next campaign, and for a host of voracious soldiers and
+contractors. A system of robbery and extortion, more shameless even than
+that practised in Italy, was put in force against the cantonal governments,
+against the monasteries, and against private individuals. In compensation
+for the material losses inflicted upon the country, the new Helvetic
+Republic, one and indivisible, was proclaimed at Aarau. It conferred an
+equality of political rights upon all natives of Switzerland, and
+substituted for the ancient varieties of cantonal sovereignty a single
+national government, composed, like that of France, of a Directory and two
+Councils of Legislature.
+
+The towns and districts which had been hitherto excluded from a share in
+government welcomed a change which seemed to place them on a level with
+their former superiors: the mountain-cantons fought with traditional
+heroism in defence of the liberties which they had inherited from their
+fathers; but they were compelled, one after another, to submit to the
+overwhelming force of France, and to accept the new constitution. Yet, even
+now, when peace seemed to have been restored, and the whole purpose of
+France attained, the tyranny and violence of the invaders exhausted the
+endurance of a spirited people. The magistrates of the Republic were
+expelled from office at the word of a French Commission; hostages were
+seized; at length an oath of allegiance to the new order was required as a
+condition for the evacuation of Switzerland by the French army. Revolt
+broke out in Unterwalden, and a handful of peasants met the French army at
+the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept.
+8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their
+resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families
+and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the
+savagery of ancient war.
+
+[French intrigues in Rome.]
+
+Intrigues at Rome paved the way for a French intervention in the affairs of
+the Papal States, coincident in time with the invasion of Switzerland. The
+residence of the French ambassador at Rome, Joseph Bonaparte, was the
+centre of a democratic agitation. The men who moved about him were in great
+part strangers from the north of Italy, but they found adherents in the
+middle and professional classes in Rome itself, although the mass of the
+poor people, as well as the numerous body whose salaries or profits
+depended upon ecclesiastical expenditure, were devoted to the priests and
+the Papacy. In anticipation of disturbances, the Government ordered
+companies of soldiers to patrol the city. A collision occurred on the 28th
+December, 1797, between the patrols and a band of revolutionists, who,
+being roughly handled by the populace as well as by the soldiers, made
+their way for protection to the courtyard of the Palazzo Corsini, where
+Joseph Bonaparte resided. Here, in the midst of a confused struggle,
+General Duphot, a member of the Embassy, was shot by a Papal soldier. [64]
+
+[Berthier enters Rome, Feb. 10, 1798.]
+
+[Roman Republic, Feb. 15, 1798.]
+
+The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they
+desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to
+Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome.
+Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the
+peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had
+produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than
+existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino
+had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known
+works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as
+much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate
+conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion
+of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had
+produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian
+Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia,
+which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned
+the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged
+exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained
+many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform
+his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his
+original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to
+Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th
+of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after
+planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the
+authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted
+itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who
+recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city
+with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the
+Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of
+French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year,
+suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal
+power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond
+the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary
+ecclesiastic.
+
+In the liberated capital a course of spoliation began, more thorough and
+systematic than any that the French had yet effected. The riches of Rome
+brought all the brokers and contractors of Paris to the spot. The museums,
+the Papal residence, and the palaces of many of the nobility were robbed of
+every article that could be moved; the very fixtures were cut away, when
+worth the carriage. On the first meeting of the National Institute in the
+Vatican it was found that the doors had lost their locks; and when, by
+order of the French, masses were celebrated in the churches in expiation of
+the death of Duphot, the patrols who were placed at the gates to preserve
+order rushed in and seized the sacred vessels. Yet the general robbery was
+far less the work of the army than of the agents and contractors sent by
+the Government. In the midst of endless peculation the soldiers were in
+want of their pay and their food. A sense of the dishonour done to France
+arose at length in the subordinate ranks of the army; and General Massena,
+who succeeded Berthier, was forced to quit his command in consequence of
+the protests of the soldiery against a system to which Massena had
+conspicuously given his personal sanction. It remained to embody the
+recovered liberties of Rome in a Republican Constitution, which was, as a
+matter of course, a reproduction of the French Directory and Councils of
+Legislature, under the practical control of the French general in command.
+What Rome had given to the Revolution in the fashion of classical
+expressions was now more than repaid. The Directors were styled Consuls;
+the divisions of the Legislature were known as the Senate and the
+Tribunate; the Praetorship and the Quaestorship were recalled to life in the
+Courts of Justice. That the new era might not want its classical memorial,
+a medal was struck, with the image and superscription of Roman heroism, to
+"Berthier, the restorer of the city," and to "Gaul, the salvation of the
+human race."
+
+[Expedition to Egypt, May, 1798.]
+
+It was in the midst of these enterprises in Switzerland and Central Italy
+that the Directory assembled the forces which Bonaparte was to lead to the
+East. The port of Expedition to embarkation was Toulon; and there, on the
+9th of May, 1798, Bonaparte took the command of the most formidable
+armament that had ever left the French shores. Great Britain was still but
+feebly represented in the Mediterranean, a detachment from St. Vincent's
+fleet at Cadiz, placed under the command of Nelson, being the sole British
+force in these waters. Heavy reinforcements were at hand; but in the
+meantime Nelson had been driven by stress of weather from his watch upon
+Toulon. On the 19th of May the French armament put out to sea, its
+destination being still kept secret from the soldiers themselves. It
+appeared before Malta on the 16th of June. By the treachery of the knights
+Bonaparte was put in possession of this stronghold, which he could not even
+have attempted to besiege. After a short delay the voyage was resumed, and
+the fleet reached Alexandria without having fallen in with the English, who
+had now received their reinforcements. The landing was safely effected, and
+Alexandria fell at the first assault. After five days the army advanced
+upon Cairo. At the foot of the Pyramids the Mameluke cavalry vainly threw
+themselves upon Bonaparte's soldiers. They were repulsed with enormous loss
+on their own side and scarcely any on that of the French. Their camp was
+stormed; Cairo was occupied; and there no longer existed a force in Egypt
+capable of offering any serious resistance to the invaders.
+
+[Battle of the Nile, Aug. 1.]
+
+But the fortune which had brought Bonaparte's army safe into the Egyptian
+capital was destined to be purchased by the utter destruction of his fleet.
+Nelson had passed the French in the night, when, after much perplexity, he
+decided on sailing in the direction of Egypt. Arriving at Alexandria before
+his prey, he had hurried off in an imaginary pursuit to Rhodes and Crete.
+At length he received information which led him to visit Alexandria a
+second time. He found the French fleet, numbering thirteen ships of the
+line and four frigates, at anchor in Aboukir Bay. [65] His own fleet was
+slightly inferior in men and guns, but he entered battle with a
+presentiment of the completeness of his victory. Other naval battles have
+been fought with larger forces; no destruction was ever so complete as that
+of the Battle of the Nile (August 1). Two ships of the line and two
+frigates, out of the seventeen sail that met Nelson, alone escaped from his
+hands. Of eleven thousand officers and men, nine thousand were taken
+prisoners, or perished in the engagement. The army of Bonaparte was cut off
+from all hope of support or return; the Republic was deprived of
+communication with its best troops and its greatest general.
+
+[Coalition of 1798.]
+
+A coalition was now gathering against France superior to that of 1793 in
+the support of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, although Spain was now on the
+side of the Republic, and Prussia, in spite of the warnings of the last two
+years, refused to stir from its neutrality. The death of the Empress
+Catherine, and the accession of Paul, had caused a most serious change in
+the prospects of Europe. Hitherto the policy of the Russian Court had been
+to embroil the Western Powers with one another, and to confine its efforts
+against the French Republic to promises and assurances; with Paul, after an
+interval of total reaction, the professions became realities. [66] No
+monarch entered so cordially into Pitt's schemes for a renewal of the
+European league; no ally had joined the English minister with a sincerity
+so like his own. On the part of the Ottoman Government, the pretences of
+friendship with which Bonaparte disguised the occupation of Egypt were
+taken at their real worth. War was declared by the Porte; and a series of
+negotiations, carried on during the autumn of 1798, united Russia, England,
+Turkey, and Naples in engagements of mutual support against the French
+Republic.
+
+[Nelson at Naples, Sept., 1798.]
+
+A Russian army set out on its long march towards the Adriatic: the levies
+of Austria prepared for a campaign in the spring of 1799; but to the
+English Government every moment that elapsed before actual hostilities was
+so much time given to uncertainties; and the man who had won the Battle of
+the Nile ridiculed the precaution which had hitherto suffered the French to
+spread their intrigues through Italy, and closed the ports of Sicily and
+Naples to his own most urgent needs. Towards the end of September, Nelson
+appeared in the Bay of Naples, and was received with a delirium that
+recalled the most effusive scenes in the French Revolution. [67] In the
+city of Naples, as in the kingdom generally, the poorest classes were the
+fiercest enemies of reform, and the steady allies of the Queen and the
+priesthood against that section of the better-educated classes which had
+begun to hope for liberty. The system of espionage and persecution with
+which the sister of Marie Antoinette avenged upon her own subjects the
+sufferings of her kindred had grown more oppressive with every new victory
+of the Revolution. In the summer of 1798 there were men languishing for the
+fifth year in prison, whose offences had never been investigated, and whose
+relatives were not allowed to know whether they were dead or alive. A mode
+of expression, a fashion of dress, the word of an informer, consigned
+innocent persons to the dungeon, with the possibility of torture. In the
+midst of this tyranny of suspicion, in the midst of a corruption which made
+the naval and military forces of the kingdom worse than useless, King
+Ferdinand and his satellites were unwearied in their theatrical invocations
+of the Virgin and St. Januarius against the assailants of divine right and
+the conquerors of Rome. A Court cowardly almost beyond the example of
+Courts, a police that had trained every Neapolitan to look upon his
+neighbour as a traitor, an administration that had turned one of the
+hardiest races in Europe into soldiers of notorious and disgraceful
+cowardice--such were the allies whom Nelson, ill-fitted for politics by his
+sailor-like inexperience and facile vanity, heroic in his tenderness and
+fidelity, in an evil hour encouraged to believe themselves invincible
+because they possessed his own support. On the 14th of November, 1798, King
+Ferdinand published a proclamation, which, without declaring war on the
+French, announced that the King intended to occupy the Papal States and
+restore the Papal government. The manifesto disclaimed all intention of
+conquest, and offered a free pardon to all compromised persons. Ten days
+later the Neapolitan army crossed the frontier, led by the Austrian
+general, Mack, who passed among his admirers for the greatest soldier in
+Europe. [68]
+
+[Ferdinand enters Rome, Nov. 29.]
+
+The mass of the French troops, about twelve thousand in number, lay in the
+neighbourhood of Ancona; Rome and the intermediate stations were held by
+small detachments. Had Mack pushed forward towards the Upper Tiber, his
+inroad, even if it failed to crush the separated wings of the French army,
+must have forced them to retreat; but, instead of moving with all his
+strength through Central Italy, Mack led the bulk of his army upon Rome,
+where there was no French force capable of making a stand, and sent weak
+isolated columns towards the east of the peninsula, where the French were
+strong enough to make a good defence. On the approach of the Neapolitans to
+Rome, Championnet, the French commander, evacuated the city, leaving a
+garrison in the Castle of St. Angelo, and fell back on Civita Castellana,
+thirty miles north of the capital. The King of Naples entered Rome on the
+29th November. The restoration of religion was celebrated by the erection
+of an immense cross in the place of the tree of liberty, by the immersion
+of several Jews in the Tiber, by the execution of a number of compromised
+persons whose pardon the King had promised, and by a threat to shoot one of
+the sick French soldiers in the hospital for every shot fired by the guns
+of St. Angelo. [69] Intelligence was despatched to the exiled Pontiff of
+the discomfiture of his enemies. "By help of the divine grace," wrote King
+Ferdinand, "and of the most miraculous St. Januarius, we have to-day with
+our army entered the sacred city of Rome, so lately profaned by the
+impious, who now fly terror-stricken at the sight of the Cross and of my
+arms. Leave then, your Holiness, your too modest abode, and on the wings of
+cherubim, like the virgin of Loreto, come and descend upon the Vatican, to
+purify it by your sacred presence." A letter to the King of Piedmont, who
+had already been exhorted by Ferdinand to encourage his peasants to
+assassinate French soldiers, informed him that "the Neapolitans, guided by
+General Mack, had sounded the hour of death to the French, and proclaimed
+to Europe, from the summit of the Capitol, that the time of the Kings had
+come."
+
+[Mack defeated by Championnet, Dec. 6-13.]
+
+The despatches to Piedmont fell into the hands of the enemy, and the usual
+modes of locomotion would scarcely have brought Pope Pius to Rome in time
+to witness the exit of his deliverer. Ferdinand's rhapsodies were cut short
+by the news that his columns advancing into the centre and east of the
+Papal States had all been beaten or captured. Mack, at the head of the main
+army, now advanced to avenge the defeat upon the French at Civita
+Castellana and Terni. But his dispositions were as unskilful as ever:
+wherever his troops encountered the enemy they were put to the rout; and,
+as he had neglected to fortify or secure a single position upon his line of
+march, his defeat by a handful of French soldiers on the north of Rome
+involved the loss of the country almost up to the gates of Naples. On the
+first rumour of Mack's reverses the Republican party at Rome declared for
+France. King Ferdinand fled; Championnet re-entered Rome, and, after a few
+days' delay, advanced into Neapolitan territory. Here, however, he found
+himself attacked by an enemy more formidable than the army which had been
+organised to expel the French from Italy. The Neapolitan peasantry, who, in
+soldiers' uniform and under the orders of Mack, could scarcely be brought
+within sight of the French, fought with courage when an appeal to their
+religious passions collected them in brigand-like bands under leaders of
+their own. Divisions of Championnet's army sustained severe losses; they
+succeeded, however, in effecting their junction upon the Volturno; and the
+stronghold of Gaeta, being defended by regular soldiers and not by
+brigands, surrendered to the French at the first summons.
+
+[French enter Naples, Jan. 23, 1799.]
+
+Mack was now concentrating his troops in an entrenched camp before Capua.
+The whole country was rising against the invaders; and, in spite of lost
+battles and abandoned fortresses, the Neapolitan Government if it had
+possessed a spark of courage, might still have overthrown the French army,
+which numbered only 18,000 men. But the panic and suspicion which the
+Government had fostered among its subjects were now avenged upon itself.
+The cry of treachery was raised on every side. The Court dreaded a
+Republican rising; the priests and the populace accused the Court of
+conspiracy with the French; Mack protested that the soldiers were resolved
+to be beaten; the soldiers swore that they were betrayed by Mack. On the
+night of the 21st of December, the Royal Family secretly went on board
+Nelson's ship the _Vanguard_, and after a short interval they set sail
+for Palermo, leaving the capital in charge of Prince Pignatelli, a courtier
+whom no one was willing to obey. [70] Order was, however, maintained by a
+civic guard enrolled by the Municipality, until it became known that Mack
+and Pignatelli had concluded an armistice with the French, and surrendered
+Capua and the neighbouring towns. Then the populace broke into wild uproar.
+The prisons were thrown open; and with the arms taken from the arsenal the
+lazzaroni formed themselves into a tumultuous army, along with thousands of
+desperate men let loose from the gaols and the galleys. The priests,
+hearing that negotiations for peace were opened, raised the cry of treason
+anew; and, with the watchword of the Queen, "All the gentlemen are
+Jacobins; only the people are faithful," they hounded on the mob to riot
+and murder. On the morning of January 15th hordes of lazzaroni issued from
+the gates to throw themselves upon the French, who were now about nine
+miles from the city; others dragged the guns down from the forts to defend
+the streets. The Republican party, however, and that considerable body
+among the upper class which was made Republican by the chaos into which the
+Court, with its allies, the priests, and the populace, had thrown Naples,
+kept up communication with Championnet, and looked forward to the entrance
+of the French as the only means of averting destruction and massacre. By a
+stratagem carried out on the night of the 20th they gained possession of
+the fort of St. Elmo, while the French were already engaged in a bloody
+assault upon the suburbs. On the 23rd Championnet ordered the attack to be
+renewed. The conspirators within St. Elmo hoisted the French flag and
+turned their guns upon the populace; the fortress of the Carmine was
+stormed by the French; and, before the last struggle for life and death
+commenced in the centre of the city, the leaders of the lazzaroni listened
+to words of friendship which Championnet addressed to them in their own
+language, and, with the incoherence of a half-savage race, escorted his
+soldiers with cries of joy to the Church of St. Januarius, which
+Championnet promised to respect and protect.
+
+[Parthenopean Republic.]
+
+Championnet used his victory with a discretion and forbearance rare amongst
+French conquerors. He humoured the superstition of the populace; he
+encouraged the political hopes of the enlightened. A vehement revulsion of
+feeling against the fugitive Court and in favour of Republican government
+followed the creation of a National Council by the French general, and his
+ironical homage to the patron saint. The Kingdom of Naples was converted
+into the Parthenopean Republic. New laws, new institutions, discussed in a
+representative assembly, excited hopes and interests unknown in Naples
+before. But the inevitable incidents of a French occupation, extortion and
+impoverishment, with all their bitter effects on the mind of the people,
+were not long delayed. In every country district the priests were exciting
+insurrection. The agents of the new Government, men with no experience in
+public affairs, carried confusion wherever they went. Civil war broke out
+in fifty different places; and the barbarity of native leaders of
+insurrection, like Fra Diavolo, was only too well requited by the French
+columns which traversed the districts in revolt.
+
+[War with Austria and Russia, March, 1799.]
+
+The time was ill chosen by the French Government for an extension of the
+area of combat to southern Italy. Already the first division of the Russian
+army, led by Suvaroff, had reached Moravia, and the Court of Vienna was
+only awaiting its own moment for declaring war. So far were the
+newly-established Governments in Rome and Naples from being able to assist
+the French upon the Adige, that the French had to send troops to Rome and
+Naples to support the new Governments. The force which the French could
+place upon the frontier was inferior to that which two years of preparation
+had given to Austria: the Russians, who were expected to arrive in Lombardy
+in April, approached with the confidence of men who had given to the French
+none of their recent triumphs. Nor among the leaders was personal
+superiority any longer markedly on the side of the French, as in the war of
+the First Coalition. Suvaroff and the Archduke Charles were a fair match
+for any of the Republican generals, except Bonaparte, who was absent in
+Egypt. The executive of France had deeply declined. Carnot was in exile;
+the work of organisation which he had pursued with such energy and
+disinterestedness flagged under his mediocre and corrupt successors.
+Skilful generals and brave soldiers were never wanting to the Republic; but
+no single controlling will, no storm of national passion, inspired the
+Government with the force which it had possessed under the Convention, and
+which returned to it under Napoleon.
+
+A new character was given to the war now breaking out by the inclusion of
+Switzerland in the area of combat. In the war of the First Coalition,
+Switzerland had been neutral territory; but the events of 1798 had left the
+French in possession of all Switzerland west of the Rhine, and an Austrian
+force subsequently occupied the Grisons. The line separating the combatants
+now ran without a break from Mainz to the Adriatic. The French armies were
+in continuous communication with one another, and the movements of each
+could be modified according to the requirements of the rest. On the other
+hand, a disaster sustained at any one point of the line endangered every
+other point; for no neutral territory intervened, as in 1796, to check a
+lateral movement of the enemy, and to protect the communications of a
+French army in Lombardy from a victorious Austrian force in southern
+Germany. The importance of the Swiss passes in this relation was understood
+and even overrated by the French Government; and an energy was thrown into
+their mountain warfare which might have produced greater results upon the
+plains.
+
+[The Archduke Charles defeats Jourdan at Stockach, March, 25.]
+
+Three armies formed the order of battle on either side. Jourdan held the
+French command upon the Rhine; Massena in Switzerland; Scherer, the least
+capable of the Republican generals, on the Adige. On the side of the
+Allies, the Archduke Charles commanded in southern Germany; in Lombardy the
+Austrians were led by Kray, pending the arrival of Suvaroff and his corps;
+in Switzerland the command was given to Hotze, a Swiss officer who had
+gained some distinction in foreign service. It was the design of the French
+to push their centre under Massena through the mountains into the Tyrol,
+and by a combined attack of the central and the southern army to destroy
+the Austrians upon the upper Adige, while Jourdan, also in communication
+with the centre, drove the Archduke down the Danube upon Vienna. Early in
+March the campaign opened. Massena assailed the Austrian positions east of
+the head-waters of the Rhine, and forced back the enemy into the heart of
+the Orisons. Jourdan crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and passed the Black
+Forest with 40,000 men. His orders were to attack the Archduke Charles,
+whatever the Archduke's superiority of force. The French and the Austrian
+armies met at Stockach, near the head of the Lake of Constance (March 25).
+Overwhelming numbers gave the Archduke a complete victory. Jourdan was not
+only stopped in his advance, but forced to retreat beyond the Rhine.
+Whatever might be the fortune of the armies of Switzerland and Italy, all
+hope of an advance upon Vienna by the Danube was at an end.
+
+[Murder of the French envoys at Rastadt, April 28.]
+
+Freed from the invader's presence, the Austrians now spread themselves over
+Baden, up to the gates of Rastadt, where, in spite of the war between
+France and Austria, the envoys of the minor German States still continued
+their conferences with the French agents. On the 28th of April the French
+envoys, now three in number, were required by the Austrians to depart
+within twenty-four hours. An escort, for which they applied, was refused.
+Scarcely had their carriages passed through the city gates when they were
+attacked by a squadron of Austrian hussars. Two of French envoys the French
+envoys were murdered; the third left for dead. Whether this frightful
+violation of international law was the mere outrage of a drunken soldiery,
+as it was represented to be by the Austrian Government; whether it was to
+any extent occasioned by superior civil orders, or connected with French
+emigrants living in the neighbourhood, remains unknown. Investigations
+begun by the Archduke Charles were stopped by the Cabinet, in order that a
+more public inquiry might be held by the Diet. This inquiry, however, never
+took place. In the year 1804 all papers relating to the Archduke's
+investigation were removed by the Government from the military archives.
+They have never since been discovered. [71]
+
+[Battle of Magnano, April 5.]
+
+The outburst of wrath with which the French people learnt the fate of their
+envoys would have cost Austria dear if Austria had now been the losing
+party in the war; but, for the present, everything seemed to turn against
+the Republic. Jourdan had scarcely been overthrown in Germany before a
+ruinous defeat at Magnano, on the Adige, drove back the army of Italy to
+within a few miles of Milan; while Massena, deprived of the fruit of his
+own victories by the disasters of his colleagues, had to abandon the
+eastern half of Switzerland, and to retire upon the line of the river
+Limnat, Lucerne, and the Gothard. Charles now moved from Germany into
+Switzerland. Massena fixed his centre at Zuerich, and awaited the Archduke's
+assault. For five weeks Charles remained inactive: at length, on the 4th of
+June, he gave battle. After two days' struggle against greatly superior
+forces, Massena was compelled to evacuate Zuerich. He retreated, however, no
+farther than to the ridge of the Uetliberg, a few miles west of the city;
+and here, fortifying his new position, he held obstinately on, while the
+Austrians established themselves in the central passes of Switzerland, and
+disaster after disaster seemed to be annihilating the French arms in Italy.
+
+[Suvaroff's Campaign in Lombardy, April-June.]
+
+Suvaroff, at the head of 17,000 Russians, had arrived in Lombardy in the
+middle of April. His first battle was fought, and his first victory won, at
+the passage of the Adda on the 25th of April. It was followed by the
+surrender of Milan and the dissolution of the Cisalpine Republic. Moreau,
+who now held the French command, fell back upon Alessandria, intending to
+cover both Genoa and Turin; but a sudden movement of Suvaroff brought the
+Russians into the Sardinian capital before it was even known to be in
+jeopardy. The French general, cut off from the roads over the Alps, threw
+himself upon the Apennines above Genoa, and waited for the army which had
+occupied Naples, and which, under the command of Macdonald, was now
+hurrying to his support, gathering with it on its march the troops that lay
+scattered on the south of the Po. Macdonald moved swiftly through central
+Italy, and crossed the Apennines above Pistoia in the beginning of June.
+His arrival at Modena with 20,000 men threatened to turn the balance in
+favour of the French. Suvaroff, aware of his danger, collected all the
+troops within reach with the utmost despatch, and pushed eastwards to meet
+Macdonald on the Trebbia. Moreau descended from the Apennines in the same
+direction; but he had underrated the swiftness of the Russian general; and,
+before he had advanced over half the distance, Macdonald was attacked by
+Suvaroff on the Trebbia, and overthrown in three days of the most desperate
+fighting that had been seen in the war (June 18). [72]
+
+[Naples.]
+
+All southern Italy now rose against the Governments established by the
+French. Cardinal Ruffo, with a band of fanatical peasants, known as the
+Army of the Faith, made himself master of Apulia and Calabria amid scenes
+of savage cruelty, and appeared before Naples, where the lazzaroni were
+ready to unite with the hordes of the Faithful in murder and pillage.
+Confident of support within the city, and assisted by some English and
+Russian vessels in the harbour, Ruffo attacked the suburbs of Naples on the
+morning of the 13th of June. Massacre and outrage continued within and
+without the city for five days. On the morning of the 19th, the Cardinal
+proposed a suspension of arms. It was accepted by the Republicans, who were
+in possession of the forts. Negotiations followed. On the 23rd conditions
+of peace were signed by Ruffo on behalf of the King of Naples, and by the
+representatives of Great Britain and of Russia in guarantee for their
+faithful execution. It was agreed that the Republican garrison should march
+out with the honours of war; that their persons and property should be
+respected; that those who might prefer to leave the country should be
+conveyed to Toulon on neutral vessels; and that all who remained at home
+should be free from molestation.
+
+[Reign of Terror.]
+
+The garrison did not leave the forts that night. On the following morning,
+while they were embarking on board the polaccas which were to take them to
+Toulon, Nelson's fleet appeared in the Bay of Naples. Nelson declared that
+in treating with rebels Cardinal Ruffo had disobeyed the King's orders, and
+he pronounced the capitulation null and void. The polaccas, with the
+Republicans crowded on board, were attached to the sterns of the English
+ships, pending the arrival of King Ferdinand. On the 29th of June, Admiral
+Caracciolo, who had taken office under the new Government, and on its fall
+had attempted to escape in disguise, was brought a captive before Nelson.
+Nelson ordered him to be tried by a Neapolitan court-martial, and, in spite
+of his old age, his rank, and his long service to the State, caused him to
+be hanged from a Neapolitan ship's yard-arm, and his body to be thrown into
+the sea. Some days later, King Ferdinand arrived from Palermo, and Nelson
+now handed over all his prisoners to the Bourbon authorities. A reign of
+terror followed. Innumerable persons were thrown into prison.
+Courts-martial, or commissions administering any law that pleased
+themselves, sent the flower of the Neapolitan nation to the scaffold. Above
+a hundred sentences of death were carried out in Naples itself:
+confiscation, exile, and imprisonment struck down thousands of families. It
+was peculiar to the Neapolitan proscriptions that a Government with the
+names of religion and right incessantly upon its lips selected for
+extermination both among men and women those who were most distinguished in
+character, in science, and in letters, whilst it chose for promotion and
+enrichment those who were known for deeds of savage violence. The part
+borne by Nelson in this work of death has left a stain on his glory which
+time cannot efface. [73]
+
+[Austrian designs in Italy.]
+
+[New plan of the War.]
+
+It was on the advance of the Army of Naples under Macdonald that the French
+rested their last hope of recovering Lombardy. The battle of the Trebbia
+scattered this hope to the winds, and left it only too doubtful whether
+France could be saved from invasion. Suvaroff himself was eager to fall
+upon Moreau before Macdonald could rally from his defeat, and to drive him
+westwards along the coast-road into France. It was a moment when the
+fortune of the Republic hung in the scales. Had Suvaroff been permitted to
+follow his own counsels, France would probably have seen the remnant of her
+Italian armies totally destroyed, and the Russians advancing upon Lyons or
+Marseilles. The Republic was saved, as it had been in 1793, by the
+dissensions of its enemies. It was not only for the purpose of resisting
+French aggression that Austria had renewed the war, but for the purpose of
+extending its own dominion in Italy. These designs were concealed from
+Russia; they were partially made known by Thugut to the British Ambassador,
+under the most stringent obligation to secrecy. On the 17th of August,
+1799, Lord Minto acquainted his Government with the intentions of the
+Austrian Court. "The Emperor proposes to retain Piedmont, and to take all
+that part of Savoy which is important in a military view. I have no doubt
+of his intention to keep Nice also, if he gets it, which will make the Var
+his boundary with France. The whole territory of the Genoese Republic seems
+to be an object of serious speculation ... The Papal Legations will, I am
+persuaded, be retained by the Emperor ... I am not yet master of the
+designs on Tuscany." [74] This was the sense in which Austria understood
+the phrase of defending the rights of Europe against French aggression. It
+was not, however, for this that the Czar had sent his army from beyond the
+Carpathians. Since the opening of the campaign Suvaroff had been in
+perpetual conflict with the military Council of Vienna. [75] Suvaroff was
+bent upon a ceaseless pursuit of the enemy; the Austrian Council insisted
+upon the reduction of fortresses. What at first appeared as a mere
+difference of military opinion appeared in its true political character
+when the allied troops entered Piedmont. The Czar desired with his whole
+soul to crush the men of the Revolution, and to restore the governments
+which France had overthrown. As soon as his troops entered Turin, Suvaroff
+proclaimed the restoration of the House of Savoy, and summoned all
+Sardinian officers to fight for their King. He was interrupted by a letter
+from Vienna requiring him to leave political affairs in the hands of the
+Viennese Ministry. [76] The Russians had already done as much in Italy as
+the Austrian Cabinet desired them to do, and the first wish of Thugut was
+now to free himself from his troublesome ally. Suvaroff raged against the
+Austrian Government in every despatch, and tendered his resignation. His
+complaints inclined the Czar to accept a new military scheme, which was
+supported by the English Government in the hope of terminating the
+contention between Suvaroff and the Austrian Council. It was agreed at St.
+Petersburg that, as soon as the French armies were destroyed, the reduction
+of the Italian fortresses should be left exclusively to the Austrians; and
+that Suvaroff, uniting with a new Russian army now not far distant, should
+complete the conquest of Switzerland, and then invade France by the Jura,
+supported on his right by the Archduke Charles. An attack was to be made at
+the same time upon Holland by a combined British and Russian force.
+
+If executed in its original form, this design would have thrown a
+formidable army upon France at the side of Franche Comte, where it is least
+protected by fortresses. But at the last moment an alteration in the plan
+was made at Vienna. The prospect of an Anglo-Russian victory in Holland
+again fixed the thoughts of the Austrian Minister upon Belgium, which had
+been so lightly abandoned five years before, and which Thugut now hoped to
+re-occupy and to barter for Bavaria or some other territory. "The Emperor,"
+he wrote, "cannot turn a deaf ear to the appeal of his subjects. He cannot
+consent that the Netherlands shall be disposed of without his own
+concurrence." [77] The effect of this perverse and mischievous resolution
+was that the Archduke Charles received orders to send the greater part of
+his army from Switzerland to the Lower Rhine, and to leave only 25,000 men
+to support the new Russian division which, under General Korsakoff, was
+approaching from the north to meet Suvaroff. The Archduke, as soon as the
+new instructions reached him, was filled with the presentiment of disaster,
+and warned his Government that in the general displacement of forces an
+opportunity would be given to Massena, who was still above Zuerich, to
+strike a fatal blow. Every despatch that passed between Vienna and St.
+Petersburg now increased the Czar's suspicion of Austria. The Pope and the
+King of Naples were convinced that Thugut had the same design upon their
+own territories which had been shown in his treatment of Piedmont. [78]
+They appealed to the Czar for protection. The Czar proposed a European
+Congress, at which the Powers might learn one another's real intentions.
+The proposal was not accepted by Austria; but, while disclaiming all desire
+to despoil the King of Sardinia, the Pope, or the King of Naples, Thugut
+admitted that Austria claimed an improvement of its Italian frontier, in
+other words, the annexation of a portion of Piedmont, and of the northern
+part of the Roman States. The Czar replied that he had taken up arms in
+order to check one aggressive Government, and that he should not permit
+another to take its place.
+
+[Battle of Novi, Aug. 15.]
+
+For the moment, however, the allied forces continued to co-operate in Italy
+against the French army on the Apennines covering Genoa. This army had
+received reinforcements, and was now placed under the command of Joubert,
+one of the youngest and most spirited of the Republican generals. Joubert
+determined to attack the Russians before the fall of Mantua should add the
+besieging army to Suvaroff's forces in the field. But the information which
+he received from Lombardy misled him. In the second week of August he was
+still unaware that Mantua had fallen a fortnight before. He descended from
+the mountains to attack Suvaroff at Tortona, with a force about equal to
+Suvaroff's own. On reaching Novi he learnt that the army of Mantua was also
+before him (Aug. 15). It was too late to retreat; Joubert could only give
+to his men the example of Republican spirit and devotion. Suvaroff himself,
+with Kray, the conqueror of Mantua, began the attack: the onset of a second
+Austrian corps, at the moment when the strength of the Russians was
+failing, decided the day. Joubert did not live to witness the close of a
+defeat which cost France eleven thousand men. [79]
+
+[Suvaroff goes into Switzerland.]
+
+The allied Governments had so framed their plans that the most overwhelming
+victory could produce no result. Instead of entering France, Suvaroff was
+compelled to turn back into Switzerland, while the Austrians continued to
+besiege the fortresses of Piedmont. In Switzerland Suvaroff had to meet an
+enemy who was forewarned of his approach, and who had employed every
+resource of military skill and daring to prevent the union of the two
+Russian armies now advancing from the south and the north. Before Suvaroff
+could leave Italy, a series of admirably-planned attacks had given Massena
+the whole network of the central Alpine passes, and closed every avenue of
+communication between Suvaroff and the army with which he hoped to
+co-operate. The folly of the Austrian Cabinet seconded the French general's
+exertions. No sooner had Korsakoff and the new Russian division reached
+Schaffhausen than the Archduke Charles, forced by his orders from Vienna,
+turned northwards (Sept. 3), leaving the Russians with no support but
+Hotze's corps, which was scattered over six cantons. [80] Korsakoff
+advanced to Zuerich; Massena remained in his old position on the Uetliberg.
+It was now that Suvaroff began his march into the Alps, sorely harassed and
+delayed by the want of the mountain-teams which the Austrians had promised
+him, and filled with the apprehension that Korsakoff would suffer some
+irreparable disaster before his own arrival.
+
+[Second Battle of Zuerich, Sept. 26.]
+
+Two roads lead from the Italian lakes to central Switzerland; one, starting
+from the head of Lago Maggiore and crossing the Gothard, ends on the shore
+of Lake Lucerne; the other, crossing the Spluegen, runs from the Lake of
+Como to Reichenau, in the valley of the Rhine. The Gothard in 1799 was not
+practicable for cannon; it was chosen by Suvaroff, however, for his own
+advance, with the object of falling upon Massena's rear with the utmost
+possible speed. He left Bellinzona on the 21st of September, fought his way
+in a desperate fashion through the French outposts that guarded the defiles
+of the Gothard, and arrived at Altorf near the Lake of Lucerne. Here it was
+discovered that the westward road by which Suvaroff meant to strike upon
+the enemy's communications had no existence. Abandoning this design,
+Suvaroff made straight for the district where his colleague was encamped,
+by a shepherd's path leading north-eastwards across heights of 7,000 feet
+to the valley of the Muotta. Over this desolate region the Russians made
+their way; and the resolution which brought them as far as the Muotta would
+have brought them past every other obstacle to the spot where they were to
+meet their countrymen. But the hour was past. While Suvaroff was still
+struggling in the mountains, Massena advanced against Zuerich, put
+Korsakoff's army to total rout, and drove it, with the loss of all its
+baggage and of a great part of its artillery, outside the area of
+hostilities.
+
+[Retreat of Suvaroff.]
+
+The first rumours of the catastrophe reached Suvaroff on the Muotta; he
+still pushed on eastwards, and, though almost without ammunition, overthrew
+a corps commanded by Massena in person, and cleared the road over the
+Pragel at the point of the bayonet, arriving in Glarus on the 1st of
+October. Here the full extent of Korsakoff's disaster was made known to
+him. To advance or to fall back was ruin. It only remained for Suvaroff's
+army to make its escape across a wild and snow-covered mountain-tract into
+the valley of the Rhine, where the river flows below the northern heights
+of the Grisons. This exploit crowned a campaign which filled Europe with
+astonishment. The Alpine traveller of to-day turns with some distrust from
+narratives which characterise with every epithet of horror and dismay
+scenes which are the delight of our age; but the retreat of Suvaroff's
+army, a starving, footsore multitude, over what was then an untrodden
+wilderness of rock, and through fresh-fallen autumn snow two feet deep, had
+little in common with the boldest feats of Alpine hardihood. [81] It was
+achieved with loss and suffering; it brought the army from a position of
+the utmost danger into one of security; but it was followed by no renewed
+attack. Proposals for a combination between Suvaroff and the Archduke
+Charles resulted only in mutual taunts and menaces. The co-operation of
+Russia in the war was at an end. The French remained masters of the whole
+of the Swiss territory that they had lost since the beginning of the
+campaign.
+
+[British and Russian expedition against Holland Aug. 1799.]
+
+In the summer months of 1799 the Czar had relieved his irritation against
+Austria by framing in concert with the British Cabinet the plan for a joint
+expedition against Holland. It was agreed that 25,000 English and 17,000
+Russian troops, brought from the Baltic in British ships, should attack the
+French in the Batavian Republic, and raise an insurrection on behalf of the
+exiled Stadtholder. Throughout July the Kentish coast-towns were alive with
+the bustle of war; and on the 13th of August the first English division,
+numbering 12,000 men, set sail from Deal under the command of Sir Ralph
+Abercromby. After tossing off the Dutch coast for a fortnight, the troops
+landed at the promontory of the Helder. A Dutch corps was defeated on the
+sand-hills, and the English captured the fort of the Helder, commanding the
+Texel anchorage. Immediately afterwards a movement in favour of the
+Stadtholder broke out among the officers of the Dutch fleet. The captains
+hoisted the Orange flag, and brought their ships over to the English.
+
+This was the first and the last result of the expedition. The Russian
+contingent and a second English division reached Holland in the middle of
+September, and with them came the Duke of York, who now took the command
+out of the hands of Abercromby. On the other side reinforcements daily
+arrived from France, until the enemy's troops, led by General Brune, were
+equal in strength to the invaders. A battle fought at Alkmaar on the 19th
+of September gave the Allies some partial successes and no permanent
+advantage; and on the 3rd of October the Duke of York gained one of those
+so-called victories which result in the retreat of the conquerors. Never
+were there so many good reasons for a bad conclusion. The Russians moved
+too fast or too slow; the ditches set at nought the rules of strategy; it
+was discovered that the climate of Holland was unfavourable to health, and
+that the Dutch had not the slightest inclination to get back their
+Stadtholder. The result of a series of mischances, every one of which would
+have been foreseen by an average midshipman in Nelson's fleet, or an
+average sergeant in Massena's army, was that York had to purchase a retreat
+for the allied forces at a price equivalent to an unconditional surrender.
+He was allowed to re-embark on consideration that Great Britain restored to
+the French 8,000 French and Dutch prisoners, and handed over in perfect
+repair all the military works which our own soldiers had erected at the
+Helder. Bitter complaints were raised among the Russian officers against
+York's conduct of the expedition. He was accused of sacrificing the Russian
+regiments in battle, and of courting a general defeat in order not to
+expose his own men. The accusation was groundless. Where York was,
+treachery or bad faith was superfluous. York in command, the feeblest enemy
+became invincible. Incompetence among the hereditary chiefs of the English
+army had become part of the order of nature. The Ministry, when taxed with
+failure, obstinately shut their eyes to the true cause of the disaster.
+Parliament was reminded that defeat was the most probable conclusion of any
+military operations that we might undertake, and that England ought not to
+expect success when Prussia and Austria had so long met only with
+misfortune. Under the command of Nelson, English sailors were indeed
+manifesting that kind of superiority to the seamen of other nations which
+the hunter possesses over his prey; yet this gave no reason why foresight
+and daring should count for anything ashore. If the nation wished to see
+its soldiers undefeated, it must keep them at home to defend their country.
+Even among the Opposition no voice was raised to protest against the system
+which sacrificed English life and military honour to the dignity of the
+Royal Family. The collapse of the Anglo-Russian expedition was viewed with
+more equanimity in England than in Russia. The Czar dismissed his
+unfortunate generals. York returned home, to run horses at Newmarket, to
+job commissions with his mistress, and to earn his column at St. James's
+Park.
+
+[Unpopularity of the Directory.]
+
+[Plans of Sieyes 1799.]
+
+It was at this moment, when the tide of military success was already
+turning in favour of the Republic, that the revolution took place which
+made Bonaparte absolute ruler of France. Since the attack of the Government
+upon the Royalists in Fructidor, 1797, the Directory and the factions had
+come no nearer to a system of mutual concession, or to a peaceful
+acquiescence in the will of a parliamentary majority. The Directory,
+assailed both by the extreme Jacobins and by the Constitutionalists, was
+still strong enough to crush each party in its turn. The elections of 1798,
+which strengthened the Jacobins, were annulled with as little scruple as
+the Royalist elections in the preceding year; it was only when defeat in
+Germany and Italy had brought the Government into universal discredit that
+the Constitutionalist party, fortified by the return of a large majority in
+the elections of 1799, dared to turn the attack upon the Directors
+themselves. The excitement of foreign conquest had hitherto shielded the
+abuses of Government from criticism; but when Italy was lost, when generals
+and soldiers found themselves without pay, without clothes, without
+reinforcements, one general outcry arose against the Directory, and the
+nation resolved to have done with a Government whose outrages and
+extortions had led to nothing but military ruin. The disasters of France in
+the spring of 1799, which resulted from the failure of the Government to
+raise the armies to their proper strength, were not in reality connected
+with the defects of the Constitution. They were caused in part by the
+shameless jobbery of individual members of the Administration, in part by
+the absence of any agency, like that of the Conventional Commissioners of
+1793, to enforce the control of the central Government over the local
+authorities, left isolated and independent by the changes of 1789. Faults
+enough belonged, however, to the existing political order; and the
+Constitutionalists, who now for the second time found themselves with a
+majority in the Councils, were not disposed to prolong a system which from
+the first had turned their majorities into derision. A party grew up around
+the Abbe Sieyes intent upon some change which should give France a
+government really representing its best elements. What the change was to be
+few could say; but it was known that Sieyes, who had taken a leading part
+in 1789, and had condemned the Constitution of 1795 from the moment when it
+was sketched, had elaborated a scheme which he considered exempt from every
+error that had vitiated its predecessors. As the first step to reform,
+Sieyes himself was elected to a Directorship then falling vacant. Barras
+attached himself to Sieyes; the three remaining Directors, who were
+Jacobins and popular in Paris, were forced to surrender their seats. Sieyes
+now only needed a soldier to carry out his plans. His first thought had
+turned on Joubert, but Joubert was killed at Novi. Moreau scrupled to raise
+his hand against the law; Bernadotte, a general distinguished both in war
+and in administration, declined to play a secondary part. Nor in fact was
+the support of Sieyes indispensable to any popular and ambitious soldier
+who was prepared to attack the Government. Sieyes and his friends offered
+the alliance of a party weighty in character and antecedents; but there
+were other well-known names and powerful interests at the command of an
+enterprising leader, and all France awaited the downfall of a Government
+whose action had resulted only in disorder at home and defeat abroad.
+
+[Bonaparte returns from Egypt, Oct., 1799.]
+
+Such was the political situation when, in the summer of 1799, Bonaparte,
+baffled in an attack upon the Syrian fortress of St. Jean d'Acre, returned
+to Egypt, and received the first tidings from Europe which had reached him
+since the outbreak of the war. He saw that his opportunity had arrived. He
+determined to leave his army, whose ultimate failure was inevitable, and to
+offer to France in his own person that sovereignty of genius and strength
+for which the whole nation was longing. On the 7th of October a despatch
+from Bonaparte was read in the Council of Five Hundred, announcing a
+victory over the Turks at Aboukir. It brought the first news that had been
+received for many months from the army of Egypt; it excited an outburst of
+joyous enthusiasm for the general and the army whom a hated Government was
+believed to have sent into exile; it recalled that succession of victories
+which had been unchecked by a single defeat, and that Peace which had given
+France a dominion wider than any that her Kings had won. While every
+thought was turned upon Bonaparte, the French nation suddenly heard that
+Bonaparte himself had landed on the coast of Provence. "I was sitting that
+day," says Beranger in his autobiography, "in our reading-room with thirty
+or forty other persons. Suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had
+returned from Egypt. At the words, every man in the room started to his
+feet and burst into one long shout of joy." The emotion portrayed by
+Beranger was that of the whole of France. Almost everything that now
+darkens the early fame of Bonaparte was then unknown. His falsities, his
+cold, unpitying heart were familiar only to accomplices and distant
+sufferers; even his most flagrant wrongs, such as the destruction of
+Venice, were excused by a political necessity, or disguised as acts of
+righteous chastisement. The hopes, the imagination of France saw in
+Bonaparte the young, unsullied, irresistible hero of the Republic. His fame
+had risen throughout a crisis which had destroyed all confidence in others.
+The stale placemen of the factions sank into insignificance by his side;
+even sincere Republicans, who feared the rule of a soldier, confessed that
+it is not always given to a nation to choose the mode of its own
+deliverance. From the moment that Bonaparte landed at Frejus, he was master
+of France.
+
+[Conspiracy of Sieyes and Bonaparte.]
+
+Sieyes saw that Bonaparte, and no one else, was the man through whom he
+could overthrow the existing Constitution. [82] So little sympathy existed,
+however, between Sieyes and the soldier to whom he now offered his support,
+that Bonaparte only accepted Sieyes' project after satisfying himself that
+neither Barras nor Bernadotte would help him to supreme power. Once
+convinced of this, Bonaparte closed with Sieyes' offers. It was agreed that
+Sieyes and his friend Ducos should resign their Directorships, and that the
+three remaining Directors should be driven from office. The Assemblies, or
+any part of them favourable to the plot, were to appoint a Triumvirate
+composed of Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos, for the purpose of drawing up a
+new Constitution. In the new Constitution it was understood, though without
+any definite arrangement, that Bonaparte and Sieyes were to be the leading
+figures. The Council of Ancients was in great part in league with the
+conspirators: the only obstacle likely to hinder the success of the plot
+was a rising of the Parisian populace. As a precaution against attack, it
+was determined to transfer the meeting of the Councils to St. Cloud.
+Bonaparte had secured the support of almost all the generals and troops in
+Paris. His brother Lucien, now President of the Council of Five Hundred,
+hoped to paralyse the action of his own Assembly, in which the conspirators
+were in the minority.
+
+[Coup d'etat, 18 Brumaire (Nov. 9), 1799.]
+
+Early on the morning of the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), a crowd of
+generals and officers met before Bonaparte's house. At the same moment a
+portion of the Council of Ancients assembled, and passed a decree which
+adjourned the session to St. Cloud, and conferred on Bonaparte the command
+over all the troops in Paris. The decree was carried to Bonaparte's house
+and read to the military throng, who acknowledged it by brandishing their
+swords. Bonaparte then ordered the troops to their posts, received the
+resignation of Barras, and arrested the two remaining Directors in the
+Luxembourg. During the night there was great agitation in Paris. The arrest
+of the two Directors and the display of military force revealed the true
+nature of the conspiracy, and excited men to resistance who had hitherto
+seen no great cause for alarm. The Councils met at St. Cloud at two on the
+next day. The Ancients were ready for what was coming; the Five Hundred
+refused to listen to Bonaparte's accomplices, and took the oath of fidelity
+to the Constitution. Bonaparte himself entered the Council of Ancients, and
+in violent, confused language declared that he had come to save the
+Republic from unseen dangers. He then left the Assembly, and entered the
+Chamber of the Five Hundred, escorted by armed grenadiers. A roar of
+indignation greeted the appearance of the bayonets. The members rushed in a
+mass upon Bonaparte, and drove him out of the hall. His brother now left
+the President's chair and joined the soldiers outside, whom he harangued in
+the character of President of the Assembly. The soldiers, hitherto
+wavering, were assured by Lucien's civil authority and his treacherous
+eloquence. The drums beat; the word of command was given; and the last free
+representatives of France struggled through doorways and windows before the
+levelled and advancing bayonets.
+
+[Sieyes' plan of Constitution.]
+
+The Constitution which Sieyes hoped now to impose upon France had been
+elaborated by its author at the close of the Reign of Terror. Designed at
+that epoch, it bore the trace of all those apprehensions which gave shape
+to the Constitution of 1795. The statutory outrages of 1793, the Royalist
+reaction shown in the events of Vendemiaire, were the perils from which
+both Sieyes and the legislators of 1795 endeavoured to guard the future of
+France. It had become clear that a popular election might at any moment
+return a royalist majority to the Assembly: the Constitution of 1795
+averted this danger by prolonging the power of the Conventionalists; Sieyes
+overcame it by extinguishing popular election altogether. He gave to the
+nation no right but that of selecting half a million persons who should be
+eligible to offices in the Communes, and who should themselves elect a
+smaller body of fifty thousand, eligible to offices in the Departments. The
+fifty thousand were in their turn to choose five thousand, who should be
+eligible to places in the Government and the Legislature. The actual
+appointments were to be made, however, not by the electors, but by the
+Executive. With the irrational multitude thus deprived of the power to
+bring back its old oppressors, priests, royalists, and nobles might safely
+do their worst. By way of still further precaution, Sieyes proposed that
+every Frenchman who had been elected to the Legislature since 1789 should
+be inscribed for ten years among the privileged five thousand.
+
+Such were the safeguards provided against a Bourbonist reaction. To guard
+against a recurrence of those evils which France had suffered from the
+precipitate votes of a single Assembly, Sieyes broke up the legislature
+into as many chambers as there are stages in the passing of a law. The
+first chamber, or Council of State, was to give shape to measures suggested
+by the Executive; a second chamber, known as the Tribunate, was to discuss
+the measures so framed, and ascertain the objections to which they were
+liable; the third chamber, known as the Legislative Body, was to decide in
+silence for or against the measures, after hearing an argument between
+representatives of the Council and of the Tribunate. As a last impregnable
+bulwark against Jacobins and Bourbonists alike, Sieyes created a Senate
+whose members should hold office for life, and be empowered to annul every
+law in which the Chambers might infringe upon the Constitution.
+
+It only remained to invent an Executive. In the other parts of his
+Constitution, Sieyes had borrowed from Rome, from Greece, and from Venice;
+in his Executive he improved upon the political theories of Great Britain.
+He proposed that the Government should consist of two Consuls and a Great
+Elector; the Elector, like an English king, appointing and dismissing the
+Consuls, but taking no active part in the administration himself. The
+Consuls were to be respectively restricted to the affairs of peace and of
+war. Grotesque under every aspect, the Constitution of Sieyes was really
+calculated to effect in all points but one the end which he had in view.
+His object was to terminate the convulsions of France by depriving every
+element in the State of the power to create sudden change. The members of
+his body politic, a Council that could only draft, a Tribunate that could
+only discuss, a Legislature that could only vote, Yes or No, were impotent
+for mischief; and the nation itself ceased to have a political existence as
+soon as it had selected its half-million notables.
+
+[Sieyes and Bonaparte.]
+
+So far, nothing could have better suited the views of Bonaparte; and up to
+this point Bonaparte quietly accepted Sieyes' plan. But the general had his
+own scheme for what was to follow. Sieyes might apportion the act of
+deliberation among debating societies and dumb juries to the full extent of
+his own ingenuity; but the moment that he applied his disintegrating method
+to the Executive, Bonaparte swept away the flimsy reasoner, and set in the
+midst of his edifice of shadows the reality of an absolute personal rule.
+The phantom Elector, and the Consuls who were to be the Elector's
+tenants-at-will, corresponded very little to the power which France desired
+to see at its head. "Was there ever anything so ridiculous?" cried
+Bonaparte. "What man of spirit could accept such a post?" It was in vain
+that Sieyes had so nicely set the balance. His theories gave to France only
+the pageants which disguised the extinction of the nation beneath a single
+will: the frame of executive government which the country received in 1799
+was that which Bonaparte deduced from the conception of an absolute central
+power. The First Consul summed up all executive authority in his own
+person. By his side there were set two colleagues whose only function was
+to advise. A Council of State placed the highest skill and experience in
+France at the disposal of the chief magistrate, without infringing upon his
+sovereignty. All offices, both in the Ministries of State and in the
+provinces, were filled by the nominees of the First Consul. No law could be
+proposed but at his desire.
+
+[Contrast of the Institutions of 1791 and 1799.]
+
+[Centralisation of 1799.]
+
+The institutions given to France by the National Assembly of 1789 and those
+given to it in the Consulate exhibited a direct contrast seldom found
+outside the region of abstract terms. Local customs, survivals of earlier
+law, such as soften the difference between England and the various
+democracies of the United States, had no place in the sharp-cut types in
+which the political order of France was recast in 1791 and 1799. The
+Constituent Assembly had cleared the field before it began to reconstruct.
+Its reconstruction was based upon the Rights of Man, identified with the
+principle of local self-government by popular election. It deduced a system
+of communal administration so completely independent that France was
+described by foreign critics as partitioned into 40,000 republics; and the
+criticism was justified when, in 1793, it was found necessary to create a
+new central Government, and to send commissioners from the capital into the
+provinces. In the Constitution of 1791, judges, bishops, officers of the
+National Guard, were all alike subjected to popular election; the Minister
+of War could scarcely move a regiment from one village to another without
+the leave of the mayor of the commune. In the Constitution of 1799 all
+authority was derived from the head of the State. A system of
+centralisation came into force with which France under her kings had
+nothing to compare. All that had once served as a check upon monarchical
+power, the legal Parliaments, the Provincial Estates of Brittany and
+Languedoc, the rights of lay and ecclesiastical corporations, had vanished
+away. In the place of the motley of privileges that had tempered the
+Bourbon monarchy, in the place of the popular Assemblies of the Revolution,
+there sprang up a series of magistracies as regular and as absolute as the
+orders of military rank. [83] Where, under the Constitution of 1791, a body
+of local representatives had met to conduct the business of the Department,
+there was now a Prefet, appointed by the First Consul, absolute, like the
+First Consul himself, and assisted only by the advice of a nominated
+council, which met for one fortnight in the year. In subordination to the
+Prefet, an officer and similar council transacted the local business of the
+Arrondissement. Even the 40,000 Maires with their communal councils were
+all appointed directly or indirectly by the Chief of the State. There
+existed in France no authority that could repair a village bridge, or light
+the streets of a town, but such as owed its appointment to the central
+Government. Nor was the power of the First Consul limited to the
+administration. With the exception of the lowest and the highest members of
+the judicature, he nominated all judges, and transferred them at his
+pleasure to inferior or superior posts.
+
+Such was the system which, based to a great extent upon the preferences of
+the French people, fixed even more deeply in the national character the
+willingness to depend upon an omnipresent, all-directing power. Through its
+rational order, its regularity, its command of the highest science and
+experience, this system of government could not fail to confer great and
+rapid benefits upon the country. It has usually been viewed by the French
+themselves as one of the finest creations of political wisdom. In
+comparison with the self-government which then and long afterwards existed
+in England, the centralisation of France had all the superiority of
+progress and intelligence over torpor and self-contradiction. Yet a heavy,
+an incalculable price is paid by every nation which for the sake of
+administrative efficiency abandons its local liberties, and all that is
+bound up with their enjoyment. No practice in the exercise of public right
+armed a later generation of Frenchmen against the audacity of a common
+usurper: no immortality of youth secured the institutions framed by
+Napoleon against the weakness and corruption which at some period undermine
+all despotisms. The historian who has exhausted every term of praise upon
+the political system of the Consulate lived to declare, as Chief of the
+State himself, that the first need of France was the decentralisation of
+power. [84]
+
+[State policy of Bonaparte.]
+
+After ten years of disquiet, it was impossible that any Government could be
+more welcome to the French nation than one which proclaimed itself the
+representative, not of party or of opinion, but of France itself. No
+section of the nation had won a triumph in the establishment of the
+Consulate; no section had suffered a defeat. In his own elevation Bonaparte
+announced the close of civil conflict. A Government had arisen which
+summoned all to its service which would employ all, reward all, reconcile
+all. The earliest measures of the First Consul exhibited the policy of
+reconciliation by which he hoped to rally the whole of France to his side.
+The law of hostages, under which hundreds of families were confined in
+retaliation for local Royalist disturbances, was repealed, and Bonaparte
+himself went to announce their liberty to the prisoners in the Temple.
+Great numbers of names were struck off the list of the emigrants, and the
+road to pardon was subsequently opened to all who had not actually served
+against their country. In the selection of his officers of State, Bonaparte
+showed the same desire to win men of all parties. Cambaceres, a regicide,
+was made Second Consul; Lebrun, an old official of Louis XVI., became his
+colleague. In the Ministries, in the Senate, and in the Council of State
+the nation saw men of proved ability chosen from all callings in life and
+from all political ranks. No Government of France had counted among its
+members so many names eminent for capacity and experience. One quality
+alone was indispensable, a readiness to serve and to obey. In that
+intellectual greatness which made the combination of all the forces of
+France a familiar thought in Bonaparte's mind, there was none of the moral
+generosity which could pardon opposition to himself, or tolerate energy
+acting under other auspices than his own. He desired to see authority in
+the best hands; he sought talent and promoted it, but on the understanding
+that it took its direction from himself. Outside this limit ability was his
+enemy, not his friend; and what could not be caressed or promoted was
+treated with tyrannical injustice. While Bonaparte boasted of the career
+that he had thrown open to talent, he suppressed the whole of the
+independent journalism of Paris, and banished Mme. de Stael, whose guests
+continued to converse, when they might not write, about liberty. Equally
+partial, equally calculated, was Bonaparte's indulgence towards the ancient
+enemies of the Revolution, the Royalists and the priests. He felt nothing
+of the old hatred of Paris towards the Vendean noble and the superstitious
+Breton; he offered his friendship to the stubborn Breton race, whose
+loyalty and piety he appreciated as good qualities in subjects; but failing
+their submission, he instructed his generals in the west of France to burn
+down their villages, and to set a price upon the heads of their chiefs.
+Justice, tolerance, good faith, were things which had no being for
+Bonaparte outside the circle of his instruments and allies.
+
+[France ceases to excite democracy abroad, but promotes equality under
+monarchical systems.]
+
+[Effect of Bonaparte's autocracy outside France.]
+
+In the foreign relations of France it was not possible for the most
+unscrupulous will to carry aggression farther than it had been already
+carried; yet the elevation of Bonaparte deeply affected the fortunes of all
+those States whose lot depended upon France. It was not only that a mind
+accustomed to regard all human things as objects for its own disposal now
+directed an irresistible military force, but from the day when France
+submitted to Bonaparte, the political changes accompanying the advance of
+the French armies took a different character. Belgium and Holland, the
+Rhine Provinces, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Parthenopean Republics,
+had all received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms
+of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French
+generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to
+freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves.
+The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric
+of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for
+self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period
+between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those hopes
+which have since been realised in the freedom and the unity of Italy. So
+long as France had her own tumultuous assemblies, her elections in the
+village and in the county-town, it was impossible for her to form republics
+beyond the Alps without introducing at least some germ of republican
+organisation and spirit. But when all power was concentrated in a single
+man, when the spoken and the written word became an offence against the
+State, when the commotion of the old municipalities was succeeded by the
+silence and the discipline of a body of clerks working round their chief,
+then the advance of French influence ceased to mean the support of popular
+forces against the Governments. The form which Bonaparte had given to
+France was the form which he intended for the clients of France. Hence in
+those communities which directly received the impress of the Consulate, as
+in Bavaria and the minor German States, authority, instead of being
+overthrown, was greatly strengthened. Bonaparte carried beyond the Rhine
+that portion of the spirit of the Revolution which he accepted at home, the
+suppression of privilege, the extinction of feudal rights, the reduction of
+all ranks to equality before the law, and the admission of all to the
+public service. But this levelling of the social order in the client-states
+of France, and the establishment of system and unity in the place of
+obsolete privilege, cleared the way not for the supremacy of the people,
+but for the supremacy of the Crown. The power which was taken away from
+corporations, from knights, and from ecclesiastics, was given, not to a
+popular Representative, but to Cabinet Ministers and officials ranged after
+the model of the official hierarchy of France. What the French had in the
+first epoch of their Revolution endeavoured to impart to Europe--the spirit
+of liberty and self-government--they had now renounced themselves. The
+belief in popular right, which made the difference between the changes of
+1789 and those attempted by the Emperor Joseph, sank in the storms of the
+Revolution.
+
+[Bonaparte legislates in the spirit of the reforming monarchs of the 18th
+century.]
+
+Yet the statesmanship of Bonaparte, if it repelled the liberal and
+disinterested sentiment of 1789, was no mere cunning of a Corsican soldier,
+or exploit of mediaeval genius born outside its age. Subject to the fullest
+gratification of his own most despotic or most malignant impulse, Bonaparte
+carried into his creations the ideas upon which the greatest European
+innovators before the French Revolution had based their work. What
+Frederick and Joseph had accomplished, or failed to accomplish, was
+realised in Western Germany when its Sovereigns became the clients of the
+First Consul. Bonaparte was no child of the French Revolution; he was the
+last and the greatest of the autocratic legislators who worked in an unfree
+age. Under his rule France lost what had seemed to be most its own; it most
+powerfully advanced the forms of progress common to itself and the rest of
+Europe. Bonaparte raised no population to liberty: in extinguishing
+privilege and abolishing the legal distinctions of birth, in levelling all
+personal and corporate authority beneath the single rule of the State, he
+prepared the way for a rational freedom, when, at a later day, the
+Government of the State should itself become the representative of the
+nation's will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and England--The War continues--Massena
+besieged in Genoa--Moreau invades Southern Germany--Bonaparte crosses the
+St. Bernard, and descends in the rear of the Austrians--Battle of
+Marengo--Austrians retire behind the Mincio--Treaty between England and
+Austria--Austria continues the War--Battle of Hohenlinden--Peace of
+Luneville--War between England and the Northern Maritime League--Battle of
+Copenhagen--Murder of Paul--End of the Maritime War--English Army enters
+Egypt--French defeated at Alexandria--They capitulate at Cairo and
+Alexandria--Preliminaries of Peace between England and France signed at
+London, followed by Peace of Amiens--Pitt's Irish Policy and his
+retirement--Debates on the Peace--Aggressions of Bonaparte during the
+Continental Peace--Holland, Italy, Switzerland--Settlement of Germany under
+French and Russian influence--Suppression of Ecclesiastical States and Free
+Cities--Its effects--Stein--France under the Consulate--The Civil Code--The
+Concordat.
+
+
+[Overtures of Bonaparte to Austria and to England, 1799.]
+
+The establishment of the Consulate gave France peace from the strife of
+parties. Peace from foreign warfare was not less desired by the nation; and
+although the First Consul himself was restlessly planning the next
+campaign, it belonged to his policy to represent himself as the mediator
+between France and Europe. Discarding the usual diplomatic forms, Bonaparte
+addressed letters in his own name to the Emperor Francis and to King George
+III., deploring the miseries inflicted by war upon nations naturally
+allied, and declaring his personal anxiety to enter upon negotiations for
+peace. The reply of Austria which was courteously worded, produced an offer
+on the part of Bonaparte to treat for peace upon the basis of the Treaty of
+Campo Formio. Such a proposal was the best evidence of Bonaparte's real
+intentions. Austria had re-conquered Lombardy, and driven the armies of the
+Republic from the Adige to within a few miles of Nice. To propose a peace
+which should merely restore the situation existing at the beginning of the
+war was pure irony. The Austrian Government accordingly declared itself
+unable to treat without the concurrence of its allies. The answer of
+England to the overtures of the First Consul was rough and defiant. It
+recounted the causes of war and distrust which precluded England from
+negotiating with a revolutionary Government; and, though not insisting on
+the restoration of the Bourbons as a condition of peace, it stated that no
+guarantee for the sincerity and good behaviour of France would be so
+acceptable to Great Britain as the recall of the ancient family. [85]
+
+Few State papers have been distinguished by worse faults of judgment than
+this English manifesto. It was intended to recommend the Bourbons to France
+as a means of procuring peace: it enabled Bonaparte to represent England as
+violently interfering with the rights of the French people, and the
+Bourbons as seeking their restoration at the hand of the enemy of their
+country. The answer made to Pitt's Government from Paris was such as one
+high-spirited nation which had recently expelled its rulers might address
+to another that had expelled its rulers a century before. France, it was
+said, had as good a right to dismiss an incapable dynasty as Great Britain.
+If Talleyrand's reply failed to convince King George that before restoring
+the Bourbons he ought to surrender his own throne to the Stuarts, it
+succeeded in transferring attention from the wrongs inflicted by France to
+the pretensions advanced by England. That it affected the actual course of
+events there is no reason to believe. The French Government was well
+acquainted with the real grounds of war possessed by England, in spite of
+the errors by which the British Cabinet weakened the statement of its
+cause. What the mass of the French people now thought, or did not think,
+had become a matter of very little importance.
+
+[Situation of the Armies.]
+
+[Moreau invades South Germany, April, 1800.]
+
+The war continued. Winter and the early spring of 1800 passed in France
+amidst vigorous but concealed preparations for the campaign which was to
+drive the Austrians from Italy. In Piedmont the Austrians spent months in
+inaction, which might have given them Genoa and completed the conquest of
+Italy before Bonaparte's army could take the field. It was not until the
+beginning of April that Melas, their general, assailed the French positions
+on the Genoese Apennines; a fortnight more was spent in mountain warfare
+before Massena, who now held the French command, found himself shut up in
+Genoa and blockaded by land and sea. The army which Bonaparte was about to
+lead into Italy lay in between Dijon and Geneva, awaiting the arrival of
+the First Consul. On the Rhine, from Strasburg to Schaffhausen, a force of
+100,000 men was ready to cross into Germany under the command of Moreau,
+who was charged with the task of pushing the Austrians back from the Upper
+Danube, and so rendering any attack through Switzerland upon the
+communications of Bonaparte's Italian force impossible. Moreau's army was
+the first to move. An Austrian force, not inferior to Moreau's own, lay
+within the bend of the Rhine that covers Baden and Wuertemberg. Moreau
+crossed the Rhine at various points, and by a succession of ingenious
+manoeuvres led his adversary, Kray, to occupy all the roads through the
+Black Forest except those by which the northern divisions of the French
+were actually passing. A series of engagements, conspicuous for the skill
+of the French general and the courage of the defeated Austrians, gave
+Moreau possession of the country south of the Danube as far as Ulm, where
+Kray took refuge in his entrenched camp. Beyond this point Moreau's
+instructions forbade him to advance. His task was fulfilled by the
+severance of the Austrian army from the roads into Italy.
+
+[Bonaparte crosses the Alps, May, 1800.]
+
+Bonaparte's own army was now in motion. Its destination was still secret;
+its very existence was doubted by the Austrian generals. On the 8th of May
+the First Consul himself arrived at Geneva, and assumed the command. The
+campaign upon which this army was now entering was designed by Bonaparte to
+surpass everything that Europe had hitherto seen most striking in war. The
+feats of Massena and Suvaroff in the Alps had filled his imagination with
+mountain warfare. A victory over nature more imposing than theirs might, in
+the present position of the Austrian forces in Lombardy, be made the
+prelude to a victory in the field without a parallel in its effects upon
+the enemy. Instead of relieving Genoa by an advance along the coast-road,
+Bonaparte intended to march across the Alps and to descend in the rear of
+the Austrians. A single defeat would then cut the Austrians off from their
+communications with Mantua, and result either in the capitulation of their
+army or in the evacuation of the whole of the country that they had won,
+Bonaparte led his army into the mountains. The pass of the Great St.
+Bernard, though not a carriage-road, offered little difficulty to a
+commander supplied with every resource of engineering material and skill;
+and by this road the army crossed the Alps. The cannons were taken from
+their carriages and dragged up the mountain in hollowed trees; thousands of
+mules transported the ammunition and supplies; workshops for repairs were
+established on either slope of the mountain; and in the Monastery of St.
+Bernard there were stores collected sufficient to feed the soldiers as they
+reached the summit during six successive days (May 15-20). The passage of
+the St. Bernard was a triumph of organisation, foresight, and good
+management; as a military exploit it involved none of the danger, none of
+the suffering, none of the hazard, which gave such interest to the campaign
+of Massena and Suvaroff.
+
+[Bonaparte cuts off the Austrian army from Eastern Lombardy.]
+
+Bonaparte had rightly calculated upon the unreadiness of his enemy. The
+advanced guard of the French army poured down the valley of the Dora-Baltea
+upon the scanty Austrian detachments at Ivrea and Chiusella, before Melas,
+who had in vain been warned of the departure of the French from Geneva,
+arrived with a few thousand men at Turin to dispute the entrance into
+Italy. Melas himself, on the opening of the campaign, had followed a French
+division to Nice, leaving General Ott in charge of the army investing
+Genoa. On reaching Turin he discovered the full extent of his peril, and
+sent orders to Ott to raise the siege of Genoa and to join him with every
+regiment that he could collect. Ott, however, was unwilling to abandon the
+prey at this moment falling into his grasp. He remained stationary till the
+5th of June, when Massena, reduced to the most cruel extremities by famine,
+was forced to surrender Genoa to the besiegers. But his obstinate endurance
+had the full effect of a battle won. Ott's delay rendered Melas powerless
+to hinder the movements of Bonaparte, when, instead of marching upon Genoa,
+as both French and Austrians expected him to do, he turned eastward, and
+thrust his army between the Austrians and their own fortresses. Bonaparte
+himself entered Milan (June 2); Lannes and Murat were sent to seize the
+bridges over the Po and the Adda. The Austrian detachment guarding Piacenza
+was overpowered; the communications of Melas with the country north of the
+Powere completely severed. Nothing remained for the Austrian commander but
+to break through the French or to make his escape to Genoa.
+
+[Battle of Marengo, June 14, 1800.]
+
+[Conditions of Armistice.]
+
+The French centre was now at Stradella, half-way between Piacenza and
+Alessandria. Melas was at length joined by Ott at Alessandria, but so
+scattered were the Austrian forces, that out of 80,000 men Melas had not
+more than 33,000 at his command. Bonaparte's forces were equal in number;
+his only fear was that Melas might use his last line of retreat, and escape
+to Genoa without an engagement. The Austrian general, however, who had
+shared with Suvaroff the triumph over Joubert at Novi, resolved to stake
+everything upon a pitched battle. He awaited Bonaparte's approach at
+Alessandria. On the 12th of June Bonaparte advanced westward from
+Stradella. His anxiety lest Melas might be escaping from his hands
+increased with every hour of the march that brought him no tidings of the
+enemy; and on the 13th, when his advanced guard had come almost up to the
+walls of Alessandria without seeing an enemy, he could bear the suspense no
+longer, and ordered Desaix to march southward towards Novi and hold the
+road to Genoa. Desaix led off his division. Early the next morning the
+whole army of Melas issued from Alessandria, and threw itself upon the
+weakened line of the French at Marengo. The attack carried everything
+before it: at the end of seven hours' fighting, Melas, exhausted by his
+personal exertions, returned into Alessandria, and sent out tidings of a
+complete victory. It was at this moment that Desaix, who had turned at the
+sound of the cannon, appeared on the field, and declared that, although one
+battle had been lost, another might be won. A sudden cavalry-charge struck
+panic into the Austrians, who believed the battle ended and the foe
+overthrown. Whole brigades threw down their arms and fled; and ere the day
+closed a mass of fugitives, cavalry and infantry, thronging over the
+marshes of the Bormida, was all that remained of the victorious Austrian
+centre. The suddenness of the disaster, the desperate position of the army,
+cut off from its communications, overthrew the mind of Melas, and he agreed
+to an armistice more fatal than an unconditional surrender. The Austrians
+retired behind the Mincio, and abandoned to the French every fortress in
+Northern Italy that lay west of that river. A single battle had produced
+the result of a campaign of victories and sieges. Marengo was the most
+brilliant in conception of all Bonaparte's triumphs. If in its execution
+the genius of the great commander had for a moment failed him, no mention
+of the long hours of peril and confusion was allowed to obscure the
+splendour of Bonaparte's victory. Every document was altered or suppressed
+which contained a report of the real facts of the battle. The descriptions
+given to the French nation claimed only new homage to the First Consul's
+invincible genius and power. [86]
+
+[Austria continues the war.]
+
+At Vienna the military situation was viewed more calmly than in Melas'
+camp. The conditions of the armistice were generally condemned, and any
+sudden change in the policy of Austria was prevented by a treaty with
+England, binding Austria, in return for British subsidies, and for a secret
+promise of part of Piedmont, to make no separate peace with France before
+the end of February, 1801. This treaty was signed a few hours before the
+arrival of the news of Marengo. It was the work of Thugut, who still
+maintained his influence over the Emperor, in spite of growing unpopularity
+and almost universal opposition. Public opinion, however, forced the
+Emperor at least to take steps for ascertaining the French terms of peace.
+An envoy was sent to Paris; and, as there could be no peace without the
+consent of England, conferences were held with the object of establishing a
+naval armistice between England and France. England, however, refused the
+concessions demanded by the First Consul; and the negotiations were broken
+off in September. But this interval of three months had weakened the
+authority of the Minister and stimulated the intrigues which at every great
+crisis paralysed the action of Austria. At length, while Thugut was
+receiving the subsidies of Great Britain and arranging for the most
+vigorous prosecution of the war, the Emperor, concealing the transaction
+from his Minister, purchased a new armistice by the surrender of the
+fortresses of Ulm and Ingolstadt to Moreau's army. [87]
+
+[Battle of Hohenlinden, Dec. 3, 1800.]
+
+A letter written by Thugut after a council held on the 25th of September
+gives some indication of the stormy scene which then passed in the
+Emperor's presence. Thugut tendered his resignation, which was accepted;
+and Lehrbach, the author of the new armistice, was placed in office. But
+the reproaches of the British ambassador forced the weak Emperor to rescind
+this appointment on the day after it had been published to the world. There
+was no one in Vienna capable of filling the vacant post; and after a short
+interval the old Minister resumed the duties of his office, without,
+however, openly resuming the title. The remainder of the armistice was
+employed in strengthening the force opposed to Moreau, who now received
+orders to advance upon Vienna. The Archduke John, a royal strategist of
+eighteen, was furnished with a plan for surrounding the French army and
+cutting it off from its communications. Moreau lay upon the Isar; the
+Austrians held the line of the Inn. On the termination of the armistice the
+Austrians advanced and made some devious marches in pursuance of the
+Archduke's enterprise, until a general confusion, attributed to the
+weather, caused them to abandon their manoeuvres and move straight against
+the enemy. On the 3rd of December the Austrians plunged into the
+snow-blocked roads of the Forest of Hohenlinden, believing that they had
+nothing near them but the rear-guard of a retiring French division. Moreau
+waited until they had reached the heart of the forest, and then fell upon
+them with his whole force in front, in flank, and in the rear. The defeat
+of the Austrians was overwhelming. What remained of the war was rather a
+chase than a struggle. Moreau successively crossed the Inn, the Salza, and
+the Traun; and on December 25th the Emperor, seeing that no effort of Pitt
+could keep Moreau out of Vienna, accepted an armistice at Steyer, and
+agreed to treat for peace without reference to Great Britain.
+
+[Peace of Luneville, Feb. 9, 1801.]
+
+Defeats on the Mincio, announced during the following days, increased the
+necessity for peace. Thugut was finally removed from power. Some resistance
+was offered to the conditions proposed by Bonaparte, but these were
+directed more to the establishment of French influence in Germany than to
+the humiliation of the House of Hapsburg. Little was taken from Austria but
+what she had surrendered at Campo Formio. It was not by the cession of
+Italian or Slavonic provinces that the Government of Vienna paid for
+Marengo and Hohenlinden, but at the cost of that divided German race whose
+misfortune it was to have for its head a sovereign whose interests in the
+Empire and in Germany were among the least of all his interests. The Peace
+of Luneville, [88] concluded between France and the Emperor on the 9th of
+February, 1801, without even a reference to the Diet of the Empire, placed
+the minor States of Germany at the mercy of the French Republic. It left to
+the House of Hapsburg the Venetian territory which it had gained in 1797;
+it required no reduction of the Hapsburg influence in Italy beyond the
+abdication of the Grand Duke of Tuscany; but it ceded to France, without
+the disguises of 1797, the German provinces west of the Rhine, and it
+formally bound the Empire to compensate the dispossessed lay Sovereigns in
+such a manner as should be approved by France. The French Republic was thus
+made arbiter, as a matter of right, in the rearrangement of the maimed and
+shattered Empire. Even the Grand Duke of Tuscany, like his predecessor in
+ejection, the Duke of Modena, was to receive some portion of the German
+race for his subjects, in compensation for the Italians taken from him. To
+such a pass had political disunion brought a nation which at that time
+could show the greatest names in Europe in letters, in science, and in art.
+
+[Peace with Naples.]
+
+[Russia turns against England.]
+
+[Northern Maritime League, Dec., 1800.]
+
+Austria having succumbed, the Court of Naples, which had been the first of
+the Allies to declare war, was left at the mercy of Bonaparte. Its
+cruelties and tyranny called for severe punishment; but the intercession of
+the Czar kept the Bourbons upon the throne, and Naples received peace upon
+no harder condition than the exclusion of English vessels from its ports.
+England was now left alone in its struggle with the French Republic. Nor
+was it any longer to be a struggle only against France and its
+dependencies. The rigour with which the English Government had used its
+superiority at sea, combined with the folly which it had shown in the
+Anglo-Russian attack upon Holland, raised against it a Maritime League
+under the leadership of a Power which England had offended as a neutral and
+exasperated as an ally. Since the pitiful Dutch campaign, the Czar had
+transferred to Great Britain the hatred which he had hitherto borne to
+France. The occasion was skilfully used by Bonaparte, to whom, as a
+soldier, the Czar felt less repugnance than to the Government of advocates
+and contractors which he had attacked in 1799. The First Consul restored
+without ransom several thousands of Russian prisoners, for whom the
+Austrians and the English had refused to give up Frenchmen in exchange, and
+followed up this advance by proposing that the guardianship of Malta, which
+was now blockaded by the English, should be given to the Czar. Paul had
+caused himself to be made Grand Master of the Maltese Order of St. John of
+Jerusalem. His vanity was touched by Bonaparte's proposal, and a friendly
+relation was established between the French and Russian Governments.
+England, on the other hand, refused to place Malta under Russian
+guardianship, either before or after its surrender. This completed the
+breach between the Courts of London and St. Petersburg. The Czar seized all
+the English vessels in his ports and imprisoned their crews (Sept. 9). A
+difference of long standing existed between England and the Northern
+Maritime Powers, which was capable at any moment of being made a cause of
+war. The rights exercised over neutral vessels by English ships in time of
+hostilities, though good in international law, were so oppressive that, at
+the time of the American rebellion, the Northern Powers had formed a
+league, known as the Armed Neutrality, for the purpose of resisting by
+force the interference of the English with neutral merchantmen upon the
+high seas. Since the outbreak of war with France, English vessels had again
+pushed the rights of belligerents to extremes. The Armed Neutrality of 1780
+was accordingly revived under the auspices of the Czar. The League was
+signed on the 16th of December, 1800, by Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. Some
+days later Prussia gave in its adhesion. [89]
+
+[Points at issue.]
+
+The points at issue between Great Britain and the Neutrals were such as
+arise between a great naval Power intent upon ruining its adversary and
+that larger part of the world which remains at peace and desires to carry
+on its trade with as little obstruction as possible. It was admitted on all
+sides that a belligerent may search a neutral vessel in order to ascertain
+that it is not conveying contraband of war, and that a neutral vessel,
+attempting to enter a blockaded port, renders itself liable to forfeiture;
+but beyond these two points everything was in dispute. A Danish ship
+conveys a cargo of wine from a Bordeaux merchant to his agent in New York.
+Is the wine liable to be seized in the mid-Atlantic by an English cruiser,
+to the destruction of the Danish carrying-trade, or is the Danish flag to
+protect French property from a Power whose naval superiority makes capture
+upon the high seas its principal means of offence? England announces that a
+French port is in a state of blockade. Is a Swedish vessel, stopped while
+making for the port in question, to be considered a lawful prize, when, if
+it had reached the port, it would as a matter of fact have found no real
+blockade in existence? A Russian cargo of hemp, pitch, and timber is
+intercepted by an English vessel on its way to an open port in France. Is
+the staple produce of the Russian Empire to lose its market as contraband
+of war? Or is an English man-of-war to allow material to pass into France,
+without which the repair of French vessels of war would be impossible?
+
+[War between England and the Northern Maritime Powers, Jan., 1801.]
+
+These were the questions raised as often as a firm of shipowners in a
+neutral country saw their vessel come back into port cleared of its cargo,
+or heard that it was lying in the Thames awaiting the judgment of the
+Admiralty Court. Great Britain claimed the right to seize all French
+property, in whatever vessel it might be sailing, and to confiscate, as
+contraband of war, not only muskets, gunpowder, and cannon, but wheat, on
+which the provisioning of armies depended, and hemp, pitch, iron, and
+timber, out of which the navies of her adversary were formed. The Neutrals,
+on the other hand, demanded that a neutral flag should give safe passage to
+all goods on board, not being contraband of war; that the presence of a
+vessel of State as convoy should exempt merchantmen from search; that no
+port should be considered in a state of blockade unless a competent
+blockading force was actually in front of it; and that contraband of war
+should include no other stores than those directly available for battle.
+Considerations of reason and equity may be urged in support of every
+possible theory of the rights of belligerents and neutrals; but the theory
+of every nation has, as a matter of fact, been that which at the time
+accorded with its own interests. When a long era of peace had familiarised
+Great Britain with the idea that in the future struggles of Europe it was
+more likely to be a spectator than a belligerent, Great Britain accepted
+the Neutrals' theory of international law at the Congress of Paris in 1856;
+but in 1801, when the lot of England seemed to be eternal warfare, any
+limitation of the rights of a belligerent appeared to every English jurist
+to contradict the first principles of reason. Better to add a general
+maritime war to the existing difficulties of the country than to abandon
+the exercise of its naval superiority in crippling the commerce of an
+adversary. The Declaration of armed Neutrality, announcing the intention of
+the Allied Powers to resist the seizure of French goods on board their own
+merchantmen, was treated in this country as a declaration of war. The
+Government laid an embargo upon all vessels of the allied neutrals lying in
+English ports (Jan. 14th, 1801), and issued a swarm of privateers against
+the trading ships making for the Baltic. Negotiations failed to lower the
+demands of either side, and England prepared to deal with the navies of
+Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Prussia.
+
+[Battle of Copenhagen, April 2, 1801.]
+
+At the moment, the concentrated naval strength of England made it more than
+a match for its adversaries. A fleet of seventeen ships of the line sailed
+from Yarmouth on the 12th of March, under the command of Parker and Nelson,
+with orders to coerce the Danes and to prevent the junction of the
+confederate navies. The fleet reached the Sound. The Swedish batteries
+commanding the Sound failed to open fire. Nelson kept to the eastern side
+of the channel, and brought his ships safely past the storm of shot poured
+upon them from the Danish guns at Elsinore. He appeared before Copenhagen
+at mid-day on the 30th of March. Preparations for resistance were made by
+the Danes with extraordinary spirit and resolution. The whole population of
+Copenhagen volunteered for service on the ships, the forts, and the
+floating batteries. Two days were spent by the English in exploring the
+shallows of the channel; on the morning of the 2nd of April Nelson led his
+ships into action in front of the harbour. Three ran aground; the Danish
+fire from land and sea was so violent that after some hours Admiral Parker,
+who watched the engagement from the mid-channel, gave the signal of recall.
+Nelson laughed at the signal, and continued the battle. In another hour the
+six Danish men-of-war and the whole of the floating batteries were disabled
+or sunk. The English themselves had suffered most severely from a
+resistance more skilful and more determined than anything that they had
+experienced from the French, and Nelson gladly offered a truce as soon as
+his own victory was assured. The truce was followed by negotiation, and the
+negotiation by an armistice for fourteen weeks, a term which Nelson
+considered sufficient to enable him to visit and to overthrow the navies of
+Sweden and Russia.
+
+[Murder of Paul, March 23.]
+
+[Peace between England and the Northern Powers.]
+
+But an event had already occurred more momentous in its bearing upon the
+Northern Confederacy than the battle of Copenhagen itself. On the night of
+the 23rd of March the Czar of Russia was assassinated in his palace. Paul's
+tyrannical violence, and his caprice verging upon insanity, had exhausted
+the patience of a court acquainted with no mode of remonstrance but
+homicide. Blood-stained hands brought to the Grand Duke Alexander the crown
+which he had consented to receive after a pacific abdication. Alexander
+immediately reversed the policy of his father, and sent friendly
+communications both to the Government at London and to the commander of the
+British fleet in the Baltic. The maintenance of commerce with England was
+in fact more important to Russia than the protection of its carrying trade.
+Nelson's attack was averted. A compromise was made between the two
+Governments, which saved Russia's interests, without depriving England of
+its chief rights against France. The principles of the Armed Neutrality
+were abandoned by the Government of St. Petersburg in so far as they
+related to the protection of an enemy's goods by the neutral flag. Great
+Britain continued to seize French merchandise on board whatever craft it
+might be found; but it was stipulated that the presence of a ship of war
+should exempt neutral vessels from search by privateers, and that no port
+should be considered as in a state of blockade unless a reasonable
+blockading force was actually in front of it. The articles condemned as
+contraband were so limited as not to include the flax, hemp, and timber, on
+whose export the commerce of Russia depended. With these concessions the
+Czar was easily brought to declare Russia again neutral. The minor Powers
+of the Baltic followed the example of St. Petersburg; and the naval
+confederacy which had threatened to turn the balance in the conflict
+between England and the French Republic left its only trace in the
+undeserved suffering of Denmark.
+
+[Affairs in Egypt.]
+
+Eight years of warfare had left France unassailable in Western Europe, and
+England in command of every sea. No Continental armies could any longer be
+raised by British subsidies: the navies of the Baltic, with which Bonaparte
+had hoped to meet England on the seas, lay at peace in their ports. Egypt
+was now the only arena remaining where French and English combatants could
+meet, and the dissolution of the Northern Confederacy had determined the
+fate of Egypt by leaving England in undisputed command of the approach to
+Egypt by sea. The French army, vainly expecting reinforcements, and
+attacked by the Turks from the east, was caught in a trap. Soon after the
+departure of Bonaparte from Alexandria, his successor, General Kleber, had
+addressed a report to the Directory, describing the miserable condition of
+the force which Bonaparte had chosen to abandon. The report was intercepted
+by the English, and the Government immediately determined to accept no
+capitulation which did not surrender the whole of the French army as
+prisoners of war. An order to this effect was sent to the Mediterranean.
+Before, however, the order reached Sir Sidney Smith, the English admiral
+cooperating with the Turks, an agreement had been already signed by him at
+El Arish, granting Kleber's army a free return to France (Feb. 24, 1800).
+After Kleber, in fulfilment of the conditions of the treaty, had withdrawn
+his troops from certain positions, Sir Sidney Smith found himself compelled
+to inform the French General that in the negotiations of El Arish he had
+exceeded his powers, and that the British Government insisted upon the
+surrender of the French forces. Kleber replied by instantly giving battle
+to the Turks at Heliopolis, and putting to the rout an army six times as
+numerous as his own. The position of the French seemed to be growing
+stronger in Egypt, and the prospect of a Turkish re-conquest more doubtful,
+when the dagger of a fanatic robbed the French of their able chief, and
+transferred the command to General Menou, one of the very few French
+officers of marked incapacity who held command at any time during the war.
+The British Government, as soon as it learnt what had taken place between
+Kleber and Sir Sidney Smith, declared itself willing to be bound by the
+convention of El Arish. The offer was, however, rejected by the French. It
+was clear that the Turks could never end the war by themselves; and the
+British Ministry at last came to understand that Egypt must be re-conquered
+by English arms.
+
+[English army lands in Egypt, March, 1801.]
+
+[French capitulate at Cairo, June 27, 1801.]
+
+[And at Alexandria, Aug. 30.]
+
+On the 8th of March, 1801, a corps of 17,000 men, led by Sir Ralph
+Abercromby, landed at Aboukir Bay. According to the plan of the British
+Government, Abercromby's attack was to be supported by a Turkish corps from
+Syria, and by an Anglo-Indian division brought from Ceylon to Kosseir, on
+the Red Sea. The Turks and the Indian troops were, however, behind their
+time, and Abercromby opened the campaign alone. Menou had still 27,000
+troops at his disposal. Had he moved up with the whole of his army from
+Cairo, he might have destroyed the English immediately after their landing.
+Instead of doing so, he allowed weak isolated detachments of the French to
+sink before superior numbers. The English had already gained confidence of
+victory when Menou advanced in some force in order to give battle in front
+of Alexandria. The decisive engagement took place on the 21st of March. The
+French were completely defeated. Menou, however, still refused to
+concentrate his forces; and in the course of a few weeks 13,000 French
+troops which had been left behind at Cairo were cut off from communication
+with the rest of the army. A series of attempts made by Admiral Ganteaume
+to land reinforcements from France ended fruitlessly. Towards the end of
+June the arrival of a Turkish force enabled the English to surround the
+French in Cairo. The circuit of the works was too large to be successfully
+defended; on the other hand, the English were without the heavy artillery
+necessary for a siege. Under these circumstances the terms which had
+originally been offered at El Arish were again proposed to General Belliard
+for himself and the army of Cairo. They were accepted, and Cairo was
+surrendered to the English on condition that the garrison should be
+conveyed back to France (June 27). Soon after the capitulation General
+Baird reached Lower Egypt with an Anglo-Indian division. Menou with the
+remainder of the French army was now shut up in Alexandria. His forts and
+outworks were successively carried; his flotilla was destroyed; and when
+all hope of support from France had been abandoned, the army of Alexandria,
+which formed the remnant of the troops with which Bonaparte had won his
+earliest victories in Italy, found itself compelled to surrender the last
+stronghold of the French in Egypt (Aug. 30). It was the first important
+success which had been gained by English soldiers over the troops of the
+Republic; the first campaign in which English generalship had permitted the
+army to show itself in its true quality.
+
+[Negotiations for peace.]
+
+[Preliminaries of London, Oct. 1, 1801.]
+
+[Peace of Amiens, March 27, 1802.]
+
+Peace was now at hand. Soon after the Treaty of Luneville had withdrawn
+Austria from the war, unofficial negotiations had begun between the
+Governments of Great Britain and France. The object with which Pitt had
+entered upon the war, the maintenance of the old European system against
+the aggression of France, was now seen to be one which England must
+abandon. England had borne its share in the defence of the Continent. If
+the Continental Powers could no longer resist the ascendancy of a single
+State, England could not struggle for the Balance of Power alone. The
+negotiations of 1801 had little in common with those of 1796. Belgium,
+which had been the burden of all Pitt's earlier despatches, no longer
+figured as an object of contention. The frontier of the Rhine, with the
+virtual possession of Holland and Northern Italy, under the title of the
+Batavian, Ligurian, and Cisalpine Republics, was tacitly conceded to
+France. In place of the restoration of the Netherlands, the negotiators of
+1801 argued about the disposal of Egypt, of Malta, and of the colonies
+which Great Britain had conquered from France and its allies. Events
+decided the fate of Egypt. The restoration of Malta to the Knights of St.
+John was strenuously demanded by France, and not refused by England. It was
+in relation to the colonial claims of France that the two Governments found
+it most difficult to agree. Great Britain, which had lost no territory
+itself, had conquered nearly all the Asiatic and Atlantic colonies of the
+French Republic and of its Dutch and Spanish allies. In return for the
+restoration of Ceylon, the Cape of Good Hope, Guiana, Trinidad, and various
+East and West Indian settlements, France had nothing to offer to Great
+Britain but peace. If peace, however, was to be made, the only possible
+settlement was by means of a compromise; and it was finally agreed that
+England should retain Ceylon and Trinidad, and restore the rest of the
+colonies which it had taken from France, Spain, and Holland. Preliminaries
+of peace embodying these conditions were signed at London on the 1st of
+October, 1801. Hostilities ceased; but an interval of several months
+between the preliminary agreement and the conclusion of the final treaty
+was employed by Bonaparte in new usurpations upon the Continent, to which
+he forced the British Government to lend a kind of sanction in the
+continuance of the negotiations. The Government, though discontented, was
+unwilling to treat these acts as new occasions of war. The conferences were
+at length brought to a close, and the definitive treaty between France and
+Great Britain was signed at Amiens on the 27th of March, 1802. [90]
+
+[Pitt's retirement. Its cause.]
+
+[Union of Ireland and Great Britain, 1800.]
+
+The Minister who, since the first outbreak of war, had so resolutely
+struggled for the freedom of Europe, was no longer in power when Great
+Britain entered into negotiations with the First Consul. In the same week
+that Austria signed the Peace of Luneville, Pitt had retired from office.
+The catastrophe which dissolved his last Continental alliance may possibly
+have disposed Pitt to make way for men who could treat for peace with a
+better grace than himself, but the immediate cause of his retirement was an
+affair of internal policy. Among the few important domestic measures which
+Pitt had not sacrificed to foreign warfare was a project for the
+Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland had up to this time
+possessed a Parliament nominally independent of that of Great Britain. Its
+population, however, was too much divided to create a really national
+government; and, even if the internal conditions of the country had been
+better, the practical sovereignty of Great Britain must at that time have
+prevented the Parliament of Dublin from being more than an agency of
+ministerial corruption. It was the desire of Pitt to give to Ireland, in
+the place of a fictitious independence, that real participation in the
+political life of Great Britain which has more than recompensed Scotland
+and Wales for the loss of separate nationality. As an earnest of
+legislative justice, Pitt gave hopes to the leaders of the Irish Catholic
+party that the disabilities which excluded Roman Catholics from the House
+of Commons and from many offices in the public service would be no longer
+maintained. On this understanding the Catholics of Ireland abstained from
+offering to Pitt's project a resistance which would probably have led to
+its failure. A majority of members in the Protestant Parliament of Dublin
+accepted the price which the Ministry offered for their votes. A series of
+resolutions in favour of the Legislative Union of the two countries was
+transmitted to England in the spring of 1800; the English Parliament passed
+the Act of Union in the same summer; and the first United Parliament of
+Great Britain and Ireland assembled in London at the beginning of the year
+1801.
+
+[Pitt desires to emancipate the Catholics.]
+
+[Pitt resigns Feb. 1801.]
+
+[Addington Minister.]
+
+Pitt now prepared to fulfil his virtual promise to the Irish Catholics. A
+measure obliterating the ancient lines of civil and religious enmity, and
+calling to public life a class hitherto treated as alien and hostile to the
+State, would have been in true consonance with all that was best in Pitt's
+own statesmanship. But the ignorant bigotry of King George III. was excited
+against him by men who hated every act of justice or tolerance to Roman
+Catholics; and it proved of greater force than the genius of the Minister.
+The old threat of the King's personal enmity was publicly addressed to
+Pitt's colleague, Dundas, when the proposal for Catholic emancipation was
+under discussion in the Cabinet; and, with a just regard for his own
+dignity, Pitt withdrew from office (Feb. 5, 1801), unable to influence a
+Sovereign who believed his soul to be staked on the letter of the
+Coronation Oath. The ablest members of Pitt's government, Grenville,
+Dundas, and Windham, retired with their leader. Addington, Speaker of the
+House of Commons, became Prime Minister, with colleagues as undistinguished
+as himself. It was under the government of Addington that the negotiations
+were begun which resulted in the signature of Preliminaries of Peace in
+October 1801.
+
+[The Peace of 1801.]
+
+Pitt himself supported the new Ministry in their policy of peace;
+Grenville, lately Pitt's Foreign Minister, unsparingly condemned both the
+cession of the conquered colonies and the policy of granting France peace
+on any terms whatever. Viewed by the light of our own knowledge of events,
+the Peace of 1801 appears no more than an unprofitable break in an
+inevitable war; and perhaps even then the signs of Bonaparte's ambition
+justified those who, like Grenville, urged the nation to give no truce to
+France, and to trust to Bonaparte's own injustice to raise us up allies
+upon the Continent. But, for the moment, peace seemed at least worth a
+trial. The modes of prosecuting a war of offence were exhausted; the cost
+of the national defence remained the same. There were no more navies to
+destroy, no more colonies to seize; the sole means of injuring the enemy
+was by blockading his ports, and depriving him of his maritime commerce. On
+the other hand, the possibility of a French invasion required the
+maintenance of an enormous army and militia in England, and prevented any
+great reduction in the expenses of the war, which had already added two
+hundred millions to the National Debt. Nothing was lost by making peace,
+except certain colonies and military positions which few were anxious to
+retain. The argument that England could at any moment recover what she now
+surrendered was indeed a far sounder one than most of those which went to
+prove that the positions in question were of no real service. Yet even on
+the latter point there was no want of high authority. It was Nelson himself
+who assured the House of Lords that neither Malta nor the Cape of Good Hope
+could ever be of importance to Great Britain. [91] In the face of such
+testimony, the men who lamented that England should allow the adversary to
+recover any lost ground in the midst of a struggle for life or death,
+passed for obstinate fanatics. The Legislature reflected the general
+feeling of the nation; and the policy of the Government was confirmed in
+the Lords and the Commons by majorities of ten to one.
+
+[Aggressions of Bonaparte during the Continental peace.]
+
+[Holland, Sept., 1801.]
+
+Although the Ministry of Addington had acted with energy both in Egypt and
+in the Baltic, it was generally felt that Pitt's retirement marked the
+surrender of that resolute policy which had guided England since 1793. When
+once the Preliminaries of Peace had been signed in London, Bonaparte
+rightly judged that Addington would waive many just causes of complaint,
+rather than break off the negotiations which were to convert the
+Preliminaries into a definitive treaty. Accordingly, in his instructions to
+Joseph Bonaparte, who represented France at the conferences held at Amiens,
+the First Consul wrote, through Talleyrand, as follows:--"You are forbidden
+to entertain any proposition relating to the King of Sardinia, or to the
+Stadtholder, or to the internal affairs of Batavia, of Helvetia, or the
+Republic of Italy. None of these subjects have anything to do with the
+discussions of England." The list of subjects excluded from the
+consideration of England was the list of aggressions by which Bonaparte
+intended to fill up the interval of Continental peace. In the Treaty of
+Luneville, the independence of the newly-established republics in Holland,
+Switzerland, and Italy had been recognised by France. The restoration of
+Piedmont to the House of Savoy had been the condition on which the Czar
+made peace. But on every one of these points the engagements of France were
+made only to be broken. So far from bringing independence to the
+client-republics of France, the peace of Luneville was but the introduction
+to a series of changes which brought these States directly into the hands
+of the First Consul. The establishment of absolute government in France
+itself entailed a corresponding change in each of its dependencies, and the
+creation of an executive which should accept the First Consul's orders with
+as little question as the Prefect of a French department. Holland received
+its new constitution while France was still at war with England. The
+existing Government and Legislature of the Batavian Republic were dissolved
+(Sept., 1801), and replaced by a council of twelve persons, each holding
+the office of President in turn for a period of three months, and by a
+legislature of thirty-five, which met only for a few days in the year. The
+power given to the new President during his office was enough, and not more
+than enough, to make him an effective servant: a three-months' Minister and
+an Assembly that met and parted at the word of command were not likely to
+enter into serious rivalry with the First Consul. The Dutch peaceably
+accepted the constitution thus forced upon them; they possessed no means of
+resistance, and their affairs excited but little interest upon the
+Continent.
+
+[Bonaparte made President of the Italian Republic, Jan., 1802.]
+
+[Piedmont annexed to France, Sept., 1802.]
+
+Far more striking was the revolution next effected by the First Consul. In
+obedience to orders sent from Paris to the Legislature of the Cisalpine
+Republic, a body of four hundred and fifty Italian representatives crossed
+the Alps in the middle of winter in order to meet the First Consul at
+Lyons, and to deliberate upon a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic.
+The constitution had, as a matter of fact, been drawn up by Talleyrand, and
+sent to the Legislature at Milan some months before. But it was not for the
+sake of Italy that its representatives were collected at Lyons, in the
+presence of the First Consul, with every circumstance of national
+solemnity. It was the most striking homage which Bonaparte could exact from
+a foreign race in the face of all France; it was the testimony that other
+lands besides France desired Bonaparte to be their sovereign. When all the
+minor offices in the new Cisalpine Constitution had been filled, the
+Italians learnt that the real object of the convocation was to place the
+sceptre in Bonaparte's hands. They accepted the part which they found
+themselves forced to play, and offered to the First Consul the presidency
+of the Cisalpine State (Jan. 25, 1802). Unlike the French Consulate, the
+chief magistracy in the new Cisalpine Constitution might be prolonged
+beyond the term of ten years. Bonaparte had practically won the Crown of
+Lombardy; and he had given to France the example of a submission more
+unqualified than its own. A single phrase rewarded the people who had thus
+placed themselves in his hands. The Cisalpine Republic was allowed to
+assume the name of Italian Republic. The new title indicated the national
+hopes which had sprung up in Italy during the past ten years; it indicated
+no real desire on the part of Bonaparte to form either a free or a united
+Italian nation. In the Cisalpine State itself, although a good
+administration and the extinction of feudal privileges made Bonaparte's
+government acceptable, patriots who asked for freedom ran the risk of exile
+or imprisonment. What further influence was exercised by France upon
+Italian soil was not employed for the consolidation of Italy. Tuscany was
+bestowed by Bonaparte upon the Spanish Prince of Parma, and controlled by
+agents of the First Consul. Piedmont, which had long been governed by
+French generals, was at length definitely annexed to France.
+
+[Intervention in Switzerland.]
+
+[Bonaparte Mediator of the Helvetic League, Oct. 4, 1802.]
+
+Switzerland had not, like the Cisalpine Republic, derived its liberty from
+the victories of French armies, nor could Bonaparte claim the presidency of
+the Helvetic State under the title of its founder. The struggles of the
+Swiss parties, however, placed the country at the mercy of France. Since
+the expulsion of the Austrians by Massena in 1799, the antagonism between
+the Democrats of the town and the Federalists of the Forest Cantons had
+broken out afresh. A French army still occupied Switzerland; the Minister
+of the First Consul received instructions to interfere with all parties and
+consolidate none. In the autumn of 1801, the Federalists were permitted to
+dissolve the central Helvetic Government, which had been created by the
+Directory in 1798. One change followed another, until, on the 19th of May,
+1802, a second Constitution was proclaimed, based, like that of 1798, on
+centralising and democratic principles, and almost extinguishing the old
+local independence of the members of the Swiss League. No sooner had French
+partisans created this Constitution, which could only be maintained by
+force against the hostility of Berne and the Forest Cantons, than the
+French army quitted Switzerland. Civil war instantly broke out, and in the
+course of a few weeks the Government established by the French had lost all
+Switzerland except the Pays de Vaud. This was the crisis for which
+Bonaparte had been waiting. On the 4th of October a proclamation appeared
+at Lausanne, announcing that the First Consul had accepted the office of
+Mediator of the Helvetic League. A French army entered Switzerland.
+Fifty-six deputies from the cantons were summoned to Paris; and, in the
+beginning of 1803, a new Constitution, which left the central Government
+powerless in the hands of France and reduced the national sovereignty to
+cantonal self-administration, placed Switzerland on a level with the
+Batavian and the Cisalpine dependencies of Bonaparte. The Rhone Valley,
+with the mountains crossed by the new road over the Simplon, was converted
+into a separate republic under the title of La Valais. The new chief
+magistrate of the Helvetic Confederacy entered upon his office with a
+pension paid out of Bonaparte's secret police fund.
+
+[Settlement of Germany.]
+
+Such was the nature of the independence which the Peace of Luneville gave
+to Holland, to Northern Italy, and to Switzerland. The re-organisation of
+Germany, which was provided for by the same treaty, affected larger
+interests, and left more permanent traces upon European history. In the
+provinces ceded to France lay the territory of the ancient ecclesiastical
+princes of the empire, the Electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Treves; but,
+besides these spiritual sovereigns, a variety of secular potentates,
+ranging from the Elector Palatine, with 600,000 subjects, to the Prince of
+Wiedrunkel, with a single village, owned territory upon the left bank of
+the Rhine; and for the dispossessed lay princes new territories had now to
+be formed by the destruction of other ecclesiastical States in the interior
+of Germany. Affairs returned to the state in which they had stood in 1798,
+and the comedy of Rastadt was renewed at the point where it had been broken
+off: the only difference was that the French statesmen who controlled the
+partition of ecclesiastical Germany now remained in Paris, instead of
+coming to the Rhine, to run the risk of being murdered by Austrian hussars.
+Scarcely was the Treaty of Luneville signed when the whole company of
+intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with
+their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became
+known that by common consent the Free Cities of the Empire were now to be
+thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant Mathieu had no occasion
+to ask for bribes, or to manoeuvre for the position of arbiters in Germany.
+They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old
+school toiled up four flights of stairs to the office of the needy
+secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty Minister. They
+hugged Talleyrand's poodle; they vied with one another in gaining a smile
+from the child whom he brought up at his house. [92] The shrewder of them
+fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal
+care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long
+as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.
+
+This was the real process of the German re-organisation. A pretended one
+was meanwhile enacted by the Diet of Ratisbon. The Diet deliberated during
+the whole of the summer of 1801 without arriving at a single resolution.
+Not even the sudden change of Russian policy that followed the death of the
+Emperor Paul and deprived Bonaparte of the support of the Northern Maritime
+League, could stimulate the German Powers to united action. The old
+antagonism of Austria and Prussia paralysed the Diet. Austria sought a
+German indemnity for the dethroned Grand Duke of Tuscany; Prussia aimed at
+extending its influence into Southern Germany by the annexation of Wuerzburg
+and Bamberg. Thus the summer of 1801 was lost in interminable debate, until
+Bonaparte regained the influence over Russia which he had held before the
+death of Paul, and finally set himself free from all check and restraint by
+concluding peace with England.
+
+[German policy of Bonaparte.]
+
+No part of Bonaparte's diplomacy was more ably conceived or more likely to
+result in a permanent empire than that which affected the secondary States
+of Germany. The rivalry of Austria and Prussia, the dread of Austrian
+aggression felt in Bavaria, the grotesque ambition of the petty sovereigns
+of Baden and Wuertemburg, were all understood and turned to account in the
+policy which from this time shaped the French protectorate beyond the
+Rhine. Bonaparte intended to give to Prussia such an increase of territory
+upon the Baltic as should counterbalance the power of Austria; and for this
+purpose he was willing to sacrifice Hanover or Mecklenburg: but he forbade
+Prussia's extension to the south. Austria, so far from gaining new
+territory in Bavaria, was to be deprived of its own outlying possessions in
+Western Germany, and excluded from all influence in this region. Bavaria,
+dependent upon French protection against Austria, was to be greatly
+strengthened. Baden and Wuertemberg, enriched by the spoil of little
+sovereignties, of Bishoprics and Free Cities, were to look to France for
+further elevation and aggrandisement. Thus, while two rival Powers balanced
+one another upon the Baltic and the Lower Danube, the sovereigns of central
+and western Germany, owing everything to the Power that had humbled
+Austria, would find in submission to France the best security for their own
+gains, and the best protection against their more powerful neighbours.
+
+[Treaty between France and Russia for joint action in Germany, Oct. 11,
+1801.]
+
+One condition alone could have frustrated a policy agreeable to so many
+interests, namely, the existence of a national sentiment among the Germans
+themselves. But the peoples of Germany cared as little about a Fatherland
+as their princes. To the Hessian and the Bavarian at the centre of the
+Empire, Germany was scarcely more than it was to the Swiss or the Dutch,
+who had left the Empire centuries before. The inhabitants of the Rhenish
+Provinces had murmured for a while at the extortionate rule of the
+Directory; but their severance from Germany and their incorporation with a
+foreign race touched no fibre of patriotic regret; and after the
+establishment of a better order of things under the Consulate the
+annexation to France appears to have become highly popular. [93] Among a
+race whose members could thus be actually conquered and annexed without
+doing violence to their feelings Bonaparte had no difficulty in finding
+willing allies. While the Diet dragged on its debates upon the settlement
+of the Empire, the minor States pursued their bargainings with the French
+Government; and on the 14th of August, 1801, Bavaria signed the first of
+those treaties which made the First Consul the patron of Western Germany.
+Two months later a secret treaty between France and Russia admitted the new
+Czar, Alexander, to a share in the reorganisation of the Empire. The
+Governments of Paris and St. Petersburg pledged themselves to united action
+for the purpose of maintaining an equilibrium between Austria and Prussia;
+and the Czar further stipulated for the advancement of his own relatives,
+the Sovereigns of Bavaria, Baden, and Wuertemberg. The relationship of these
+petty princes to the Russian family enabled Bonaparte to present to the
+Czar, as a graceful concession, the very measure which most vitally
+advanced his own power in Germany. Alexander's intervention made resistance
+on the part of Austria hopeless. One after another the German Sovereigns
+settled with their patrons for a share in the spoil; and on the 3rd of
+June, 1802, a secret agreement between France and Russia embodied the whole
+of these arrangements, and disposed of almost all the Free Cities and the
+entire ecclesiastical territory of the Empire.
+
+[Diet of Ratisbon accepts French Scheme.]
+
+[End of German Ecclesiastical States and forty-five Free Cities, March,
+1803.]
+
+When everything had thus been settled by the foreigners, a Committee, to
+which the Diet of Ratisbon had referred the work of re-organisation, began
+its sessions, assisted by a French and a Russian representative. The Scheme
+which had been agreed upon between France and Russia was produced entire;
+and in spite of the anger and the threats of Austria it passed the
+Committee with no greater delay than was inseparable from everything
+connected with German affairs. The Committee presented the Scheme to the
+Diet: the Diet only agitated itself as to the means of passing the Scheme
+without violating those formalities which were the breath of its life. The
+proposed destruction of all the Ecclesiastical States, and of forty-five
+out of the fifty Free Cities, would extinguish a third part of the members
+of the Diet itself. If these unfortunate bodies were permitted to vote upon
+the measure, their votes might result in its rejection: if unsummoned,
+their absence would impair the validity of the resolution. By a masterpiece
+of conscientious pedantry it was agreed that the doomed prelates and cities
+should be duly called to vote in their turn, and that upon the mention each
+name the answer "absent" should be returned by an officer. Thus, faithful
+to its formalities, the Empire voted the destruction of its ancient
+Constitution; and the sovereignties of the Ecclesiastics and Free Cities,
+which had lasted for so many centuries, vanished from Europe (March, 1803).
+[94]
+
+[Effect on Germany.]
+
+The loss was small indeed. The internal condition of the priest-ruled
+districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance
+reduced life to a gross and dismal inertia. Except in their patronage of
+music, the ecclesiastical princes had perhaps rendered no single service to
+Germany. The Free Cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of
+their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged
+families. For Germany, as a nation, the destruction of these petty
+sovereignties was not only an advantage but an absolute necessity. The
+order by which they were superseded was not devised in the interest of
+Germany itself; yet even in the arrangements imposed by the foreigner
+Germany gained centres from which the institutions of modern political life
+entered into regions where no public authority had yet been known beyond
+the court of the bishop or the feudal officers of the manor. [95] Through
+the suppression of the Ecclesiastical States a Protestant majority was
+produced in the Diet. The change bore witness to the decline of Austrian
+and of Catholic energy during the past century; it scarcely indicated the
+future supremacy of the Protestant rival of Austria; for the real interests
+of Germany were but faintly imaged in the Diet, and the leadership of the
+race was still open to the Power which should most sincerely identify
+itself with the German nation. The first result of the changed character of
+the Diet was the confiscation of all landed property held by religious or
+charitable bodies, even where these had never advanced the slightest claim
+to political independence. The Diet declared the whole of the land held in
+Germany by pious foundations to be at the disposal of the Governments for
+purposes of religion, of education, and of financial relief. The more needy
+courts immediately seized so welcome an opportunity of increasing their
+revenues. Germany lost nothing by the dissolution of some hundreds of
+monasteries; the suppression of hospitals and the impoverishment of
+Universities was a doubtful benefit. Through the destruction of the
+Ecclesiastical States and the confiscation of Church lands, the support of
+an army of priests was thrown upon the public revenues. The Elector of
+Cologne, who had been an indifferent civil ruler, became a very prosperous
+clergyman on L20,000 a year. All the members of the annexed or disendowed
+establishments, down to the acolytes and the sacristans, were credited with
+annuities equal in value to what they had lost. But in the confusion caused
+by war the means to satisfy these claims was not always forthcoming; and
+the ecclesiastical revolution, so beneficial on the whole to the public
+interest, was not effected without much severe and undeserved individual
+suffering.
+
+[Governments in Germany become more absolute and more regular.]
+
+[Bavaria. Reforms of Montgelas.]
+
+[Suppression of the Knights.]
+
+The movement of 1803 put an end to an order of things more curious as a
+survival of the mixed religious and political form of the Holy Roman Empire
+than important in the actual state of Europe. The temporal power now lost
+by the Church in Germany had been held in such sluggish hands that its
+effect was hardly visible except in a denser prejudice and an idler life
+than prevailed under other Governments. The first consequence of its
+downfall was that a great part of Germany which had hitherto had no
+political organisation at all gained the benefit of a regular system of
+taxation, of police, of civil and of criminal justice. If harsh and
+despotic, the Governments which rose to power at the expense of the Church
+were usually not wanting in the love of order and uniformity. Officers of
+the State administered a fixed law where custom and privilege had hitherto
+been the only rule. Appointments ceased to be bought or inherited; trades
+and professions were thrown open; the peasant was relieved of his heaviest
+feudal burdens. Among the newly consolidated States, Bavaria was the one
+where the reforming impulse of the time took the strongest form. A new
+dynasty, springing from the west of the Rhine, brought something of the
+spirit of French liberalism into a country hitherto unsurpassed in Western
+Europe for its ignorance and bigotry. [96] The Minister Montgelas, a
+politician of French enlightenment, entered upon the same crusade against
+feudal and ecclesiastical disorder which Joseph had inaugurated in Austria
+twenty years before. His measures for subjecting the clergy to the law, and
+for depriving the Church of its control over education, were almost
+identical with those which in 1790 had led to the revolt of Belgium; and
+the Bavarian landowners now unconsciously reproduced all the mediaeval
+platitudes of the University of Louvain. Montgelas organised and levelled
+with a remorseless common sense. Among his victims there was a class which
+had escaped destruction in the recent changes. The Knights of the Empire,
+with their village jurisdictions, were still legally existent; but to
+Montgelas such a class appeared a mere absurdity, and he sent his soldiers
+to disperse their courts and to seize their tolls. Loud lamentation
+assailed the Emperor at Vienna. If the dethroned bishops had bewailed the
+approaching extinction of Christianity in Europe, the knights just as
+convincingly deplored the end of chivalry. Knightly honour, now being swept
+from the earth, was proved to be the true soul of German nationality, the
+invisible support of the Imperial throne. For a moment the intervention of
+the Emperor forced Montgelas to withdraw his grasp from the sacred rents
+and turnpikes; but the threatening storm passed over, and the example of
+Bavaria was gradually followed by the neighbouring Courts.
+
+[Stein and the Duke of Nassau.]
+
+[Stein's attack on the Minor Princes.]
+
+It was to the weak and unpatriotic princes who were enriched by the French
+that the knights fell victims. Among the knights thus despoiled by the Duke
+of Nassau was the Ritter vom Stein, a nobleman who had entered the Prussian
+service in the reign of Frederick the Great, and who had lately been placed
+in high office in the newly-acquired province of Muenster. Stein was
+thoroughly familiar with the advantages of systematic government; the loss
+of his native parochial jurisdiction was not a serious one to a man who had
+become a power in Prussia; and although domestic pride had its share in
+Stein's resentment, the protest now published by him against the
+aggressions of the Duke of Nassau sounded a different note from that of his
+order generally. That a score of farmers should pay their dues and take off
+their hats to the officer of the Duke of Nassau instead of to the bailiff
+of the Ritter vom Stein was not a matter to excite deep feeling in Europe;
+but that the consolidation of Germany should be worked out in the interest
+of French hirelings instead of in the interests of the German people was
+justly treated by Stein as a subject for patriotic anger. In his letter
+[97] to the Duke of Nassau, Stein reproached his own despoiler and the
+whole tribe of petty princes with that treason to German interests which
+had won them the protection of the foreigner. He argued that the knights
+were a far less important obstacle to German unity than those very princes
+to whom the knights were sacrificed; and he invoked that distant day which
+should give to Germany a real national unity, over knights and princes
+alike, under the leadership of a single patriotic sovereign. Stein's appeal
+found little response among his contemporaries. Like a sober man among
+drunkards, he seemed to be scarcely rational. The simple conception of a
+nation sacrificing its internal rivalries in order to avert foreign rule
+was folly to the politicians who had all their lives long been outwitting
+one another at Vienna or Berlin, or who had just become persons of
+consequence in Europe through the patronage of Bonaparte. Yet, if years of
+intolerable suffering were necessary before any large party in Germany rose
+to the idea of German union, the ground had now at least been broken. In
+the changes that followed the Peace of Luneville the fixity and routine of
+Germany received its death-blow. In all but name the Empire had ceased to
+exist. Change and re-constitution in one form or another had become
+familiar to all men's minds; and one real statesman at the least was
+already beginning to learn the lesson which later events were to teach to
+the rest of the German race.
+
+[France, 1801-1804.]
+
+[Civil Code.]
+
+Four years of peace separated the Treaty of Luneville from the next
+outbreak of war between France and any Continental Power. They were years
+of extension of French influence in every neighbouring State; in France
+itself, years of the consolidation of Bonaparte's power, and of the decline
+of everything that checked his personal rule. The legislative bodies sank
+into the insignificance for which they had been designed; everything that
+was suffered to wear the appearance of strength owed its vigour to the
+personal support of the First Consul. Among the institutions which date
+from this period, two, equally associated with the name of Napoleon, have
+taken a prominent place in history, the Civil Code and the Concordat. Since
+the middle of the eighteenth century the codification of law had been
+pursued with more or less success by almost every Government in Europe. In
+France the Constituent Assembly of 1789 had ordered the statutes, by which
+it superseded the old variety of local customs, to be thus cast into a
+systematic form. A Committee of the Convention had completed the draft of a
+Civil Code. The Directory had in its turn appointed a Commission; but the
+project still remained unfulfilled when the Directory was driven from
+power. Bonaparte instinctively threw himself into a task so congenial to
+his own systematising spirit, and stimulated the efforts of the best
+jurists in France by his personal interest and pride in the work of
+legislation. A Commission of lawyers, appointed by the First Consul,
+presented the successive chapters of a Civil Code to the Council of State.
+In the discussions in the Council of State Bonaparte himself took an
+active, though not always a beneficial, part. The draft of each chapter, as
+it left the Council of State, was submitted, as a project of Law, to the
+Tribunate and to the Legislative Body. For a moment the free expression of
+opinion in the Tribunate caused Bonaparte to suspend his work in impatient
+jealousy. The Tribunate, however, was soon brought to silence; and in
+March, 1804, France received the Code which has formed from that time to
+the present the basis of its civil rights.
+
+[Napoleon as a legislator.]
+
+When Napoleon declared that he desired his fame to rest upon the Civil
+Code, he showed his appreciation of the power which names exercise over
+mankind. It is probable that a majority of the inhabitants of Western
+Europe believe that Napoleon actually invented the laws which bear his
+name. As a matter of fact, the substance of these laws was fixed by the
+successive Assemblies of the Revolution; and, in the final revision which
+produced the Civil Code, Napoleon appears to have originated neither more
+nor less than several of the members of his Council whose names have long
+been forgotten. He is unquestionably entitled to the honour of a great
+legislator, not, however, as one who, like Solon or like Mahomet, himself
+created a new body of law, but as one who most vigorously pursued the work
+of consolidating and popularising law by the help of all the skilled and
+scientific minds whose resources were at his command. Though faulty in
+parts, the Civil Code, through its conciseness, its simplicity, and its
+justice, enabled Napoleon to carry a new and incomparably better social
+order into every country that became part of his Empire. Four other Codes,
+appearing at intervals from the year 1804 to the year 1810, embodied, in a
+corresponding form, the Law of Commerce, the Criminal Law, and the Rules of
+Civil and of Criminal Process. [98] The whole remains a monument of the
+legal energy of the period which began in 1789, and of the sagacity with
+which Napoleon associated with his own rule all the science and the
+reforming zeal of the jurists of his day.
+
+[The Concordat.]
+
+[The Concordat destroys the Free Church.]
+
+Far more distinctively the work of Napoleon's own mind was the
+reconciliation with the Church of Rome effected by the Concordat. It was a
+restoration of religion similar to that restoration of political order
+which made the public service the engine of a single will. The bishops and
+priests, whose appointment the Concordat transferred from their
+congregations to the Government, were as much instruments of the First
+Consul as his prefects and his gendarmes. The spiritual wants of the
+public, the craving of the poor for religious consolation, were made the
+pretext for introducing the new theological police. But the situation of
+the Catholic Church was in reality no worse in France at the commencement
+of the Consulate than its present situation in Ireland. The Republic had
+indeed subjected the non-juring priests to the heaviest penalties, but the
+exercise of Christian worship, which, even in the Reign of Terror, had only
+been interrupted by local and individual fanaticism, had long recovered the
+protection of the law, services in the open air being alone prohibited.
+[99] Since 1795 the local authorities had been compelled to admit the
+religious societies of their district to the use of church-buildings.
+Though the coup d'etat of Fructidor, 1797, renewed the persecution of
+non-juring priests, it in no way checked the activity of the Constitutional
+Church, now free from all connection with the Civil Government. While the
+non-juring priests, exiled as political offenders, or theatrically adoring
+the sacred elements in the woods, pretended that the age of the martyrs had
+returned to France, a Constitutional Church, ministering in 4,000 parishes,
+unprivileged but unharassed by the State, supplied the nation with an
+earnest and respectable body of clergy. [100] But in the eyes of the First
+Consul everything left to voluntary association was so much lost to the
+central power. In the order of nature, peasants must obey priests, priests
+must obey bishops, and bishops must obey the First Consul. An alliance with
+the Pope offered to Bonaparte the means of supplanting the popular
+organisation of the Constitutional Church by an imposing hierarchy, rigid
+in its orthodoxy and unquestioning in its devotion to himself. In return
+for the consecration of his own rule, Bonaparte did not shrink from
+inviting the Pope to an exercise of authority such as the Holy See had
+never even claimed in France. The whole of the existing French Bishops,
+both the exiled non-jurors and those of the Constitutional Church, were
+summoned to resign their Sees into the hands of the Pope; against all who
+refused to do so sentence of deposition was pronounced by the Pontiff,
+without a word heard in defence, or the shadow of a fault alleged. The Sees
+were re-organised, and filled up by nominees of the First Consul. The
+position of the great body of the clergy was substantially altered in its
+relation to the Bishops. Episcopal power was made despotic, like all other
+power in France: thousands of the clergy, hitherto secure in their livings,
+were placed at the disposal of their bishop, and rendered liable to be
+transferred at the pleasure of their superior from place to place. The
+Constitutional Church vanished, but religion appeared to be honoured by
+becoming part of the State.
+
+[Results in Ultramontanism.]
+
+In its immediate action, the Napoleonic Church served the purpose for which
+it was intended. For some few years the clergy unflaggingly preached,
+prayed, and catechised to the glory of their restorer. In the greater cycle
+of religious change, the Concordat of Bonaparte appears in another light.
+However little appreciated at the time, it was the greatest, the most
+critical, victory which the Roman See has ever gained over the more
+enlightened and the more national elements in the Catholic Church. It
+converted the Catholicism of France from a faith already far more
+independent than that of Fenelon and Bossuet into the Catholicism which in
+our own day has outstripped the bigotry of Spain and Austria in welcoming
+the dogma of Papal infallibility. The lower clergy, condemned by the State
+to an intolerable subjection, soon found their only hope in an appeal to
+Rome, and instinctively worked as the emissaries of the Roman See. The
+Bishops, who owed their office to an unprecedented exercise of Papal power
+and to the destruction of religious independence in France, were not the
+men who could maintain a struggle with the Papacy for the ancient Gallican
+liberties. In the resistance to the Papacy which had been maintained by the
+Continental Churches in a greater or less degree during the eighteenth
+century, France had on the whole taken the most effective part; but, from
+the time when the Concordat dissolved both the ancient and the
+revolutionary Church system of France, the Gallican tradition of the past
+became as powerless among the French clergy as the philosophical liberalism
+of the Revolution.
+
+[So do the German changes.]
+
+In Germany the destruction of the temporal power of the Church tended
+equally to Ultramontanism. An archbishop of Cologne who governed half a
+million subjects was less likely to prostrate himself before the Papal
+Chair than an archbishop of Cologne who was only one among a regiment of
+churchmen. The spiritual Electors and Princes who lost their dominions in
+1801 had understood by the interests of their order something more tangible
+than a body of doctrines. When not hostile to the Papacy, they had usually
+treated it with indifference. The conception of a Catholic society exposed
+to persecution at the hands of the State on account of its devotion to Rome
+was one which had never entered the mind of German ecclesiastics in the
+eighteenth century. Without the changes effected in Germany by the Treaty
+of Luneville, without the Concordat of Bonaparte, Catholic orthodoxy would
+never have become identical with Ultramontanism. In this respect the
+opening years of the present century mark a turning-point in the relation
+of the Church to modern life. Already, in place of the old monarchical
+Governments, friendly on the whole to the Catholic Church, events were
+preparing the way for that changed order with which the century seems
+destined to close--an emancipated France, a free Italy, a secular,
+state-disciplined Germany, and the Church in conspiracy against them all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+England claims Malta--War renewed--Bonaparte occupies Hanover, and
+blockades the Elbe--Remonstrances of Prussia--Cadoudal's Plot--Murder of
+the Duke of Enghien--Napoleon Emperor--Coalition of 1805--Prussia holds
+aloof--State of Austria--Failure of Napoleon's attempt to gain naval
+superiority in the Channel--Campaign in Western Germany--Capitulation of
+Ulm--Trafalgar--Treaty of Potsdam between Prussia and the Allies--The
+French enter Vienna--Haugwitz sent to Napoleon with Prussian Ultimatum--
+Battle of Austerlitz--Haugwitz signs a Treaty of Alliance with
+Napoleon--Peace--Treaty of Presburg--End of the Holy Roman Empire--
+Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte--Battle of Maida--The Napoleonic Empire
+and Dynasty--Federation of the Rhine--State of Germany--Possibility of
+maintaining the Empire of 1806.
+
+
+[England prepares for war, Nov., 1802.]
+
+[England claims Malta.]
+
+War was renewed between France and Great Britain in the spring of 1803.
+Addington's Government, in their desire for peace, had borne with
+Bonaparte's aggressions during all the months of negotiation at Amiens;
+they had met his complaints against the abuse of the English press by
+prosecuting his Royalist libellers; throughout the Session of 1802 they had
+upheld the possibility of peace against the attacks of their parliamentary
+opponents. The invasion of Switzerland in the autumn of 1802, following the
+annexation of Piedmont, forced the Ministry to alter its tone. The King's
+Speech at the meeting of Parliament in November declared that the changes
+in operation on the Continent demanded measures of security on the part of
+Great Britain. The naval and military forces of the country were restored
+to a war-footing; the evacuation of Malta by Great Britain, which had
+hitherto been delayed chiefly through a misunderstanding with Russia, was
+no longer treated as a matter of certainty. While the English Government
+still wavered, a challenge was thrown down by the First Consul which forced
+them into decided action. The _Moniteur_ published on the 13th of January,
+1803, a report upon Egypt by Colonel Sebastiani, pointing in the plainest
+terms to the renewal of French attacks upon the East. The British
+Government demanded explanations, and declared that until satisfaction was
+given upon this point they should retain possession of Malta. Malta was in
+fact appropriated by Great Britain as an equivalent for the Continental
+territory added to France since the end of the war. [101]
+
+[War, May, 1803.]
+
+It would have been better policy if, some months earlier, Bonaparte had
+been required to withdraw from Piedmont or from Switzerland, under pain of
+hostilities with England. Great Britain had as little technical right to
+retain Malta as Bonaparte had to annex Piedmont. The desire for peace had,
+however, led Addington's Government to remain inactive until Bonaparte's
+aggressions had become accomplished facts. It was now too late to attempt
+to undo them: England could only treat the settlement of Amiens as
+superseded, and claim compensation on its own side. Malta was the position
+most necessary to Great Britain, in order to prevent Bonaparte from
+carrying out projects in Egypt and Greece of which the Government had
+evidence independent of Sebastiani's report. The value of Malta, so lately
+denied by Nelson, was now fully understood both in France and England. No
+sooner had the English Ministry avowed its intention of retaining the
+island than the First Consul declared himself compelled to take up arms in
+behalf of the faith of treaties. Ignoring his own violations of
+treaty-rights in Italy and Switzerland, Bonaparte declared the retention of
+Malta by Great Britain to be an outrage against all Europe. He assailed the
+British Ambassador with the utmost fury at a reception held at the
+Tuileries on the 13th of March; and, after a correspondence of two months,
+which probably marked his sense of the power and obstinacy of his enemy,
+the conflict was renewed which was now to continue without a break until
+Bonaparte was driven from his throne.
+
+[Bonaparte and Hanover.]
+
+So long as England was without Continental allies its warfare was limited
+to the seizure of colonies and the blockade of ports: on the part of France
+nothing could be effected against the island Power except by actual
+invasion. There was, however, among the communities of Germany one which,
+in the arguments of a conqueror, might be treated as a dependency of
+England, and made to suffer for its connection with the British Crown.
+Hanover had hitherto by common agreement been dissociated from the wars in
+which its Elector engaged as King of England; even the personal presence of
+King George II. at the battle of Dettingen had been held no ground for
+violating its neutrality. Bonaparte, however, was untroubled by precedents
+in a case where he had so much to gain. Apart from its value as a possible
+object of exchange in the next treaty with England, Hanover would serve as
+a means of influencing Prussia: it was also worth so many millions in cash
+through the requisitions which might be imposed upon its inhabitants. The
+only scruple felt by Bonaparte in attacking Hanover arose from the
+possibility of a forcible resistance on the part of Prussia to the
+appearance of a French army in North Germany. Accordingly, before the
+invasion began, General Duroc was sent to Berlin to inform the King of the
+First Consul's intentions, and to soothe any irritation that might be felt
+at the Prussian Court by assurances of friendship and respect.
+
+[Prussia and Hanover.]
+
+It was a moment of the most critical importance to Prussia. Prussia was the
+recognised guardian of Northern Germany; every consideration of interest
+and of honour required that its Government should forbid the proposed
+occupation of Hanover--if necessary, at the risk of actual war. Hanover in
+the hands of France meant the extinction of German independence up to the
+frontiers of the Prussian State. If, as it was held at Berlin, the cause of
+Great Britain was an unjust one, and if the connection of Hanover with the
+British Crown was for the future to make that province a scapegoat for the
+offences of England, the wisest course for Prussia would have been to
+deliver Hanover at once from its French and from its English enemies by
+occupying it with its own forces. The Foreign Minister, Count Haugwitz,
+appears to have recommended this step, but his counsels were overruled.
+King Frederick William III., who had succeeded his father in 1797, was a
+conscientious but a timid and spiritless being. Public affairs were in the
+hands of his private advisers, of whom the most influential were the
+so-called cabinet-secretaries, Lombard and Beyme, men credulously anxious
+for the goodwill of France, and perversely blind to the native force and
+worth which still existed in the Prussian Monarchy. [102] Instead of
+declaring the entry of the French into Hanover to be absolutely
+incompatible with the safety of the other North German States, King
+Frederick William endeavoured to avert it by diplomacy. He tendered his
+mediation to the British Government upon condition of the evacuation of
+Malta; and, when this proposal was bluntly rejected, he offered to the
+First Consul his personal security that Hanover should pay a sum of money
+in order to be spared the intended invasion.
+
+[French enter Hanover, May, 1803.]
+
+[Oppression in Hanover, 1803-1805.]
+
+Such a proposal marked the depth to which Prussian statemanship had sunk;
+it failed to affect the First Consul in the slightest degree. While
+negotiations were still proceeding, a French division, commanded by General
+Mortier, entered Hanover (May, 1803). The Hanoverian army was lost through
+the follies of the civil Government; the Duke of Cambridge, commander of
+one of its divisions, less ingenious than his brother the Duke of York in
+finding excuses for capitulation, resigned his commission, and fled to
+England, along with many brave soldiers, who subsequently found in the army
+of Great Britain the opportunity for honourable service which was denied to
+them at home. Hanover passed into the possession of France, and for two
+years the miseries of French occupation were felt to the full. Extortion
+consumed the homely wealth of the country; the games and meetings of the
+people were prohibited; French spies violated the confidences of private
+life; law was administered by foreign soldiers; the press existed only for
+the purpose of French proselytism. It was in Hanover that the bitterness of
+that oppression was first felt which subsequently roused all North Germany
+against a foreign master, and forced upon the race the long-forgotten
+claims of patriotism and honour.
+
+[French blockade the Elbe.]
+
+[Vain remonstrance of Prussia.]
+
+Bonaparte had justly calculated upon the inaction of the Prussian
+Government when he gave the order to General Mortier to enter Hanover; his
+next step proved the growth of his confidence in Prussia's impassivity. A
+French force was despatched to Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the Elbe, in order
+to stop the commerce of Great Britain with the interior of Germany. The
+British Government immediately informed the Court of Berlin that it should
+blockade the Elbe and the Weser against the ships of all nations unless the
+French soldiers withdrew from the Elbe. As the linen trade of Silesia and
+other branches of Prussian industry depended upon the free navigation of
+the Elbe, the threatened reprisals of the British Government raised very
+serious questions for Prussia. It was France, not England, that had first
+violated the neutrality of the river highway; and the King of Prussia now
+felt himself compelled to demand assurances Bonaparte that the interests of
+Germany should suffer no further injury at his hands. A letter was written
+by the King to the First Consul, and entrusted to the cabinet-secretary,
+Lombard, who carried it to Napoleon at Brussels (July, 1803). Lombard, the
+son of French parents who had settled at Berlin in the reign of Frederick
+the Great, had risen from a humble station through his skill in expression
+in the two languages that were native to him; and the accomplishments which
+would have made him a good clerk or a successful journalist made him in the
+eyes of Frederick William a counsellor for kings. The history of his
+mission to Brussels gives curious evidence both of the fascination
+exercised by Napoleon over common minds, and of the political helplessness
+which in Prussia could now be mistaken for the quality of a statesman.
+Lombard failed to obtain from Napoleon any guarantee or security whatever;
+yet he wrote back in terms of the utmost delight upon the success of his
+mission. Napoleon had infatuated him by the mere exercise of his personal
+charm. "What I cannot describe," said Lombard, in his report to the King
+relating his interview with the First Consul, [103] "is the tone of
+goodness and noble frankness with which he expressed his reverence for your
+Majesty's rights, and asked for that confidence from your Majesty which he
+so well deserves." "I only wish," he cried at the close of Napoleon's
+address, "that I could convey to the King, my master, every one of your
+words and the tone in which they are uttered; he would then, I am sure,
+feel a double joy at the justice with which you have always been treated at
+his hands." Lombard's colleagues at Berlin were perhaps not stronger men
+than the envoy himself, but they were at least beyond the range of
+Napoleon's voice and glance, and they received this rhapsody with coldness.
+They complained that no single concession had been made by the First Consul
+upon the points raised by the King. Cuxhaven continued in French hands; the
+British inexorably blockaded the Germans upon their own neutral waters; and
+the cautious statecraft of Prussia proved as valueless to Germany as the
+obstinate, speculating warfare of Austria.
+
+[Alexander displeased.]
+
+There was, however, a Power which watched the advance of French dominion
+into Northern Germany with less complaisance than the Germans themselves.
+The Czar of Russia had gradually come to understand the part allotted to
+him by Bonaparte since the Peace of Luneville, and was no longer inclined
+to serve as the instrument of French ambition. Bonaparte's occupation of
+Hanover changed the attitude of Alexander into one of coldness and
+distrust. Alexander saw and lamented the help which he himself had given to
+Bonaparte in Germany: events that now took place in France itself, as well
+as the progress of French intrigues in Turkey, [104] threw him into the
+arms of Bonaparte's enemies, and prepared the way for a new European
+coalition.
+
+[Bonaparte about to become Emperor.]
+
+[Murder of the Duke of Enghien, March 20, 1804.]
+
+The First Bonaparte Consul had determined to assume the dignity of Emperor.
+The renewal of war with England excited a new outburst of enthusiasm for
+his person; nothing was wanting to place the crown on his head but the
+discovery of a plot against his life. Such a plot had been long and
+carefully followed by the police. A Breton gentleman, Georges Cadoudal, had
+formed the design of attacking the First Consul in the streets of Paris in
+the midst of his guards. Cadoudal and his fellow-conspirators, including
+General Pichegru, were traced by the police from the coast of Normandy to
+Paris: an unsuccessful attempt was made to lure the Count of Artois, and
+other royal patrons of the conspiracy, from Great Britain. When all the
+conspirators who could be enticed to France were collected within the
+capital, the police, who had watched every stage of the movement, began to
+make arrests. Moreau, the last Republican soldier of France, was charged
+with complicity in the plot. Pichegru and Cadoudal were thrown into prison,
+there to await their doom; Moreau, who probably wished for the overthrow of
+the Consular Government, but had no part in the design against Bonaparte's
+life, [105] was kept under arrest and loaded with official calumny. One
+sacrifice more remained to be made, in place of the Bourbon d'Artois, who
+baffled the police of the First Consul beyond the seas. In the territory of
+Baden, twelve miles from the French frontier, there lived a prince of the
+exiled house, the Duke of Enghien, a soldier under the first Coalition
+against France, now a harmless dependent on the bounty of England. French
+spies surrounded him; his excursions into the mountains gave rise to a
+suspicion that he was concerned in Pichegru's plot. This was enough to mark
+him for destruction. Bonaparte gave orders that he should be seized,
+brought to Paris, and executed. On the 15th of March, 1804, a troop of
+French soldiers crossed the Rhine and arrested the Duke in his own house at
+Ettenheim. They arrived with him at Paris on the 20th. He was taken to the
+fort of Vincennes without entering the city. On that same night a
+commission of six colonels sat in judgment upon the prisoner, whose grave
+was already dug, and pronounced sentence of death without hearing a word of
+evidence. At daybreak the Duke was led out and shot.
+
+[Napoleon Emperor, May 18, 1804.]
+
+If some barbaric instinct made the slaughter of his predecessor's kindred
+in Bonaparte's own eyes the omen of a successful usurpation, it was not so
+with Europe generally. One universal sense of horror passed over the
+Continent. The Court of Russia put on mourning; even the Diet of Ratisbon
+showed signs of human passion at the indignity done to Germany by the
+seizure of the Duke of Enghien on German soil. Austria kept silent, but
+watched the signs of coming war. France alone showed no pity. Before the
+Duke of Enghien had been dead a week, the Senate besought Napoleon to give
+to France the security of a hereditary throne. Prefects, bishops, mayors,
+and councils with one voice repeated the official prayer. A resolution in
+favour of imperial rule was brought forward in the Tribunate, and passed,
+after a noble and solitary protest on the part of Carnot. A decree of the
+Senate embodied the terms of the new Constitution; and on the 18th of May,
+without waiting for the sanction of a national vote, Napoleon assumed the
+title of Emperor of the French.
+
+[Title of Emperor of Austria, Aug., 1804.]
+
+In France itself the change was one more of the name than of the substance
+of power. Napoleon could not be vested with a more absolute authority than
+he already possessed; but the forms of republican equality vanished; and
+although the real social equality given to France by the Revolution was
+beyond reach of change, the nation had to put up with a bastard Court and a
+fictitious aristocracy of Corsican princes, Terrorist excellencies, and
+Jacobin dukes. The new dynasty was recognised at Vienna and Berlin: on the
+part of Austria it received the compliment of an imitation. Three months
+after the assumption of the Imperial title by Napoleon, the Emperor Francis
+(Emperor in Germany, but King in Hungary and Bohemia) assumed the title of
+Emperor of all his Austrian dominions. The true reason for this act was the
+virtual dissolution of the Germanic system by the Peace of Luneville, and
+the probability that the old Imperial dignity, if preserved in name, would
+soon be transferred to some client of Napoleon or to Napoleon himself. Such
+an apprehension was, however, not one that could be confessed to Europe.
+Instead of the ruin of Germany, the grandeur of Austria was made the
+ostensible ground of change. In language which seemed to be borrowed from
+the scriptural history of Nebuchadnezzar, the Emperor Francis declared
+that, although no possible addition could be made to his own personal
+dignity, as Roman Emperor, yet the ancient glory of the Austrian House, the
+grandeur of the principalities and kingdoms which were united under its
+dominion, required that the Sovereigns of Austria should hold a title equal
+to that of the greatest European throne. A general war against Napoleon was
+already being proposed by the Court of St. Petersburg; but for the present
+the Corsican and the Hapsburg Caesar exchanged their hypocritical
+congratulations. [106]
+
+[Pitt again Minister, May, 1804.]
+
+[Coalition of 1805.]
+
+Almost at the same time that Bonaparte ascended the throne, Pitt returned
+to power in Great Britain. He was summoned by the general distrust felt in
+Addington's Ministry, and by the belief that no statesman but himself could
+rally the Powers of Europe against the common enemy. Pitt was not long in
+framing with Russia the plan of a third Coalition. The Czar broke off
+diplomatic intercourse with Napoleon in September, 1804, and induced the
+Court of Vienna to pledge itself to resist any further extension of French
+power. Sweden entered into engagements with Great Britain. On the opening
+of Parliament at the beginning of 1805, King George III. announced that an
+understanding existed between Great Britain and Russia, and asked in
+general terms for a provision for Continental subsidies. In April, a treaty
+was signed at St. Petersburg by the representatives of Russia and Great
+Britain, far more comprehensive and more serious in its provisions than any
+which had yet united the Powers against France. [107] Russia and England
+bound themselves to direct their efforts to the formation of a European
+League capable of placing five hundred thousand men in the field. Great
+Britain undertook to furnish subsidies to every member of the League; no
+peace was to be concluded with France but by common consent; conquests
+made by any of the belligerents were to remain unappropriated until the
+general peace; and at the termination of the war a Congress was to fix
+certain disputed points of international right, and to establish a
+federative European system for their maintenance and enforcement. As the
+immediate objects of the League, the treaty specified the expulsion of
+the French from Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Northern Germany; the
+re-establishment of the King of Sardinia in Piedmont, with an increase of
+territory; and the creation of a solid barrier against any future
+usurpations of France. The last expression signified the union of Holland
+and part of Belgium under the House of Orange. In this respect, as in the
+provision for a common disposal of conquests and for the settlement of
+European affairs by a Congress, the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1805 defined
+the policy actually carried out in 1814. Other territorial changes now
+suggested by Pitt, including the annexation of the Rhenish Provinces to
+the Prussian Monarchy, were not embodied in the treaty, but became from
+this time understood possibilities.
+
+[Policy of Prussia.]
+
+[Prussia neutral.]
+
+England and Russia had, however, some difficulty in securing allies.
+Although in violation of his promises to Austria, Napoleon had accepted the
+title of King of Italy from the Senate of the Italian Republic, and had
+crowned himself with the Iron Crown of Lombardy (March, 1805), the
+Ministers at Vienna would have preferred peace, if that had been possible;
+and their master reluctantly consented to a war against Napoleon when war
+in some form or other seemed inevitable. The policy of Prussia was
+doubtful. For two years past Napoleon had made every effort to induce
+Prussia to enter into alliance with himself. After the invasion of Hanover
+he had doubled his attentions to the Court of Berlin, and had spared
+nothing in the way of promises and assurances of friendship to win the King
+over to his side. The neutrality of Prussia was of no great service to
+France: its support would have been of priceless value, rendering any
+attack upon France by Russia or Austria almost impossible, and thus
+enabling Napoleon to throw his whole strength into the combat with Great
+Britain. In the spring of 1804, the King of Prussia, uncertain of the
+friendship of the Czar, and still unconvinced of the vanity of Napoleon's
+professions, had inclined to a defensive alliance with France. The news of
+the murder of the Duke of Enghien, arriving almost simultaneously with a
+message of goodwill from St. Petersburg, led him to abandon this project of
+alliance, but caused no breach with Napoleon. Frederick William adhered to
+the temporising policy which Prussia had followed since 1795, and the
+Foreign Minister, Haugwitz, who had recommended bolder measures, withdrew
+for a time from the Court. [108] Baron Hardenberg, who had already acted as
+his deputy, stepped into his place. Hardenberg, the negotiator of the peace
+of Basle, had for the last ten years advocated a system of neutrality. A
+politician quick to grasp new social and political ideas, he was without
+that insight into the real forces at work in Europe which, in spite of
+errors in detail, made the political aims of Pitt, and of many far inferior
+men, substantially just and correct. So late as the end of the year 1804,
+Hardenberg not only failed to recognise the dangers to which Prussia was
+exposed from Napoleon's ambition, but conceived it to be still possible for
+Prussia to avert war between France and the Allied Powers by maintaining a
+good understanding with all parties alike. Hardenberg's neutrality excited
+the wrath of the Russian Cabinet. While Metternich, the Austrian ambassador
+at Berlin, cautiously felt his way, the Czar proposed in the last resort to
+force Prussia to take up arms. A few months more passed; and, when
+hostilities were on the point of breaking out, Hanover was definitely
+offered to Prussia by Napoleon as the price of an alliance. Hardenberg,
+still believing that it lay within the power of Prussia, by means of a
+French alliance, both to curb Napoleon and to prevent a European war, urged
+the King to close with the offer of the French Emperor. [109] But the King
+shrank from a decision which involved the possibility of immediate war. The
+offer of Hanover was rejected, and Prussia connected itself neither with
+Napoleon nor his enemies.
+
+[State of Austria. The army.]
+
+Pitt, the author of the Coalition of 1805, had formed the most sanguine
+estimate of the armaments of his allies. Austria was said to have entered
+upon a new era since the peace of Luneville, and to have turned to the best
+account all the disasters of its former campaigns. There had indeed been no
+want of fine professions from Vienna, but Pitt knew little of the real
+state of affairs. The Archduke Charles had been placed at the head of the
+military administration, and entrusted with extraordinary powers; but the
+whole force of routine and corruption was ranged against him. He was
+deceived by his subordinates; and after three years of reorganisation he
+resigned his post, confessing that he left the army no nearer efficiency
+than it was before. Charles was replaced at the War Office by General Mack.
+Within six months this bustling charlatan imagined himself to have effected
+the reorganisation of which the Archduke despaired, [110] while he had in
+fact only introduced new confusion into an army already hampered beyond any
+in Europe by its variety of races and languages.
+
+[Political condition of Austria.]
+
+If the military reforms of Austria were delusive, its political reforms
+were still more so. The Emperor had indeed consented to unite the
+Ministers, who had hitherto worked independently, in a Council of State;
+but here reform stopped. Cobenzl, who was now First Minister, understood
+nothing but diplomacy. Men continued in office whose presence was an
+insuperable bar to any intelligent action: even in that mechanical routine
+which, in the eyes of the Emperor Francis, constituted the life of the
+State, everything was antiquated and self-contradictory. In all that
+affected the mental life of the people the years that followed the peace of
+Luneville were distinctly retrograde. Education was placed more than ever
+in the hands of the priests; the censorship of the press was given to the
+police; a commission was charged with the examination of all the books
+printed during the reign of the Emperor Joseph, and above two thousand
+works, which had come into being during that brief period of Austrian
+liberalism, were suppressed and destroyed. Trade regulations were issued
+which combined the extravagance of the French Reign of Terror with the
+ignorance of the Middle Ages. All the grain in the country was ordered to
+be sold before a certain date, and the Jews were prohibited from carrying
+on the corn-trade for a year. Such were the reforms described by Pitt in
+the English Parliament as having effected the regeneration of Austria.
+Nearer home things were judged in a truer light. Mack's paper-regiments,
+the helplessness and unreality of the whole system of Austrian officialism,
+were correctly appreciated by the men who had been most in earnest during
+the last war. Even Thugut now thought a contest hopeless. The Archduke
+Charles argued to the end for peace, and entered upon the war with the
+presentiment of defeat and ruin.
+
+[Plans of campaign, 1805.]
+
+The plans of the Allies for the campaign of 1805 covered an immense field.
+[111] It was intended that one Austrian army should operate in Lombardy
+under the Archduke Charles, while a second, under General Mack, entered
+Bavaria, and there awaited the arrival of the Russians, who were to unite
+with it in invading France: British and Russian contingents were to combine
+with the King of Sweden in Pomerania, and with the King of Naples in
+Southern Italy. At the head-quarters of the Allies an impression prevailed
+that Napoleon was unprepared for war. It was even believed that his
+character had lost something of its energy under the influence of an
+Imperial Court. Never was there a more fatal illusion. The forces of France
+had never been so overwhelming; the plans of Napoleon had never been worked
+out with greater minuteness and certainty. From Hanover to Strasburg masses
+of troops had been collected upon the frontier in readiness for the order
+to march; and, before the campaign opened, the magnificent army of
+Boulogne, which had been collected for the invasion of England, was thrown
+into the scale against Austria.
+
+[Failure of Napoleon's naval designs against England.]
+
+[Nelson and Villeneuve, April-June, 1805.]
+
+Events had occurred at sea which frustrated Napoleon's plan for an attack
+upon Great Britain. This attack, which in 1797 had been but lightly
+threatened, had, upon the renewal of war with England in 1803, become the
+object of Napoleon's most serious efforts. An army was concentrated at
+Boulogne sufficient to overwhelm the military forces of England, if once it
+could reach the opposite shore. Napoleon's thoughts were centred on a plan
+for obtaining the naval superiority in the Channel, if only for the few
+hours which it would take to transport the army from Boulogne to the
+English coast. It was his design to lure Nelson to the other side of the
+Atlantic by a feigned expedition against the West Indies, and, during the
+absence of the English admiral, to unite all the fleets at present lying
+blockaded in the French ports, as a cover for the invading armament.
+Admiral Villeneuve was ordered to sail to Martinique, and, after there
+meeting with some other ships, to re-cross the Atlantic with all possible
+speed, and liberate the fleets blockaded in Ferrol, Brest, and Rochefort.
+The junction of the fleets would give Napoleon a force of fifty sail in the
+British Channel, a force more than sufficient to overpower all the
+squadrons which Great Britain could possibly collect for the defence of its
+shores. Such a design exhibited all the power of combination which marked
+Napoleon's greatest triumphs; but it required of an indifferent marine the
+precision and swiftness of movement which belonged to the land-forces of
+France; it assumed in the seamen of Great Britain the same absence of
+resource which Napoleon had found among the soldiers of the Continent. In
+the present instance, however, Napoleon had to deal with a man as far
+superior to all the admirals of France as Napoleon himself was to the
+generals of Austria and Prussia. Villeneuve set sail for the West Indies in
+the spring of 1805, and succeeded in drawing Nelson after him; but, before
+he could re-cross the Atlantic, Nelson, incessantly pursuing the French
+squadron in the West-Indian seas, and at length discovering its departure
+homewards at Antigua (June 13), had warned the English Government of
+Villeneuve's movement by a message sent in the swiftest of the English
+brigs. [112] The Government, within twenty-four hours of receiving Nelson's
+message, sent orders to Sir Robert Calder instantly to raise the blockades
+of Ferrol and Rochefort, and to wait for Villeneuve off Cape Finisterre.
+Here Villeneuve met the English fleet (July 22). He was worsted in a
+partial engagement, and retired into the harbour of Ferrol. The pressing
+orders of Napoleon forced the French admiral, after some delay, to attempt
+that movement on Brest and Rochefort on which the whole plan of the
+invasion of England depended. But Villeneuve was no longer in a condition
+to meet the English force assembled against him. He put back without
+fighting, and retired to Cadiz. All hope of carrying out the attack upon
+England was lost.
+
+[March of French armies on Bavaria, Sept.]
+
+It only remained for Napoleon to avenge himself upon Austria through the
+army which was baulked of its English prey. On the 1st of September, when
+the Austrians were now on the point of crossing the Inn, the camp of
+Boulogne was broken up. The army turned eastwards, and distributed itself
+over all the roads leading from the Channel to the Rhine and the Upper
+Danube. Far on the north-east the army of Hanover, commanded by Bernadotte,
+moved as its left wing, and converged upon a point in Southern Germany
+half-way between the frontiers of France and Austria. In the fables that
+long disguised the true character of every action of Napoleon, the
+admirable order of march now given to the French armies appears as the
+inspiration of a moment, due to the rebound of Napoleon's genius after
+learning the frustration of all his naval plans. In reality, the employment
+of the "Army of England" against a Continental coalition had always been an
+alternative present to Napoleon's mind; and it was threateningly mentioned
+in his letters at a time when Villeneuve's failure was still unknown.
+
+[Austrians invade Bavaria, Sept. 8.]
+
+The only advantage which the Allies derived from the remoteness of the
+Channel army was that Austria was able to occupy Bavaria without
+resistance. General Mack, who was charged with this operation, crossed the
+Inn on the 8th of September. The Elector of Bavaria was known to be
+secretly hostile to the Coalition. The design of preventing his union with
+the French was a correct one; but in the actual situation of the allied
+armies it was one that could not be executed without great risk. The
+preparations of Russia required more time than was allowed for them; no
+Russian troops could reach the Inn before the end of October; and, in
+consequence, the entire force operating in Western Germany did not exceed
+seventy thousand men. Any doubts, however, as to the prudence of an advance
+through Bavaria were silenced by the assurance that Napoleon had to bring
+the bulk of his army from the British Channel. [113] In ignorance of the
+real movements of the French, Mack pushed on to the western limit of
+Bavaria, and reached the river Iller, the border of Wuertemberg, where he
+intended to stand on the defensive until the arrival of the Russians.
+
+[Mack at Ulm, October.]
+
+[Capitulation of Ulm, Oct. 17.]
+
+Here, in the first days of October, he became aware of the presence of
+French troops, not only in front but to the east of his own position.
+With some misgiving as to the situation of the enemy, Mack nevertheless
+refused to fall back from Ulm. Another week revealed the true state of
+affairs. Before the Russians were anywhere near Bavaria, the vanguard of
+Napoleon's Army of the Channel and the Army of Hanover had crossed
+North-Western Germany, and seized the roads by which Mack had advanced
+from Vienna. Every hour that Mack remained in Ulm brought new divisions
+of the French into the Bavarian towns and villages behind him. Escape was
+only possible by a retreat into the Tyrol, or by breaking through the
+French line while it was yet incompletely formed. Resolute action might
+still have saved the Austrian army; but the only energy that was shown
+was shown in opposition to the general. The Archduke Ferdinand, who was
+the titular commander-in-chief, cut his way through the French with part
+of the cavalry; Mack remained in Ulm, and the iron circle closed around
+him. At the last moment, after the hopelessness of the situation had
+become clear even to himself, Mack was seized by an illusion that some
+great disaster had befallen the French in their rear, and that in the
+course of a few days Napoleon would be in full retreat. "Let no man utter
+the word 'Surrender'"--he proclaimed in an order of October 15th--"the
+enemy is in the most fearful straits; it is impossible that he can
+continue more than a few days in the neighbourhood. If provisions run
+short, we have three thousand horses to nourish us." "I myself," continued
+the general, "will be the first to eat horseflesh." Two days later the
+inevitable capitulation took place; and Mack with 25,000 men, fell into the
+hands of the enemy without striking a blow. A still greater number of the
+Austrians outside Ulm surrendered in detachments. [114]
+
+[Trafalgar, Oct. 21.]
+
+[Effects.]
+
+All France read with wonder Napoleon's bulletins describing the capture of
+an entire army and the approaching presentation of forty Austrian standards
+to the Senate at Paris. No imperial rhetoric acquainted the nation with an
+event which, within four days of the capitulation of Ulm, inflicted a
+heavier blow on France than Napoleon himself had ever dealt to any
+adversary. On the 21st of October Nelson's crowning victory of Trafalgar,
+won over Villeneuve venturing out from Cadiz, annihilated the combined
+fleets of France and Spain. Nelson fell in the moment of his triumph; but
+the work which his last hours had achieved was one to which years prolonged
+in glory could have added nothing. He had made an end of the power of
+France upon the sea. Trafalgar was not only the greatest naval victory, it
+was the greatest and most momentous victory won either by land or by sea
+during the whole of the Revolutionary War. No victory, and no series of
+victories, of Napoleon produced the same effect upon Europe. Austria was in
+arms within five years of Marengo, and within four years of Austerlitz;
+Prussia was ready to retrieve the losses of Jena in 1813; a generation
+passed after Trafalgar before France again seriously threatened England at
+sea. The prospect of crushing the British navy, so long as England had the
+means to equip a navy, vanished: Napoleon henceforth set his hopes on
+exhausting England's resources by compelling every State on the Continent
+to exclude her commerce. Trafalgar forced him to impose his yoke upon all
+Europe, or to abandon the hope of conquering Great Britain. If national
+love and pride have idealised in our great sailor a character which, with
+its Homeric force and freshness, combined something of the violence and the
+self-love of the heroes of a rude age, the common estimate of Nelson's work
+in history is not beyond the truth. So long as France possessed a navy,
+Nelson sustained the spirit of England by his victories; his last triumph
+left England in such a position that no means remained to injure her but
+those which must result in the ultimate deliverance of the Continent.
+
+[Treaty of Potsdam, Nov. 3.]
+
+[Violation of Prussian territory.]
+
+The consequences of Trafalgar lay in the future; the military situation in
+Germany after Mack's catastrophe was such that nothing could keep the army
+of Napoleon out of Vienna. In the sudden awakening of Europe to its danger,
+one solitary gleam of hope appeared in the attitude of the Prussian Court.
+Napoleon had not scrupled, in his anxiety for the arrival of the Army of
+Hanover, to order Bernadotte, its commander, to march through the Prussian
+territory of Anspach, which lay on his direct route towards Ulm. It was
+subsequently alleged by the Allies that Bernadotte's violation of Prussian
+neutrality had actually saved him from arriving too late to prevent Mack's
+escape; but, apart from all imaginary grounds of reproach, the insult
+offered to Prussia by Napoleon was sufficient to incline even Frederick
+William to decided action. Some weeks earlier the approach of Russian
+forces to his frontier had led Frederick William to arm; the French had now
+more than carried out what the Russians had only suggested. When the
+outrage was made known to the King of Prussia, that cold and reserved
+monarch displayed an emotion which those who surrounded him had seldom
+witnessed. [115] The Czar was forthwith offered a free passage for his
+armies through Silesia; and, before the news of Mack's capitulation reached
+the Russian frontier, Alexander himself was on the way to Berlin. The
+result of the deliberations of the two monarchs was the Treaty of Potsdam,
+signed on November 3rd. By this treaty Prussia undertook to demand from
+Napoleon an indemnity for the King of Piedmont, and the evacuation of
+Germany, Switzerland, and Holland: failing Napoleon's acceptance of
+Prussia's mediation upon these terms, Prussia engaged to take the field
+with 180,000 men.
+
+[French enter Vienna, Nov. 13.]
+
+Napoleon was now close upon Vienna. A few days after the capitulation of
+Ulm thirty thousand Russians, commanded by General Kutusoff, had reached
+Bavaria; but Mack's disaster rendered it impossible to defend the line of
+the Inn, and the last detachments of the Allies disappeared as soon as
+Napoleon's vanguard approached the river. The French pushed forth in
+overpowering strength upon the capital. Kutusoff and the weakened Austrian
+army could neither defend Vienna nor meet the invader in the field. It was
+resolved to abandon the city, and to unite the retreating forces on the
+northern side of the Danube with a second Russian army now entering
+Moravia. On the 7th of November the Court quitted Vienna. Six days later
+the French entered the capital, and by an audacious stratagem of Murat's
+gained possession of the bridge connecting the city with the north bank of
+the Danube, at the moment when the Austrian gunners were about to blow it
+into the air. [116] The capture of this bridge deprived the allied army of
+the last object protecting it from Napoleon's pursuit. Vienna remained in
+the possession of the French. All the resources of a great capital were now
+added to the means of the conqueror; and Napoleon prepared to follow his
+retreating adversary beyond the Danube, and to annihilate him before he
+could reach his supports.
+
+[The Allies and Napoleon in Moravia, Nov.]
+
+The retreat of the Russian army into Moravia was conducted with great skill
+by General Kutusoff, who retorted upon Murat the stratagem practised at the
+bridge of Vienna, and by means of a pretended armistice effected his
+junction with the newly-arrived Russian corps between Olmuetz and Bruenn.
+Napoleon's anger at the escape of his prey was shown in the bitterness of
+his attacks upon Murat. The junction of the allied armies in Moravia had in
+fact most seriously altered the prospects of the war. For the first time
+since the opening of the campaign, the Allies had concentrated a force
+superior in numbers to anything that Napoleon could bring against it. It
+was impossible for Napoleon, while compelled to protect himself on the
+Italian side, to lead more than 70,000 men into Moravia. The Allies had now
+80,000 in camp, with the prospect of receiving heavy reinforcements. The
+war, which lately seemed to be at its close, might now, in the hands of a
+skilful general, be but beginning. Although the lines of Napoleon's
+communication with France were well guarded, his position in the heart of
+Europe exposed him to many perils; the Archduke Charles had defeated
+Massena at Caldiero on the Adige, and was hastening northwards; above all,
+the army of Prussia was preparing to enter the field. Every mile that
+Napoleon advanced into Moravia increased the strain upon his resources;
+every day that postponed the decision of the campaign brought new strength
+to his enemies. Merely to keep the French in their camp until a Prussian
+force was ready to assail their communications seemed enough to ensure the
+Allies victory; and such was the counsel of Kutusoff, who made war in the
+temper of the wariest diplomatist. But the scarcity of provisions was
+telling upon the discipline of the army, and the Czar was eager for battle.
+[117] The Emperor Francis gave way to the ardour of his allies. Weyrother,
+the Austrian chief of the staff, drew up the most scientific plans for a
+great victory that had ever been seen even at the Austrian head-quarters;
+and towards the end of November it was agreed by the two Emperors that the
+allied army should march right round Napoleon's position near Bruenn, and
+fight a battle with the object of cutting off his retreat upon Vienna.
+
+[Haugwitz comes with Prussian demands to Napoleon, Nov. 28.]
+
+[Haugwitz goes away to Vienna.]
+
+It was in the days immediately preceding the intended battle, and after
+Napoleon had divined the plans of his enemy, that Count Haugwitz, bearing
+the demands of the Cabinet of Berlin, reached the French camp at Bruenn.
+[118] Napoleon had already heard something of the Treaty of Potsdam, and
+was aware that Haugwitz had started from Berlin. He had no intention of
+making any of those concessions which Prussia required; at the same time it
+was of vital importance to him to avoid the issue of a declaration of war
+by Prussia, which would nerve both Austria and Russia to the last
+extremities. He therefore resolved to prevent Haugwitz by every possible
+method from delivering his ultimatum, until a decisive victory over the
+allied armies should have entirely changed the political situation. The
+Prussian envoy himself played into Napoleon's hands. Haugwitz had obtained
+a disgraceful permission from his sovereign to submit to all Napoleon's
+wishes, if, before his arrival, Austria should be separately treating for
+peace; and he had an excuse for delay in the fact that the military
+preparations of Prussia were not capable of being completed before the
+middle of December. He passed twelve days on the journey from Berlin, and
+presented himself before Napoleon on the 28th of November. The Emperor,
+after a long conversation, requested that he would proceed to Vienna and
+transact business with Talleyrand. He was weak enough to permit himself to
+be removed to a distance with his ultimatum to Napoleon undelivered. When
+next the Prussian Government heard of their envoy, he was sauntering in
+Talleyrand's drawing-rooms at Vienna, with the cordon of the French Legion
+of Honour on his breast, exchanging civilities with officials who politely
+declined to enter upon any question of business.
+
+[Austerlitz, Dec. 2.]
+
+[Armistice, Dec. 4.]
+
+Haugwitz once removed to Vienna, and the Allies thus deprived of the
+certainty that Prussia would take the field, Napoleon trusted that a single
+great defeat would suffice to break up the Coalition. The movements of the
+Allies were exactly those which he expected and desired. He chose his own
+positions between Bruenn and Austerlitz in the full confidence of victory;
+and on the morning of the 2nd of December, when the mists disappeared
+before a bright wintry sun, he saw with the utmost delight that the Russian
+columns were moving round him in a vast arc, in execution of the
+turning-movement of which he had forewarned his own army on the day before.
+Napoleon waited until the foremost columns were stretched far in advance of
+their supports; then, throwing Soult's division upon the gap left in the
+centre of the allied line, he cut the army into halves, and crushed its
+severed divisions at every point along the whole line of attack. The
+Allies, although they outnumbered Napoleon, believed themselves to be
+overpowered by an army double their own size. The incoherence of the allied
+movements was as marked as the unity and effectiveness of those of the
+French. It was alleged in the army that Kutusoff, the commander-in-chief,
+had fallen asleep while the Austrian Weyrother was expounding his plans for
+the battle; a truer explanation of the palpable errors in the allied
+generalship was that the Russian commander had been forced by the Czar to
+carry out a plan of which he disapproved. The destruction in the ranks of
+the Allies was enormous, for the Russians fought with the same obstinacy as
+at the Trebbia and at Novi. Austria had lost a second army in addition to
+its capital; and the one condition which could have steeled its Government
+against all thoughts of peace--the certainty of an immediate Prussian
+attack upon Napoleon--had vanished with the silent disappearance of the
+Prussian envoy. Two days after the battle, the Emperor Francis met his
+conqueror in the open field, and accepted an armistice, which involved the
+withdrawal of the Russian army from his dominions.
+
+[Haugwitz signs Treaty with Napoleon, Dec. 15.]
+
+Yet even now the Czar sent appeals to Berlin for help, and the negotiation
+begun by Austria would possibly have been broken off if help had been
+given. But the Cabinet of Frederick William had itself determined to evade
+its engagements; and as soon as the news of Austerlitz reached Vienna,
+Haugwitz had gone over heart and soul to the conqueror. While negotiations
+for peace were carried on between France and Austria, a parallel
+negotiation was carried on with the envoy of Prussia; and even before the
+Emperor Francis gave way to the conqueror's demands, Haugwitz signed a
+treaty with Napoleon at Schoenbrunn, by which Prussia, instead of attacking
+Napoleon, entered into an alliance with him, and received from him in
+return the dominion of Hanover (December 15, 1805). [119] Had Prussia been
+the defeated power at Austerlitz, the Treaty of Schoenbrunn could not have
+more completely reversed the policy to which King Frederick William had
+pledged himself six weeks before. While Haugwitz was making his pact with
+Napoleon, Hardenberg had been arranging with an English envoy for the
+combination of English and Russian forces in Northern Germany. [120]
+
+There were some among the King's advisers who declared that the treaty must
+be repudiated, and the envoy disgraced. But the catastrophe of Austerlitz,
+and the knowledge that the Government of Vienna was entering upon a
+separate negotiation, had damped the courage of the men in power. The
+conduct of Haugwitz was first excused, then supported, then admired. The
+Duke of Brunswick disgraced himself by representing to the French
+Ambassador in Berlin that the whole course of Prussian policy since the
+beginning of the campaign had been an elaborate piece of dissimulation in
+the interest of France. The leaders of the patriotic party in the army
+found themselves without influence or following; the mass of the nation
+looked on with the same stupid unconcern with which it had viewed every
+event of the last twenty years. The King finally decided that the treaty by
+which Haugwitz had thrown the obligations of his country to the winds
+should be ratified, with certain modifications, including one that should
+nominally reserve to King George III. a voice in the disposal of Hanover.
+[121]
+
+[Treaty of Presburg, Dec. 27.]
+
+[End of the Holy Roman Empire, Aug. 6, 1806.]
+
+Ten days after the departure of the Prussian envoy from Vienna, peace was
+concluded between France and Austria by the Treaty of Presburg [122]
+(December 27). At the outbreak of the war Napoleon had declared to his army
+that he would not again spare Austria, as he had spared her at Campo Formio
+and at Luneville; and he kept his word. The Peace of Presburg left the
+Austrian State in a condition very different from that in which it had
+emerged from the two previous wars. The Treaty of Campo Formio had only
+deprived Austria of Belgium in order to replace it by Venice; the
+Settlement of Luneville had only substituted French for Austrian influence
+in Western Germany: the Treaty that followed the battle of Austerlitz
+wrested from the House of Hapsburg two of its most important provinces, and
+cut it off at once from Italy, from Switzerland, and from the Rhine.
+Venetia was ceded to Napoleon's kingdom of Italy; the Tyrol was ceded to
+Bavaria; the outlying districts belonging to Austria in Western Germany
+were ceded to Baden and to Wuertemberg. Austria lost 28,000 square miles of
+territory and 3,000,000 inhabitants. The Emperor recognised the sovereignty
+and independence of Bavaria, Baden, and Wuertemberg, and renounced all
+rights over those countries as head of the Germanic Body. The Electors of
+Bavaria and Wuertemberg, along with a large increase of territory, received
+the title of King. The constitution of the Empire ceased to exist even in
+name. It only remained for its chief, the successor of the Roman Caesars, to
+abandon his title at Napoleon's bidding; and on the 6th of August, 1806, an
+Act, published by Francis II. at Vienna, made an end of the outworn and
+dishonoured fiction of a Holy Roman Empire.
+
+[Naples given to Joseph Bonaparte.]
+
+Though Russia had not made peace with Napoleon, the European Coalition was
+at an end. Now, as in 1801, the defeat of the Austrian armies left the
+Neapolitan Monarchy to settle its account with the conqueror. Naples had
+struck no blow; but it was only through the delays of the Allies that the
+Neapolitan army had not united with an English and a Russian force in an
+attack upon Lombardy. What had been pardoned in 1801 was now avenged upon
+the Bourbon despot of Naples and his Austrian Queen, who from the first had
+shown such bitter enmity to France. Assuming the character of a judge over
+the sovereigns of Europe, Napoleon pronounced from Vienna that the House of
+Naples had ceased to reign (Dec. 27, 1805). The sentence was immediately
+carried into execution. Ferdinand fled, as he had fled in 1798, to place
+himself under the protection of the navy of Great Britain. The vacant
+throne was given by Napoleon to his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte.
+Ferdinand, with the help of the English fleet, maintained himself in
+Sicily. A thread of sea two miles broad was sufficient barrier against the
+Power which had subdued half the Continent; and no attempt was made either
+by Napoleon or his brother to gain a footing beyond the Straits of Messina.
+In Southern Italy the same fanatical movements took place among the
+peasantry as in the previous period of French occupation. When the armies
+of Austria and Russia were crushed, and the continent lay at the mercy of
+France, Great Britain imagined that it could effect something against
+Napoleon in a corner of Italy, with the help of some ferocious villagers. A
+British force, landing near Maida, on the Calabrian coast, in the summer of
+1806, had the satisfaction of defeating the French at the point of the
+bayonet, of exciting a horde of priests and brigands to fruitless
+barbarities, and of abandoning them to their well-merited chastisement.
+
+[Battle of Maida, July 6, 1806.]
+
+[The Empire. Napoleonic dynasty and titles.]
+
+The elevation of Napoleon's brother Joseph to the throne of Naples was the
+first of a series of appointments now made by Napoleon in the character of
+Emperor of the West. He began to style himself the new Charlemagne; his
+thoughts and his language were filled with pictures of universal
+sovereignty; his authority, as a military despot who had crushed his
+neighbours, became strangely confused in his own mind with that half-sacred
+right of the Caesars from which the Middle Ages derived all subordinate
+forms of power. He began to treat the government of the different countries
+of Western Europe as a function to be exercised by delegation from himself.
+Even the territorial grants which under the Feudal System accompanied
+military or civil office were now revived and the commander of a French
+army-corps or the chief of the French Foreign Office became the titular
+lord of some obscure Italian principality. [123] Napoleon's own family were
+to reign in many lands, as the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had reigned
+before them, but in strict dependence on their head. Joseph Bonaparte had
+not long been installed at Naples when his brother Louis was compelled to
+accept the Crown of Holland. Jerome, for whom no kingdom was at present
+vacant, was forced to renounce his American wife, in order that he might
+marry the daughter of the King of Wuertemberg. Eugene Beauharnais,
+Napoleon's step-son, held the office of Viceroy of Italy; Murat, who had
+married Napoleon's sister, had the German Duchy of Berg. Bernadotte,
+Talleyrand, and Berthier found themselves suzerains of districts whose
+names were almost unknown to them. Out of the revenues of Northern Italy a
+yearly sum was reserved as an endowment for the generals whom the Emperor
+chose to raise to princely honours.
+
+[Federation of the Rhine.]
+
+More statesmanlike, more practical than Napoleon's dynastic policy, was his
+organisation of Western Germany under its native princes as a dependency of
+France. The object at which all French politicians had aimed since the
+outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the exclusion of both Austria and
+Prussia from influence in Western Germany, was now completely attained. The
+triumph of French statesmanship, the consummation of two centuries of
+German discord, was seen in the Act of Federation subscribed by the Western
+German Sovereigns in the summer of 1806. By this Act the Kings of Bavaria
+and Wuertemberg, the Elector of Baden, and thirteen minor princes, united
+themselves, in the League known as the Rhenish Confederacy, under the
+protection of the French Emperor, and undertook to furnish contingents,
+amounting to 63,000 men, in all wars in which the French Empire should
+engage. Their connection with the ancient Germanic Body was completely
+severed; the very town in which the Diet of the Empire had held its
+meetings was annexed by one of the members of the Confederacy. The
+Confederacy itself, with a population of 8,000,000, became for all purposes
+of war and foreign policy a part of France. Its armies were organised by
+French officers; its frontiers were fortified by French engineers; its
+treaties were made for it at Paris. In the domestic changes which took
+place within these States the work of consolidation begun in 1801 was
+carried forward with increased vigour. Scores of tiny principalities which
+had escaped dissolution in the earlier movement were now absorbed by their
+stronger neighbours. Governments became more energetic, more orderly, more
+ambitious. The princes who made themselves the vassals of Napoleon assumed
+a more despotic power over their own subjects. Old constitutional forms
+which had imposed some check on the will of the sovereign, like the Estates
+of Wuertemberg, were contemptuously suppressed; the careless, ineffective
+routine of the last age gave place to a system of rigorous precision
+throughout the public services. Military service was enforced in countries
+hitherto free from it. The burdens of the people became greater, but they
+were more fairly distributed. The taxes were more equally levied; justice
+was made more regular and more simple. A career both in the army and the
+offices of Government was opened to a people to whom the very conception of
+public life had hitherto been unknown.
+
+[No national unity in Germany.]
+
+The establishment of German unity in our own day after a victorious
+struggle with France renders it difficult to imagine the voluntary
+submission of a great part of the race to a French sovereign, or to excuse
+a policy which, like that of 1806, appears the opposite of everything
+honourable and patriotic. But what seems strange now was not strange then.
+No expression more truly describes the conditions of that period than one
+of the great German poet who was himself so little of a patriot. "Germany,"
+said Goethe, "is not a nation." Germany had indeed the unity of race; but
+all that truly constitutes a nation, the sense of common interest, a common
+history, pride, and desire, Germany did not possess at all. Bavaria, the
+strongest of the western States, attached itself to France from a
+well-grounded fear of Austrian aggression. To be conquered by Austria was
+just as much conquest for Bavaria as to be conquered by any other Power; it
+was no step to German unity, but a step in the aggrandisement of the House
+of Hapsburg. The interests of the Austrian House were not the interests of
+Germany any more than they were the interests of Croatia, or of Venice, or
+of Hungary. Nor, on the other hand, had Prussia yet shown a form of
+political life sufficiently attractive to lead the southern States to
+desire to unite with it. Frederick's genius had indeed made him the hero of
+Germany, but his military system was harsh and tyrannical. In the actual
+condition of Austria and Prussia, it is doubtful whether the population of
+the minor States would have been happier united to these Powers than under
+their own Governments. Conquest in any case was impossible, and there was
+nothing to stimulate to voluntary union. It followed that the smaller
+States were destined to remain without a nationality, until the violence of
+some foreign Power rendered weakness an intolerable evil, and forced upon
+the better minds of Germany the thought of a common Fatherland.
+
+[What German unity desirable.]
+
+The necessity of German unity is no self-evident political truth. Holland
+and Switzerland in past centuries detached themselves from the Empire, and
+became independent States, with the highest advantage to themselves.
+Identity of blood is no more conclusive reason for political union between
+Holstein and the Tyrol than between Great Britain and the United States of
+America. The conditions which determine both the true area and the true
+quality of German unity are, in fact, something more complex than an
+ethnological law or an outburst of patriotic indignation against the
+French. Where local circumstances rendered it possible for a German
+district, after detaching itself from the race, to maintain a real national
+life and defend itself from foreign conquest, there it was perhaps better
+that the connection with Germany should be severed; where, as in the great
+majority of minor States, independence resulted only in military
+helplessness and internal stagnation, there it was better that independence
+should give place to German unity. But the conditions of any tolerable
+unity were not present so long as Austria was the leading Power. Less was
+imperilled in the future of the German people by the submission of the
+western States to France than would have been lost by their permanent
+incorporation under Austria.
+
+[The Empire of 1806 might have been permanent.]
+
+[Limits of a possible Napoleonic Empire.]
+
+With the establishment of the Rhenish Confederacy and the conquest of
+Naples, Napoleon's empire reached, but did not overpass, the limits within
+which the sovereignty of France might probably have been long maintained.
+It has been usual to draw the line between the sound statesmanship and the
+hazardous enterprises of Napoleon at the Peace of Luneville: a juster
+appreciation of the condition of Western Europe would perhaps include
+within the range of a practical, though mischievous, ideal the whole of the
+political changes which immediately followed the war of 1805, and which
+extended Napoleon's dominion to the Inn and to the Straits of Messina.
+Italy and Germany were not then what they have since become. The districts
+that lay between the Rhine and the Inn were not more hostile to the
+foreigner than those Rhenish Provinces which so readily accepted their
+union with France. The more enterprising minds in Italy found that the
+Napoleonic rule, with all its faults, was superior to anything that Italy
+had known in recent times. If we may judge from the feeling with which
+Napoleon was regarded in Germany down to the middle of the year 1806, and
+in Italy down to a much later date, the Empire then founded might have been
+permanently upheld, if Napoleon had abstained from attacking other States.
+No comparison can be made between the attractive power exercised by the
+social equality of France, its military glory, and its good administration,
+and the slow and feeble process of assimilation which went on within the
+dominions of Austria; yet Austria succeeded in uniting a greater variety of
+races than France sought to unite in 1806. The limits of a possible France
+were indeed fixed, and fixed more firmly than by any geographical line, in
+the history and national character of two other peoples. France could not
+permanently overpower Prussia, and it could not permanently overpower
+Spain. But within a boundary-line drawn roughly from the mouth of the Elbe
+to the head of the Adriatic, that union of national sentiment and material
+force which checks the formation of empires did not exist. The true
+turning-point in Napoleon's career was the moment when he passed beyond the
+policy which had planned the Federation of the Rhine, and roused by his
+oppression the one State which was still capable of giving a national life
+to Germany.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Death of Pitt--Ministry of Fox and Grenville--Napoleon forces Prussia into
+War with England, and then offers Hanover to England--Prussia resolves on
+War with Napoleon--State of Prussia--Decline of the Army--Southern Germany
+with Napoleon--Austria Neutral--England and Russia about to help Prussia,
+but not immediately--Campaign of 1806--Battles of Jena and Auerstaedt--Ruin
+of the Prussian Army--Capitulation of Fortresses--Demands of Napoleon--The
+War continues--Berlin Decree--Exclusion of English Goods from the
+Continent--Russia enters the War--Campaign in Poland and East
+Prussia--Eylau--Treaty of Bartenstein--Friedland--Interview at
+Tilsit--Alliance of Napoleon and Alexander--Secret Articles--English
+Expedition to Denmark--The French enter Portugal--Prussia after the Peace
+of Tilsit--Stein's Edict of Emancipation--The Prussian Peasant--Reform of
+the Prussian Army, and Creation of Municipalities--Stein's other Projects
+of Reform, which are not carried out.
+
+
+[Death of Pitt, Jan. 23rd, 1806.]
+
+[Coalition Ministry of Fox and Grenville.]
+
+Six weeks after the tidings of Austerlitz reached Great Britain, the
+statesman who had been the soul of every European coalition against France
+was carried to the grave. [124] Pitt passed away at a moment of the deepest
+gloom. His victories at sea appeared to have effected nothing; his
+combinations on land had ended in disaster and ruin. If during Pitt's
+lifetime a just sense of the greatness and patriotism of all his aims
+condoned the innumerable faults of his military administration, that
+personal ascendancy which might have disarmed criticism even after the
+disaster of Austerlitz belonged to no other member of his Ministry. His
+colleagues felt their position to be hopeless. Though the King attempted to
+set one of Pitt's subordinates in the vacant place, the prospects of Europe
+were too dark, the situation of the country too serious, to allow a
+Ministry to be formed upon the ordinary principles of party-organisation or
+in accordance with the personal preferences of the monarch. The nation
+called for the union of the ablest men of all parties in the work of
+government; and, in spite of the life-long hatred of King George to Mr.
+Fox, a Ministry entered upon office framed by Fox and Grenville conjointly;
+Fox taking the post of Foreign Secretary, with a leading influence in the
+Cabinet, and yielding to Grenville the title of Premier. Addington received
+a place in the Ministry, and carried with him the support of a section of
+the Tory party, which was willing to countenance a policy of peace.
+
+[Napoleon hopes to intimidate Fox through Prussia.]
+
+Fox had from the first given his whole sympathy to the French Revolution,
+as the cause of freedom. He had ascribed the calamities of Europe to the
+intervention of foreign Powers in favour of the Bourbon monarchy: he had
+palliated the aggressions of the French Republic as the consequences of
+unjust and unprovoked attack: even the extinction of liberty in France
+itself had not wholly destroyed his faith in the honour and the generosity
+of the soldier of the Revolution. In the brief interval of peace which in
+1802 opened the Continent to English travellers, Fox had been the guest of
+the First Consul. His personal feeling towards the French Government had in
+it nothing of that proud and suspicious hatred which made negotiation so
+difficult while Pitt continued in power. It was believed at Paris, and with
+good reason, that the first object of Fox on entering upon office would be
+the restoration of peace. Napoleon adopted his own plan in view of the
+change likely to arise in the spirit of the British Cabinet. It was his
+habit, wherever he saw signs of concession, to apply more violent means of
+intimidation. In the present instance he determined to work upon the
+pacific leanings of Fox by adding Prussia to the forces arrayed against
+Great Britain. Prussia, isolated and discredited since the battle of
+Austerlitz, might first be driven into hostilities with England, and then
+be made to furnish the very satisfaction demanded by England as the primary
+condition of peace.
+
+[The King of Prussia wishes to disguise the cession of Hanover.]
+
+[Napoleon forces Prussia into war with England, March, 1806.]
+
+At the moment when Napoleon heard of Pitt's death, he was expecting the
+arrival of Count Haugwitz at Paris for the purpose of obtaining some
+modification in the treaty which he had signed on behalf of Prussia after
+the battle of Austerlitz. The principal feature in that treaty had been the
+grant of Hanover to Prussia by the French Emperor in return for its
+alliance. This was the point which above all others excited King Frederick
+William's fears and scruples. He desired to retain Hanover, but he also
+desired to derive his title rather from its English owner than from its
+French invader. It was the object of Haugwitz' visit to Paris to obtain an
+alteration in the terms of the treaty which should make the Prussian
+occupation of Hanover appear to be merely provisional, and reserve to the
+King of England at least a nominal voice in its ultimate transfer. In full
+confidence that Napoleon would agree to such a change, the King of Prussia
+had concealed the fact of its cession to himself by Napoleon, and published
+an untruthful proclamation, stating that, in the interests of the
+Hanoverian people themselves, a treaty had been signed and ratified by the
+French and Prussian Governments, in virtue of which Hanover was placed
+under the protection of the King of Prussia until peace should be concluded
+between Great Britain and France. The British Government received
+assurances of Prussia's respect for the rights of King George III.: the
+bitter truth that the treaty between France and Prussia contained no single
+word reserving the rights of the Elector, and that the very idea of
+qualifying the absolute cession of Hanover was an afterthought, lay hidden
+in the conscience of the Prussian Cabinet. Never had a Government more
+completely placed itself at the mercy of a pitiless enemy. Count Haugwitz,
+on reaching Paris, was received by Napoleon with a storm of invective
+against the supposed partisans of England at the Prussian Court. Napoleon
+declared that the ill faith of Prussia had made an end even of that
+miserable pact which had been extorted after Austerlitz, and insisted that
+King Frederick William should openly defy Great Britain by closing the
+ports of Northern Germany to British vessels, and by declaring himself
+endowed by Napoleon with Hanover in virtue of Napoleon's own right of
+conquest. Haugwitz signed a second and more humiliating treaty embodying
+these conditions; and the Prussian Government, now brought into the depths
+of contempt, but unready for immediate war, executed the orders of its
+master. [125] A proclamation, stating that Prussia had received the
+absolute dominion of Hanover from its conqueror Napoleon, gave the lie to
+the earlier announcements of King Frederick William. A decree was published
+excluding the ships of England from the ports of Prussia and from those of
+Hanover itself (March 28, 1806). It was promptly answered by the seizure of
+four hundred Prussian vessels in British harbours, and by the total
+extinction of Prussian maritime commerce by British privateers. [126]
+
+[Napoleon negotiates with Fox. Offers Hanover to England.]
+
+Scarcely was Prussia committed to this ruinous conflict with Great Britain,
+when Napoleon opened negotiations for peace with Mr. Fox's Government. The
+first condition required by Great Britain was the restitution of Hanover to
+King George III. It was unhesitatingly granted by Napoleon. [127] Thus was
+Prussia to be mocked of its prey, after it had been robbed of all its
+honour. For the present, however, no rumour of this part of the negotiation
+reached Berlin. The negotiation itself, which dragged on through several
+months, turned chiefly upon the future ownership of Sicily. Napoleon had in
+the first instance agreed that Sicily should be left in the hands of
+Ferdinand of Naples, who had never been expelled from it by the French.
+Finding, however, that the Russian envoy d'Oubril, who had been sent to
+Paris with indefinite instructions by the Emperor Alexander, was willing to
+separate the cause of Russia from that of England, and to sign a separate
+peace, Napoleon retracted his promise relating to Sicily, and demanded that
+this island should be ceded to his brother Joseph. D'Oubril signed
+Preliminaries on behalf of Russia on the 20th of July, and left the English
+negotiator to obtain what terms he could. Fox had been willing to recognise
+the order of things established by Napoleon on the Italian mainland; he
+would even have ceded Sicily, if Russia had urged this in a joint
+negotiation; but he was too good a statesman to be cheated out of Sicily by
+a mere trick. He recalled the English envoy from Paris, and waited for the
+judgment of the Czar upon the conduct of his own representative. The Czar
+disavowed d'Oubril's negotiations, and repudiated the treaty which he
+brought back to St. Petersburg. Napoleon had thus completely overreached
+himself, and, instead of severing Great Britain and Russia by separate
+agreements, had only irritated and displeased them both. The negotiations
+went no further; their importance lay only in the effect which they
+produced upon Prussia, when Napoleon's offer of Hanover to Great Britain
+became known at Berlin.
+
+[Prussia learns of Napoleon's offer of Hanover to England, Aug. 7.]
+
+[Prussia determines on war.]
+
+From the time when Haugwitz' second treaty placed his master at Napoleon's
+feet, Prussia had been subjected to an unbroken series of insults and
+wrongs. Murat, as Duke of Berg, had seized upon territory allotted to
+Prussia in the distribution of the ecclesiastical lands; the establishment
+of a North German Confederacy under Prussian leadership was suggested by
+Napoleon himself, only to be summarily forbidden as soon as Prussia
+attempted to carry the proposal into execution. There was scarcely a
+courtier in Berlin who did not feel that the yoke of the French had become
+past endurance; even Haugwitz himself now considered war as a question of
+time. The patriotic party in the capital and the younger officers of the
+army bitterly denounced the dishonoured Government, and urged the King to
+strike for the credit of his country. [128] In the midst of this deepening
+agitation, a despatch arrived from Lucchesini, the Prussian Ambassador at
+Paris (August 7), relating the offer of Hanover made by Napoleon to the
+British Government. For nearly three months Lucchesini had caught no
+glimpse of the negotiations between Great Britain and France; suddenly, on
+entering into conversation with the English envoy at a dinner-party, he
+learnt the blow which Napoleon had intended to deal to Prussia. Lucchesini
+instantly communicated with the Court of Berlin; but his despatch was
+opened by Talleyrand's agents before it left Paris, and the French
+Government was thus placed on its guard against the sudden explosion of
+Prussian wrath. Lucchesini's despatch had indeed all the importance that
+Talleyrand attributed to it. It brought that spasmodic access of resolution
+to the irresolute King which Bernadotte's violation of his territory had
+brought in the year before. The whole Prussian army was ordered to prepare
+for war; Brunswick was summoned to form plans of a campaign; and appeals
+for help were sent to Vienna, to St. Petersburg, and even to the hostile
+Court of London.
+
+[Condition of Prussia.]
+
+[Ministers not in the King's Cabinet.]
+
+The condition of Prussia at this critical moment was one which filled with
+the deepest alarm those few patriotic statesmen who were not blinded by
+national vanity or by slavery to routine. The foreign policy of Prussia in
+1805, miserable as it was, had been but a single manifestation of the
+helplessness, the moral deadness that ran through every part of its
+official and public life. Early in the year 1806 a paper was drawn up by
+Stein, [129] exposing, in language seldom used by a statesman, the
+character of the men by whom Frederick William was surrounded, and
+declaring that nothing but a speedy change of system could save the
+Prussian State from utter downfall and ruin. Two measures of immediate
+necessity were specified by Stein, the establishment of a responsible
+council of Ministers, and the removal of Haugwitz and all his friends from
+power. In the existing system of government the Ministers were not the
+monarch's confidential advisers. The Ministers performed their work in
+isolation from one another; the Cabinet, or confidential council of the
+King, was composed of persons holding no public function, and free from all
+public responsibility. No guarantee existed that the policy of the country
+would be the same for two days together. The Ministers were often unaware
+of the turn that affairs had taken in the Cabinet; and the history of
+Haugwitz' mission to Austerlitz showed that an individual might commit the
+State to engagements the very opposite of those which he was sent to
+contract. The first necessity for Prussia was a responsible governing
+council: with such a council, formed from the heads of the actual
+Administration, the reform of the army and of the other branches of the
+public service, which was absolutely hopeless under the present system,
+might be attended with some chance of success.
+
+[State of the Prussian Army.]
+
+[Higher officers.]
+
+The army of Prussia, at an epoch when the conscription and the genius of
+Napoleon had revolutionised the art of war, was nothing but the army of
+Frederick the Great grown twenty years older. [130] It was obvious to all
+the world that its commissariat and marching-regulations belonged to a time
+when weeks were allowed for movements now reckoned by days; but there were
+circumstances less conspicuous from the outside which had paralysed the
+very spirit of soldiership, and prepared the way for a military collapse in
+which defeats in the field were the least dishonourable event. Old age had
+rendered the majority of the higher officers totally unfit for military
+service. In that barrack-like routine of officialism which passed in
+Prussia for the wisdom of government, the upper ranks of the army formed a
+species of administrative corps in time of peace, and received for their
+civil employment double the pay that they could earn in actual war. Aged
+men, with the rank of majors, colonels, and generals, mouldered in the
+offices of country towns, and murmured at the very mention of a war, which
+would deprive them of half their salaries. Except in the case of certain
+princes, who were placed in high rank while young, and of a few vigorous
+patriarchs like Bluecher, all the energy and military spirit of the army was
+to be found in men who had not passed the grade of captain. The higher
+officers were, on an average, nearly double the age of French officers of
+corresponding rank. [131] Of the twenty-four lieutenant-generals, eighteen
+were over sixty; the younger ones, with a single exception, were princes.
+Five out of the seven commanders of infantry were over seventy; even the
+sixteen cavalry generals included only two who had not reached sixty-five.
+These were the men who, when the armies of Prussia were beaten in the
+field, surrendered its fortresses with as little concern as if they had
+been receiving the French on a visit of ceremony. Their vanity was as
+lamentable as their faint-heartedness. "The army of his Majesty," said
+General Ruechel on parade, "possesses several generals equal to Bonaparte."
+Faults of another character belonged to the generation which had grown up
+since Frederick. The arrogance and licentiousness of the younger officers
+was such that their ruin on the field of Jena caused positive joy to a
+great part of the middle classes of Prussia. But, however hateful their
+manners, and however rash their self-confidence, the vices of these younger
+men had no direct connection with the disasters of 1806. The gallants who
+sharpened their swords on the window-sill of the French Ambassador received
+a bitter lesson from the plebeian troopers of Murat; but they showed
+courage in disaster, and subsequently gave to their country many officers
+of ability and honour.
+
+[Common soldiers.]
+
+What was bad in the higher grades of the army was not retrieved by any
+excellence on the part of the private soldier. The Prussian army was
+recruited in part from foreigners, but chiefly from Prussian serfs, who
+were compelled to serve. Men remained with their regiments till old age;
+the rough character of the soldiers and the frequency of crimes and
+desertions occasioned the use of brutal punishments, which made the
+military service an object of horror to the better part of the middle and
+lower classes. The soldiers themselves, who could be flogged and drilled
+into high military perfection by a great general like Frederick, felt a
+surly indifference to their present taskmasters, and were ready to desert
+in masses to their homes as soon as a defeat broke up the regimental muster
+and roll-call. A proposal made in the previous year to introduce that
+system of general service which has since made Prussia so great a military
+power was rejected by a committee of generals, on the ground that it "would
+convert the most formidable army of Europe into a militia." But whether
+Prussia entered the war with a militia or a regular army, under the men who
+held command in 1806 it could have met with but one fate. Neither soldiery
+nor fortresses could have saved a kingdom whose generals knew only how to
+capitulate.
+
+[Southern Germany. Execution of Palm, Aug. 26.]
+
+All southern Germany was still in Napoleon's hands. As the probability of a
+war with Prussia became greater and greater, Napoleon had tightened his
+grasp upon the Confederate States. Publications originating among the
+patriotic circles of Austria were beginning to appeal to the German people
+to unite against a foreign oppressor. An anonymous pamphlet, entitled
+"Germany in its Deep Humiliation," was sold by various booksellers in
+Bavaria, among others by Palm, a citizen of Nuremberg. There is no evidence
+that Palm was even acquainted with the contents of the pamphlet; but as in
+the case of the Duke of Enghien, two years before, Napoleon had required a
+victim to terrify the House of Bourbon, so now he required a victim to
+terrify those who among the German people might be inclined to listen to
+the call of patriotism. Palm was not too obscure for the new Charlemagne.
+The innocent and unoffending man, innocent even of the honourable crime of
+attempting to save his country, was dragged before a tribunal of French
+soldiers, and executed within twenty-four hours, in pursuance of the
+imperative orders of Napoleon (August 26). The murder was an unnecessary
+one, for the Bavarians and the Wuertembergers were in fact content with the
+yoke they bore; its only effect was to arouse among a patient and
+home-loving class the doubt whether the German citizen and his family might
+not after all have some interest in the preservation of national
+independence.
+
+[Austria neutral. England and Russia can give Prussia no prompt help.]
+
+When, several years later, the oppressions of Napoleon had given to a great
+part of the German race at least the transient nobleness of a real
+patriotism, the story of Palm's death was one of those that kindled the
+bitterest sense of wrong: at the time, it exercised no influence upon the
+course of political events. Southern Germany remained passive, and supplied
+Napoleon with a reserve of soldiers: Prussia had to look elsewhere for
+allies. Its prospects of receiving support were good, if the war should
+prove a protracted one, but not otherwise. Austria, crippled by the
+disasters of 1805, could only hope to renew the struggle if victory should
+declare against Napoleon. In other quarters help might be promised, but it
+could not be given at the time and at the place where it was needed. The
+Czar proffered the whole forces of his Empire; King George III. forgave the
+despoilers of his patrimony when he found that they really intended to
+fight the French; but the troops of Alexander lay far in the East, and the
+action of England in any Continental war was certain to be dilatory and
+ineffective. Prussia was exposed to the first shock of the war alone. In
+the existing situation of the French armies, a blow unusually swift and
+crushing might well be expected by all who understood Napoleon's warfare.
+
+[Situation of the French and Prussian armies, Sept., 1806.]
+
+[French on the Main.]
+
+[Prussians on the Saale.]
+
+A hundred and seventy thousand French soldiers, with contingents from the
+Rhenish Confederate States, lay between the Main and the Inn. The last
+weeks of peace, in which the Prussian Government imagined themselves to be
+deceiving the enemy while they pushed forward their own preparations, were
+employed by Napoleon in quietly concentrating this vast force upon the Main
+(September, 1806). Napoleon himself appeared to be absorbed in friendly
+negotiations with General Knobelsdorff, the new Prussian Ambassador at
+Paris. In order to lull Napoleon's suspicions, Haugwitz had recalled
+Lucchesini from Paris, and intentionally deceived his successor as to the
+real designs of the Prussian Cabinet. Knobelsdorff confidentially informed
+the Emperor that Prussia was not serious in its preparations for war.
+Napoleon, caring very little whether Prussia intended to fight or not,
+continued at Paris in the appearance of the greatest calm, while his
+lieutenants in Southern Germany executed those unobserved movements which
+were to collect the entire army upon the Upper Main. In the meantime the
+advisers of King Frederick William supposed themselves to have made
+everything ready for a vigorous offensive. Divisions of the Prussian army,
+numbering nearly 130,000 men, were concentrated in the neighbourhood of
+Jena, on the Saale. The bolder spirits in the military council pressed for
+an immediate advance through the Thuringian Forest, and for an attack upon
+what were supposed to be the scattered detachments of the French in
+Bavaria. Military pride and all the traditions of the Great Frederick
+impelled Prussia to take the offensive rather than to wait for the enemy
+upon the strong line of the Elbe. Political motives pointed in the same
+direction, for the support of Saxony was doubtful if once the French were
+permitted to approach Dresden.
+
+[Confusion of the Prussians.]
+
+On the 23rd of September King Frederick William arrived at the
+head-quarters of the army, which were now at Naumburg, on the Saale. But
+his presence brought no controlling mind to the direction of affairs.
+Councils of war held on the two succeeding days only revealed the discord
+and the irresolution of the military leaders of Prussia. Brunswick, the
+commander-in-chief, sketched the boldest plans, and shrank from the
+responsibility of executing them. Hohenlohe, who commanded the left wing,
+lost no opportunity of opposing his superior; the suggestions of officers
+of real ability, like Scharnhorst, chief of the staff, fell unnoticed among
+the wrangling of pedants and partisans. Brunswick, himself a man of great
+intelligence though of little resolution, saw the true quality of the men
+who surrounded him. "Ruechel," he cried, "is a tin trumpet, Moellendorf a
+dotard, Kalkreuth a cunning trickster. The generals of division are a set
+of stupid journeymen. Are these the people with whom one can make war on
+Napoleon? No. The best service that I could render to the King would be to
+persuade him to keep the peace." [132] It was ultimately decided, after two
+days of argument, that the army should advance through the Thuringian
+Forest, while feints on the right and left deceived the French as to its
+real direction. The diplomatists, however, who were mad enough to think
+that an ultimatum which they had just despatched to Paris would bring
+Napoleon on to his knees, insisted that the opening of hostilities should
+be deferred till the 8th of October, when the term of grace which they had
+given to Napoleon would expire.
+
+[Prussians at Erfurt, Oct. 4.]
+
+A few days after this decision had been formed, intelligence arrived at
+head-quarters that Napoleon himself was upon the Rhine. Before the
+ultimatum reached the hands of General Knobelsdorff in Paris, Napoleon had
+quitted the capital, and the astonished Ambassador could only send the
+ultimatum in pursuit of him after he had gone to place himself at the head
+of 200,000 men. The news that Napoleon was actually in Mainz confounded the
+diplomatists in the Prussian camp, and produced an order for an immediate
+advance. This was the wisest as well as the boldest determination that had
+yet been formed; and an instant assault upon the French divisions on the
+Main might perhaps even now have given the Prussian army the superiority in
+the first encounter. But some fatal excuse was always at hand to justify
+Brunswick in receding from his resolutions. A positive assurance was
+brought into camp by Lucchesini that Napoleon had laid his plans for
+remaining on the defensive on the south of the Thuringian Forest. If this
+were true, there might yet be time to improve the plan of the campaign; and
+on the 4th of October, when every hour was of priceless value, the forward
+march was arrested, and a new series of deliberations began at the
+head-quarters at Erfurt. In the council held on the 4th of October, a total
+change in the plan of operations was urged by Hohenlohe's staff. They
+contended, and rightly, that it was the design of Napoleon to pass the
+Prussian army on the east by the valley of the Saale, and to cut it off
+from the roads to the Elbe. The delay in Brunswick's movements had in fact
+brought the French within striking distance of the Prussian communications.
+Hohenlohe urged the King to draw back the army from Erfurt to the Saale, or
+even to the east of it, in order to cover the roads to Leipzig and the
+Elbe. His theory of Napoleon's movements, which was the correct one, was
+adopted by the council, and the advance into the Thuringian Forest was
+abandoned; but instead of immediately marching eastwards with the whole
+army, the generals wasted two more days in hesitations and half-measures.
+At length it was agreed that Hohenlohe should take post at Jena, and that
+the mass of the army should fall back to Weimar, with the object of
+striking a blow at some undetermined point on the line of Napoleon's
+advance.
+
+[Encounter at Saalfeld, Oct. 10.]
+
+[Napoleon defeats Hohenlohe at Jena, Oct. 14.]
+
+[Davoust defeats Brunswick at Auerstaedt, Oct. 14.]
+
+[Ruin of the Prussian Army.]
+
+Napoleon, who had just received the Prussian ultimatum with unbounded
+ridicule and contempt, was now moving along the roads that lead from
+Bamberg and Baireuth to the Upper Saale. On the 10th of October, as the
+division of Lannes was approaching Saalfeld, it was attacked by Prince
+Louis Ferdinand at the head of Hohenlohe's advanced guard. The attack was
+made against Hohenlohe's orders. It resulted in the total rout of the
+Prussian force. Though the numbers engaged were small, the loss of
+magazines and artillery, and the death of Prince Louis Ferdinand, the hero
+of the war-party, gave to this first repulse the moral effect of a great
+military disaster. Hohenlohe's troops at Jena were seized with panic;
+numbers of men threw away their arms and dispersed; the drivers of
+artillery-waggons and provision-carts cut the traces and rode off with
+their horses. Brunswick, however, and the main body of the army, were now
+at Weimar, close at hand; and if Brunswick had decided to fight a great
+battle at Jena, the Prussians might have brought nearly 90,000 men into
+action. But the plans of the irresolute commander were again changed. It
+was resolved to fall back upon Magdeburg and the Elbe. Brunswick himself
+moved northwards to Naumburg; Hohenlohe was ordered to hold the French in
+check at Jena until this movement was completed. Napoleon reached Jena. He
+had no intelligence of Brunswick's retreat, and imagined the mass of the
+Prussian army to be gathered round Hohenlohe, on the plateau before him. He
+sent Davoust, with a corps 27,000 strong, to outflank the enemy by a march
+in the direction of Naumburg, and himself prepared to make the attack in
+front with 90,000 men, a force more than double Hohenlohe's real army. The
+attack was made on the 14th of October. Hohenlohe's army was dashed to
+pieces by Napoleon, and fled in wild disorder. Davoust's weak corps, which
+had not expected to meet with any important forces until it fell upon
+Hohenlohe's flank, found itself in the presence of Brunswick's main army,
+when it arrived at Auerstaedt, a few miles to the north. Fortune had given
+to the Prussian commander an extraordinary chance of retrieving what
+strategy had lost. A battle conducted with common military skill would not
+only have destroyed Davoust, but have secured, at least for the larger
+portion of the Prussian forces, a safe retreat to Leipzig or the Elbe. The
+French general, availing himself of steep and broken ground, defeated
+numbers nearly double his own through the confusion of his adversary, who
+sent up detachment after detachment instead of throwing himself upon
+Davoust with his entire strength. The fighting was as furious on the
+Prussian side as its conduct was unskilful. King Frederick William, who led
+the earlier cavalry charges, had two horses killed under him. Brunswick was
+mortally wounded. Many of the other generals were killed or disabled. There
+remained, however, a sufficient number of unbroken regiments to preserve
+some order in the retreat until the army came into contact with the remnant
+of Hohenlohe's forces, flying for their lives before the cavalry of Murat.
+Then all hope was lost. The fugitive mass struck panic and confusion into
+the retreating columns; and with the exception of a few regiments which
+gathered round well-known leaders, the soldiers threw away their arms and
+spread over the country in headlong rout. There was no line of retreat, and
+no rallying-point. The disaster of a single day made an end of the Prussian
+army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. A great part of
+the troops was captured by the pursuing enemy during the next few days. The
+regiments which preserved their coherence were too weak to make any attempt
+to check Napoleon's advance, and could only hope to save themselves by
+escaping to the fortresses on the Oder.
+
+[Haugwitz and Lord Morpeth.]
+
+[Retreat and surrender of Hohenlohe.]
+
+Two days before the battle of Jena, an English envoy, Lord Morpeth, had
+arrived at the head-quarters of the King of Prussia, claiming the
+restoration of Hanover, and bearing an offer of the friendship and support
+of Great Britain. At the moment when the Prussian monarchy was on the point
+of being hurled to the ground, its Government might have been thought
+likely to welcome any security that it should not be abandoned in its
+utmost need. Haugwitz, however, was at head-quarters, dictating lying
+bulletins, and perplexing the generals with ridiculous arguments of policy
+until the French actually opened fire. When the English envoy made known
+his arrival, he found that no one would transact business with him.
+Haugwitz had determined to evade all negotiations until the battle had been
+fought. He was unwilling to part with Hanover, and he hoped that a victory
+over Napoleon would enable him to meet Lord Morpeth with a bolder
+countenance on the following day. When that day arrived, Ministers and
+diplomatists were flying headlong over the country. The King made his
+escape to Weimar, and wrote to Napoleon, begging for an armistice; but the
+armistice was refused, and the pursuit of the broken army was followed up
+without a moment's pause. The capital offered no safe halting-place; and
+Frederick William only rested when he had arrived at Graudenz, upon the
+Vistula. Hohenlohe's poor remnant of an army passed the Elbe at Magdeburg,
+and took the road for Stettin, at the mouth of the Oder, leaving Berlin to
+its fate. The retreat was badly conducted; alternate halts and strained
+marches discouraged the best of the soldiers. As the men passed their
+native villages they abandoned the famishing and broken-spirited columns;
+and at the end of a fortnight's disasters Prince Hohenlohe surrendered to
+his pursuers at Prenzlau with his main body, now numbering only 10,000 men
+(Oct. 28).
+
+[Bluecher at Luebeck.]
+
+Bluecher, who had shown the utmost energy and fortitude after the
+catastrophe of Jena, was moving in the rear of Hohenlohe with a
+considerable force which his courage had gathered around him. On learning
+of Hohenlohe's capitulation, he instantly reversed his line of march, and
+made for the Hanoverian fortress of Hameln, in order to continue the war in
+the rear of the French. Overwhelming forces, however, cut off his retreat
+to the Elbe; he was hemmed in on the east and on the west; and nothing
+remained for him but to throw himself into the neutral town of Luebeck, and
+fight until food and ammunition failed him. The French were at his heels.
+The magistrates of Luebeck prayed that their city might not be made into a
+battle-field, but in vain; Bluecher refused to move into the open country.
+The town was stormed by the French, and put to the sack. Bluecher was driven
+out, desperately fighting, and pent in between the Danish frontier and the
+sea. Here, surrounded by overpowering numbers, without food, without
+ammunition, he capitulated on the 7th of November, after his courage and
+resolution had done everything that could ennoble both general and soldiers
+in the midst of overwhelming calamity.
+
+[Napoleon at Berlin, Oct. 27.]
+
+[Capitulation of Prussian fortresses.]
+
+The honour of entering the Prussian capital was given by Napoleon to
+Davoust, whose victory at Auerstaedt had in fact far surpassed his own.
+Davoust entered Berlin without resistance on the 25th of October; Napoleon
+himself went to Potsdam, and carried off the sword and the scarf that lay
+upon the grave of Frederick the Great. Two days after Davoust, the Emperor
+made his own triumphal entry into the capital. He assumed the part of the
+protector of the people against the aristocracy, ordering the formation of
+a municipal body and of a civic guard for the city of Berlin. The military
+aristocracy he treated with the bitterest hatred and contempt. "I will make
+that noblesse," he cried, "so poor that they shall beg their bread." The
+disaster of Jena had indeed fearfully punished the insolence with which the
+officers of the army had treated the rest of the nation. The Guards were
+marched past the windows of the citizens of Berlin, a miserable troop of
+captives; soldiers of rank who remained in the city had to attend upon the
+French Emperor to receive his orders. But calamity was only beginning. The
+overthrow of Jena had been caused by faults of generalship, and cast no
+stain upon the courage of the officers; the surrender of the Prussian
+fortresses, which began on the day when the French entered Berlin, attached
+the utmost personal disgrace to their commanders. Even after the
+destruction of the army in the field, Prussia's situation would not have
+been hopeless if the commanders of fortresses had acted on the ordinary
+rules of military duty. Magdeburg and the strongholds upon the Oder were
+sufficiently armed and provisioned to detain the entire French army, and to
+give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as numerous as
+that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human nature--old age,
+fear, and credulity--seemed to have been placed at the head of Prussia's
+defences. The very object for which fortresses exist was forgotten; and the
+fact that one army had been beaten in the field was made a reason for
+permitting the enemy to forestall the organisation of another. Spandau
+surrendered on the 25th of October, Stettin on the 29th. These were places
+of no great strength; but the next fortress to capitulate, Kuestrin on the
+Oder, was in full order for a long siege. It was surrendered by the older
+officers, amidst the curses of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the
+artillerymen had to be dragged from their guns by force. Magdeburg, with a
+garrison of 24,000 men and enormous supplies, fell before a French force
+not numerous enough to beleaguer it (Nov. 8).
+
+[Napoleon's demands.]
+
+Neither Napoleon himself nor any one else in Europe could have foreseen
+such conduct on the part of the Prussian commanders. The unexpected series
+of capitulations made him demand totally different terms of peace from
+those which he had offered after the battle of Jena. A week after the
+victory, Napoleon had demanded, as the price of peace, the cession of
+Prussia's territory west of the Elbe, with the exception of the town of
+Magdeburg, and the withdrawal of Prussia from the affairs of Germany. These
+terms were communicated to King Frederick William; he accepted them, and
+sent Lucchesini to Berlin to negotiate for peace upon this basis.
+Lucchesini had scarcely reached the capital when the tidings arrived of
+Hohenlohe's capitulation, followed by the surrender of Stettin and Kuestrin.
+The Prussian envoy now sought in vain to procure Napoleon's ratification of
+the terms which he had himself proposed. No word of peace could be
+obtained: an armistice was all that the Emperor would grant, and the terms
+on which the armistice was offered rose with each new disaster to the
+Prussian arms. On the fall of Magdeburg becoming known, Napoleon demanded
+that the troops of Prussia should retire behind the Vistula, and surrender
+every fortress that they still retained, with the single exception of
+Koenigsberg. Much as Prussia had lost, it would have cost Napoleon a second
+campaign to make himself master of what he now asked; but to such a depth
+had the Prussian Government sunk, that Lucchesini actually signed a
+convention at Charlottenburg (November 16), surrendering to Napoleon, in
+return for an armistice, the entire list of uncaptured fortresses,
+including Dantzig and Thorn on the Lower Vistula, Breslau, with the rest of
+the untouched defences of Silesia, Warsaw and Praga in Prussian Poland, and
+Colberg upon the Pomeranian coast. [133]
+
+[Frederick William continues the war.]
+
+The treaty, however, required the King's ratification. Frederick William,
+timorous as he was, hesitated to confirm an agreement which ousted him from
+his dominions as completely as if the last soldier of Prussia had gone into
+captivity. The patriotic party, headed by Stein, pleaded for the honour of
+the country against the miserable Cabinet which now sought to complete its
+work of ruin. Assurances of support arrived from St. Petersburg. The King
+determined to reject the treaty, and to continue the war to the last
+extremity. Haugwitz hereupon tendered his resignation, and terminated a
+political career disastrous beyond any recorded in modern times. For a
+moment, it seemed as if the real interests of the country were at length to
+be recognised in the appointment of Stein to one of the three principal
+offices of State. But the King still remained blind to the necessity of
+unity in the government, and angrily dismissed Stein when he refused to
+hold the Ministry if representatives of the old Cabinet and of the
+peace-party were to have places beside him. The King's act was ill
+calculated to serve the interests of Prussia, either at home or abroad.
+Stein was the one Minister on whom the patriotic party of Prussia and the
+Governments of Europe could rely with perfect confidence. [134] His
+dismissal at this crisis proved the incurable poverty of Frederick
+William's mental nature; it also proved that, so long as any hope remained
+of saving the Prussian State by the help of the Czar of Russia, the
+patriotic party had little chance of creating a responsible government at
+home.
+
+[Napoleon at Berlin.]
+
+[The Berlin decree against English commerce, Nov. 21, 1806.]
+
+Throughout the month of November French armies overran Northern Germany:
+Napoleon himself remained at Berlin, and laid the foundations of a
+political system corresponding to that which he had imposed upon Southern
+Germany after the victory of Austerlitz. The Houses of Brunswick and
+Hesse-Cassel were deposed, in order to create a new client-kingdom of
+Westphalia; Saxony, with Weimar and four other duchies, entered the
+Confederation of the Rhine. A measure more widely affecting the Continent
+of Europe dated from the last days of the Emperor's residence at the
+Prussian capital. On the 21st of November, 1806, a decree was published at
+Berlin prohibiting the inhabitants of the entire European territory allied
+with France from carrying on any commerce with Great Britain, or admitting
+any merchandise that had been produced in Great Britain or in its colonies.
+[135] The line of coast thus closed to the shipping and the produce of the
+British Empire included everything from the Vistula to the southern point
+of Dalmatia, with the exception of Denmark and Portugal and the Austrian
+port of Trieste. All property belonging to English subjects, all
+merchandise of British origin, whoever might be the owner, was ordered to
+be confiscated: no vessel that had even touched at a British port was
+permitted to enter a Continental harbour. It was the fixed purpose of
+Napoleon to exhaust Great Britain, since he could not destroy its navies,
+or, according to his own expression, to conquer England upon the Continent.
+All that was most harsh and unjust in the operation of the Berlin Decree
+fell, however, more upon Napoleon's own subjects than upon Great Britain.
+The exclusion of British ships from the harbours of the allies of France
+was no more than the exercise of a common right in war; even the seizure of
+the property of Englishmen, though a violation of international law, bore
+at least an analogy to the seizure of French property at sea; but the
+confiscation of the merchandise of German and Dutch traders, after it had
+lain for weeks in their own warehouses, solely because it had been produced
+in the British Empire, was an act of flagrant and odious oppression. The
+first result of the Berlin Decree was to fill the trading towns of North
+Germany with French revenue-officers and inquisitors. Peaceable tradesmen
+began to understand the import of the battle of Jena when French gendarmes
+threw their stock into the common furnace, or dragged them to prison for
+possessing a hogshead of Jamaica sugar or a bale of Leeds cloth. The
+merchants who possessed a large quantity of English or colonial wares were
+the heaviest sufferers by Napoleon's commercial policy: the public found
+the markets supplied by American and Danish traders, until, at a later
+period, the British Government adopted reprisals, and prevented the ships
+of neutrals from entering any port from which English vessels were
+excluded. Then every cottage felt the stress of the war. But if the full
+consequences of the Berlin Decree were delayed until the retaliation of
+Great Britain reached the dimensions of Napoleon's own tyranny, the Decree
+itself marked on the part of Napoleon the assumption of a power in conflict
+with the needs and habits of European life. Like most of the schemes of
+Napoleon subsequent to the victories of 1806, it transgressed the limits of
+practical statesmanship, and displayed an ambition no longer raised above
+mere tyranny by its harmony with forms of progress and with the better
+tendencies of the age.
+
+[Napoleon and the Poles.]
+
+Immediately after signing the Berlin Decree, Napoleon quitted the Prussian
+capital (Nov. 25). The first act of the war had now closed. The Prussian
+State was overthrown; its territory as far as the Vistula lay at the mercy
+of the invader; its King was a fugitive at Koenigsberg, at the eastern
+extremity of his dominions. The second act of the war began with the
+rejection of the armistice which had been signed by Lucchesini, and with
+the entry of Russia into the field against Napoleon. The scene of
+hostilities was henceforward in Prussian Poland and in the Baltic Province
+lying between the lower Vistula and the Russian frontier. Napoleon entered
+Poland, as he had entered Italy ten years before, with the pretence of
+restoring liberty to an enslaved people. Kosciusko's name was fraudulently
+attached to a proclamation summoning the Polish nation to arms; and
+although Kosciusko himself declined to place any trust in the betrayer of
+Venice, thousands of his countrymen flocked to Napoleon's standard, or
+anticipated his arrival by capturing and expelling the Prussian detachments
+scattered through their country. Promises of the restoration of Polish
+independence were given by Napoleon in abundance; but the cause of Poland
+was the last to attract the sympathy of a man who considered the sacrifice
+of the weak to the strong to be the first principle of all good policy. To
+have attempted the restoration of Polish independence would have been to
+make permanent enemies of Russia and Prussia for the sake of an ally weaker
+than either of them. The project was not at this time seriously entertained
+by Napoleon. He had no motive to face a work of such enormous difficulty as
+the creation of a solid political order among the most unpractical race in
+Europe. He was glad to enrol the Polish nobles among his soldiers; he knew
+the value of their enthusiasm, and took pains to excite it; but, when the
+battle was over, it was with Russia, not Poland, that France had to settle;
+and no better fate remained, even for the Prussian provinces of Poland,
+than in part to be formed into a client-state, in part to be surrendered as
+a means of accommodation with the Czar.
+
+[Campaign in Poland against Russia, Dec., 1806.]
+
+The armies of Russia were at some distance from the Vistula when, in
+November, 1806, Napoleon entered Polish territory. Their movements were
+slow, their numbers insufficient. At the moment when all the forces of the
+Empire were required for the struggle against Napoleon, troops were being
+sent into Moldavia against the Sultan. Nor were the Russian commanders
+anxious to save what still remained of the Prussian kingdom. The disasters
+of Prussia, like those of Austria at the beginning of the campaign of 1805,
+excited less sympathy than contempt; and the inclination of the Czar's
+generals was rather to carry on the war upon the frontier of their own
+country than to commit themselves to a distant campaign with a despised
+ally. Lestocq, who commanded the remnant of the Prussian army upon the
+Vistula, was therefore directed to abandon his position at Thorn and to
+move eastwards. The French crossed the Vistula higher up the river; and by
+the middle of December the armies of France and Russia lay opposite to one
+another in the neighbourhood of Pultusk, upon the Ukra and the Narew. The
+first encounter, though not of a decisive character, resulted in the
+retreat of the Russians. Heavy rains and fathomless mud checked the
+pursuit. War seemed almost impossible in such a country and such a climate;
+and Napoleon ordered his troops to take up their winter quarters along the
+Vistula, believing that nothing more could be attempted on either side
+before the spring.
+
+[Eylau, Feb. 8, 1807.]
+
+[Napoleon and Bennigsen in East Prussia.]
+
+But the command of the Russian forces was now transferred from the aged and
+half-mad Kamenski, [136] who had opened the campaign, to a general better
+qualified to cope with Napoleon. Bennigsen, the new commander-in-chief, was
+an active and daring soldier. Though a German by birth, his soldiership was
+of that dogged and resolute order which suits the character of Russian
+troops; and, in the mid-winter of 1806, Napoleon found beyond the Vistula
+such an enemy as he had never encountered in Western Europe. Bennigsen
+conceived the design of surprising the extreme left of the French line,
+where Ney's division lay stretched towards the Baltic, far to the
+north-east of Napoleon's main body. Forest and marsh concealed the movement
+of the Russian troops, and both Ney and Bernadotte narrowly escaped
+destruction. Napoleon now broke up his winter quarters, and marched in
+great force against Bennigsen in the district between Koenigsberg and the
+mouth of the Vistula. Bennigsen manoeuvred and retired until his troops
+clamoured for battle. He then took up a position at Eylau, and waited for
+the attack of the French. The battle of Eylau, fought in the midst of
+snowstorms on the 8th of February, 1807, was unlike anything that Napoleon
+had ever yet seen. His columns threw themselves in vain upon the Russian
+infantry. Augereau's corps was totally destroyed in the beginning of the
+battle. The Russians pressed upon the ground where Napoleon himself stood;
+and, although the superiority of the Emperor's tactics at length turned the
+scale, and the French began a forward movement, their advance was stopped
+by the arrival of Lestocq and a body of 13,000 Prussians. At the close of
+the engagement 30,000 men lay wounded or dead in the snow; the positions of
+the armies remained what they had been in the morning. Bennigsen's
+lieutenants urged him to renew the combat on the next day; but the
+confusion of the Russian army was such that the French, in spite of their
+losses and discouragement, would probably have gained the victory in a
+second battle; [137] and the Russian commander determined to fall back
+towards Koenigsberg, content with having disabled the enemy and given
+Napoleon such a check as he had never received before. Napoleon, who had
+announced his intention of entering Koenigsberg in triumph, fell back upon
+the river Passarge, and awaited the arrival of reinforcements.
+
+[Sieges of Dantzig and Colberg, March, 1807.]
+
+[Inaction of England.]
+
+[Fall of Grenville's Ministry, March 24, 1807.]
+
+[Treaty of Barrenstein between Russia, Prussia, England, and Sweden.
+April, 1807.]
+
+The warfare of the next few months was confined to the reduction of the
+Prussian fortresses which had not yet fallen into the hands of the French.
+Dantzig surrendered after a long and difficult siege; the little town of
+Colberg upon the Pomeranian coast prolonged a defence as honourable to its
+inhabitants as to the military leaders. Two soldiers of singularly
+different character, each destined to play a conspicuous part in coming
+years, first distinguished themselves in the defence of Colberg. Gneisenau,
+a scientific soldier of the highest order, the future guide of Bluecher's
+victorious campaigns, commanded the garrison; Schill, a cavalry officer of
+adventurous daring, gathered round him a troop of hardy riders, and
+harassed the French with an audacity as perplexing to his military
+superiors as to the enemy. The citizens, led by their burgomaster, threw
+themselves into the work of defence with a vigour in striking contrast to
+the general apathy of the Prussian people; and up to the end of the war
+Colberg remained uncaptured. Obscure as Colberg was, its defence might have
+given a new turn to the war if the Government of Great Britain had listened
+to the entreaties of the Emperor Alexander, and despatched a force to the
+Baltic to threaten the communications of Napoleon. The task was not a
+difficult one for a Power which could find troops, as England now did, to
+send to Constantinople, to Alexandria, and to Buenos Ayres; but military
+judgment was more than ever wanting to the British Cabinet. Fox had died at
+the beginning of the war; his successors in Grenville's Ministry, though
+they possessed a sound theory of foreign policy, [138] were not fortunate
+in its application, nor were they prompt enough in giving financial help to
+their allies. Suddenly, however, King George quarrelled with his Ministers
+upon the ancient question of Catholic Disabilities, and drove them from
+office (March 24). The country sided with the King. A Ministry came into
+power, composed of the old supporters of Pitt, men, with the exception of
+Canning and Castlereagh, of narrow views and poor capacity, headed by the
+Duke of Portland, who, in 1793, had given his name to the section of the
+Whig party which joined Pitt. The foreign policy of the new Cabinet, which
+concealed its total lack of all other statesmanship, returned to the lines
+laid down by Pitt in 1805. Negotiations were opened with Russia for the
+despatch of an English army to the Baltic; arms and money were promised to
+the Prussian King. For a moment it seemed as if the Powers of Europe had
+never been united in so cordial a league. The Czar embraced the King of
+Prussia in the midst of his soldiers, and declared with tears that the two
+should stand or fall together. The Treaty of Bartenstein, signed in April
+1807 pledged the Courts of St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and Berlin to a joint
+prosecution of the war, and the common conclusion of peace. Great Britain
+joined the pact, and prepared to fulfil its part in the conflict upon the
+Baltic. But the task was a difficult one, for Grenville's Ministry had
+dispersed the fleet of transports; and, although Canning determined upon
+the Baltic expedition in April, two months passed before the fleet was
+ready to sail.
+
+[Summer campaign in East Prussia, 1807.]
+
+[Battle of Friedland.]
+
+In the meantime army upon army was moving to the support of Napoleon, from
+France, from Spain, from Holland, and from Southern Germany. The fortresses
+of the Elbe and the Oder, which ought to have been his barrier, had become
+his base of operations; and so enormous were the forces at his command,
+that, after manning every stronghold in Central Europe, he was able at the
+beginning of June to bring 140,000 men into the field beyond the Vistula.
+The Russians had also received reinforcements, but Bennigsen's army was
+still weaker than that of the enemy. It was Bennigsen, nevertheless, who
+began the attack; and now, as in the winter campaign, he attempted to
+surprise and crush the northern corps of Ney. The same general movement of
+the French army followed as in January. The Russian commander, outnumbered
+by the French, retired to his fortified camp at Heilsberg. After sustaining
+a bloody repulse in an attack upon this position, Napoleon drew Bennigsen
+from his lair by marching straight upon Koenigsberg. Bennigsen supposed
+himself to be in time to deal with an isolated corps; he found himself face
+to face with the whole forces of the enemy at Friedland, accepted battle,
+and was unable to save his army from a severe and decisive defeat (June
+14). The victory of Friedland brought the French into Koenigsberg. Bennigsen
+retired behind the Niemen; and on the 19th of June an armistice closed the
+operations of the hostile forces upon the frontiers of Russia. [139]
+
+The situation of Bennigsen's army was by no means desperate. His men had
+not been surrounded; they had lost scarcely any prisoners; they felt no
+fear of the French. But the general exaggerated the seriousness of his
+defeat. Like most of his officers, he was weary of the war, and felt no
+sympathy with the motives which led the Emperor to fight for the common
+cause of Europe. The politicians who surrounded Alexander urged him to
+withdraw Russia from a conflict in which she had nothing to gain. The
+Emperor wavered. The tardiness of Great Britain, the continued neutrality
+of Austria, cast a doubt upon the wisdom of his own disinterestedness; and
+he determined to meet Napoleon, and ascertain the terms on which Russia
+might be reconciled to the master of half the Continent.
+
+[Interview of Napoleon and Alexander at Tilsit, June 25.]
+
+On the 25th of June the two sovereigns met one another on the raft of
+Tilsit, in the midstream of the river Niemen. The conversation, which is
+alleged to have been opened by Alexander with an expression of hatred
+towards England, was heard by no one but the speakers. But whatever the
+eagerness or the reluctance of the Russian monarch to sever himself from
+Great Britain, the purpose of Napoleon was effected. Alexander surrendered
+himself to the addresses of a conqueror who seemed to ask for nothing and
+to offer everything. The negotiations were prolonged; the relations of the
+two monarchs became more and more intimate; and the issue of the struggle
+for life or death was that Russia accepted the whole scheme of Napoleonic
+conquest, and took its place by the side of the despoiler in return for its
+share of the prey. It was in vain that the King of Prussia had rejected
+Napoleon's offers after the battle of Eylau, in fidelity to his engagements
+towards his ally. Promises, treaties, and pity were alike cast to the
+winds. The unfortunate Frederick William received no more embraces; the
+friend with whom he was to stand or fall bargained away the larger half of
+his dominions to Napoleon, and even rectified the Russian frontier at his
+expense. Prussia's continued existence in any shape whatever was described
+as a concession made by Napoleon to Alexander. By the public articles of
+the Treaties of Tilsit, signed by France, Russia, and Prussia in the first
+week of July, the King of Prussia ceded to Napoleon the whole of his
+dominions west of the Elbe, and the entire territory which Prussia had
+gained in the three partitions of Poland, with the exception of a district
+upon the Lower Vistula connecting Pomerania with Eastern Prussia. Out of
+the ceded territory on the west of the Elbe a Kingdom of Westphalia was
+created for Napoleon's brother Jerome; the Polish provinces of Prussia,
+with the exception of a strip made over to Alexander, were formed into the
+Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, and presented to Napoleon's vassal, the King of
+Saxony. Russia recognised the Napoleonic client-states in Italy, Holland,
+and Germany. The Czar undertook to offer his mediation in the conflict
+between France and Great Britain; a secret article provided that, in the
+event of Great Britain and France being at war on the ensuing 1st of
+December, Prussia should declare war against Great Britain.
+
+[Secret Treaty of Alliance.]
+
+[Conspiracy of the two Emperors.]
+
+Such were the stipulations contained in the formal Treaties of Peace
+between the three Powers. These, however, contained but a small part of the
+terms agreed upon between the masters of the east and of the west.
+A secret Treaty of Alliance, distinct from the Treaty of Peace, was also
+signed by Napoleon and Alexander. In the conversations which won over the
+Czar to the cause of France, Napoleon had offered to Alexander the spoils
+of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Finland and the Danubian provinces were
+not too high a price for the support of a Power whose arms could paralyse
+Austria and Prussia. In return for the promise of this extension of his
+Empire, Alexander undertook, in the event of Great Britain refusing terms
+of peace dictated by himself, to unite his arms to those of Napoleon, and
+to force the neutral maritime Powers, Denmark and Portugal, to take part in
+the struggle against England. The annexation of Moldavia and Wallachia to
+the Russian Empire was provided for under the form of a French mediation.
+In the event of the Porte declining this mediation, Napoleon undertook to
+assist Russia to liberate all the European territory subject to the yoke of
+the Sultan, with the exception of Roumelia and Constantinople. A partition
+of the liberated territory between France and Russia, as well as the
+establishment of the Napoleonic house in Spain, probably formed the subject
+rather of a verbal understanding than of any written agreement. [140]
+
+Such was this vast and threatening scheme, conceived by the man whose whole
+career had been one consistent struggle for personal domination, accepted
+by the man who among the rulers of the Continent had hitherto shown the
+greatest power of acting for a European end, and of interesting himself in
+a cause not directly his own. In the imagination of Napoleon, the national
+forces of the western continent had now ceased to exist. Austria excepted,
+there was no State upon the mainland whose army and navy were not
+prospectively in the hands of himself and his new ally. The commerce of
+Great Britain, already excluded from the greater part of Europe, was now to
+be shut out from all the rest; the armies which had hitherto fought under
+British subsidies for the independence of Europe, the navies which had
+preserved their existence by neutrality or by friendship with England, were
+soon to be thrown without distinction against that last foe. If even at
+this moment an English statesman who had learnt the secret agreement of
+Tilsit might have looked without fear to the future of his country, it was
+not from any imperfection in the structure of Continental tyranny. The
+fleets of Denmark and Portugal might be of little real avail against
+English seamen; the homes of the English people might still be as secure
+from foreign invasion as when Nelson guarded the seas; but it was not from
+any vestige of political honour surviving in the Emperor Alexander. Where
+Alexander's action was of decisive importance, in his mediation between
+France and Prussia, he threw himself without scruple on to the side of
+oppression. It lay within his power to gain terms of peace for Prussia as
+lenient as those which Austria had gained at Campo Formio and at Luneville:
+he sacrificed Prussia, as he allied himself against the last upholders of
+national independence in Europe, in order that he might himself receive
+Finland and the Danubian Provinces.
+
+[English expedition against Denmark, July, 1807.]
+
+Two days before the signature of the Treaty of Tilsit the British troops
+which had once been so anxiously expected by the Czar landed in the island
+of Ruegen. The struggle in which they were intended to take their part was
+over. Sweden alone remained in arms; and even the Quixotic pugnacity of
+King Gustavus was unable to save Stralsund from a speedy capitulation. But
+the troops of Great Britain were not destined to return without striking a
+blow. The negotiations between Napoleon and Alexander had scarcely begun,
+when secret intelligence of their purport was sent to the British
+Government. [141] It became known in London that the fleet of Denmark was
+to be seized by Napoleon, and forced to fight against Great Britain.
+Canning and his colleagues acted with the promptitude that seldom failed
+the British Government when it could effect its object by the fleet alone.
+They determined to anticipate Napoleon's violation of Danish neutrality,
+and to seize upon the navy which would otherwise be seized by France and
+Russia.
+
+[Bombardment of Copenhagen, Sept. 2.]
+
+On the 28th of July a fleet with 20,000 men on board set sail from the
+British coast. The troops landed in Denmark in the middle of August, and
+united with the corps which had already been despatched to Ruegen. The
+Danish Government was summoned to place its navy in the hands of Great
+Britain, in order that it might remain as a deposit in some British port
+until the conclusion of peace. While demanding this sacrifice of Danish
+neutrality, England undertook to protect the Danish nation and colonies
+from the hostility of Napoleon, and to place at the disposal of its
+Government every means of naval and military defence. Failing the surrender
+of the fleet, the English declared that they would bombard Copenhagen. The
+reply given to this summons was such as might be expected from a courageous
+nation exasperated against Great Britain by its harsh treatment of neutral
+ships of commerce, and inclined to submit to the despot of the Continent
+rather than to the tyrants of the seas. Negotiations proved fruitless, and
+on the 2nd of September the English opened fire on Copenhagen. For three
+days and nights the city underwent a bombardment of cruel efficiency.
+Eighteen hundred houses were levelled, the town was set on fire in several
+places, and a large number of the inhabitants lost their lives. At length
+the commander found himself compelled to capitulate. The fleet was handed
+over to Great Britain, with all the stores in the arsenal of Copenhagen. It
+was brought to England, no longer under the terms of a friendly neutrality,
+but as a prize of war.
+
+The captors themselves were ashamed of their spoil. England received an
+armament which had been taken from a people who were not our enemies, and
+by an attack which was not war, with more misgiving than applause. In
+Europe the seemingly unprovoked assault upon a weak neutral State excited
+the utmost indignation. The British Ministry, who were prevented from
+making public the evidence which they had received of the intention of the
+two Emperors, were believed to have invented the story of the Secret
+Treaty. The Danish Government denied that Napoleon had demanded their
+co-operation; Napoleon and Alexander themselves assumed the air of
+indignant astonishment. But the facts alleged by Canning and his colleagues
+were correct. The conspiracy of the two Emperors was no fiction. The only
+question still remaining open--and this is indeed an essential one--relates
+to the engagements entered into by the Danish Government itself. Napoleon
+in his correspondence of this date alludes to certain promises made to him
+by the Court of Denmark, but he also complains that these promises had not
+been fulfilled; and the context of the letter renders it almost certain
+that, whatever may have been demanded by Napoleon, nothing more was
+promised by Denmark than that its ports should be closed to English
+vessels. [142] Had the British Cabinet possessed evidence of the
+determination of the Danish Government to transfer its fleet to Napoleon
+without resistance, the attack upon Denmark, considered as virtually an act
+of war, would not have been unjust. But beyond an alleged expression of
+Napoleon at Tilsit, no such evidence was even stated to have reached
+London; and the undoubted conspiracy of the Emperors against Danish
+neutrality was no sufficient ground for an action on the part of Great
+Britain which went so far beyond the mere frustration of their designs. The
+surrender of the Danish fleet demanded by England would have been an
+unqualified act of war on the part of Denmark against Napoleon; it was no
+mere guarantee for a continued neutrality. Nor had the British Government
+the last excuse of an urgent and overwhelming necessity. Nineteen Danish
+men-of-war would not have turned the scale against England. The memory of
+Trafalgar might well have given a British Ministry courage to meet its
+enemies by the ordinary methods of war. Had the forces of Denmark been far
+larger than they actually were, the peril of Great Britain was not so
+extreme as to excuse the wrong done to mankind by an example encouraging
+all future belligerents to anticipate one another in forcing each neutral
+state to take part with themselves.
+
+[Napoleon's demands upon Portugal.]
+
+The fleet which Napoleon had meant to turn against this country now lay
+safe within Portsmouth harbour. Denmark, in bitter resentment, declared war
+against Great Britain, and rendered some service to the Continental League
+by the attacks of its privateers upon British merchant-vessels in the
+Baltic. The second neutral Power whose fate had been decided by the two
+Emperors at Tilsit received the summons of Napoleon a few days before the
+attack on Copenhagen. The Regent of Portugal himself informed the British
+Government that he had been required by Napoleon to close his ports to
+British vessels, to declare war on England, and to confiscate all British
+property within his dominions. Placed between a Power which could strip him
+of his dominions on land, and one which could despoil him of everything he
+possessed beyond the sea, the Regent determined to maintain his ancient
+friendship with Great Britain, and to submit to Napoleon only in so far as
+the English Government would excuse him, as acting under coercion. Although
+a nominal state of war arose between Portugal and England, the Regent
+really acted in the interest of England, and followed the advice of the
+British Cabinet up to the end.
+
+[Treaty of Fontainebleau between France and Spain for the partition of
+Portugal, Oct. 27.]
+
+The end was soon to come. The demands of Napoleon, arbitrary and oppressive
+as they were, by no means expressed his full intentions towards Portugal.
+He had determined to seize upon this country, and to employ it as a means
+for extending his own dominion over the whole of the Spanish Peninsula. An
+army-corps, under the command of Junot, had been already placed in the
+Pyrenees. On the 12th of October Napoleon received the answer of the Regent
+of Portugal, consenting to declare war upon England, and only rejecting the
+dishonourable order to confiscate all English property. This single act of
+resistance was sufficient for Napoleon's purpose. He immediately recalled
+his ambassador from Lisbon, and gave orders to Junot to cross the frontier,
+and march upon Portugal. The King of Spain, who was to be Napoleon's next
+victim, was for the moment employed as his accomplice. A treaty was
+concluded at Fontainebleau between Napoleon and King Charles IV. for the
+partition of Portugal (Oct. 27). [143] In return for the cession of the
+kingdom of Etruria, which was still nominally governed by a member of the
+Spanish house, the King of Spain was promised half the Portuguese colonies,
+along with the title of Emperor of the Indies; the northern provinces of
+Portugal were reserved for the infant King of Etruria, its southern
+provinces for Godoy, Minister of Charles IV.; the central districts were to
+remain in the hands of France, and to be employed as a means of regaining
+the Spanish colonies from England upon the conclusion of a general peace.
+
+[Junot invades Portugal, Nov., 1807.]
+
+[Flight of the House of Braganza.]
+
+Not one of these provisions was intended to be carried into effect. The
+conquest of Portugal was but a part of the conquest of the whole peninsula.
+But neither the Spanish Court nor the Spanish people suspected Napoleon's
+design. Junot advanced without resistance through the intervening Spanish
+territory, and pushed forward upon Lisbon with the utmost haste. The speed
+at which Napoleon's orders forced him to march reduced his army to utter
+prostration, and the least resistance would have resulted in its ruin. But
+the Court of Lisbon had determined to quit a country which they could not
+hope to defend against the master of the Continent. Already in the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the House of Braganza had been
+familiar with the project of transferring the seat of their Government to
+Brazil; and now, with the approval of Great Britain, the Regent resolved to
+maintain the independence of his family by flight across the Atlantic. As
+Junot's troops approached the capital, the servants of the palace hastily
+stowed the royal property on ship-board. On the 29th of November, when the
+French were now close at hand, the squadron which bore the House of
+Braganza to its colonial home dropped down the Tagus, saluted by the cannon
+of the English fleet that lay in the same river. Junot entered the capital
+a few hours later, and placed himself at the head of the Government without
+encountering any opposition. The occupation of Portugal was described by
+Napoleon as a reprisal for the bombardment of Copenhagen. It excited but
+little attention in Europe; and even at the Spanish Court the only feeling
+was one of satisfaction at the approaching aggrandisement of the Bourbon
+monarchy. The full significance of Napoleon's intervention in the affairs
+of the Peninsula was not discovered until some months were passed.
+
+[Prussia after the Peace of Tilsit.]
+
+[Stein Minister, Oct. 5, 1807.]
+
+Portugal and Denmark had felt the consequences of the peace made at Tilsit.
+Less, however, depended upon the fate of the Danish fleet and the
+Portuguese Royal Family than upon the fate of Prussia, the most cruelly
+wronged of all the victims sacrificed by Alexander's ambition. The
+unfortunate Prussian State, reduced to half its former extent, devastated
+and impoverished by war, and burdened with the support of a French army,
+found in the crisis of its ruin the beginning of a worthier national life.
+Napoleon, in his own vindictive jealousy, unwittingly brought to the head
+of the Prussian Government the ablest and most patriotic statesman of the
+Continent. Since the spring of 1807 Baron Hardenberg had again been the
+leading Minister of Prussia, and it was to his counsel that the King's
+honourable rejection of a separate peace after the battle of Eylau was due.
+Napoleon could not permit this Minister, whom he had already branded as a
+partisan of Great Britain, to remain in power; he insisted upon
+Hardenberg's dismissal, and recommended the King of Prussia to summon
+Stein, who was as yet known to Napoleon only as a skilful financier, likely
+to succeed in raising the money which the French intended to extort.
+
+[Edict of Emancipation, Oct. 9, 1807.]
+
+Stein entered upon office on the 5th of October, 1807, with almost
+dictatorial power. The need of the most radical changes in the public
+services, as well as in the social order of the Prussian State, had been
+brought home to all enlightened men by the disasters of the war; and a
+commission, which included among its members the historian Niebuhr, had
+already sketched large measures of reform before Hardenberg quitted office.
+Stein's appointment brought to the head of the State a man immeasurably
+superior to Hardenberg in the energy necessary for the execution of great
+changes, and gave to those who were the most sincerely engaged in civil or
+military reform a leader unrivalled in patriotic zeal, in boldness, and in
+purity of character. The first great legislative measure of Stein was the
+abolition of serfage, and of all the legal distinctions which fixed within
+the limits of their caste the noble, the citizen, and the peasant. In
+setting his name to the edict [144] which, on the 9th of October, 1807,
+made an end of the mediaeval framework of Prussian society, Stein was indeed
+but consummating a change which the progress of neighbouring States must
+have forced upon Prussia, whoever held its government. The Decree was
+framed upon the report of Hardenberg's Commission, and was published by
+Stein within six days after his own entry upon office. Great as were the
+changes involved in this edict of emancipation, it contained no more than
+was necessary to bring Prussia up to the level of the least advanced of the
+western Continental States. In Austria pure serfage had been abolished by
+Maria Theresa thirty years before; it vanished, along with most of the
+legal distinctions of class, wherever the victories of France carried a new
+political order; even the misused peasantry of Poland had been freed from
+their degrading yoke within the borders of the newly-founded Duchy of
+Warsaw. If Prussia was not to renounce its partnership in European progress
+and range itself with its barbarous eastern neighbour, that order which
+fettered the peasant to the soil, and limited every Prussian to the
+hereditary occupations of his class could no longer be maintained. It is
+not as an achievement of individual genius, but as the most vivid
+expression of the differences between the old and the new Europe, that the
+first measure of Stein deserves a closer examination.
+
+[The Prussian peasant before and after the Edict of Oct. 9.]
+
+The Edict of October 9, 1807, extinguished all personal servitude; it
+permitted the noble, the citizen, and the peasant to follow any calling; it
+abolished the rule which prevented land held by a member of one class from
+passing into the hands of another class; it empowered families to free
+their estates from entail. Taken together, these enactments substitute the
+free disposition of labour and property for the outworn doctrine which
+Prussia had inherited from the feudal ages, that what a man is born that he
+shall live and die. The extinction of serfage, though not the most
+prominent provision of the Edict, was the one whose effects were the
+soonest felt. In the greater part of Prussia the marks of serfage, as
+distinct from payments and services amounting to a kind of rent, were the
+obligation of the peasant to remain on his holding, and the right of the
+lord to take the peasant's children as unpaid servants into his house. A
+general relation of obedience and command existed, as between an hereditary
+subject and master, although the lord could neither exact an arbitrary
+amount of labour nor inflict the cruel punishments which had been common in
+Poland and Hungary. What the villein was in England in the thirteenth
+century, that the serf was in Prussia in the year 1806; and the change
+which in England gradually elevated the villein into the free copyholder
+was that change which, so many centuries later, the Prussian legislator
+effected by one great measure. Stein made the Prussian peasant what the
+English copyholder had become at the accession of Henry VII., and what the
+French peasant had been before 1789, a free person, but one bound to render
+fixed dues and service to the lord of the manor in virtue of the occupation
+of his land. These feudal dues and services, which the French peasant,
+accustomed for centuries before the Revolution to consider himself as the
+full proprietor of the land, treated as a mere grievance and abuse, Stein
+considered to be the best form in which the joint interest of the lord and
+the peasant could be maintained. It was reserved for Hardenberg, four years
+later, to free the peasant from all obligations towards his lord, and to
+place him in unshackled proprietorship of two-thirds of his former holding,
+the lord receiving the remaining one-third in compensation for the loss of
+feudal dues. Neither Stein nor Hardenberg interfered with the right of the
+lord to act as judge and police-magistrate within the limits of his manor;
+and the hereditary legal jurisdiction, which was abolished in Scotland in
+1747, and in France in 1789, continued unchanged in Prussia down to the
+year 1848.
+
+[Relative position of the peasant in Prussia and England.]
+
+The history of Agrarian Reform upon the Continent shows how vast was the
+interval of time by which some of the greatest social changes in England
+had anticipated the corresponding changes in almost all other nations. But
+if the Prussian peasant at the beginning of this century remained in the
+servile condition which had passed out of mind in Great Britain before the
+Reformation, the early prosperity of the peasant in England was dearly
+purchased by a subsequent decline which has made his present lot far
+inferior to that of the children or grandchildren of the Prussian serf.
+However heavy the load of the Prussian serf, his holding was at least
+protected by law from absorption into the domain of his lord. Before
+sufficient capital had been amassed in Prussia to render landed property an
+object of competition, the forced military service of Frederick had made it
+a rule of State that the farmsteads of the peasant class must remain
+undiminished in number, at whatever violence to the laws of the market or
+the desires of great landlords. No process was permitted to take place
+corresponding to that by which in England, after the villein had become the
+free copyholder, the lord, with or without technical legal right,
+terminated the copyhold tenure of his retainer, and made the land as much
+his own exclusive property as the chairs and tables in his house. In
+Prussia, if the law kept the peasant on the land, it also kept the land for
+the peasant. Economic conditions, in the absence of such control in
+England, worked against the class of small holders. Their early
+enfranchisement in fact contributed to their extinction. It would perhaps
+have been better for the English labouring class to remain bound by a
+semi-servile tie to their land, than to gain a free holding which the law,
+siding with the landlord, treated as terminable at the expiration of
+particular lives, and which the increasing capital of the rich made its
+favourite prey. It is little profit to the landless, resourceless English
+labourer to know that his ancestor was a yeoman when the Prussian was a
+serf. Long as the bondage of the peasant on the mainland endured,
+prosperity came at last. The conditions which once distinguished
+agricultural England from the Continent are now reversed. Nowhere on the
+Continent is there a labouring class so stripped and despoiled of all
+interest in the soil, so sedulously excluded from all possibilities of
+proprietorship, as in England. In England alone the absence of internal
+revolution and foreign pressure has preserved a class whom a life spent in
+toil leaves as bare and dependent as when it began, and to whom the only
+boon which their country can offer is the education which may lead them to
+quit it.
+
+[Reform of Prussian Army.]
+
+[Short service.]
+
+Besides the commission which had drafted the Edict of Emancipation, Stein
+found a military commission engaged on a plan for the reorganisation of the
+Prussian army. The existing system forced the peasant to serve in the ranks
+for twenty years, and drew the officers from the nobility, leaving the
+inhabitants of towns without either the duty or the right to enter the army
+at all. Since the battle of Jena, no one doubted that the principle of
+universal liability to military service must be introduced into Prussia; on
+the other hand, the very disasters of the State rendered it impossible to
+maintain an army on anything approaching to its former scale. With half its
+territory torn from it, and the remainder devastated by war, Prussia could
+barely afford to keep 40,000 soldiers in arms. Such were the conditions
+laid before the men who were charged with the construction of a new
+Prussian military system. Their conclusions, imperfect in themselves, and
+but partially carried out in the succeeding years, have nevertheless been
+the basis of the latest military organisation of Prussia and of Europe
+generally. The problem was solved by the adoption of a short period of
+service and the rapid drafting of the trained conscript into a
+reserve-force. Scharnhorst, President of the Military Commission, to whom
+more than to any one man Prussia owed its military revival, proposed to
+maintain an Active Army of 40,000 men; a Reserve, into which soldiers
+should pass after short service in the active army; a Landwehr, to be
+employed only for the internal defence of the country; and a Landsturm, or
+general arming of the population, for a species of guerilla warfare.
+Scharnhorst's project was warmly supported by Stein, who held a seat and a
+vote on the Military Commission; and the system of short service, with a
+Reserve, was immediately brought into action, though on a very limited
+scale. The remainder of the scheme had to wait for the assistance of
+events. The principle of universal military obligation was first proclaimed
+in the war of 1813, when also the Landwehr was first enrolled.
+
+[Stein's plans of political reform.]
+
+[Design for a Parliament, for Municipalities, and District boards.]
+
+The reorganisation of the Prussian military system and the emancipation of
+the peasant, though promoted by Stein's accession to power, did not
+originate in Stein himself; the distinctive work of Stein was a great
+scheme of political reform. Had Stein remained longer in power, he would
+have given to Prussia at least the beginnings of constitutional government.
+Events drove him from office when but a small part of his project was
+carried into effect; but the project itself was great and comprehensive. He
+designed to give Prussia a Parliament, and to establish a system of
+self-government in its towns and country districts. Stein had visited
+England in his youth. The history and the literature of England interested
+him beyond those of any other country; and he had learnt from England that
+the partnership of the nation in the work of government, so far from
+weakening authority, animates it with a force which no despotic system can
+long preserve. Almost every important State-paper written by Stein
+denounces the apathy of the civil population of Prussia, and attributes it
+to their exclusion from all exercise of public duties. He declared that the
+nation must be raised from its torpor by the establishment of
+representative government and the creation of free local institutions in
+town and country. Stein was no friend of democracy. Like every other
+Prussian statesman he took for granted the exercise of a vigorous
+monarchical power at the centre of the State; but around the permanent
+executive he desired to gather the Council of the Nation, checking at least
+the caprices of Cabinet-rule, and making the opinion of the people felt by
+the monarch. Stein's Parliament would have been a far weaker body than the
+English House of Commons, but it was at least not intended to be a mockery,
+like those legislative bodies which Napoleon and his clients erected as the
+disguise of despotism. The transaction of local business in the towns and
+country districts, which had hitherto belonged to officials of the Crown,
+Stein desired to transfer in part to bodies elected by the inhabitants
+themselves. The functions allotted to the new municipal bodies illustrated
+the modest and cautious nature of Stein's attempt in the direction of
+self-government, including no more than the care of the poor, the
+superintendence of schools, and the maintenance of streets and public
+buildings. Finance remained partly, police wholly, in the hands of the
+central Government. Equally limited were the powers which Stein proposed to
+entrust to the district councils elected by the rural population. In
+comparison with the self-government of England or America, the
+self-government which Stein would have introduced into Prussia was of the
+most elementary character; yet his policy stood out in striking contrast to
+that which in every client-state of Napoleon was now crushing out the last
+elements of local independence under a rigid official centralisation.
+
+[Municipal reform alone carried out.]
+
+Stein was indeed unable to transform Prussia as he desired. Of the
+legislative, the municipal, and the district reforms which he had sketched,
+the municipal reform was the only one which he had time to carry out before
+being driven from power; and for forty years the municipal institutions
+created by Stein were the only fragment of liberty which Prussia enjoyed. A
+vehement opposition to reform was excited among the landowners, and
+supported by a powerful party at the Court. Stein was detested by the
+nobles whose peasants he had emancipated, and by the Berlin aristocracy,
+which for the last ten years had maintained the policy of friendship with
+France, and now declared the only safety of the Prussian State to lie in
+unconditional submission to Napoleon. The fire of patriotism, of energy, of
+self-sacrifice, which burned in Stein made him no representative of the
+Prussian governing classes of his time. It was not long before the
+landowners, who deemed him a Jacobin, and the friends of the French, who
+called him a madman, had the satisfaction of seeing the Minister sent into
+banishment by order of Napoleon himself (Dec., 1808). Stein left the
+greater part of his work uncompleted, but he had not laboured in vain. The
+years of his ministry in 1807 and 1808 were the years that gathered
+together everything that was worthiest in Prussia in the dawn of a national
+revival, and prepared the way for that great movement in which, after an
+interval of the deepest gloom, Stein was himself to light the nation to its
+victory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Spain in 1806--Napoleon uses the quarrel between Ferdinand and Godoy--He
+affects to be Ferdinand's protector--Dupont's army enters Spain--Murat in
+Spain--Charles abdicates--Ferdinand King--Savary brings Ferdinand to
+Bayonne--Napoleon makes both Charles and Ferdinand resign--Spirit of the
+Spanish Nation--Contrast with Germany--Rising of all Spain--The Notables at
+Bayonne--Campaign of 1808--Capitulation of Baylen--Wellesley lands in
+Portugal--Vimieiro--Convention of Cintra--Effect of the Spanish Rising on
+Europe--War Party in Prussia--Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt--Stein
+resigns, and is proscribed--Napoleon in Spain--Spanish Misgovernment--
+Campaign on the Ebro--Campaign of Sir John Moore--Corunna--Napoleon
+leaves Spain--Siege of Saragossa--Successes of the French.
+
+
+[Spanish affairs, 1793-1806.]
+
+[Spain in 1806.]
+
+Spain, which had played so insignificant a part throughout the
+Revolutionary War, was now about to become the theatre of events that
+opened a new world of hope to Europe. Its King, the Bourbon Charles IV.,
+was more weak and more pitiful than any sovereign of the age. Power
+belonged to the Queen and to her paramour Godoy, who for the last fourteen
+years had so conducted the affairs of the country that every change in its
+policy had brought with it new disaster. In the war of the First Coalition
+Spain had joined the Allies, and French armies had crossed the Pyrenees. In
+1796 Spain entered the service of France, and lost the battle of St.
+Vincent. At the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon surrendered its colony Trinidad
+to England; on the renewal of the war he again forced it into hostilities
+with Great Britain, and brought upon it the disaster of Trafalgar. This
+unbroken humiliation of the Spanish arms, combined with intolerable
+oppression and impoverishment at home, raised so bitter an outcry against
+Godoy's government, that foreign observers, who underrated the loyalty of
+the Spanish people, believed the country to be on the verge of revolution.
+At the Court itself the Crown Prince Ferdinand, under the influence of his
+Neapolitan wife, headed a party in opposition to Godoy and the supporters
+of French dominion. Godoy, insecure at home, threw himself the more
+unreservedly into the arms of Napoleon, who bestowed upon him a
+contemptuous patronage, and flattered him with the promise of an
+independent principality in Portugal. Izquierdo, Godoy's agent at Paris,
+received proposals from Napoleon which were concealed from the Spanish
+Ambassador; and during the first months of 1806 Napoleon possessed no more
+devoted servant than the man who virtually held the government of Spain.
+
+[Spain intends to join Prussia in 1806.]
+
+The opening of negotiations between Napoleon and Fox's Ministry in May,
+1806, first shook this relation of confidence and obedience. Peace between
+France and England involved the abandonment on the part of Napoleon of any
+attack upon Portugal; and Napoleon now began to meet Godoy's inquiries
+after his Portuguese principality with an ominous silence. The next
+intelligence received was that the Spanish Balearic Islands had been
+offered by Napoleon to Great Britain, with the view of providing an
+indemnity for Ferdinand of Naples, if he should give up Sicily to Joseph
+Bonaparte (July, 1806.) This contemptuous appropriation of Spanish
+territory, without even the pretence of consulting the Spanish Government,
+excited scarcely less anger at Madrid than the corresponding proposal with
+regard to Hanover excited at Berlin. The Court began to meditate a change
+of policy, and watched the events which were leading Prussia to arm for the
+war of 1806. A few weeks more passed, and news arrived that Buenos Ayres,
+the capital of Spanish South America, had fallen into the hands of the
+English. This disaster produced the deepest impression, for the loss of
+Buenos Ayres was believed, and with good reason, to be but the prelude to
+the loss of the entire American empire of Spain. Continuance of the war
+with England was certain ruin; alliance with the enemies of Napoleon was at
+least not hopeless, now that Prussia was on the point of throwing its army
+into the scale against France. An agent was despatched by the Spanish
+Government to London (Sept., 1806); and, upon the commencement of
+hostilities by Prussia, a proclamation was issued by Godoy, which, without
+naming any actual enemy, summoned the Spanish people to prepare for a war
+on behalf of their country.
+
+[Treaty of Fontainebleau, Oct., 1807.]
+
+Scarcely had the manifesto been read by the Spaniards when the Prussian
+army was annihilated at Jena. The dream of resistance to Napoleon vanished
+away; the only anxiety of the Spanish Government was to escape from the
+consequences of its untimely daring. Godoy hastened to explain that his
+martial proclamation had been directed not against the Emperor of the
+French, but against the Emperor of Morocco. Napoleon professed himself
+satisfied with this palpable absurdity: it appeared as if the events of the
+last few months had left no trace on his mind. Immediately after the Peace
+of Tilsit he resumed his negotiations with Godoy upon the old friendly
+footing, and brought them to a conclusion in the Treaty of Fontainebleau
+(Oct., 1807), which provided for the invasion of Portugal by a French and a
+Spanish army, and for its division into principalities, one of which was to
+be conferred upon Godoy himself. The occupation of Portugal was duly
+effected, and Godoy looked forward to the speedy retirement of the French
+from the province which was to be his portion of the spoil.
+
+[Napoleon uses the enmity of Ferdinand against Godoy.]
+
+[Napoleon about to intervene as protector of Ferdinand.]
+
+Napoleon, however, had other ends in view. Spain, not Portugal, was the
+true prize. Napoleon had gradually formed the determination of taking Spain
+into his own hands, and the dissensions of the Court itself enabled him to
+appear upon the scene as the judge to whom all parties appealed. The Crown
+Prince Ferdinand had long been at open enmity with Godoy and his own
+mother. So long as Ferdinand's Neapolitan wife was alive, her influence
+made the Crown Prince the centre of the party hostile to France; but after
+her death in 1806, at a time when Godoy himself inclined to join Napoleon's
+enemies, Ferdinand took up a new position, and allied himself with the
+French Ambassador, at whose instigation he wrote to Napoleon, soliciting
+the hand of a princess of the Napoleonic House. [145] Godoy, though unaware
+of the letter, discovered that Ferdinand was engaged in some intrigue. King
+Charles was made to believe that his son had entered into a conspiracy to
+dethrone him. The Prince was placed under arrest, and on the 30th of
+October, 1807, a royal proclamation appeared at Madrid, announcing that
+Ferdinand had been detected in a conspiracy against his parents, and that
+he was about to be brought to justice along with his accomplices. King
+Charles at the same time wrote a letter to Napoleon, of whose connection
+with Ferdinand he had not the slightest suspicion, stating that he intended
+to exclude the Crown Prince from the succession to the throne of Spain. No
+sooner had Napoleon received the communication from the simple King than he
+saw himself in possession of the pretext for intervention which he had so
+long desired. The most pressing orders were given for the concentration of
+troops on the Spanish frontier; Napoleon appeared to be on the point of
+entering Spain as the defender of the hereditary rights of Ferdinand. The
+opportunity, however, proved less favourable than Napoleon had expected.
+The Crown Prince, overcome by his fears, begged forgiveness of his father,
+and disclosed the negotiations which had taken place between himself and
+the French Ambassador. Godoy, dismayed at finding Napoleon's hand in what
+he had supposed to be a mere palace-intrigue, abandoned all thought of
+proceeding further against the Crown Prince; and a manifesto announced that
+Ferdinand was restored to the favour of his father. Napoleon now
+countermanded the order which he had given for the despatch of the Rhenish
+troops to the Pyrenees, and contented himself with directing General
+Dupont, the commander of an army-corps nominally destined for Portugal, to
+cross the Spanish frontier and advance as far as Vittoria.
+
+[Dupont enters Spain, Dec., 1807.]
+
+[French welcomed in Spain as Ferdinand's protectors.]
+
+Dupont's troops entered Spain in the last days of the year 1807, and were
+received with acclamations. It was universally believed that Napoleon had
+espoused the cause of Ferdinand, and intended to deliver the Spanish nation
+from the detested rule of Godoy. Since the open attack made upon Ferdinand
+in the publication of the pretended conspiracy, the Crown Prince, who was
+personally as contemptible as any of his enemies, had become the idol of
+the people. For years past the hatred of the nation towards Godoy and the
+Queen had been constantly deepening, and the very reforms which Godoy
+effected in the hope of attaching to himself the more enlightened classes
+only served to complete his unpopularity with the fanatical mass of the
+nation. The French, who gradually entered the Peninsula to the number of
+80,000, and who described themselves as the protectors of Ferdinand and of
+the true Catholic faith, were able to spread themselves over the northern
+provinces without exciting suspicion. It was only when their commanders, by
+a series of tricks worthy of American savages, obtained possession of the
+frontier citadels and fortresses, that the wiser part of the nation began
+to entertain some doubt as to the real purpose of their ally. At the Court
+itself and among the enemies of Ferdinand the advance of the French roused
+the utmost alarm. King Charles wrote to Napoleon in the tone of ancient
+friendship; but the answer he received was threatening and mysterious. The
+utterances which the Emperor let fall in the presence of persons likely to
+report them at Madrid were even more alarming, and were intended to terrify
+the Court into the resolution to take flight from Madrid. The capital once
+abandoned by the King, Napoleon judged that he might safely take everything
+into his own hands on the pretence of restoring to Spain the government
+which it had lost.
+
+[Murat sent to Spain, Feb., 1808.]
+
+[Charles IV. abdicates, March 17, 1808.]
+
+On the 20th of February, 1808, Murat was ordered to quit Paris in order to
+assume the command in Spain. Not a word was said by Napoleon to him before
+his departure. His instructions first reached him at Bayonne; they were of
+a military nature, and gave no indication of the ultimate political object
+of his mission. Murat entered Spain on the 1st of March, knowing no more
+than that he was ordered to reassure all parties and to commit himself to
+none, but with full confidence that he himself was intended by Napoleon to
+be the successor of the Bourbon dynasty. It was now that the Spanish Court,
+expecting the appearance of the French army in Madrid, resolved upon that
+flight which Napoleon considered so necessary to his own success. The
+project was not kept a secret. It passed from Godoy to the Ministers of
+State, and from them to the friends of Ferdinand. The populace of Madrid
+was inflamed by the report that Godoy was about to carry the King to a
+distance, in order to prolong the misgovernment which the French had
+determined to overthrow. A tumultuous crowd marched from the capital to
+Aranjuez, the residence of the Court. On the evening of the 17th of March,
+the palace of Godoy was stormed by the mob. Godoy himself was seized, and
+carried to the barracks amid the blows and curses of the populace. The
+terrified King, who already saw before him the fate of his cousin, Louis
+XVI., first published a decree depriving Godoy of all his dignities, and
+then abdicated in favour of his son. On the 19th of March Ferdinand was
+proclaimed King.
+
+[French enter Madrid, March 23.]
+
+Such was the unexpected intelligence that met Murat as he approached
+Madrid. The dissensions of the Court, which were to supply his ground of
+intervention, had been terminated by the Spaniards themselves: in the place
+of a despised dotard and a menaced favourite, Spain had gained a youthful
+sovereign around whom all classes of the nation rallied with the utmost
+enthusiasm. Murat's position became a very difficult one; but he supplied
+what was wanting in his instructions by the craft of a man bent upon
+creating a vacancy in his own favour. He sent his aide-de-camp, Monthieu,
+to visit the dethroned sovereign, and obtained a protest from King Charles
+IV., declaring his abdication to have been extorted from him by force, and
+consequently to be null and void. This document Murat kept secret; but he
+carefully abstained from doing anything which might involve a recognition
+of Ferdinand's title. On the 23rd of March the French troops entered
+Madrid. Nothing had as yet become known to the public that indicated an
+altered policy on the part of the French; and the soldiers of Murat, as the
+supposed friends of Ferdinand, met with as friendly a reception in Madrid
+as in the other towns of Spain. On the following day Ferdinand himself made
+his solemn entry into the capital, amid wild demonstrations of an almost
+barbaric loyalty.
+
+[Savary brings Ferdinand to Bayonne, April, 1808.]
+
+In the tumult of popular joy it was noticed that Murat's troops continued
+their exercises without the least regard to the pageant that so deeply
+stirred the hearts of the Spaniards. Suspicions were aroused; the
+enthusiasm of the people for the French soldiers began to change into
+irritation and ill-will. The end of the long drama of deceit was in fact
+now close at hand. On the 4th of April General Savary arrived at Madrid
+with instructions independent of those given to Murat. He was charged to
+entice the new Spanish sovereign from his capital, and to bring him, either
+as a dupe or as a prisoner, on to French soil. The task was not a difficult
+one. Savary pretended that Napoleon had actually entered Spain, and that he
+only required an assurance of Ferdinand's continued friendship before
+recognising him as the legitimate successor of Charles IV. Ferdinand, he
+added, could show no greater mark of cordiality to his patron than by
+advancing to meet him on the road. Snared by these hopes, Ferdinand set out
+from Madrid, in company with Savary and some of his own foolish confidants.
+On reaching Burgos, the party found no signs of the Emperor. They continued
+their journey to Vittoria. Here Ferdinand's suspicions were aroused, and he
+declined to proceed farther. Savary hastened to Bayonne to report the delay
+to Napoleon. He returned with a letter which overcame Ferdinand's scruples
+and induced him to cross the Pyrenees, in spite of the prayers of statesmen
+and the loyal violence of the simple inhabitants of the district. At
+Bayonne Ferdinand was visited by Napoleon, but not a word was spoken on the
+object of his journey. In the afternoon the Emperor received Ferdinand and
+his suite at a neighbouring chateau, but preserved the same ominous
+silence. When the other guests departed, the Canon Escoiquiz, a member of
+Ferdinand's retinue, was detained, and learned from Napoleon's own lips the
+fate in store for the Bourbon Monarchy. Savary returned to Bayonne with
+Ferdinand, and informed the Prince that he must renounce the crown of
+Spain. [146]
+
+[Charles and Ferdinand surrender their rights to Napoleon.]
+
+[Attack on the French in Madrid, May 2.]
+
+For some days Ferdinand held out against Napoleon's demands with a
+stubbornness not often shown by him in the course of his mean and
+hypocritical career. He was assailed not only by Napoleon but by those
+whose fall had been his own rise; for Godoy was sent to Bayonne by Murat,
+and the old King and Queen hurried after their son in order to witness his
+humiliation. Ferdinand's parents attacked him with an indecency that
+astonished even Napoleon himself; but the Prince maintained his refusal
+until news arrived from Madrid which terrified him into submission. The
+irritation of the capital had culminated in an armed conflict between the
+populace and the French troops. On an attempt being made by Murat to remove
+the remaining members of the royal family from the palace, the capital had
+broken into open insurrection, and wherever French soldiers were found
+alone or in small bodies they were massacred. (May 2.) Some hundreds of the
+French perished; but the victory of Murat was speedy, and his vengeance
+ruthless. The insurgents were driven into the great central square of the
+city, and cut down by repeated charges of cavalry. When all resistance was
+over, numbers of the citizens were shot in cold blood. Such was the
+intelligence which reached Bayonne in the midst of Napoleon's struggle with
+Ferdinand. There was no further need of argument. Ferdinand was informed
+that if he withheld his resignation for twenty-four hours longer he would
+be treated as a rebel. He yielded; and for a couple of country houses and
+two life-annuities the crown of Spain and the Indies was renounced in
+favour of Napoleon by father and son.
+
+[National spirit of the Spaniards.]
+
+The crown had indeed been won without a battle. That there remained a
+Spanish nation ready to fight to the death for its independence was not a
+circumstance which Napoleon had taken into account. His experience had as
+yet taught him of no force but that of Governments and armies. In the
+larger States, or groups of States, which had hitherto been the spoil of
+France, the sense of nationality scarcely existed. Italy had felt it no
+disgrace to pass under the rule of Napoleon. The Germans on both sides of
+the Rhine knew of a fatherland only as an arena of the keenest jealousies.
+In Prussia and in Austria the bond of citizenship was far less the love of
+country than the habit of obedience to government. England and Russia,
+where patriotism existed in the sense in which it existed in Spain, had as
+yet been untouched by French armies. Judging from the action of the Germans
+and the Italians, Napoleon might well suppose that in settling with the
+Spanish Government he had also settled with the Spanish people, or, at the
+worst, that his troops might have to fight some fanatical peasants, like
+those who resisted the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples. But the
+Spanish nation was no mosaic of political curiosities like the Holy Roman
+Empire, and no divided and oblivious family like the population of Italy.
+Spain, as a single nation united under its King, had once played the
+foremost part in Europe: when its grandeur departed, its pride had remained
+behind: the Spaniard, in all his torpor and impoverishment, retained the
+impulse of honour, the spirited self-respect, which periods of national
+greatness leave behind them among a race capable of cherishing their
+memory. Nor had those influences of a common European culture, which
+directly opposed themselves to patriotism in Germany, affected the
+home-bred energy of Spain. The temper of mind which could find satisfaction
+in the revival of a form of Greek art when Napoleon's cavalry were scouring
+Germany, or which could inquire whether mankind would not profit by the
+removal of the barriers between nations, was unknown among the Spanish
+people. Their feeling towards a foreign invader was less distant from that
+of African savages than from that of the civilised and literary nations
+which had fallen so easy a prey to the French. Government, if it had
+degenerated into everything that was contemptible, had at least failed to
+reduce the people to the passive helplessness which resulted from the
+perfection of uniformity in Prussia. Provincial institutions, though
+corrupted, were not extinguished; provincial attachments and prejudices
+existed in unbounded strength. Like the passion of the Spaniard for his
+native district, his passion for Spain was of a blind and furious
+character. Enlightened conviction, though not altogether absent, had small
+place in the Spanish war of defence. Religious fanaticism, hatred of the
+foreigner, delight in physical barbarity, played their full part by the
+side of nobler elements in the struggle for national independence.
+
+[Rising of Spain, May, 1808.]
+
+The captivity of Ferdinand, and the conflict of Murat's troops with the
+inhabitants of Madrid, had become known in the Spanish cities before the
+middle of May. On the 20th of the same month the _Gaceta_ announced
+the abdication of the Bourbon family. Nothing more was wanting to throw
+Spain into tumult. The same irresistible impulse seized provinces and
+cities separated by the whole breadth of the Peninsula. Without
+communication, and without the guidance of any central authority, the
+Spanish people in every part of the kingdom armed themselves against the
+usurper. Carthagena rose on the 22nd. Valencia forced its magistrates to
+proclaim King Ferdinand on the 23rd. Two days later the mountain-district
+of Asturias, with a population of half a million, formally declared war on
+Napoleon, and despatched envoys to Great Britain to ask for assistance. On
+the 26th, Santander and Seville, on opposite sides of the Peninsula, joined
+the national movement. Corunna, Badajoz, and Granada declared themselves on
+the Feast of St. Ferdinand, the 30th of May. Thus within a week the entire
+country was in arms, except in those districts where the presence of French
+troops rendered revolt impossible. The action of the insurgents was
+everywhere the same. They seized upon the arms and munitions of war
+collected in the magazines, and forced the magistrates or commanders of
+towns to place themselves at their head. Where the latter resisted, or were
+suspected of treachery to the national cause, they were in many cases put
+to death. Committees of Government were formed in the principal cities, and
+as many armies came into being as there were independent centres of the
+insurrection.
+
+[Joseph Bonaparte made King.]
+
+[Napoleon's Assembly at Bayonne, June, 1808.]
+
+Napoleon was in the meantime collecting a body of prelates and grandees at
+Bayonne, under the pretence of consulting the representatives of the
+Spanish nation. Half the members of the intended Assembly received a
+personal summons from the Emperor; the other half were ordered to be chosen
+by popular election. When the order, however, was issued from Bayonne, the
+country was already in full revolt. Elections were held only in the
+districts occupied by the French, and not more than twenty representatives
+so elected proceeded to Bayonne. The remainder of the Assembly, which
+numbered in all ninety-one persons, was composed of courtiers who had
+accompanied the Royal Family across the Pyrenees, and of any Spaniards of
+distinction upon whom the French could lay their hands. Joseph Bonaparte
+was brought from Naples to receive the crown of Spain. [147] On the 15th of
+June the Assembly of the Notables was opened. Its discussions followed the
+order prescribed by Napoleon on all similar occasions. Articles disguising
+a central absolute power with some pretence of national representation were
+laid before the Assembly, and adopted without criticism. Except in the
+privileges accorded to the Church, little indicated that the Constitution
+of Bayonne was intended for the Spanish rather than for any other nation.
+Its political forms were as valuable or as valueless as those which
+Napoleon had given to his other client States; its principles of social
+order were those which even now despotism could not dissever from French
+supremacy--the abolition of feudal services, equality of taxation,
+admission of all ranks to public employment. Titles of nobility were
+preserved, the privileges of nobility abolished. One genuine act of homage
+was rendered to the national character. The Catholic religion was declared
+to be the only one permitted in Spain.
+
+[Attempts of Napoleon to suppress the Spanish rising.]
+
+While Napoleon was thus emancipating the peasants from the nobles, and
+reconciling his supremacy with the claims of the Church, peasants and
+townspeople were flocking to arms at the call of the priests, who so little
+appreciated the orthodoxy of their patron as to identify him in their
+manifestos with Calvin, with the Antichrist, and with Apollyon. [148] The
+Emperor underrated the military efficiency of the national revolt, and
+contented himself with sending his lieutenants to repress it, while he
+himself, expecting a speedy report of victory, remained in Bayonne.
+Divisions of the French army moved in all directions against the
+insurgents. Dupont was ordered to march upon Seville from the capital,
+Moncey upon Valencia; Marshal Bessieres took command of a force intended to
+disperse the main army of the Spaniards, which threatened the roads from
+the Pyrenees to Madrid. The first encounters were all favourable to the
+practised French troops; yet the objects which Napoleon set before his
+generals were not achieved. Moncey failed to reduce Valencia; Dupont found
+himself outnumbered on passing the Sierra Morena, and had to retrace his
+steps and halt at Andujar, where the road to Madrid leaves the valley of
+the Guadalquivir. Without sustaining any severe loss, the French divisions
+were disheartened by exhausting and resultless marches; the Spaniards
+gained new confidence on each successive day which passed without
+inflicting upon them a defeat. At length, however, the commanders of the
+northern army were forced by Marshal Bessieres to fight a pitched battle at
+Rio Seco, on the west of Valladolid (July 13th). Bessieres won a complete
+victory, and gained the lavish praises of his master for a battle which,
+according to Napoleon's own conception, ended the Spanish war by securing
+the roads from the Pyrenees to Madrid.
+
+[Capitulation of Baylen, July 19.]
+
+[Dupont in Andalusia.]
+
+Never had Napoleon so gravely mistaken the true character of a campaign.
+The vitality of the Spanish insurrection lay not in the support of the
+capital, which had never passed out of the hands of the French, but in the
+very independence of the several provincial movements. Unlike Vienna and
+Berlin, Madrid might be held by the French without the loss being felt by
+their adversary; Cadiz, Corunna, Lisbon, were equally serviceable bases for
+the insurrection. The victory of Marshal Bessieres in the north preserved
+the communication between France and Madrid, and it did nothing more. It
+failed to restore the balance of military force in the south of Spain, or
+to affect the operations of the Spanish troops which were now closing round
+Dupont upon the Guadalquivir. On the 15th of July Dupont was attacked at
+Andujar by greatly superior forces. His lieutenant, Vedel, knowing the
+Spaniards to be engaged in a turning movement, made a long march northwards
+in order to guard the line of retreat. In his absence the position of
+Baylen, immediately in Dupont's rear, was seized by the Spanish general
+Reding. Dupont discovered himself to be surrounded. He divided his army
+into two columns, and moved on the night of the 18th from Andujar towards
+Baylen, in the hope of overpowering Reding's division. At daybreak on the
+19th the positions of Reding were attacked by the French. The struggle
+continued until mid-day, though the French soldiers sank exhausted with
+thirst and with the burning heat. At length the sound of cannon was heard
+in the rear. Castanos, the Spanish general commanding at Andujar, had
+discovered Dupont's retreat, and pressed behind him with troops fresh and
+unwearied by conflict. Further resistance was hopeless. Dupont had to
+negotiate for a surrender. He consented to deliver up Vedel's division as
+well as his own, although Vedel's troops were in possession of the road to
+Madrid, the Spanish commander promising, on this condition, that the
+captives should not be retained as prisoners of war in Spain, but be
+permitted to return by sea to their native country. The entire army of
+Andalusia, numbering 23,000 men, thus passed into the hands of an enemy
+whom Napoleon had not believed to possess a military existence. Dupont's
+anxiety to save something for France only aggravated the extent of the
+calamity; for the Junta of Seville declined to ratify the terms of the
+capitulation, and the prisoners, with the exception of the superior
+officers, were sent to the galleys at Cadiz. The victorious Spaniards
+pushed forwards upon Madrid. King Joseph, who had entered the city only a
+week before, had to fly from his capital. The whole of the French troops in
+Spain were compelled to retire to a defensive position upon the Ebro.
+
+[Wellesley lands in Portugal, Aug. 1, 1808.]
+
+[Vimeiro, Aug. 21.]
+
+[Convention of Cintra, Aug. 30.]
+
+The disaster of Baylen did not come alone. Napoleon's attack upon Portugal
+had brought him within the striking-range of Great Britain. On the 1st of
+August an English army, commanded by Sir Arthur Wellesley, landed on the
+Portuguese coast at the mouth of the Mondego. Junot, the first invader of
+the Peninsula, was still at Lisbon; his forces in occupation of Portugal
+numbered nearly 30,000 men, but they were widely dispersed, and he was
+unable to bring more than 13,000 men into the field against the 16,000 with
+whom Wellesley moved upon Lisbon. Junot advanced to meet the invader. A
+battle was fought at Vimieiro, thirty miles north of Lisbon, on the 21st of
+August. The victory was gained by the British; and had the first advantage
+been followed up, Junot's army would scarcely have escaped capture. But the
+command had passed out of Wellesley's hands. His superior officer, Sir
+Harry Burrard, took up the direction of the army immediately the battle
+ended, and Wellesley had to acquiesce in a suspension of operations at a
+moment when the enemy seemed to be within his grasp. Junot made the best
+use of his reprieve. He entered into negotiations for the evacuation of
+Portugal, and obtained the most favourable terms in the Convention of
+Cintra, signed on the 30th of August. The French army was permitted to
+return to France with its arms and baggage. Wellesley, who had strongly
+condemned the inaction of his superior officers after the battle of the
+21st, agreed with them that, after the enemy had once been permitted to
+escape, the evacuation of Portugal was the best result which the English
+could obtain. [149] Junot's troops were accordingly conveyed to French
+ports at the expense of the British Government, to the great displeasure of
+the public, who expected to see the marshal and his army brought prisoners
+into Portsmouth. The English were as ill-humoured with their victory as the
+French with their defeat. When on the point of sending Junot to a
+court-martial for his capitulation, Napoleon learnt that the British
+Government had ordered its own generals to be brought to trial for
+permitting the enemy to escape them.
+
+[Effect of Spanish rising on Europe.]
+
+[War-party in Austria and Prussia.]
+
+[Napoleon and Prussia.]
+
+If the Convention of Cintra gained little glory for England, the tidings of
+the successful uprising of the Spanish people against Napoleon, and of
+Dupont's capitulation at Baylen, created the deepest impression in every
+country of Europe that still entertained the thought of resistance to
+France. The first great disaster had befallen Napoleon's arms. It had been
+inflicted by a nation without a government, without a policy, without a
+plan beyond that of the liberation of its fatherland from the foreigner.
+What Coalition after Coalition had failed to effect, the patriotism and
+energy of a single people deserted by its rulers seemed about to
+accomplish. The victory of the regular troops at Baylen was but a part of
+that great national movement in which every isolated outbreak had had its
+share in dividing and paralysing the Emperor's force. The capacity of
+untrained popular levies to resist practised troops might be exaggerated in
+the first outburst of wonder and admiration caused by the Spanish rising;
+but the difference made in the nature of the struggle by the spirit of
+popular resentment and determination was one upon which mistake was
+impossible. A sudden light broke in upon the politicians of Austria and
+Prussia, and explained the powerlessness of those Coalitions in which the
+wars had always been the affair of the Cabinets, and never the affair of
+the people. What the Spanish nation had effected for itself against
+Napoleon was not impossible for the German nation, if once a national
+movement like that of Spain sprang up among the German race. "I do not
+see," wrote Bluecher some time afterwards, "why we should not think
+ourselves as good as the Spaniards." The best men in the Austrian and
+Prussian Governments began to look forward to the kindling of popular
+spirit as the surest means for combating the tyranny of Napoleon. Military
+preparations were pushed forward in Austria with unprecedented energy and
+on a scale rivalling that of France itself. In Prussia the party of Stein
+determined upon a renewal of the war, and decided to risk the extinction of
+the Prussian State rather than submit to the extortions by which Napoleon
+was completing the ruin of their country. It was among the patriots of
+Northern Germany that the course of the Spanish struggle excited the
+deepest emotion, and gave rise to the most resolute purpose of striking for
+European liberty.
+
+Since the nominal restoration of peace between France and Prussia by the
+cession of half the Prussian kingdom, not a month had passed without the
+infliction of some gross injustice upon the conquered nation. The
+evacuation of the country had in the first instance been made conditional
+upon the payment of certain requisitions in arrear. While the amount of
+this sum was being settled, all Prussia, except Koenigsberg, remained in the
+hands of the French, and 157,000 French soldiers lived at free quarters
+upon the unfortunate inhabitants. At the end of the year 1807 King
+Frederick William was informed that, besides paying to Napoleon 60,000,000
+francs in money, and ceding domain lands of the same value, he must
+continue to support 40,000 French troops in five garrison-towns upon the
+Oder. Such was the dismay caused by this announcement, that Stein quitted
+Koenigsberg, now the seat of government, and passed three months at the
+head-quarters of the French at Berlin, endeavouring to frame some
+settlement less disastrous to his country. Count Daru, Napoleon's
+administrator in Prussia, treated the Minister with respect, and accepted
+his proposal for the evacuation of Prussian territory on payment of a fixed
+sum to the French. But the agreement required Napoleon's ratification, and
+for this Stein waited in vain. [150]
+
+[Stein urges war.]
+
+[Demands of Napoleon, Sept., 1808.]
+
+Month after month dragged on, and Napoleon made no reply. At length the
+victories of the Spanish insurrection in the summer of 1808 forced the
+Emperor to draw in his troops from beyond the Elbe. He placed a bold front
+upon his necessities, and demanded from the Prussian Government, as the
+price of evacuation, a still larger sum than that which had been named in
+the previous winter: he insisted that the Prussian army should be limited
+to 40,000 men, and the formation of the Landwehr abandoned; and he required
+the support of a Prussian corps of 16,000 men, in the event of hostilities
+breaking out between France and Austria. Not even on these conditions was
+Prussia offered the complete evacuation of her territory. Napoleon still
+insisted on holding the three principal fortresses on the Oder with a
+garrison of 10,000 men. Such was the treaty proposed to the Prussian Court
+(September, 1808) at a time when every soldierly spirit thrilled with the
+tidings from Spain, and every statesman was convinced by the events of the
+last few months that Napoleon's treaties were but stages in a progression
+of wrongs. Stein and Scharnhorst urged the King to arm the nation for a
+struggle as desperate as that of Spain, and to delay only until Napoleon
+himself was busied in the warfare of the Peninsula. Continued submission
+was ruin; revolt was at least not hopeless. However forlorn the condition
+of Prussia, its alliances were of the most formidable character. Austria
+was arming without disguise; Great Britain had intervened in the warfare of
+the Peninsula with an efficiency hitherto unknown in its military
+operations; Spain, on the estimate of Napoleon himself, required an army of
+200,000 men. Since the beginning of the Spanish insurrection Stein had
+occupied himself with the organisation of a general outbreak throughout
+Northern Germany. Rightly or wrongly, he believed the train to be now laid,
+and encouraged the King of Prussia to count upon the support of a popular
+insurrection against the French in all the territories which they had taken
+from Prussia, from Hanover, and from Hesse.
+
+[Stein resigns, Nov. 24. Proscribed by Napoleon.]
+
+[Napoleon and Alexander meet at Erfurt, Oct. 7, 1808.]
+
+In one point alone Stein was completely misinformed. He believed that
+Alexander, in spite of the Treaty of Tilsit, would not be unwilling to see
+the storm burst upon Napoleon, and that in the event of another general war
+the forces of Russia would more probably be employed against France than in
+its favour. The illusion was a fatal one. Alexander was still the
+accomplice of Napoleon. For the sake of the Danubian Principalities,
+Alexander was willing to hold central Europe in check while Napoleon
+crushed the Spaniards, and to stifle every bolder impulse in the simple
+King of Prussia. Napoleon himself dreaded the general explosion of Europe
+before Spain was conquered, and drew closer to his Russian ally.
+Difficulties that had been placed in the way of the Russian annexation of
+Roumania vanished. The Czar and the Emperor determined to display to all
+Europe the intimacy of their union by a festal meeting at Erfurt in the
+midst of their victims and their dependents. The whole tribe of vassal
+German sovereigns was summoned to the meeting-place; representatives
+attended from the Courts of Vienna and Berlin. On the 7th of October
+Napoleon and Alexander made their entry into Erfurt. Pageants and
+festivities required the attendance of the crowned and titled rabble for
+several days; but the only serious business was the settlement of a treaty
+confirming the alliance of France and Russia, and the notification of the
+Czar to the envoy of the King of Prussia that his master must accept the
+terms demanded by Napoleon, and relinquish the idea of a struggle with
+France. [151] Count Goltz, the Prussian envoy, unwillingly signed the
+treaty which gave Prussia but a partial evacuation at so dear a cost, and
+wrote to the King that no course now remained for him but to abandon
+himself to unreserved dependence upon France, and to permit Stein and the
+patriotic party to retire from the direction of the State. Unless the King
+could summon up courage to declare war in defiance of Alexander, there was,
+in fact, no alternative left open to him. Napoleon had discovered Stein's
+plans for raising an insurrection in Germany several weeks before, and had
+given vent to the most furious outburst of wrath against Stein in the
+presence of the Prussian Ambassador at Erfurt. If the great struggle on
+which Stein's whole heart and soul were set was to be relinquished, if
+Spain was to be crushed before Prussia moved an arm, and Austria was to be
+left to fight its inevitable battle alone, then the presence of Stein at
+the head of the Prussian State was only a snare to Europe, a peril to
+Prussia, and a misery to himself. Stein asked for and received his
+dismissal. (Nov. 24, 1808.)
+
+Stein's retirement averted the wrath of Napoleon from the King of Prussia;
+but the whole malignity of that Corsican nature broke out against the
+high-spirited patriot as soon as fresh victories had released Napoleon from
+the ill-endured necessity of self-control. On the 16th of December, when
+Madrid had again passed into the possession of the French, an imperial
+order appeared, which gave the measure of Napoleon's hatred of the fallen
+Minister. Stein was denounced as the enemy of the Empire; his property was
+confiscated; he was ordered to be seized by the troops of the Emperor or
+his allies wherever they could lay their hands upon him. As in the days of
+Roman tyranny, the west of Europe could now afford no asylum to the enemies
+of the Emperor. Russia and Austria remained the only refuge of the exile.
+Stein escaped into Bohemia; and, as the crowning humiliation of the
+Prussian State, its police were forced to pursue as a criminal the
+statesman whose fortitude had still made it possible in the darkest days
+for Prussian patriots not to despair of their country.
+
+[Misgovernment of the Spanish Junta.]
+
+[Napoleon goes to Spain, Nov., 1808.]
+
+Central Europe secured by the negotiations with Alexander at Erfurt,
+Napoleon was now able to place himself at the head of the French forces in
+Spain without fear of any immediate attack from the side of Germany. Since
+the victory of Baylen the Spaniards had made little progress either towards
+good government or towards a good military administration. The provincial
+Juntas had consented to subordinate themselves to a central committee
+chosen from among their own members; but this new supreme authority, which
+held its meetings at Aranjuez, proved one of the worst governments that
+even Spain itself had ever endured. It numbered thirty persons,
+twenty-eight of whom were priests, nobles, or officials. [152] Its
+qualities were those engrained in Spanish official life. In legislation it
+attempted absolutely nothing but the restoration of the Inquisition and the
+protection of Church lands; its administration was confined to a foolish
+interference with the better generals, and the acquisition of enormous
+supplies of war from Great Britain, which were either stolen by contractors
+or allowed to fall into the hands of the French. While the members of the
+Junta discussed the titles of honour which were to attach to them
+collectively and individually, and voted themselves salaries equal to those
+of Napoleon's generals, the armies fell into a state of destitution which
+scarcely any but Spanish troops would have been capable of enduring. The
+energy of the humbler classes alone prolonged the military existence of the
+insurrection; the Government organised nothing, comprehended nothing. Its
+part in the national movement was confined to a system of begging and
+boasting, which demoralised the Spaniards, and bewildered the agents and
+generals of England who first attempted the difficult task of assisting the
+Spaniards to help themselves. When the approach of army after army, the
+levies of Germany, Poland, Holland, and Italy, in addition to Napoleon's
+own veteran troops of Austerlitz and Jena, gave to the rest of the world
+some idea of the enormous force which Napoleon was about to throw on to
+Spain, the Spanish Government could form no better design than to repeat
+the movement of Baylen against Napoleon himself on the banks of the Ebro.
+
+[Napoleon enters Madrid, Dec. 4.]
+
+[Campaign on the Ebro, Nov., 1808.]
+
+The Emperor for the first time crossed the Pyrenees in the beginning of
+November, 1808. The victory of the Spaniards in the summer had forced the
+invaders to retire into the district between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, and
+the Ebro now formed the dividing-line between the hostile armies. It was
+the intention of Napoleon to roll back the extremes of the Spanish line to
+the east and the west, and, breaking through its centre, to move straight
+upon Burgos and Madrid. The Spaniards, for their part, were not content to
+act upon the defensive. When Napoleon arrived at Vittoria on the 5th of
+November, the left wing of the Spanish army under General Blake had already
+received orders to move eastwards from the upper waters of the Ebro, and to
+cut the French off from their communication with the Pyrenees. The movement
+was exactly that which Napoleon desired; for in executing it, Blake had
+only to march far enough eastwards to find himself completely surrounded by
+French divisions. A premature movement of the French generals themselves
+alone saved Blake from total destruction. He was attacked and defeated at
+Espinosa, on the upper Ebro, before he had advanced far enough to lose his
+line of retreat (Nov. 10); and, after suffering great losses, he succeeded
+in leading off a remnant of his army into the mountains of Asturias. In the
+centre, Soult drove the enemy before him, and captured Burgos. Of the army
+which was to have cleared Spain of the French, nothing now remained but a
+corps on the right at Tudela, commanded by Palafox. The destruction of this
+body was committed by the Emperor to Lannes and Ney. Ney was ordered to
+take a long march southwards in order to cut off the retreat of the
+Spaniards; he found it impossible, however, to execute his march within the
+time prescribed; and Palafox, beaten by Lannes at Tudela, made good his
+retreat into Saragossa. A series of accidents had thus saved the divisions
+of the Spanish army from actual capture, but there no longer existed a
+force capable of meeting the enemy in the field. Napoleon moved forward
+from Burgos upon Madrid. The rest of his march was a triumph. The batteries
+defending the mountain-pass of Somo Sierra were captured by a charge of
+Polish cavalry; and the capital itself surrendered, after a short artillery
+fire, on the 4th of December, four weeks after the opening of the campaign.
+
+[Campaign of Sir John Moore.]
+
+An English army was slowly and painfully making its way towards the Ebro at
+the time when Napoleon broke in pieces the Spanish line of defence. On the
+14th of October Sir John Moore had assumed the command of 20,000 British
+troops at Lisbon. He was instructed to march to the neighbourhood of
+Burgos, and to co-operate with the Spanish generals upon the Ebro.
+According to the habit of the English, no allowance was made for the
+movements of the enemy while their own were under consideration; and the
+mountain-country which Moore had to traverse placed additional obstacles in
+the way of an expedition at least a month too late in its starting. Moore
+believed it to be impossible to carry his artillery over the direct road
+from Lisbon to Salamanca, and sent it round by way of Madrid, while he
+himself advanced through Ciudad Rodrigo, reaching Salamanca on the 13th of
+November. Here, while still waiting for his artillery, rumours reached him
+of the destruction of Blake's army at Espinosa, and of the fall of Burgos.
+Later came the report of Palafox's overthrow at Tudela. Yet even now Moore
+could get no trustworthy information from the Spanish authorities. He
+remained for some time in suspense, and finally determined to retreat into
+Portugal. Orders were sent to Sir David Baird, who was approaching with
+reinforcements from Corunna, to turn back towards the northern coast.
+Scarcely had Moore formed this decision, when despatches arrived from
+Frere, the British agent at Madrid, stating that the Spaniards were about
+to defend the capital to the last extremity, and that Moore would be
+responsible for the ruin of Spain and the disgrace of England if he failed
+to advance to its relief. To the great joy of his soldiers, Moore gave
+orders for a forward march. The army advanced upon Valladolid, with the
+view of attacking the French upon their line of communication, while the
+siege of the capital engaged them in front. Baird was again ordered
+southwards. It was not until the 14th of December, ten days after Madrid
+had passed into the hands of the French, that Moore received intelligence
+of its fall. Neither the Spanish Government nor the British agent who had
+caused Moore to advance took the trouble to inform him of the surrender of
+the capital; he learnt it from an intercepted French despatch. From the
+same despatch Moore learnt that to the north of him, at Saldanha, on the
+river Carrion, there lay a comparatively small French force under the
+command of Soult. The information was enough for Moore, heart-sick at the
+mockery to which his army had been subjected, and burning for decisive
+action. He turned northwards, and marched against Soult, in the hope of
+surprising him before the news of his danger could reach Napoleon in the
+capital.
+
+[Napoleon marches against Moore, Dec. 19.]
+
+[Retreat of the English.]
+
+[Corunna, Jan. 16, 1809.]
+
+On the 19th of December a report reached Madrid that Moore had suspended
+his retreat on Portugal. Napoleon instantly divined the actual movement of
+the English, and hurried from Madrid against Moore at the head of 40,000
+men. Moore had met Baird on the 20th at Mayorga; on the 23rd the united
+British divisions reached Sahagun, scarcely a day's march from Soult at
+Saldanha. Here the English commander learnt that Napoleon himself was on
+his track. Escape was a question of hours. Napoleon had pushed across the
+Guadarama mountains in forced marches through snow and storm. Had his
+vanguard been able to seize the bridge over the river Esla at Benavente
+before the English crossed it, Moore would have been cut off from all
+possibility of escape. The English reached the river first and blew up the
+bridge. This rescued them from immediate danger. The defence of the river
+gave Moore's army a start which rendered the superiority of Napoleon's
+numbers of little effect. For a while Napoleon followed Moore towards the
+northern coast. On the 1st of January, 1809, he wrote an order which showed
+that he looked upon Moore's escape as now inevitable, and on the next day
+he quitted the army, leaving to his marshals the honour of toiling after
+Moore to the coast, and of seizing some thousands of frozen or drunken
+British stragglers. Moore himself pushed on towards Corunna with a rapidity
+which was dearly paid for by the demoralisation of his army. The sufferings
+and the excesses of the troops were frightful; only the rear-guard, which
+had to face the enemy, preserved soldierly order. At length Moore found it
+necessary to halt and take up position, in order to restore the discipline
+of his army. He turned upon Soult at Lugo, and offered battle for two
+successive days; but the French general declined an engagement; and Moore,
+satisfied with having recruited his troops, continued his march upon
+Corunna. Soult still followed. On January 11th the English army reached the
+sea; but the ships which were to convey them back to England were nowhere
+to be seen. A battle was inevitable, and Moore drew up his troops, 14,000
+in number, on a range of low hills outside the town to await the attack of
+the French. On the 16th, when the fleet had now come into harbour, Soult
+gave battle. The French were defeated at every point of their attack. Moore
+fell at the moment of his victory, conscious that the army which he had so
+bravely led had nothing more to fear. The embarkation was effected that
+night; on the next day the fleet put out to sea.
+
+[Siege of Saragossa, Dec., 1808.]
+
+[Napoleon leaves Spain, Jan 19, 1809.]
+
+Napoleon quitted Spain on the 19th of January, 1809, leaving his brother
+Joseph again in possession of the capital, and an army of 300,000 men under
+the best generals of France engaged with the remnants of a defeated force
+which had never reached half that number. No brilliant victories remained
+to be won; no enemy remained in the field important enough to require the
+presence of Napoleon. Difficulties of transit and the hostility of the
+people might render the subjugation of Spain a slower process than the
+subjugation of Prussia or Italy; but, to all appearance, the ultimate
+success of the Emperor's plans was certain, and the worst that lay before
+his lieutenants was a series of wearisome and obscure exertions against an
+inconsiderable foe. Yet, before the Emperor had been many weeks in Paris, a
+report reached him from Marshal Lannes which told of some strange form of
+military capacity among the people whose armies were so contemptible in the
+field. The city of Saragossa, after successfully resisting its besiegers in
+the summer of 1808, had been a second time invested after the defeats of
+the Spanish armies upon the Ebro. [153] The besiegers themselves were
+suffering from extreme scarcity when, on the 22nd of January, 1809, Lannes
+took up the command. Lannes immediately called up all the troops within
+reach, and pressed the battering operations with the utmost vigour. On the
+29th, the walls of Saragossa were stormed in four different places.
+
+[Defeats of the Spaniards, March, 1809.]
+
+According to all ordinary precedents of war, the French were now in
+possession of the city. But the besiegers found that their real work was
+only beginning. The streets were trenched and barricaded; every dwelling
+was converted into a fortress; for twenty days the French were forced to
+besiege house by house. In the centre of the town the popular leaders
+erected a gallows, and there they hanged every one who flinched from
+meeting the enemy. Disease was added to the horrors of warfare. In the
+cellars, where the women and children crowded in filth and darkness, a
+malignant pestilence broke out, which, at the beginning of February, raised
+the deaths to five hundred a day. The dead bodies were unburied; in that
+poisoned atmosphere the slightest wound produced mortification and death.
+At length the powers of the defenders sank. A fourth part of the town had
+been won by the French; of the townspeople and peasants who were within the
+walls at the beginning of the siege, it is said that thirty thousand had
+perished; the remainder could only prolong their defence to fall in a few
+days more before disease or the enemy. Even now there were members of the
+Junta who wished to fight as long as a man remained, but they were
+outnumbered. On the 20th of February what was left of Saragossa
+capitulated. Its resistance gave to the bravest of Napoleon's soldiers an
+impression of horror and dismay new even to men who had passed through
+seventeen years of revolutionary warfare, but it failed to retard
+Napoleon's armies in the conquest of Spain. No attempt was made to relieve
+the heroic or ferocious city. Everywhere the tide of French conquest
+appeared to be steadily making its advance. Soult invaded Portugal; in
+combination with him, two armies moved from Madrid upon the southern and
+the south-western provinces of Spain. Oporto fell on the 28th of March; in
+the same week the Spanish forces covering the south were decisively beaten
+at Ciudad Real and at Medellin upon the line of the Guadiana. The hopes of
+Europe fell. Spain itself could expect no second Saragossa. It appeared as
+if the complete subjugation of the Peninsula could now only be delayed by
+the mistakes of the French generals themselves, and by the untimely removal
+of that controlling will which had hitherto made every movement a step
+forward in conquest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Austria preparing for war--The war to be one on behalf of the German
+Nation--Patriotic Movement in Prussia--Expected Insurrection in North
+Germany--Plans of Campaign--Austrian Manifesto to the Germans--Rising of
+the Tyrolese--Defeats of the Archduke Charles in Bavaria--French in
+Vienna--Attempts of Doernberg and Schill--Battle of Aspern--Second Passage
+of the Danube--Battle of Wagram--Armistice of Znaim--Austria waiting for
+events--Wellesley in Spain--He gains the Battle of Talavera, but
+retreats--Expedition against Antwerp fails--Austria makes Peace--Treaty of
+Vienna--Real Effects of the War of 1809--Austria after 1809--Metternich--
+Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise--Severance of Napoleon and
+Alexander--Napoleon annexes the Papal States, Holland, La Valais, and the
+North German Coast--The Napoleonic Empire: Its Benefits and Wrongs--The
+Czar withdraws from Napoleon's Commercial System--War with Russia
+imminent--Wellington in Portugal: Lines of Torres Vedras; Massena's
+Campaign of 1810, and retreat--Soult in Andalusia--Wellington's Campaign
+of 1810--Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz--Salamanca.
+
+
+[Austria preparing for war, 1808-9.]
+
+Napoleon, quitting Spain in the third week of January, 1809, travelled to
+Paris with the utmost haste. He believed Austria to be on the point of
+declaring war; and on the very day of his arrival at the capital he called
+out the contingents of the Rhenish Federation. In the course of the next
+few weeks, however, he formed the opinion that Austria would either decline
+hostilities altogether, or at least find it impossible to declare war
+before the middle of May. For once the efforts of Austria outstripped the
+calculations of her enemy. Count Stadion, the earnest and enlightened
+statesman who had held power in Austria since the Peace of Presburg, had
+steadily prepared for a renewal of the struggle with France. He was
+convinced that Napoleon would soon enter upon new enterprises of conquest,
+and still farther extend his empire at the expense of Austria, unless
+attacked before Spain had fallen under his dominion. Metternich, now
+Austrian Ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon was intending to
+divide Turkey as soon as he had conquered Spain; and, although he advised
+delay, he agreed with the Cabinet at Vienna that Austria must sooner or
+later strike in self-defence. [154] Stadion, more sanguine, was only
+prevented from declaring war in 1808 by the counsels of the Archduke
+Charles and of other generals who were engaged in bringing the immense mass
+of new levies into military formation. Charles himself attached little
+value to the patriotic enthusiasm which, since the outbreak of the Spanish
+insurrection, had sprung up in the German provinces of Austria. He saw the
+approach of war with more apprehension than pleasure; but, however faint
+his own hopes, he laboured earnestly in creating for Austria a force far
+superior to anything that she had possessed before, and infused into the
+mass of the army that confident and patriotic spirit which he saw in others
+rather than felt in himself. By the beginning of March, 1809, Austria had
+260,000 men ready to take the field.
+
+[The war of 1809 to be a war for Germany.]
+
+The war now breaking out was to be a war for the German nation, as the
+struggle of the Spaniards had been a struggle for Spain. The animated
+appeals of the Emperor's generals formed a singular contrast to the silence
+with which the Austrian Cabinet had hitherto entered into its wars. The
+Hapsburg sovereign now stood before the world less as the inheritor of an
+ancient empire and the representative of the Balance of Power than as the
+disinterested champion of the German race. On the part of the Emperor
+himself the language of devotion for Germany was scarcely more than
+ironical. Francis belonged to an age and to a system in which the idea of
+nationality had no existence; and, like other sovereigns, he regarded his
+possessions as a sort of superior property which ought to be defended by
+obedient domestic dogs against marauding foreign wolves. The same personal
+view of public affairs had hitherto satisfied the Austrians. It had been
+enough for them to be addressed as the dutiful children of a wise and
+affectionate father. The Emperor spoke the familiar Viennese dialect; he
+was as homely in his notions and his prejudices as any beerseller in his
+dominions; his subjects might see him at almost any hour of the day or
+night; and out of the somewhat tough material of his character popular
+imagination had no difficulty in framing an idol of parental geniality and
+wisdom. Fifteen years of failure and mismanagement had, however, impaired
+the beauty of the domestic fiction; and although old-fashioned Austrians,
+like Haydn, the composer of the Austrian Hymn, were ready to go down to the
+grave invoking a blessing on their gracious master, the Emperor himself and
+his confidants were shrewd enough to see that the newly-excited sense of
+German patriotism would put them in possession of a force which they could
+hardly evoke by the old methods.
+
+[Austrian Parties.]
+
+One element of reality lay in the professions which were not for the most
+part meant very seriously. There was probably now no statesman in Austria
+who any longer felt a jealousy of the power of Prussia. With Count Stadion
+and his few real supporters the restoration of Germany was a genuine and
+deeply-cherished desire; with the majority of Austrian politicians the
+interests of Austria herself seemed at least for the present to require the
+liberation of North Germany. Thus the impassioned appeals of the Archduke
+Charles to all men of German race to rise against their foreign oppressor,
+and against their native princes who betrayed the interests of the
+Fatherland, gained the sanction of a Court hitherto very little inclined to
+form an alliance with popular agitation. If the chaotic disorder of the
+Austrian Government had been better understood in Europe, less importance
+would have been attached to this sudden change in its tone. No one in the
+higher ranks at Vienna was bound by the action of his colleagues. The
+Emperor, though industrious, had not the capacity to enforce any coherent
+system of government. His brothers caballed one against another, and
+against the persons who figured as responsible ministers. State-papers were
+brought by soldiers to the Emperor for his signature without the knowledge
+of his advisers. The very manifestos which seemed to herald a new era for
+Germany owed most of their vigour to the literary men who were entrusted
+with their composition. [155]
+
+[Patriotic movement in Prussia.]
+
+[Governing classes in South Germany on the side of Napoleon.]
+
+The answer likely to be rendered by Germany to the appeal of Austria was
+uncertain. In the Rhenish Federation there were undoubted signs of
+discontent with French rule among the common people; but the official
+classes were universally on the side of Napoleon, who had given them their
+posts and their salaries; while the troops, and especially the officers,
+who remembered the time when they had been mocked by the Austrians as
+"harlequins" and "nose-bags," were won by the kindness of the great
+conqueror, who organised them under the hands of his own generals, and gave
+them the companionship of his own victorious legions. Little could be
+expected from districts where to the mass of the population the old regime
+of German independence had meant nothing more than attendance at the
+manor-court of a knight, or the occasional spectacle of a ducal wedding, or
+a deferred interest in the droning jobbery of some hereditary
+town-councillor. In Northern Germany there was far more prospect of a
+national insurrection. There the spirit of Stein and of those who had
+worked with him was making itself felt, in spite of the fall of the
+Minister. Scharnhorst's reforms had made the Prussian army a school of
+patriotism, and the work of statesmen and soldiers was promoted by men who
+spoke to the feelings and the intelligence of the nation. Literature lost
+its indifference to nationality and to home. The philosopher Fichte, the
+poet Arndt, the theologian Schleiermacher pressed the claims of Germany and
+of the manlier virtues upon a middle class singularly open to literary
+influences, singularly wanting in the experience and the impulses of active
+public life. [156] In the Kingdom of Westphalia preparations for an
+insurrection against the French were made by officers who had served in the
+Prussian and the Hessian armies. In Prussia itself, by the side of many
+nobler agencies, the newly-founded Masonic society of the Tugendbund, or
+League of Virtue, made the cause of the Fatherland popular among thousands
+to whom it was an agreeable novelty to belong to any society at all. No
+spontaneous, irresistible uprising, like that which Europe had seen in the
+Spanish Peninsula, was to be expected among the unimpulsive population of
+the North German plains; but the military circles of Prussia were generally
+in favour of war, and an insurrection of the population west of the Elbe
+was not improbable in the event of Napoleon's army being defeated by
+Austria in the field. King Frederick William, too timid to resolve upon war
+himself, too timid even to look with satisfaction upon the bold attitude of
+Austria, had every reason for striking, if once the balance should incline
+against Napoleon: even against his own inclination it was possible that the
+ardour of his soldiers might force him into war.
+
+[Plans of campaign.]
+
+So strong were the hopes of a general rising in Northern Germany, that the
+Austrian Government to some extent based its plans for the campaign on this
+event. In the ordinary course of hostilities between France and Austria the
+line of operations in Germany is the valley of the Danube; but in preparing
+for the war of 1809 the Austrian Government massed its forces in the
+north-west of Bohemia, with the object of throwing them directly upon
+Central Germany. The French troops which were now evacuating Prussia were
+still on their way westwards at the time when Austria was ready to open the
+campaign. Davoust, with about 60,000 men, was in Northern Bavaria,
+separated by a great distance from the nearest French divisions in Baden
+and on the Rhine. By a sudden incursion of the main army of Austria across
+the Bohemian mountains, followed by an uprising in Northern Germany,
+Davoust and his scattered detachments could hardly escape destruction. Such
+was the original plan of the campaign, and it was probably a wise one in
+the present exceptional superiority of the Austrian preparations over those
+of France. For the first time since the creation of the Consulate it
+appeared as if the opening advantages of the war must inevitably be upon
+the side of the enemies of France. Napoleon had underrated both the energy
+and the resources of his adversary. By the middle of March, when the
+Austrians were ready to descend upon Davoust from Bohemia, Napoleon's first
+troops had hardly crossed the Rhine. Fortunately for the French commander,
+the Austrian Government, at the moment of delivering its well-planned blow,
+was seized with fear at its own boldness. Recollections of Hohenlinden and
+Ulm filled anxious minds with the thought that the valley of the Danube was
+insufficiently defended; and on the 20th of March, when the army was on the
+point of breaking into Northern Bavaria, orders were given to divert the
+line of march to the south, and to enter the Rhenish Confederacy by the
+roads of the Danube and the Inn. Thus the fruit of so much energy, and of
+the enemy's rare neglectfulness, was sacrificed at the last moment. It was
+not until the 9th of April that the Austrian movement southward was
+completed, and that the army lay upon the line of the Inn, ready to attack
+Napoleon in the territory of his principal German ally.
+
+[Austrian manifesto to the Germans.]
+
+The proclamations now published by the Emperor and the Archduke bore
+striking testimony to the influence of the Spanish insurrection in exciting
+the sense of national right, and awakening the Governments of Europe to the
+force which this placed in their hands. For the first time in history a
+manifesto was addressed "to the German nation." The contrast drawn in the
+Archduke's address to his army between the Spanish patriots dying in the
+defence of their country, and the German vassal-contingents dragged by
+Napoleon into Spain to deprive a gallant nation of its freedom, was one of
+the most just and the most telling that tyranny has ever given to the
+leaders of a righteous cause. [157] The Emperor's address "to the German
+nation" breathed the same spirit. It was not difficult for the politicians
+of the Rhenish Federation to ridicule the sudden enthusiasm for liberty and
+nationality shown by a Government which up to the present time had dreaded
+nothing so much as the excitement of popular movements; but, however
+unconcernedly the Emperor and the old school of Austrian statesmen might
+adopt patriotic phrases which they had no intention to remember when the
+struggle was over, such language was a reality in the effect which it
+produced upon the thousands who, both in Austria and other parts of
+Germany, now for the first time heard the summons to unite in defence of a
+common Fatherland.
+
+[Austrians invade Bavaria, April 9, 1809.]
+
+[Rising of the Tyrol, April, 1809.]
+
+[Its causes religious.]
+
+The leading divisions of the Archduke's army crossed the Inn on the 9th of
+April. Besides the forces intended for the invasion of Bavaria, which
+numbered 170,000 men, the Austrian Government had formed two smaller
+armies, with which the Princes Ferdinand and John were to take up the
+offensive in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and in Northern Italy. On every side
+Austria was first in the field; but even before its regular forces could
+encounter the enemy, a popular outbreak of the kind that the Government had
+invoked wrested from the French the whole of an important province. While
+the army crossed the Inn, the Tyrolese people rose, and overpowered the
+French and Bavarian detachments stationed in their country. The Tyrol had
+been taken from Austria at the Peace of Presburg, and attached to
+Napoleon's vassal kingdom of Bavaria. In geographical position and in
+relationship of blood the Tyrolese were as closely connected with the
+Bavarians as with the Austrians; and the annexation would probably have
+caused no lasting discontent if the Bavarian Government had condescended to
+take some account of the character of its new subjects. Under the rule of
+Austria the Tyrolese had enjoyed many privileges. They were exempt from
+military service, except in their own militia; they paid few taxes; they
+possessed forms of self-government which were at least popular enough to be
+regretted after they had been lost. The people adored their bishops and
+clergy. Nowhere could the Church exhibit a more winning example of unbroken
+accord between a simple people and a Catholic Crown. Protestantism and the
+unholy activities of reason had never brought trouble into the land. The
+people believed exactly what the priests told them, and delighted in the
+innumerable holidays provided by the Church. They had so little cupidity
+that no bribe could induce a Tyrolese peasant to inform the French of any
+movement; they had so little intelligence that, when their own courage and
+stout-heartedness had won their first battle, they persuaded one another
+that they had been led by a Saint on a white horse. Grievances of a
+substantial character were not wanting under the new Bavarian rule; but it
+was less the increased taxation and the enforcement of military service
+that exasperated the people than the attacks made by the Government upon
+the property and rights of the Church. Montgelas, the reforming Bavarian
+minister, treated the Tyrolese bishops with as little ceremony as the
+Swabian knights. The State laid claim to all advowsons; and upon the
+refusal of the bishops to give up their patronage, the bishops themselves
+were banished and their revenues sequestrated. A passion for uniformity and
+common sense prompted the Government to revive the Emperor Joseph's edicts
+against pilgrimages and Church holidays. It became a police-offence to shut
+up a shop on a saint's day, or to wear a gay dress at a festival. Bavarian
+soldiers closed the churches at the end of a prescribed number of masses.
+At a sale of Church property, ordered by the Government, some of the sacred
+vessels were permitted to fall into the hands of the Jews.
+
+These were the wrongs that fired the simple Tyrolese. They could have borne
+the visits of the tax-gatherer and the lists of conscription; they could
+not bear that their priests should be overruled, or that their observances
+should be limited to those sufficient for ordinary Catholics. Yet, with all
+its aspect of unreason, the question in the Tyrol was also part of that
+larger question whether Napoleon's pleasure should be the rule of European
+life, or nations should have some voice in the disposal of their own
+affairs. The Tyrolese were not more superstitious, and they were certainty
+much less cruel, than the Spaniards. They fought for ecclesiastical
+absurdities; but their cause was also the cause of national right, and the
+admiration which their courage excited in Europe was well deserved.
+
+[Tyrolese expel Bavarians and French, April 1809.]
+
+Early in the year 1809 the Archduke John had met the leaders of the
+Tyrolese peasantry, and planned the first movements of a national
+insurrection. As soon as the Austrian army crossed the Inn, the peasants
+thronged to their appointed meeting-places. Scattered detachments of the
+Bavarians were surrounded, and on the 12th of April the main body of the
+Tyrolese, numbering about 15,000 men, advanced upon Innsbruck. The town was
+invested; the Bavarian garrison, consisting of 3,000 regular troops, found
+itself forced to surrender after a severe engagement. On the next morning a
+French column, on the march from Italy to the Danube, approached Innsbruck,
+totally unaware of the events of the preceding day. The Tyrolese closed
+behind it as it advanced. It was not until the column was close to the town
+that its commander, General Brisson, discovered that Innsbruck had fallen
+into an enemy's hands. Retreat was impossible; ammunition was wanting for a
+battle; and Brisson had no choice but to surrender to the peasants, who had
+already proved more than a match for the Bavarian regular troops. The
+Tyrolese had done their work without the help of a single Austrian
+regiment. In five days the weak fabric of Bavarian rule had been thrown to
+the ground. The French only maintained themselves in the lower valley of
+the Adige: and before the end of April their last positions at Trent and
+Roveredo were evacuated, and no foreign soldier remained on Tyrolese soil.
+
+[Campaign of Archduke Charles in Bavaria.]
+
+The operations of the Austrian commanders upon the Inn formed a melancholy
+contrast to the activity of the mountaineers. In spite of the delay of
+three weeks in opening the campaign, Davoust had still not effected his
+junction with the French troops in Southern Bavaria, and a rapid movement
+of the Austrians might even now have overwhelmed his isolated divisions at
+Ratisbon. Napoleon himself had remained in Paris till the last moment,
+instructing Berthier, the chief of the staff, to concentrate the vanguard
+at Ratisbon, if by the 15th of April the enemy had not crossed the Inn, but
+to draw back to the line of the Lech if the enemy crossed the Inn before
+that day. [158] The Archduke entered Bavaria on the 9th; but, instead of
+retiring to the Lech, Berthier allowed the army to be scattered over an
+area sixty miles broad, from Ratisbon to points above Augsburg. Davoust lay
+at Ratisbon, a certain prey if the Archduke pushed forwards with vigour and
+thrust his army between the northern and the southern positions of the
+French. But nothing could change the sluggishness of the Austrian march.
+The Archduke was six days in moving from the Inn to the Isar; and before
+the order was given for an advance upon Ratisbon, Napoleon himself had
+arrived at Donauwoerth, and taken the command out of the hands of his feeble
+lieutenant.
+
+[Napoleon restores superiority of French, April 18, 19.]
+
+It needed all the Emperor's energy to snatch victory from the enemy's
+grasp. Davoust was bidden to fall back from Ratisbon to Neustadt; the most
+pressing orders were sent to Massena, who commanded the right at Augsburg,
+to push forward to the north-east in the direction of his colleague, before
+the Austrians could throw the mass of their forces upon Davoust's weak
+corps. Both generals understood the urgency of the command. Davoust set out
+from Ratisbon on the morning of the 19th. He was attacked by the Archduke,
+but so feebly and irresolutely that, with all their superiority in numbers,
+the Austrians failed to overpower the enemy at any one point. Massena,
+immediately after receiving his orders, hurried from Augsburg
+north-eastwards, while Napoleon himself advanced into the mid-space between
+the two generals, and brought the right and left wings of the French army
+into communication with one another. In two days after the Emperor's
+arrival all the advantages of the Austrians were gone: the French, so
+lately exposed to destruction, formed a concentrated mass in the presence
+of a scattered enemy. The issue of the campaign was decided by the
+movements of these two days. Napoleon was again at the head of 150,000 men;
+the Archduke, already baulked in his first attack upon Davoust, was seized
+with unworthy terror when he found that Napoleon himself was before him,
+and resigned himself to anticipations of ruin.
+
+[Austrian defeats at Landshut and Eggmuehl, April 22.]
+
+[French enter Vienna, May 13.]
+
+A series of manoeuvres and engagements in the finest style of Napoleonic
+warfare filled the next three days with French victories and Austrian
+disasters. On April the 20th the long line of the Archduke's army was cut
+in halves by an attack at Abensberg. The left was driven across the Isar at
+Landshut; the right, commanded by the Archduke himself, was overpowered at
+Eggmuehl on the 22nd, and forced northwards. The unbroken mass of the French
+army now thrust itself between the two defeated wings of the enemy. The
+only road remaining open to the Archduke was that through Ratisbon to the
+north of the Danube. In five days, although no engagement of the first
+order had taken place between the French and Austrian armies, Charles had
+lost 60,000 men; the mass of his army was retreating into Bohemia, and the
+road to Vienna lay scarcely less open than after Mack's capitulation at Ulm
+four years before. A desperate battle fought against the advancing French
+at Edelsberg by the weak divisions that had remained on the south of the
+Danube, proved that the disasters of the campaign were due to the faults of
+the general, not to the men whom he commanded. But whatever hopes of
+ultimate success might still be based on the gallant temper of the army, it
+was impossible to prevent the fall of the capital. The French, leaving the
+Archduke on the north of the Danube, pressed forwards along the direct
+route from the Inn to Vienna. The capital was bombarded and occupied. On
+the 13th of May Napoleon again took up his quarters in the palace of the
+Austrian monarchs where he had signed the Peace of 1806. The divisions
+which had fallen back before him along the southern road crossed the Danube
+at Vienna, and joined the Archduke on the bank of the river opposite the
+capital.
+
+[Attempts of Doernberg and Schill in Northern Germany, April, 1809.]
+
+The disasters of the Bavarian campaign involved the sacrifice of all that
+had resulted from Austrian victories elsewhere, and of all that might have
+been won by a general insurrection in Northern Germany. In Poland and in
+Italy the war had opened favourably for Austria. Warsaw had been seized;
+Eugene Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, had been defeated by the Archduke
+John at Sacile, in Venetia; but it was impossible to pursue these
+advantages when the capital itself was on the point of falling into the
+hands of the enemy. The invading armies halted, and ere long the Archduke
+John commenced his retreat into the mountains. In Northern Germany no
+popular uprising could be expected when once Austria had been defeated. The
+only movements that took place were undertaken by soldiers, and undertaken
+before the disasters in Bavaria became known. The leaders in this military
+conspiracy were Doernberg, an officer in the service of King Jerome of
+Westphalia, and Schill, the Prussian cavalry leader who had so brilliantly
+distinguished himself in the defence of Colberg. Doernberg had taken service
+under Jerome with the design of raising Jerome's own army against him. It
+had been agreed by the conspirators that at the same moment Doernberg should
+raise the Hessian standard in Westphalia, and Schill, marching from Berlin
+with any part of the Prussian army that would follow him, should proclaim
+war against the French in defiance of the Prussian Government. Doernberg had
+made sure of the support of his own regiment; but at the last moment the
+plot was discovered, and he was transferred to the command of a body of men
+upon whom he could not rely. He placed himself at the head of a band of
+peasants, and raised the standard of insurrection. King Jerome's troops met
+the solicitations of their countrymen with a volley of bullets. Doernberg
+fled for his life; and the revolt ended on the day after it had begun
+(April 23). Schill, unconscious of Doernberg's ruin, and deceived by reports
+of Austrian victories upon the Danube, led out his regiment from Berlin as
+if for a day's manoeuvring, and then summoned his men to follow him in
+raising a national insurrection against Napoleon. The soldiers answered
+Schill's eloquent words with shouts of applause; the march was continued
+westwards, and Schill crossed the Elbe, intending to fall upon the
+communications of Napoleon's army, already, as he believed, staggering
+under the blows delivered by the Archduke in the valley of the Danube.
+
+[Schill at Stralsund, May 23.]
+
+On reaching Halle, Schill learnt of the overthrow of the Archduke and of
+Doernberg's ruin in Westphalia. All hope of success in the enterprise on
+which he had quitted Berlin was dashed to the ground. The possibility of
+raising a popular insurrection vanished. Schill, however, had gone too far
+to recede; and even now it was not too late to join the armies of
+Napoleon's enemies. Schill might move into Bohemia, or to some point on the
+northern coast where he would be within reach of English vessels. But in
+any case quick and steady decision was necessary; and this Schill could not
+attain. Though brave even to recklessness, and gifted with qualities which
+made him the idol of the public, Schill lacked the disinterestedness and
+self-mastery which calm the judgment in time of trial. The sudden ruin of
+his hopes left him without a plan. He wasted day after day in purposeless
+marches, while the enemy collected a force to overwhelm him. His influence
+over his men became impaired; the denunciations of the Prussian Government
+prevented other soldiers from joining him. At length Schill determined to
+recross the Elbe, and to throw himself into the coast town of Stralsund, in
+Swedish Pomerania. He marched through Mecklenburg, and suddenly appeared
+before Stralsund at moment when the French cannoneers in garrison were
+firing a salvo in honour of Napoleon's entry into Vienna. A hand-to-hand
+fight gave Schill possession of the town, with all its stores. For a moment
+it seemed as if Stralsund might become a second Saragossa; but the French
+were at hand before it was possible to create works of defence. Schill had
+but eighteen hundred men, half of whom were cavalry; he understood nothing
+of military science, and would listen to no counsels. A week after his
+entry into Stralsund the town was stormed by a force four times more
+numerous than its defenders. Capitulation was no word for the man who had
+dared to make a private war upon Napoleon; Schill could only set the
+example of an heroic death. [159] The officers who were not so fortunate as
+to fall with their leader were shot in cold blood, after trial by a French
+court-martial. Six hundred common soldiers who surrendered were sent to the
+galleys of Toulon to sicken among French thieves and murderers. The cruelty
+of the conqueror, the heroism of the conquered, gave to Schill's
+ill-planned venture the importance of a great act of patriotic martyrdom.
+Another example had been given of self-sacrifice in the just cause.
+Schill's faults were forgotten; his memory deepened the passion with which
+all the braver spirits of Germany now looked for the day of reckoning with
+their oppressor. [160]
+
+[Napoleon crosses the Danube, May 20.]
+
+[Battle of Aspern, May 21, 22.]
+
+Napoleon had finished the first act of the war of 1809 by the occupation of
+Vienna; but no peace was possible until the Austrian army, which lay upon
+the opposite bank of the river, had been attacked and beaten. Four miles
+below Vienna the Danube is divided into two streams by the island of Lobau:
+the southern stream is the main channel of the river, the northern is only
+a hundred and fifty yards broad. It was here that Napoleon determined to
+make the passage. The broad arm of the Danube, sheltered by the island from
+the enemy's fire, was easily bridged by boats; the passage from the island
+to the northern bank, though liable to be disputed by the Austrians, was
+facilitated by the narrowing of the stream. On the 18th of May, Napoleon,
+supposing himself to have made good the connection between the island and
+the southern bank, began to bridge the northern arm of the river. His
+movements were observed by the enemy, but no opposition was offered. On the
+20th a body of 40,000 French crossed to the northern bank, and occupied the
+villages of Aspern and Essling. This was the movement for which the
+Archduke Charles, who had now 80,000 men under arms, had been waiting.
+Early on the 21st a mass of heavily-laden barges was let loose by the
+Austrians above the island. The waters of the Danube were swollen by the
+melting of the snows, and at midday the bridges of the French over the
+broad arm of the river were swept away. A little later, dense Austrian
+columns were seen advancing upon the villages of Aspern and Essling, where
+the French, cut off from their supports, had to meet an overpowering enemy
+in front, with an impassable river in their rear. The attack began at four
+in the afternoon; when night fell the French had been driven out of Aspern,
+though they still held the Austrians at bay in their other position at
+Essling. During the night the long bridges were repaired; forty thousand
+additional troops moved across the island to the northern bank of the
+Danube; and the engagement was renewed, now between equal numbers, on the
+following morning. Five times the village of Aspern was lost and won. In
+the midst of the struggle the long bridges were again carried away. Unable
+to break the enemy, unable to bring up any new forces from Vienna, Napoleon
+ordered a retreat. The army was slowly withdrawn into the island of Lobau.
+There for the next two days it lay without food and without ammunition,
+severed from Vienna, and exposed to certain destruction if the Archduke
+could have thrown his army across the narrow arm of the river and renewed
+the engagement. But the Austrians were in no condition to follow up their
+victory. Their losses were enormous; their stores were exhausted. The
+moments in which a single stroke might have overthrown the whole fabric of
+Napoleon's power were spent in forced inaction. By the third day after the
+battle of Aspern the communications between the island and the mainland
+were restored, and Napoleon's energy had brought the army out of immediate
+danger.
+
+[Effect on Europe.]
+
+[Brunswick invades Saxony.]
+
+Nevertheless, although the worst was averted, and the French now lay secure
+in their island fortress, the defeat of Aspern changed the position of
+Napoleon in the eyes of all Europe. The belief in his invincibility was
+destroyed; he had suffered a defeat in person, at the head of his finest
+troops, from an enemy little superior in strength to himself. The disasters
+of the Austrians in the opening of the campaign were forgotten; everywhere
+the hopes of resistance woke into new life. Prussian statesmen urged their
+King to promise his support if Austria should gain one more victory. Other
+enemies were ready to fall upon Napoleon without waiting for this
+condition. England collected an immense armament destined for an attack
+upon some point of the northern coast. Germany, lately mute and nerveless,
+gave threatening signs. The Duke of Brunswick, driven from his inheritance
+after his father's death at Jena, invaded the dominions of Napoleon's
+vassal, the King of Saxony, and expelled him from his capital. Popular
+insurrections broke out in Wuertemberg and in Westphalia, and proved the
+rising force of national feeling even in districts where the cause of
+Germany lately seemed so hopelessly lost.
+
+[Napoleon's preparations for the second passage of the Danube, June.]
+
+[French cross the Danube, July 4.]
+
+But Napoleon concerned himself little with these remoter enemies. Every
+energy of his mind was bent to the one great issue on which victory
+depended, the passage of the Danube. His chances of success were still
+good, if the French troops watching the enemy between Vienna and the
+Adriatic could be brought up in time for the final struggle. The Archduke
+Charles was in no hurry for a battle, believing that every hour increased
+the probability of an attack upon Napoleon by England or Prussia, or
+insurgent Germany. Never was the difference between Napoleon and his ablest
+adversaries more strikingly displayed than in the work which was
+accomplished by him during this same interval. He had determined that in
+the next battle his army should march across the Danube as safely and as
+rapidly as it could march along the streets of Vienna. Two solid bridges
+were built on piles across the broad arm of the river; no less than six
+bridges of rafts were made ready to be thrown across the narrow arm when
+the moment arrived for the attack. By the end of June all the outlying
+divisions of the French army had gathered to the great rallying-point; a
+hundred and eighty thousand men were in the island, or ready to enter it;
+every movement, every position to be occupied by each member of this vast
+mass in its passage and advance, was fixed down to the minutest details.
+Napoleon had decided to cross from the eastern, not from the northern side
+of the island, and thus to pass outside the fortifications which the
+Archduke had erected on the former battlefield. Towards midnight on the 4th
+of July, in the midst of a violent storm, the six bridges were successively
+swung across the river. The artillery opened fire. One army corps after
+another, each drawn up opposite to its own bridge, marched to the northern
+shore, and by sunrise nearly the whole of Napoleon's force deployed on the
+left bank of the Danube. The river had been converted into a great highway;
+the fortifications which had been erected by the Archduke were turned by
+the eastward direction of the passage. All that remained for the Austrian
+commander was to fight a pitched battle on ground that was now at least
+thoroughly familiar to him. Charles had taken up a good position on the
+hills that look over the village of Wagram. Here, with 130,000 men, he
+awaited the attack of the French. The first attack was made in the
+afternoon after the crossing of the river. It failed; and the French army
+lay stretched during the night between the river and the hills, while the
+Archduke prepared to descend upon their left on the morrow, and to force
+himself between the enemy and the bridges behind them.
+
+[Battle of Wagram, July 5, 6.]
+
+[Armistice of Zuaim, July 12.]
+
+Early on the morning of the 6th the two largest armies that had ever been
+brought face to face in Europe began their onslaught. Spectators from the
+steeples of Vienna saw the fire of the French little by little receding on
+their left, and dense masses of the Austrians pressing on towards the
+bridges, on whose safety the existence of the French army depended. But ere
+long the forward movement stopped. Napoleon had thrown an overpowering
+force against the Austrian centre, and the Archduke found himself compelled
+to recall his victorious divisions and defend his own threatened line.
+Gradually the superior numbers of the French forced the enemy back. The
+Archduke John, who had been ordered up from Presburg, failed to appear on
+the field; and at two o'clock Charles ordered a retreat. The order of the
+Austrians was unbroken; they had captured more prisoners than they had
+lost; their retreat was covered by so powerful an artillery that the French
+could make no pursuit. The victory was no doubt Napoleon's, but it was a
+victory that had nothing in common with Jena and Austerlitz. Nothing was
+lost by the Austrians at Wagram but their positions and the reputation of
+their general. The army was still in fighting-order, with the fortresses of
+Bohemia behind it. Whether Austria would continue the war depended on the
+action of the other European Powers. If Great Britain successfully landed
+an armament in Northern Germany or dealt any overwhelming blow in Spain, if
+Prussia declared war on Napoleon, Austria might fight on. If the other
+Powers failed, Austria, must make peace. The armistice of Zuaim, concluded
+on the 12th of July, was recognised on all sides as a mere device to gain
+time. There was a pause in the great struggle in the central Continent. Its
+renewal or its termination depended upon the issue of events at a distance.
+
+[Wellesley invades Spain, June, 1809.]
+
+[Talavera, July 27.]
+
+[Wellesley retreats to Portugal.]
+
+For the moment the eyes of all Europe were fixed upon the British army in
+Spain. Sir Arthur Wellesley, who took command at Lisbon in the spring, had
+driven Soult out of Oporto, and was advancing by the valley of the Tagus
+upon the Spanish capital. Some appearance of additional strength was given
+to him by the support of a Spanish army under the command of General
+Cuesta. Wellesley's march had, however, been delayed by the neglect and bad
+faith of the Spanish Government, and time had been given to Soult to
+collect a large force in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, ready either to
+fall upon Wellesley from the north, or to unite with another French army
+which lay at Talavera, if its commander, Victor, had the wisdom to postpone
+an engagement. The English general knew nothing of Soult's presence on his
+flank: he continued his march towards Madrid along the valley of the Tagus,
+and finally drew up for battle at Talavera, when Victor, after retreating
+before Cuesta to some distance, hunted back his Spanish pursuer to the
+point from which he had started. [161] The first attack was made by Victor
+upon the English positions at evening on the 27th of July. Next morning the
+assault was renewed, and the battle became general. Wellesley gained a
+complete victory, but the English themselves suffered heavily, and the army
+remained in its position. Within the next few days Soult was discovered to
+be descending from the mountains between Salamanca and the Tagus. A force
+superior to Wellesley's own threatened to close upon him from the rear, and
+to hem him in between two fires. The sacrifices of Talavera proved to have
+been made in vain. Wellesley had no choice but to abandon his advance upon
+the Spanish capital, and to fall back upon Portugal by the roads south of
+the Tagus. In spite of the defeat of Victor, the French were the winners of
+the campaign. Madrid was still secure; the fabric of French rule in the
+Spanish Peninsula was still unshaken. The tidings of Wellesley's retreat
+reached Napoleon and the Austrian negotiators, damping the hopes of
+Austria, and easing Napoleon's fears. Austria's continuance of the war now
+depended upon the success or failure of the long-expected descent of an
+English army upon the northern coast of Europe.
+
+Three months before the Austrian Government declared war upon Napoleon, it
+had acquainted Great Britain with its own plans, and urged the Cabinet to
+dispatch an English force to Northern Germany. Such a force, landing at the
+time of the battle of Aspern, would certainly have aroused both Prussia and
+the country between the Elbe and the Maine. But the difference between a
+movement executed in time and one executed weeks and months too late was
+still unknown at the English War Office. The Ministry did not even begin
+their preparations till the middle of June, and then they determined, in
+pursuance of a plan made some years earlier, to attack the French fleet and
+docks at Antwerp, and to ignore that patriotic movement in Northern Germany
+from which they had so much to hope.
+
+[British Expedition against Antwerp, July, 1809.]
+
+[Total failure.]
+
+On the 28th of July, two months after the battle of Aspern and three weeks
+after the battle of Wagram, a fleet of thirty-seven ships of the line, with
+innumerable transports and gunboats, set sail from Dover for the Schelde.
+Forty thousand troops were on board; the commander of the expedition was
+the Earl of Chatham, a court-favourite in whom Nature avenged herself upon
+Great Britain for what she had given to this country in his father and his
+younger brother. The troops were landed on the island of Walcheren. Instead
+of pushing forward to Antwerp with all possible haste, and surprising it
+before any preparations could be made for its defence, Lord Chatham placed
+half his army on the banks of various canals, and with the other half
+proceeded to invest Flushing. On the 16th of August this unfortunate town
+surrendered, after a bombardment that had reduced it to a mass of ruins.
+During the next ten days the English commander advanced about as many
+miles, and then discovered that for all prospect of taking Antwerp he might
+as well have remained in England. Whilst Chatham was groping about in
+Walcheren, the fortifications of Antwerp were restored, the fleet carried
+up the river, and a mass of troops collected sufficient to defend the town
+against a regular siege. Defeat stared the English in the face. At the end
+of August the general recommended the Government to recall the expedition,
+only leaving a force of 15,000 soldiers to occupy the marshes of Walcheren.
+Chatham's recommendations were accepted; and on a spot so notoriously
+pestiferous that Napoleon had refused to permit a single French soldier to
+serve there on garrison duty, [162] an English army-corps, which might at
+least have earned the same honour as Schill and Brunswick in Northern
+Germany, was left to perish of fever and ague. When two thousand soldiers
+were in their graves, the rest were recalled to England.
+
+[Austria makes peace.]
+
+Great Britain had failed to weaken or to alarm Napoleon; the King of
+Prussia made no movement on behalf of the losing cause; and the Austrian
+Government unwillingly found itself compelled to accept conditions of
+peace. It was not so much a deficiency in its forces as the universal
+distrust of its generals that made it impossible for Austria to continue
+the war. The soldiers had fought as bravely as the French, but in vain. "If
+we had a million soldiers," it was said, "we must make peace; for we have
+no one to command them." Count Stadion, who was for carrying on the war to
+the bitter end, despaired of throwing his own energetic courage into the
+men who surrounded the Emperor, and withdrew from public affairs. For week
+after week the Emperor fluctuated between the acceptance of Napoleon's hard
+conditions and the renewal of a struggle which was likely to involve his
+own dethronement as well as the total conquest of the Austrian State. At
+length Napoleon's demands were presented in the form of an ultimatum. In
+his distress the Emperor's thoughts turned towards the Minister who, eight
+years before, had been so strong, so resolute, when all around him wavered.
+Thugut, now seventy-six years old, was living in retirement. The Emperor
+sent one of his generals to ask his opinion on peace or war. "I thought to
+find him," reported the general, "broken in mind and body; but the fire of
+his spirit is in its full force." Thugut's reply did honour to his
+foresight: "Make peace at any price. The existence of the Austrian monarchy
+is at stake: the dissolution of the French Empire is not far off." On the
+14th of October the Emperor Francis accepted his conqueror's terms, and
+signed conditions of peace. [163]
+
+[Peace of Vienna, Oct. 14, 1809.]
+
+[Real effects of the war of 1809.]
+
+The Treaty of Vienna, the last which Napoleon signed as a conqueror, took
+from the Austrian Empire 50,000 square miles of territory and more than
+4,000,000 inhabitants. Salzburg, with part of Upper Austria, was ceded to
+Bavaria; Western Galicia, the territory gained by Austria in the final
+partition of Poland, was transferred to the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw; part of
+Carinthia, with the whole of the country lying between the Adriatic and the
+Save as far as the frontier of Bosnia, was annexed to Napoleon's own
+Empire, under the title of the Illyrian Provinces. Austria was cut off from
+the sea, and the dominion of Napoleon extended without a break to the
+borders of Turkey. Bavaria and Saxony, the outposts of French sovereignty
+in Central Europe, were enriched at the expense of the Power which had
+called Germany to arms; Austria, which at the beginning of the
+Revolutionary War had owned territory upon the Rhine and exercised a
+predominating influence over all Italy, seemed now to be finally excluded
+both from Germany and the Mediterranean. Yet, however striking the change
+of frontier which gave to Napoleon continuous dominion from the Straits of
+Calais to the border of Bosnia, the victories of France in 1809 brought in
+their train none of those great moral changes which had hitherto made each
+French conquest a stage in European progress. The campaign of 1796 had
+aroused the hope of national independence in Italy; the settlements of 1801
+and 1806 had put an end to Feudalism in Western Germany; the victories of
+1809 originated nothing but a change of frontier such as the next war might
+obliterate and undo. All that was permanent in the effects of the year 1809
+was due, not to any new creations of Napoleon, but to the spirit of
+resistance which France had at length excited in Europe. The revolt of the
+Tyrol, the exploits of Brunswick and Schill, gave a stimulus to German
+patriotism which survived the defeat of Austria. Austria itself, though
+overpowered, had inflicted a deadly injury upon Napoleon, by withdrawing
+him from Spain at the moment when he might have completed its conquest, and
+by enabling Wellesley to gain a footing in the Peninsula. Napoleon appeared
+to have gathered a richer spoil from the victories of 1809 than from any of
+his previous wars; in reality he had never surrounded himself with so many
+dangers. Russia was alienated by the annexation of West Galicia to the
+Polish Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Northern Germany had profited by the examples
+of courage and patriotism shown so largely in 1809 on behalf of the
+Fatherland; Spain, supported by Wellesley's army, was still far from
+submission. The old indifference which had smoothed the way for the earlier
+French conquests was no longer the characteristic of Europe. The
+estrangement of Russia, the growth of national spirit in Germany and in
+Spain, involved a danger to Napoleon's power which far outweighed the
+visible results of his victory.
+
+[Austria and the Tyrol.]
+
+Austria itself could only acquiesce in defeat: nor perhaps would the
+permanent interests of Europe have been promoted by its success. The
+championship of Germany which it assumed at the beginning of the war would
+no doubt have resulted in the temporary establishment of some form of
+German union under Austrian leadership, if the event of the war had been
+different; but the sovereign of Hungary and Croatia could never be the true
+head of the German people; and the conduct of the Austrian Government after
+the peace of 1809 gave little reason to regret its failure to revive a
+Teutonic Empire. No portion of the Emperor's subjects had fought for him
+with such determined loyalty as the Tyrolese. After having been the first
+to throw off the yoke of the stranger, they had again and again freed their
+country when Napoleon's generals supposed all resistance overcome; and in
+return for their efforts the Emperor had solemnly assured them that he
+would never accept a peace which did not restore them to his Empire. If
+fair dealing was due anywhere it was due from the Court of Austria to the
+Tyrolese. Yet the only reward of the simple courage of these mountaineers
+was that the war-party at head-quarters recklessly employed them as a means
+of prolonging, hostilities after the armistice of Znaim, and that up to the
+moment when peace was signed they were left in the belief that the Emperor
+meant to keep his promise, Austria, however, could not ruin herself to
+please the Tyrolese. Circumstances were changed; and the phrases of
+patriotism which had excited so much rejoicing at the beginning of the war
+were now fallen out of fashion at Vienna. Nothing more was heard about the
+rights of nations and the deliverance of Germany. Austria had made a great
+venture and failed; and the Government rather resumed than abandoned its
+normal attitude in turning its back upon the professions of 1809.
+
+[Austrian policy after 1809.]
+
+[Metternich.]
+
+Henceforward the policy of Austria was one of calculation, untinged by
+national sympathies. France had been a cruel enemy; yet if there was a
+prospect of winning something for Austria by a French alliance,
+considerations of sentiment could not be allowed to stand in the way. A
+statesman who, like Count Stadion, had identified the interests of Austria
+with the liberation of Germany, was no fitting helmsman for the State in
+the shifting course that now lay before it. A diplomatist was called to
+power who had hitherto by Napoleon's own desire represented the Austrian
+State at Paris. Count Metternich, the new Chief Minister, was the son of a
+Rhenish nobleman who had held high office under the Austrian crown. His
+youth had been passed at Coblentz, and his character and tastes were those
+which in the eighteenth century had marked the court-circles of the little
+Rhenish Principalities, French in their outer life, unconscious of the
+instinct of nationality, polished and seductive in that personal management
+which passed for the highest type of statesmanship. Metternich had been
+ambassador at Dresden and at Berlin before he went to Paris. Napoleon had
+requested that he might be transferred to the Court of the Tuileries, on
+account of the marked personal courtesy shown by Metternich to the French
+ambassador at Berlin during the war between France and Austria in 1805.
+Metternich carried with him all the friendliness of personal intercourse
+which Napoleon expected in him, but he also carried with him a calm and
+penetrating self-possession, and the conviction that Napoleon would give
+Europe no rest until his power was greatly diminished. He served Austria
+well at Paris, and in the negotiations for peace which followed the battle
+of Wagram he took a leading part. After the disasters of 1809, when war was
+impossible and isolation ruin, no statesman could so well serve Austria as
+one who had never confessed himself the enemy of any Power; and, with the
+full approval of Napoleon, the late Ambassador at Paris was placed at the
+head of the Austrian State.
+
+[Marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise, 1810.]
+
+[Severance of Napoleon and Alexander.]
+
+Metternich's first undertaking gave singular evidence of the flexibility of
+system which was henceforward to guard Austria's interests. Before the
+grass had grown over the graves at Wagram, the Emperor Francis was
+persuaded to give his daughter in marriage to Napoleon. For some time past
+Napoleon had determined on divorcing Josephine and allying himself to one
+of the reigning houses of the Continent. His first advances were made at
+St. Petersburg; but the Czar hesitated to form a connection which his
+subjects would view as a dishonour; and the opportunity was seized by the
+less fastidious Austrians as soon as the fancies of the imperial suitor
+turned towards Vienna. The Emperor Francis, who had been bullied by
+Napoleon upon the field of Austerlitz, ridiculed and insulted in every
+proclamation issued during the late campaign, gave up his daughter for what
+was called the good of his people, and reconciled himself to a son-in-law
+who had taken so many provinces for his dowry. Peace had not been
+proclaimed four months when the treaty was signed which united the House of
+Bonaparte to the family of Marie Antoinette. The Archduke Charles
+represented Napoleon in the espousals; the Archbishop of Vienna anointed
+the bride with the same sacred oil with which he had consecrated the
+banners of 1809; the servile press which narrated the wedding festivities
+found no space to mention that the Emperor's bravest subject, the Tyrolese
+leader Hofer, was executed by Napoleon as a brigand in the interval between
+the contract and the celebration of the marriage. Old Austrian families,
+members of the only aristocracy upon the Continent that still possessed
+political weight and a political tradition, lamented the Emperor's consent
+to a union which their prejudices called a mis-alliance, and their
+consciences an adultery; but the object of Metternich was attained. The
+friendship between France and Russia, which had inflicted so much evil on
+the Continent since the Peace of Tilsit, was dissolved; the sword of
+Napoleon was turned away from Austria for at least some years; the
+restoration of the lost provinces of the Hapsburg seemed not impossible,
+now that Napoleon and Alexander were left face to face in Europe, and the
+alliance of Austria had become so important to the power which had hitherto
+enriched itself at Austria's expense.
+
+[Napoleon annexes Papal States, May, 1809.]
+
+Napoleon crowned his new bride, and felt himself at length the equal of the
+Hapsburgs and the Bourbons. Except in Spain, his arms were no longer
+resisted upon the Continent, and the period immediately succeeding the
+Peace of Vienna was that which brought the Napoleonic Empire to its widest
+bounds. Already, in the pride of the first victories of 1809, Napoleon had
+completed his aggressions upon the Papal sovereignty by declaring the
+Ecclesiastical States to be united to the French Empire (May 17, 1809). The
+Pope retorted upon his despoiler with a Bull of Excommunication; but the
+spiritual terrors were among the least formidable of those then active in
+Europe, and the sanctity of the Pontiff did not prevent Napoleon's soldiers
+from arresting him in the Quirinal, and carrying him as a prisoner to
+Savona. Here Pius VII., was detained for the next three years. The Roman
+States received the laws and the civil organisation of France. [164]
+Bishops and clergy who refused the oath of fidelity to Napoleon were
+imprisoned or exiled; the monasteries and convents were dissolved; the
+cardinals and great officers, along with the archives and the whole
+apparatus of ecclesiastical rule, were carried to Paris. In relation to the
+future of European Catholicism, the breach between Napoleon and Pius VII.,
+was a more important event than was understood at the time; its immediate
+and visible result was that there was one sovereign the fewer in Europe,
+and one more province opened to the French conscription.
+
+[Napoleon annexes, Holland, July, 1810.]
+
+The next of Napoleon's vassals who lost his throne was the King of Holland.
+Like Joseph in Spain, and like Murat in Naples, Louis Bonaparte had made an
+honest effort to govern for the benefit of his subjects. He had endeavoured
+to lighten the burdens which Napoleon laid upon the Dutch nation, already
+deprived of its colonies, its commerce, and its independence; and every
+plea which Louis had made for his subjects had been treated by Napoleon as
+a breach of duty towards himself. The offence of the unfortunate King of
+Holland became unpardonable when he neglected to enforce the orders of
+Napoleon against the admission of English goods. Louis was summoned to
+Paris, and compelled to sign a treaty, ceding part of his dominions and
+placing his custom-houses in the hands of French officers. He returned to
+Holland, but affairs grew worse and worse. French troops overran the
+country; Napoleon's letters were each more menacing than the last; and at
+length Louis fled from his dominions (July 1, 1810), and delivered himself
+from a royalty which had proved the most intolerable kind of servitude. A
+week later Holland was incorporated with the French Empire.
+
+[Annexation of Le Valais, and of the North German coast.]
+
+Two more annexations followed before the end of the year. The Republic of
+the Valais was declared to have neglected the duty imposed upon it of
+repairing the road over the Simplon, and forfeited its independence. The
+North German coast district, comprising the Hanse towns, Oldenburg, and
+part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, was annexed to the French Empire, with
+the alleged object of more effectually shutting out British goods from the
+ports of the Elbe and the Weser. Hamburg, however, and most of the
+territory now incorporated with France, had been occupied by French troops
+ever since the war of 1806, and the legal change in its position scarcely
+made its subjection more complete. Had the history of this annexation been
+written by men of the peasant-class, it would probably have been described
+in terms of unmixed thankfulness and praise. In the Decree introducing the
+French principle of the free tenure of land, thirty-six distinct forms of
+feudal service are enumerated, as abolished without compensation. [165]
+
+[Extent of Napoleon's Empire and Dependencies, 1810.]
+
+Napoleon's dominion had now reached its widest bounds. The frontier of the
+Empire began at Luebeck on the Baltic, touched the Rhine at Wesel, and
+followed the river and the Jura mountains to the foot of the Lake of
+Geneva; then, crossing the Alps above the source of the Rhone, it ran with
+the rivers Sesia and Po to a point nearly opposite Mantua, mounted to the
+watershed of the Apennines, and descended to the Mediterranean at
+Terracina. The late Ecclesiastical States were formed into the two
+Departments of the Tiber and of Trasimene; Tuscany, also divided into
+French Departments, and represented in the French Legislative Body, gave
+the title of Archduchess and the ceremonial of a Court to Napoleon's sister
+Eliza; the Kingdom of Italy, formed by Lombardy, Venice, and the country
+east of the Apennines as far south as Ascoli, belonged to Napoleon himself,
+but was not constitutionally united with the French Empire. On the east of
+the Adriatic the Illyrian Provinces extended Napoleon's rule to the borders
+of Bosnia and Montenegro. Outside the frontier of this great Empire an
+order of feudatories ruled in Italy, in Germany, and in Poland. Murat, King
+of Naples, and the client-princes of the Confederation of the Rhine,
+holding all Germany up to the frontiers of Prussia and Austria, as well as
+the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, were nominally sovereigns within their own
+dominions; but they held their dignities at Napoleon's pleasure, and the
+population and revenues of their States were at his service.
+
+[Benefits of Napoleon's rule.]
+
+[Wrongs of Napoleon's rule.]
+
+[Commercial blockade.]
+
+The close of the year 1810 saw the last changes effected which Europe was
+destined to receive at the hands of Napoleon. The fabric of his sovereignty
+was raised upon the ruins of all that was obsolete and forceless upon the
+western Continent; the benefits as well as the wrongs or his supremacy were
+now seen in their widest operation. All Italy, the northern districts of
+Germany which were incorporated with the Empire, and a great part of the
+Confederate Territory of the Rhine, received in the Code Napoleon a law
+which, to an extent hitherto unknown in Europe, brought social justice into
+the daily affairs of life. The privileges of the noble, the feudal burdens
+of the peasant, the monopolies of the guilds, passed away, in most
+instances for ever. The comfort and improvement of mankind were vindicated
+as the true aim of property by the abolition of the devices which convert
+the soil into an instrument of family pride, and by the enforcement of a
+fair division of inheritances among the children of the possessor. Legal
+process, both civil and criminal, was brought within the comprehension of
+ordinary citizens, and submitted to the test of publicity. These were among
+the fruits of an earlier enlightenment which Napoleon's supremacy bestowed
+upon a great part of Europe. The price which was paid for them was the
+suppression of every vestige of liberty, the conscription, and the
+Continental blockade. On the whole, the yoke was patiently borne. The
+Italians and the Germans of the Rhenish Confederacy cared little what
+Government they obeyed; their recruits who were sent to be killed by the
+Austrians or the Spaniards felt it no especial hardship to fight Napoleon's
+battles. More galling was the pressure of Napoleon's commercial system and
+of the agencies by which he attempted to enforce it. In the hope of ruining
+the trade of Great Britain, Napoleon spared no severity against the owners
+of anything that had touched British hands, and deprived the Continent of
+its entire supply of colonial produce, with the exception of such as was
+imported at enormous charges by traders licensed by himself. The possession
+of English goods became a capital offence. In the great trading towns a
+system of permanent terrorism was put in force against the merchants.
+Soldiers ransacked their houses; their letters were opened; spies dogged
+their steps. It was in Hamburg, where Davoust exercised a sort of
+independent sovereignty, that the violence and injustice of the Napoleonic
+commercial system was seen in its most repulsive form; in the greater part
+of the Empire it was felt more in the general decline of trade and in a
+multitude of annoying privations than in acts of obtrusive cruelty. [166]
+The French were themselves compelled to extract sugar from beetroot, and to
+substitute chicory for coffee; the Germans, less favoured by nature, and
+less rapid in adaptation, thirsted and sulked. Even in such torpid
+communities as Saxony political discontent was at length engendered by
+bodily discomfort. Men who were proof against all the patriotic exaltation
+of Stein and Fichte felt that there must be something wrong in a system
+which sent up the price of coffee to five shillings a pound, and reduced
+the tobacconist to exclusive dependence upon the market-gardener.
+
+[The Czar withdraws from Napoleon's commercial system, Dec., 1810.]
+
+[France and Russia preparing for war, 1811.]
+
+It was not, however, by its effects upon Napoleon's German vassals that the
+Continental system contributed to the fall of its author. Whatever the
+discontent of these communities, they obeyed Napoleon as long as he was
+victorious, and abandoned him only when his cause was lost. Its real
+political importance lay in the hostility which it excited between France
+and Russia. The Czar, who had attached himself to Napoleon's commercial
+system at the Peace of Tilsit, withdrew from it in the year succeeding the
+Peace of Vienna. The trade of the Russian Empire had been ruined by the
+closure of its ports to British vessels and British goods. Napoleon had
+broken his promise to Russia by adding West Galicia to the Polish Duchy of
+Warsaw; and the Czar refused to sacrifice the wealth of his subjects any
+longer in the interest of an insincere ally. At the end of the year 1810 an
+order was published at St. Petersburg, opening the harbours of Russia to
+all ships bearing a neutral flag, and imposing a duty upon many of the
+products of France. This edict was scarcely less than a direct challenge to
+the French Emperor. Napoleon exaggerated the effect of his Continental
+prohibitions upon English traffic. He imagined that the command of the
+European coast-line, and nothing short of this, would enable him to exhaust
+his enemy; and he was prepared to risk a war with Russia rather than permit
+it to frustrate his long-cherished hopes. Already in the Austrian marriage
+Napoleon had marked the severance of his interests from those of Alexander.
+An attempted compromise upon the affairs of Poland produced only new
+alienation and distrust; an open affront was offered to Alexander in the
+annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose sovereign was a member of his
+own family. The last event was immediately followed by the publication of
+the new Russian tariff. In the spring of 1811 Napoleon had determined upon
+war. With Spain still unsubdued, he had no motive to hurry on hostilities;
+Alexander on his part was still less ready for action; and the forms of
+diplomatic intercourse were in consequence maintained for some time longer
+at Paris and St. Petersburg. But the true nature of the situation was shown
+by the immense levies that were ordered both in France and Russia; and the
+rest of the year was spent in preparations for the campaign which was
+destined to decide the fate of Europe.
+
+[Affairs in Spain and Portugal, 1809-1812.]
+
+[Lines of Torres Vedras, 1809-1810.]
+
+We have seen that during the period of more than two years that elapsed
+between the Peace of Vienna and the outbreak of war with Russia, Napoleon
+had no enemy in arms upon the Continent except in the Spanish Peninsula.
+Had the Emperor himself taken up the command in Spain, he would probably
+within a few months have crushed both the Spanish armies and their English
+ally. A fatal error in judgment made him willing to look on from a distance
+whilst his generals engaged with this last foe. The disputes with the Pope
+and the King of Holland might well have been adjourned for another year;
+but Napoleon felt no suspicions that the conquest of the Spanish Peninsula
+was too difficult a task for his marshals; nor perhaps would it have been
+so if Wellington had been like any of the generals whom Napoleon had
+himself encountered. The French forces in the Peninsula numbered over
+300,000 men: in spite of the victory of Talavera, the English had been
+forced to retreat into Portugal. But the warfare of Wellington was a
+different thing from that even of the best Austrian or Russian commanders.
+From the time of the retreat from Talavera he had foreseen that Portugal
+would be invaded by an army far outnumbering his own; and he planned a
+scheme of defence as original, as strongly marked with true military
+insight, as Napoleon's own most daring schemes of attack. Behind Lisbon a
+rugged mountainous tract stretches from the Tagus to the sea: here, while
+the English army wintered in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Wellington
+employed thousands of Portuguese labourers in turning the promontory into
+one vast fortress. No rumour of the operation was allowed to reach the
+enemy. A double series of fortifications, known as the Lines of Torres
+Vedras, followed the mountain-bastion on the north of Lisbon, and left no
+single point open between the Tagus and the sea. This was the barrier to
+which Wellington meant in the last resort to draw his assailants, whilst
+the country was swept of everything that might sustain an invading army,
+and the irregular troops of Portugal closed in upon its rear. [167]
+
+[Retreat of Massena, 1810-11.]
+
+[Massena's campaign against Wellington, 1810.]
+
+In June, 1810, Marshal Massena, who had won the highest distinction at
+Aspern and Wagram, arrived in Spain, and took up the command of the army
+destined for the conquest of Portugal. Ciudad Rodrigo was invested:
+Wellington, too weak to effect its relief, too wise to jeopardise his army
+for the sake of Spanish praise, lay motionless while this great fortress
+fell into the hands of the invader. In September, the French, 70,000
+strong, entered Portugal. Wellington retreated down the valley of the
+Mondego, devastating the country. At length he halted at Busaco and gave
+battle (September 27). The French were defeated; the victory gave the
+Portuguese full confidence in the English leader; but other roads were open
+to the invader, and Wellington continued his retreat. Massena followed, and
+heard for the first time of the fortifications of Torres Vedras when he was
+within five days' march of them. On nearing the mountain-barrier, Massena
+searched in vain for an unprotected point. Fifty thousand English and
+Portuguese regular troops, besides a multitude of Portuguese militia, were
+collected behind the lines; with the present number of the French an
+assault was hopeless. Massena waited for reinforcements. It was with the
+utmost difficulty that he could keep his army from starving; at length,
+when the country was utterly exhausted, he commenced his retreat (Nov. 14).
+Wellington descended from the heights, but his marching force was still too
+weak to risk a pitched battle. Massena halted and took post at Santarem, on
+the Tagus. Here, and in the neighbouring valley of the Zezere, he
+maintained himself during the winter. But in March, 1811, reinforcements
+arrived from England: Wellington moved forward against his enemy, and the
+retreat of the French began in real earnest. Massena made his way
+northwards, hard pressed by the English, and devastating the country with
+merciless severity in order to retard pursuit. Fire and ruin marked the
+track of the retreating army; but such were the sufferings of the French
+themselves, both during the invasion and the retreat, that when Massena
+re-entered Spain, after a campaign in which only one pitched battle had
+been fought, his loss exceeded 30,000 men.
+
+[Soult conquers Spain as far as Cadiz.]
+
+[Wellington's campaign of 1811.]
+
+Other French armies, in spite of a most destructive guerilla warfare, were
+in the meantime completing the conquest of the south and the east of Spain.
+Soult captured Seville, and began to lay siege to Cadiz. Here, at the end
+of 1810, an order reached him from Napoleon to move to the support of
+Massena. Leaving Victor in command at Cadiz, Soult marched northwards,
+routed the Spaniards, and conquered the fortress of Badajoz, commanding the
+southern road into Portugal. Massena, however, was already in retreat, and
+Soult's own advance was cut short by intelligence that Graham, the English
+general in Cadiz, had broken out upon the besiegers and inflicted a heavy
+defeat. Soult returned to Cadiz and resumed the blockade. Wellington, thus
+freed from danger of attack from the south, and believing Massena to be
+thoroughly disabled, considered that the time had come for a forward
+movement into Spain. It was necessary for him to capture the fortresses of
+Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo on the northern road, and to secure his own
+communications with Portugal by wresting back Badajoz from the French. He
+left a small force to besiege Almeida, and moved to Elvas to make
+arrangements with Beresford for the siege of Badajoz. But before the
+English commander had deemed it possible, the energy of Massena had
+restored his troops to efficiency; and the two armies of Massena and Soult
+were now ready to assail the English on the north and the south. Massena
+marched against the corps investing Almeida. Wellington hastened back to
+meet him, and fought a battle at Fuentes d'Onoro. The French were defeated;
+Almeida passed into the hands of the English. In the south, Soult advanced
+to the relief of Badajoz. He was overthrown by Beresford in the bloody
+engagement of Albuera (May 16th); but his junction with the army of the
+north, which was now transferred from Massena to Marmont, forced the
+English to raise the siege; and Wellington, after audaciously offering
+battle to the combined French armies, retired within the Portuguese
+frontier, and marched northwards with the design of laying siege to Ciudad
+Rodrigo. Again outnumbered by the French, he was compelled to retire to
+cantonments on the Coa.
+
+[Capture of Ciudad Rodrigo, Jan. 19, 1812.]
+
+[Capture of Badajoz, April 6.]
+
+Throughout the autumn months, which were spent in forced inaction,
+Wellington held patiently to his belief that the French would be unable to
+keep their armies long united, on account of the scarcity of food. His
+calculations were correct, and at the close of the year 1811 the English
+were again superior in the field. Wellington moved against Ciudad Rodrigo,
+and took it by storm on the 19th of January, 1812. The road into Spain was
+opened; it only remained to secure Portugal itself by the capture of
+Badajoz. Wellington crossed the Tagus on the 8th of March, and completed
+the investment of Badajoz ten days later. It was necessary to gain
+possession of the city, at whatever cost, before Soult could advance to its
+relief. On the night of the 6th of April Wellington gave orders for the
+assault. The fury of the attack, the ferocity of the English soldiers in
+the moment of their victory, have made the storm of Badajoz conspicuous
+amongst the most terrible events of war. But the purpose of Wellington was
+effected; the base of the English army in Portugal was secured from all
+possibility of attack; and at the moment when Napoleon was summoning his
+veteran regiments from beyond the Pyrenees for the invasion of Russia, the
+English commander, master of the frontier fortresses of Spain, was
+preparing to overwhelm the weakened armies in the Peninsula, and to drive
+the French from Madrid.
+
+[Wellington invades Spain, June 1812.]
+
+[Salamanca, July 22.]
+
+[Wellington retires to Portugal.]
+
+It was in the summer of 1812, when Napoleon was now upon the point of
+opening the Russian campaign, that Wellington advanced against Marmont's
+positions in the north of Spain and the French lines of communication with
+the capital. Marmont fell back and allowed Wellington to pass Salamanca;
+but on reaching the Douro he turned upon his adversary, and by a succession
+of swift and skilful marches brought the English into some danger of losing
+their communications with Portugal. Wellington himself now retreated as far
+as Salamanca, and there gave battle (July 22). A decisive victory freed the
+English army from its peril, and annihilated all the advantages gained by
+Marmont's strategy and speed. The French were so heavily defeated that they
+had to fall back on Burgos. Wellington marched upon Madrid. At his approach
+King Joseph fled from the capital, and ordered Soult to evacuate Andalusia,
+and to meet him at Valencia, on the eastern coast. Wellington entered
+Madrid amidst the wild rejoicing of the Spaniards, and then turned
+northwards to complete the destruction of the army which he had beaten at
+Salamanca. But the hour of his final success was not yet come. His advance
+upon Madrid, though wise as a political measure, had given the French
+northern army time to rally. He was checked by the obstinate defence of
+Burgos; and finding the French strengthened by the very abandonment of
+territory which his victory had forced upon them, he retired to Portugal,
+giving to King Joseph a few months' more precarious enjoyment of his
+vassal-sovereignty before his final and irrevocable overthrow.
+
+[The war excites a constitutional movement in Spain.]
+
+In Spain itself the struggle of the nation for its independence had
+produced a political revolution as little foreseen by the Spaniards as by
+Napoleon himself when the conflict began. When, in 1808, the people had
+taken up arms for its native dynasty, the voices of those who demanded a
+reform in the abuses of the Bourbon government had scarcely been heard amid
+the tumult of loyal enthusiasm for Ferdinand. There existed, however, a
+group of liberally-minded men in Spain; and as soon as the invasion of the
+French and the subsequent successes of the Spaniards had overthrown both
+the old repressive system of the Bourbons and that which Napoleon attempted
+to put in its place, the opinions of these men, hitherto scarcely known
+outside the circle of their own acquaintances, suddenly became a power in
+the country through the liberation of the press. Jovellanos, an upright and
+large-minded statesman, who had suffered a long imprisonment in the last
+reign in consequence of his labours in the cause of progress, now
+represented in the Central Junta the party of constitutional reform. The
+Junta itself acted with but little insight or sincerity. A majority of its
+members neither desired nor understood the great changes in government
+which Jovellanos advocated; yet the Junta itself was an irregular and
+revolutionary body, and was forced to appeal to the nation in order to hold
+its ground against the old legal Councils of the monarchy, which possessed
+not only a better formal right, but all the habits of authority. The
+victories of Napoleon at the end of 1808, and the threatening attitude both
+of the old official bodies and of the new provincial governments which had
+sprung up in every part of the kingdom, extorted from the Junta in the
+spring of 1809 a declaration in favour of the assembling of the Cortes, or
+National Parliament, in the following year. Once made, the declaration
+could not be nullified or withdrawn. It was in vain that the Junta, alarmed
+at the progress of popular opinions, restored the censorship of the press,
+and attempted to suppress the liberal journals. The current of political
+agitation swept steadily on; and before the end of the year 1809 the
+conflict of parties, which Spain was henceforward to experience in common
+with the other Mediterranean States, had fairly begun. [168]
+
+[Spanish Liberals in 1809 and 1810.]
+
+The Spanish Liberals of 1809 made the same attack upon despotic power, and
+upheld the same theories of popular right, as the leaders of the French
+nation twenty years before. Against them was ranged the whole force of
+Spanish officialism, soon to be supported by the overwhelming power of the
+clergy. In the outset, however, the Liberals carefully avoided infringing
+on the prerogatives of the Church. Thus accommodating its policy to the
+Catholic spirit of the nation, the party of reform gathered strength
+throughout the year 1809, as disaster after disaster excited the wrath of
+the people against both the past and the present holders of power. It was
+determined by the Junta that the Cortes should assemble on the 1st of
+March, 1810. According to the ancient usage of Spain, each of the Three
+Estates, the Clergy, the Nobles, and the Commons, would have been
+represented in the Cortes by a separate assembly. The opponents of reform
+pressed for the maintenance of this mediaeval order, the Liberals declared
+for a single Chamber; the Junta, guided by Jovellanos, adopted a middle
+course, and decided that the higher clergy and nobles should be jointly
+represented by one Chamber, the Commons by a second. Writs of election had
+already been issued, when the Junta, driven to Cadiz by the advance of the
+French armies, and assailed alike by Liberals, by reactionists, and by city
+mobs, ended its ineffective career, and resigned its powers into the hands
+of a Regency composed of five persons (Jan. 30, 1810). Had the Regency
+immediately taken steps to assemble the Cortes, Spain would probably have
+been content with the moderate reforms which two Chambers, formed according
+to the plans of Jovellanos, would have been likely to sanction. The
+Regency, however, preferred to keep power in its own hands and ignored the
+promise which the Junta had given to the nation. Its policy of obstruction,
+which was continued for months after the time when the Cortes ought to have
+assembled, threw the Liberal party into the hands of men of extremes, and
+prepared the way for revolution instead of reform. It was only when the
+report reached Spain that Ferdinand was about to marry the daughter of King
+Joseph, and to accept the succession to the Spanish crown from the usurper
+himself, that the Regency consented to convoke the Cortes. But it was now
+no longer possible to create an Upper House to serve as a check upon the
+popular Assembly. A single Chamber was elected, and elected in great part
+within the walls of Cadiz itself; for the representatives of districts
+where the presence of French soldiery rendered election impossible were
+chosen by refugees from those districts within Cadiz, amid the tumults of
+political passion which stir a great city in time of war and revolution.
+
+[Constitution made by the Cortes, 1812.]
+
+On the 24th of September, 1810, the Cortes opened. Its first act was to
+declare the sovereignty of the people, its next act to declare the freedom
+of the Press. In every debate a spirit of bitter hatred towards the old
+system of government and of deep distrust towards Ferdinand himself
+revealed itself in the speeches of the Liberal deputies, although no one in
+the Assembly dared to avow the least want of loyalty towards the exiled
+House. The Liberals knew how passionate was the love of the Spanish people
+for their Prince; but they resolved that, if Ferdinand returned to his
+throne, he should return without the power to revive the old abuses of
+Bourbon rule. In this spirit the Assembly proceeded to frame a Constitution
+for Spain. The Crown was treated as the antagonist and corrupter of the
+people; its administrative powers were jealously reduced; it was confronted
+by an Assembly to be elected every two years, and the members of this
+Assembly were prohibited both from holding office under the Crown, and from
+presenting themselves for re-election at the end of their two years'
+service. To a Representative Body thus excluded from all possibility of
+gaining any practical acquaintance with public affairs was entrusted not
+only the right of making laws, but the control of every branch of
+government. The executive was reduced to a mere cypher.
+
+[The Clergy against the Constitution.]
+
+Such was the Constitution which, under the fire of the French artillery now
+encompassing Cadiz, the Cortes of Spain proclaimed in the spring of the
+year 1812. Its principles had excited the most vehement opposition within
+the Assembly itself; by the nation, or at least that part of it which was
+in communication with Cadiz, it appeared to be received with enthusiasm.
+The Liberals, who had triumphed over their opponents in the debates in the
+Assembly, believed that their own victory was the victory of the Spanish
+people over the forces of despotism. But before the first rejoicings were
+over, ominous signs appeared of the strength of the opposite party, and of
+the incapacity of the Liberals themselves to form any effective Government.
+The fanaticism of the clergy was excited by a law partly ratifying the
+suppression of monasteries begun by Joseph Bonaparte; the enactments of the
+Cortes regarding the censorship of religious writings threw the Church into
+open revolt. In declaring the freedom of the Press, the Cortes had
+expressly guarded themselves against extending this freedom to religious
+discussion; the clergy now demanded the restoration of the powers of the
+Inquisition, which had been in abeyance since the beginning of the war. The
+Cortes were willing to grant to the Bishops the right of condemning any
+writing as heretical, and they were willing to enforce by means of the
+ordinary tribunals the law which declared the Catholic religion to be the
+only one permitted in Spain; but they declined to restore the jurisdiction
+of the Holy Office (Feb., 1813). Without this engine for the suppression of
+all mental independence the priesthood of Spain conceived its cause to be
+lost. The anathema of the Church went out against the new order. Uniting
+with the partisans of absolutism, whom Wellington, provoked by the
+extravagances of the Liberals, now took under his protection, the clergy
+excited an ignorant people against its own emancipators, and awaited the
+time when the return of Ferdinand, and a combination of all the interests
+hostile to reform, should overthrow the Constitution which the Liberals
+fondly imagined to have given freedom to Spain.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+War approaching between France and Russia--Policy of Prussia--Hardenberg's
+Ministry--Prussia forced into Alliance with Napoleon--Austrian Alliance--
+Napoleon's Preparations--He enters Russia--Alexander and Bernadotte--Plan
+of the Russians to fight a Battle at Drissa frustrated--They retreat on
+Witepsk--Sufferings of the French--French enter Smolensko--Battle of
+Borodino--Evacuation of Moscow--Moscow fired--The Retreat from Moscow--The
+French at Smolensko--Advance of Russian Armies from North and South--
+Battle of Krasnoi--Passage of the Beresina--The French reach the Niemen--
+York's Convention with the Russians--The Czar and Stein--Russian Army
+enters Prussia--Stein raises East Prussia--Treaty of Kalisch--Prussia
+declares War--Enthusiasm of the Nation--Idea of German Unity--The Landwehr.
+
+
+[Austria and Prussia in 1811.]
+
+[Hardenberg's Ministry.]
+
+War between France and Russia was known to be imminent as early as the
+spring of 1811. The approach of the conflict was watched with the deepest
+anxiety by the two States of central Europe which still retained some
+degree of independence. The Governments of Berlin and Vienna had been drawn
+together by misfortune. The same ultimate deliverance formed the secret
+hope of both; but their danger was too great to permit them to combine in
+open resistance to Napoleon's will. In spite of a tacit understanding
+between the two powers, each was compelled for the present to accept the
+conditions necessary to secure its own existence. The situation of Prussia
+in especial was one of the utmost danger. Its territory lay directly
+between the French Empire and Russia; its fortresses were in the hands of
+Napoleon, its resources were certain to be seized by one or other of the
+hostile armies. Neutrality was impossible, however much desired by Prussia
+itself; and the only question to be decided by the Government was whether
+Prussia should enter the war as the ally of France or of Russia. Had the
+party of Stein been in power, Prussia would have taken arms against
+Napoleon at every risk. Stein, however, was in exile his friends, though
+strong in the army, were not masters of the Government; the foreign policy
+of the country was directed by a statesman who trusted more to time and
+prudent management than to desperate resolves. Hardenberg had been recalled
+to office in 1810, and permitted to resume the great measures of civil
+reform which had been broken off two years before. The machinery of
+Government was reconstructed upon principles that had been laid down by
+Stein; agrarian reform was carried still farther by the abolition of
+peasant's service, and the partition of peasant's land between the occupant
+and his lord; an experiment, though a very ill-managed one, was made in the
+forms of constitutional Government by the convocation of three successive
+assemblies of the Notables. On the part of the privileged orders Hardenberg
+encountered the most bitter opposition; his own love of absolute power
+prevented him from winning popular confidence by any real approach towards
+a Representative System. Nor was the foreign policy of the Minister of a
+character to excite enthusiasm. A true patriot at heart, he seemed at times
+to be destitute of patriotism, when he was in fact only destitute of the
+power to reveal his real motives.
+
+[Hardenburg's foreign policy, 1811.]
+
+Convinced that Prussia could not remain neutral in the coming war, and
+believing some relief from its present burdens to be absolutely necessary,
+Hardenberg determined in the first instance to offer Prussia's support to
+Napoleon, demanding in return for it a reduction of the payments still due
+to France, and the removal of the limits imposed upon the Prussian army.
+[169] The offer of the Prussian alliance reached Napoleon in the spring of
+1811: he maintained an obstinate silence. While the Prussian envoy at Paris
+vainly waited for an audience, masses of troops advanced from the Rhine
+towards the Prussian frontier, and the French garrisons on the Oder were
+raised far beyond their stipulated strength. In July the envoy returned
+from Paris, announcing that Napoleon declined even to enter upon a
+discussion of the terms proposed by Hardenberg. King Frederick William
+now wrote to the Czar, proposing an alliance between Prussia and Russia.
+It was not long before the report of Hardenberg's military preparations
+reached Paris. Napoleon announced that if they were not immediately
+suspended he should order Davoust to march on Berlin; and he presented a
+counter-proposition for a Prussian alliance, which was in fact one of
+unqualified submission. The Government had to decide between accepting a
+treaty which placed Prussia among Napoleon's vassals, or certain war.
+Hardenberg, expecting favourable news from St. Petersburg, pronounced in
+favour of war; but the Czar, though anxious for the support of Prussia,
+had determined on a defensive plan of operations, and declared that he
+could send no troops beyond the Russian frontier.
+
+[Prussia accepts alliance with Napoleon Feb, 1812.]
+
+Prussia was thus left to face Napoleon alone. Hardenberg shrank from the
+responsibility of proclaiming a war for life or death, and a treaty was
+signed which added the people of Frederick the Great to that inglorious
+crowd which fought at Napoleon's orders against whatever remained of
+independence and nationality in Europe. [170] (Feb. 24th, 1812.) Prussia
+undertook to supply Napoleon with 20,000 men for the impending campaign,
+and to raise no levies and to give no orders to its troops without
+Napoleon's consent. Such was the bitter termination of all those patriotic
+hopes and efforts which had carried Prussia through its darkest days.
+Hardenberg himself might make a merit of bending before the storm, and of
+preserving for Prussia the means of striking when the time should come; but
+the simpler instincts of the patriotic party felt his submission to be the
+very surrender of national existence. Stein in his exile denounced the
+Minister with unsparing bitterness. Scharnhorst resigned his post; many of
+the best officers in the Prussian army quitted the service of King
+Frederick William in order to join the Russians in the last struggle for
+European liberty.
+
+[Alliance of Austria with Napoleon.]
+
+The alliance which Napoleon pressed upon Austria was not of the same
+humiliating character as that which Prussia was forced to accept. Both
+Metternich and the Emperor Francis would have preferred to remain neutral,
+for the country was suffering from a fearful State-bankruptcy, and the
+Government had been compelled to reduce its paper money, in which all debts
+and salaries were payable, to a fifth of its nominal value. Napoleon,
+however, insisted on Austria's co-operation. The family-relations of the
+two Emperors pointed to a close alliance, and the reward which Napoleon
+held out to Austria, the restoration of the Illyrian provinces, was one of
+the utmost value. Nor was the Austrian contingent to be treated, like the
+Prussian, as a mere French army-corps. Its operations were to be separate
+from those of the French, and its command was to be held by an Austrian
+general, subordinate only to Napoleon himself. On these terms Metternich
+was not unwilling to enter the campaign. He satisfied his scruples by
+inventing a strange diplomatic form in which Austria was still described as
+a neutral, although she took part in the war, [171] and felt as little
+compunction in uniting with France as in explaining to the Courts of St.
+Petersburg and Berlin that the union was a hypocritical one. The Sovereign
+who was about to be attacked by Napoleon, and the Sovereigns who sent their
+troops to Napoleon's support, perfectly well understood one another's
+position. The Prussian corps, watched and outnumbered by the French, might
+have to fight the Russians because they could not help it; the Austrians,
+directed by their own commander, would do no serious harm to the Russians
+so long as the Russians did no harm to them. Should the Czar succeed in
+giving a good account of his adversary, he would have no difficulty in
+coming to a settlement with his adversary's forced allies.
+
+[Preparations of Napoleon for invasion of Russia.]
+
+The Treaties which gave to Napoleon the hollow support of Austria and
+Prussia were signed early in the year 1812. During the next three months
+all Northern Germany was covered with enormous masses of troops and
+waggon-trains, on their way from the Rhine to the Vistula. No expedition
+had ever been organised on anything approaching to the scale of the
+invasion of Russia. In all the wars of the French since 1793 the enemy's
+country had furnished their armies with supplies, and the generals had
+trusted to their own exertions for everything but guns and ammunition. Such
+a method could not, however, be followed in an invasion of Russia. The
+country beyond the Niemen was no well-stocked garden, like Lombardy or
+Bavaria. Provisions for a mass of 450,000 men, with all the means of
+transport for carrying them far into Russia, had to be collected at Dantzig
+and the fortresses of the Vistula. No mercy was shown to the unfortunate
+countries whose position now made them Napoleon's harvest-field and
+storehouse. Prussia was forced to supplement its military assistance with
+colossal grants of supplies. The whole of Napoleon's troops upon the march
+through Germany lived at the expense of the towns and villages through
+which they passed; in Westphalia such was the ruin caused by military
+requisitions that King Jerome wrote to Napoleon, warning him to fear the
+despair of men who had nothing more to lose. [172]
+
+[Napoleon crosses Russian frontier, June, 1812.]
+
+[Alexander and Bernadotte.]
+
+At length the vast stores were collected, and the invading army reached the
+Vistula. Napoleon himself quitted Paris on the 9th of May, and received the
+homage of the Austrian and Prussian Sovereigns at Dresden. The eastward
+movement of the army continued. The Polish and East Prussian districts
+which had been the scene of the combats of 1807 were again traversed by
+French columns. On the 23rd of June the order was given to cross the Niemen
+and enter Russian territory. Out of 600,000 troops whom Napoleon had
+organised for this campaign, 450,000 were actually upon the frontier. Of
+these, 380,000 formed the central army, under Napoleon's own command, at
+Kowno, on the Niemen; to the north, at Tilsit, there was formed a corps of
+32,000, which included the contingent furnished by Prussia; the Austrians,
+under Schwarzenburg, with a small French division, lay to the south, on the
+borders of Galicia. Against the main army of Napoleon, the real invading
+force, the Russians could only bring up 150,000 men. These were formed into
+the First and Second Armies of the West. The First, or Northern Army, with
+which the Czar himself was present, numbered about 100,000, under the
+command of Barclay de Tolly; the Second Army, half that strength, was led
+by Prince Bagration. In Southern Poland and on the Lower Niemen the French
+auxiliary corps were faced by weak divisions. In all, the Russians had only
+220,000 men to oppose to more than double that number of the enemy. The
+principal reinforcements which they had to expect were from the armies
+hitherto engaged with the Turks upon the Danube. Alexander found it
+necessary to make peace with the Porte at the cost of a part of the spoils
+of Tilsit. The Danubian provinces, with the exception of Bessarabia, were
+restored to the Sultan, in order that Russia might withdraw its forces from
+the south. Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, who was threatened with the
+loss of his own dominions in the event of Napoleon's victory, concluded an
+alliance with the Czar. In return for the co-operation of a Swedish army,
+Alexander undertook, with an indifference to national right worthy of
+Napoleon himself, to wrest Norway from Denmark, and to annex it to the
+Swedish crown.
+
+[Russians intend to fight at Drissa.]
+
+[Russian armies severed, and retreat on Witepsk.]
+
+The head-quarters of the Russian army were at Wilna when Napoleon crossed
+the Niemen. It was unknown whether the French intended to advance upon
+Moscow or upon St. Petersburg; nor had any systematic plan of the campaign
+been adopted by the Czar. The idea of falling back before the enemy was
+indeed familiar in Russia since the war between Peter the Great and Charles
+XII. of Sweden, and there was no want of good counsel in favour of a
+defensive warfare; [173] but neither the Czar nor any one of his generals
+understood the simple theory of a retreat in which no battles at all should
+be fought. The most that was understood by a defensive system was the
+occupation of an entrenched position for battle, and a retreat to a second
+line of entrenchments before the engagement was repeated. The actual course
+of the campaign was no result of a profound design; it resulted from the
+disagreements of the general's plans, and the frustration of them all. It
+was intended in the first instance to fight a battle at Drissa, on the
+river Dwina. In this position, which was supposed to cover the roads both
+to Moscow and St. Petersburg, a great entrenched camp had been formed, and
+here the Russian army was to make its first stand against Napoleon.
+Accordingly, as soon as the French crossed the Niemen, both Barclay and
+Bagration were ordered by the Czar to fall back upon Drissa. But the
+movements of the French army were too rapid for the Russian commanders to
+effect their junction. Bagration, who lay at some distance to the south,
+was cut off from his colleague, and forced to retreat along the eastern
+road towards Witepsk. Barclay reached Drissa in safety, but he knew himself
+to be unable to hold it alone against 300,000 men. He evacuated the lines
+without waiting for the approach of the French, and fell back in the
+direction taken by the second army. The first movement of defence had thus
+failed, and the Czar now quitted the camp, leaving to Barclay the command
+of the whole Russian forces.
+
+[Collapse of the French transport.]
+
+[Barclay and Bagration unite at Smolensko, Aug. 3.]
+
+Napoleon entered Wilna, the capital of Russian Poland, on the 28th of June.
+The last Russian detachments had only left it a few hours before; but the
+French were in no condition for immediate pursuit. Before the army reached
+the Niemen the unparalleled difficulties of the campaign had become only
+too clear. The vast waggon-trains broke down on the highways. The stores
+were abundant, but the animals which had to transport them died of
+exhaustion. No human genius, no perfection of foresight and care, could
+have achieved the enormous task which Napoleon had undertaken. In spite of
+a year's preparations the French suffered from hunger and thirst from the
+moment that they set foot on Russian soil. Thirty thousand stragglers had
+left the army before it reached Wilna; twenty-five thousand sick were in
+the hospitals; the transports were at an unknown distance in the rear. At
+the end of six days' march from the Niemen, Napoleon found himself
+compelled to halt for nearly three weeks. The army did not leave Wilna till
+the 16th of July, when Barclay had already evacuated the camp at Drissa.
+When at length a march became possible, Napoleon moved upon the Upper
+Dwina, hoping to intercept Barclay upon the road to Witepsk; but
+difficulties of transport again brought him to a halt, and the Russian
+commander reached Witepsk before his adversary. Here Barclay drew up for
+battle, supposing Bagration's army to be but a short distance to the south.
+In the course of the night intelligence arrived that Bagration's army was
+nowhere near the rallying-point, but had been driven back towards
+Smolensko. Barclay immediately gave up the thought of fighting a battle,
+and took the road to Smolensko himself, leaving his watch-fires burning.
+His movement was unperceived by the French; the retreat was made in good
+order; and the two severed Russian armies at length effected their junction
+at a point three hundred miles distant from the frontier.
+
+[The French waste away.]
+
+[French enter Smolensko, Aug. 18.]
+
+[Barclay superseded by Kutusoff.]
+
+Napoleon, disappointed of battle, entered Witepsk on the evening after the
+Russians had abandoned it (July 28). Barclay's escape was, for the French,
+a disaster of the first magnitude, since it extinguished all hope of
+crushing the larger of the two Russian armies by overwhelming numbers in
+one great and decisive engagement. The march of the French during the last
+twelve days showed at what cost every further step must be made. Since
+quitting Wilna the 50,000 sick and stragglers had risen to 100,000. Fever
+and disease struck down whole regiments. The provisioning of the army was
+beyond all human power. Of the 200,000 men who still remained, it might
+almost be calculated in how many weeks the last would perish. So fearful
+was the prospect that Napoleon himself thought of abandoning any further
+advance until the next year, and of permitting the army to enter into
+winter-quarters upon the Dwina. But the conviction that all Russian
+resistance would end with the capture of Moscow hurried him on. The army
+left Witepsk on the 13th of August, and followed the Russians to Smolensko.
+Here the entire Russian army clamoured for battle. Barclay stood alone in
+perceiving the necessity for retreat. The generals caballed against him;
+the soldiers were on the point of mutiny; the Czar himself wrote to express
+his impatience for an attack upon the French. Barclay nevertheless
+persisted in his resolution to abandon Smolensko. He so far yielded to the
+army as to permit the rearguard to engage in a bloody struggle with the
+French when they assaulted the town; but the evacuation was completed under
+cover of night; and when the French made their entrance into Smolensko on
+the next morning they found it deserted and in rums. The surrender of
+Smolensko was the last sacrifice that Barclay could extort from Russian
+pride. He no longer opposed the universal cry for battle, and the retreat
+was continued only with the intention of halting at the first strong
+position. Barclay himself was surveying a battleground when he heard that
+the command had been taken out of his hands. The Czar had been forced by
+national indignation at the loss of Smolensko to remove this able soldier,
+who was a Livonian by birth, and to transfer the command to Kutusotff, a
+thorough Russian, whom a life-time spent in victories over the Turk had
+made, in spite of his defeat at Austerlitz, the idol of the nation.
+
+[The French advance from Smolensko.]
+
+When Kutusoff reached the camp, the prolonged miseries of the French
+advance had already reduced the invaders to the number of the army opposed
+to them. As far as Smolensko the French had at least not suffered from the
+hostility of the population, who were Poles, not Russians; but on reaching
+Smolensko they entered a country where every peasant was a fanatical enemy.
+The villages were burnt down by their inhabitants, the corn destroyed, and
+the cattle driven into the woods. Every day's march onward from Smolensko
+cost the French three thousand men. On reaching the river Moskwa in the
+first week of September, a hundred and seventy-five thousand out of
+Napoleon's three hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were in the
+hospitals, or missing, or dead. About sixty thousand guarded the line of
+march. The Russians, on the other hand, had received reinforcements which
+covered their losses at Smolensko; and although detachments had been sent
+to support the army of Riga, Kutusoff was still able to place over one
+hundred thousand men in the field.
+
+[Battle of Borodino, Sept. 7.]
+
+[Evacuation of Moscow. French enter Moscow, Sept. 14.]
+
+On the 5th of September the Russian army drew up for battle at Borodino, on
+the Moskwa, seventy miles west of the capital. At early morning on the 7th
+the French advanced to the attack. The battle was, in proportion to its
+numbers, the most sanguinary of modern times. Forty thousand French, thirty
+thousand Russians were struck down. At the close of the day the French were
+in possession of the enemy's ground, but the Russians, unbroken in their
+order, had only retreated to a second line of defence. Both sides claimed
+the victory; neither had won it. It was no catastrophe such as Napoleon
+required for the decision of the war, it was no triumph sufficient to save
+Russia from the necessity of abandoning its capital. Kutusoff had sustained
+too heavy a loss to face the French beneath the walls of Moscow. Peace was
+no nearer for the 70,000 men who had been killed or wounded in the fight.
+The French steadily advanced; the Russians retreated to Moscow, and
+evacuated the capital when their generals decided that they could not
+encounter the French assault. The Holy City was left undefended before the
+invader. But the departure of the army was the smallest part of the
+evacuation. The inhabitants, partly of their own free will, partly under
+the compulsion of the Governor, abandoned the city in a mass. No gloomy or
+excited crowd, as at Vienna and Berlin, thronged the streets to witness the
+entrance of the great conqueror, when on the 14th of September Napoleon
+took possession of Moscow. His troops marched through silent and deserted
+streets. In the solitude of the Kremlin Napoleon received the homage of a
+few foreigners, who alone could be collected by his servants to tender to
+him the submission of the city.
+
+[Moscow fired.]
+
+But the worst was yet to come. On the night after Napoleon's entry, fires
+broke out in different parts of Moscow. They were ascribed at first to
+accident; but when on the next day the French saw the flames gaining ground
+in every direction, and found that all the means for extinguishing fire had
+been removed from the city, they understood the doom to which Moscow had
+been devoted by its own defenders. Count Rostopchin, the governor, had
+determined on the destruction of Moscow without the knowledge of the Czar.
+The doors of the prisons were thrown open. Rostopchin gave the signal by
+setting fire to his own palace, and let loose his bands of incendiaries
+over the city. For five days the flames rose and fell; and when, on the
+evening of the 20th, the last fires ceased, three-fourths of Moscow lay in
+ruins.
+
+[Napoleon at Moscow, Sept. 14-Oct. 19.]
+
+Such was the prize for which Napoleon had sacrificed 200,000 men, and
+engulfed the weak remnant of his army six hundred miles deep in an enemy's
+country. Throughout all the terrors of the advance Napoleon had held fast
+to the belief that Alexander's resistance would end with the fall of his
+capital. The events that accompanied the entry of the French into Moscow
+shook his confidence; yet even now Napoleon could not believe that the Czar
+remained firm against all thoughts of peace. His experience in all earlier
+wars had given him confidence in the power of one conspicuous disaster to
+unhinge the resolution of kings. His trust in the deepening impression made
+by the fall of Moscow was fostered by negotiations begun by Kutusoff for
+the very purpose of delaying the French retreat. For five weeks Napoleon
+remained at Moscow as if spell-bound, unable to convince himself of his
+powerlessness to break Alexander's determination, unable to face a retreat
+which would display to all Europe the failure of his arms and the
+termination of his career of victory. At length the approach of winter
+forced him to action. It was impossible to provision the army at Moscow
+during the winter months, even if there had been nothing to fear from the
+enemy. Even the mocking overtures of Kutusoff had ceased. The frightful
+reality could no longer be concealed. On the 19th of October the order for
+retreat was given. It was not the destruction of Moscow, but the departure
+of its inhabitants, that had brought the conqueror to ruin. Above two
+thousand houses were still standing; but whether the buildings remained or
+perished made little difference; the whole value of the capital to Napoleon
+was lost when the inhabitants, whom he could have forced to procure
+supplies for his army, disappeared. Vienna and Berlin had been of such
+incalculable service to Napoleon because the whole native administration
+placed itself under his orders, and every rich and important citizen became
+a hostage for the activity of the rest. When the French gained Moscow, they
+gained nothing beyond the supplies which were at that moment in the city.
+All was lost to Napoleon when the class who in other capitals had been his
+instruments fled at his approach. The conflagration of Moscow acted upon
+all Europe as a signal of inextinguishable national hatred; as a military
+operation, it neither accelerated the retreat of Napoleon nor added to the
+miseries which his army had to undergo.
+
+[Napoleon leaves Moscow, Oct. 19.]
+
+[Forced to retreat by the same road.]
+
+The French forces which quitted Moscow in October numbered about 100,000
+men. Reinforcements had come in during the occupation of the city, and the
+health of the soldiers had been in some degree restored by a month's rest.
+Everything now depended upon gaining a line of retreat where food could be
+found. Though but a fourth part of the army which entered Russia in the
+summer, the army which left Moscow was still large enough to protect itself
+against the enemy, if allowed to retreat through a fresh country; if forced
+back upon the devastated line of its advance it was impossible for it to
+escape destruction. Napoleon therefore determined to make for Kaluga, on
+the south of Moscow, and to endeavour to gain a road to Smolensko far
+distant from that by which he had come. The army moved from Moscow in a
+southern direction. But its route had been foreseen by Kutusoff. At the end
+of four days' march it was met by a Russian corps at Jaroslavitz. A bloody
+struggle left the French in possession of the road: they continued their
+advance; but it was only to find that Kutusoff, with his full strength, had
+occupied a line of heights farther south, and barred the way to Kaluga. The
+effort of an assault was beyond the powers of the French. Napoleon surveyed
+the enemy's position, and recognised the fatal necessity of abandoning the
+march southwards and returning to the wasted road by which he had advanced.
+The meaning of the backward movement was quickly understood by the army.
+From the moment of quitting Jaroslavitz, disorder and despair increased
+with every march. Thirty thousand men were lost upon the road before a
+pursuer appeared in sight. When, on the 2nd of November, the army reached
+Wiazma, it numbered no more than 65,000 men.
+
+[Kutusoff follows by parallel road.]
+
+Kutusoff was unadventurous in pursuit. The necessity of moving his army
+along a parallel road south of the French, in order to avoid starvation,
+diminished the opportunities for attack; but the general himself disliked
+risking his forces, and preferred to see the enemy's destruction effected
+by the elements. At Wiazma, where, on the 3rd of November, the French were
+for the first time attacked in force, Kutusoff's own delay alone saved them
+from total ruin. In spite of heavy loss the French kept possession of the
+road, and secured their retreat to Smolensko, where stores of food had been
+accumulated, and where other and less exhausted French troops were at hand.
+
+[Frost, Nov. 6.]
+
+[French reach Smolensko, Nov. 9.]
+
+Up to the 6th of November the weather had been sunny and dry. On the 6th
+the long-delayed terrors of Russian winter broke upon the pursuers and the
+pursued. Snow darkened the air and hid the last traces of vegetation from
+the starving cavalry trains. The temperature sank at times to forty degrees
+of frost. Death came, sometimes in the unfelt release from misery,
+sometimes in horrible forms of mutilation and disease. Both armies were
+exposed to the same sufferings; but the Russians had at least such succour
+as their countrymen could give; where the French sank, they died. The order
+of war disappeared under conditions which made life itself the accident of
+a meal or of a place by the camp-fire. Though most of the French soldiery
+continued to carry their arms, the Guard alone kept its separate formation;
+the other regiments marched in confused masses. From the 9th to the 13th of
+November these starving bands arrived one after another at Smolensko,
+expecting that here their sufferings would end. But the organisation for
+distributing the stores accumulated in Smolensko no longer existed. The
+perishing crowds were left to find shelter where they could; sacks of corn
+were thrown to them for food.
+
+[Russian armies from north and south attempt to cut off French retreat.]
+
+[Krasnoi, Nov. 17.]
+
+It was impossible for Napoleon to give his wearied soldiers rest, for new
+Russian armies were advancing from the north and the south to cut off their
+retreat. From the Danube and from the Baltic Sea troops were pressing
+forward to their meeting-point upon the rear of the invader. Witgenstein,
+moving southwards at the head of the army of the Dwina, had overpowered the
+French corps stationed upon that river, and made himself master of Witepsk.
+The army of Bucharest, which had been toiling northwards ever since the
+beginning of August, had advanced to within a few days' march of its
+meeting-point with the army of the Dwina upon the line of Napoleon's
+communications. Before Napoleon reached Smolensko he sent orders to Victor,
+who was at Smolensko with some reserves, to march against Witgenstein and
+drive him back upon the Dwina. Victor set out on his mission. During the
+short halt of Napoleon in Smolensko, Kutusoff pushed forward to the west of
+the French, and took post at Krasnoi, thirty miles farther along the road
+by which Napoleon had to pass. The retreat of the French seemed to be
+actually cut off. Had the Russian general dared to face Napoleon and his
+Guards, he might have held the French in check until the arrival of the two
+auxiliary armies from the north and south enabled him to capture Napoleon
+and his entire force. Kutusoff, however, preferred a partial and certain
+victory to a struggle with Napoleon for life or death. He permitted
+Napoleon and the Guard to pass by unattacked, and then fell upon the hinder
+divisions of the French army. (Nov. 17.) These unfortunate troops were
+successively cut to pieces. Twenty-six thousand were made prisoners. Ney,
+with a part of the rear-guard, only escaped by crossing the Dnieper on the
+ice. Of the army that had quitted Moscow there now remained but 10,000
+combatants and 20,000 followers. Kutusoff himself was brought to such a
+state of exhaustion that he could carry the pursuit no further, and entered
+into quarters upon the Dnieper.
+
+[Victor joins Napoleon.]
+
+[Passage of the Beresina, Nov. 28th.]
+
+It was a few days after the battle at Krasnoi that the divisions of Victor,
+coming from the direction of the Dwina, suddenly encountered the remnant
+of Napoleon's army. Though aware that Napoleon was in retreat, they knew
+nothing of the calamities that had befallen him, and were struck with
+amazement when, in the middle of a forest, they met with what seemed more
+like a miserable troop of captives than an army upon the march. Victor's
+soldiers of a mere auxiliary corps found themselves more than double the
+effective strength of the whole army of Moscow. Their arrival again placed
+Napoleon at the head of 30,000 disciplined troops, and gave the French a
+gleam of victory in the last and seemingly most hopeless struggle in the
+campaign. Admiral Tchitchagoff, in command of the army marching from the
+Danube, had at length reached the line of Napoleon's retreat, and
+established himself at Borisov, where the road through Poland crosses the
+river Beresina. The bridge was destroyed by the Russians, and Tchitchagoff
+opened communication with Witgenstein's army, which lay only a few miles to
+the north. It appeared as if the retreat of the French was now finally
+intercepted, and the surrender of Napoleon inevitable. Yet even in this
+hopeless situation the military skill and daring of the French worked with
+something of its ancient power. The army reached the Beresina; Napoleon
+succeeded in withdrawing the enemy from the real point of passage; bridges
+were thrown across the river, and after desperate fighting a great part of
+the army made good its footing upon the western bank (Nov. 28). But the
+losses even among the effective troops were enormous. The fate of the
+miserable crowd that followed them, torn by the cannon-fire of the
+Russians, and precipitated into the river by the breaking of one of the
+bridges, has made the passage of the Beresina a synonym for the utmost
+degree of human woe.
+
+[French reach the Niemen, Dec. 13.]
+
+This was the last engagement fought by the army. The Guards still preserved
+their order: Marshal Ney still found soldiers capable of turning upon the
+pursuer with his own steady and unflagging courage; but the bulk of the
+army struggled forward in confused crowds, harassed by the Cossacks, and
+laying down their arms by thousands before the enemy. The frost, which had
+broken up on the 19th, returned on the 30th of November with even greater
+severity. Twenty thousand fresh troops which joined the army between the
+Beresina and Wilna scarcely arrested the process of dissolution. On the 3rd
+of December Napoleon quitted the army. Wilna itself was abandoned with all
+its stores; and when at length the fugitives reached the Niemen, they
+numbered little more than twenty thousand. Here, six months earlier, three
+hundred and eighty thousand men had crossed with Napoleon. A hundred
+thousand more had joined the army in the course of its retreat. Of all this
+host, not the twentieth part reached the Prussian frontier. A hundred and
+seventy thousand remained prisoners in the hands of the Russians; a greater
+number had perished. Of the twenty thousand men who now beheld the Niemen,
+probably not seven thousand had crossed with Napoleon. In the presence of a
+catastrophe so overwhelming and so unparalleled the Russian generals might
+well be content with their own share in the work of destruction. Yet the
+event proved that Kutusoff had done ill in sparing the extremest effort to
+capture or annihilate his foe. Not only was Napoleon's own escape the
+pledge of continued war, but the remnant that escaped with him possessed a
+military value out of all proportion to its insignificant numbers. The best
+of the army were the last to succumb. Out of those few thousands who
+endured to the end, a very large proportion were veteran officers, who
+immediately took their place at the head of Napoleon's newly-raised armies,
+and gave to them a military efficiency soon to be bitterly proved by Europe
+on many a German battle-field.
+
+[York's convention with the Russians, Dec. 30.]
+
+[York and the Prussian contingent at Riga.]
+
+Four hundred thousand men were lost to a conqueror who could still stake
+the lives of half a million more. The material power of Napoleon, though
+largely, was not fatally diminished by the Russian campaign; it was through
+its moral effect, first proved in the action of Prussia, that the retreat
+from Moscow created a new order of things in Europe. The Prussian
+contingent, commanded by General von York, lay in front of Riga, where it
+formed part of the French subsidiary army-corps led by Marshal Macdonald.
+Early in November the Russian governor of Riga addressed himself to York,
+assuring him that Napoleon was ruined, and soliciting York himself to take
+up arms against Macdonald. [174] York had no evidence, beyond the word of
+the Russian commander, of the extent of Napoleon's losses; and even if the
+facts were as stated, it was by no means clear that the Czar might not be
+inclined to take vengeance on Prussia on account of its alliance with
+Napoleon. York returned a guarded answer to the Russian, and sent an
+officer to Wilna to ascertain the real state of the French army. On the 8th
+of December the officer returned, and described what he had himself seen.
+Soon afterwards the Russian commandant produced a letter from the Czar,
+declaring his intention to deal with Prussia as a friend, not as an enemy.
+On these points all doubt was removed; York's decision was thrown upon
+himself. York was a rigid soldier of the old Prussian type, dominated by
+the idea of military duty. The act to which the Russian commander invited
+him, and which the younger officers were ready to hail as the liberation of
+Prussia, might be branded by his sovereign as desertion and treason.
+Whatever scruples and perplexity might be felt in such a situation by a
+loyal and obedient soldier were felt by York. He nevertheless chose the
+course which seemed to be for his country's good; and having chosen it, he
+accepted all the consequences which it involved. On the 30th of December a
+convention was signed at Tauroggen, which, under the guise of a truce,
+practically withdrew the Prussian army from Napoleon, and gave the Russians
+possession of Koenigsberg. The momentous character of the act was recognised
+by Napoleon as soon as the news reached Paris. York's force was the
+strongest military body upon the Russian frontier; united with Macdonald,
+it would have forced the Russian pursuit to stop at the Niemen; abandoning
+Napoleon, it brought his enemies on to the Vistula, and threatened
+incalculable danger by its example to all the rest of Germany. For the
+moment, however, Napoleon could count upon the spiritless obedience of King
+Frederick William. In the midst of the French regiments that garrisoned
+Berlin, the King wrote orders pronouncing York's convention null and void,
+and ordering York himself to be tried by court-martial. The news reached
+the loyal soldier: he received it with grief, but maintained his resolution
+to act for his country's good. "With bleeding heart," he wrote, "I burst
+the bond of obedience, and carry on the war upon my own responsibility. The
+army desires war with France; the nation desires it; the King himself
+desires it, but his will is not free. The army must make his will free."
+
+[The Czar and Stein.]
+
+[Alexander enters Prussia, Jan., 1813.]
+
+York's act was nothing less than the turning-point in Prussian history.
+Another Prussian, at this great crisis of Europe, played as great, though
+not so conspicuous, a part. Before the outbreak of the Russian war, the
+Czar had requested the exile Stein to come to St. Petersburg to aid him
+with his counsels during the struggle with Napoleon. Stein gladly accepted
+the call; and throughout the campaign he encouraged the Czar in the
+resolute resistance which the Russian nation itself required of its
+Government. So long as French soldiers remained on Russian soil, there was
+indeed little need for a foreigner to stimulate the Czar's energies; but
+when the pursuit had gloriously ended on the Niemen, the case became very
+different. Kutusoff and the generals were disinclined to carry the war into
+Germany. The Russian army had itself lost three-fourths of its numbers;
+Russian honour was satisfied; the liberation of Western Europe might be
+left to Western Europe itself. Among the politicians who surrounded
+Alexander, there were a considerable number, including the first minister
+Romanzoff, who still believed in the good policy of a French alliance.
+These were the influences with which Stein had to contend, when the
+question arose whether Russia should rest satisfied with its own victories,
+or summon all Europe to unite in overthrowing Napoleon's tyranny. No record
+remains of the stages by which Alexander's mind rose to the clear and firm
+conception of a single European interest against Napoleon; indications
+exist that it was Stein's personal influence which most largely affected
+his decision. Even in the darkest moments of the war, when the forces of
+Russia seemed wholly incapable of checking Napoleon's advance, Stein had
+never abandoned his scheme for raising the German nation against Napoleon.
+The confidence with which he had assured Alexander of ultimate victory over
+the invader had been thoroughly justified; the triumph which he had
+predicted had come with a rapidity and completeness even surpassing his
+hopes. For a moment Alexander identified himself with the statesman who, in
+the midst of Germany's humiliation, had been so resolute, so far-sighted,
+so aspiring. [175] The minister of the peace-party was dismissed: Alexander
+ordered his troops to advance into Prussia, and charged Stein himself to
+assume the government of the Prussian districts occupied by Russian armies.
+Stein's mission was to arm the Landwehr, and to gather all the resources of
+the country for war against France; his powers were to continue until some
+definite arrangement should be made between the King of Prussia and the
+Czar.
+
+[Stein's commission from Alexander.]
+
+[Province of East Prussia arms, Jan., 1813.]
+
+Armed with this commission from a foreign sovereign, Stein appeared at
+Koenigsberg on the 22nd of January, 1813, and published an order requiring
+the governor of the province of East Prussia to convoke an assembly for the
+purpose of arming the people. Stein would have desired York to appear as
+President of the Assembly; but York, like most of the Prussian officials,
+was alarmed and indignant at Stein's assumption of power in Prussia as the
+representative of the Russian Czar, and hesitated to connect himself with
+so revolutionary a measure as the arming of the people. It was only upon
+condition that Stein himself should not appear in the Assembly that York
+consented to recognise its powers. The Assembly met. York entered the
+house, and spoke a few soul-stirring words. His undisguised declaration of
+war with France was received with enthusiastic cheers. A plan for the
+formation of a Landwehr, based on Scharnhorst's plans of 1808, was laid
+before the Assembly, and accepted. Forty thousand men were called to arms
+in a province which included nothing west of the Vistula. The nation itself
+had begun the war, and left its Government no choice but to follow. Stein's
+task was fulfilled; and he retired to the quarters of Alexander, unwilling
+to mar by the appearance of foreign intervention the work to which the
+Prussian nation had now committed itself beyond power of recall. It was the
+fortune of the Prussian State, while its King dissembled before the French
+in Berlin, to possess a soldier brave enough to emancipate its army, and a
+citizen bold enough to usurp the government of its provinces. Frederick
+William forgave York his intrepidity; Stein's action was never forgiven by
+the timid and jealous sovereign whose subjects he had summoned to arm
+themselves for their country's deliverance.
+
+[Policy of Hardenberg.]
+
+[Treaty of Kalisch, Feb. 27.]
+
+The Government of Berlin, which since the beginning of the Revolutionary
+War had neither been able to fight, nor to deceive, nor to be honest, was
+at length forced by circumstances into a certain effectiveness in all three
+forms of action. In the interval between the first tidings of Napoleon's
+disasters and the announcement of York's convention with the Russians,
+Hardenberg had been assuring Napoleon of his devotion, and collecting
+troops which he carefully prevented from joining him. [176] The desire of
+the King was to gain concessions without taking part in the war either
+against Napoleon or on his side. When, however, the balance turned more
+decidedly against Napoleon, he grew bolder; and the news of York's
+defection, though it seriously embarrassed the Cabinet for the moment,
+practically decided it in favour of war with France. The messenger who was
+sent to remove York from his command received private instructions to fall
+into the hands of the Russians, and to inform the Czar that, if his troops
+advanced as far as the Oder, King Frederick William would be ready to
+conclude an alliance. Every post that arrived from East Prussia
+strengthened the warlike resolutions of the Government. At length the King
+ventured on the decisive step of quitting Berlin and placing himself at
+Breslau (Jan. 25). At Berlin he was in the power of the French; at Breslau
+he was within easy reach of Alexander. The significance of the journey
+could not be mistaken: it was immediately followed by open preparation for
+war with France. On February 3rd there appeared an edict inviting
+volunteers to enrol themselves: a week later all exemptions from military
+service were abolished, and the entire male population of Prussia between
+the ages of seventeen and twenty-four was declared liable to serve. General
+Knesebeck was sent to the headquarters of the Czar, which were now between
+Warsaw and Kalisch, to conclude a treaty of alliance. Knesebeck demanded
+securities for the restoration to Prussia of all the Polish territory which
+it had possessed before 1806; the Czar, unwilling either to grant this
+condition or to lose the Prussian alliance, kept Knesebeck at his quarters,
+and sent Stein with a Russian plenipotentiary to Breslau to conclude the
+treaty with Hardenberg himself. Stein and Hardenberg met at Breslau on the
+26th of February. Hardenberg accepted the Czar's terms, and the treaty,
+known as the Treaty of Kalisch, [177] was signed on the following day. By
+this treaty, without guaranteeing the restoration of Prussian Poland,
+Russia undertook not to lay down its arms until the Prussian State as a
+whole was restored to the area and strength which it had possessed before
+1806. For this purpose annexations were promised in Northern Germany. With
+regard to Poland, Russia promised no more than to permit Prussia to retain
+what it had received in 1772, together with a strip of territory to connect
+this district with Silesia. The meaning of the agreement was that Prussia
+should abandon to Russia the greater part of its late Polish provinces, and
+receive an equivalent German territory in its stead. The Treaty of Kalisch
+virtually surrendered to the Czar all that Prussia had gained in the
+partitions of Poland made in 1793 and in 1795. The sacrifice was deemed a
+most severe one by every Prussian politician, and was accepted only as a
+less evil than the loss of Russia's friendship, and a renewed submission to
+Napoleon. No single statesman, not even Stein himself, appears to have
+understood that in exchanging its Polish conquests for German annexations,
+in turning to the German west instead of to the alien Slavonic east,
+Prussia was in fact taking the very step which made it the possible head of
+a future united Germany.
+
+[French retreat to the Elbe.]
+
+War was still undeclared upon Napoleon by King Frederick William, but
+throughout the month of February the light cavalry of the Russians pushed
+forward unhindered through Prussian territory towards the Oder, and crowds
+of volunteers, marching through Berlin on their way to the camps in
+Silesia, gave the French clear signs of the storm that was about to burst
+upon them. [178] The remnant of Napoleon's army, now commanded by Eugene
+Beauharnais, had fallen back step by step to the Oder. Here, resting on the
+fortresses, it might probably have checked the Russian advance; but the
+heart of Eugene failed; the line of the Oder was abandoned, and the retreat
+continued to Berlin and the Elbe. The Cossacks followed. On the 20th of
+February they actually entered Berlin and fought with the French in the
+streets. The French garrison was far superior in force; but the appearance
+of the Cossacks caused such a ferment that, although the alliance between
+France and Prussia was still in nominal existence, the French troops
+expected to be cut to pieces by the people. For some days they continued to
+bivouac in the streets, and as soon as it became known that a regular
+Russian force had reached the Oder, Eugene determined to evacuate Berlin.
+On the 4th of March the last French soldier quitted the Prussian capital.
+The Cossacks rode through the town as the French left it, and fought with
+their rear-guard. Some days later Witgenstein appeared with Russian
+infantry. On March 17th York made his triumphal entry at the head of his
+corps, himself cold and rigid in the midst of tumultuous outbursts of
+patriotic joy.
+
+[King of Prussia declares war March 17.]
+
+It was on this same day that King Frederick William issued his proclamation
+to the Prussian people, declaring that war had begun with France, and
+summoning the nation to enter upon the struggle as one that must end either
+in victory or in total destruction. The proclamation was such as became a
+monarch conscious that his own faint-heartedness had been the principal
+cause of Prussia's humiliation. It was simple and unboastful, admitting
+that the King had made every effort to preserve the French alliance, and
+ascribing the necessity for war to the intolerable wrongs inflicted by
+Napoleon in spite of Prussia's fulfilment of its treaty-obligations. The
+appeal to the great memories of Prussia's earlier sovereigns, and to the
+example of Russia, Spain, and all countries which in present or in earlier
+times had fought for their independence against a stronger foe, was worthy
+of the truthful and modest tone in which the King spoke of the misfortunes
+of Prussia under his own rule.
+
+[Spirit of the Prussian nation.]
+
+[Idea of Germany unity.]
+
+But no exhortations were necessary to fire the spirit of the Prussian
+people. Seven years of suffering and humiliation had done their work. The
+old apathy of all classes had vanished under the pressure of a bitter sense
+of wrong. If among the Court party of Berlin and the Conservative
+landowners there existed a secret dread of the awakening of popular forces,
+the suspicion could not be now avowed. A movement as penetrating and as
+universal as that which France had experienced in 1792 swept through the
+Prussian State. It had required the experience of years of wretchedness,
+the intrusion of the French soldier upon the peace of the family, the sight
+of the homestead swept bare of its stock to supply the invaders of Russia,
+the memory of Schill's companions shot in cold blood for the cause of the
+Fatherland, before the Prussian nation caught that flame which had
+spontaneously burst out in France, in Spain, and in Russia at the first
+shock of foreign aggression. But the passion of the Prussian people, if it
+had taken long to kindle, was deep, steadfast, and rational. It was
+undisgraced by the frenzies of 1792, or by the religious fanaticism of the
+Spanish war of liberation; where religion entered into the struggle, it
+heightened the spirit of self-sacrifice rather than that of hatred to the
+enemy. Nor was it a thing of small moment to the future of Europe that in
+every leading mind the cause of Prussia was identified with the cause of
+the whole German race. The actual condition of Germany warranted no such
+conclusion, for Saxony, Bavaria, and the whole of the Rhenish Federation
+still followed Napoleon: but the spirit and the ideas which became a living
+force when at length the contest with Napoleon broke out were those of men
+like Stein, who in the depths of Germany's humiliation had created the
+bright and noble image of a common Fatherland. It was no more given to
+Stein to see his hopes fulfilled than it was given to Mirabeau to establish
+constitutional liberty in France, or to the Italian patriots of 1797 to
+create a united Italy. A group of States where kings like Frederick William
+and Francis, ministers like Hardenberg and Metternich, governed millions of
+people totally destitute of political instincts and training, was not to be
+suddenly transformed into a free nation by the genius of an individual or
+the patriotism of a single epoch. But if the work of German union was one
+which, even in the barren form of military empire, required the efforts of
+two more generations, the ideals of 1813 were no transient and ineffective
+fancy. Time was on the side of those who called the Prussian monarchy the
+true centre round which Germany could gather. If in the sequel Prussia was
+slow to recognise its own opportunities, the fault was less with patriots
+who hoped too much than with kings and ministers who dared too little.
+
+[Formation of the Landwehr.]
+
+For the moment, the measures of the Prussian Government were worthy of the
+spirit shown by the nation. Scharnhorst's military system had given Prussia
+100,000 trained soldiers ready to join the existing army of 45,000. The
+scheme for the formation of a Landwehr, though not yet carried into effect,
+needed only to receive the sanction of the King. On the same day that
+Frederick William issued his proclamation to the people, he decreed the
+formation of the Landwehr and the Landsturm. The latter force, which was
+intended in case of necessity to imitate the peasant warfare of Spain and
+La Vendee, had no occasion to act: the Landwehr, though its arming was
+delayed by the poverty and exhaustion of the country, gradually became a
+most formidable reserve, and sent its battalions to fight by the side of
+the regulars in some of the greatest engagements in the war. It was the
+want of arms and money, not of willing soldiers, that prevented Prussia
+from instantly attacking Napoleon with 200,000 men. The conscription was
+scarcely needed from the immense number of volunteers who joined the ranks.
+Though the completion of the Prussian armaments required some months more,
+Prussia did not need to stand upon the defensive. An army of 50,000 men was
+ready to cross the Elbe immediately on the arrival of the Russians, and to
+open the next campaign in the territory of Napoleon's allies of the Rhenish
+Federation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+The War of Liberation--Bluecher crosses the Elbe--Battle of Luetzen--The
+Allies retreat to Silesia--Battle of Bautzen--Armistice--Napoleon intends
+to intimidate Austria--Mistaken as to the Forces of Austria--Metternich's
+Policy--Treaty of Reichenbach--Austria offers its Mediation--Congress of
+Prague--Austria enters the War--Armies and Plans of Napoleon and the
+Allies--Campaign of August--Battles of Dresden, Grosbeeren, the Katzbach,
+and Kulm--Effect of these Actions--Battle of Dennewitz--German Policy of
+Austria favourable to the Princes of the Rhenish Confederacy--Frustrated
+Hopes of German Unity--Battle of Leipzig--The Allies reach the Rhine--
+Offers of Peace at Frankfort--Plan of Invasion of France--Backwardness of
+Austria--The Allies enter France--Campaign of 1814--Congress of Chatillon--
+Napoleon moves to the rear of the Allies--The Allies advance on Paris--
+Capitulation of Paris--Entry of the Allies--Dethronement of Napoleon--
+Restoration of the Bourbons--The Charta--Treaty of Paris--Territorial
+Effects of the War, 1792-1814--Every Power except France had gained--France
+relatively weaker in Europe--Summary of the Permanent Effects of this
+Period on Europe.
+
+
+[Napoleon in 1813.]
+
+The first three months of the year 1813 were spent by Napoleon in vigorous
+preparation for a campaign in Northern Germany. Immediately after receiving
+the news of York's convention with the Russians he had ordered a levy of
+350,000 men. It was in vain that Frederick William and Hardenberg affected
+to disavow the general as a traitor; Napoleon divined the national
+character of York's act, and laid his account for a war against the
+combined forces of Prussia and Russia. In spite of the catastrophe of the
+last campaign, Napoleon was still stronger than his enemies. Italy and the
+Rhenish Federation had never wavered in their allegiance; Austria, though a
+cold ally, had at least shown no signs of hostility. The resources of an
+empire of forty million inhabitants were still at Napoleon's command. It
+was in the youth and inexperience of the new soldiers, and in the scarcity
+of good officers, [179] that the losses of the previous year showed their
+most visible effect. Lads of seventeen, commanded in great part by officers
+who had never been through a campaign, took the place of the soldiers who
+had fought at Friedland and Wagram. They were as brave as their
+predecessors, but they failed in bodily strength and endurance. Against
+them came the remnant of the men who had pursued Napoleon from Moscow, and
+a Prussian army which was but the vanguard of an armed nation.
+Nevertheless, Napoleon had no cause to expect defeat, provided that Austria
+remained on his side. Though the Prussian nation entered upon the conflict
+in the most determined spirit, a war on the Elbe against Russia and Prussia
+combined was a less desperate venture than a war with Russia alone beyond
+the Niemen.
+
+[Bluecher crosses the Elbe, March, 1813.]
+
+When King Frederick William published his declaration of war (March 17),
+the army of Eugene had already fallen back as far west as Magdeburg,
+leaving garrisons in most of the fortresses between the Elbe and the
+Russian frontier. Napoleon was massing troops on the Main, and preparing
+for an advance in force, when the Prussians, commanded by Bluecher, and some
+weak divisions of the Russian army, pushed forward to the Elbe. On the 18th
+of March the Cossacks appeared in the suburbs of Dresden, on the right bank
+of the river. Davoust, who was in command of the French garrison, blew up
+two arches of the bridge, and retired to Magdeburg: Bluecher soon afterwards
+entered Dresden, and called upon the Saxon nation to rise against Napoleon.
+But he spoke to deaf ears. The common people were indifferent; the
+officials waited to see which side would conquer. Bluecher could scarcely
+obtain provisions for his army; he passed on westwards, and came into the
+neighbourhood of Leipzig. Here he found himself forced to halt, and to wait
+for his allies. Though a detachment of the Russian army under Witgenstein
+had already crossed the Elbe, the main army, with Kutusoff, was still
+lingering at Kalisch on the Polish frontier, where it had arrived six weeks
+before. As yet the Prussians had only 50,000 men ready for action; until
+the Russians came up, it was unsafe to advance far beyond the Elbe. Bluecher
+counted every moment lost that kept him from battle: the Russian
+commander-in-chief, sated with glory and sinking beneath the infirmities of
+a veteran, could scarcely be induced to sign an order of march. At length
+Kutusoff's illness placed the command in younger hands. His strength failed
+him during the march from Poland; he was left dying in Silesia; and on the
+24th of April the Czar and the King of Prussia led forward his veteran
+troops into Dresden.
+
+[Napoleon enters Dresden, May 14.]
+
+[Battle of Luetzen, May 2.]
+
+Napoleon was now known to be approaching with considerable force by the
+roads of the Saale. A pitched battle west of the Elbe was necessary before
+the Allies could hope to win over any of the States of the Rhenish
+Confederacy; the flat country beyond Leipzig offered the best possible
+field for cavalry, in which the Allies were strong and Napoleon extremely
+deficient. It was accordingly determined to unite all the divisions of the
+army with Bluecher on the west of Leipzig, and to attack the French as soon
+as they descended from the hilly country of the Saale, and began their
+march across the Saxon plain. The Allies took post at Luetzen: the French
+advanced, and at midday on the 2nd of May the battle of Luetzen began. Till
+evening, victory inclined to the Allies. The Prussian soldiery fought with
+the utmost spirit; for the first time in Napoleon's campaigns, the French
+infantry proved weaker than an enemy when fighting against them in equal
+numbers. But the generalship of Napoleon turned the scale. Seventy thousand
+of the French were thrown upon fifty thousand of the Allies; the battle was
+fought in village streets and gardens, where cavalry were useless; and at
+the close of the day, though the losses on each side were equal, the Allies
+were forced from the positions which they had gained. Such a result was
+equivalent to a lost battle. Napoleon's junction with the army of Eugene at
+Magdeburg was now inevitable, unless a second engagement was fought and
+won. No course remained to the Allies but to stake everything upon a
+renewed attack, or to retire behind the Elbe and meet the reinforcements
+assembling in Silesia. King Frederick William declared for a second battle;
+[180] he was over-ruled, and the retreat commenced. Napoleon entered
+Dresden on May 14th. No attempt was made by the Allies to hold the line of
+the Elbe; all the sanguine hopes with which Bluecher and his comrades had
+advanced to attack Napoleon within the borders of the Rhenish Confederacy
+were dashed to the ground. The Fatherland remained divided against itself.
+Saxony and the rest of the vassal States were secured to France by the
+victory of Luetzen; the liberation of Germany was only to be wrought by
+prolonged and obstinate warfare, and by the wholesale sacrifice of Prussian
+life.
+
+[Armistice, June 4.]
+
+[Battle of Bautzen, May 21.]
+
+It was with deep disappointment, but not with any wavering of purpose, that
+the allied generals fell back before Napoleon towards the Silesian
+fortresses. The Prussian troops which had hitherto taken part in the war
+were not the third part of those which the Government was arming; new
+Russian divisions were on the march from Poland. As the Allies moved
+eastwards from the Elbe, both their own forces and those of Napoleon
+gathered strength. The retreat stopped at Bautzen, on the river Spree; and
+here, on the 19th of May, 90,000 of the Allies and the same number of the
+French drew up in order of battle. The Allies held a long, broken chain of
+hills behind the river, and the ground lying between these hills and the
+village of Bautzen. On the 20th the French began the attack, and won the
+passage of the river. In spite of the approach of Ney with 40,000 more
+troops, the Czar and the King of Prussia determined to continue the battle
+on the following day. The struggle of the 21st was of the same obstinate
+and indecisive character as that at Luetzen. Twenty-five thousand French had
+been killed or wounded before the day was over, but the bad generalship of
+the Allies had again given Napoleon the victory. The Prussian and Russian
+commanders were all at variance; Alexander, who had to decide in their
+contentions, possessed no real military faculty. It was not for want of
+brave fighting and steadfastness before the enemy that Bautzen was lost.
+The Allies retreated in perfect order, and without the loss of a single
+gun. Napoleon followed, forcing his wearied regiments to ceaseless
+exertion, in the hope of ruining by pursuit an enemy whom he could not
+overthrow in battle. In a few more days the discord of the allied generals
+and the sufferings of the troops would probably have made them unable to
+resist Napoleon's army, weakened as it was. But the conqueror himself
+halted in the moment of victory. On the 4th of June an armistice of seven
+weeks arrested the pursuit, and brought the first act of the War of
+Liberation to a close.
+
+[Napoleon and Austria.]
+
+Napoleon's motive for granting this interval to his enemies, the most fatal
+step in his whole career, has been vaguely sought among the general reasons
+for military delay; as a matter of fact, Napoleon was thinking neither of
+the condition of his own army nor of that of the Allies when he broke off
+hostilities, but of the probable action of the Court of Vienna. [181] "I
+shall grant a truce," he wrote to the Viceroy of Italy (June 2, 1813), "on
+account of the armaments of Austria, and in order to gain time to bring up
+the Italian army to Laibach to threaten Vienna." Austria had indeed
+resolved to regain, either by war or negotiation, the provinces which it
+had lost in 1809. It was now preparing to offer its mediation, but it was
+also preparing to join the Allies in case Napoleon rejected its demands.
+Metternich was anxious to attain his object, if possible, without war. The
+Austrian State was bankrupt; its army had greatly deteriorated since 1809;
+Metternich himself dreaded both the ambition of Russia and what he
+considered the revolutionary schemes of the German patriots. It was his
+object not to drive Napoleon from his throne, but to establish a European
+system in which neither France nor Russia should be absolutely dominant.
+Soon after the retreat from Moscow the Cabinet of Vienna had informed
+Napoleon, though in the most friendly terms, that Austria could not longer
+remain in the position of a dependent ally. [182] Metternich stated, and
+not insincerely, that by certain concessions Napoleon might still count on
+Austria's friendship; but at the same time he negotiated with the allied
+Powers, and encouraged them to believe that Austria would, under certain
+circumstances, strike on their behalf. The course of the campaign of May
+was singularly favourable to Metternich's policy. Napoleon had not won a
+decided victory; the Allies, on the other hand, were so far from success
+that Austria could set almost any price it pleased upon its alliance. By
+the beginning of June it had become a settled matter in the Austrian
+Cabinet that Napoleon must be made to resign the Illyrian Provinces
+conquered in 1809 and the districts of North Germany annexed in 1810; but
+it was still the hope of the Government to obtain this result by peaceful
+means. Napoleon saw that Austria was about to change its attitude, but he
+had by no means penetrated the real intentions of Metternich. He credited
+the Viennese Government with a stronger sentiment of hostility towards
+himself than it actually possessed; at the same time he failed to
+appreciate the fixed and settled character of its purpose. He believed that
+the action of Austria would depend simply upon the means which he possessed
+to intimidate it; that, if the army of Italy were absent, Austria would
+attack him; that, on the other hand, if he could gain time to bring the
+army of Italy into Carniola, Austria would keep the peace. It was with this
+belief, and solely for the purpose of bringing up a force to menace
+Austria, that Napoleon stayed his hand against the Prussian and Russian
+armies after the battle of Bautzen, and gave time for the gathering of the
+immense forces which were destined to effect his destruction.
+
+[Metternich offers Austria's mediation.]
+
+Immediately after the conclusion of the armistice of June 4th, Metternich
+invited Napoleon to accept Austria's mediation for a general peace. The
+settlement which Metternich contemplated was a very different one from that
+on which Stein and the Prussian patriots had set their hopes. Austria was
+willing to leave to Napoleon the whole of Italy and Holland, the frontier
+of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Western Germany: all that was
+required by Metternich, as arbiter of Europe, was the restoration of the
+provinces taken from Austria after the war of 1809, the reinstatement of
+Prussia in Western Poland, and the abandonment by France of the
+North-German district annexed in 1810. But to Napoleon the greater or less
+extent of the concessions asked by Austria was a matter of no moment. He
+was determined to make no concessions at all, and he entered into
+negotiations only for the purpose of disguising from Austria the real
+object with which he had granted the armistice. While Napoleon affected to
+be weighing the proposals of Austria, he was in fact calculating the number
+of marches which would place the Italian army on the Austrian frontier;
+this once effected, he expected to hear nothing more of Metternich's
+demands.
+
+[Napoleon deceived as to the forces of Austria.]
+
+It was a game of deceit; but there was no one who was so thoroughly
+deceived as Napoleon himself. By some extraordinary miscalculation on the
+part of his secret agents, he was led to believe that the forces of [***]
+whole force of Austria, both in the north and the south, amounted to only
+100,000 men, [183] and it was on this estimate that he had formed his plans
+of intimidation. In reality Austria had double that number of men ready to
+take the field. By degrees Napoleon saw reason to suspect himself in error.
+On the 11th of July he wrote to his Foreign Minister, Maret, bitterly
+reproaching him with the failure of the secret service to gain any
+trustworthy information. It was not too late to accept Metternich's terms.
+Yet even now, when the design of intimidating Austria had proved an utter
+delusion, and Napoleon was convinced that Austria would fight, and fight
+with very powerful forces, his pride and his invincible belief in his own
+superiority prevented him from drawing back. He made an attempt to enter
+upon a separate negotiation with Russia, and, when this failed, he resolved
+to face the conflict with the whole of Europe.
+
+[Treaty of Reichenbach, June 27.]
+
+There was no longer any uncertainty among Napoleon's enemies. On the 27th
+of June, Austria had signed a treaty at Reichenbach, pledging itself to
+join the allied Powers in the event of Napoleon rejecting the conditions to
+be proposed by Austria as mediator; and the conditions so to be proposed
+were fixed by the same treaty. They were the following:--The suppression of
+the Duchy of Warsaw; the restoration to Austria of the Illyrian Provinces;
+and the surrender by Napoleon of the North-German district annexed to his
+Empire in 1810. Terms more hostile to France than these Austria declined to
+embody in its mediation. The Elbe might still sever Prussia from its German
+provinces lost in 1807; Napoleon might still retain, as chief of the
+Rhenish Confederacy, his sovereignty over the greater part of the German
+race.
+
+[Austria enters the war, Aug. 10.]
+
+[Congress of Prague, July 15-Aug. 10.]
+
+From the moment when these conditions were fixed, there was nothing which
+the Prussian generals so much dreaded as that Napoleon might accept them,
+and so rob the Allies of the chance of crushing him by means of Austria's
+support. But their fears were groundless. The counsels of Napoleon were
+exactly those which his worst enemies would have desired him to adopt. War,
+and nothing but war, was his fixed resolve. He affected to entertain
+Austria's propositions, and sent his envoy Caulaincourt to a Congress which
+Austria summoned at Prague; but it was only for the purpose of gaining a
+few more weeks of preparation. The Congress met; the armistice was
+prolonged to the 10th of August. Caulaincourt, however, was given no power
+to close with Austria's demands. He was ignorant that he had only been sent
+to Prague in order to gain time. He saw the storm gathering: unable to
+believe that Napoleon intended to fight all Europe rather than make the
+concessions demanded of him, he imagined that his master still felt some
+doubt whether Austria and the other Powers meant to adhere to their word.
+As the day drew nigh which closed the armistice and the period given for a
+reply to Austria's ultimatum, Caulaincourt implored Napoleon not to deceive
+himself with hopes that Austria would draw back. Napoleon had no such hope;
+he knew well that Austria would declare war, and he accepted the issue.
+Caulaincourt heard nothing more. At midnight on the 10th of August the
+Congress declared itself dissolved. Before the dawn of the next morning the
+army in Silesia saw the blaze of the beacon-fires which told that
+negotiation was at an end, and that Austria was entering the war on the
+side of the Allies. [184]
+
+[Armies of Napoleon and the Allies.]
+
+Seven days' notice was necessary before the commencement of actual
+hostilities. Napoleon, himself stationed at Dresden, held all the lower
+course of the Elbe; and his generals had long had orders to be ready to
+march on the morning of the 18th. Forces had come up from all parts of the
+Empire, raising the French army at the front to 300,000 men; but, for the
+first time in Napoleon's career, his enemies had won from a pause in war
+results even surpassing his own. The strength of the Prussian and Russian
+armies was now enormously different from what it had been at Luetzen and
+Bautzen. The Prussian Landwehr, then a weaponless and ill-clad militia
+drilling in the villages, was now fully armed, and in great part at the
+front. New Russian divisions had reached Silesia. Austria took the field
+with a force as numerous as that which had checked Napoleon in 1809. At the
+close of the armistice, 350,000 men actually faced the French positions
+upon the Elbe; 300,000 more were on the march, or watching the German
+fortresses and the frontier of Italy. The allied troops operating against
+Napoleon were divided into three armies. In the north, between Wittenberg
+and Berlin, Bernadotte commanded 60,000 Russians and Prussians, in addition
+to his own Swedish contingent. Bluecher was placed at the head of 100,000
+Russians and Prussians in Silesia. The Austrians remained undivided, and
+formed, together with some Russian and Prussian divisions, the great army
+of Bohemia, 200,000 strong, under the command of Schwarzenberg. The plan of
+the campaign had been agreed upon by the Allies soon after the Treaty of
+Reichenbach had been made with Austria. It was a sound, though not a daring
+one.
+
+[Plan of the Allies.]
+
+The three armies, now forming an arc from Wittenberg to the north of
+Bohemia, were to converge upon the line of Napoleon's communications behind
+Dresden; if separately attacked, their generals were to avoid all hazardous
+engagements, and to manoeuvre so as to weary the enemy and preserve their
+own general relations, as far as possible, unchanged. Bluecher, as the most
+exposed, was expected to content himself the longest with the defensive;
+the great army of Bohemia, after securing the mountain-passes between
+Bohemia and Saxony, might safely turn Napoleon's position at Dresden, and
+so draw the two weaker armies towards it for one vast and combined
+engagement in the plain of Leipzig.
+
+[Napoleon's plan of attack.]
+
+In outline, the plan of the Allies was that which Napoleon expected them to
+adopt. His own design was to anticipate it by an offensive of extraordinary
+suddenness and effect. Hostilities could not begin before the morning of
+the 18th of August; by the 21st or the 22nd, Napoleon calculated that he
+should have captured Berlin. Oudinot, who was at Wittenberg with 80,000
+men, had received orders to advance upon the Prussian capital at the moment
+that the armistice expired, and to force it, if necessary by bombardment,
+into immediate surrender. The effect of this blow, as Napoleon supposed,
+would be to disperse the entire reserve-force of the Prussian monarchy, and
+paralyse the action of its army in the field. While Oudinot marched on
+Berlin, Bluecher was to be attacked in Silesia, and prevented from rendering
+any assistance either on the north or on the south. The mass of Napoleon's
+forces, centred at Dresden, and keeping watch upon the movements of the
+army of Bohemia, would either fight a great battle, or, if the Allies made
+a false movement, march straight upon Prague, the centre of Austria's
+supplies, and reach it before the enemy. All the daring imagination of
+Napoleon's earlier campaigns displayed itself in such a project, which, if
+successful, would have terminated the war within ten days; but this
+imagination was no longer, as in those earlier campaigns, identical with
+insight into real possibilities. The success of Napoleon's plan involved
+the surprise or total defeat of Bernadotte before Berlin, the disablement
+of Bluecher, and a victory, or a strategical success equivalent to a
+victory, over the vast army of the south. It demanded of a soldiery,
+inferior to the enemy in numerical strength, the personal superiority which
+had belonged to the men of Jena and Austerlitz, when in fact the French
+regiments of conscripts had ceased to be a match for equal numbers of the
+enemy. But no experience could alter Napoleon's fixed belief in the fatuity
+of all warfare except his own. After the havoc of Borodino, after the even
+struggles of Luetzen and Bautzen, he still reasoned as if he had before him
+the armies of Brunswick and Mack. His plan assumed the certainty of success
+in each of its parts; for the failure of a single operation hazarded all
+the rest, by requiring the transfer of reinforcements from armies already
+too weak for the tasks assigned to them. Nevertheless, the utmost that
+Napoleon would acknowledge was that the execution of his design needed
+energy. He still underrated the force which Austria had brought into the
+field against him. Though ignorant of the real position and strength of the
+army in Bohemia, and compelled to wait for the enemy's movements before
+striking on this side, he already in imagination saw the war decided by the
+fall of the Prussian capital.
+
+[Triple movement, Aug. 18-26.]
+
+[Battle of Dresden, Aug. 26, 27.]
+
+[Battles of Grossbeeren, Aug. 23, and the Katzbach, Aug. 26.]
+
+On the 18th of August the forward movement began. Oudinot advanced from
+Wittenberg towards Berlin; Napoleon himself hurried into Silesia, intending
+to deal Bluecher one heavy blow, and instantly to return and place himself
+before Schwarzenberg. On the 21st, and following days, the Prussian general
+was attacked and driven eastwards. Napoleon committed the pursuit to
+Macdonald, and hastened back to Dresden, already threatened by the advance
+of the Austrians from Bohemia. Schwarzenberg and the allied sovereigns, as
+soon as they heard that Napoleon had gone to seek Bluecher in Silesia, had
+in fact abandoned their cautious plans, and determined to make an assault
+upon Dresden with the Bohemian army alone. But it was in vain that they
+tried to surprise Napoleon. He was back at Dresden on the 25th, and ready
+for the attack. Never were Napoleon's hopes higher than on this day. His
+success in Silesia had filled him with confidence. He imagined Oudinot to
+be already in Berlin; and the advance of Schwarzenberg against Dresden gave
+him the very opportunity which he desired for crushing the Bohemian army in
+one great battle, before it could draw support either from Bluecher or from
+Bernadotte. Another Austerlitz seemed to be at hand. Napoleon wrote to
+Paris that he should be in Prague before the enemy; and, while he completed
+his defences in front of Dresden, he ordered Vandamme, with 40,000 men, to
+cross the Elbe at Koenigstein, and force his way south-westwards on to the
+roads into Bohemia, in the rear of the Great Army, in order to destroy its
+magazines and menace its line of retreat on Prague. On August 26th
+Schwarzenberg's host assailed the positions of Napoleon on the slopes and
+gardens outside Dresden. Austrians, Russians, and Prussians all took part
+in the attack. Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, stood by the side of the
+Emperor Alexander, whom he had come to help against his own countrymen. He
+lived only to witness one of the last and greatest victories of France. The
+attack was everywhere repelled: the Austrian divisions were not only
+beaten, but disgraced and overthrown. At the end of two days' fighting the
+Allies were in full retreat, leaving 20,000 prisoners in the hands of
+Napoleon. It was a moment when the hearts of the bravest sank, and when
+hope itself might well vanish, as the rumour passed through the Prussian
+regiments that Metternich was again in friendly communication with
+Napoleon. But in the midst of Napoleon's triumph intelligence arrived which
+robbed it of all its worth. Oudinot, instead of conquering Berlin, had been
+defeated by the Prussians of Bernadotte's army at Grossbeeren (Aug. 23),
+and driven back upon the Elbe. Bluecher had turned upon Macdonald in
+Silesia, and completely overthrown his army on the river Katzbach, at the
+very moment when the Allies were making their assault upon Dresden. It was
+vain to think of a march upon Prague, or of the annihilation of the
+Austrians, when on the north and the east Napoleon's troops were meeting
+with nothing but disaster. The divisions which had been intended to support
+Vandamme's movement from Koenigstein upon the rear of the Great Army were
+retained in the neighbourhood of Dresden, in order to be within reach of
+the points where their aid might be needed. Vandamme, ignorant of his
+isolation, was left with scarcely 40,000 men to encounter the Great Army in
+its retreat.
+
+[Battle of Kulm, Aug. 29, 30.]
+
+He threw himself upon a Russian corps at Kulm, in the Bohemian mountains,
+on the morning of the 29th. The Russians, at first few in number, held
+their ground during the day; in the night, and after the battle had
+recommenced on the morrow, vast masses of the allied troops poured in. The
+French fought desperately, but were overwhelmed. Vandamme himself was made
+prisoner, with 10,000 of his men. The whole of the stores and most of the
+cannon of his army remained in the enemy's hands.
+
+[Effect of the twelve days, Aug. 18-30.]
+
+[Battle of Dennewitz, Sept. 6.]
+
+The victory at Kulm secured the Bohemian army from pursuit, and almost
+extinguished the effects of its defeat at Dresden. Thanks to the successes
+of Bluecher and of Bernadotte's Prussian generals, which prevented Napoleon
+from throwing all his forces on to the rear of the Great Army,
+Schwarzenberg's rash attack had proved of no worse significance than an
+unsuccessful raid. The Austrians were again in the situation assigned to
+them in the original plan of the campaign, and capable of resuming their
+advance into the interior of Saxony: Bluecher and the northern commanders
+had not only escaped separate destruction, but won great victories over the
+French: Napoleon, weakened by the loss of 100,000 men, remained exactly
+where he had been at the beginning of the campaign. Had the triple movement
+by which he meant to overwhelm his adversaries been capable of execution,
+it would now have been fully executed. The balance, however, had turned
+against Napoleon; and the twelve days from the 18th to the 29th of August,
+though marked by no catastrophe like Leipzig or Waterloo, were in fact the
+decisive period in the struggle of Europe against Napoleon. The attack by
+which he intended to prevent the junction of the three armies had been
+made, and had failed. Nothing now remained for him but to repeat the same
+movements with a discouraged force against an emboldened enemy, or to quit
+the line of the Elbe, and prepare for one vast and decisive encounter with
+all three armies combined. Napoleon drove from his mind the thought of
+failure; he ordered Ney to take command of Oudinot's army, and to lead it
+again, in increased strength, upon Berlin; he himself hastened to
+Macdonald's beaten troops in Silesia, and rallied them for a new assault
+upon Bluecher. All was in vain. Ney, advancing on Berlin, was met by the
+Prussian general Billow at Dennewitz, and totally routed (Sept. 6):
+Bluecher, finding that Napoleon himself was before him, skilfully avoided
+battle, and forced his adversary to waste in fruitless marches the brief
+interval which he had [***] from his watch on Schwarzenberg. Each conflict
+with the enemy, each vain and exhausting march, told that the superiority
+had passed from the French to their foes, and that Napoleon's retreat was
+now only a matter of time. "These creatures have learnt something," said
+Napoleon in the bitterness of his heart, as he saw the columns of Bluecher
+manoeuvring out of his grasp. Ney's report of his own overthrow at
+Dennewitz sounded like an omen of the ruin of Waterloo. "I have been
+totally defeated," he wrote, "and do not yet know whether my army has
+re-assembled. The spirit of the generals and officers is shattered. To
+command in such conditions is but half to command. I had rather be a common
+grenadier."
+
+[Metternich.]
+
+[German policy of Stein and of Austria.]
+
+The accession of Austria had turned the scale in favour of the Allies; it
+rested only with the allied generals themselves to terminate the warfare
+round Dresden, and to lead their armies into the heart of Saxony. For a
+while the course of the war flagged, and military interests gave place to
+political. It was in the interval between the first great battles and the
+final advance on Leipzig that the future of Germany was fixed by the three
+allied Powers. In the excitement of the last twelve months little thought
+had been given, except by Stein and his friends, to the political form to
+be set in the place of the Napoleonic Federation of the Rhine. Stein, in
+the midst of the Russian campaign, had hoped for a universal rising of the
+German people against Napoleon, and had proposed the dethronement of all
+the German princes who supported his cause. His policy had received the
+general approval of Alexander, and, on the entrance of the Russian army
+into Germany, a manifesto had been issued appealing to the whole German
+nation, and warning the vassals of Napoleon that they could only save
+themselves by submission. [185] A committee had been appointed by the
+allied sovereigns, under the presidency of Stein himself, to administer the
+revenues of all Confederate territory that should be occupied by the allied
+armies. Whether the reigning Houses should be actually expelled might
+remain in uncertainty; but it was the fixed hope of Stein and his friends
+that those princes who were permitted to retain their thrones would be
+permitted to retain them only as officers in a great German Empire, without
+sovereign rights either over their own subjects or in relation to foreign
+States. The Kings of Bavaria and Wuertemberg had gained their titles and
+much of their despotic power at home from Napoleon; their independence of
+the Head of Germany had made them nothing more than the instruments of a
+foreign conqueror. Under whatever form the central authority might be
+revived, Stein desired that it should be the true and only sovereign Power
+in Germany, a Power to which every German might appeal against the
+oppression of a minor Government, and in which the whole nation should find
+its representative before the rest of Europe. In the face of such a central
+authority, whether an elected Parliament or an Imperial Council, the minor
+princes could at best retain but a fragment of their powers; and such was
+the theory accepted at the allied head-quarters down to the time when
+Austria proffered its mediation and support. Then everything changed. The
+views of the Austrian Government upon the future system of Germany were in
+direct opposition to those of Stein's party. Metternich dreaded the thought
+of popular agitation, and looked upon Stein, with his idea of a National
+Parliament and his plans for dethroning the Rhenish princes, as little
+better than the Jacobins of 1792. The offer of a restored imperial dignity
+in Germany was declined by the Emperor of Austria at the instance of his
+Minister. With characteristic sense of present difficulties, and blindness
+to the great forces which really contained their solution, Metternich
+argued that the minor princes would only be driven into the arms of the
+foreigner by the establishment of any supreme German Power. They would
+probably desert Napoleon if the Allies guaranteed to them everything that
+they at present possessed; they would be freed from all future temptation
+to attach themselves to France if Austria contented itself with a
+diplomatic influence and with the ties of a well-constructed system of
+treaties. In spite of the influence of Stein with the Emperor Alexander,
+Metternich's views prevailed. Austria had so deliberately kept itself in
+balance during the first part of the year 1813, that the Allies were now
+willing to concede everything, both in this matter and in others, in return
+for its support. Nothing more was heard of the dethronement of the
+Confederate princes, or even of the limitation of their powers. It was
+agreed by the Treaty of Teplitz, signed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria on
+September 9th, that every State of the Rhenish Confederacy should be placed
+in a position of absolute independence. Negotiations were opened with the
+King of Bavaria, whose army had steadily fought on the side of Napoleon in
+every campaign since 1806. Instead of being outlawed as a criminal, he was
+welcomed as an ally. The Treaty of Ried, signed on the 3rd of October,
+guaranteed to the King of Bavaria, in return for his desertion of Napoleon,
+full sovereign rights, and the whole of the territory which he had received
+from Napoleon, except the Tyrol and the Austrian district on the Inn. What
+had been accorded to the King of Bavaria could not be refused to the rest
+of Napoleon's vassals who were willing to make their peace with the Allies
+in time. Germany was thus left at the mercy of a score of petty Cabinets.
+It was seen by the patriotic party in Prussia at what price the alliance of
+Austria had been purchased. Austria had indeed made it possible to conquer
+Napoleon, but it had also made an end of all prospect of the union of the
+German nation.
+
+[Allies cross the Elbe, Oct. 3.]
+
+Till the last days of September the position of the hostile armies round
+Dresden remained little changed, Napoleon unweariedly repeated his attacks,
+now on one side, now on another, but without result. The Allies on their
+part seemed rooted to the soil. Bernadotte, balanced between the desire to
+obtain Norway from the Allies and a foolish hope of being called to the
+throne of France, was bent on doing the French as little harm as possible;
+Schwarzenberg, himself an indifferent general, was distracted by the
+councillors of all the three monarchs; Bluecher alone pressed for decided
+and rapid action. At length the Prussian commander gained permission to
+march northwards, and unite his army with Bernadotte's in a forward
+movement across the Elbe. The long-expected Russian reserves, led by
+Bennigsen, reached the Bohemian mountains; and at the beginning of October
+the operation began which was to collect the whole of the allied forces in
+the plain of Leipzig. Bluecher forced the passage of the Elbe at Wartenburg.
+It was not until Napoleon learnt that the army of Silesia had actually
+crossed the river that he finally quitted Dresden. Then, hastening
+northwards, he threw himself upon the Prussian general; but Bluecher again
+avoided battle, as he had done in Silesia; and on the 7th of October his
+army united with Bernadotte's, which had crossed the Elbe two days before.
+
+The enemy was closing in upon Napoleon. Obstinately as he had held on to
+the line of the Elbe, he could hold on no longer. In the frustration of all
+his hopes there flashed across his mind the wild project of a march
+eastwards to the Oder, and the gathering of all the besieged garrisons for
+a campaign in which the enemy should stand between himself and France; but
+the dream lasted only long enough to gain a record. Napoleon ventured no
+more than to send a corps back to the Elbe to threaten Berlin, in the hope
+of tempting Bluecher and Bernadotte to abandon the advance which they had
+now begun in co-operation with the great army of Schwarzenberg. From the
+10th to the 14th of October, Napoleon [***] at Dueben, between Dresden and
+Leipzig, restlessly expecting to hear of Bluecher's or Bernadotte's retreat.
+The only definite information that he could gain was that Schwarzenberg was
+pressing on towards the west. At length he fell back to Leipzig, believing
+that Bluecher, but not Bernadotte, was advancing to meet Schwarzenberg and
+take part in a great engagement. As he entered Leipzig on October 14th the
+cannon of Schwarzenberg was heard on the south.
+
+[Battle of Leipzig. Oct 16-19.]
+
+Napoleon drew up for battle. The number of his troops in position around
+the city was 170,000: about 15,000 others lay within call. He placed
+Marmont and Ney on the north of Leipzig at the village of Moeckern, to meet
+the expected onslaught of Bluecher; and himself, with the great mass of his
+army, took post on the south, facing Schwarzenberg. On the morning of the
+16th, Schwarzenberg began the attack. His numbers did not exceed 150,000,
+for the greater part of the Russian army was a march in the rear. The
+battle was an even one. The Austrians failed to gain ground: with one more
+army-corps Napoleon saw that he could overpower the enemy. He was still
+without intelligence of Bluecher's actual appearance in the north; and in
+the rash hope that Bluecher's coming might be delayed, he sent orders to Ney
+and Marmont to leave their positions and hurry to the south to throw
+themselves upon Schwarzenberg. Ney obeyed. Marmont, when the order reached
+him, was actually receiving Bluecher's first fire. He determined to remain
+and defend the village of Moeckern, though left without support. York,
+commanding the vanguard of Bluecher's army, assailed him with the utmost
+fury. A third part of the troops engaged on each side were killed or
+wounded before the day closed; but in the end the victory of the Prussians
+was complete. It was the only triumph won by the Allies on this first day
+of the battle, but it turned the scale against Napoleon. Marmont's corps
+was destroyed; Ney, divided between Napoleon and Marmont, had rendered no
+effective help to either. Schwarzenberg, saved from a great disaster,
+needed only to wait for Bernadotte and the Russian reserves, and to renew
+the battle with an additional force of 100,000 men.
+
+[Storm of Leipzig, 19th. French retreat.]
+
+[Battle of the 18th.]
+
+In the course of the night Napoleon sent proposals for peace. It was in the
+vain hope of receiving some friendly answer from his father-in-law, the
+Austrian Emperor, that he delayed making his retreat during the next day,
+while it might still have been unmolested. No answer was returned to his
+letter. In the evening of the 17th, Bennigsen's army reached the field of
+battle. Next morning began that vast and decisive encounter known in the
+language of Germany as "the battle of the nations," the greatest battle in
+all authentic history, the culmination of all the military effort of the
+Napoleonic age. Not less than 300,000 men fought on the side of the Allies;
+Napoleon's own forces numbered 170,000. The battle raged all round Leipzig,
+except on the west, where no attempt was made to interpose between Napoleon
+and the line of his retreat. As in the first engagement, the decisive
+successes were those of Bluecher, now tardily aided by Bernadotte, on the
+north; Schwarzenberg's divisions, on the south side of the town, fought
+steadily, but without gaining much ground. But there was no longer any
+doubt as to the issue of the struggle. If Napoleon could not break the
+Allies in the first engagement, he had no chance against them now when they
+had been joined by 100,000 more men. The storm of attack grew wilder and
+wilder: there were no new forces to call up for the defence. Before the day
+was half over Napoleon drew in his outer line, and began to make
+dispositions for a retreat from Leipzig. At evening long trains of wounded
+from the hospitals passed through the western gates of the city along the
+road towards the Rhine. In the darkness of night the whole army was
+withdrawn from its positions, and dense masses poured into the town, until
+every street was blocked with confused and impenetrable crowds of cavalry
+and infantry. The leading divisions moved out of the gates before sunrise.
+As the throng lessened, some degree of order was restored, and the troops
+which Napoleon intended to cover the retreat took their places under the
+walls of Leipzig. The Allies advanced to the storm on the morning of the
+19th. The French were driven into the town; the victorious enemy pressed on
+towards the rear of the retreating columns. In the midst of the struggle an
+explosion was heard above the roar of the battle. The bridge over the
+Elster, the only outlet from Leipzig to the west, had been blown up by
+--the mistake of a French soldier before the rear-guard began to cross. The
+mass of fugitives, driven from the streets of the town, found before them
+an impassable river. Some swam to the opposite bank or perished in
+attempting to do so; the rest, to the number of 15,000, laid down their
+arms. This was the end of the battle. Napoleon had lost in the three days
+40,000 killed and wounded, 260 guns, and 30,000 prisoners. The killed and
+wounded of the Allies reached the enormous sum of 54,000.
+
+[Conditions of peace offered to Napoleon at Frankfort, Nov. 9th.]
+
+[Allies follow Napoleon to the Rhine.]
+
+The campaign was at an end. Napoleon led off a large army, but one that was
+in no condition to turn upon its pursuers. At each stage in the retreat
+thousands of fever-stricken wretches were left to terrify even the pursuing
+army with the dread of their infection. It was only when the French found
+the road to Frankfort blocked at Hanau by a Bavarian force that they
+rallied to the order of battle. The Bavarians were cut to pieces; the road
+was opened; and, a fortnight after the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon, with
+the remnant of his great army, re-crossed the Rhine. Behind him the fabric
+of his Empire fell to the ground. Jerome fled from Westphalia; [186] the
+princes of the Rhenish Confederacy came one after another to make their
+peace with the Allies; Buelow, with the army which had conquered Ney at
+Dennewitz, marched through the north of Germany to the deliverance of
+Holland. Three days after Napoleon had crossed the Rhine the Czar reached
+Frankfort; and here, on the 7th of November, a military council was held,
+in which Bluecher and Gneisenau, against almost all the other generals,
+advocated an immediate invasion of France. The soldiers, however, had time
+to re-consider their opinions, for, on the 9th, it was decided by the
+representatives of the Powers to send an offer of peace to Napoleon, and
+the operations of the war were suspended by common consent. The condition
+on which peace was offered to Napoleon was the surrender of the conquests
+of France beyond the Alps and the Rhine. The Allies were still willing to
+permit the Emperor to retain Belgium, Savoy, and the Rhenish Provinces;
+they declined, however, to enter into any negotiation until Napoleon had
+accepted this basis of peace; and they demanded a distinct reply before the
+end of the month of November.
+
+[Offer of peace withdrawn, Dec. 1.]
+
+[Plan of invasion of France.]
+
+[Allies enter France, Jan., 1814.]
+
+Napoleon, who had now arrived in Paris, and saw around him all the signs of
+power, returned indefinite answers. The month ended without the reply which
+the Allies required; and on the 1st of December the offer of peace was
+declared to be withdrawn. It was still undecided whether the war should
+take the form of an actual invasion of France. The memory of Brunswick's
+campaign of 1792, and of the disasters of the first coalition in 1793, even
+now exercised a powerful influence over men's minds. Austria was unwilling
+to drive Napoleon to extremities, or to give to Russia and Prussia the
+increased influence which they would gain in Europe from the total
+overthrow of Napoleon's power. It was ultimately determined that the allied
+armies should enter France, but that the Austrians, instead of crossing the
+north-eastern frontier, should make a detour by Switzerland, and gain the
+plateau of Langres in Champagne, from which the rivers Seine, Marne, and
+Aube, with the roads following their valleys, descend in the direction of
+the capital. The plateau of Langres was said to be of such strategical
+importance that its occupation by an invader would immediately force
+Napoleon to make peace. As a matter of fact, the plateau was of no
+strategical importance whatever; but the Austrians desired to occupy it,
+partly with the view of guarding against any attack from the direction of
+Italy and Lyons, partly from their want of the heavy artillery necessary
+for besieging the fortresses farther north, [187] and from a just
+appreciation of the dangers of a campaign conducted in a hostile country
+intersected by several rivers. Anything was welcomed by Metternich that
+seemed likely to avert, or even to postpone, a struggle with Napoleon for
+life or death. Bluecher correctly judged the march through Switzerland to be
+mere procrastination. He was himself permitted to take the straight road
+into France, though his movements were retarded in order to keep pace with
+the cautious steps of Schwarzenberg. On the last day of the year 1813 the
+Prussian general crossed the Rhine near Coblentz; on the 18th of January,
+1814, the Austrian army, having advanced from Switzerland by Belfort and
+Vesoul, reached its halting-place on the plateau of Langres. Here the march
+stopped; and here it was expected that terms of peace would be proposed by
+Napoleon.
+
+[Wellington entering France from the south.]
+
+It was not on the eastern side alone that the invader was now entering
+France. Wellington had passed the Pyrenees. His last victorious march into
+the north of Spain began on the day when the Prussian and Russian armies
+were defeated by Napoleon at Bautzen (May 21, 1813). During the armistice
+of Dresden, a week before Austria signed the treaty which fixed the
+conditions of its armed mediation, he had gained an overwhelming triumph at
+Vittoria over King Joseph and the French army, as it retreated with all the
+spoils gathered in five years' occupation of Spain (June 21). A series of
+bloody engagements had given the English the passes of the Pyrenees in
+those same days of August and September that saw the allied armies close
+around Napoleon at Dresden; and when, after the catastrophe of Leipzig, the
+wreck of Napoleon's host was retreating beyond the Rhine, Soult, the
+defender of the Pyrenees, was driven by the British general from his
+entrenchments on the Nivelle, and forced back under the walls of Bayonne.
+
+[French armies unable to hold the frontier.]
+
+[Napoleon's plan of defence.]
+
+Twenty years had passed since, in the tempestuous morn of the Revolution,
+Hoche swept the armies of the first coalition across the Alsatian frontier.
+Since then, French soldiers had visited every capital, and watered every
+soil with their blood; but no foreign soldier had set foot on French soil.
+Now the cruel goads of Napoleon's military glory had spent the nation's
+strength, and the force no longer existed which could bar the way to its
+gathered enemies. The armies placed upon the eastern frontier had to fall
+back before an enemy five times more numerous than themselves. Napoleon had
+not expected that the Allies would enter France before the spring. With
+three months given him for organisation, he could have made the
+frontier-armies strong enough to maintain their actual positions; the
+winter advance of the Allies compelled him to abandon the border districts
+of France, and to concentrate his defence in Champagne, between the Marne,
+the Seine, and the Aube. This district was one which offered extraordinary
+advantages to a great general acting against an irresolute and
+ill-commanded enemy. By holding the bridges over the three rivers, and
+drawing his own supplies along the central road from Paris to
+Arcis-sur-Aube, Napoleon could securely throw the bulk of his forces from
+one side to the other against the flank of the Allies, while his own
+movements were covered by the rivers, which could not be passed except at
+the bridges. A capable commander at the head of the Allies would have
+employed the same river-strategy against Napoleon himself, after conquering
+one or two points of passage by main force; but Napoleon had nothing of the
+kind to fear from Schwarzenberg; and if the Austrian head-quarters
+continued to control the movements of the allied armies, it was even now
+doubtful whether the campaign would close at Paris or on the Rhine.
+
+[Campaign of 1814.]
+
+For some days after the arrival of the monarchs and diplomatists at Langres
+(Jan. 22), Metternich and the more timorous among the generals opposed any
+further advance into France, and argued that the army had already gained
+all it needed by the occupation of the border provinces. It was only upon
+the threat of the Czar to continue the war by himself that the Austrians
+consented to move forward upon Paris. After several days had been lost in
+discussion, the advance from Langres was begun. Orders were given to
+Bluecher, who had pushed back the French divisions commanded by Marmont and
+Mortier, and who was now near St. Dizier on the Marne, to meet the Great
+Army at Brienne. This was the situation of the Allies when, on the 25th of
+January, Napoleon left Paris, and placed himself at Chalons on the Marne,
+at the head of his left wing, having his right at Troyes and at Arcis,
+guarding the bridges over the Seine and the Aube. Napoleon knew that
+Bluecher was moving towards the Austrians; he hoped to hold the Prussian
+general in check at St. Dizier, and to throw himself upon the heads of
+Schwarzenberg's columns as they moved towards the Aube. Bluecher, however,
+had already passed St. Dizier when Napoleon reached it. Napoleon pursued,
+and overtook the Prussians at Brienne. After an indecisive battle, Bluecher
+fell back towards Schwarzenberg. The allied armies effected their junction,
+and Bluecher, now supported by the Austrians, turned and marched down the
+right bank of the Aube to meet Napoleon. Napoleon, though far outnumbered,
+accepted battle. He was attacked at La Rothiere close above Brienne, and
+defeated with heavy loss (Feb. 1). A vigorous pursuit would probably have
+ended the war; but the Austrians held back. Schwarzenberg believed peace to
+be already gained, and condemned all further action as useless waste of
+life. In spite of the protests of the Emperor Alexander, he allowed
+Napoleon to retire unmolested. Schwarzenberg's inaction was no mere error
+in military judgment. There was a direct conflict between the Czar and the
+Austrian Cabinet as to the end to be obtained by the war. Alexander already
+insisted on the dethronement of Napoleon; the Austrian Government would
+have been content to leave Napoleon in power if he would accept a peace
+giving France no worse a frontier than it had possessed in 1791.
+Castlereagh, who had come from England, and Hardenberg were as yet inclined
+to support Metternich's policy, although the whole Prussian army, the
+public opinion of Great Britain, and the counsels of Stein and all the
+bolder Prussian statesmen, were on the side of the Czar. [188]
+
+[Congress of Chatillon, Feb. 5-9.]
+
+Already the influence of the peace-party was so far in the ascendant that
+negotiations had been opened with Napoleon. Representatives of all the
+Powers assembled at Chatillon, in Burgundy; and there, towards the end of
+January, Caulaincourt appeared on behalf of France. The first sitting took
+place on the 5th of February; on the following day Caulaincourt received
+full powers from Napoleon to conclude peace. The Allies laid down as the
+condition of peace the limitation of France to the frontiers of 1791. Had
+Caulaincourt dared to conclude peace instantly on these terms, Napoleon
+would have retained his throne; but he was aware that Napoleon had only
+granted him full powers in consequence of the disastrous battle of La
+Rothiere, and he feared to be disavowed by his master as soon as the army
+had escaped from danger. Instead of simply accepting the Allies' offer, he
+raised questions as to the future of Italy and Germany. The moment was
+lost; on the 9th of February the Czar recalled his envoy from Chatillon,
+and the sittings of the Congress were broken off.
+
+[Defeats of Bluecher on the Marne Feb. 10-14.]
+
+[Montereau, Feb 18.]
+
+[Austrians fall back towards Langres.]
+
+Schwarzenberg was now slowly and unwillingly moving forwards along the
+Seine towards Troyes. Bluecher was permitted to return to the Marne, and to
+advance upon Paris by an independent line of march. He crossed the country
+between the Aube and the Marne, and joined some divisions which he had left
+behind him on the latter river. But his dispositions were outrageously
+careless: his troops were scattered over a space of sixty miles from
+Chalons westward, as if he had no enemy to guard against except the weak
+divisions commanded by Mortier and Marmont, which had uniformly fallen back
+before his advance. Suddenly Napoleon himself appeared at the centre of the
+long Prussian line at Champaubert. He had hastened northwards in pursuit of
+Bluecher with 30,000 men, as soon as Schwarzenberg entered Troyes; and on
+February 10th a weak Russian corps that lay in the centre of Bluecher's
+column was overwhelmed before it was known the Emperor had left the Seine.
+Then, turning leftwards, Napoleon overthrew the Prussian vanguard at
+Montmirail, and two days later attacked and defeated Bluecher himself, who
+was bringing up the remainder of his troops in total ignorance of the enemy
+with whom he had to deal. In four days Bluecher's army, which numbered
+70,000 men, had thrice been defeated in detail by a force of 30,000.
+Bluecher was compelled to fall back upon Chalons; Napoleon instantly
+returned to the support of Oudinot's division, which he had left in front
+of Schwarzenberg. In order to relieve Bluecher, the Austrians had pushed
+forward on the Seine beyond Montereau. Within three days after the battle
+with Bluecher, Napoleon was back upon the Seine, and attacking the heads of
+the Austrian column. On the 18th of February he gained so decisive a
+victory at Montereau that Schwarzenberg abandoned the advance, and fell
+back upon Troyes, sending word to Bluecher to come southwards again and help
+him to fight a great battle. Bluecher moved off with admirable energy, and
+came into the neighbourhood of Troyes within a week after his defeats upon
+the Marne. But the design of fighting a great battle was given up. The
+disinclination of the Austrians to vigorous action was too strong to be
+overcome; and it was finally determined that Schwarzenberg should fall back
+almost to the plateau of Langres, leaving Bluecher to unite with the troops
+of Buelow which had conquered Holland, and to operate on the enemy's flank
+and rear.
+
+[Congress of Chatillon resumed, Feb. 17-March 15.]
+
+The effect of Napoleon's sudden victories on the Marne was instantly seen
+in the councils of the allied sovereigns. Alexander, who had withdrawn his
+envoy from Chatillon, could no longer hold out against negotiations with
+Napoleon. He restored the powers of his envoy, and the Congress
+re-assembled. But Napoleon already saw himself in imagination driving the
+invaders beyond the Rhine, and sent orders to Caulaincourt to insist upon
+the terms proposed at Frankfort, which left to France both the Rhenish
+Provinces and Belgium. At the same time he attempted to open a private
+negotiation with his father-in-law the Emperor of Austria, and to detach
+him from the cause of the Allies. The attempt failed; the demands now made
+by Caulaincourt overcame even the peaceful inclinations of the Austrian
+Minister; and on the 1st of March the Allies signed a new treaty at
+Chaumont, pledging themselves to conclude no peace with Napoleon that did
+not restore the frontier of 1791, and to maintain a defensive alliance
+against France for a period of twenty years. [189] Caulaincourt continued
+for another fortnight at Chatillon, instructed by Napoleon to prolong the
+negotiations, but forbidden to accept the only conditions which the Allies
+were willing to grant.
+
+[Napoleon follows Bluecher to the north. Battle of Laon, March 10.]
+
+Bluecher was now on his way northwards to join the so-called army of
+Bernadotte upon the Aisne. Since the Battle of Leipzig, Bernadotte himself
+had taken no part in the movements of the army nominally under his command.
+The Netherlands had been conquered by Buelow and the Russian general
+Winzingerode, and these officers were now pushing southwards in order to
+take part with Bluecher in a movement against Paris. Napoleon calculated
+that the fortress of Soissons would bar the way to the northern army, and
+enable him to attack and crush Bluecher before he could effect a junction
+with his colleagues. He set out in pursuit of the Prussians, still hoping
+for a second series of victories like those he had won upon the Marne. But
+the cowardice of the commander of Soissons ruined his chances of success.
+The fortress surrendered to the Russians at the first summons. Bluecher met
+the advanced guard of the northern army upon the Aisne on the 4th of March,
+and continued his march towards Laon for the purpose of uniting with its
+divisions which lay in the rear. The French followed, but the only
+advantage gained by Napoleon was a victory over a detached Russian corps at
+Craonne. Marmont was defeated with heavy loss by a sally of Bluecher from
+his strong position on the hill of Laon (March 10); and the Emperor
+himself, unable to restore the fortune of the battle, fell back upon
+Soissons, and thence marched southward to throw himself again upon the line
+of the southern army.
+
+[Napoleon marches to the rear of the Allies, March 23.]
+
+[The Allies advance on Paris.]
+
+Schwarzenberg had once more begun to move forward on the news of Bluecher's
+victory at Laon. His troops were so widely dispersed that Napoleon might
+even now have cut the line in halves had he known Schwarzenberg's real
+position. But he made a detour in order to meet Oudinot's corps, and gave
+the Austrians time to concentrate at Arcis-sur-Aube. Here, on the 20th of
+March, Napoleon found himself in face of an army of 100,000 men. His own
+army was less than a third of that number; yet with unalterable contempt
+for the enemy he risked another battle. No decided issue was reached in the
+first day's fighting, and Napoleon remained in position, expecting that
+Schwarzenberg would retreat during the night. But on the morrow the
+Austrians were still fronting him. Schwarzenberg had at length learnt his
+own real superiority, and resolved to assist the enemy no longer by a
+wretched system of retreat. A single act of firmness on the part of the
+Austrian commander showed Napoleon that the war of battles was at an end.
+He abandoned all hope of resisting the invaders in front: it only remained
+for him to throw himself on to their rear, and, in company with the
+frontier-garrisons and the army of Lyons, to attack their communications
+with Germany. The plan was no unreasonable one, if Paris could either have
+sustained a siege or have fallen into the enemy's hands without terminating
+the war. But the Allies rightly judged that Napoleon's power would be
+extinct from the moment that Paris submitted. They received the
+intelligence of the Emperor's march to the east, and declined to follow
+him. The armies of Schwarzenberg and Bluecher approached one another, and
+moved together on Paris. It was at Vitry, on March 27th, that Napoleon
+first discovered that the troops which had appeared to be following his
+eastward movement were but a detachment of cavalry, and that the allied
+armies were in full march upon the capital. He instantly called up every
+division within reach, and pushed forward by forced marches for the Seine,
+hoping to fall upon Schwarzenberg's rear before the allied vanguard could
+reach Paris. But at each hour of the march it became more evident that the
+enemy was far in advance. For two days Napoleon urged his men forward; at
+length, unable to bear the intolerable suspense, he quitted the army on the
+morning of the 30th, and drove forward at the utmost speed along the road
+through Fontainebleau to the capital. As day sank, he met reports of a
+battle already begun. When he reached the village of Fromenteau, fifteen
+miles from Paris, at ten o'clock at night, he heard that Paris had actually
+surrendered.
+
+[Attack on Paris, March 30.]
+
+[Capitulation of Marmont.]
+
+[Allies enter Paris, March 31.]
+
+The Allies had pressed forward without taking any notice of Napoleon's
+movements, and at early morning on the 30th they had opened the attack on
+the north-eastern heights of Paris. Marmont, with the fragments of a beaten
+army and some weak divisions of the National Guard, had but 35,000 men to
+oppose to three times that number of the enemy. The Government had taken no
+steps to arm the people, or to prolong resistance after the outside line of
+defence was lost, although the erection of barricades would have held the
+Allies in check until Napoleon arrived with his army. While Marmont fought
+in the outer suburbs, masses of the people were drawn up on Montmartre,
+expecting the Emperor's appearance, and the spectacle of a great and
+decisive battle. But the firing in the outskirts stopped soon after noon:
+it was announced that Marmont had capitulated. The report struck the people
+with stupor and fury. They had vainly been demanding arms since early
+morning; and even after the capitulation unsigned papers were handed about
+by men of the working classes, advocating further resistance. [190] But the
+people no longer knew how to follow leaders of its own. Napoleon had
+trained France to look only to himself: his absence left the masses, who
+were still eager to fight for France, helpless in the presence of the
+conqueror: there were enemies enough of the Government among the richer
+classes to make the entry of the foreigner into Paris a scene of actual joy
+and exultation. To such an extent had the spirit of caste and the malignant
+delight in Napoleon's ruin overpowered the love of France among the party
+of the old noblesse, that upon the entry of the allied forces into Paris on
+the 31st of March hundreds of aristocratic women kissed the hands, or the
+very boots and horses, of the leaders of the train, and cheered the
+Cossacks who escorted a band of French prisoners, bleeding and exhausted,
+through the streets.
+
+[Napoleon dethroned, April 2.]
+
+Napoleon's reign was indeed at an end. Since the rupture of the Congress of
+Chatillon on the 18th of March, the Allies had determined to make his
+dethronement a condition of peace. As the end approached, it was seen that
+no successor was possible but the chief of the House of Bourbon, although
+Austria would perhaps have consented to the establishment of a Regency
+under the Empress Marie Louise, and the Czar had for a time entertained the
+project of placing Bernadotte at the head of the French State. Immediately
+after the entry into Paris it was determined to raise the exile Louis
+XVIII. to the throne. The politicians of the Empire who followed Talleyrand
+were not unwilling to unite with the conquerors, and with the small party
+of Royalist noblesse, in recalling the Bourbon dynasty. Alexander, who was
+the real master of the situation, rightly judged Talleyrand to be the man
+most capable of enlisting the public opinion of France on the side of the
+new order. He took up his abode at Talleyrand's house, and employed this
+dexterous statesman as the advocate both of the policy of the Allies, and
+of the principles of constitutional liberty, which at this time Alexander
+himself sincerely befriended. A Provisional Government was appointed under
+Talleyrand's leadership. On the 2nd of April the Senate proclaimed the
+dethronement of Napoleon. On the 6th it published a Constitution, and
+recalled the House of Bourbon.
+
+Louis XVIII. was still in England: his brother, the Count of Artois, had
+joined the invaders in France and assumed the title of Lieutenant of the
+Kingdom; but the influence of Alexander was necessary to force this
+obstinate and unteachable man into anything like a constitutional position.
+The Provisional Government invited the Count to take up the administration
+until the King's arrival, in virtue of a decree of the Senate. D'Artois
+declined to recognise the Senate's competency, and claimed the Lieutenancy
+of the Kingdom as his brother's representative. The Senate refusing to
+admit the Count's divine right, some unmeaning words were exchanged when
+d'Artois entered Paris; and the Provisional Government, disregarding the
+claims of the Royal Lieutenant, continued in the full exercise of its
+powers. At length the Czar insisted that d'Artois should give way. The
+decree of the Senate was accordingly accepted by him at the Tuileries on
+the 14th of April; the Provisional Government retired, and a Council of
+State was formed, in which Talleyrand still continued to exercise the real
+powers of government. In the address made by d'Artois on this occasion, he
+stated that although the King had not empowered him to accept the
+Constitution made by the Senate on the 6th of April, he entertained no
+doubt that the King would accept the principles embodied in that
+Constitution, which were those of Representative Government, of the freedom
+of the press, and of the responsibility of ministers. A week after
+d'Artois' declaration, Louis XVIII. arrived in France.
+
+[Louis XVIII. and the Czar.]
+
+[Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3.]
+
+Louis XVIII., though capable of adapting himself in practice to a
+constitutional system, had never permitted himself to question the divine
+right of the House of Bourbon to sovereign power. The exiles who surrounded
+him were slow to understand the needs of the time. They recommended the
+King to reject the Constitution. Louis made an ambiguous answer when the
+Legislative Body met him at Compiegne and invited an expression of the
+royal policy. It was again necessary for the Czar to interfere, and to
+explain to the King that France could no longer be an absolute monarchy.
+Louis, however, was a better arguer than the Count of Artois. He reasoned
+as a man whom the sovereigns of Europe had felt it their duty to restore
+without any request from himself. If the Senate of Napoleon, he urged, had
+the right to give France a Constitution, he himself ought never to have
+been brought from his peaceful English home. He was willing to grant a free
+Constitution to his people in exercise of his own royal rights, but he
+could not recognise one created by the servants of an usurper. Alexander
+was but half satisfied with the liberal professions of Louis: he did not,
+however, insist on his acceptance of the Constitution drawn up by the
+Senate, but he informed him that until the promises made by d'Artois were
+confirmed by a royal proclamation, there would be no entry into Paris. The
+King at length signed a proclamation written by Talleyrand, and made his
+festal entry into the capital on the 3rd of May.
+
+[Feeling of Paris.]
+
+The promises of Louis himself, the unbroken courtesy and friendliness shown
+by the Allies to Paris since their victory a month before, had almost
+extinguished the popular feeling of hostility towards a dynasty which owed
+its recall to the overthrow of French armies. The foreign leaders
+themselves had begun to excite a certain admiration and interest. Alexander
+was considered, and with good reason, as a generous enemy; the simplicity
+of the King of Prussia, his misfortunes, his well-remembered gallantry at
+the Battle of Jena, gained him general sympathy. It needed but little on
+the part of the returning Bourbons to convert the interest and curiosity of
+Paris into affection. The cortege which entered the capital with Louis
+XVIII. brought back, in a singular motley of obsolete and of foreign
+costumes, the bearers of many unforgotten names. The look of the King
+himself, as he drove through Paris, pleased the people. The childless
+father of the murdered Duke of Enghien gained the pitying attention of
+those few who knew the face of a man twenty-five years an exile. But there
+was one among the members of the returning families whom every heart in
+Paris went out to meet. The daughter of Louis XVI., who had shared the
+captivity of her parents and of her brother, the sole survivor of her
+deeply-wronged house, now returned as Duchess of Angouleme. The uniquely
+mournful history of her girlhood, and her subsequent marriage with her
+cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a
+warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI.
+But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the
+disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice
+and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer
+to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was
+felt that the Bourbons had brought back no single person among them who was
+capable of winning the French nation's love.
+
+[Napoleon sent to Elba.]
+
+[Napoleon.]
+
+The recall of the ancient line had been allowed to appear to the world as
+the work of France itself; Napoleon's fate could only be fixed by his
+conquerors. After the fall of Paris, Napoleon remained at Fontainebleau
+awaiting events. The soldiers and the younger officers of his army were
+still ready to fight for him; the marshals, however, were utterly weary,
+and determined that France should no longer suffer for the sake of a single
+man. They informed Napoleon that he must abdicate. Yielding to their
+pressure, Napoleon, on the 3rd of April, drew up an act of abdication in
+favour of his infant son, and sent it by Caulaincourt to the allied
+sovereigns at Paris. The document was rejected by the Allies; Caulaincourt
+returned with the intelligence that Napoleon must renounce the throne for
+himself and all his family. For a moment the Emperor thought of renewing
+the war; but the marshals refused their aid more resolutely than before,
+and, on the 6th of April, Napoleon signed an unconditional surrender of the
+throne for himself and his heirs. He was permitted by the Allies to retain
+the unmeaning title of Emperor, and to carry with him a body-guard and a
+considerable revenue to the island of Elba, henceforward to be his
+principality and his prison. The choice of this island, within easy reach
+of France and Italy, and too extensive to be guarded without a large fleet,
+was due to Alexander's ill-judged generosity towards Napoleon, and to a
+promise made to Marmont that the liberty of the Emperor should be
+respected. Alexander was not left without warning of the probable effects
+of his leniency. Sir Charles Stewart, military representative of Great
+Britain at the allied head-quarters, urged both his own and the allied
+Governments to substitute some more distant island for Elba, if they
+desired to save Europe from a renewed Napoleonic war, and France from the
+misery of a second invasion. The Allies, though not without misgivings,
+adhered to their original plan, and left it to time to justify the
+predictions of their adviser.
+
+[Treaty of Paris, May 30.]
+
+It was well known what would be the terms of peace, now that Napoleon was
+removed from the throne. The Allies had no intention of depriving France of
+any of the territory that it had held before 1792: the conclusion of a
+definitive Treaty was only postponed until the Constitution, which
+Alexander required King Louis XVIII. to grant, had been drawn up by a royal
+commission and approved by the King. On the 27th of May the draft of this
+Constitution, known as the Charta, was laid before the King, and sanctioned
+by him; on the 30th, the Treaty of Paris was signed by the representatives
+of France and of all the great Powers. [191] France, surrendering all its
+conquests, accepted the frontier of the 1st of January, 1792, with a slight
+addition of territory on the side of Savoy and at points on its northern
+and eastern border. It paid no indemnity. It was permitted to retain all
+the works of art accumulated by twenty years of rapine, except the trophies
+carried from the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin and the spoils of the Library
+of Vienna. It received back nearly all the colonies which had been taken
+from it by Great Britain. By the clauses of the Treaty disposing of the
+territory that had formed the Empire and the dependencies of Napoleon,
+Holland was restored to the House of Orange, with the provision that its
+territory should be largely increased; Switzerland was declared
+independent; it was stipulated that Italy, with the exception of the
+Austrian Provinces, should consist of independent States, and that Germany
+should remain distributed among a multitude of sovereigns, independent, but
+united by a Federal tie. The navigation of the Rhine was thrown open. By a
+special agreement with Great Britain the French Government undertook to
+unite its efforts to those of England in procuring the suppression of the
+Slave-trade by all the Powers, and pledged itself to abolish the
+Slave-trade among French subjects within five years at the latest. For the
+settlement of all European questions not included in the Treaty of Paris it
+was agreed that a Congress of the Powers should, within two months,
+assemble at Vienna. These were the public articles of the Treaty of Paris.
+Secret clauses provided that the Allies--that is, the Allies independently
+of France--should control the distributions of territory to be made at the
+Congress; that Austria should receive Venetia and all Northern Italy as far
+as the Ticino; that Genoa should be given to the King of Sardinia; and that
+the Southern Netherlands should be united into a single kingdom with
+Holland, and thus form a solid bulwark against France on the north. No
+mention was made of Naples, whose sovereign, Murat, had abandoned Napoleon
+and allied himself with Austria, but without fulfilling in good faith the
+engagements into which he had entered against his former master. A nominal
+friend of the Allies, he knew that he had played a double game, and that
+his sovereignty, though not yet threatened, was insecure. [192]
+
+[Territorial arrangements of 1814.]
+
+Much yet remained to be settled by the Congress at Vienna, but in the
+Treaty of Paris two at least of the great Powers saw the objects attained
+for which they had straggled so persistently through all the earlier years
+of the war, and which at a later time had appeared to pass almost out of
+the range of possibility. England saw the Netherlands once more converted
+into a barrier against France, and Antwerp held by friendly hands. Austria
+reaped the full reward of its cool and well-balanced diplomacy during the
+crisis of 1813, in the annexation of an Italian territory that made it the
+real mistress of the Peninsula. Castlereagh and every other English
+politician felt that Europe had done itself small honour in handing Venice
+back to the Hapsburg; but this had been the condition exacted by Metternich
+at Prague before he consented to throw the sword of Austria into the
+trembling scale; [193] and the Republican traditions both of Venice and of
+Genoa counted for little among the statesmen of 1814, in comparison with
+the divine right of a Duke of Modena or a Prince of Hesse Cassel. [194]
+France itself, though stripped of the dominion won by twenty years of
+warfare, was permitted to retain, for the benefit of a restored line of
+kings, the whole of its ancient territory, and the spoil of all the
+galleries and museums of Western Europe. It would have been no unnatural
+wrong if the conquerors of 1814 had dealt with the soil of France as France
+had dealt with other lands; it would have been an act of bare justice to
+restore to its rightful owners the pillage that had been brought to Paris,
+and to recover from the French treasury a part of the enormous sums which
+Napoleon had extorted from conquered States. But the Courts were too well
+satisfied with their victory to enter into a strict account upon secondary
+matters; and a prudent regard on the part of the Allies to the prospects of
+the House of Bourbon saved France from experiencing what it had inflicted
+upon others.
+
+[All the Powers except France gained territory by the war, 1792-1814.]
+
+The policy which now restored to France the frontier of 1792 was viewed
+with a very different feeling in France and in all other countries. Europe
+looked with a kind of wonder upon its own generosity; France forgot the
+unparalleled provocations which it had offered to mankind, and only
+remembered that Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces had formed part of the
+Republic and the Empire for nearly twenty years. These early conquests of
+the Republic, which no one had attempted to wrest from France since 1795,
+had undoubtedly been the equivalent for which, in the days of the
+Directory, Austria had been permitted to extend itself in Italy, and
+Prussia in Germany. In the opinion of men who sincerely condemned
+Napoleon's distant conquests, the territory between France and the Rhine
+was no more than France might legitimately demand, as a counterpoise to the
+vast accessions falling to one or other of the Continental Powers out of
+the territory of Poland, Venice, and the body of suppressed States in
+Germany. Poland, excluding the districts taken from it before 1792,
+contained a population twice as great as that of Belgium and the Rhenish
+Provinces together: Venice carried with it, in addition to a commanding
+province on the Italian mainland, the Eastern Adriatic Coast as far as
+Ragusa. If it were true that the proportionate increase of power formed the
+only solid principle of European policy, France sustained a grievous injury
+in receiving back the limits of 1791, when every other State on the
+Continent was permitted to retain the territory, or an equivalent for the
+territory, which it had gained in the great changes that took place between
+1791 and 1814. But in fact there had never been a time during the last
+hundred and fifty years when France, under an energetic Government, had not
+possessed a force threatening to all its neighbours. France, reduced to its
+ancient limits, was still the equal, and far more than the equal, of any of
+the Continental Powers, with all that they had gained during the
+Revolutionary War. It remained the first of European nations, though no
+longer, as in the eighteenth century, the one great nation of the western
+continent. Its efforts after universal empire had aroused other nations
+into life. Had the course of French conquest ceased before Napoleon grasped
+power, France would have retained its frontier of the Rhine, and long have
+exercised an unbounded influence over both Germany and Italy, through the
+incomparably juster and brighter social life which the Revolution, combined
+with all that France had inherited from the past, enabled it to display to
+those countries. Napoleon, in the attempt to impose his rule upon all
+Europe, created a power in Germany whose military future was to be not less
+solid than that of France itself, and left to Europe, in the accord of his
+enemies, a firmer security against French attack than any that the efforts
+of statesmen had ever framed.
+
+[Permanent effect on Europe of period 1792-1814.]
+
+[National sense excited in Germany and Italy.]
+
+The league of the older monarchies had proved stronger in the end than the
+genius and the ambition of a single man. But if, in the service of
+Napoleon, France had exhausted its wealth, sunk its fleets, and sacrificed
+a million lives, only that it might lose all its earlier conquests, and
+resume limits which it had outgrown before Napoleon held his first command,
+it was not thus with the work which, for or against itself, France had
+effected in Europe during the movements of the last twenty years. In the
+course of the epoch now ending the whole of the Continent up to the
+frontiers of Austria and Russia had gained the two fruitful ideas of
+nationality and political freedom. There were now two nations in Europe
+where before there had been but aggregates of artificial States. Germany
+and Italy were no longer mere geographical expressions: in both countries,
+though in a very unequal degree, the newly-aroused sense of nationality had
+brought with it the claim for unity and independence. In Germany, Prussia
+had set a great example, and was hereafter to reap its reward; in Italy
+there had been no State and no statesman to take the lead either in
+throwing off Napoleon's rule, or in forcing him, as the price of support,
+to give to his Italian kingdom a really national government. Failing to act
+for itself, the population of all Italy, except Naples, was parcelled out
+between Austria and the ancient dynasties; but the old days of passive
+submission to the foreigner were gone for ever, and time was to show
+whether those were the dreamers who thought of a united Italy, or those who
+thought that Metternich's statesmanship had for ever settled the fate of
+Venice and of Milan.
+
+[Desire for political liberty.]
+
+The second legacy of the Revolutionary epoch, the idea of constitutional
+freedom, which in 1789 had been as much wanting in Spain, where national
+spirit was the strongest, as in those German States where it was the
+weakest, had been excited in Italy by the events of 1796 and 1798, in Spain
+by the disappearance of the Bourbon king and the self-directed struggle of
+the nation against the invader; in Prussia it had been introduced by the
+Government itself when Stein was at the head of the State. "It is
+impossible," wrote Lord Castlereagh in the spring of 1814, "not to perceive
+a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of
+freedom are in full operation." [195] There was in fact scarcely a Court in
+Europe which was not now declaring its intention to frame a Constitution.
+The professions might be lightly made; the desire and the capacity for
+self-government might still be limited to a narrower class than the friends
+of liberty imagined; but the seed was sown, and a movement had begun which
+was to gather strength during the next thirty years of European history,
+while one revolution after another proved that Governments could no longer
+with safety disregard the rights of their subjects.
+
+[Social changes.]
+
+Lastly, in all the territory that had formed Napoleon's Empire and
+dependencies, and also in Prussia, legal changes had been made in the
+rights and relations of the different classes of society, so important as
+almost to create a new type of social life. Within the Empire itself the
+Code Napoleon, conferring upon the subjects of France the benefits which
+the French had already won for themselves, had superseded a society resting
+on class-privilege, on feudal service, and on the despotism of custom, by a
+society resting on equality before the law, on freedom of contract, and on
+the unshackled ownership and enjoyment of land, whether the holder
+possessed an acre or a league. The principles of the French Code, if not
+the Code itself, had been introduced into Napoleon's kingdom of Italy, into
+Naples, and into almost all the German dependencies of France. In Prussia
+the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg had been directed, though less boldly,
+towards the same end; and when, after 1814, the Rhenish Provinces were
+annexed to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna, the Government was wise
+enough and liberal enough to leave these districts in the enjoyment of the
+laws which France had given them, and not to risk a comparison between even
+the best Prussian legislation and the Code Napoleon. In other territory now
+severed from France and restored to German or Italian princes, attempts
+were not wanting to obliterate the new order and to re-introduce the
+burdens and confusions of the old regime. But these reactions, even where
+unopposed for a time, were too much in conflict with the spirit of the age
+to gain more than a temporary and precarious success. The people had begun
+to know good and evil: examples of a free social order were too close at
+hand to render it possible for any part of the western continent to relapse
+for any very long period into the condition of the eighteenth century.
+
+[Limits.]
+
+It was indeed within a distinct limit that the Revolutionary epoch effected
+its work of political and social change. Neither England nor Austria
+received the slightest impulse to progress. England, on the contrary,
+suspended almost all internal improvement during the course of the war; the
+domestic policy of the Austrian Court, so energetic in the reign
+immediately preceding the Revolution, became for the next twenty years,
+except where it was a policy of repression, a policy of pure vacancy and
+inaction. But in all other States of Western Europe the period which
+reached its close with Napoleon's fall left deep and lasting traces behind
+it. Like other great epochs of change, it bore its own peculiar character.
+It was not, like the Renaissance and the Reformation, a time when new
+worlds of faith and knowledge transformed the whole scope and conception of
+human life; it was not, like our own age, a time when scientific discovery
+and increased means of communication silently altered the physical
+conditions of existence; it was a time of changes directly political in
+their nature, and directly effected by the political agencies of
+legislation and of war. In the perspective of history the Napoleonic age
+will take its true place among other, and perhaps greater, epochs. Its
+elements of mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes
+of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political
+energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty
+five years, it will perhaps scarcely find a parallel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+The Restoration of 1814--Norway--Naples--Westphalia--Spain--The Spanish
+Constitution overthrown: Victory of the Clergy--Restoration in France--The
+Charta--Encroachments of the Nobles and Clergy--Growing Hostility to the
+Bourbons--Congress of Vienna--Talleyrand and the Four Powers--The Polish
+Question--The Saxon Question--Theory of Legitimacy--Secret Alliance against
+Russia and Prussia--Compromise--The Rhenish Provinces--Napoleon leaves Elba
+and lands in France--His Declarations--Napoleon at Grenoble, at Lyon, at
+Paris--The Congress of Vienna unites Europe against France--Murat's Action
+in Italy--The Acte Additionnel--The Champ de Mai--Napoleon takes up the
+offensive--Battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo--Affairs at
+Paris--Napoleon sent to St. Helena--Wellington and Fouche--Arguments on the
+proposed Cession of French Territory--Treaty of Holy Alliance--Second
+Treaty of Paris--Conclusion of the Work of the Congress of Vienna--
+Federation of Germany--Estimate of the Congress of Vienna and of the
+Treaties of 1815--The Slave Trade.
+
+
+Of all the events which, in the more recent history of mankind, have struck
+the minds of nations with awe, and appeared to reveal in its direct
+operation a power overruling the highest human effort, there is none equal
+in grandeur and terror to the annihilation of Napoleon's army in the
+invasion of Russia. It was natural that a generation which had seen State
+after State overthrown, and each new violation of right followed by an
+apparent consolidation of the conqueror's strength, should view in the
+catastrophe of 1812 the hand of Providence visibly outstretched for the
+deliverance of Europe. [196] Since that time many years have passed. Perils
+which then seemed to envelop the future of mankind now appear in part
+illusory; sacrifices then counted cheap have proved of heavy cost. The
+history of the two last generations shows that not everything was lost to
+Europe in passing subjection to a usurper, nor everything gained by the
+victory of his opponents. It is now not easy to suppress the doubt whether
+the permanent interests of mankind would not have been best served by
+Napoleon's success in 1812. His empire had already attained dimensions that
+rendered its ultimate disruption certain: less depended upon the
+postponement or the acceleration of its downfall than on the order of
+things ready to take its place. The victory of Napoleon in 1812 would have
+been followed by the establishment of a Polish kingdom in the provinces
+taken from Russia. From no generosity in the conqueror, from no sympathy on
+his part with a fallen people, but from the necessities of his political
+situation, Poland must have been so organised as to render it the bulwark
+of French supremacy in the East. The serf would have been emancipated. The
+just hatred of the peasant to the noble, which made the partition of 1772
+easy, and has proved fatal to every Polish uprising from that time to the
+present, would have been appeased by an agrarian reform executed with
+Napoleon's own unrivalled energy and intelligence, and ushered in with
+brighter hopes than have at any time in the history of Poland lit the dark
+shades of peasant-life. The motives which in 1807 had led Napoleon to stay
+his hand, and to content himself with half-measures of emancipation in the
+Duchy of Warsaw [197], could have had no place after 1812, when Russia
+remained by his side, a mutilated but inexorable enemy, ever on the watch
+to turn to its own advantage the first murmurs of popular discontent beyond
+the border. Political independence, the heritage of the Polish noble, might
+have been withheld, but the blessing of landed independence would have been
+bestowed on the mass of the Polish people. In the course of some years this
+restored kingdom, though governed by a member of the house of Bonaparte,
+would probably have gained sufficient internal strength to survive the
+downfall of Napoleon's Empire or his own decease. England, Austria, and
+Turkey would have found it no impossible task to prevent its absorption by
+Alexander at the re-settlement of Europe, if indeed the collapse of Russia
+had not been followed by the overthrow of the Porte, and the establishment
+of a Greek, a Bulgarian, and a Roumanian Kingdom under the supremacy of
+France. By the side of the three absolute monarchs of Central and Eastern
+Europe there would have remained, upon Napoleon's downfall, at least one
+people in possession of the tradition of liberty: and from the example of
+Poland, raised from the deep but not incurable degradation of its social
+life, the rulers of Russia might have gained courage to emancipate the
+serf, without waiting for the lapse of another half-century and the
+occurrence of a second ruinous war. To compare a possible sequence of
+events with the real course of history, to estimate the good lost and evil
+got through events which at the time seemed to vindicate the moral
+governance of the world, is no idle exercise of the imagination. It may
+serve to give caution to the judgment: it may guard us against an arbitrary
+and fanciful interpretation of the actual. The generation which witnessed
+the fall of Napoleon is not the only one which has seen Providence in the
+fulfilment of its own desire, and in the storm-cloud of nature and history
+has traced with too sanguine gaze the sacred lineaments of human equity and
+love.
+
+[Settlement of 1814.]
+
+[Norway.]
+
+[Naples.]
+
+The Empire of Napoleon had indeed passed away. The conquests won by the
+first soldiers of the Republic were lost to France along with all the
+latest spoils of its Emperor; but the restoration which was effected in
+1814 was no restoration of the political order which had existed on the
+Continent before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The Powers which
+had overthrown Napoleon had been partakers, each in its own season, in the
+system of aggrandisement which had obliterated the old frontiers of Europe.
+Russia had gained Finland, Bessarabia, and the greater part of Poland;
+Austria had won Venice, Dalmatia, and Salzburg; Prussia had received
+between the years 1792 and 1806 an extension of territory in Poland and
+Northern Germany that more than doubled its area. It was now no part of the
+policy of the victorious Courts to reinstate the governments which they had
+themselves dispossessed: the settlement of 1814, in so far as it deserved
+the name of a restoration, was confined to the territory taken from
+Napoleon and from princes of his house. Here, though the claims of
+Republics and Ecclesiastical Princes were forgotten, the titles of the old
+dynasties were freely recognised. In France itself, in the Spanish
+Peninsula, in Holland, Westphalia, Piedmont, and Tuscany, the banished
+houses resumed their sovereignty. It cost the Allies nothing to restore
+these countries to their hereditary rulers, and it enabled them to describe
+the work of 1814 in general terms as the restoration of lawful government
+and national independence. But the claims of legitimacy, as well as of
+national right, were, as a matter of fact, only remembered where there
+existed no motive to disregard them; where they conflicted with
+arrangements of policy, they received small consideration. Norway, which
+formed part of the Danish monarchy, had been promised by Alexander to
+Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, in 1812, in return for his support
+against Napoleon, and the bargain had been ratified by the Allies. As soon
+as Napoleon was overthrown, Bernadotte claimed his reward. It was in vain
+that the Norwegians, abandoned by their king, declared themselves
+independent, and protested against being handed over like a flock of sheep
+by the liberators of Europe. The Allies held to their contract; a British
+fleet was sent to assist Bernadotte in overpowering his new subjects, and
+after a brief resistance the Norwegians found themselves compelled to
+submit to their fate (April--Aug., 1814). [198] At the other extremity of
+Europe a second of Napoleon's generals still held his throne among the
+restored legitimate monarchs. Murat, King of Naples, had forsaken Napoleon
+in time to make peace and alliance with Austria. Great Britain, though
+entering into a military convention, had not been a party to this treaty;
+and it had declared that its own subsequent support of Murat would depend
+upon the condition that he should honourably exert himself in Italy against
+Napoleon's forces. This condition Murat had not fulfilled. The British
+Government was, however, but gradually supplied with proofs of his
+treachery; nor was Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, inclined to raise
+new difficulties at Vienna by pressing the claim of Ferdinand of Sicily to
+his territories on the mainland. [199] Talleyrand, on behalf of the
+restored Bourbons of Paris, intended to throw all his strength into a
+diplomatic attack upon Murat before the end of the Congress; but for the
+present Murat's chances seemed to be superior to those of his rival.
+Southern Italy thus continued in the hands of a soldier of fortune, who,
+unlike Bernadotte, was secretly the friend of Napoleon, and ready to
+support him in any attempt to regain his throne.
+
+[Restoration in Westphalia.]
+
+The engagement of the Allies towards Bernadotte, added to the stipulations
+of the Peace of Paris, left little to be decided by the Congress of Vienna
+beyond the fate of Poland, Saxony, and Naples, and the form of political
+union to be established in Germany. It had been agreed that the Congress
+should assemble within two months after the signature of the Peace of
+Paris: this interval, however, proved to be insufficient, and the autumn
+had set in before the first diplomatists arrived at Vienna, and began the
+conferences which preceded the formal opening of the Congress. In the
+meantime a singular spectacle was offered to Europe by the Courts whose
+restoration was the subject of so much official thanksgiving. Before King
+Louis XVIII. returned to Paris, the exiled dynasties had regained their
+thrones in Northern Germany and in Spain. The process of reaction had begun
+in Hanover and in Hesse as soon as the battle of Leipzig had dissolved the
+Kingdom of Westphalia and driven Napoleon across the Rhine. Hanover indeed
+did not enjoy the bodily presence of its Sovereign: its character was
+oligarchical, and the reaction here was more the affair of the privileged
+classes than of the Government. In Hesse a prince returned who was the very
+embodiment of divine right, a prince who had sturdily fought against French
+demagogues in 1792, and over whose stubborn, despotic nature the
+revolutions of a whole generation and the loss of his own dominions since
+the battle of Jena had passed without leaving a trace. The Elector was
+seventy years old when, at the end of the year 1813, his faithful subjects
+dragged his carriage in triumph into the streets of Cassel. On the day
+after his arrival he gave orders that the Hessian soldiery who had been
+sent on furlough after the battle of Jena should present themselves, every
+man in the garrison-town where he had stood on the 1st of November, 1806. A
+few weeks later all the reforms of the last seven years were swept away
+together. The Code Napoleon ceased to be the law of the land; the old
+oppressive distinctions of caste, with the special courts for the
+privileged orders, came again into force, in defiance of the spirit of the
+age. The feudal burdens of the peasantry were revived, the purchasers of
+State-lands compelled to relinquish the land without receiving back any of
+their purchase-money. The decimal coinage was driven out of the country.
+The old system of taxation, with its iniquitous exemptions, was renewed.
+All promotions, all grants of rank made by Jerome's Government were
+annulled: every officer, every public servant resumed the station which he
+had occupied on the 1st of November, 1806. The very pigtails and powder of
+the common soldier under the old regime were revived. [200]
+
+[Restoration in Spain.]
+
+The Hessians and their neighbours in North-Western Germany had from of old
+been treated with very little ceremony by their rulers; and if they
+welcomed back a family which had been accustomed to hire them out at so
+much a head to fight against the Hindoos or by the side of the North
+American Indians, it only proved that they preferred their native
+taskmasters to Jerome Bonaparte and his French crew of revellers and
+usurers. The next scene in the European reaction was a far more mournful
+one. Ferdinand of Spain had no sooner re-crossed the Pyrenees in the spring
+of 1814, than, convinced of his power by the transports of popular
+enthusiasm that attended his progress through Northern Spain, he determined
+to overthrow the Constitution of 1812, and to re-establish the absolute
+monarchy which had existed before the war. The courtiers and ecclesiastics
+who gathered round the King dispelled any scruples that he might have felt
+in lifting his hand against a settlement accepted by the nation. They
+represented to him that the Cortes of 1812--which, whatever their faults,
+had been recognised as the legitimate Government of Spain by both England
+and Russia--consisted of a handful of desperate men, collected from the
+streets of Cadiz, who had taken upon themselves to insult the Crown, to rob
+the Church, and to imperil the existence of the Catholic Faith. On the
+entry of the King into Valencia, the cathedral clergy expressed the wishes
+of their order in the address of homage which they offered to Ferdinand.
+"We beg your Majesty," their spokesman concluded, "to take the most
+vigorous measures for the restoration of the Inquisition, and of the
+ecclesiastical system that existed in Spain before your Majesty's
+departure." "These," replied the King, "are my own wishes, and I will not
+rest until they are fulfilled." [201]
+
+[Spanish Constitution overthrown.]
+
+The victory of the clergy was soon declared. On the 11th of May the King
+issued a manifesto at Valencia, proclaiming the Constitution of 1812 and
+every decree of the Cortes null and void, and denouncing the penalties of
+high treason against everyone who should defend the Constitution by act,
+word, or writing. A variety of promises, made only to be broken,
+accompanied this assertion of the rights of the Crown. The King pledged
+himself to summon new Cortes as soon as public order should be restored, to
+submit the expenditure to the control of the nation, and to maintain
+inviolate the security of person and property. It was a significant comment
+upon Ferdinand's professions of Liberalism that on the very day on which
+the proclamation was issued the censorship of the Press was restored. But
+the King had not miscalculated his power over the Spanish people. The same
+storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's
+reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass
+of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty:
+they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at
+the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798
+had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern
+Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by arresting thirty of the
+most distinguished of the Liberals, than tumults broke out in every part of
+the country against Constitutionalist magistrates and citizens. Mobs,
+headed by priests bearing the standard of the Inquisition, destroyed the
+tablets erected in honour of the Constitution of 1812, and burned Liberal
+writings in bonfires in the market-places. The prisons were filled with men
+who, but a short time before, had been the objects of popular adulation.
+
+[The clergy in power.]
+
+Whatever pledges of allegiance had been given to the Constitution of 1812,
+it was clear that this Constitution had no real hold on the nation, and
+that Ferdinand fulfilled the wish of the majority of Spaniards in
+overthrowing it. A wise and energetic sovereign would perhaps have allowed
+himself to use this outburst of religious fanaticism for the purpose of
+substituting some better order for the imprudent arrangements of 1812.
+Ferdinand, an ignorant, hypocritical buffoon, with no more notion of
+political justice or generosity than the beasts of the field, could only
+substitute for the fallen Cortes a government by palace-favourites and
+confessors. It was in vain, that the representatives of Great Britain urged
+the King to fulfil his constitutional promises, and to liberate the persons
+who had unjustly been thrown into prison. [202] The clergy were masters of
+Spain and of the King: their influence daily outweighed even that of
+Ferdinand's own Ministers, when, under the pressure of financial necessity,
+the Ministers began to offer some resistance to the exorbitant demands of
+the priesthood. On the 23rd of May the King signed an edict restoring all
+monasteries throughout Spain, and reinstating them in their lands. On the
+24th of June the clergy were declared exempt from taxation. On the 21st of
+July the Church won its crowning triumph in the re-establishment of the
+Inquisition. In the meantime the army was left without pay, in some places
+actually without food. The country was at the mercy of bands of guerillas,
+who, since the disappearance of the enemy, had turned into common brigands,
+and preyed upon their own countrymen. Commerce was extinct; agriculture
+abandoned; innumerable villages were lying in ruins; the population was
+barbarised by the savage warfare with which for years past it had avenged
+its own sufferings upon the invader. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain
+was the one in which the events of the Revolutionary epoch seemed to have
+left an effect most nearly approaching to unmixed evil.
+
+[Restoration in France.]
+
+In comparison with the reaction in the Spanish Peninsula the reaction in
+France was sober and dignified. Louis XVIII. was at least a scholar and a
+man of the world. In the old days, among companions whose names were now
+almost forgotten, he had revelled in Voltaire and dallied with the
+fashionable Liberalism of the time. In his exile he had played the king
+with some dignity; he was even believed to have learnt some political
+wisdom by his six years' residence in England. If he had not character,
+[203] he had at least some tact and some sense of humour; and if not a
+profound philosopher, he was at least an accomplished epicurean. He hated
+the zealotry of his brother, the Count of Artois. He was more inclined to
+quiz the emigrants than to sacrifice anything on their behalf; and the
+whole bent of his mind made him but an insincere ally of the priesthood,
+who indeed could hardly expect to enjoy such an orgy in France as their
+brethren were celebrating in Spain. The King, however, was unable to impart
+his own indifference to the emigrants who returned with him, nor had he
+imagination enough to identify himself, as King of France, with the
+military glories of the nation and with the democratic army that had won
+them. Louis held high notions of the royal prerogative: this would not in
+itself have prevented him from being a successful ruler, if he had been
+capable of governing in the interest of the nation at large. There were few
+Republicans remaining in France; the centralised institutions of the Empire
+remained in full vigour; and although the last months of Napoleon's rule
+had excited among the educated classes a strong spirit of constitutional
+opposition, an able and patriotic Bourbon accepting his new position, and
+wielding power for the benefit of the people and not of a class, might
+perhaps have exercised an authority not much inferior to that possessed by
+the Crown before 1789. But Louis, though rational, was inexperienced and
+supine. He was ready enough to admit into his Ministry and to retain in
+administrative posts throughout the country men who had served under
+Napoleon; but when the emigrants and the nobles, led by the Count of
+Artois, pushed themselves to the front of the public service, and treated
+the restoration of the Bourbons as the victory of their own order, the King
+offered but a faint resistance, and allowed the narrowest class-interests
+to discredit a monarchy whose own better traditions identified it not with
+an aristocracy but with the State.
+
+[The Charta.]
+
+The Constitution promulgated by King Louis XVIII. on the 4th of June, 1814,
+and known as the Charta, [204] was well received by the French nation.
+Though far less liberal than the Constitution accepted by Louis XVI. in
+1791, it gave to the French a measure of representative government to which
+they had been strangers under Napoleon. It created two legislative
+chambers, the Upper House consisting of peers who were nominated by the
+Crown at its pleasure, whether for life-peerages or hereditary dignity; the
+Lower House formed by national election, but by election restricted by so
+high a property-qualification [205] that not one person in two hundred
+possessed a vote. The Crown reserved to itself the sole power of proposing
+laws. In spite of this serious limitation of the competence of the two
+houses, the Lower Chamber possessed, in its right of refusing taxes and of
+discussing and rejecting all measures laid before it, a reality of power
+such as no representative body had possessed in France since the beginning
+of the Consulate. The Napoleonic nobility was placed on an equality with
+the old noblesse of France, though neither enjoyed, as nobles, anything
+more than a titular distinction. [206] Purchasers of landed property sold
+by the State since the beginning of the Revolution were guaranteed in their
+possessions. The principles of religious freedom, of equality before the
+law, and of the admissibility of all classes to public employment, which
+had taken such deep root during the Republic and the Empire, were declared
+to form part of the public law of France; and by the side of these
+deeply-cherished rights the Charta of King Louis XVIII. placed, though in a
+qualified form, the long-forgotten principle of the freedom of the Press.
+
+[Encroachments of Nobles.]
+
+Under such a Constitution there was little room for the old noblesse to
+arrogate to itself any legal superiority over the mass of the French
+nation. What was wanting in law might, however, in the opinion of the Count
+of Artois and his friends, be effected by administration. Of all the
+institutions of France the most thoroughly national and the most thoroughly
+democratic was the army; it was accordingly against the army that the
+noblesse directed its first efforts. Financial difficulties made a large
+reduction in the forces necessary. Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants
+were accordingly dismissed on half-pay; but no sooner had this measure of
+economy been effected than a multitude of emigrants who had served against
+the Republic in the army of the Prince of Conde or in La Vendee were
+rewarded with all degrees of military rank. Naval officers who had quitted
+the service of France and entered that of its enemies were reinstated with
+the rank which they had held in foreign navies. [207] The tricolor, under
+which every battle of France had been fought from Jemappes to Montmartre,
+was superseded by the white flag of the House of Bourbon, under which no
+living soldier had marched to victory. General Dupont, known only by his
+capitulation at Baylen in 1808, was appointed Minister of War. The Imperial
+Guard was removed from service at the Palace, and the so-called Military
+Household of the old Bourbon monarchy revived, with the privileges and the
+insignia belonging to the period before 1775. Young nobles who had never
+seen a shot fired crowded into this favoured corps, where the musketeer and
+the trooper held the rank and the pay of a lieutenant in the army. While in
+every village of France some battered soldier of Napoleon cursed the
+Government that had driven him from his comrades, the Court revived at
+Paris all the details of military ceremonial that could be gathered from
+old almanacks, from the records of court-tailors, and from the memories of
+decayed gallants. As if to convince the public that nothing had happened
+during the last twenty-two years, the aged Marquis de Chansenets, who had
+been Governor of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, and had then
+escaped by hiding among the bodies of the dead, [208] resumed his place at
+the head of the officers of the Palace.
+
+[Encroachments of the clergy.]
+
+[Growing hostility to the Bourbons.]
+
+These were but petty triumphs for the emigrants and nobles, but they were
+sufficient to make the restored monarchy unpopular. Equally injurious was
+their behaviour in insulting the families of Napoleon's generals, in
+persecuting men who had taken part in the great movement of 1789, and in
+intimidating the peasant-owners of land that had been confiscated and sold
+by the State. Nor were the priesthood backward in discrediting the
+Government of Louis XVIII. in the service of their own order. It might be
+vain to think of recovering the Churchlands, or of introducing the
+Inquisition into France, but the Court might at least be brought to invest
+itself with the odour of sanctity, and the parish-priest might be made as
+formidable a person within his own village as the mayor or the agent of the
+police-minister. Louis XVIII. was himself sceptical and self-indulgent.
+This, however, did not prevent him from publishing a letter to the Bishops
+placing his kingdom under the especial protection of the Virgin Mary, and
+from escorting the image of the patron-saint through the streets of Paris
+in a procession in which Marshal Soult and other regenerate Jacobins of the
+Court braved the ridicule of the populace by acting as candle-bearers.
+Another sign of the King's submission to the clergy was the publication of
+an edict which forbade buying and selling on Sundays and festivals.
+
+Whatever the benefits of a freely-observed day of rest, this enactment,
+which was not submitted to the Chambers, passed for an arrogant piece of
+interference on the part of the clergy with national habits; and while it
+caused no inconvenience to the rich, it inflicted substantial loss upon a
+numerous and voluble class of petty traders. The wrongs done to the
+French nation by the priests and emigrants who rose to power in 1814 were
+indeed the merest trifle in comparison with the wrongs which it had
+uncomplainingly borne at the hands of Napoleon. But the glory of the
+Empire, the strength and genius of its absolute rule, were gone. In its
+place there was a family which had been dissociated from France during
+twenty years, which had returned only to ally itself with an unpopular
+and dreaded caste, and to prove that even the unexpected warmth with
+which it had been welcomed home could not prevent it from becoming, at
+the end of a few months, utterly alien and uninteresting. The indifference
+of the nation would not have endangered the Bourbon monarchy if the army
+had been won over by the King. But here the Court had excited the
+bitterest enmity. The accord which for a moment had seemed possible even
+to Republicans of the type of Carnot had vanished at a touch. [209]
+Rumours of military conspiracies grew stronger with every month.
+Wellington, now British Ambassador at Paris, warned his Government of the
+changed feeling of the capital, of the gatherings of disbanded officers,
+of possible attacks upon the Tuileries. "The truth is," he wrote, "that
+the King of France without the army is no King." Wellington saw the more
+immediate danger: [210] he failed to see the depth and universality of
+the movement passing over France, which before the end of the year 1814
+had destroyed the hold of the Bourbon monarchy except in those provinces
+where it had always found support, and prepared the nation at large to
+welcome back the ruler who so lately seemed to have fallen for ever.
+
+[Congress of Vienna, Sept., 1814.]
+
+Paris and Madrid divided for some months after the conclusion of peace the
+attention of the political world. At the end of September the centre of
+European interest passed to Vienna. The great council of the Powers, so
+long delayed, was at length assembled. The Czar of Russia, the Kings of
+Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria, and Wuertemberg, and nearly all the statesmen of
+eminence in Europe, gathered round the Emperor Francis and his Minister,
+Metternich, to whom by common consent the presidency of the Congress was
+offered. Lord Castlereagh represented England, and Talleyrand France.
+Rasumoffsky and other Russian diplomatists acted under the immediate
+directions of their master, who on some occasions even entered into
+personal correspondence with the Ministers of the other Powers.
+Hardenberg stood in a somewhat freer relation to King Frederick William;
+Stein was present, but without official place. The subordinate envoys and
+attaches of the greater Courts, added to a host of petty princes and the
+representatives who came from the minor Powers, or from communities which
+had ceased to possess any political existence at all, crowded Vienna. In
+order to relieve the antagonisms which had already come too clearly into
+view, Metternich determined to entertain his visitors in the most
+magnificent fashion; and although the Austrian State was bankrupt, and in
+some districts the people were severely suffering, a sum of about L10,000
+a day was for some time devoted to this purpose. The splendour and the
+gaieties of Metternich were emulated by his guests; and the guardians of
+Europe enjoyed or endured for months together a succession of fetes,
+banquets, dances, and excursions, varied, through the zeal of Talleyrand
+to ingratiate himself with his new master, by a Mass of great solemnity
+on the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. [211] One incident
+lights the faded and insipid record of vanished pageants and defunct
+gallantries. Beethoven was in Vienna. The Government placed the great
+Assembly-rooms at his disposal, and enabled the composer to gratify a
+harmless humour by sending invitations in his own name to each of the
+Sovereigns and grandees then in Vienna. Much personal homage, some
+substantial kindness from these gaudy creatures of the hour, made the
+period of the Congress a bright page in that wayward and afflicted life
+whose poverty has enriched mankind with such immortal gifts.
+
+[Talleyrand and the four Powers.]
+
+The Congress had need of its distractions, for the difficulties which faced
+it were so great that, even after the arrival of the Sovereigns, it was
+found necessary to postpone the opening of the regular sittings until
+November. By the secret articles of the Peace of Paris, the Allies had
+reserved to themselves the disposal of all vacant territory, although their
+conclusions required to be formally sanctioned by the Congress at large.
+The Ministers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia accordingly
+determined at the outset to decide upon all territorial questions among
+themselves, and only after their decisions were completely formed to submit
+them to France and the other Powers. [212] Talleyrand, on hearing of this
+arrangement, protested that France itself was now one of the Allies, and
+demanded that the whole body of European States should at once meet in open
+Congress. The four Courts held to their determination, and began their
+preliminary sittings without Talleyrand. But the French statesman had,
+under the form of a paradox, really stated the true political situation.
+The greater Powers were so deeply divided in their aims that their old bond
+of common interest, the interest of union against France, was now less
+powerful than the impulse that made them seek the support of France against
+one another. Two men had come to the Congress with a definite aim:
+Alexander had resolved to gain the Duchy of Warsaw, and to form it, with or
+without some part of Russian Poland, into a Polish kingdom, attached to his
+own crown: Talleyrand had determined, either on the question of Poland, or
+on the question of Saxony, which arose out of it, to break allied Europe
+into halves, and to range France by the side of two of the great Powers
+against the two others. The course of events favoured for a while the
+design of the Minister: Talleyrand himself prosecuted his plan with an
+ability which, but for the untimely return of Napoleon from Elba, would
+have left France, without a war, the arbiter and the leading Power of
+Europe.
+
+[Polish question.]
+
+Since the Russian victories of 1812, the Emperor Alexander had made no
+secret of his intention to restore a Polish Kingdom and a Polish
+nationality. [213] Like many other designs of this prince, the project
+combined a keen desire for personal glorification with a real generosity of
+feeling. Alexander was thoroughly sincere in his wish not only to make the
+Poles again a people, but to give them a Parliament and a free
+Constitution. The King of Poland, however, was to be no independent prince,
+but Alexander himself: although the Duchy of Warsaw, the chief if not the
+sole component of the proposed new kingdom, had belonged to Austria and
+Prussia after the last partition of Poland, and extended into the heart of
+the Prussian monarchy. Alexander insisted on his anxiety to atone for the
+crime of Catherine in dismembering Poland: the atonement, however, was to
+be made at the sole cost of those whom Catherine had allowed to share the
+booty. Among the other Governments, the Ministry of Great Britain would
+gladly have seen a Polish State established in a really independent form;
+[214] failing this, it desired that the Duchy of Warsaw should be divided,
+as formerly, between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was anxious that the
+fortress of Cracow, at any rate, should not fall into the hands of the
+Czar. Stein and Hardenberg, and even Alexander's own Russian counsellors,
+earnestly opposed the Czar's project, not only on account of the claims of
+Prussia on Warsaw, but from dread of the agitation likely to be produced by
+a Polish Parliament among all Poles outside the new State. King Frederick
+William, however, was unaccustomed to dispute the wishes of his ally; and
+the Czar's offer of Saxony in substitution for Warsaw gave to the Prussian
+Ministers, who were more in earnest than their master, at least the
+prospect of receiving a valuable equivalent for what they might surrender.
+
+[Saxon question.]
+
+By the Treaty of Kalisch, made when Prussia united its arms with those of
+Russia against Napoleon (Feb. 27th, 1813), the Czar had undertaken to
+restore the Prussian monarchy to an extent equal to that which it had
+possessed in 1805. It was known before the opening of the Congress that the
+Czar proposed to do this by handing over to King Frederick William the
+whole of Saxony, whose Sovereign, unlike his colleagues in the Rhenish
+Confederacy, had supported Napoleon up to his final overthrow at Leipzig.
+Since that time the King of Saxony had been held a prisoner, and his
+dominions had been occupied by the Allies. The Saxon question had thus
+already gained the attention of all the European Governments, and each of
+the Ministers now at Vienna brought with him some more or less distinct
+view upon the subject. Castlereagh, who was instructed to foster the union
+of Prussia and Austria against Alexander's threatening ambition, was
+willing that Prussia should annex Saxony if in return it would assist him
+in keeping Russia out of Warsaw: [215] Metternich disliked the annexation,
+but offered no serious objection, provided that in Western Germany Prussia
+would keep to the north of the Main: Talleyrand alone made the defence of
+the King of Saxony the very centre of his policy, and subordinated all
+other aims to this. His instructions, like those of Castlereagh, gave
+priority to the Polish question; [216] but Talleyrand saw that Saxony, not
+Poland, was the lever by which he could throw half of Europe on to the side
+of France; and before the four Allied Courts had come to any single
+conclusion, the French statesman had succeeded, on what at first passed for
+a subordinate point, in breaking up their concert.
+
+[Talleyrand's action on Saxony.]
+
+For a while the Ministers of Austria, Prussia, and England appeared to be
+acting in harmony; and throughout the month of October all three
+endeavoured to shake the purpose of Alexander regarding Warsaw. [217]
+Talleyrand, however, foresaw that the efforts of Prussia in this direction
+would not last very long, and he wrote to Louis XVIII. asking for his
+permission to make a definite offer of armed assistance to Austria in case
+of need. Events took the turn which Talleyrand expected. Early in November
+the King of Prussia completely yielded to Alexander, and ordered Hardenberg
+to withdraw his opposition to the Russian project. Metternich thus found
+himself abandoned on the Polish question by Prussia; and at the same moment
+the answer of King Louis XVIII. arrived, and enabled Talleyrand to assure
+the Austrian Minister that, if resistance to Russia and Prussia should
+become necessary, he might count on the support of a French army.
+Metternich now completely changed his position on the Saxon question, and
+wrote to Hardenberg (Dec. 10) stating that, inasmuch as Prussia had chosen
+to sacrifice Warsaw, the Emperor Francis absolutely forbade the annexation
+of more than a fifth part of the kingdom of Saxony. Castlereagh, disgusted
+with the obstinacy of Russia and the subserviency of King Frederick
+William, forgave Talleyrand for not supporting him earlier, and cordially
+entered into this new plan for thwarting the Northern Powers. The leading
+member of the late Rhenish Confederacy, the King of Bavaria, threw himself
+with eagerness into the struggle against Prussia and against German unity.
+In proportion as Stein and the patriots of 1813 urged the claims of German
+nationality under Prussian leadership against the forfeited rights of a
+Court which had always served on Napoleon's side, the politicians of the
+Rhenish Confederacy declaimed against the ambition and the Jacobinism of
+Prussia, and called upon Europe to defend the united principles of
+hereditary right and of national independence in the person of the King of
+Saxony.
+
+[Theory of Legitimacy.]
+
+Talleyrand's object was attained. He had isolated Russia and Prussia, and
+had drawn to his own side not only England and Austria but the whole body
+of the minor German States. Nothing was wanting but a phrase, or an idea,
+which should consecrate the new league in the opinion of Europe as a league
+of principle, and bind the Allies, in matters still remaining open, to the
+support of the interests of the House of Bourbon. Talleyrand had made his
+theory ready. In notes to Castlereagh and Metternich, [218] he declared
+that the whole drama of the last twenty years had been one great struggle
+between revolution and established right, a struggle at first between
+Republicanism and Monarchy, afterwards between usurping dynasties and
+legitimate dynasties. The overthrow of Napoleon had been the victory of the
+principle of legitimacy; the task of England and Austria was now to extend
+the work of restitution to all Europe, and to defend the principle against
+new threatened aggressions. In the note to Castlereagh, Talleyrand added a
+practical corollary. "To finish the revolution, the principle of legitimacy
+must triumph without exception. The kingdom of Saxony must be preserved;
+the kingdom of Naples must return to its legitimate king."
+
+[Alliance against Russia and Prussia, Jan. 3, 1815.]
+
+As an historical summary of the Napoleonic wars, Talleyrand's doctrine was
+baseless. No one but Pitt had cared about the fate of the Bourbons; no one
+would have hesitated to make peace with Napoleon, if Napoleon would have
+accepted terms of peace. The manifesto was not, however, intended to meet a
+scientific criticism. In the English Foreign Office it was correctly
+described as a piece of drollery; and Metternich was too familiar with the
+language of principles himself to attach much meaning to it in the mouth of
+anyone else. Talleyrand, however, kept a grave countenance. With inimitable
+composure the old Minister of the Directory wrote to Louis XVIII. lamenting
+that Castlereagh did not appear to care much about the principle of
+legitimacy, and in fact did not quite comprehend it; [219] and he added his
+fear that this moral dimness on the part of the English Minister arose from
+the dealing of his countrymen with Tippoo Sahib. But for Europe at
+large,--for the English Liberal party, who looked upon the Saxons and the
+Prussians as two distinct nations, and for the Tories, who forgot that
+Napoleon had made the Elector of Saxony a king; for the Emperor of Austria,
+who had no wish to see the Prussian frontier brought nearer to Prague;
+above all, for the minor German courts who dreaded every approach towards
+German unity,--Talleyrand's watchword was the best that could have been
+invented. His counsel prospered. On the 3rd of January, 1815, after a rash
+threat of war uttered by Hardenberg, a secret treaty [220] was signed by
+the representatives of France, England, and Austria, pledging these Powers
+to take the field, if necessary, against Russia and Prussia in defence of
+the principles of the Peace of Paris. The plan of the campaign was drawn
+up, the number of the forces fixed. Bavaria had already armed; Piedmont,
+Hanover, and even the Ottoman Porte, were named as future members of the
+alliance.
+
+[Compromise on Polish and Saxon questions.]
+
+[Prussia gains Rhenish Provinces.]
+
+It would perhaps be unfair to the French Minister to believe that he
+actually desired to kindle a war on this gigantic scale. Talleyrand had
+not, like Napoleon, a love for war for its own sake. His object was rather
+to raise France from its position as a conquered and isolated Power; to
+surround it with allies; to make the House of Bourbon the representatives
+of a policy interesting to a great part of Europe; and, having thus undone
+the worst results of Napoleon's rule, to trust to some future complication
+for the recovery of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine. Nor was
+Talleyrand's German policy adopted solely as the instrument of a passing
+intrigue. He appears to have had a true sense of the capacity of Prussia to
+transform Germany into a great military nation; and the policy of alliance
+with Austria and protection of the minor States which he pursued in 1814
+was that which he had advocated throughout his career. The conclusion of
+the secret treaty of January 3rd marked the definite success of his plans.
+France was forthwith admitted into the council hitherto known as that of
+the Four Courts, and from this time its influence visibly affected the
+action of Russia and Prussia, reports of the secret treaty having reached
+the Czar immediately after its signature. [221] The spirit of compromise
+now began to animate the Congress. Alexander had already won a virtual
+decision in his favour on the Polish question, but he abated something of
+his claims, and while gaining the lion's share of the Duchy of Warsaw, he
+ultimately consented that Cracow, which threatened the Austrian frontier,
+should be formed into an independent Republic, and that Prussia should
+receive the fortresses of Dantzic and Thorn on the Vistula, with the
+district lying between Thorn and the border of Silesia. [222] This was
+little for Alexander to abandon; on the Saxon question the allies of
+Talleyrand gained most that they demanded. The King of Saxony was restored
+to his throne, and permitted to retain Dresden and about half of his
+dominions. Prussia received the remainder. In lieu of a further expansion
+in Saxony, Prussia was awarded territory on the left bank of the Rhine,
+which, with its recovered Westphalian provinces, restored the monarchy to
+an area and population equal to that which it had possessed in 1805. But
+the dominion given to Prussia beyond the Rhine, though considered at the
+time to be a poor equivalent for the second half of Saxony, was in reality
+a gift of far greater value. It made Prussia, in defence of its own soil,
+the guardian and bulwark of Germany against France. It brought an element
+into the life of the State in striking contrast with the aristocratic and
+Protestant type predominant in the older Prussian provinces,--a Catholic
+population, liberal in its political opinions, and habituated by twenty
+years' union with France to the democratic tendencies of French social
+life. It gave to Prussia something more in common with Bavaria and the
+South, and qualified it, as it had not been qualified before, for its
+future task of uniting Germany under its own leadership.
+
+[Napoleon leaves Elba, Feb. 26.]
+
+[Lands in France, March 1.]
+
+The Polish and Saxon difficulties, which had threatened the peace of
+Europe, were virtually settled before the end of the month of January.
+Early in February Lord Castlereagh left Vienna, to give an account of his
+labours and to justify his policy before the English House of Commons. His
+place at the Congress was taken by the Duke of Wellington. There remained
+the question of Naples, the formation of a Federal Constitution for
+Germany, and several matters of minor political importance, none of which
+endangered the good understanding of the Powers. Suddenly the action of the
+Congress was interrupted by the most startling intelligence. On the night
+of March 6th Metternich was roused from sleep to receive a despatch
+informing him that Napoleon had quitted Elba. The news had taken eight days
+to reach Vienna. Napoleon had set sail on the 26th of February. In the
+silence of his exile he had watched the progress of events in France: he
+had convinced himself of the strength of the popular reaction against the
+priests and emigrants; and the latest intelligence which he had received
+from Vienna led him to believe that the Congress itself was on the point of
+breaking up. There was at least some chance of success in an attempt to
+regain his throne; and, the decision once formed, Napoleon executed it with
+characteristic audacity and despatch. Talleyrand, on hearing that Napoleon
+had left Elba, declared that he would only cross into Italy and there raise
+the standard of Italian independence: instead of doing this, Napoleon made
+straight for France, with the whole of his guard, eleven hundred in number,
+embarked on a little flotilla of seven ships. The voyage lasted three days:
+no French or English vessels capable of offering resistance met the
+squadron. On the 1st of March Napoleon landed at the bay of Jouan, three
+miles to the west of Antibes. A detachment of his guards called upon the
+commandant of Antibes to deliver up the town to the Emperor; the commandant
+refused, and the troops bivouacked that evening, with Napoleon among them,
+in the olive-woods by the shore of the Mediterranean.
+
+[Moves on Grenoble.]
+
+[Troops at La Mure.]
+
+Before daybreak began the march that was to end in Paris. Instead of
+following the coast road of Provence, which would have brought him to
+Toulon and Marseilles, where most of the population were fiercely Royalist,
+[223] and where Massena and other great officers might have offered
+resistance, Napoleon struck northwards into the mountains, intending to
+descend upon Lyons by way of Grenoble. There were few troops in this
+district, and no generals capable of influencing them. The peasantry of
+Dauphine were in great part holders of land that had been taken from the
+Church and the nobles: they were exasperated against the Bourbons, and,
+like the peasantry of France generally, they identified the glory of the
+country which they loved with the name and the person of Napoleon. As the
+little band penetrated into the mountains the villagers thronged around
+them, and by offering their carts and horses enabled Napoleon to march
+continuously over steep and snowy roads at the rate of forty miles a day.
+No troops appeared to dispute these mountain passages: it was not until the
+close of the fifth day's march that Napoleon's mounted guard, pressing on
+in front of the marching column, encountered, in the village of La Mure,
+twenty miles south of Grenoble, a regiment of infantry wearing the white
+cockade of the House of Bourbon. The two bodies of troops mingled and
+conversed in the street: the officer commanding the royal infantry fearing
+the effect on his men, led them back on the road towards Grenoble.
+Napoleon's lancers also retired, and the night passed without further
+communication. At noon on the following day the lancers, again advancing
+towards Grenoble, found the infantry drawn up to defend the road. They
+called out that Napoleon was at hand, and begged the infantry not to fire.
+Presently Napoleon's column came in sight; one of his _aides-de-camp_
+rode to the front of the royal troops, addressed them, and pointed out
+Napoleon. The regiment was already wavering, the officer commanding had
+already given the order of retreat, when the men saw their Emperor
+advancing towards them. They saw his face, they heard his voice: in another
+moment the ranks were broken, and the soldiers were pressing with shouts
+and tears round the leader whom nature had created with such transcendent
+capacity for evil, and endowed with such surpassing power of attracting
+love.
+
+[Enters Grenoble, March 7.]
+
+[Declaration of his purpose.]
+
+Everything was decided by this first encounter. "In six days," said
+Napoleon, "we shall be in the Tuileries." The next pledge of victory came
+swiftly. Colonel Labedoyere, commander of the 7th Regiment of the Line, had
+openly declared for Napoleon in Grenoble, and appeared on the road at the
+head of his men a few hours after the meeting at La Mure. Napoleon reached
+Grenoble the same evening. The town had been in tumult all day. The Prefet
+fled: the general in command sent part of his troops away, and closed the
+gates. On Napoleon's approach the population thronged the ramparts with
+torches; the gates were burst open; Napoleon was borne through the town in
+triumph by a wild and intermingled crowd of soldiers and workpeople. The
+whole mass of the poorer classes of the town welcomed him with enthusiasm:
+the middle classes, though hostile to the Church and the Bourbons, saw too
+clearly the dangers to France involved in Napoleon's return to feel the
+same joy. [224] They remained in the background, neither welcoming Napoleon
+nor interfering with the welcome offered him by others. Thus the night
+passed. On the morning of the next day Napoleon received the magistrates
+and principal inhabitants of the town, and addressed them in terms which
+formed the substance of every subsequent declaration of his policy. "He had
+come," he said, "to save France from the outrages of the returning nobles;
+to secure to the peasant the possession of his land; to uphold the rights
+won in 1789 against a minority which sought to re-establish the privileges
+of caste and the feudal burdens of the last century. France had made trial
+of the Bourbons: it had done well to do so; but the experiment had failed.
+The Bourbon monarchy had proved incapable of detaching itself from its
+worst supports, the priests and nobles: only the dynasty which owed its
+throne to the Revolution could maintain the social work of the Revolution.
+As for himself, he had learnt wisdom by misfortune. He renounced conquest.
+He should give France peace without and liberty within. He accepted the
+Treaty of Paris and the frontiers of 1792. Freed from the necessities which
+had forced him in earlier days to found a military Empire, he recognised
+and bowed to the desire of the French nation for constitutional government.
+He should henceforth govern only as a constitutional sovereign, and seek
+only to leave a constitutional crown to his son."
+
+[Feeling of the various classes.]
+
+[Napoleon enters Lyons, March 10.]
+
+This language was excellently chosen. It satisfied the peasants and the
+workmen, who wished to see the nobles crushed, and it showed at least a
+comprehension of the feelings uppermost in the minds of the wealthier and
+more educated middle classes, the longing for peace, and the aspiration
+towards political liberty. It was also calculated to temper the unwelcome
+impression that an exiled ruler was being forced upon France by the
+soldiery. The military movement was indeed overwhelmingly decisive, yet the
+popular movement was scarcely less so. The Royalists were furious, but
+impotent to act; thoughtful men in all classes held back, with sad
+apprehensions of returning war and calamity; [225] but from the time when
+Napoleon left Grenoble, the nation at large was on his side. There was
+nowhere an effective centre of resistance. The Prefets and other civil
+officers appointed under the Empire still for the most part held their
+posts; they knew themselves to be threatened by the Bourbonist reaction,
+but they had not yet been displaced; their professions of loyalty to Louis
+XVIII. were forced, their instincts of obedience to their old master, even
+if they wished to have done with him, profound. From this class, whose
+cowardice and servility find too many parallels in history, [226] Napoleon
+had little to fear. Among the marshals and higher officers charged with the
+defence of the monarchy, those who sincerely desired to serve the Bourbons
+found themselves powerless in the midst of their troops. Macdonald, who
+commanded at Lyons, had to fly from his men, in order to escape being made
+a prisoner. The Count of Artois, who had come to join him, discovered that
+the only service he could render to the cause of his family was to take
+himself out of sight. Napoleon entered Lyons on the 10th of March, and now
+formally resumed his rank and functions as Emperor. His first edicts
+renewed that appeal to the ideas and passions of the Revolution which had
+been the key-note of every one of his public utterances since leaving Elba.
+Treating the episode of Bourbon restoration as null and void, the edicts of
+Lyons expelled from France every emigrant who had returned without the
+permission of the Republic or the Emperor; they drove from the army the
+whole mass of officers intruded by the Government of Louis XVIII.; they
+invalidated every appointment and every dismissal made in the magistracy
+since the 1st of April, 1814; and, reverting to the law of the Constituent
+Assembly of 1789, abolished all nobility except that which had been
+conferred by the Emperor himself.
+
+[Marshal Ney.]
+
+[The Chambers in Paris.]
+
+[Napoleon enters Paris, March 20.]
+
+From this time all was over. Marshal Ney, who had set out from Paris
+protesting that Napoleon deserved to be confined in an iron cage, [227]
+found, when at some distance from Lyons, that the nation and army were on
+the side of the Emperor, and proclaimed his own adherence to him in an
+address to his troops. The two Chambers of Legislature, which had been
+prorogued, were summoned by King Louis XVIII. as soon as the news of
+Napoleon's landing reached the capital. The Chambers met on the 13th of
+March. The constitutionalist party, though they had opposed various
+measures of King Louis' Government as reactionary, were sincerely loyal to
+the Charta, and hastened, in the cause of constitutional liberty, to offer
+to the King their cordial support in resisting Bonaparte's military
+despotism. The King came down to the Legislative Chamber, and, in a scene
+concerted with his brother, the Count of Artois, made, with great dramatic
+effect, a declaration of fidelity to the Constitution. Lafayette and the
+chiefs of the Parliamentary Liberals hoped to raise a sufficient force from
+the National Guard of Paris to hold Napoleon in check. The project,
+however, came to nought. The National Guard, which represented the middle
+classes of Paris, was decidedly in favour of the Charta and Constitutional
+Government; but it had no leaders, no fighting-organisation, and no
+military spirit. The regular troops who were sent out against Napoleon
+mounted the tricolor as soon as they were out of sight of Paris, and joined
+their comrades. The courtiers passed from threats to consternation and
+helplessness. On the night of March 19th King Louis fled from the
+Tuileries. Napoleon entered the capital the next evening, welcomed with
+acclamations by the soldiers and populace, but not with that general
+rejoicing which had met him at Lyons, and at many of the smaller towns
+through which he had passed.
+
+[Congress of Vienna outlaws Napoleon.]
+
+[Napoleon's preparations for defence.]
+
+France was won: Europe remained behind. On the 13th of March the Ministers
+of all the Great Powers, assembled at Vienna, published a manifesto
+denouncing Napoleon Bonaparte as the common enemy of mankind, and declaring
+him an outlaw. The whole political structure which had been reared with so
+much skill by Talleyrand vanished away. France was again alone, with all
+Europe combined against it. Affairs reverted to the position in which they
+had stood in the month of March, 1814, when the Treaty of Chaumont was
+signed, which bound the Powers to sustain their armed concert against
+France, if necessary, for a period of twenty years. That treaty was now
+formally renewed. [228] The four great Powers undertook to employ their
+whole available resources against Bonaparte until he should be absolutely
+unable to create disturbance, and each pledged itself to keep permanently
+in the field a force of at least a hundred and fifty thousand men. The
+presence of the Duke of Wellington at Vienna enabled the Allies to decide
+without delay upon the general plan for their invasion of France. It was
+resolved to group the allied troops in three masses; one, composed of the
+English and the Prussians under Wellington and Bluecher, to enter France by
+the Netherlands; the two others, commanded by the Czar and Prince
+Schwarzenberg, to advance from the middle and upper Rhine. Nowhere was
+there the least sign of political indecision. The couriers sent by Napoleon
+with messages of amity to the various Courts were turned back at the
+frontiers with their despatches undelivered. It was in vain for the Emperor
+to attempt to keep up any illusion that peace was possible. After a brief
+interval he himself acquainted France with the true resolution of his
+enemies. The most strenuous efforts were made for defence. The old soldiers
+were called from their homes. Factories of arms and ammunition began their
+hurried work in the principal towns. The Emperor organised with an energy
+and a command of detail never surpassed at any period of his life; the
+nature of the situation lent a new character to his genius, and evoked in
+the organisation of systematic defence all that imagination and resource
+which had dazzled the world in his schemes of invasion and surprise. Nor,
+as hitherto, was the nation to be the mere spectator of his exploits. The
+population of France, its National Guard, its _levee en masse_, as
+well as its armies and its Emperor, was to drive the foreigner from French
+soil. Every operation of defensive warfare, from the accumulation of
+artillery round the capital to the gathering of forest-guards and
+free-shooters in the thickets of the Vosges and the Ardennes, occupied in
+its turn the thoughts of Napoleon. [229] Had France shared his resolution
+or his madness, had the Allies found at the outset no chief superior to
+their Austrian leader in 1814, the war on which they were now about to
+enter would have been one of immense difficulty and risk, its ultimate
+issue perhaps doubtful.
+
+[Campaign and fall of Murat, April, 1815]
+
+Before Napoleon or his adversaries were ready to move, hostilities broke
+out in Italy. Murat, King of Naples, had during the winter of 1814 been
+represented at Vienna by an envoy: he was aware of the efforts made by
+Talleyrand to expel him from his throne, and knew that the Government of
+Great Britain, convinced of his own treachery during the pretended
+combination with the Allies in 1814, now inclined to act with France. [230]
+The instinct of self-preservation led him to risk everything in raising the
+standard of Italian independence, rather than await the loss of his
+kingdom; and the return of Napoleon precipitated his fall. At the moment
+when Napoleon was about to leave Elba, Murat, who knew his intention, asked
+the permission of Austria to move a body of troops through Northern Italy
+for the alleged purpose of attacking the French Bourbons, who were
+preparing to restore his rival, Ferdinand. Austria declared that it should
+treat the entry either of French or of Neapolitan troops into Northern
+Italy as an act of war. Murat, as soon as Napoleon's landing in France
+became known, protested to the Allies that he intended to remain faithful
+to them, but he also sent assurances of friendship to Napoleon, and
+forthwith invaded the Papal States. He acted without waiting for Napoleon's
+instructions, and probably with the intention of winning all Italy for
+himself even if Napoleon should victoriously re-establish his Empire. On
+the 10th of April, Austria declared war against him. Murat pressed forward
+and entered Bologna, now openly proclaiming the unity and independence of
+Italy. The feeling of the towns and of the educated classes generally
+seemed to be in his favour, but no national rising took place. After some
+indecisive encounters with the Austrians, Murat retreated. As he fell back
+towards the Neapolitan frontier, his troops melted away. The enterprise
+ended in swift and total ruin; and on the 22nd of May an English and
+Austrian force took possession of the city of Naples in the name of King
+Ferdinand. Murat, leaving his family behind him, fled to France, and sought
+in vain to gain a place by the side of Napoleon in his last great struggle,
+and to retrieve as a soldier the honour which he had lost as a king. [231]
+
+[The Acte Additionnel, April 23, 1815.]
+
+In the midst of his preparations for war with all Europe, Napoleon found it
+necessary to give some satisfaction to that desire for liberty which was
+again so strong in France. He would gladly have deferred all political
+change until victory over the foreigner had restored his own undisputed
+ascendency over men's minds; he was resolved at any rate not to be harassed
+by a Constituent Assembly, like that of 1789, at the moment of his greatest
+peril; and the action of King Louis XVIII. in granting liberty by Charta
+gave him a precedent for creating a Constitution by an Edict supplementary
+to the existing laws of the Empire. Among the Liberal politicians who had
+declared for King Louis XVIII. while Napoleon was approaching Paris, one of
+the most eminent was Benjamin Constant, who had published an article
+attacking the Emperor with great severity on the very day when he entered
+the capital. Napoleon now invited Constant to the Tuileries, assured him
+that he no longer either desired or considered it possible to maintain an
+absolute rule in France, and requested Constant himself to undertake the
+task of drawing up a Constitution. Constant, believing the Emperor to be in
+some degree sincere, accepted the proposals made to him, and, at the cost
+of some personal consistency, entered upon the work, in which Napoleon by
+no means allowed him entire freedom. [232] The result of Constant's labours
+was the Decree known as the Acte Additionnel of 1815. The leading
+provisions of this Act resembled those of the Charta: both professed to
+establish a representative Government and the responsibility of Ministers;
+both contained the usual phrases guaranteeing freedom of religion and
+security of person and property. The principal differences were that the
+Chamber of Peers was now made wholly hereditary, and that the Emperor
+absolutely refused to admit the clause of the Charta abolishing
+confiscation as a penalty for political offences. On the other hand,
+Constant definitely extinguished the censorship of the Press, and provided
+some real guarantee for the free expression of opinion by enacting that
+Press-offences should be judged only in the ordinary Jury-courts. Constant
+was sanguine enough to believe that the document which he had composed
+would reduce Napoleon to the condition of a constitutional king. As a
+Liberal statesman, he pressed the Emperor to submit the scheme to a
+Representative Assembly, where it could be examined and amended. This
+Napoleon refused to do, preferring to resort to the fiction of a Plebiscite
+for the purpose of procuring some kind of national sanction for his Edict.
+The Act was published on the 23rd of April, 1815. Voting lists were then
+opened in all the Departments, and the population of France, most of whom
+were unable to read or write, were invited to answer Yes or No to the
+question whether they approved of Napoleon's plan for giving his subjects
+Parliamentary government.
+
+[The Chambers summoned for June.]
+
+There would have been no difficulty in obtaining some millions of votes for
+any absurdity that the Emperor might be pleased to lay before the French
+people; but among the educated minority who had political theories of their
+own, the publication of this reform by Edict produced the worst possible
+impression. No stronger evidence, it was said, could have been given of the
+Emperor's insincerity than the dictatorial form in which he affected to
+bestow liberty upon France. Scarcely a voice was raised in favour of the
+new Constitution. The measure had in fact failed of its effect. Napoleon's
+object was to excite an enthusiasm that should lead the entire nation, the
+educated classes as well as the peasantry, to rally round him in a struggle
+with the foreigner for life or death: he found, on the contrary, that he
+had actually injured his cause. The hostility of public opinion was so
+serious that Napoleon judged it wise to make advances to the Liberal party,
+and sent his brother Joseph to Lafayette, to ascertain on what terms he
+might gain his support. [233] Lafayette, strongly condemning the form of
+the Acte Additionnel, stated that the Emperor could only restore public
+confidence by immediately convoking the Chambers. This was exactly what
+Napoleon desired to avoid, until he had defeated the English and Prussians;
+nor in fact had the vote of the nation accepting the new Constitution yet
+been given. But the urgency of the need overcame the Emperor's inclinations
+and the forms of law. Lafayette's demand was granted: orders were issued
+for an immediate election, and the meeting of the Chambers fixed for the
+beginning of June, a few days earlier than the probable departure of the
+Emperor to open hostilities on the northern frontier.
+
+[Elections.]
+
+Lafayette's counsel had been given in sincerity, but Napoleon gained little
+by following it. The nation at large had nothing of the faith in the
+elections which was felt by Lafayette and his friends. In some places not a
+single person appeared at the poll: in most, the candidates were elected by
+a few scores of voters. The Royalists absented themselves on principle: the
+population generally thought only of the coming war, and let the professed
+politicians conduct the business of the day by themselves. Among the
+deputies chosen there were several who had sat in the earlier Assemblies of
+the Revolution; and, mingled with placemen and soldiers of the Empire, a
+considerable body of men whose known object was to reduce Napoleon's power.
+One interest alone was unrepresented--that of the Bourbon family, which so
+lately seemed to have been called to the task of uniting the old and the
+new France around itself.
+
+[Champ de Mai.]
+
+Napoleon, troubling himself little about the elections, laboured
+incessantly at his preparations for war, and by the end of May two hundred
+thousand men were ready to take the field. The delay of the Allies, though
+necessary, enabled their adversary to take up the offensive. It was the
+intention of the Emperor to leave a comparatively small force to watch the
+eastern frontier, and himself, at the head of a hundred and twenty-five
+thousand men, to fall upon Wellington and Bluecher in the Netherlands, and
+crush them before they could unite their forces. With this object the
+greater part of the army was gradually massed on the northern roads at
+points between Paris, Lille, and Maubeuge. Two acts of State remained to be
+performed by the Emperor before he quitted the capital; the inauguration of
+the new Constitution and the opening of the Chambers of Legislature. The
+first, which had been fixed for the 26th of May, and announced as a revival
+of the old Frankish Champ de Mai, was postponed till the beginning of the
+following month. On the 1st of June the solemnity was performed with
+extraordinary pomp and splendour, on that same Champ de Mars where,
+twenty-five years before, the grandest and most affecting of all the
+festivals of the Revolution, the Act of Federation, had been celebrated by
+King Louis XVI. and his people. Deputations from each of the constituencies
+of France, from the army, and from every public body, surrounded the
+Emperor in a great amphitheatre enclosed at the southern end of the plain:
+outside there were ranged twenty thousand soldiers of the Guard and other
+regiments; and behind them spread the dense crowd of Paris. When the total
+of the votes given in the Plebiscite had been summed up and declared, the
+Emperor took the oath to the Constitution, and delivered one of his
+masterpieces of political rhetoric. The great officers of State took the
+oath in their turn: mass was celebrated, and Napoleon, leaving the enclosed
+space, then presented their standards to the soldiery in the Champ de Mars,
+addressing some brief, soul-stirring word to each regiment as it passed.
+The spectacle was magnificent, but except among the soldiers themselves a
+sense of sadness and disappointment passed over the whole assembly. The
+speech of the Emperor showed that he was still the despot at heart: the
+applause was forced: all was felt to be ridiculous, all unreal. [234]
+
+[Plan of Napoleon.]
+
+The opening of the Legislative Chambers took place a few days later, and on
+the night of the 11th of June Napoleon started for the northern frontier.
+The situation of the forces opposed to him in this his last campaign
+strikingly resembled that which had given him his first Italian victory in
+1796. Then the Austrians and Sardinians, resting on opposite bases, covered
+the approaches to the Sardinian capital, and invited the assailant to break
+through their centre and drive the two defeated wings along diverging and
+severed paths of retreat. Now the English and the Prussians covered
+Brussels, the English resting westward on Ostend, the Prussians eastward on
+Cologne, and barely joining hands in the middle of a series of posts nearly
+eighty miles long. The Emperor followed the strategy of 1796. He determined
+to enter Belgium by the central road of Charleroi, and to throw his main
+force upon Bluecher, whose retreat, if once he should be severed from his
+colleague, would carry him eastwards towards Liege, and place him outside
+the area of hostilities round Brussels. Bluecher driven eastwards, Napoleon
+believed that he might not only push the English commander out of Brussels,
+but possibly, by a movement westwards, intercept him from the sea and cut
+off his communication with Great Britain. [235]
+
+[Situation of the armies.]
+
+On the night of the 13th of June, the French army, numbering a hundred and
+twenty-nine thousand men, had completed its concentration, and lay gathered
+round Beaumont and Philippeville. Wellington was at Brussels; his troops,
+which consisted of thirty-five thousand English and about sixty thousand
+Dutch, Germans, and Belgians, [236] guarded the country west of the
+Charleroi road as far as Oudenarde on the Scheldt. Bluecher's headquarters
+were at Namur; he had a hundred and twenty thousand Prussians under his
+command, who were posted between Charleroi, Namur, and Liege. Both the
+English and Prussian generals were aware that very large French forces had
+been brought close to the frontier, but Wellington imagined Napoleon to be
+still in Paris, and believed that the war would be opened by a forward
+movement of Prince Schwarzenberg into Alsace. It was also his fixed
+conviction that if Napoleon entered Belgium he would throw himself not upon
+the Allied centre, but upon the extreme right of the English towards the
+sea. [237] In the course of the 14th, the Prussian outposts reported that
+the French were massed round Beaumont: later in the same day there were
+clear signs of an advance upon Charleroi. Early next morning the attack on
+Charleroi began. The Prussians were driven out of it, and retreated in the
+direction of Ligny, whither Bluecher now brought up all the forces within
+his reach. It was unknown to Wellington until the afternoon of the 15th
+that the French had made any movement whatever: on receiving the news of
+their advance, he ordered a concentrating movement of all his forces
+eastward, in order to cover the road to Brussels and to co-operate with the
+Prussian general. A small division of the British army took post at Quatre
+Bras that night, and on the morning of the 16th Wellington himself rode to
+Ligny, and promised his assistance to Bluecher, whose troops were already
+drawn up and awaiting the attack of the French.
+
+[Ligny, June 16.]
+
+But the march of the invader was too rapid for the English to reach the
+field of battle. Already, on returning to Quatre Bras in the afternoon,
+Wellington found his own troops hotly engaged. Napoleon had sent Ney along
+the road to Brussels to hold the English in check and, if possible, to
+enter the capital, while he himself, with seventy thousand men, attacked
+Bluecher. The Prussian general had succeeded in bringing up a force superior
+in number to his assailants; but the French army, which consisted in a
+great part of veterans recalled to the ranks, was of finer quality than any
+that Napoleon had led since the campaign of Moscow, and it was in vain that
+Bluecher and his soldiers met them with all the gallantry and even more than
+the fury of 1813. There was murderous hand-to-hand fighting in the villages
+where the Prussians had taken up their position: now the defenders, now the
+assailants gave way: but at last the Prussians, with a loss of thirteen
+thousand men, withdrew from the combat, and left the battlefield in
+possession of the enemy. If the conquerors had followed up the pursuit that
+night, the cause of the Allies would have been ruined. The effort of battle
+had, however, been too great, or the estimate which Napoleon made of his
+adversary's rallying power was too low. He seems to have assumed that
+Bluecher must necessarily retreat eastwards towards Namur; while in reality
+the Prussian was straining every nerve to escape northwards, and to restore
+his severed communication with his ally.
+
+[Quatre Bras, June 16.]
+
+At Quatre Bras the issue of the day was unfavourable to the French. Ney
+missed his opportunity of seizing this important point before it was
+occupied by the British in any force; and when the battle began the British
+infantry-squares unflinchingly bore the attack of Ney's cavalry, and drove
+them back again and again with their volleys, until successive
+reinforcements had made the numbers on both sides even. At the close of the
+day the French marshal, baffled and disheartened, drew back his troops to
+their original position. The army-corps of General d'Erlon, which Napoleon
+had placed between himself and Ney in order that it might act wherever
+there was the greatest need, was first withdrawn from Ney to assist at
+Ligny, and then, as it was entering into action at Ligny, recalled to
+Quatre Bras, where it arrived only after the battle was over. Its presence
+in either field would probably have altered the issue of the campaign.
+
+[Prussian movement.]
+
+Bluecher, on the night of the 16th, lay disabled and almost senseless; his
+lieutenant, Gneisenau, not only saved the army, but repaired, and more than
+repaired, all its losses by a memorable movement northwards that brought
+the Prussians again into communication with the British. Napoleon, after an
+unexplained inaction during the night of the 16th and the morning of the
+17th, committed the pursuit of the Prussians to Marshal Grouchy, ordering
+him never to let the enemy out of his sight; but Bluecher and Gneisenau had
+already made their escape, and had concentrated so large a body in the
+neighbourhood of Wavre, that Grouchy could not now have prevented a force
+superior to his own from uniting with the English, even if he had known the
+exact movements of each of the three armies, and, with a true presentiment
+of his master's danger, had attempted to rejoin him on the morrow.
+
+Wellington, who had both anticipated that Bluecher would be beaten at Ligny,
+and assured himself that the Prussian would make good his retreat
+northwards, moved on the 17th from Quatre Bras to Waterloo, now followed by
+Napoleon and the mass of the French army. At Waterloo he drew up for
+battle, trusting to the promise of the gallant Prussian that he would
+advance in that direction on the following day. Bluecher, in so doing,
+exposed himself to the risk of having his communications severed and half
+his army captured, if Napoleon should either change the direction of his
+main attack and bend eastwards, or should crush Wellington before the
+arrival of the Prussians, and seize the road from Brussels to Louvain with
+a victorious force. Such considerations would have driven a commander like
+Schwarzenberg back to Liege, but they were thrown to the winds by Bluecher
+and Gneisenau. In just reliance on his colleague's energy, Wellington, with
+thirty thousand English and forty thousand Dutch, Germans, and Belgians,
+awaited the attack of Napoleon, at the head of seventy-four thousand
+veteran soldiers. The English position extended two miles along the brow of
+a gentle slope of cornfields, and crossed at right angles the great road
+from Charleroi to Brussels; the chateau of Hugomont, some way down the
+slope on the right, and the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, on the high-road
+in front of the left centre, served as fortified outposts. The French
+formed on the opposite and corresponding slope; the country was so open
+that, but for the heavy rain on the evening of the 17th, artillery could
+have moved over almost any part of the field with perfect freedom.
+
+[Waterloo, June 18.]
+
+At eleven o'clock on Sunday, the 18th of June, the battle began. Napoleon,
+unconscious of the gathering of the Prussians on his right, and
+unacquainted with the obstinacy of English troops, believed the victory
+already thrown into his hands by Wellington's hardihood. His plan was to
+burst through the left of the English line near La Haye Sainte, and thus to
+drive Wellington westwards and place the whole French army between its two
+defeated enemies. The first movement was an assault on the buildings of
+Hugomont, made for the purpose of diverting Wellington from the true point
+of attack. The English commander sent detachments to this outpost
+sufficient to defend it, but no more. After two hours' indecisive fighting
+and a heavy cannonade, Ney ordered D'Erlon's corps forward to the great
+onslaught on the centre and left. As the French column pressed up the
+slope, General Picton charged at the head of a brigade. The English leader
+was among the first to fall, but his men drove the enemy back, and at the
+same time the Scots Greys, sweeping down from the left, cut right through
+both the French infantry and their cavalry supports, and, charging far up
+the opposite slope, reached and disabled forty of Ney's guns, before they
+were in their turn overpowered and driven back by the French dragoons. The
+English lost heavily, but the onslaught of the enemy had totally failed,
+and thousands of prisoners remained behind. There was a pause in the
+infantry combat; and again the artillery of Napoleon battered the English
+centre, while Ney marshalled fresh troops for a new and greater effort.
+About two o'clock the attack was renewed on the left. La Haye Sainte was
+carried, and vast masses of cavalry pressed up the English slope, and rode
+over the plateau to the very front of the English line. Wellington sent no
+cavalry to meet them, but trusted, and trusted justly, to the patience and
+endurance of the infantry themselves, who, hour after hour, held their
+ground, unmoved by the rush of the enemy's horse and the terrible spectacle
+of havoc and death in their own ranks; for all through the afternoon the
+artillery of Napoleon poured its fire wherever the line was left open, or
+the assault of the French cavalry rolled back.
+
+At last the approach of the Prussians visibly told. Napoleon had seen their
+vanguard early in the day, and had detached Count Lobau with seven thousand
+men to hold them in check; but the little Prussian corps gradually swelled
+to an army, and as the day wore on it was found necessary to reinforce
+Count Lobau with some of the finest divisions of the French infantry. Still
+reports came in of new Prussian columns approaching. At six o'clock
+Napoleon prepared to throw his utmost strength into one grand final attack
+upon the British, and to sweep them away before the battle became general
+with their allies. Two columns of the Imperial Guard, supported by every
+available regiment, moved from the right and left towards the English
+centre. The column on the right, unchecked by the storm of Wellington's
+cannon-shot from front and flank, pushed to the very ridge of the British
+slope, and came within forty yards of the cross-road where the English
+Guard lay hidden. Then Wellington gave the order to fire. The French
+recoiled; the English advanced at the charge, and drove the enemy down the
+hill, returning themselves for a while to their own position. The left
+column of the French Guard attacked with equal bravery, and met with the
+same fate. Then, while the French were seeking to re-form at the bottom of
+the hill, Wellington commanded a general advance. The whole line of the
+British infantry and cavalry swept down into the valley; before them the
+baffled and sorely-stricken host of the enemy broke into a confused mass;
+only the battalions of the old Guard, which had halted in the rear of the
+attacking columns, remained firm together. Bluecher, from the east, dealt
+the death-blow, and, pressing on to the road by which the French were
+escaping, turned the defeat into utter ruin and dispersion. The pursuit,
+which Wellington's troops were too exhausted to attempt, was carried on
+throughout the night by the Prussian cavalry with memorable ardour and
+terrible success. Before the morning the French army was no more than a
+rabble of fugitives.
+
+[Napoleon at Paris.]
+
+[Allies enter Paris, July 7.]
+
+Napoleon fled to Philippeville, and made some ineffectual attempts both
+there and at Laon to fix a rallying point for his vanished forces. From
+Laon he hastened to Paris, which he reached at sunrise on the 21st. His
+bulletin describing the defeat of Waterloo was read to the Chambers on the
+same morning. The Lower House immediately declared against the Emperor, and
+demanded his abdication. Unless Napoleon seized the dictatorship his cause
+was lost. Carnot and Lucien Bonaparte urged him to dismiss the Chambers and
+to stake all on his own strong will; but they found no support among the
+Emperor's counsellors. On the next day Napoleon abdicated in favour of his
+son. But it was in vain that he attempted to impose an absent successor
+upon France, and to maintain his own Ministers in power. It was equally in
+vain that Carnot, filled with the memories of 1793, called upon the
+Assembly to continue the war and to provide for the defence of Paris. A
+Provisional Government entered upon office. Days were spent in inaction and
+debate while the Allies advanced through France. On the 28th of June, the
+Prussians appeared on the north of the capital; and, as the English
+followed, they moved to the south of the Seine, out of the range of the
+fortifications with which Napoleon had covered the side of St. Denis and
+Montmartre. Davoust, with almost all the generals in Paris, declared
+defence to be impossible. On the 3rd of July, a capitulation was signed.
+The remnants of the French army were required to withdraw beyond the Loire.
+The Provisional Government dissolved itself; the Allied troops entered the
+capital and on the following day the Members of the Chamber of Deputies, on
+arriving at their Hall of Assembly, found the gates closed, and a
+detachment of soldiers in possession. France was not, even as a matter of
+form, consulted as to its future government. Louis XVIII. was summarily
+restored to his throne. Napoleon, who had gone to Rochefort with the
+intention of sailing to the United States, lingered at Rochefort until
+escape was no longer possible, and then embarked on the British ship
+_Bellerophon_, commending himself, as a second Themistocles, to the
+generosity of the Prince Regent of England. He who had declared that the
+lives of a million men were nothing to him [238] trusted to the folly or
+the impotence of the English nation to provide him with some agreeable
+asylum until he could again break loose and deluge Europe with blood. But
+the lesson of 1814 had been learnt. Some island in the ocean far beyond the
+equator formed the only prison for a man whom no European sovereign could
+venture to guard, and whom no fortress-walls could have withdrawn from the
+attention of mankind. Napoleon was conveyed to St. Helena. There, until at
+the end of six years death removed him, he experienced some trifling share
+of the human misery that he had despised.
+
+[Wellington and Fouche.]
+
+Victory had come so swiftly that the Allied Governments were unprepared
+with terms of peace. The Czar and the Emperor of Austria were still at
+Heidelberg when the battle of Waterloo was fought; they had advanced no
+further than Nancy when the news reached them that Paris had surrendered.
+Both now hastened to the capital, where Wellington was already exercising
+the authority to which his extraordinary successes as well as his great
+political superiority over all the representatives of the Allies then
+present, entitled him. Before the entry of the English and Prussian troops
+into Paris he had persuaded Louis XVIII. to sever himself from the party of
+reaction by calling to office the regicide Fouche, head of the existing
+Provisional Government. Fouche had been guilty of the most atrocious crimes
+at Lyons in 1793; he had done some of the worst work of each succeeding
+government in France; and, after returning to his old place as Napoleon's
+Minister of Police during the Hundred Days, he had intrigued as early as
+possible for the restoration of Louis XVIII., if indeed he had not held
+treasonable communication with the enemy during the campaign. His sole
+claim to power was that every gendarme and every informer in France had at
+some time acted as his agent, and that, as a regicide in office, he might
+possibly reconcile Jacobins and Bonapartists to the second return of the
+Bourbon family. Such was the man whom, in association with Talleyrand, the
+Duke of Wellington found himself compelled to propose as Minister to Louis
+XVIII. The appointment, it was said, was humiliating, but it was necessary;
+and with the approval of the Count of Artois the King invited this
+blood-stained eavesdropper to an interview and placed him in office. Need
+subdued the scruples of the courtiers: it could not subdue the resentment
+of that grief-hardened daughter of Louis XVI. whom Napoleon termed the only
+man of her family. The Duchess of Angouleme might have forgiven the Jacobin
+Fouche the massacres at Lyons: she refused to speak to a Minister whom she
+termed one of the murderers of her father.
+
+[Disagreement on terms of peace.]
+
+Fouche had entered into a private negotiation with Wellington while the
+English were on the outskirts of Paris, and while the authorised envoys of
+the Assembly were engaged elsewhere. Wellington's motive for recommending
+him to the King was the indifference or hostility felt by some of the
+Allies to Louis XVIII. personally, which led the Duke to believe that if
+Louis did not regain his throne before the arrival of the sovereigns he
+might never regain it at all. [239] Fouche was the one man who could at
+that moment throw open the road to the Tuileries. If his overtures were
+rejected, he might either permit Carnot to offer some desperate resistance
+outside Paris, or might retire himself with the army and the Assembly
+beyond the Loire, and there set up a Republican Government. With Fouche and
+Talleyrand united in office under Louis XVIII., there was no fear either of
+a continuance of the war or of the suggestion of a change of dynasty on the
+part of any of the Allies. By means of the Duke's independent action Louis
+XVIII. was already in possession when the Czar arrived at Paris, and
+nothing now prevented the definite conclusion of peace but the disagreement
+of the Allies themselves as to the terms to be exacted. Prussia, which had
+suffered so bitterly from Napoleon, demanded that Europe should not a
+second time deceive itself with the hollow guarantee of a Bourbon
+restoration, but should gain a real security for peace by detaching Alsace
+and Lorraine, as well as a line of northern fortresses, from the French
+monarchy. Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of England, stated it to be the
+prevailing opinion in this country that France might fairly be stripped of
+the principal conquests made by Louis XIV.; but he added that if Napoleon,
+who was then at large, should become a prisoner, England would waive a
+permanent cession of territory, on condition that France should be occupied
+by foreign armies until it had, at its own cost, restored the
+barrier-fortresses of the Netherlands. [240] Metternich for a while held
+much the same language as the Prussian Minister: Alexander alone declared
+from the first against any reduction of the territory of France, and
+appealed to the declarations of the Powers that the sole object of the war
+was the destruction of Napoleon and the maintenance of the order
+established by the Peace of Paris.
+
+[Arguments for and against cessions.]
+
+[Prussia isolated.]
+
+[Second Treaty of Paris, Nov. 20.]
+
+The arguments for and against the severance of the border-provinces from
+France were drawn at great length by diplomatists, but all that was
+essential in them was capable of being very briefly put. On the one side,
+it was urged by Stein and Hardenberg that the restoration of the Bourbons
+in 1814 with an undiminished territory had not prevented France from
+placing itself at the end of a few months under the rule of the military
+despot whose life was one series of attacks on his neighbours: that the
+expectation of long-continued peace, under whatever dynasty, was a vain one
+so long as the French possessed a chain of fortresses enabling them at any
+moment to throw large armies into Germany or the Netherlands: and finally,
+that inasmuch as Germany, and not England or Russia, was exposed to these
+irruptions, Germany had the first right to have its interests consulted in
+providing for the public security. On the other side, it was argued by the
+Emperor Alexander, and with far greater force by the Duke of Wellington,
+[241] that the position of the Bourbons would be absolutely hopeless if
+their restoration, besides being the work of foreign armies, was
+accompanied by the loss of French provinces: that the French nation,
+although it had submitted to Napoleon, had not as a matter of fact offered
+the resistance to the Allies which it was perfectly capable of offering:
+and that the danger of any new aggressive or revolutionary movement might
+be effectually averted by keeping part of France occupied by the Allied
+forces until the nation had settled down into tranquillity under an
+efficient government. Notes embodying these arguments were exchanged
+between the Ministers of the great Powers during the months of July and
+August. The British Cabinet, which had at first inclined to the Prussian
+view, accepted the calm judgment of Wellington, and transferred itself to
+the side of the Czar. Metternich went with the majority. Hardenberg, thus
+left alone, abandoned point after point in his demands, and consented at
+last that France should cede little more than the border-strips which had
+been added by the Peace of 1814 to its frontier of 1791. Chambery and the
+rest of French Savoy, Landau and Saarlouis on the German side,
+Philippeville and some other posts on the Belgian frontier, were fixed upon
+as the territory to be surrendered. The resolution of the Allied
+Governments was made known to Louis XVIII. towards the end of September.
+Negotiation on details dragged on for two months more, while France itself
+underwent a change of Ministry; and the definitive Treaty of Peace, known
+as the second Treaty of Paris, was not signed until November the 20th.
+France escaped without substantial loss of territory; it was, however,
+compelled to pay indemnities amounting in all to about L40,000,000; to
+consent to the occupation of its northern provinces by an Allied force of
+150,000 men for a period not exceeding five years; and to defray the cost
+of this occupation out of its own revenues. The works of art taken from
+other nations, which the Allies had allowed France to retain in 1814, had
+already been restored to their rightful owners. No act of the conquerors in
+1815 excited more bitter or more unreasonable complaint.
+
+[Treaty of Holy Alliance, Sept. 26.]
+
+It was in the interval between the entry of the Allies into Paris and the
+definitive conclusion of peace that a treaty was signed which has gained a
+celebrity in singular contrast with its real insignificance, the Treaty of
+Holy Alliance. Since the terrible events of 1812 the Czar's mind had taken
+a strongly religious tinge. His private life continued loose as before; his
+devotion was both very well satisfied with itself and a prey to mysticism
+and imposture in others; but, if alloyed with many weaknesses, it was at
+least sincere, and, like Alexander's other feelings, it naturally sought
+expression in forms which seemed theatrical to stronger natures. Alexander
+had rendered many public acts of homage to religion in the intervals of
+diplomatic and military success in the year 1814; and after the second
+capture of Paris he drew up a profession of religious and political faith,
+embodying, as he thought, those high principles by which the Sovereigns of
+Europe, delivered from the iniquities of Napoleon, were henceforth to
+maintain the reign of peace and righteousness on earth. [242] This
+document, which resembled the pledge of a religious brotherhood, formed the
+draft of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance. The engagement, as one binding on
+the conscience, was for the consideration of the Sovereigns alone, not of
+their Ministers; and in presenting it to the Emperor Francis and King
+Frederick William, the Czar is said to have acted with an air of great
+mystery. The King of Prussia, a pious man, signed the treaty in
+seriousness; the Emperor of Austria, who possessed a matter-of-fact humour,
+said that if the paper related to doctrines of religion, he must refer it
+to his confessor, if to secrets of State, to Prince Metternich. What the
+confessor may have thought of the Czar's political evangel is not known:
+the opinion delivered by the Minister was not a sympathetic one. "It is
+verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the
+treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not
+in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to
+Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible to
+Castlereagh was religious enthusiasm. "The fact is," he wrote home to the
+English Premier, "that the Emperor's mind is not completely sound." [243]
+Apart, however, from the Czar's sanity or insanity, it was impossible for
+the Prince Regent, or for any person except the responsible Minister, to
+sign a treaty, whether it meant anything or nothing, in the name of Great
+Britain. Castlereagh was in great perplexity. On the one hand, he feared to
+wound a powerful ally; on the other, he dared not violate the forms of the
+Constitution. A compromise was invented. The Treaty of the Holy Alliance
+was not graced with the name of the Prince Regent, but the Czar received a
+letter declaring that his principles had the personal approval of this
+great authority on religion and morality. The Kings of Naples and Sardinia
+were the next to subscribe, and in due time the names of the witty glutton,
+Louis XVIII., and of the abject Ferdinand of Spain were added. Two
+potentates alone received no invitation from the Czar to enter the League:
+the Pope, because he possessed too much authority within the Christian
+Church, and the Sultan, because he possessed none at all.
+
+[Treaty between the Four Powers, Nov. 20.]
+
+Such was the history of the Treaty of Holy Alliance, of which, it may be
+safely said, no single person connected with it, except the Czar and the
+King of Prussia, thought without a smile. The common belief that this
+Treaty formed the basis of a great monarchical combination against Liberal
+principles is erroneous; for, in the first place, no such combination
+existed before the year 1818; and, in the second place, the Czar, who was
+the author of the Treaty, was at this time the zealous friend of Liberalism
+both in his own and in other countries. The concert of the Powers was
+indeed provided for by articles signed on the same day as the Peace of
+Paris; but this concert, which, unlike the Holy Alliance, included England,
+was directed towards the perpetual exclusion of Napoleon from power, and
+the maintenance of the established Government in France. The Allies pledged
+themselves to act in union if revolution or usurpation should again
+convulse France and endanger the repose of other States, and undertook to
+resist with their whole force any attack that might be made upon the army
+of occupation. The federative unity which for a moment Europe seemed to
+have gained from the struggle against Napoleon, and the belief existing in
+some quarters in its long continuance, were strikingly shown in the last
+article of this Quadruple Treaty, which provided that, after the holding of
+a Congress at the end of three or more years, the Sovereigns or Ministers
+of all the four great Powers should renew their meetings at fixed
+intervals, for the purpose of consulting upon their common interests, and
+considering the measures best fitted to secure the repose and prosperity of
+nations, and the continuance of the peace of Europe. [244]
+
+[German Federation.]
+
+Thus terminated, certainly without any undue severity, yet not without some
+loss to the conquered nation, the work of 1815 in France. In the meantime
+the Congress of Vienna, though interrupted by the renewal of war, had
+resumed and completed its labours. One subject of the first importance
+remained unsettled when Napoleon returned, the federal organisation of
+Germany. This work had been referred by the Powers in the autumn of 1814 to
+a purely German committee, composed of the representatives of Austria and
+Prussia and of three of the Minor States; but the first meetings of the
+committee only showed how difficult was the problem, and how little the
+inclination in most quarters to solve it. The objects with which statesmen
+like Stein demanded an effective federation were thoroughly plain and
+practical. They sought, in the first place, that Germany should be rendered
+capable of defending itself against the foreigner; and in the second place,
+that the subjects of the minor princes, who had been made absolute rulers
+by Napoleon, should now be guaranteed against despotic oppression. To
+secure Germany from being again conquered by France, it was necessary that
+the members of the League, great and small, should abandon something of
+their separate sovereignty, and create a central authority with the sole
+right of making war and alliances. To protect the subjects of the minor
+princes from the abuse of power, it was necessary that certain definite
+civil rights and a measure of representative government should be assured
+by Federal Law to the inhabitants of every German State, and enforced by
+the central authority on the appeal of subjects against their Sovereigns.
+There was a moment when some such form of German union had seemed to be
+close at hand, the moment when Prussia began its final struggle with
+Napoleon, and the commander of the Czar's army threatened the German
+vassals of France with the loss of their thrones (Feb., 1813). But even
+then no statesman had satisfied himself how Prussia and Austria were to
+unite in submission to a Federal Government; and from the time when Austria
+made terms with the vassal princes little hope of establishing a really
+effective authority at the centre of Germany remained. Stein, at the
+Congress of Vienna, once more proposed to restore the title and the
+long-vanished powers of the Emperor; but he found no inclination on the
+part of Metternich to promote his schemes for German unity, while some of
+the minor princes flatly refused to abandon any fraction of their
+sovereignty over their own subjects. The difficulties in the way of
+establishing a Federal State were great, perhaps insuperable; the statesmen
+anxious for it few in number; the interests opposed to it all but
+universal. Stein saw that the work was intended to be unsubstantial, and
+withdrew himself from it before its completion. The Act of Federation,
+[245] which was signed on the 8th of June, created a Federal Diet, forbade
+the members of the League to enter into alliances against the common
+interest, and declared that in each State, Constitutions should be
+established. But it left the various Sovereigns virtually independent of
+the League; it gave the nomination of members of the Diet to the
+Governments absolutely, without a vestige of popular election; and it
+contained no provision for enforcing in any individual State, whose ruler
+might choose to disregard it, the principle of constitutional rule. Whether
+the Federation would in any degree have protected Germany in case of attack
+by France or Russia is matter for conjecture, since a long period of peace
+followed the year 1815; but so far was it from securing liberty to the
+Minor States, that in the hands of Metternich the Diet, impotent for every
+other purpose, became an instrument for the persecution of liberal opinion
+and for the suppression of the freedom of the press.
+
+[Final Act of the Congress, June 10.]
+
+German affairs, as usual, were the last to be settled at the Congress; when
+these were at length disposed of, the Congress embodied the entire mass of
+its resolutions in one great Final Act [246] of a hundred and twenty-one
+articles, which was signed a few days before the battle of Waterloo was
+fought. This Act, together with the second Treaty of Paris, formed the
+public law with which Europe emerged from the warfare of a quarter of a
+century, and entered upon a period which proved, even more than it was
+expected to prove, one of long-lasting peace. Standing on the boundary-line
+between two ages, the legislation of Vienna forms a landmark in history.
+The provisions of the Congress have sometimes been criticised as if that
+body had been an assemblage of philosophers, bent only on advancing the
+course of human progress, and endowed with the power of subduing the
+selfish impulses of every Government in Europe. As a matter of fact the
+Congress was an arena where national and dynastic interests struggled for
+satisfaction by every means short of actual war. To inquire whether the
+Congress accomplished all that it was possible to accomplish for Europe is
+to inquire whether Governments at that moment forgot all their own
+ambitions and opportunities, and thought only of the welfare of mankind.
+Russia would not have given up Poland without war; Austria would not have
+given up Lombardy and Venice without war. The only measures of 1814-15 in
+which the common interest was really the dominant motive were those adopted
+either with the view of strengthening the States immediately exposed to
+attack by France, or in the hope of sparing France itself the occasion for
+new conflicts. The union of Holland and Belgium, and the annexation of the
+Genoese Republic to Sardinia, were the means adopted for the former end;
+for the latter, the relinquishment of all claims to Alsace and Lorraine.
+These were the measures in which the statesmen of 1814-15 acted with their
+hands free, and by these their foresight may fairly be judged. Of the union
+of Belgium to Holland it is not too much to say that, although planned by
+Pitt, and treasured by every succeeding Ministry as one of his wisest
+schemes, it was wholly useless and inexpedient. The tranquillity of Western
+Europe was preserved during fifteen years, not by yoking together
+discordant nationalities, but by the general desire to avoid war; and as
+soon as France seriously demanded the liberation of Belgium from Holland,
+it had to be granted. Nor can it be believed that the addition of the
+hostile and discontented population of Genoa to the kingdom of Piedmont
+would have saved that monarchy from invasion if war had again arisen. The
+annexation of Genoa was indeed fruitful of results, but not of results
+which Pitt and his successors had anticipated. It was intended to
+strengthen the House of Savoy for the purpose of resistance to France:
+[247] it did strengthen the House of Savoy, but as the champion of Italy
+against Austria. It was intended to withdraw the busy trading city Genoa
+from the influences of French democracy: in reality it brought a strong
+element of innovation into the Piedmontese State itself, giving, on the one
+hand, a bolder and more national spirit to its Government, and, on the
+other hand, elevating to the ideal of a united Italy those who, like the
+Genoese Mazzini, were now no longer born to be the citizens of a free
+Republic. In sacrificing the ancient liberty of Genoa, the Congress itself
+unwittingly began the series of changes which was to refute the famous
+saying of Metternich, that Italy was but a geographical expression.
+
+[Alsace and Lorraine.]
+
+But if the policy of 1814-15 in the affairs of Belgium and Piedmont only
+proves how little an average collection of statesmen can see into the
+future, the policy which, in spite of Waterloo, left France in possession
+of an undiminished territory, does no discredit to the foresight, as it
+certainly does the highest honour to the justice and forbearance of
+Wellington, whose counsels then turned the scale. The wisdom of the
+resolution has indeed been frequently impugned. German statesmen held then,
+and have held ever since, that the opportunity of disarming France once for
+all of its weapons of attack was wantonly thrown away. Hardenberg, when his
+arguments for annexation of the frontier-fortresses were set aside,
+predicted that streams of blood would hereafter flow for the conquest of
+Alsace and Lorraine, [248] and his prediction has been fulfilled. Yet no
+one perhaps would have been more astonished than Hardenberg himself, could
+he have known that fifty-five years of peace between France and Prussia
+would precede the next great struggle. When the same period of peace shall
+have followed the acquisition of Metz and Strasburg by Prussia, it will be
+time to condemn the settlement of 1815 as containing the germ of future
+wars; till then, the effects of that settlement in maintaining peace are
+entitled to recognition. It is impossible to deny that the Allies, in
+leaving to France the whole of its territory in 1815, avoided inflicting
+the most galling of all tokens of defeat upon a spirited and still most
+powerful nation. The loss of Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine was
+keenly enough felt for thirty years to come, and made no insignificant part
+of the French people ready at any moment to rush into war; how much greater
+the power of the war-cry, how hopeless the task of restraint, if to the
+other motives for war there had been added the liberation of two of the
+most valued provinces of France. Without this the danger was great enough.
+Thrice at least in the next thirty years the balance seemed to be turning
+against the continuance of peace. An offensive alliance between France and
+Russia was within view when the Bourbon monarchy fell; the first years of
+Louis Philippe all but saw the revolutionary party plunge France into war
+for Belgium and for Italy; ten years later the dismissal of a Ministry
+alone prevented the outbreak of hostilities on the distant affairs of
+Syria. Had Alsace and Lorraine at this time been in the hands of disunited
+Germany, it is hard to believe that the Bourbon dynasty would not have
+averted, or sought to avert, its fall by a popular war, or that the victory
+of Louis Philippe over the war-party, difficult even when there was no
+French soil to reconquer, would have been possible. The time indeed came
+when a new Bonaparte turned to enterprises of aggression the resources
+which Europe had left unimpaired to his country; but to assume that the
+cessions proposed in 1815 would have made France unable to move, with or
+without allies, half a century afterwards, is to make a confident guess in
+a doubtful matter; and, with Germany in the condition in which it remained
+after 1815, it is at least as likely that the annexation of Alsace and
+Lorraine would have led to the early reconquest of the Rhenish provinces by
+France, or to a war between Austria and Prussia, as that it would have
+prolonged the period of European peace beyond that distant limit which it
+actually reached.
+
+[English efforts at the Congress to abolish the slave-trade.]
+
+Among the subjects which were pressed upon the Congress of Vienna there was
+one in which the pursuit of national interests and calculations of policy
+bore no part, the abolition of the African slave-trade. The British people,
+who, after twenty years of combat in the cause of Europe, had earned so
+good a right to ask something of their allies, probably attached a deeper
+importance to this question than to any in the whole range of European
+affairs, with the single exception of the personal overthrow of Napoleon.
+Since the triumph of Wiberforce's cause in the Parliament of 1807, and the
+extinction of English slave-traffic, the anger with which the nation viewed
+this detestable cruelty, too long tolerated by itself, had become more and
+more vehement and widespread. By the year 1814 the utterances of public
+opinion were so loud and urgent that the Government, though free from
+enthusiasm itself, was forced to place the international prohibition of the
+slave-trade in the front rank of its demands. There were politicians on the
+Continent credulous enough to believe that this outcry of the heart and the
+conscience of the nation was but a piece of commercial hypocrisy.
+Talleyrand, with far different insight, but not with more sympathy, spoke
+of the state of the English people as one of frenzy. [249] Something had
+already been effected at foreign courts. Sweden had been led to prohibit
+slave-traffic in 1813, Holland in the following year. Portugal had been
+restrained by treaty from trading north of the line. France had pledged
+itself in the first Treaty of Paris to abolish the commerce within five
+years. Spain alone remained unfettered, and it was indeed intolerable that
+the English slavers should have been forced to abandon their execrable
+gains only that they should fall into the hands of the subjects of King
+Ferdinand. It might be true that the Spanish colonies required a larger
+supply of slaves than they possessed; but Spain had at any rate not the
+excuse that it was asked to surrender an old and profitable branch of
+commerce. It was solely through the abolition of the English slave-trade
+that Spain possessed any slave-trade whatever. Before the year 1807 no
+Spanish ship had been seen on the coast of Africa for a century, except one
+in 1798 fitted out by Godoy. [250] As for the French trade, that had been
+extinguished by the capture of Senegal and Goree; and along the two
+thousand miles of coast from Cape Blanco to Cape Formosa a legitimate
+commerce with the natives was gradually springing up in place of the
+desolating traffic in flesh and blood. It was hoped by the English people
+that Castlereagh would succeed in obtaining a universal and immediate
+prohibition of the slave-trade by all the Powers assembled at Vienna. The
+Minister was not wanting in perseverance, but he failed to achieve this
+result. France, while claiming a short delay elsewhere, professed itself
+willing, like Portugal, to abolish at once the traffic north of the line;
+but the Government on which England had perhaps the greatest claim, that of
+Spain, absolutely refused to accept this restriction, or to bind itself to
+a final prohibition before the end of eight years. Castlereagh then
+proposed that a Council of Ambassadors at London and Paris should be
+charged with the international duty of expediting the close of the
+slave-trade; the measure which he had in view being the punishment of
+slave-dealing States by a general exclusion of their exports. Against this
+Spain and Portugal made a formal protest, treating the threat as almost
+equivalent to one of war. The project dropped, and the Minister of England
+had to content himself with obtaining from the Congress a solemn
+condemnation of the slave-trade, as contrary to the principles of
+civilisation and human right (Feb., 1815).
+
+The work was carried a step further by Napoleon's return from Elba.
+Napoleon understood the impatience of the English people, and believed that
+he could make no higher bid for its friendship than by abandoning the
+reserves made by Talleyrand at the Congress, and abolishing the French
+slave-trade at once and for all. This was accomplished; and the Bourbon
+ally of England, on his second restoration could not undo what had been
+done by the usurper. Spain and Portugal alone continued to pursue--the
+former country without restriction, the latter on the south of the line--a
+commerce branded by the united voice of Europe as infamous. The Governments
+of these countries alleged in their justification that Great Britain itself
+had resisted the passing of the prohibitory law until its colonies were far
+better supplied with slaves than those of its rivals now were. This was
+true, but it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was not known, the
+sincerity of English feeling was not appreciated, until, twenty years
+later, the nation devoted a part of its wealth to release the slave from
+servitude, and the English race from the reproach of slave holding. Judged
+by the West Indian Emancipation of 1833, the Spanish appeal to English
+history sounds almost ludicrous. But the remembrance of the long years
+throughout which the advocates of justice encountered opposition in England
+should temper the severity of our condemnation of the countries which still
+defended a bad interest. The light broke late upon ourselves: the darkness
+that still lingered elsewhere had too long been our own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+Concert of Europe after 1815--Spirit of the Foreign Policy of Alexander, of
+Metternich, and of the English Ministry--Metternich's action in Italy,
+England's in Sicily and Spain--The Reaction in France--Richelieu and the
+New Chamber--Execution of Ney--Imprisonments and persecutions--Conduct of
+the Ultra-Royalists in Parliament--Contests on the Electoral Bill and the
+Budget--The Chamber prorogued--Affair of Grenoble--Dissolution of the
+Chamber--Electoral Law and Financial Settlement of 1817--Character of the
+first years of peace in Europe generally--Promise of a Constitution in
+Prussia--Hardenberg opposed by the partisans of autocracy and
+privilege--Schmalz's Pamphlet--Delay of Constitutional Reform in Germany at
+large--The Wartburg Festival--Progress of Reaction--The Czar now inclines
+to repression--Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--Evacuation of France--Growing
+influence of Metternich in Europe--His action on Prussia--Murder of
+Kotzebue--The Carlsbad Conference and measures of repression in
+Germany--Richelieu and Decazes--Murder of the Duke of Berry--Progress of
+the reaction in France--General causes of the victory of reaction in
+Europe.
+
+
+[Concert of Europe regarding France.]
+
+For nearly twenty years the career of Bonaparte had given to European
+history the unity of interest which belongs to a single life. This unity
+does not immediately disappear on the disappearance of his mighty figure.
+The Powers of Europe had been too closely involved in the common struggle,
+their interests were too deeply concerned in the maintenance of the
+newly-established order, for the thoughts of Governments to be withdrawn
+from foreign affairs, and the currents of national policy to fall at once
+apart into separate channels. The Allied forces continued to occupy France
+with Wellington as commander-in-chief; the defence of the Bourbon monarchy
+had been declared the cause of Europe at large; the conditions under which
+the numbers of the army of occupation might be reduced, or the period of
+occupation shortened, remained to be fixed by the Allies themselves. France
+thus formed the object of a common European deliberation; nor was the
+concert of the Powers without its peculiar organ. An International Council
+was created at Paris, consisting of the Ambassadors of the four great
+Courts. The forms of a coalition were, for the first time, preserved after
+the conclusion of peace. Communications were addressed to the Government of
+Louis XVIII., in the name of all the Powers together. The Council of
+Ambassadors met at regular intervals, and not only transacted business
+relating to the army of occupation and the payment of indemnities, but
+discussed the domestic policy of the French Government, and the situation
+of parties or the signs of political opinion in the Assembly and the
+nation.
+
+[Action of the Powers outside France.]
+
+In thus watching over the restored Bourbon monarchy, the Courts of Europe
+were doing no more than they had bound themselves to do by treaty. Paris,
+however, was not the only field for a busy diplomacy. In most of the minor
+capitals of Europe each of the Great Powers had its own supposed interests
+to pursue, or its own principles of government to inculcate. An age of
+transition seemed to have begun. Constitutions had been promised in many
+States, and created in some; in Spain and in Sicily they had reached the
+third stage, that of suppression. It was not likely that the statesmen who
+had succeeded to Napoleon's power in Europe should hold themselves entirely
+aloof from the affairs of their weaker neighbours, least of all when a
+neighbouring agitation might endanger themselves. In one respect the
+intentions of the British, the Austrian, and the Russian Governments were
+identical, and continued to be so, namely, in the determination to
+countenance no revolutionary movement. Revolution, owing to the experience
+of 1793, had come to be regarded as synonymous with aggressive warfare.
+Jacobins, anarchists, disturbers of the public peace, were only different
+names for one and the same class of international criminals, who were
+indeed indigenous to France, but might equally endanger the peace of
+mankind in other countries. Against these fomenters of mischief all the
+Courts were at one.
+
+[Alexander.]
+
+Here, however, agreement ceased. It was admitted that between revolutionary
+disturbance and the enjoyment of constitutional liberty a wide interval
+existed, and the statesmen of the leading Powers held by no means the same
+views as to the true relation between nations and their rulers. The most
+liberal in theory among the Sovereigns of 1815 was the Emperor Alexander.
+Already, in the summer of 1815, he had declared the Duchy of Warsaw to be
+restored to independence and nationality, under the title of the Kingdom of
+Poland; and before the end of the year he had granted it a Constitution,
+which created certain representative assemblies, and provided the new
+kingdom with an army and an administration of its own, into which no person
+not a Pole could enter. The promised introduction of Parliamentary life
+into Poland was but the first of a series of reforms dimly planned by
+Alexander, which was to culminate in the bestowal of a Constitution upon
+Russia itself, and the emancipation of the serf. [251] Animated by hopes
+like these for his own people, hopes which, while they lasted, were not
+merely sincere but ardent, Alexander was also friendly to the cause of
+constitutional government in other countries. Ambition mingled with
+disinterested impulses in the foreign policy of the Czar. It was impossible
+that Alexander should forget the league into which England and Austria had
+so lately entered against him. He was anxious to keep France on his side;
+he was not inclined to forego the satisfaction of weakening Austria by
+supporting national hopes in Italy; [252] and he hoped to create some
+counterpoise to England's maritime power by allying Russia with a
+strengthened and better-administered Spain. Agents of the Czar abounded in
+Italy and in Germany, but in no capital was the Ambassador of Russia more
+active than in Madrid. General Tatistcheff, who was appointed to this post
+in 1814, became the terror of all his colleagues and of the Cabinet of
+London from his extraordinary activity in intrigue; but in relation to the
+internal affairs of Spain his influence was beneficial; and it was
+frequently directed towards the support of reforming Ministers, whom King
+Ferdinand, if free from foreign pressure, would speedily have sacrificed to
+the pleasure of his favourites and confessors.
+
+[Metternich.]
+
+[Metternich's policy in Germany.]
+
+[In Italy.]
+
+In the eyes of Prince Metternich, the all-powerful Minister of Austria,
+Alexander was little better than a Jacobin. The Austrian State, though its
+frontiers had been five times changed since 1792, had continued in a
+remarkable degree free from the impulse to internal change. The Emperor
+Francis was the personification of resistance to progress; the Minister
+owed his unrivalled position not more to his own skilful statesmanship in
+the great crisis of 1813 than to a genuine accord with the feelings of his
+master. If Francis was not a man of intellect, Metternich was certainly a
+man of character; and for a considerable period they succeeded in
+impressing the stamp of their own strongly-marked Austrian policy upon
+Europe. The force of their influence sprang from no remote source; it was
+due mainly to a steady intolerance of all principles not their own.
+Metternich described his system with equal simplicity and precision as an
+attempt neither to innovate nor to go back to the past, but to keep things
+as they were. In the old Austrian dominions this was not difficult to do,
+for things had no tendency to move and remained fixed of themselves; [253]
+but on the outside, both on the north and on the south, ideas were at work
+which, according to Metternich, ought never to have entered the world, but,
+having unfortunately gained admittance, made it the task of Governments to
+resist their influence by all available means. Stein and the leaders of the
+Prussian War of Liberation had agitated Germany with hopes of national
+unity, of Parliaments, and of the impulsion of the executive powers of
+State by public opinion. Against these northern innovators, Metternich had
+already won an important victory in the formation of the Federal
+Constitution. The weakness and timidity of the King of Prussia made it
+probable that, although he was now promising his subjects a Constitution,
+he might at no distant date be led to unite with other German Governments
+in a system of repression, and in placing Liberalism under the ban of the
+Diet. In Italy, according to the conservative statesman, the same dangers
+existed and the same remedies were required. Austria, through the
+acquisition of Venice, now possessed four times as large a territory beyond
+the Alps as it had possessed before 1792; but the population was no longer
+the quiescent and contented folk that it had been in the days of Maria
+Theresa. Napoleon's kingdom and army of Italy had taught the people
+warfare, and given them political aims and a more masculine spirit.
+Metternich's own generals had promised the Italians independence when they
+entered the country in 1814; Murat's raid a year later had actually been
+undertaken in the name of Italian unity. These were disagreeable incidents,
+and signs were not wanting of the existence of a revolutionary spirit in
+the Italian provinces of Austria, especially among the officers who had
+served under Napoleon. Metternich was perfectly clear as to the duties of
+his Government. The Italians might have a Viceroy to keep Court at Milan, a
+body of native officials to conduct their minor affairs, and a mock
+Congregation or Council, without any rights, powers, or functions whatever;
+if this did not satisfy them, they were a rebellious people, and government
+must be conducted by means of spies, police, and the dungeons of the
+Spielberg. [254]
+
+[Scheme of an Austrian Protectorate over Italy.]
+
+On this system, backed by great military force, there was nothing to fear
+from the malcontents of Lombardy and Venice: it remained for Metternich to
+extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of
+treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional
+government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire
+country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious
+that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it
+was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the
+resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions of Austria,
+should consist of independent States. The first Sovereign over whom the net
+was cast was Ferdinand of Naples. On the 15th of June, 1815, immediately
+after the overthrow of Murat, King Ferdinand signed a Treaty of Alliance
+with Austria, which contained a secret clause, pledging the King to
+introduce no change into his recovered kingdom inconsistent with its own
+old monarchical principles, or with the principles which had been adopted
+by the Emperor of Austria for the government of his Italian provinces.
+[255] Ferdinand, two years before, had been compelled by Great Britain to
+grant Sicily a Constitution, and was at this very moment promising one to
+Naples. The Sicilian Constitution was now tacitly condemned; the
+Neapolitans were duped. By a further secret clause, the two contracting
+Sovereigns undertook to communicate to one another everything that should
+come to their knowledge affecting the security and tranquillity of the
+Italian peninsula; in other words, the spies and the police of Ferdinand
+were now added to Metternich's staff in Lombardy. Tuscany, Modena, and
+Parma entered into much the same condition of vassalage; but the scheme for
+a universal federation of Italy under Austria's leadership failed through
+the resistance of Piedmont and of the Pope. Pius VII. resented the attempts
+of Austria, begun in 1797 and repeated at the Congress of Vienna, to
+deprive the Holy See of Bologna and Ravenna. The King of Sardinia, though
+pressed by England to accept Metternich's offer of alliance, maintained
+with great decision the independence of his country, and found in the
+support of the Czar a more potent argument than any that he could have
+drawn from treaties. [256]
+
+[Spirit of England's foreign policy.]
+
+The part played by the British Government at this epoch has been severely
+judged not only by the later opinion of England itself, but by the
+historical writers of almost every nation in Europe. It is perhaps
+fortunate for the fame of Pitt that he did not live to witness the
+accomplishment of the work in which he had laboured for thirteen years. The
+glory of a just and courageous struggle against Napoleon's tyranny remains
+with Pitt; the opprobrium of a settlement hostile to liberty has fallen on
+his successors. Yet there is no good ground for believing that Pitt would
+have attached a higher value to the rights or inclinations of individual
+communities than his successors did in re-adjusting the balance of power;
+on the contrary, he himself first proposed to destroy the Republic of
+Genoa, and to place Catholic Belgium under the Protestant Crown of Holland;
+nor was any principle dearer to him than that of aggrandising the House of
+Austria as a counterpoise to the power of France. [257] The Ministry of
+1815 was indeed but too faithfully walking in the path into which Pitt had
+been driven by the King and the nation in 1793. Resistance to France had
+become the one absorbing care, the beginning and end of English
+statesmanship. Government at home had sunk to a narrow and unfeeling
+opposition to the attempts made from time to time to humanise the mass of
+the people, to reform an atrocious criminal law, to mitigate the civil
+wrongs inflicted in the name and the interest of a State-religion. No one
+in the Cabinet doubted that authority, as such, must be wiser than
+inexperienced popular desire, least of all the statesman who now, in
+conjunction with the Duke of Wellington, controlled the policy of Great
+Britain upon the Continent. Lord Castlereagh had no sympathy with cruelty
+or oppression in Continental rulers; he had just as little belief in the
+value of free institutions to their subjects. [258] The nature of his
+influence, which has been drawn sometimes in too dark colours, may be
+fairly gathered from the course of action which he followed in regard to
+Sicily and to Spain.
+
+[In Sicily.]
+
+In Sicily the representative of Great Britain, Lord William Bentinck, had
+forced King Ferdinand, who could not have maintained himself for an hour
+without the arms and money of England, to establish in 1813 a Parliament
+framed on the model of our own. The Parliament had not proved a wise or a
+capable body, but its faults were certainly not equal to those of King
+Ferdinand, and its re-construction under England's auspices would have been
+an affair of no great difficulty. Ferdinand, however, had always detested
+free institutions, and as soon as he regained the throne of Naples he
+determined to have done with the Sicilian Parliament. A correspondence on
+the intended change took place between Lord Castlereagh and A'Court, the
+Ambassador who had now succeeded Lord William Bentinck. [259] That the
+British Government, which had protected the Sicilian Crown against Napoleon
+at the height of his power, could have protected the Sicilian Constitution
+against King Ferdinand's edicts without detaching a single man-of-war's
+boat, is not open to doubt. Castlereagh, however, who for years past had
+been paying, stimulating, or rebuking every Government in Europe, and who
+had actually sent the British fleet to make the Norwegians submit to
+Bernadotte, now suddenly adopted the principle of non-intervention, and
+declared that, so long as Ferdinand did not persecute the Sicilians who at
+the invitation of England had taken part in political life, or reduce the
+privileges of Sicily below those which had existed prior to 1813, Great
+Britain would not interfere with his action. These stipulations were
+inserted in order to satisfy the House of Commons, and to avert the charge
+that England had not only abandoned the Sicilian Constitution, but
+consented to a change which left the Sicilians in a worse condition than if
+England had never intervened in their affairs. Lord Castlereagh shut his
+eyes to the confession involved, that he was leaving the Sicilians to a
+ruler who, but for such restraint, might be expected to destroy every
+vestige of public right, and to take the same bloody and unscrupulous
+revenge upon his subjects which he had taken when Nelson restored him to
+power in 1799.
+
+[Action of England in Spain.]
+
+The action of the British Government in Spain showed an equal readiness to
+commit the future to the wisdom of Courts. Lord Castlereagh was made
+acquainted with the Spanish Ferdinand's design of abolishing the
+Constitution on his return in the year 1814. "So far," he replied, "as the
+mere existence of the Constitution is at stake, it is impossible to believe
+that any change tranquilly effected can well be worse." [260] In this case
+the interposition of England would perhaps not have availed against a
+reactionary clergy and nation: Castlereagh, was, moreover, deceived by
+Ferdinand's professions that he had no desire to restore absolute
+government. He credited the King with the same kind of moderation which had
+led Louis XVIII. to accept the Charta in France, and looked forward to the
+maintenance of a constitutional regime, though under conditions more
+favourable to the executive power and to the influence of the great landed
+proprietors and clergy. [261] Events soon proved what value was to be
+attached to the word of the King; the flood of reaction and vengeance broke
+over the country; and from this time the British Government, half
+confessing and half excusing Ferdinand's misdeeds, exerted itself to check
+the outrages of despotism, and to mitigate the lot of those who were now
+its victims. In the interest of the restored monarchies themselves, as much
+as from a regard to the public opinion of Great Britain, the Ambassadors of
+England urged moderation upon all the Bourbon Courts. This, however, was
+also done by Metternich, who neither took pleasure in cruelty, nor desired
+to see new revolutions produced by the extravagances of priests and
+emigrants. It was not altogether without cause that the belief arose that
+there was little to choose, in reference to the constitutional liberties of
+other States, between the sentiments of Austria and those of the Ministers
+of free England. A difference, however, did exist. Metternich actually
+prohibited the Sovereigns over whom his influence extended from granting
+their subjects liberty: England, believing the Sovereigns to be more
+liberal than they were, did not interfere to preserve constitutions from
+destruction.
+
+[Outrages of the Royalists in the south of France, June-August.]
+
+Such was the general character of the influence now exercised by the three
+leading Powers of Europe. Prussia, which had neither a fleet like England,
+an Italian connection like Austria, nor an ambitious Sovereign like Russia,
+concerned itself little with distant States, and limited its direct action
+to the affairs of France, in which it possessed a substantial interest,
+inasmuch as the indemnities due from Louis XVIII. had yet to be paid. The
+possibility of recovering these sums depended upon the maintenance of peace
+and order in France; and from the first it was recognised by every
+Government in Europe that the principal danger to peace and order arose
+from the conduct of the Count of Artois and his friends, the party of
+reaction. The counterrevolutionary movement began in mere riot and outrage.
+No sooner had the news of the battle of Waterloo reached the south of
+France than the Royalist mob of Marseilles drove the garrison out of the
+town, and attacked the quarter inhabited by the Mameluke families whom
+Napoleon had brought from Egypt. Thirteen of these unfortunate persons, and
+about as many Bonapartist citizens, were murdered. [262] A few weeks later
+Nismes was given over to anarchy and pillage. Religious fanaticism here
+stimulated the passion of political revenge. The middle class in Nismes
+itself and a portion of the surrounding population were Protestant, and had
+hailed Napoleon's return from Elba as a deliverance from the ascendancy of
+priests, and from the threatened revival of the persecutions which they had
+suffered under the old Bourbon monarchy. The Catholics, who were much more
+numerous, included the lowest class in the town, the larger landed
+proprietors of the district, and above half of the peasantry. Bands of
+volunteers had been formed by the Duke of Angouleme at the beginning of the
+Hundred Days, in the hope of sustaining a civil war against Napoleon. After
+capitulating to the Emperor's generals, some companies had been attacked by
+villagers and hunted down like wild beasts. The bands now reassembled and
+entered Nismes. The garrison, after firing upon them, were forced to give
+up their arms, and in this defenceless state a considerable number of the
+soldiers were shot down (July 17). On the next day the leaders of the armed
+mob began to use their victory. For several weeks murder and outrage,
+deliberately planned and publicly announced, kept not only Nismes itself,
+but a wide extent of the surrounding country in constant terror. The
+Government acted slowly and feebly; the local authorities were intimidated;
+and, in spite of the remonstrances of Wellington and the Russian
+Ambassador, security was not restored until the Allies took the matter into
+their own hands, and a detachment of Austrian troops occupied the
+Department of the Gard. Other districts in the south of France witnessed
+the same outbreaks of Royalist ferocity. Avignon was disgraced by the
+murder of Marshal Brune, conqueror of the Russians and English in the Dutch
+campaign of 1799, an honest soldier, who after suffering Napoleon's neglect
+in the time of prosperity, had undertaken the heavy task of governing
+Marseilles during the Hundred Days. At Toulouse, General Ramel, himself a
+Royalist, was mortally wounded by a band of assassins, and savagely
+mutilated while lying disabled and expiring.
+
+[Elections of 1815.]
+
+Crimes like these were the counterpart of the September massacres of 1792;
+and the terrorism exercised by the Royalists in 1815 has been compared, as
+a whole, with the Republican Reign of Terror twenty-two years earlier. But
+the comparison does little credit to the historical sense of those who
+suggested it. The barbarities of 1815 were strictly local: shocking as they
+were, they scarcely amounted in all to an average day's work of Carrier or
+Fouche in 1794; and the action of the established Government, though
+culpably weak, was not itself criminal. A second and more dangerous stage
+of reaction began, however, when the work of popular vengeance closed.
+Elections for a new Chamber of Deputies were held at the end of August. The
+Liberals and the adherents of Napoleon, paralysed by the disasters of
+France and the invaders' presence, gave up all as lost: the Ministers of
+Louis XVIII. abstained from the usual electoral manoeuvres, Talleyrand
+through carelessness, Fouche from a desire to see parties evenly balanced:
+the ultra-Royalists alone had extended their organisation over France, and
+threw themselves into the contest with the utmost passion and energy.
+Numerically weak, they had the immense forces of the local administration
+on their side. The Prefets had gone over heart and soul to the cause of the
+Count of Artois, who indeed represented to them that he was acting under
+the King's own directions. The result was that an Assembly was elected to
+which France has seen only one parallel since, namely in the Parliament of
+1871, elected when invaders again occupied the country, and the despotism
+of a second Bonaparte had ended in the same immeasurable calamity. The bulk
+of the candidates returned were country gentlemen whose names had never
+been heard of in public life since 1789, men who had resigned themselves to
+inaction and obscurity under the Republic and the Empire, and whose one
+political idea was to reverse the injuries done by the Revolution to their
+caste and to their Church. They were Royalists because a Bourbon monarchy
+alone could satisfy their claims: they called themselves ultra-Royalists,
+but they were so only in the sense that they required the monarchy to
+recognise no ally but themselves. They had already shown before Napoleon's
+return that their real chief was the Count of Artois, not the King; in what
+form their ultra-Royalism would exhibit itself in case the King should not
+submit to be their instrument remained to be proved.
+
+[Fall of Talleyrand and Fouche.]
+
+[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept., 1815.]
+
+The first result of the elections was the downfall of Talleyrand's Liberal
+Ministry. The Count of Artois and the courtiers, who had been glad enough
+to secure Fouche's services while their own triumph was doubtful, now
+joined in the outcry of the country gentlemen again this monster of
+iniquity. Talleyrand promptly disencumbered himself of his old friend, and
+prepared to meet the new Parliament as an ultra-Royalist; but in the eyes
+of the victorious party Talleyrand himself, the married priest and the
+reputed accomplice in the murder of the Duke of Enghien, was little better
+than his regicide colleague; and before the Assembly met he was forced to
+retire from power.
+
+[Richelieu's Ministry, Sept. 1815.]
+
+His successor, the Duc de Richelieu, was recommended to Louis XVIII. by the
+Czar. Richelieu had quitted France early in the Revolution, and, unlike
+most of the emigrants, had played a distinguished part in the country which
+gave him refuge. Winning his first laurels in the siege of Ismail under
+Suvaroff, he had subsequently been made Governor of the Euxine provinces of
+Russia, and the flourishing town of Odessa had sprung up under his rule.
+His reputation as an administrator was high; his personal character
+singularly noble and disinterested. Though the English Government looked at
+first with apprehension upon a Minister so closely connected with the Czar
+of Russia, Richelieu's honesty and truthfulness soon gained him the respect
+of every foreign Court. His relation to Alexander proved of great service
+to France in lightening the burden of the army of occupation; his equity,
+his acquaintance with the real ends of monarchical government, made him,
+though no lover of liberty, a valuable Minister in face of an Assembly
+which represented nothing but the passions and the ideas of a reactionary
+class. But Richelieu had been too long absent from France to grasp the
+details of administration with a steady hand. The men, the parties of 1815,
+were new to him: it is said that he was not acquainted by sight with most
+of his colleagues when he appointed them to their posts. The Ministry in
+consequence was not at unity within itself. Some of its members, like
+Decazes, were more liberal than their chief; others, like Clarke and
+Vaublanc, old servants of Napoleon now turned ultra-Royalists, were eager
+to make themselves the instruments of the Count of Artois, and to carry
+into the work of government the enthusiasm of revenge which had already
+found voice in the elections.
+
+[Violence of the Chamber of 1815.]
+
+The session opened on the 7th of October. Twenty-nine of the peers, who had
+joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days, were excluded from the House, and
+replaced by adherents of the Bourbons; nevertheless the peers as a body
+opposed themselves to extreme reaction, and, in spite of Chateaubriand's
+sanguinary harangues, supported the moderate policy of Richelieu against
+the majority of the Lower House. The first demand of the Chamber of
+Deputies was for retribution upon traitors; [263] their first conflict with
+the Government of Louis XVIII. arose upon the measures which were brought
+forward by the Ministry for the preservation of public security and the
+punishment of seditious acts. The Ministers were attacked, not because
+their measures were too severe, but because they were not severe enough.
+While taking power to imprison all suspected persons without trial, or to
+expel them from their homes, Decazes, the Police-Minister, proposed to
+punish incitements to sedition by fines and terms of imprisonment varying
+according to the gravity of the offence. So mild a penalty excited the
+wrath of men whose fathers and brothers had perished on the guillotine.
+Some cried out for death, others for banishment to Cayenne. When it was
+pointed out that the infliction of capital punishment for the mere attempt
+at sedition would place this on a level with armed rebellion, it was
+answered that a distinction might be maintained by adding in the latter
+case the ancient punishment of parricide, the amputation of the hand.
+Extravagances like this belonged rather to the individuals than to a party;
+but the vehemence of the Chamber forced the Government to submit to a
+revision of its measure. Transportation to Cayenne, but not death, was
+ultimately included among the penalties for seditious acts. The Minister of
+Justice, M. Barbe-Marbois, who had himself been transported to Cayenne by
+the Jacobins in 1797, was able to satisfy the Chamber from his own
+experience that they were not erring on the side of mercy. [264]
+
+[Ney executed, Dec. 7.]
+
+It was in the midst of these heated debates that Marshal Ney was brought to
+trial for high treason. A so-called Edict of Amnesty had been published by
+the King on the 24th of July, containing the names of nineteen persons who
+were to be tried by courts-martial on capital charges, and of thirty-eight
+others who were to be either exiled or brought to justice, as the Chamber
+might determine. Ney was included in the first category. Opportunities for
+escape had been given to him by the Government, as indeed they had to
+almost every other person on the list. King Louis XVIII. well understood
+that his Government was not likely to be permanently strengthened by the
+execution of some of the most distinguished men in France; the emigrants,
+however, and especially the Duchess of Angouleme, were merciless, and the
+English Government acted a deplorable part. "One can never feel that the
+King is secure on his throne," wrote Lord Liverpool, "until he has dared to
+spill traitors' blood." It is not that many examples would be necessary;
+but the daring to make a few will alone manifest any strength in the
+Government. [265] Labedoyere had already been executed. On the 9th of
+November Ney was brought before a court-martial, at which Castlereagh and
+his wife had the bad taste to be present. The court-martial, headed by
+Ney's old comrade Jourdan, declared itself incompetent to judge a peer of
+France accused of high treason, [266] Ney was accordingly tried before the
+House of Peers. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, and indeed the legal
+guilt of the Marshal could hardly be denied. Had the men who sat in
+judgment upon him been a body of Vendean peasants who had braved fire and
+sword for the Bourbon cause, the sentence of death might have been
+pronounced with pure, though stern lips: it remains a deep disgrace to
+France that among the peers who voted not only for Ney's condemnation but
+for his death, there were some who had themselves accepted office and pay
+from Napoleon during the Hundred Days. A word from Wellington would still
+have saved the Marshal's life, but in interceding for Ney the Duke would
+have placed himself in direct opposition to the action of his own
+Government. When the Premier had dug the grave, it was not for Wellington
+to rescue the prisoner. It is permissible to hope that he, who had so
+vehemently reproached Bluecher for his intention to put Napoleon to death if
+he should fall into his hands, would have asked clemency for Ney had he
+considered himself at liberty to obey the promptings of his own nature. The
+responsibility for Marshal Ney's death rests, more than upon any other
+individual, upon Lord Liverpool.
+
+On the 7th of December the sentence was executed. Ney was shot at early
+morning in an unfrequented spot, and the Government congratulated itself
+that it had escaped the dangers of a popular demonstration and heard the
+last of a disagreeable business. Never was there a greater mistake. No
+crime committed in the Reign of Terror attached a deeper popular opprobrium
+to its authors than the execution of Ney did to the Bourbon family. The
+victim, a brave but rough half-German soldier, [267] rose in popular legend
+almost to the height of the Emperor himself. His heroism in the retreat
+from Moscow became, and with justice, a more glorious memory than Davoust's
+victory at Jena or Moreau's at Hohenlinden. Side by side with the thought
+that the Bourbons had been brought back by foreign arms, the remembrance
+sank deep into the heart of the French people that this family had put to
+death "the bravest of the brave." It would have been no common good fortune
+for Louis XVIII. to have pardoned or visited with light punishment a great
+soldier whose political feebleness had led him to an act of treason,
+condoned by the nation at large. Exile would not have made the transgressor
+a martyr. But the common sense of mankind condemns Ney's execution: the
+public opinion of France has never forgiven it.
+
+[Amnesty Bill, Dec 8.]
+
+On the day after the great example was made, Richelieu brought forward the
+Amnesty Bill of the Government in the House of Representatives. The King,
+while claiming full right of pardon, desired that the Chamber should be
+associated with him in its exercise, and submitted a project of law
+securing from prosecution all persons not included in the list published on
+July 24th. Measures of a very different character had already been
+introduced under the same title into the Chamber. Though the initiative in
+legislation belonged by virtue of the Charta to the Crown, resolutions
+might be moved by members in the shape of petition or address, and under
+this form the leaders of the majority had drawn up schemes for the
+wholesale proscription of Napoleon's adherents. It was proposed by M. la
+Bourdonnaye to bring to trial all the great civil and military officers
+who, during the Hundred Days, had constituted the Government of the
+usurper; all generals, prefets, and commanders of garrisons, who had obeyed
+Napoleon before a certain day, to be named by the Assembly; and all voters
+for the death of Louis XVI. who had recognised Napoleon by signing the Acte
+Additionnel. The language in which these prosecutions were urged was the
+echo of that which had justified the bloodshed of 1793; its violence was
+due partly to the fancy that Napoleon's return was no sudden and unexpected
+act, but the work of a set of conspirators in high places, who were still
+plotting the overthrow of the monarchy. [268]
+
+[Persecution of suspected persons over all France.]
+
+It was in vain that Richelieu intervened with the expression of the King's
+own wishes, and recalled the example of forgiveness shown in the testament
+of Louis XVI. The committee which was appointed to report on the projects
+of amnesty brought up a scheme little different from that of La
+Bourdonnaye, and added to it the iniquitous proposal that civil actions
+should be brought against all condemned persons for the damages sustained
+by the State through Napoleon's return. This was to make a mock of the
+clause in the Charta which abolished confiscation. The report of the
+committee caused the utmost dismay both in France itself and among the
+representatives of foreign Powers at Paris. The conflict between the men of
+reaction and the Government had openly broken out; Richelieu's Ministry,
+the guarantee of peace, seemed to be on the point of falling. On the 2nd of
+January, 1816, the Chamber proceeded to discuss the Bill of the Government
+and the amendments of the committee. The debate lasted four days; it was
+only by the repeated use of the King's own name that the Ministers
+succeeded in gaining a majority of nine votes against the two principal
+categories of exception appended to the amnesty by their opponents. The
+proposal to restore confiscation under the form of civil actions was
+rejected by a much greater majority, but on the vote affecting the
+regicides the Government was defeated. This indeed was considered of no
+great moment. Richelieu, content with having averted measures which would
+have exposed several hundred persons to death, exile, or pecuniary ruin,
+consented to banish from France the regicides who had acknowledged
+Napoleon, along with the thirty-eight persons named in the second list of
+July 24th. Among other well-known men, Carnot, who had rendered such great
+services to his country, went to die in exile. Of the seventeen companions
+of Ney and Labedoyere in the first list of July 24th, most had escaped from
+France; one alone suffered death. [269] But the persons originally excluded
+from the amnesty and the regicides exiled by the Assembly formed but a
+small part of those on whom the vengeance of the Royalists fell; for it was
+provided that the amnesty-law should apply to no one against whom
+proceedings had been taken before the formal promulgation of the law. The
+prisons were already crowded with accused persons, who thus remained
+exposed to punishment; and after the law had actually passed the Chamber,
+telegraph-signals were sent over the country by Clarke, the Minister of
+War, ordering the immediate accusation of several others. One distinguished
+soldier at least, General Travot, was sentenced to death on proceedings
+thus instituted between the passing and the promulgation of the law of
+amnesty. [270] Executions, however, were not numerous except in the south
+of France, but an enormous number of persons were imprisoned or driven from
+their homes, some by judgment of the law-courts, some by the exercise of
+the powers conferred on the administration by the law of Public Security.
+[271] The central government indeed had less part in this species of
+persecution than the Prefets and other local authorities, though within
+their own departments Clarke and Vaublanc set an example which others were
+not slow to follow. Royalist committees were formed all over the country,
+and assumed the same kind of irregular control over the officials of their
+districts as had been practised by the Jacobin committees of 1793.
+Thousands of persons employed in all grades of the public service, in
+schools and colleges as well as in the civil administration, in the
+law-courts as well as in the army and navy, were dismissed from their
+posts. The new-comers were professed agents of the reaction; those who were
+permitted to retain their offices strove to outdo their colleagues in their
+renegade zeal for the new order. It was seen again, as it had been seen
+under the Republic and under the Empire, that if virtue has limits,
+servility has none. The same men who had hunted down the peasant for
+sheltering his children from Napoleon's conscription now hunted down those
+who were stigmatised as Bonapartists. The clergy threw in their lot with
+the victorious party, and denounced to the magistrates their parishioners
+who treated them with disrespect. [272] Darker pages exist in French
+history than the reaction of 1815, none more contemptible. It is the
+deepest condemnation of the violence of the Republic and the despotism of
+the Empire that the generation formed by it should have produced the class
+who could exhibit, and the public who could tolerate, the prodigies of
+baseness which attended the second Bourbon restoration.
+
+[The reactionists adopt Parliamentary theory.]
+
+Within the Chamber of Deputies the Ultra-Royalist majority had gained
+Parliamentary experience in the debates on the Amnesty Bill and the Law of
+Public Security: their own policy now took a definite shape, and to
+outbursts of passion there succeeded the attempt to realise ideas. Hatred
+of the Revolution and all its works was still the dominant impulse of the
+Assembly; but whatever may have been the earlier desire of the
+Ultra-Royalist noblesse, it was no longer their intention to restore the
+political system that existed before 1789. They would in that case have
+desired to restore absolute monarchy, and to surrender the power which
+seemed at length to have fallen into the hands of their own class. With
+Artois on the throne this might have been possible, for Artois, though heir
+to the crown, was still what he had been in his youth, the chief of a
+party: with Louis XVIII. and Richelieu at the head of the State, the
+Ultra-Royalists became the adversaries of royal prerogative and the
+champions of the rights of Parliament. Before the Revolution the noblesse
+had possessed privileges; it had not possessed political power. The
+Constitution of 1814 had unexpectedly given it, under representative forms,
+the influence denied to it under the old monarchy. New political vistas
+opened; and the men who had hitherto made St. Louis and Henry IV. the
+subject of their declamations, now sought to extend the rights of
+Parliament to the utmost, and to perpetuate in succeeding assemblies the
+rule of the present majority. An electoral law favourable to the great
+landed proprietors was the first necessity. This indeed was but a means to
+an end; another and a greater end might be attained directly, the
+restoration of a landed Church, and of the civil and social ascendancy of
+the clergy.
+
+[Ecclesiastical schemes of the reaction.]
+
+It had been admitted by King Louis XVIII. that the clause in the Charta
+relating to elections required modification, and on this point the
+Ultra-Royalists in the Chamber were content to wait for the proposals of
+the Government. In their ecclesiastical policy they did not maintain the
+same reserve. Resolutions in favour of the State-Church were discussed in
+the form of petitions to be presented to the Crown. It was proposed to make
+the clergy, as they had been before the Revolution, the sole keepers of
+registers of birth and marriage; to double the annual payment made to them
+by the State; to permit property of all kinds to be acquired by the Church
+by gift or will; to restore all Church lands not yet sold by the State;
+and, finally, to abolish the University of France, and to place all schools
+and colleges throughout the country under the control of the Bishops. One
+central postulate not only passed the Chamber, but was accepted by the
+Government and became law. Divorce was absolutely abolished; and for two
+generations after 1816 no possible aggravation of wrong sufficed in France
+to release either husband or wife from the mockery of a marriage-tie. The
+power to accept donations or legacies was granted to the clergy, subject,
+however, in every case to the approval of the Crown. The allowance made to
+them out of the revenues of the State was increased by the amount of
+certain pensions as they should fall in, a concession which fell very far
+short of the demands of the Chamber. In all, the advantages won for the
+Church were scarcely proportioned to the zeal displayed in its cause. The
+most important question, the disposal of the unsold Church lands, remained
+to be determined when the Chamber should enter upon the discussion of the
+Budget.
+
+[Electoral Bill, Dec. 18, 1815.]
+
+The Electoral Bill of the Government, from which the Ultra-Royalists
+expected so much, was introduced at the end of the year 1815. It showed in
+a singular manner the confusion of ideas existing within the Ministry as to
+the nature of the Parliamentary liberty now supposed to belong to France.
+The ex-prefet Vaublanc, to whom the framing of the measure was entrusted,
+though he imagined himself purged from the traditions of Napoleonism, could
+conceive of no relation between the executive and the legislative power but
+that which exists between a substance and its shadow. It never entered his
+mind that the representative institutions granted by the Charta were
+intended to bring an independent force to bear upon the Government, or that
+the nation should be treated as more than a fringe round the compact and
+lasting body of the administration. The language in which Vaublanc
+introduced his measure was grotesquely candid. Montesquieu, he said, had
+pointed out that powers must be subordinate; therefore the electoral power
+must be controlled by the King's Government. [273] By the side of the
+electors in the Canton and the Department there was accordingly placed, in
+the Ministerial scheme, an array of officials numerous enough to carry the
+elections, if indeed they did not actually outnumber the private voters.
+The franchise was confined to the sixty richest persons in each Canton:
+these, with the officials of the district, were to elect the voters of the
+Department, who, with a similar contingent of officials, were to choose the
+Deputies. Re-affirming the principle laid down in the Constitution of 1795
+and repeated in the Charta, Vaublanc proposed that a fifth part of the
+Assembly should retire each year.
+
+[Counter-project of Villele.]
+
+If the Minister had intended to give the Ultra-Royalists the best possible
+means of exalting the peculiar policy of their class into something like a
+real defence of liberty, he could not have framed a more fitting measure.
+The creation of constituent bodies out of mayors, crown-advocates, and
+justices of the peace, was described, and with truth, as a mere Napoleonic
+juggle. The limitation of the franchise to a fixed number of rich persons
+was condemned as illiberal and contrary to the spirit of the Charta: the
+system of yearly renovation by fifths, which threatened to curtail the
+reign of the present majority, was attributed to the dread of any complete
+expression of public opinion. It was evident that the Bill of the
+Government would either be rejected or altered in such a manner as to give
+it a totally different character. In the Committee of the Chamber which
+undertook the task of drawing up amendments, the influence was first felt
+of a man who was soon to become the chief and guiding spirit of the
+Ultra-Royalist party. M. de Villele, spokesman of the Committee, had in his
+youth been an officer in the navy of Louis XVI. On the dethronement of the
+King he had quitted the service, and settled in the Isle of Bourbon, where
+he gained some wealth and an acquaintance with details of business and
+finance rare among the French landed gentry. Returning to France under the
+Empire, he took up his abode near Toulouse, his native place, and was made
+Mayor of that city on Napoleon's second downfall. Villele's politics gained
+a strong and original colour from his personal experience and the character
+of the province in which he lived. The south was the only part of France
+known to him. There the reactionary movement of 1815 had been a really
+popular one, and the chief difficulty of the Government, at the end of the
+Hundred Days, had been to protect the Bonapartists from violence. Villele
+believed that throughout France the wealthier men among the peasantry were
+as ready to follow the priests and nobles as they were in Provence and La
+Vendee. His conception of the government of the future was the rule of a
+landed aristocracy, resting, in its struggle against monarchical
+centralisation and against the Liberalism of the middle class, on the
+conservative and religious instincts of the peasantry. Instead of excluding
+popular forces, Villele welcomed them as allies. He proposed to lower the
+franchise to one-sixth of the sum named in the Charta, and, while retaining
+a system of double-election, to give a vote in the primary assemblies to
+every Frenchman paying annual taxes to the amount of fifty francs. In
+constituencies so large as to include all the more substantial peasantry,
+while sufficiently limited to exclude the ill-paid populace in towns,
+Villele believed that the Church and the noblesse would on the whole
+control the elections. In the interest of the present majority he rejected
+the system of renovation by fifths proposed by the Government, and demanded
+that the present Chamber should continue unchanged until its dissolution,
+and the succeeding Chamber be elected entire.
+
+[Result of debates on Electoral Bill.]
+
+Villele's scheme, if carried, would in all probability have failed at the
+first trial. The districts in which the reaction of 1815 was popular were
+not so large as he supposed: in the greater part of France the peasantry
+would not have obeyed the nobles except under intimidation. This was
+suspected by the majority, in spite of the confident language in which they
+spoke of the will of the nation as identical with their own. Villele's
+boldness alarmed them: they anticipated that these great constituencies of
+peasants, if really left masters of the elections, would be more likely to
+return a body of Jacobins and Bonapartists than one of hereditary
+landlords. It was not necessary, however, to sacrifice the well-sounding
+principle of a low franchise, for the democratic vote at the first stage of
+the elections might effectively be neutralised by putting the second stage
+into the hands of the chief proprietors. The Assembly had in fact only to
+imitate the example of the Government, and to appoint a body of persons who
+should vote, as of right, by the side of the electors chosen in the primary
+assemblies. The Government in its own interest had designated a troop of
+officials as electors: the Assembly, on the contrary, resolved that in the
+Electoral College of each Department, numbering in all about 150 persons,
+the fifty principal landowners of the Department should be entitled to
+vote, whether they had been nominated by the primary constituencies or not.
+Modified by this proviso, the project of Villele passed the Assembly. The
+Government saw that under the disguise of a series of amendments a measure
+directly antagonistic to their own had been carried. The franchise had been
+altered; the real control of the elections placed in the hands of the very
+party which was now in open opposition to the King and his Ministers. No
+compromise was possible between the law proposed by the Government and that
+passed by the Assembly. The Government appealed to the Chamber of Peers.
+The Peers threw out the amendments of the Lower House. A provisional
+measure was then introduced by Richelieu for the sake of providing France
+with at least some temporary rule for the conduct of elections. It failed;
+and the constitutional legislation of the country came to a dead-lock,
+while the Government and the Assembly stood face to face, and it became
+evident that one or the other must fall. The Ministers of the Great Powers
+at Paris, who watched over the restored dynasty, debated whether or not
+they should recommend the King to resort to the extreme measure of a
+dissolution.
+
+[Contest on the Budget.]
+
+[The Chambers prorogued, April 29.]
+
+The Electoral Bill was not the only object of conflict between Richelieu's
+Ministry and the Chamber, nor indeed the principal one. The Budget excited
+fiercer passions, and raised greater issues. It was for no mere scheme of
+finance that the Government had to fight, but against a violation of public
+faith which would have left France insolvent and creditless in the face of
+the Powers who still held its territory in pledge. The debt incurred by the
+nation since 1813 was still unfunded. That part of it which had been raised
+before the summer of 1814 had been secured by law upon the unsold forests
+formerly belonging to the Church, and upon the Communal lands which
+Napoleon had made the property of the State: the remainder, which included
+the loans made during the Hundred Days, had no specified security. It was
+now proposed by the Government to place the whole of the unfunded debt upon
+the same level, and to provide for its payment by selling the so-called
+Church forests. The project excited the bitterest opposition on the side of
+the Count of Artois and his friends. If there was one object which the
+clerical and reactionary party pursued with religious fervour, it was the
+restoration of the Church lands: if there was one class which they had no
+scruple in impoverishing, it was the class that had lent money to Napoleon.
+Instead of paying the debts of the State, the Committee of the Chamber
+proposed to repeal the law of September, 1814, which pledged the Church
+forests, and to compel both the earlier and the later holders of the
+unfunded debt to accept stock in satisfaction of their claims, though the
+stock was worth less than two-thirds of its nominal value. The resolution
+was in fact one for the repudiation of a third part of the unfunded debt.
+Richelieu, seeing in what fashion his measure was about to be transformed,
+determined upon withdrawing it altogether: the majority in the Chamber,
+intent on executing its own policy and that of the Count of Artois, refused
+to recognise the withdrawal. Such a step was at once an insult and a
+usurpation of power. So great was the scandal and alarm caused by the
+scenes in the Chamber, that the Duke of Wellington, at the instance of the
+Ambassadors, presented a note to King Louis XVIII. requiring him in plain
+terms to put a stop to the machinations of his brother. [274] The
+interference of the foreigner provoked the Ultra-Royalists, and failed to
+excite energetic action on the part of King Louis, who dreaded the sour
+countenance of the Duchess of Angouleme more than he did Wellington's
+reproofs. In the end the question of a settlement of the unfunded debt was
+allowed to remain open. The Government was unable to carry the sale of the
+Church forests, the Chamber did not succeed in its project of confiscation.
+The Budget for the year, greatly altered in the interest of the landed
+proprietors, was at length brought into shape. A resolution of the Lower
+House restoring the unsold forests to the Church was ignored by the Crown;
+and the Government, having obtained the means of carrying on the public
+services, gladly abstained from further legislation, and on the 29th of
+April ended the turmoil which surrounded it by proroguing the Chambers.
+
+[Rising at Grenoble, May 6th. Executions.]
+
+It was hoped that with the close of the Session the system of imprisonment
+and surveillance which prevailed in the Departments would be brought to an
+end. Vaublanc, the Minister of coercion, was removed from office. But the
+troubles of France were not yet over. On the 6th of May, a rising of
+peasants took place at Grenoble. According to the report of General
+Donnadieu, commander of the garrison, which brought the news to the
+Government, the revolt had only been put down after the most desperate
+fighting. "The corpses of the King's enemies," said the General in his
+despatch, "cover all the roads for a league round Grenoble." [275] It was
+soon known that twenty-four prisoners had been condemned to death by
+court-martial, and sixteen of these actually executed: the court-martial
+recommended the other eight to the clemency of the Government. But the
+despatches of Donnadieu had thrown the Cabinet into a panic. Decazes, the
+most liberal of the Ministers, himself signed the hasty order requiring the
+remaining prisoners to be put to death. They perished; and when it was too
+late the Government learnt that Donnadieu's narrative was a mass of the
+grossest exaggerations, and that the affair which he had represented as an
+insurrection of the whole Department was conducted by about 300 peasants,
+half of whom were unarmed. The violence and illegality with which the
+General proceeded to establish a regime of military law soon brought him
+into collision with the Government. He became the hero of the
+Ultra-Royalists; but the Ministry, which was unwilling to make a public
+confession that it had needlessly put eight persons to death, had to bear
+the odium of an act of cruelty for which Donnadieu was really responsible.
+The part into which Decazes had been entrapped probably strengthened the
+determination of this Minister, who was now gaining great influence over
+the King, to strike with energy against the Ultra-Royalist faction. From
+this time he steadily led the King towards the only measure which could
+free the country from the rule of the Count of Artois and the
+reactionists--the dissolution of Parliament.
+
+[Decazes.]
+
+[Dissolution of the Chamber, Sept. 5, 1816.]
+
+Louis XVIII. depended much on the society of some personal favourite.
+Decazes was young and an agreeable companion; his business as
+Police-Minister gave him the opportunity of amusing the King with anecdotes
+and gossip much more congenial to the old man's taste than discussions on
+finance or constitutional law. Louis came to regard Decazes almost as a
+son, and gratified his own studious inclination by teaching him English.
+The Minister's enemies said that he won the King's heart by taking private
+lessons from some obscure Briton, and attributing his extraordinary
+progress to the skill of his royal master. But Decazes had a more effective
+retort than witticism. He opened the letters of the Ultra-Royalists and
+laid them before the King. Louis found that these loyal subjects jested
+upon his infirmities, called him a dupe in the hands of Jacobins, and
+grumbled at him for so long delaying the happy hour when Artois should
+ascend the throne. Humorous as Louis was, he was not altogether pleased to
+read that he "ought either to open his eyes or to close them for ever." At
+the same time the reports of Decazes' local agents proved that the
+Ultra-Royalist party were in reality weak in numbers and unpopular
+throughout the greater part of the country. The project of a dissolution
+was laid before the Ministers and some of the King's confidants. Though the
+Ambassadors were not consulted on the measure, it was certain that they
+would not resist it. No word of the Ministerial plot reached the rival camp
+of Artois. The King gained courage, and on the 5th of September signed the
+Ordonnance which appealed from the Parliament to the nation, and, to the
+anger and consternation of the Ultra-Royalists, made an end of the
+intractable Chamber a few weeks before the time which had been fixed for
+its re-assembling.
+
+[Electoral law, 1817.]
+
+France was well rid of a body of men who had been elected at a moment of
+despair, and who would either have prolonged the occupation of the country
+by foreign armies, or have plunged the nation into civil war. The elections
+which followed were favourable to the Government. The questions fruitlessly
+agitated in the Assembly of 1815 were settled to the satisfaction of the
+public in the new Parliament. An electoral law was passed, which, while it
+retained the high franchise fixed by the Charta, and the rule of renewing
+the Chamber by fifths, gave life and value to the representative system by
+making the elections direct. Though the constituent body of all France
+scarcely numbered under this arrangement a hundred thousand persons, it was
+extensive enough to contain a majority hostile to the reactionary policy of
+the Church and the noblesse. The men who had made wealth by banking,
+commerce, or manufactures, the so-called higher bourgeoisie, greatly
+exceeded in number the larger landed proprietors; and although they were
+not usually democratic in their opinions, they were liberal, and keenly
+attached to the modern as against the old institutions of France, inasmuch
+as their industrial interests and their own personal importance depended
+upon the maintenance of the victory won in 1789 against aristocratic
+privilege and monopoly. So strong was the hostility between the civic
+middle class and the landed noblesse, that the Ultra-Royalists in the
+Chamber sought, as they had done in the year before, to extend the
+franchise to the peasantry, in the hope of overpowering wealth with
+numbers. The electoral law, however, passed both Houses in the form in
+which it had been drawn up by the Government. Though deemed narrow and
+oligarchical by the next generation, it was considered, and with justice,
+as a great victory won by liberalism at the time. The middle class of Great
+Britain had to wait for fifteen years before it obtained anything like the
+weight in the representation given to the middle class of France by the law
+of 1817.
+
+[Establishment of financial credit.]
+
+Not many of the persons who had been imprisoned under the provisional acts
+of the last year now remained in confinement. It was considered necessary
+to prolong the Laws of Public Security, and they were re-enacted, but under
+a much softened form. It remained for the new Chamber to restore the
+financial credit of the country by making some equitable arrangement for
+securing the capital and paying the interest of the unfunded debt. Projects
+of repudiation now gained no hearing. Richelieu consented to make an annual
+allowance to the Church, equivalent to the rental of the Church forests;
+but the forests themselves were made security for the debt, and the power
+of sale was granted to the Government. Pending such repayment of the
+capital, the holders of unfunded debt received stock, calculated at its
+real, not at its titular, value. The effect of this measure was at once
+evident. The Government was enabled to enter into negotiations for a loan,
+which promised it the means of paying the indemnities due to the foreign
+Powers. On this payment depended the possibility of withdrawing the army of
+occupation. Though Wellington at first offered some resistance, thirty
+thousand men were removed in the spring of 1817; and the Czar allowed
+Richelieu to hope that, if no further difficulties should arise, the
+complete evacuation of French territory might take place in the following
+year.
+
+[Character of the years 1816-18.]
+
+Thus the dangers with which reactionary passion had threatened France
+appeared to be passing away. The partial renovation of the Chamber which
+took place in the autumn of 1817 still further strengthened the Ministry of
+Richelieu and weakened the Ultra-Royalist opposition. A few more months
+passed, and before the third anniversary of Waterloo, the Czar was ready to
+advise the entire withdrawal of foreign armies from France. An invitation
+was issued to the Powers to meet in Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. There
+was no longer any doubt that the five years' occupation, contemplated when
+the second Treaty of Paris was made, would be abandoned. The good will of
+Alexander, the friendliness of his Ambassador, Pozzo di Borgo, who, as a
+native of Corsica, had himself been a French subject, and who now aspired
+to become Minister of France, were powerful influences in favour of Louis
+XVIII. and his kingdom; much, however, of the speedy restoration of
+confidence was due to the temperate rule of Richelieu. The nation itself,
+far from suffering from Napoleon's fall, regained something of the
+spontaneous energy so rich in 1789, so wanting at a later period. The cloud
+of military disaster lifted; new mental and political life began; and under
+the dynasty forced back by foreign arms France awoke to an activity unknown
+to it while its chief gave laws to Europe. Parliamentary debate offered the
+means of legal opposition to those who bore no friendship to the Court:
+conspiracy, though it alarmed at the moment, had become the resort only of
+the obscure and the powerless. Groups of able men were gathering around
+recognised leaders, or uniting in defence of a common political creed. The
+Press, dumb under Napoleon except for purposes of sycophancy, gradually
+became a power in the land. Even the dishonest eloquence of Chateaubriand,
+enforcing the principles of legal and constitutional liberty on behalf of a
+party which would fain have used every weapon of despotism in its own
+interest, proved that the leaden weight that had so long crushed thought
+and expression existed no more.
+
+[Prussia after 1815.]
+
+[Edict promising a Constitution, May 22, 1815.]
+
+But if the years between 1815 and 1819 were in France years of hope and
+progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years
+of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of
+Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous
+local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the
+impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving
+energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When
+Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their
+Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander
+would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle
+was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely
+distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of
+internal liberty. They returned from the battlefields of Saxony and France,
+knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth
+at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice
+to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope
+seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William
+published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People
+should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing
+Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none
+existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of
+Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a
+commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency
+the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The
+right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property
+was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly
+excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested
+that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without
+the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations
+only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting
+itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme
+laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the
+most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.
+
+[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]
+
+But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It
+was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious
+services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from
+public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced
+to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the
+liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege
+which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national
+existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and
+undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid
+circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To
+decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian
+Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive
+skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient
+dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon
+Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish
+territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792
+and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution
+with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the
+General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was
+probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were
+mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at
+once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism.
+Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the
+representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had
+exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing
+was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General
+Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution
+would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular
+movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in
+the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the
+German present and the past.
+
+[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]
+
+The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July,
+1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of
+Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a
+statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic
+movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations
+dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and
+peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular
+enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813, [277]
+attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the
+French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with
+which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then,
+passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them
+of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity
+upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not
+mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who
+encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end
+by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz's pamphlet, which was written with a
+strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep
+impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was
+answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened
+until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity,
+ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance
+with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the
+quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act
+of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act
+as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a
+decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true
+bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this
+slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him
+to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had
+acted. [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably
+believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and
+looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in
+open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the
+fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.
+
+[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]
+
+In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work
+of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September.
+Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed,
+its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to
+collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed
+before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little
+progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional
+government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar,
+already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller,
+loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative
+institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the
+Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his
+extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place
+between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no
+result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the
+determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany,
+remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent
+arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm
+in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand
+for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not
+from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and
+students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form.
+The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the
+knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the
+restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any
+State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of
+German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent
+spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the
+treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal
+than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on
+account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the
+new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising
+movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the
+days of Germany's humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an
+impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.
+
+[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]
+
+On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from
+all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to
+celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of
+Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been
+decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and
+assembled within the venerable hall of Luther's Wartburg Castle; sang,
+prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the
+jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke
+of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm
+in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church
+without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with
+gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and
+lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the
+official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash
+words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of
+the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames,
+in imitation of Luther's dealing with the Pope's Bull, a quantity of what
+they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz's
+pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier's strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a
+corporal's cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were
+now being revived in Westphalia. [279] Insignificant as the whole affair
+was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts.
+Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out.
+The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the
+spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in
+everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were
+at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg
+scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his
+subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It
+left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of
+disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed
+at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety
+with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of
+liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.
+
+[Alexander in 1818.]
+
+Twelve months passed between the Wartburg festival and the beginning of the
+Conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle. In the interval a more important person
+than the King of Prussia went over to the side of reaction. Up to the
+summer of 1818, the Czar appeared to have abated nothing of his zeal for
+constitutional government. In the spring of that year, he summoned the
+Polish Diet; addressed them in a speech so enthusiastic as to alarm not
+only the Court of Vienna but all his own counsellors; and stated in the
+clearest possible language his intention of extending the benefits of a
+representative system to the whole Russian Empire. [280] At the close of
+the brief session he thanked the Polish Deputies for their boldness in
+throwing out a measure proposed by himself. Alexander's popular rhetoric at
+Warsaw might perhaps be not incompatible with a settled purpose to permit
+no encroachment on authority either there or elsewhere; but the change in
+his tone was so great when he appeared at Aix-la-Chapelle a few months
+afterwards, that some strange and sudden cause has been thought necessary
+to explain it. It is said that during the Czar's residence at Moscow, in
+June, 1818, the revelation was made to him of the existence of a mass of
+secret societies in the army, whose aim was the overthrow of his own
+Government. Alexander's father had died by the hands of murderers: his own
+temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a
+discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to
+the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with
+earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to
+a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator
+to the despot. But the evidence of what passed in his mind is wanting.
+Hearsay, conjecture, gossip, abound; [281] the one man who could have told
+all has left no word. This only is certain, that from the close of the year
+1818, the future, hitherto bright with dreams of peaceful progress, became
+in Alexander's view a battle-field between the forces of order and anarchy.
+The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to
+spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing
+authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against
+the madness that was known as popular right.
+
+[Conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, Oct., 1818.]
+
+[France evacuated.]
+
+[Proposed Quintuple Alliance.]
+
+[Canning.]
+
+At the end of September, 1818, the Sovereigns or Ministers of the Great
+Powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Conferences began. The first
+question to be decided was whether the Allied Army might safely be
+withdrawn from France; the second, in what form the concert of Europe
+should hereafter be maintained. On the first question there was no
+disagreement: the evacuation of France was resolved upon and promptly
+executed. The second question was a more difficult one. Richelieu, on
+behalf of King Louis XVIII., represented that France now stood on the same
+footing as any other European Power, and proposed that the Quadruple
+Alliance of 1815 should be converted into a genuine European federation by
+adding France to it as a fifth member. The plan had been communicated to
+the English Government, and would probably have received its assent but for
+the strong opposition raised by Canning within the Cabinet. Canning took a
+gloomy but a true view of the proposed concert of the Powers. He foresaw
+that it would really amount to a combination of governments against
+liberty. Therefore, while recognising the existing engagements of this
+country, he urged that England ought to join in no combination except that
+to which it had already pledged itself, namely, the combination made with
+the definite object of resisting French disturbance. To combine with three
+Powers to prevent Napoleon or the Jacobins from again becoming masters of
+France was a reasonable act of policy: to combine with all the Great Powers
+of Europe against nothing in particular was to place the country on the
+side of governments against peoples, and to involve England in any
+enterprise of repression which the Courts might think fit to undertake.
+Canning's warning opened the eyes of his colleagues to the view which was
+likely to be taken of such a general alliance by Parliament and by public
+opinion. Lord Castlereagh was forbidden to make this country a party to any
+abstract union of Governments. In memorable words the Prime Minister
+described the true grounds for the decision: "We must recollect in the
+whole of this business, and ought to make our Allies feel, that the general
+and European discussion of these questions will be in the British
+Parliament." [282] Fear of the rising voice of the nation, no longer forced
+by military necessities to sanction every measure of its rulers, compelled
+Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh to take account of scruples which were not
+their own. On the same grounds, while the Ministry agreed that Continental
+difficulties which might hereafter arise ought to be settled by a friendly
+discussion among the Great Powers, it declined to elevate this occasional
+deliberation into a system, and to assent to the periodical meeting of a
+Congress. Peace might or might not be promoted by the frequent gatherings
+of Sovereigns and statesmen; but a council so formed, if permanent in its
+nature, would necessarily extinguish the independence of every minor State,
+and hand over the government of all Europe to the Great Courts, if only
+they could agree with one another.
+
+[Declarations and Secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.]
+
+It was the refusal of England to enter into a general league that
+determined the form in which the results of the Conference of 1818 were
+embodied. In the first place the Quadruple Alliance against French
+revolution was renewed, and with such seriousness that the military centres
+were fixed, at which, in case of any outbreak, the troops of each of the
+Great Powers should assemble. [283] This Treaty, however, was kept secret,
+in order not to add to the difficulties of Richelieu. The published
+documents breathed another spirit. [284] Without announcing an actual
+alliance with King Louis XVIII., the Courts, including England, declared
+that through the restoration of legitimate and constitutional monarchy
+France had regained its place in the councils of Europe, and that it would
+hereafter co-operate in maintaining the general peace. For this end
+meetings of the sovereigns or their ministers might be necessary; such
+meetings would, however, be arranged by the ordinary modes of negotiation,
+nor would the affairs of any minor State be discussed by the Great Powers,
+except at the direct invitation of that State, whose representatives would
+then be admitted to the sittings. In these guarded words the intention of
+forming a permanent and organised Court of Control over Europe was
+disclaimed. A manifesto, addressed to the world at large, declared that the
+sovereigns of the five great States had no other object in their union than
+the maintenance of peace on the basis of existing treaties. They had formed
+no new political combinations; their rule was the observance of
+international law; their object the prosperity and moral welfare of their
+subjects.
+
+[Repressive tone of the Conference.]
+
+[Metternich and Austrian principles henceforth dominant.]
+
+The earnestness with which the statesmen of 1818, while accepting the
+conditions laid down by England, persevered in the project of a joint
+regulation of European affairs may suggest the question whether the plan
+which they had at heart would not in truth have operated to the benefit of
+mankind. The answer is, that the value of any International Council depends
+firstly on the intelligence which it is likely to possess, and secondly on
+the degree in which it is really representative. Experience proved that the
+Congresses which followed 1818 possessed but a limited intelligence, and
+that they represented nothing at all but authority. The meeting at
+Aix-la-Chapelle was itself the turning-point in the constitutional history
+of Europe. Though no open declaration was made against constitutional
+forms, every Sovereign and every minister who attended the Conference left
+it with the resolution to draw the reins of government tighter. A note of
+alarm had been sounded. Conspiracies in Belgium, an attempt on the life of
+Wellington, rumours of a plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, combined
+with the outcry against the German Universities and the whispered tales
+from Moscow in filling the minds of statesmen with apprehensions. The
+change which had taken place in Alexander himself was of the most serious
+moment. Up to this time Metternich, the leader of European Conservatism,
+had felt that in the Czar there were sympathies with Liberalism and
+enlightenment which made the future of Europe doubtful. [285] To check the
+dissolution of existing power, to suppress all tendency to change, was the
+habitual object of Austria, and the Czar was the one person who had seemed
+likely to prevent the principles of Austria from becoming the law of
+Europe. Elsewhere Metternich had little to fear in the way of opposition.
+Hardenberg, broken in health and ill-supported by his King, had ceased to
+be a power. Yielding to the apprehensions of Frederick William, perhaps
+with the hope of dispelling them at some future time, he took his place
+among the alarmists of the day, and suffered the German policy of Prussia,
+to which so great a future lay open a few years before, to become the mere
+reflex of Austrian inaction and repression. [286] England, so long as it
+was represented on the Continent by Castlereagh and Wellington, scarcely
+counted for anything on the side of liberty. The sudden change in Alexander
+removed the one check that stood in Austria's way; and from this time
+Metternich exercised an authority in Europe such as few statesmen have ever
+possessed. His influence, overborne by that of the Czar during 1814 and
+1815, struck root at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, maintained itself
+unimpaired during five eventful years, and sank only when the death of Lord
+Castlereagh allowed the real voice of England once more to be heard, and
+Canning, too late to forbid the work of repression in Italy and in Spain,
+inaugurated, after an interval of forced neutrality, that worthier concert
+which established the independence of Greece.
+
+[Metternich's advice to Prussia, 1818.]
+
+If it is the mark of a clever statesman to know where to press and where to
+give way, Metternich certainly proved himself one in 1818. Before the end
+of the Conference he delivered to Hardenberg and to the King of Prussia two
+papers containing a complete set of recommendations for the management of
+Prussian affairs. The contents of these documents were singular enough: it
+is still more singular that they form the history of what actually took
+place in Prussia during the succeeding years. Starting with the assumption
+that the party of revolution had found its lever in the promise of King
+Frederick William to create a Representative System, Metternich
+demonstrated in polite language to the very men who had made this promise,
+that any central Representation would inevitably overthrow the Prussian
+State; pointed out that the King's dominions consisted of seven Provinces;
+and recommended Frederick William to fulfil his promise only by giving to
+each Province a Diet for the discussion of its own local concerns. Having
+thus warned the King against creating a National Parliament, like that
+which had thrown France into revolution in 1789, Metternich exhibited the
+specific dangers of the moment and the means of overcoming them. These
+dangers were Universities, Gymnastic establishments, and the Press. "The
+revolutionists," he said, "despairing of effecting their aim themselves,
+have formed the settled plan of educating the next generation for
+revolution. The Gymnastic establishment is a preparatory school for
+University disorders. The University seizes the youth as he leaves boyhood,
+and gives him a revolutionary training. This mischief is common to all
+Germany, and must be checked by joint action of the Governments. Gymnasia,
+on the contrary, were invented at Berlin, and spring from Berlin. For
+these, palliative measures are no longer sufficient. It has become a duty
+of State for the King of Prussia to destroy the evil. The whole institution
+in every shape must be closed and uprooted." With regard to the abuse of
+the Press, Metternich contented himself with saying that a difference ought
+to be made between substantial books and mere pamphlets or journals; and
+that the regulation of the Press throughout Germany at large could only be
+effected by an agreement between Austria and Prussia. [287]
+
+[Stourdza's pamphlet.]
+
+With a million men under arms, the Sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon
+trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their
+rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon
+schoolboys' shoulders. The Emperor Francis, whose imagination had failed to
+rise to the glories of the Holy Alliance, alone seems to have had some
+suspicion of the absurdity of the present alarms. [288] The Czar
+distinguished himself by his zeal against the lecturers who were turning
+the world upside down. As if Metternich had not frightened the Congress
+enough already, the Czar distributed at Aix-la-Chapelle a pamphlet
+published by one Stourdza, a Moldavian, which described Germany as on the
+brink of revolution, and enumerated half a score of mortal disorders which
+racked that unfortunate country. The chief of all was the vicious system of
+the Universities, which instead of duly developing the vessel of the
+Christian State from the cradle of Moses, [289] brought up young men to be
+despisers of law and instruments of a licentious Press. The ingenious
+Moldavian, whose expressions in some places bear a singular resemblance to
+those of Alexander, while in others they are actually identical with
+reflections of Metternich's not then published, went on to enlighten the
+German Governments as to the best means of rescuing their subjects from
+their perilous condition. Certain fiscal and administrative changes were
+briefly suggested, but the main reform urged was exactly that propounded by
+Metternich, the enforcement of a better discipline and of a more
+rigidly-prescribed course of study at the Universities, along with the
+supervision of all journals and periodical literature.
+
+[The murder of Kotzebue, March 23, 1819.]
+
+Stourdza's pamphlet, in which loose reasoning was accompanied by the
+coarsest invective, would have gained little attention if it had depended
+on its own merits or on the reputation of its author: it became a different
+matter when it was known to represent the views of the Czar. A vehement but
+natural outcry arose at the Universities against this interference of the
+foreigner with German domestic affairs. National independence, it seemed,
+had been won in the deadly struggle against France only in order that
+internal liberty, the promised fruit of this independence, should be
+sacrificed at the bidding of Russia. The Czar himself was out of reach: the
+vengeance of outraged patriotism fell upon an insignificant person who had
+the misfortune to be regarded as his principal agent. A dramatic author
+then famous, now forgotten, August Kotzebue, held the office of Russian
+agent in Central Germany, and conducted a newspaper whose object was to
+throw ridicule on the national movement of the day, and especially on those
+associations of students where German enthusiasm reached its climax. Many
+circumstances embittered popular feeling against this man, and caused him
+to be regarded less as a legitimate enemy than as a traitor and an
+apostate. Kotzebue had himself been a student at Jena, and at one time had
+turned liberal sentiments to practical account in his plays. Literary
+jealousies and wounded vanity had subsequently alienated him from his
+country, and made him the willing and acrid hireling of a foreign Court.
+The reports which, as Russian agent, he sent to St. Petersburg were
+doubtless as offensive as the attacks on the Universities which he
+published in his journal; but it was an extravagant compliment to the man
+to imagine that he was the real author of the Czar's desertion from
+Liberalism to reaction. This, however, was the common belief, and it cost
+Kotzebue dear. A student from Erlangen, Carl Sand, who had accompanied the
+standard at the Wartburg festival, formed the silent resolve of sacrificing
+his own life in order to punish the enemy of his country. Sand was a man of
+pure and devout, though ill-balanced character. His earlier life marked him
+as one whose whole being was absorbed by what he considered a divine call.
+He thought of the Greeks who, even in their fallen estate, had so often
+died to free their country from Turkish oppression, and formed the
+deplorable conclusion that by murdering a decayed dramatist he could strike
+some great blow against the powers of evil. [290] He sought the unfortunate
+Kotzebue in the midst of his family, stabbed him to the heart, and then
+turned his weapon against himself. Recovering from his wounds, he was
+condemned to death, and perished, after a year's interval, on the scaffold,
+calling God to witness that he died for Germany to be free.
+
+[Action of Metternich.]
+
+The effects of Sand's act were very great, and their real nature was at
+once recognised. Hardenberg, the moment that he heard of Kotzebue's death,
+exclaimed that a Prussian Constitution had now become impossible.
+Metternich, who had thought the Czar mad because he desired to found a
+peaceful alliance of Sovereigns on religious principles, was not likely to
+make allowance for a kind of piety that sent young rebels over the country
+on missions of murder. The Austrian statesman was in Rome when the news of
+Kotzebue's assassination reached him. He saw that the time had come for
+united action throughout Germany, and, without making any public utterance,
+drew up a scheme of repressive measures, and sent out proposals for a
+gathering of the Ministers of all the principal German Courts. In the
+summer he travelled slowly northwards, met the King of Prussia at Teplitz,
+in Bohemia, and shortly afterwards opened the intended Conference of
+Ministers in the neighbouring town of Carlsbad. A number of innocent
+persons had already, at his instigation, been arrested in Prussia and other
+States, under circumstances deeply discreditable to Government. Private
+papers were seized, and garbled extracts from them published in official
+prints as proof of guilt. [291] "By the help of God," Metternich wrote, "I
+hope to defeat the German Revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of
+the world. The revolutionists thought me far away, because I was five
+hundred leagues off. They deceived themselves; I have been in the midst of
+them, and now I am striking my blows." [292] Metternich's plan was to
+enforce throughout Germany, by means of legislation in the Federal Diet,
+the principle which he had already privately commended to the King of
+Prussia. There were two distinct objects of policy before him: the first,
+to prevent the formation in any German State of an assembly representing
+the whole community, like the English House of Commons or the French
+Chamber of Deputies; the second, to establish a general system of
+censorship over the Press and over the Universities, and to create a
+central authority, vested, as the representative of the Diet, with
+inquisitorial powers.
+
+[The South-Western States become constitutional as Prussia relapses.]
+
+[Bavarian Constitution, May 26, 1818.]
+
+The first of these objects, the prevention of general assemblies, had been
+rendered more difficult by recent acts of the Governments of Bavaria and
+Baden. A singular change had taken place in the relation between Prussia
+and the Minor States which had formerly constituted the Federation of the
+Rhine. When, at the Congress of Vienna, Prussian statesmen had endeavoured
+to limit the arbitrary rule of petty sovereigns by charging the Diet with
+the protection of constitutional right over all Germany, the Kings of
+Bavaria and Wuertemberg had stoutly refused to part with sovereign power. To
+submit to a law of liberty, as it then seemed, was to lose their own
+separate existence, and to reduce themselves to dependence upon the
+Jacobins of Berlin. This apprehension governed the policy of the Minor
+Courts from 1813 to 1815. But since that time events had taken an
+unexpected turn. Prussia, which once threatened to excite popular movement
+over all Germany in its own interest, had now accepted Metternich's
+guidance, and made its representative in the Diet the mouthpiece of
+Austrian interest and policy. It was no longer from Berlin but from Vienna
+that the separate existence of the Minor States was threatened. The two
+great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker
+neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name
+of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns
+seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but
+in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to
+Metternich's direction, the Governments of the South-Western States
+familiarised themselves with the idea of a popular representation; and at
+the very time when the conservative programme was being drawn up for the
+Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the King of Bavaria published a Constitution.
+Baden followed after a short interval, and in each of these States,
+although the Legislature was divided into two Chambers, the representation
+established was not merely provincial, according to Metternich's plan, or
+wholly on the principle of separate Estates or Orders, as before the
+Revolution, but to some extent on the type of England and France, where the
+Lower Chamber, in theory, represented the public at large. This was enough
+to make Metternich condemn the new Constitutions as radically bad and
+revolutionary. [293] He was, however, conscious of the difficulty of making
+a direct attack upon them. This task he reserved for a later time. His
+policy at present was to obtain a declaration from the Diet which should
+prevent any other Government within the League from following in the same
+path; while, by means of Press-laws, supervision of the Universities, and a
+central commission of inquiry, he expected to make the position of
+rebellious professors and agitators so desperate that the forces of
+disorder, themselves not deeply rooted in German nature, would presently
+disappear.
+
+[Conference of Carlsbad, Aug., 1819.]
+
+The Conference of Ministers at Carlsbad, which in the memory of the German
+people is justly associated with the suppression of their liberty for an
+entire generation, began and ended in the month of August, 1819. Though
+attended by the representatives of eight German Governments, it did little
+more than register the conclusions which Metternich had already formed.
+[294] The zeal with which the envoy of Prussia supported every repressive
+measure made it useless for the Ministers of the Minor Courts to offer an
+open opposition. Nothing more was required than that the Diet should
+formally sanction the propositions thus privately accepted by all the
+leading Ministers. On the 20th of September this sanction was given. The
+Diet, which had sat for three years without framing a single useful law,
+ratified all Metternich's oppressive enactments in as many hours. It was
+ordered that in every State within the Federation the Government should
+take measures for preventing the publication of any journal or pamphlet
+except after licence given, and each Government was declared responsible to
+the Federation at large for any objectionable writing published within its
+own territory. The Sovereigns were required to appoint civil commissioners
+at the Universities, whose duty it should be to enforce public order and to
+give a salutary direction to the teaching of the professors. They were also
+required to dismiss all professors who should overstep the bounds of their
+duty, and such dismissed persons were prohibited from being employed in any
+other State. It was enacted that within fifteen days of the passing of the
+decree an extraordinary Commission should assemble at Mainz to investigate
+the origin and extent of the secret revolutionary societies which
+threatened the safety of the Federation. The Commission was empowered to
+examine and, if necessary, to arrest any subject of any German State. All
+law-courts and other authorities were required to furnish it with
+information and with documents, and to undertake all inquiries which the
+Commission might order. The Commission, however, was not a law-court
+itself: its duty was to report to the Diet, which would then create such
+judicial machinery as might be necessary. [295]
+
+[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]
+
+These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary,
+character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to
+raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815,
+which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of
+Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna
+instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger
+opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of
+federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of
+June, 1820. [296] The most important of its provisions was that which
+related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was
+declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities,
+supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no
+Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the
+Estates in certain definite acts of government. [297]
+
+In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious
+subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged
+itself with the duty of maintaining public order.
+
+[The reaction in Prussia.]
+
+From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the
+Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Wuertemberg, which received a
+Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In
+Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and
+most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the
+ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by
+those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their
+places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected,
+thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the
+Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid;
+dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his
+country's glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time
+of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the
+great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an
+encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that
+Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court
+in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the
+head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional
+State. [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled
+popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have
+sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from
+attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses
+had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation,
+was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any
+offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty
+years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German
+unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either
+refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free
+teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every
+avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed
+an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.
+
+[The Commission at Mainz.]
+
+The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was
+more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence
+of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the
+present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs
+existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and
+indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was
+instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature
+of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at
+Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and
+after two years' labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went
+back to the time of Fichte's lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund
+in 1808, traced the progress of all the students' associations and other
+patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the
+worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity,
+acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of
+treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was
+itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded.
+[299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the
+Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed
+that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and
+unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his
+new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and
+with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been
+accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a
+part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one
+another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and
+the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from
+discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers
+and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still
+permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands:
+and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with
+the scents from rich men's kitchens, [300] followed every stage of the
+political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while
+they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of
+their own.
+
+[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]
+
+[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]
+
+In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises
+made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after
+the Minister's death, King Frederick William established the Provincial
+Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that
+the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until
+such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the
+project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without
+a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial
+Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only
+once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local
+matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were
+aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did
+much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the
+friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the
+Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the
+history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by
+the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism
+of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William,
+however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and
+people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a
+parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name
+of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the
+characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The
+greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are
+probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of
+justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia
+during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on
+some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated
+interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of
+public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on
+the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the
+administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education,
+which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other
+German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A
+reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose
+reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the
+chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was
+that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the
+execution of great public ends.
+
+[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]
+
+[Interest in France.]
+
+But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in
+the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as
+the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William
+and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of
+noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,--
+calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,--embittered many an honest mind
+against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but
+it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working
+for the improvement of German public life were one after another
+extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods.
+Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being.
+[301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled
+themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old
+loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The
+Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and
+in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that
+pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of
+result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European
+Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men,
+disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the
+people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a
+free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political
+literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a
+political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of
+French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in
+foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each
+victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow
+of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the
+throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have
+sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.
+
+[France after 1818.]
+
+[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]
+
+We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and
+reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the
+Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which
+in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw
+power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the
+past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much
+satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval
+either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the
+Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back
+great numbers of Napoleon's old officers and soldiers to the army.
+Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave
+fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious
+and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events
+which took place in France during his absence, as well as the
+communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers,
+convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind
+of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed
+at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the
+design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King's
+Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be
+brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the
+conservative elements in the State. [302] While the Congress of
+Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the
+second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned
+there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon
+restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated
+with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news
+with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the
+dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villele,
+the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu
+accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which
+Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the
+real though not the nominal chief.
+
+[Election of Gregoire, Sept., 1819.]
+
+The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme
+displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one.
+For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King
+Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of
+his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An
+attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the
+creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been
+expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the
+Minister's own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now
+raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House
+of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the
+candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions.
+Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment
+and alarm. The ex-bishop Gregoire, one of the authors of the destruction of
+the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which
+established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement
+and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused
+by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the
+legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Gregoire by no
+means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions,
+however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or
+believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King
+Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it: [303] his courageous
+adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days
+of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when
+the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse
+than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled
+heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal
+Church, which Gregoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for
+himself, Gregoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the
+rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793.
+Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide
+Fouche a Minister, interpreted Gregoire's election by the people of
+Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a
+threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him
+when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his
+brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his
+favourite Minister's worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the
+King's friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of
+1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Gregoire
+could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched,
+designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed
+aristocracy. Gregoire's election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers
+who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were
+dismissed from their posts.
+
+[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]
+
+[Reaction sets in.]
+
+[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]
+
+A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a
+stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction.
+The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his
+two sons, the Dukes of Angouleme and Berry. Angouleme was childless; the
+Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he
+should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the
+Crown of France not descending to a female. [304] The circumstance which
+made Berry's life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the
+all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon
+family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner's victory over France.
+Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After
+returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes
+for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the
+13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the
+Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for
+some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King
+Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was,
+it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of
+Louvel's intention. But it was impossible that political passion should
+await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a
+stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more
+skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their
+cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a
+credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of
+complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was
+to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his
+reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State
+with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the
+Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as
+the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son
+The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet
+possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that
+his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate
+rule.
+
+[Progress of the reaction in France.]
+
+[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]
+
+[The Congregation.]
+
+Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of
+himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal
+safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was
+transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property.
+So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government
+excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution.
+Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom
+everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed
+away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to
+impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in
+the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villele and other Ultra-Royalists were
+invited to join Richelieu's Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the
+passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical
+statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But
+restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power
+open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office
+at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu
+confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to
+public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer
+against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry
+was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villele, the real head
+of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new
+France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the
+active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and
+that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface
+but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious
+indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had
+struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown
+up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic
+opponents of Napoleon's despotism, now expanded into a great organism of
+government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its
+patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility
+made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit
+which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more
+than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike
+to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the
+Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There
+might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what
+noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate
+the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole
+system of public education to the hands of the clergy?
+
+[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]
+
+In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in
+opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change
+corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the
+governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though
+strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike
+itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the
+great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on
+their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively.
+But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and
+his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that
+the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be
+governed in perpetuity by what was called the _Parti Pretre_. Twenty
+years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of
+power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored
+family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small
+satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which
+immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of
+their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the
+liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the
+new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom
+had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could
+an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a
+whole, enjoyed greater happiness.
+
+[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]
+
+Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five
+years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the
+same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without
+a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all
+differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were
+not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which
+any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very
+large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who
+had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as
+in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government
+had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had
+exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a
+Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every
+element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a
+warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which
+arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects,
+sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and
+Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional
+theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them,
+the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of
+Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power
+and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further,
+there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the
+convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary
+of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be
+at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular
+sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its
+wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of
+Jacobinism.
+
+There was also in the very fact that Europe had been restored to peace by
+the united efforts of all the governments something adverse to the success
+of a constitutional or a Liberal party in any State. Constitutional systems
+had indeed been much praised at the Congress of Vienna; but the group of
+men who actually controlled Europe in 1815, and who during the five
+succeeding years continued in correspondence and in close personal
+intercourse with one another, had, with one exception, passed their lives
+in the atmosphere of absolute government, and learnt to regard the conduct
+of all great affairs as the business of a small number of very eminent
+individuals. Castlereagh, the one Minister of a constitutional State,
+belonged to a party which, to a degree almost unequalled in Europe,
+identified political duty with the principle of hostility to change. It is
+indeed in the correspondence of the English Minister himself, and in
+relation to subjects of purely domestic government in England, that the
+community of thought which now existed between all the leading statesmen of
+Europe finds its most singular exhibition. Both Metternich and Hardenberg
+took as much interest in the suppression of Lancashire Radicalism, and in
+the measures of coercion which the British Government thought it necessary
+to pass in the year 1819, as in the chastisement of rebellious pamphleteers
+upon the Rhine, and in the dissolution of the students' clubs at Jena. It
+was indeed no very great matter for the English people, who were now close
+upon an era of reform, that Castlereagh received the congratulations of
+Vienna and Berlin for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and the right of
+public meeting, [305] or that Metternich believed that no one but himself
+knew the real import of the shouts with which the London mob greeted Sir
+Francis Burdett. [306] Neither the impending reform of the English Criminal
+Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment
+of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the
+Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed
+likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism
+formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them
+such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when
+the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future
+were so destitute of that strength which springs from connection with the
+past.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+Movements in the Mediterranean States beginning in 1820--Spain from 1814 to
+1820--The South American Colonies--The Army at Cadiz: Action of Quiroga
+and Riego--Movement at Corunna--Ferdinand accepts the Constitution of
+1812--Naples from 1815 to 1820--The Court-party, the Muratists, the
+Carbonari--The Spanish Constitution proclaimed at Naples--Constitutional
+movement in Portugal--Alexander's proposal with regard to Spain--The
+Conference and Declaration of Troppau--Protest of England--Conference of
+Laibach--The Austrians invade Naples and restore absolute Monarchy--
+Insurrection in Piedmont, which fails--Spain from 1820 to 1822--Death of
+Castlereagh--The Congress of Verona--Policy of England--The French invade
+Spain--Restoration of absolute Monarchy, and violence of the reaction--
+England prohibits the conquest of the Spanish Colonies by France, and
+subsequently recognises their independence--Affairs in Portugal--Canning
+sends troops to Lisbon--The Policy of Canning--Estimate of his place in the
+history of Europe.
+
+
+[The Mediterranean movements, beginning in 1820.]
+
+When the guardians of Europe, at the end of the first three years of peace,
+scanned from their council-chamber at Aix-la-Chapelle that goodly heritage
+which, under Providence, their own parental care was henceforth to guard
+against the assaults of malice and revolution, they had fixed their gaze
+chiefly on France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the regions most
+threatened by the spirit of change. The forecast was not an accurate one.
+In each of these countries Government proved during the succeeding years to
+be much more than a match for its real or imaginary foes: it was in the
+Mediterranean States, which had excited comparatively little anxiety, that
+the first successful attack was made upon established power. Three
+movements arose successively in the three southern peninsulas, at the time
+when Metternich was enjoying the silence which he had imposed upon Germany,
+and the Ultra-Royalists of France were making good the advantage which the
+crime of an individual and the imprudence of a party had thrown into their
+hands. In Spain and in Italy a body of soldiers rose on behalf of
+constitutional government: in Greece a nation rose against the rule of the
+foreigner. In all three countries the issue of these movements was, after a
+longer or shorter interval, determined by the Northern Powers. All three
+movements were at first treated as identical in their character, and all
+alike condemned as the work of Jacobinism. But the course of events, and a
+change of persons in the government of one great State, brought about a
+truer view of the nature of the struggle in Greece. The ultimate action of
+Europe in the affairs of that country was different from its action in the
+affairs of Italy and Spain. It is now only remembered as an instance of
+political recklessness or stupidity that a conflict of race against race
+and of religion against religion should for a while have been confused by
+some of the leading Ministers of Europe with the attempt of a party to make
+the form of domestic government more liberal. The Hellenic rising had
+indeed no feature in common with the revolutions of Naples and Cadiz; and,
+although in order of time the opening of the Greek movement long preceded
+the close of the Spanish movement, the historian, who has neither the
+politician's motive for making a confusion, nor the protection of his
+excuse of ignorance, must in this case neglect the accidents of chronology,
+and treat the two as altogether apart.
+
+[Spain between 1814 and 1820.]
+
+King Ferdinand of Spain, after overthrowing the Constitution which he found
+in existence on his return to his country, had conducted himself as if his
+object had been to show to what lengths a legitimate monarch might abuse
+the fidelity of his subjects and defy the public opinion of Europe. The
+leaders of the Cortes, whom he had arrested in 1814, after being declared
+innocent by one tribunal after another were sentenced to long terms of
+imprisonment by an arbitrary decree of the King, without even the pretence
+of judicial forms. Men who had been conspicuous in the struggle of the
+nation against Napoleon were neglected or disgraced; many of the highest
+posts were filled by politicians who had played a double part, or had even
+served under the invader. Priests and courtiers intrigued for influence
+over the King; even when a capable Minister was placed in power through the
+pressure of the ambassadors, and the King's name was set to edicts of
+administrative reform, these edicts were made a dead letter by the powerful
+band who lived upon the corruption of the public service. Nothing was
+sacred except the interest of the clergy; this, however, was enough to keep
+the rural population on the King's side. The peasant, who knew that his
+house would not now be burnt by the French, and who heard that true
+religion had at length triumphed over its enemies, understood, and cared to
+understand, nothing more. Rumours of kingly misgovernment and oppression
+scarcely reached his ears. Ferdinand was still the child of Spain and of
+the Church; his return had been the return of peace; his rule was the
+victory of the Catholic faith.
+
+[The nation satisfied: the officers discontented.]
+
+But the acquiescence of the mass of the people was not shared by the
+officers of the army and the educated classes in the towns. The overthrow
+of the Constitution was from the first condemned by soldiers who had won
+distinction under the government of the Cortes; and a series of military
+rebellion, though isolated and on the smallest scale, showed that the
+course on which Ferdinand had entered was not altogether free from danger.
+The attempts of General Mina in 1814, and of Porlier and Lacy in succeeding
+years, to raise the soldiery on behalf of the Constitution, failed, through
+the indifference of the soldiery themselves, and the power which the
+priesthood exercised in garrison-towns. Discontent made its way in the army
+by slow degrees; and the ultimate declaration of a military party against
+the existing Government was due at least as much to Ferdinand's absurd
+system of favouritism, and to the wretched condition into which the army
+had been thrown, as to an attachment to the memory or the principles of
+constitutional rule. Misgovernment made the treasury bankrupt; soldiers and
+sailors received no pay for years together; and the hatred with which the
+Spanish people had now come to regard military service is curiously shown
+by an order of the Government that all the beggars in Madrid and other
+great towns should be seized on a certain night (July 23, 1816), and
+enrolled in the army. [307] But the very beggars were more than a match for
+Ferdinand's administration. They heard of the fate in store for them, and
+mysteriously disappeared, so frustrating a measure by which it had been
+calculated that Spain would gain sixty thousand warriors.
+
+[Struggle of Spain with its colonies, 1810-1820.]
+
+The military revolution which at length broke out in the year 1820 was
+closely connected with the struggle for independence now being made by the
+American colonies of Spain; and in its turn it affected the course of this
+struggle and its final result. The colonies had refused to accept the rule
+either of Joseph Bonaparte or of the Cortes of Cadiz when their legitimate
+sovereign was dispossessed by Napoleon. While acting for the most part in
+Ferdinand's name, they had engaged in a struggle with the National
+Government of Spain. They had tasted independence; and although after the
+restoration of Ferdinand they would probably have recognised the rights of
+the Spanish Crown if certain concessions had been made, they were not
+disposed to return to the condition of inferiority in which they had been
+held during the last century, or to submit to rulers who proved themselves
+as cruel and vindictive in moments of victory as they were incapable of
+understanding the needs of the time. The struggle accordingly continued.
+Regiment after regiment was sent from Spain, to perish of fever, of forced
+marches, or on the field. The Government of King Ferdinand, despairing of
+its own resources, looked around for help among the European Powers.
+England would have lent its mediation, and possibly even armed assistance,
+if the Court of Madrid would have granted a reasonable amount of freedom to
+the colonies, and have opened their ports to British commerce. This,
+however, was not in accordance with the views of Ferdinand's advisers.
+Strange as it may appear, the Spanish Government demanded that the alliance
+of Sovereigns, which had been framed for the purpose of resisting the
+principle of rebellion and disorder in Europe, should intervene against its
+revolted subjects on the other side of the Atlantic, and it implied that
+England, if acting at all, should act as the instrument of the Alliance.
+[308] Encouragement was given to the design by the Courts of Paris and St.
+Petersburg. Whether a continent claimed its independence, or a German
+schoolboy wore a forbidden ribbon in his cap, the chiefs of the Holy
+Alliance now assumed the frown of offended Providence, and prepared to
+interpose their own superior power and wisdom to save a misguided world
+from the consequences of its own folly. Alexander had indeed for a time
+hoped that the means of subduing the colonies might be supplied by himself;
+and in his zeal to supplant England in the good graces of Ferdinand he sold
+the King a fleet of war on very moderate terms. To the scandal of Europe
+the ships, when they reached Cadiz, turned out to be thoroughly rotten and
+unseaworthy. As it was certain that the Czar's fleet and the Spanish
+soldiers, however holy their mission, would all go to the bottom together
+as soon as they encountered the waves of the Atlantic, the expedition was
+postponed, and the affairs of America were brought before the Conference of
+Aix-la-Chapelle. The Envoys of Russia and France submitted a paper, in
+which, anticipating the storm-warnings of more recent times, they described
+the dangers to which monarchical Europe would be exposed from the growth of
+a federation of republics in America; and they suggested that Wellington,
+as "the man of Europe," should go to Madrid, to preside over a negotiation
+between the Court of Spain and all the ambassadors with reference to the
+terms to be offered to the Transatlantic States. [309] England, however, in
+spite of Lord Castlereagh's dread of revolutionary contagion, adhered to
+the principles which it had already laid down; and as the counsellors of
+King Ferdinand declined to change their policy, Spain was left to subdue
+its colonies by itself.
+
+[Conspiracy in the Army of Cadiz.]
+
+It was in the army assembled at Cadiz for embarkation in the summer of 1819
+that the conspiracy against Ferdinand's Government found its leaders.
+Secret societies had now spread themselves over the principal Spanish
+towns, and looked to the soldiery on the coast for the signal of revolt.
+Abisbal, commander at Cadiz, intending to make himself safe against all
+contingencies, encouraged for awhile the plots of the discontented
+officers: then, foreseeing the failure of the movement, he arrested the
+principal men by a stratagem, and went off to Madrid, to reveal the
+conspiracy to the Court and to take credit for saving the King's crown
+(July, 1819). [310] If the army could have been immediately despatched to
+America, the danger would possibly have passed away. This, however, was
+prevented by an outbreak of yellow fever, which made it necessary to send
+the troops into cantonments for several months. The conspirators gained
+time to renew their plans. The common soldiers, who had hitherto been
+faithful to the Government, heard in their own squalor and inaction the
+fearful stories of the few sick and wounded who returned from beyond the
+seas, and learnt to regard the order of embarkation as a sentence of death.
+Several battalions were won over to the cause of constitutional liberty by
+their commanders. The leaders imprisoned a few months before were again in
+communication with their followers. After the treachery of Abisbal, it was
+agreed to carry out the revolt without the assistance of generals or
+grandees. The leaders chosen were two colonels, Quiroga and Riego, of whom
+the former was in nominal confinement in a monastery near Medina Sidonia,
+twenty miles east of Cadiz, while Riego was stationed at Cabezas, a few
+marches distant on the great road to Seville. The first day of the year
+1820 was fixed for the insurrection. It was determined that Riego should
+descend upon the head-quarters, which were at Arcos, and arrest the
+generals before they could hear anything of the movement, while Quiroga,
+moving from the east, gathered up the battalions stationed on the road, and
+threw himself into Cadiz, there to await his colleague's approach.
+
+[Action of Quiroga and Riego, Jan. 1820.]
+
+The first step in the enterprise proved successful. Riego, proclaiming the
+Constitution of 1812, surprised the headquarters, seized the generals, and
+rallied several companies to his standard. Quiroga, however, though he
+gained possession of San Fernando, at the eastern end of the peninsula of
+Leon, on which Cadiz is situated, failed to make his entrance into Cadiz.
+The commandant, hearing of the capture of the head-quarters, had closed the
+city gates, and arrested the principal inhabitants whom he suspected of
+being concerned in the plot. The troops within the town showed no sign of
+mutiny. Riego, when he arrived at the peninsula of Leon, found that only
+five thousand men in all had joined the good cause, while Cadiz, with a
+considerable garrison and fortifications of great strength, stood hostile
+before him. He accordingly set off with a small force to visit and win over
+the other regiments which were lying in the neighbouring towns and
+villages. The commanders, however, while not venturing to attack the
+mutineers, drew off their troops to a distance, and prevented them from
+entering into any communication with Riego. The adventurous soldier,
+leaving Quiroga in the peninsula of Leon, then marched into the interior of
+Andalusia (January 27), endeavouring to raise the inhabitants of the towns.
+But the small numbers of his band, and the knowledge that Cadiz and the
+greater part of the army still held by the Government, prevented the
+inhabitants from joining the insurrection, even where they received Riego
+with kindness and supplied the wants of his soldiers. During week after
+week the little column traversed the country, now cut off from retreat,
+exhausted by forced marches in drenching rain, and harassed by far stronger
+forces sent in pursuit. The last town that Riego entered was Cordova. The
+enemy was close behind him. No halt was possible. He led his band, now
+numbering only two hundred men, into the mountains, and there bade them
+disperse (March 11).
+
+[Corunna proclaims the Constitution Feb. 20.]
+
+[Abisbal's defection March 4.]
+
+With Quiroga lying inactive in the peninsula of Leon and Riego hunted from
+village to village, it seemed as if the insurrection which they had begun
+could only end in the ruin of its leaders. But the movement had in fact
+effected its object. While the courtiers around King Ferdinand, unwarned by
+the news from Cadiz, continued their intrigues against one another, the
+rumour of rebellion spread over the country. If no great success had been
+achieved by the rebels, it was also certain that no great blow had been
+struck by the Government. The example of bold action had been set; the
+shock given at one end of the peninsula was felt at the other; and a
+fortnight before Riego's band dispersed, the garrison and the citizens of
+Corunna together declared for the Constitution (February 20). From Corunna
+the revolutionary movement spread to Ferrol and to all the other
+coast-towns of Galicia. The news reached Madrid, terrifying the Government,
+and exciting the spirit of insurrection in the capital itself. The King
+summoned a council of the leading men around him. The wisest of them
+advised him to publish a moderate Constitution, and, by convoking a
+Parliament immediately, to stay the movement, which would otherwise result
+in the restoration of the Assembly and the Constitution of 1812. They also
+urged the King to abolish the Inquisition forthwith. Ferdinand's brother,
+Don Carlos, the head of the clerical party, succeeded in preventing both
+measures. Though the generals in all quarters of Spain wrote that they
+could not answer for the troops, there were still hopes of keeping down the
+country by force of arms. Abisbal, who was at Madrid, was ordered to move
+with reinforcements towards the army in the south. He set out, protesting
+to the King that he knew the way to deal with rebels. When he reached Ocana
+he proclaimed the Constitution himself (March 4).
+
+[Ferdinand accepts the Constitution 1812, March 9.]
+
+It was now clear that the cause of absolute monarchy was lost. The ferment
+in Madrid increased. On the night of the 6th of March all the great bodies
+of State assembled for council in the King's palace, and early on the 7th
+Ferdinand published a proclamation, stating that he had determined to
+summon the Cortes immediately. This declaration satisfied no one, for the
+Cortes designed by the King might be the mere revival of a mediaeval form,
+and the history of 1814 showed how little value was to be attached to
+Ferdinand's promises. Crowds gathered in the great squares of Madrid,
+crying for the Constitution of 1812. The statement of the Minister of War
+that the Guard was on the point of joining the people now overcame even the
+resistance of Don Carlos and the confessors; and after a day wasted in
+dispute, Ferdinand announced to his people that he was ready to take the
+oath to the Constitution which they desired. The next day was given up to
+public rejoicings; the book of the Constitution was carried in procession
+through the city with the honours paid to the Holy Sacrament, and all
+political prisoners were set at liberty. The prison of the Inquisition was
+sacked, the instruments of torture broken in pieces. On the 9th the leaders
+of the agitation took steps to make the King fulfil his promise. A mob
+invaded the court and threshold of the palace. At their demand the
+municipal council of 1814 was restored; its members were sent, in company
+with six deputies chosen by the populace, to receive the pledges of the
+King. Ferdinand, all smiles and bows, while he looked forward to the day
+when force or intrigue should make him again absolute master of Spain, and
+enable him to take vengeance upon the men who were humiliating, him, took
+the oath of fidelity to the Constitution of 1812. [311] New Ministers were
+immediately called to office, and a provisional Junta was placed by their
+side as the representative of the public until the new Cortes should be
+duly elected.
+
+[Condition of Naples, 1815-1820.]
+
+Tidings of the Spanish revolution passed rapidly over Europe, disquieting
+the courts and everywhere reviving the hopes of the friends of popular
+right. Before four months had passed, the constitutional movement begun in
+Cadiz was taken up in Southern Italy. The kingdom of Naples was one of
+those States which had profited the most by French conquest. During the
+nine years that its crown was held by Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, the laws
+and institutions which accompanied Napoleon's supremacy had rudely broken
+up the ancient fixity of confusions which passed for government, and had
+aroused no insignificant forces of new social life. The feudal tenure of
+land, and with it something of the feudal structure of society, had passed
+away: the monasteries had been dissolved; the French civil code, and a
+criminal code based upon that of France, had taken the place of a thousand
+conflicting customs and jurisdictions; taxation had been made, if not
+light, yet equitable and simple; justice was regular, and the same for
+baron and peasant; brigandage had been extinguished; and, for the first
+time in many centuries, the presence of a rational and uniform
+administration was felt over all the south of Italy. Nor on the restoration
+of King Ferdinand had any reaction been permitted to take place like that
+which in a moment destroyed the work of reform in Spain and in Westphalia.
+England and Austria insisted that there should be neither vengeance nor
+counterrevolution. Queen Marie Caroline, the principal agent in the
+cruelties of 1799, was dead; Ferdinand himself was old and indolent, and
+willing to leave affairs in the hands of Ministers more intelligent than
+himself. Hence the laws and the administrative system of Murat remained on
+the whole unchanged. [312] As in France, a Bourbon Sovereign placed himself
+at the head of a political order fashioned by Napoleon and the Revolution.
+Where changes in the law were made, or acts of State revoked, it was for
+the most part in consequence of an understanding with the Holy See. Thus,
+while no attempt was made to eject the purchasers of Church-lands, the
+lands not actually sold were given back to the Church; a considerable
+number of monasteries were restored; education was allowed to fall again
+into the hands of the clergy; the Jesuits were recalled, and the Church
+regained its jurisdiction in marriage-causes, as well as the right of
+suppressing writings at variance with the Catholic faith.
+
+[Hostility between the Court party and the Muratists.]
+
+But the legal and recognised changes which followed Ferdinand's return by
+no means expressed the whole change in the operation of government. If
+there were not two conflicting systems at work, there were two conflicting
+bodies of partisans in the State. Like the emigrants who returned with
+Louis XVIII., a multitude of Neapolitans, high and low, who had either
+accompanied the King in his exile to Sicily or fought for him on the
+mainland in 1799 and 1806, now expected their reward. In their interest the
+efficiency of the public service was sacrificed and the course of justice
+perverted. Men who had committed notorious crimes escaped punishment if
+they had been numbered among the King's friends; the generals and officials
+who had served under Murat, though not removed from their posts, were
+treated with discourtesy and suspicion. It was in the army most of all that
+the antagonism of the two parties was felt. A medal was struck for service
+in Sicily, and every year spent there in inaction was reckoned as two in
+computing seniority. Thus the younger officers of Murat found their way
+blocked by a troop of idlers, and at the same time their prospects suffered
+from the honest attempts made by Ministers to reduce the military
+expenditure. Discontent existed in every rank. The generals were familiar
+with the idea of political change, for during the last years of Murat's
+reign they had themselves thought of compelling him to grant a
+Constitution: the younger officers and the sergeants were in great part
+members of the secret society of the Carbonari, which in the course of the
+last few years had grown with the weakness of the Government, and had now
+become the principal power in the Neapolitan kingdom.
+
+[The Carbonari.]
+
+The origin of this society, which derived its name and its symbolism from
+the trade of the charcoal-burner, as Freemasonry from that of the builder,
+is uncertain. Whether its first aim was resistance to Bourbon tyranny after
+1799, or the expulsion of the French and Austrians from Italy, in the year
+1814 it was actively working for constitutional government in opposition to
+Murat, and receiving encouragement from Sicily, where Ferdinand was then
+playing the part of constitutional King. The maintenance of absolute
+government by the restored Bourbon Court severed the bond which for a time
+existed between legitimate monarchy and conspiracy; and the lodges of the
+Carbonari, now extending themselves over the country with great rapidity,
+became so many centres of agitation against despotic rule. By the year 1819
+it was reckoned that one person out of every twenty-five in the kingdom of
+Naples had joined the society. Its members were drawn from all classes,
+most numerously perhaps from the middle class in the towns; but even
+priests had been initiated, and there was no branch of the public service
+that had not Carbonari in its ranks. The Government, apprehending danger
+from the extension of the sect, tried to counteract it by founding a rival
+society of Calderari, or Braziers, in which every miscreant who before 1815
+had murdered and robbed in the name of King Ferdinand and the Catholic
+faith received a welcome. But though the number of such persons was not
+small, the growth of this fraternity remained far behind that of its model;
+and the chief result of the competition was that intrigue and mystery
+gained a greater charm than ever for the Italians, and that all confidence
+in Government perished, under the sense that there was a hidden power in
+the land which was only awaiting the due moment to put forth its strength
+in revolutionary action.
+
+[Morelli's movement, July 2, 1820.]
+
+After the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution, an outbreak in the
+kingdom of Naples had become inevitable. The Carbonari of Salerno, where
+the sect had its headquarters, had intended to rise at the beginning of
+June; their action, however, was postponed for some months, and it was
+anticipated by the daring movement of a few sergeants belonging to a
+cavalry regiment stationed at Nola, and of a lieutenant, named Morelli,
+whom they had persuaded to place himself at their head. Leading out a
+squadron of a hundred and fifty men in the direction of Avellino on the
+morning of July 2nd, Morelli proclaimed the Constitution. One of the
+soldiers alone left the band; force or persuasion kept others to the
+Standard, though they disapproved of the enterprise. The inhabitants of the
+populous places that lie between Nola and Avellino welcomed the squadron,
+or at least offered it no opposition: the officer commanding at Avellino
+came himself to meet Morelli, and promised him assistance. The band
+encamped that night in a village; on the next day they entered Avellino,
+where the troops and townspeople, headed by the bishop and officers,
+declared in their favour. From Avellino the news of the movement spread
+quickly over the surrounding country. The Carbonari were everywhere
+prepared for revolt; and before the Government had taken a single step in
+its own defence, the Constitution had been joyfully and peacefully
+accepted, not only by the people but by the militia and the regular troops,
+throughout the greater part of the district that lies to the east of
+Naples.
+
+[Affairs at Naples, July 2-7.]
+
+The King was on board ship in the bay, when, in the afternoon of July 2nd,
+intelligence came of Morelli's revolt at Nola. Nothing was done by the
+Ministry on that day, although Morelli and his band might have been
+captured in a few hours if any resolute officer, with a few trustworthy
+troops, had been sent against them. On the next morning, when the garrison
+of Avellino had already joined the mutineers, and taken up a strong
+position commanding the road from Naples, General Carrascosa was sent, not
+to reduce the insurgents--for no troops were given to him--but to pardon,
+to bribe, and to coax them into submission. [313] Carrascosa failed to
+effect any good; other generals, who, during the following days, attempted
+to attack the mutineers, found that their troops would not follow them, and
+that the feeling of opposition to the Government, though it nowhere broke
+into lawlessness, was universal in the army as well as the nation. If the
+people generally understood little of politics, they had learnt enough to
+dislike arbitrary taxation and the power of arbitrary arrest. Not a single
+hand or voice was anywhere raised in defence of absolutism. Escaping from
+Naples, where he was watched by the Government, General Pepe, who was at
+once the chief man among the Carbonari and military commandant of the
+province in which Avellino lies, went to place himself at the head of the
+revolution. Naples itself had hitherto remained quiet, but on the night of
+July 6th a deputation from the Carbonari informed the King that they could
+no longer preserve tranquillity in the city unless a Constitution was
+granted. The King, without waiting for morning, published an edict
+declaring that a Constitution should be drawn up within eight days;
+immediately afterwards he appointed a new Ministry, and, feigning illness,
+committed the exercise of royal authority to his son, the Duke of Calabria.
+
+[Ferdinand takes the Oath to the Spanish Constitution, July 13.]
+
+Ferdinand's action was taken by the people as a stratagem. He had employed
+the device of a temporary abdication some years before in cajoling the
+Sicilians; and the delay of eight days seemed unnecessary to ardent souls
+who knew that a Spanish Constitution was in existence and did not know of
+its defects in practice. There was also on the side of the Carbonari the
+telling argument that Ferdinand, as a possible successor to his nephew, the
+childless King of Spain, actually had signed the Spanish Constitution in
+order to preserve his own contingent rights to that crown. What Ferdinand
+had accepted as Infante of Spain he might well accept as King of Naples.
+The cry was therefore for the immediate proclamation of the Spanish
+Constitution of 1812. The court yielded, and the Duke of Calabria, as
+viceroy, published an edict making this Constitution the law of the kingdom
+of the Two Sicilies. But the tumult continued, for deceit was still feared,
+until the edict appeared again, signed by the King himself. Then all was
+rejoicing. Pepe, at the head of a large body of troops, militia and
+Carbonari, made a triumphal entry into the city, and, in company with
+Morelli and other leaders of the military rebellion, was hypocritically
+thanked by the Viceroy for his services to the nation. On the 13th of July
+the King, a hale but venerable-looking man of seventy, took the oath to the
+Constitution before the altar in the royal chapel. The form of words had
+been written out for him; but Ferdinand was fond of theatrical acts of
+religion, and did not content himself with reading certain solemn phrases.
+Raising his eyes to the crucifix above the altar, he uttered aloud a prayer
+that if the oath was not sincerely taken the vengeance of God might fall
+upon his head. Then, after blessing and embracing his sons, the venerable
+monarch wrote to the Emperor of Austria, protesting that all that he did
+was done under constraint, and that his obligations were null and void.
+[314]
+
+[Affairs in Portugal, 1807-1820.]
+
+A month more passed, and in a third kingdom absolute government fell before
+the combined action of soldiers and people. The Court of Lisbon had
+migrated to Brazil in 1807, when the troops of Napoleon first appeared upon
+the Tagus, and Portugal had since then been governed by a Regency, acting
+in the name of the absent Sovereign. The events of the Peninsular War had
+reduced Portugal almost to the condition of a dependency of Great Britain.
+Marshal Beresford, the English commander-in-chief of its army, kept his
+post when the war was over, and with him there remained a great number of
+English officers who had led the Portuguese regiments in Wellington's
+campaigns. The presence of these English soldiers was unwelcome, and
+commercial rivalry embittered the natural feeling of impatience towards an
+ally who remained as master rather than guest. Up to the year 1807 the
+entire trade with Brazil had been confined by law to Portuguese merchants;
+when, however, the Court had established itself beyond the Atlantic, it had
+opened the ports of Brazil to British ships, in return for the assistance
+given by our own country against Napoleon. Both England and Brazil profited
+by the new commerce, but the Portuguese traders, who had of old had the
+monopoly, were ruined. The change in the seat of government was in fact
+seen to be nothing less than a reversal of the old relations between the
+European country and its colony. Hitherto Brazil had been governed in the
+interests of Portugal; but with a Sovereign fixed at Rio Janeiro, it was
+almost inevitable that Portugal should be governed in the interests of
+Brazil. Declining trade, the misery and impoverishment resulting from a
+long war, resentment against a Court which could not be induced to return
+to the kingdom and against a foreigner who could not be induced to quit it,
+filled the army and all classes in the nation with discontent. Conspiracies
+were discovered as early as 1817, and the conspirators punished with all
+the barbarous ferocity of the Middle Ages. Beresford, who had not
+sufficient tact to prevent the execution of a sentence ordering twelve
+persons to be strangled, beheaded, and then burnt in the streets of Lisbon,
+found, during the two succeeding years, that the state of the country was
+becoming worse and worse. In the spring of 1820, when the Spanish
+revolution had made some change in the neighbouring kingdom, either for
+good or evil, inevitable, Beresford set out for Rio Janeiro, intending to
+acquaint the King with the real condition of affairs, and to use his
+personal efforts in hastening the return of the Court to Lisbon. Before he
+could recross the Atlantic, the Government which he left behind him at
+Lisbon had fallen.
+
+[Revolution at Oporto, August 1820.]
+
+The grievances of the Portuguese army made it the natural centre of
+disaffection, but the military conspirators had their friends among all
+classes. On the 24th of August, 1820, the signal of revolt was given at
+Oporto. Priests and magistrates, as well as the town-population, united
+with officers of the army in declaring against the Regency, and in
+establishing a provisional Junta, charged with the duty of carrying on the
+government in the name of the King until the Cortes should assemble and
+frame a Constitution. No resistance was offered by any of the civil or
+military authorities at Oporto. The Junta entered upon its functions, and
+began by dismissing all English officers, and making up the arrears of pay
+due to the soldiers. As soon as the news of the revolt reached Lisbon, the
+Regency itself volunteered to summon the Cortes, and attempted to
+conciliate the remainder of the army by imitating the measures of the Junta
+of Oporto. [315] The troops, however, declined to act against their
+comrades, and on the 15th of September the Regency was deposed, and a
+provisional Junta installed in the capital. Beresford, who now returned
+from Brazil, was forbidden to set foot on Portuguese soil. The two rival
+governing-committees of Lisbon and Oporto coalesced; and after an interval
+of confusion the elections to the Cortes were held, resulting in the return
+of a body of men whose loyalty to the Crown was not impaired by their
+hostility to the Regency. The King, when the first tidings of the
+constitutional movement reached Brazil, gave a qualified consent to the
+summoning of the Cortes which was announced by the Regency, and promised to
+return to Europe. Beresford, continuing his voyage to England without
+landing at Lisbon, found that the Government of this country had no
+disposition to interfere with the domestic affairs of its ally.
+
+[Alexander proposes joint action with regard to Spain, April, 1820.]
+
+It was the boast of the Spanish and Italian Liberals that the revolutions
+effected in 1820 were undisgraced by the scenes of outrage which had
+followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism
+thirty years before. [316] The gentler character of these southern
+movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading
+statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour
+of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any
+excess of popular violence. The alarm was first sounded at St. Petersburg.
+As soon as the Czar heard of Riego's proceedings at Cadiz, he began to
+meditate intervention; and when it was known that Ferdinand had been forced
+to accept the Constitution of 1812, he ordered his ambassadors to propose
+that all the Great Powers, acting through their Ministers at Paris, should
+address a remonstrance to the representative of Spain, requiring the Cortes
+to disavow the crime of the 8th of March, by which they had been called
+into being, and to offer a pledge of obedience to their King by enacting
+the most rigorous laws against sedition and revolt. [317] In that case, and
+in that alone, the Czar desired to add, would the Powers maintain their
+relations of confidence and amity with Spain.
+
+[England prevents joint diplomatic intervention.]
+
+This Russian proposal was viewed with some suspicion at Vienna; it was
+answered with a direct and energetic negative from London. Canning was
+still in the Ministry. The words with which in 1818 he had protested
+against a league between England and autocracy were still ringing in the
+ears of his colleagues. Lord Liverpool's Government knew itself to be
+unpopular in the country; every consideration of policy as well as of
+self-interest bade it resist the beginnings of an intervention which, if
+confined to words, was certain to be useless, and, if supported by action,
+was likely to end in that alliance between France and Russia which had been
+the nightmare of English statesmen ever since 1814, and in a second
+occupation of Spain by the very generals whom Wellington had spent so many
+years in dislodging. Castlereagh replied to the Czar's note in terms which
+made it clear that England would never give its sanction to a collective
+interference with Spain. [318] Richelieu, the nominal head of the French
+Government, felt too little confidence in his position to act without the
+concurrence of Great Britain; and the crusade of absolutism against Spanish
+liberty was in consequence postponed until the victory of the
+Ultra-Royalists at Paris was complete, and the overthrow of Richelieu had
+brought to the head of the French State a group of men who felt no scruple
+in entering upon an aggressive war.
+
+[Naples and the Great Powers.]
+
+[Austria.]
+
+[England admits Austrian but not joint intervention.]
+
+But the shelter of circumstances which for a while protected Spain from the
+foreigner did not extend to Italy, when in its turn the Neapolitan
+revolution called a northern enemy into the field. Though the kingdom of
+the Two Sicilies was in itself much less important than Spain, the
+established order of the Continent was more directly threatened by a change
+in its government. No European State was exposed to the same danger from a
+revolution in Madrid as Austria from a revolution in Naples. The Czar had
+invoked the action of the Courts against Spain, not because his own
+dominions were in peril, but because the principle of monarchical right was
+violated: with Austria the danger pressed nearer home. The establishment of
+constitutional liberty in Naples was almost certain to be followed by an
+insurrection in the Papal States and a national uprising in the Venetian
+provinces; and among all the bad results of Austria's false position in
+Italy, one of the worst was that in self-defence it was bound to resist
+every step made towards political liberty beyond its own frontier. The
+dismay with which Metternich heard of the collapse of absolute government
+at Naples [319] was understood and even shared by the English Ministry, who
+at this moment were deprived of their best guide by Canning's withdrawal.
+Austria, in peace just as much as in war, had uniformly been held to be the
+natural ally of England against the two aggressive Courts of Paris and St.
+Petersburg. It seemed perfectly right and natural to Lord Castlereagh that
+Austria, when its own interests were endangered by the establishment of
+popular sovereignty at Naples, should intervene to restore King Ferdinand's
+power; the more so as the secret treaty of 1815, by which Metternich had
+bound this sovereign to maintain absolute monarchy, had been communicated
+to the ambassador of Great Britain, and had received his approval. But the
+right to intervene in Italy belonged, according to Lord Castlereagh, to
+Austria alone. The Sovereigns of Europe had no more claim, as a body, to
+interfere with Naples than they had to interfere with Spain. Therefore,
+while the English Government sanctioned and even desired the intervention
+of Austria, as a State acting in protection of its own interests against
+revolution in a neighbouring country, it refused to sanction any joint
+intervention of the European Powers, and declared itself opposed to the
+meeting of a Congress where any such intervention might be discussed. [320]
+
+[Conference at Troppau, Oct. 1820.]
+
+Had Metternich been free to follow his own impulses, he would have thrown
+an army into Southern Italy as soon as soldiers and stores could be
+collected, and have made an end of King Ferdinand's troubles forthwith. It
+was, however, impossible for him to disregard the wishes of the Czar, and
+to abandon all at once the system of corporate action, which was supposed
+to have done such great things for Europe. [321] A meeting of sovereigns
+and Ministers was accordingly arranged, and at the end of October the
+Emperor of Austria received the Czar and King Frederick William in the
+little town of Troppau, in Moravia. France had itself first recommended the
+summoning of a Congress to deal with Neapolitan affairs, and it was
+believed for a while that England would be isolated in its resistance to a
+joint intervention. But before the Congress assembled, the firm language of
+the English Ministry had drawn Richelieu over to its side; [322] and
+although one of the two French envoys made himself the agent of the
+Ultra-Royalist faction, it was not possible for him to unite his country
+with the three Eastern Courts. France, through the weakness of its
+Government and the dissension between its representatives, counted for
+nothing at the Congress. England sent its ambassador from Vienna, but with
+instructions to act as an observer and little more; and in consequence the
+meeting at Troppau resolved itself into a gathering of the three Eastern
+autocrats and their Ministers. As Prussia had ceased to have any
+independent foreign policy whatever, Metternich needed only to make certain
+of the support of the Czar in order to range on his side the entire force
+of eastern and central Europe in the restoration of Neapolitan despotism.
+
+[Contest between Metternich and Capodistrias.]
+
+[Circular of Troppau, Dec. 8, 1820.]
+
+[The principle of intervention laid down by three Courts.]
+
+The plan of the Austrian statesman was not, however, to be realised without
+some effort. Alexander had watched with jealousy Metternich's recent
+assumption of a dictatorship over the minor German Courts; he had never
+admitted Austria's right to dominate in Italy; and even now some vestiges
+of his old attachment to liberal theories made him look for a better
+solution of the Neapolitan problem than in that restoration of despotism
+pure and simple which Austria desired. While condemning every attempt of a
+people to establish its own liberties, Alexander still believed that in
+some countries sovereigns would do well to make their subjects a grant of
+what he called sage and liberal institutions. It would have pleased him
+best if the Neapolitans could have been induced by peaceful means to
+abandon their Constitution, and to accept in return certain chartered
+rights as a gift from their King; and the concurrence of the two Western
+Powers might in this case possibly have been regained. This project of a
+compromise, by which Ferdinand would have been freed from his secret
+engagement with Austria, was exactly what Metternich desired to frustrate.
+He found himself matched, and not for the first time, against a statesman
+who was even more subtle than himself. This was Count Capodistrias, a Greek
+who from a private position had risen to be Foreign Minister of Russia, and
+was destined to become the first sovereign, in reality if not in title, of
+his native land. Capodistrias, the sympathetic partner of the Czar's
+earlier hopes, had not travelled so fast as his master along the
+reactionary road. He still represented what had been the Italian policy of
+Alexander some years before, and sought to prevent the re-establishment of
+absolute rule at Naples, at least by the armed intervention of Austria.
+Metternich's first object was to discredit the Minister in the eyes of his
+sovereign. It is said that he touched the Czar's keenest fears in a
+conversation relating to a mutiny that had just taken place among the
+troops at St. Petersburg, and so in one private interview cut the ground
+from under Capodistrias' feet; he also humoured the Czar by reviving that
+monarch's own favourite scheme for a mutual guarantee of all the Powers
+against revolution in any part of Europe. Alexander had proposed in 1818
+that the Courts should declare resistance to authority in any country to be
+a violation of European peace, entitling the Allied Powers, if they should
+think fit, to suppress it by force of arms. This doctrine, which would have
+empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a coalition upon London if the
+Reform Bill had been carried by force, had hitherto failed to gain
+international acceptance owing to the opposition of Great Britain. It was
+now formally accepted by Austria and Prussia. Alexander saw the federative
+system of European monarchy, with its principle of collective intervention,
+recognised as an established fact by at least three of the great Powers;
+[323] and in return he permitted Metternich to lay down the lines which, in
+the case of Naples, this intervention should follow. It was determined to
+invite King Ferdinand to meet his brother-sovereigns at Laibach, in the
+Austrian province of Carniola, and through him to address a summons to the
+Neapolitan people, requiring them, in the name of the three Powers, and
+under threat of invasion, to abandon their Constitution. This determination
+was announced, as a settled matter, to the envoys of England and France;
+and a circular was issued from Troppau by the three Powers to all the
+Courts of Europe (Dec. 8), embodying the doctrine of federative
+intervention, and expressing a hope that England and France would approve
+its immediate application in the case of Naples. [324]
+
+[Protest of England.]
+
+There was no ground whatever for this hope with regard to England. On the
+contrary, in proportion as the three Courts strengthened their union and
+insisted on their claim to joint jurisdiction over Europe, they drove
+England away from them. Lord Castlereagh had at first promised the moral
+support of this country to Austria in its enterprise against Naples; but
+when this enterprise ceased to be the affair of Austria alone, and became
+part of the police-system of the three despotisms, it was no longer
+possible for the English Government to view it with approval or even with
+silence. The promise of a moral support was withdrawn: England declared
+that it stood strictly neutral with regard to Naples, and protested against
+the doctrine contained in the Troppau circular, that a change of government
+in any State gave the Allied Powers the right to intervene. [325]
+
+France made no such protest; but it was still hoped at Paris that an
+Austrian invasion of Southern Italy, so irritating to French pride, might
+be averted. King Louis XVIII. endeavoured, but in vain, to act the part of
+mediator, and to reconcile the Neapolitan House of Bourbon at once with its
+own subjects and with the Northern Powers.
+
+[Conference at Laibach, Jan., 1821.]
+
+The summons went out from the Congress to King Ferdinand to appear at
+Laibach. It found him enjoying all the popularity of a constitutional King,
+surrounded by Ministers who had governed under Murat, exchanging
+compliments with a democratic Parliament, lavishing distinctions upon the
+men who had overthrown his authority, and swearing to everything that was
+set before him. As the Constitution prohibited the King from leaving the
+country without the consent of the Legislature, it was necessary for
+Ferdinand to communicate to Parliament the invitation which he had received
+from the Powers, and to take a vote of the Assembly on the subject of his
+journey. Ferdinand's Ministers possessed some political experience; they
+recognised that it would be impossible to maintain the existing
+Constitution against the hostility of three great States, and hoped that
+the Parliament would consent to Ferdinand's departure on condition that he
+pledged himself to uphold certain specified principles of free government.
+A message to the Assembly was accordingly made public, in which the King
+expressed his desire to mediate with the Powers on this basis. But the
+Ministers had not reckoned with the passions of the people. As soon as it
+became known that Ferdinand was about to set out, the leaders of the
+Carbonari mustered their bands. A host of violent men streamed into Naples
+from the surrounding country. The Parliament was intimidated, and Ferdinand
+was prohibited from leaving Naples until he had sworn to maintain the
+Constitution actually in force, that, namely, which Naples had borrowed
+from Spain. Ferdinand, whose only object was to escape from the country as
+quickly as possible, took the oath with his usual effusions of patriotism.
+He then set out for Leghorn, intending to cross from thence into Northern
+Italy. No sooner had he reached the Tuscan port than he addressed a letter
+to each of the five principal sovereigns of Europe, declaring that his last
+acts were just as much null and void as all his earlier ones. He made no
+attempt to justify, or to excuse, or even to explain his conduct; nor is
+there the least reason to suppose that he considered the perjuries of a
+prince to require a justification. "These sorry protests," wrote the
+secretary of the Congress of Troppau, "will happily remain secret. No
+Cabinet will be anxious to draw them from the sepulchre of its archives.
+Till then there is not much harm done."
+
+[Ferdinand at Laibach.]
+
+[Demands of the Allies on Naples.]
+
+Ferdinand reached Laibach, where the Czar rewarded him for the fatigues of
+his journey by a present of some Russian bears. His arrival was peculiarly
+agreeable to Metternich, whose intentions corresponded exactly with his
+own; and the fact that he had been compelled to swear to maintain the
+Spanish Constitution at Naples acted favourably for the Austrian Minister,
+inasmuch as it enabled him to say to all the world that negotiation was now
+out of the question. [326] Capodistrias, brought face to face with failure,
+twisted about, according to his rival's expression, like a devil in holy
+water, but all in vain. It was decided that Ferdinand should be restored as
+absolute monarch by an Austrian army, and that, whether the Neapolitans
+resisted or submitted, their country should be occupied by Austrian troops
+for some years to come. The only difficulty remaining was to vest King
+Ferdinand's conduct in some respectable disguise. Capodistrias, when
+nothing else was to be gained, offered to invent an entire correspondence,
+in which Ferdinand should proudly uphold the Constitution to which he had
+sworn, and protest against the determination of the Powers to force the
+sceptre of absolutism back into his hand. [327] This device, however, was
+thought too transparent. A letter was sent in the King's name to his son,
+the Duke of Calabria, stating that he had found the three Powers determined
+not to tolerate an order of things sprung from revolution; that submission
+alone would avert war; but that even in case of submission certain
+securities for order, meaning the occupation of the country by an Austrian
+army, would be exacted. The letter concluded with the usual promises of
+reform and good government. It reached Naples on the 9th of February, 1821.
+No answer was either expected or desired. On the 6th the order had been
+given to the Austrian army to cross the Po.
+
+[State of Naples and Sicily.]
+
+[The Austrians enter Naples, March 24, 1821.]
+
+[Third Neapolitan restoration.]
+
+There was little reason to fear any serious resistance on the part of the
+Neapolitans. The administration of the State was thoroughly disorganised;
+the agitation of the secret societies had destroyed all spirit of obedience
+among the soldiers; a great part of the army was absent in Sicily, keeping
+guard over a people who, under wiser management, might have doubled the
+force which Naples now opposed to the invader. When the despotic government
+of Ferdinand was overthrown, the island of Sicily, or that part of it which
+was represented by Palermo, had claimed the separate political existence
+which it had possessed between 1806 and 1815, offering to remain united to
+Naples in the person of the sovereign, but demanding a National Parliament
+and a National Constitution of its own. The revolutionary Ministers of
+Naples had, however, no more sympathy with the wishes of the Sicilians than
+the Spanish Liberals of 1812 had with those of the American Colonists. They
+required the islanders to accept the same rights and duties as any other
+province of the Neapolitan kingdom, and, on their refusal, sent over a
+considerable force and laid siege to Palermo. [328] The contest soon ended
+in the submission of the Sicilians, but it was found necessary to keep
+twelve thousand troops on the island in order to prevent a new revolt. The
+whole regular army of Naples numbered little more than forty thousand; and
+although bodies of Carbonari and of the so-called Militia set out to join
+the colours of General Pepe and to fight for liberty, they remained for the
+most part a disorderly mob, without either arms or discipline. The invading
+army of Austria, fifty thousand strong, not only possessed an immense
+superiority in organisation and military spirit, but actually outnumbered
+the forces of the defence. At the first encounter, which took place at
+Rieti, in the Papal States, the Neapolitans were put to the rout. Their
+army melted away, as it had in Murat's campaign in 1815. Nothing was heard
+among officers and men but accusations of treachery; not a single strong
+point was defended; and on the 24th of March the Austrians made their entry
+into Naples. Ferdinand, halting at Florence, sent on before him the worst
+instruments of his former despotism. It was indeed impossible for these men
+to renew, under Austrian protection, the scenes of reckless bloodshed which
+had followed the restoration of 1799; and a great number of compromised
+persons had already been provided with the means of escape. But the hand of
+vengeance was not easily stayed. Courts-martial and commissions of judges
+began in all parts of the kingdom to sentence to imprisonment and death. An
+attempted insurrection in Sicily and some desperate acts of rebellion in
+Southern Italy cost the principal actors their lives; and when an amnesty
+was at length proclaimed, an exception was made against those who were now
+called the deserters, and who were lately called the Sacred Band, of Nola,
+that is to say, the soldiers who had first risen for the Constitution.
+Morelli, who had received the Viceroy's treacherous thanks for his conduct,
+was executed, along with one of his companions; the rest were sent in
+chains to labour among felons. Hundreds of persons were left lying,
+condemned or uncondemned, in prison; others, in spite of the amnesty, were
+driven from their native land; and that great, long-lasting stream of
+fugitives now began to pour into England, which, in the early memories of
+many who are not yet old, has associated the name of Italian with the image
+of an exile and a sufferer.
+
+[Insurrection in Piedmont, March 10.]
+
+There was a moment in the campaign of Austria against Naples when the
+invading army was threatened with the most serious danger. An insurrection
+broke out in Piedmont, and the troops of that country attempted to unite
+with the patriotic party of Lombardy in a movement which would have thrown
+all Northern Italy upon the rear of the Austrians. In the first excess of
+alarm, the Czar ordered a hundred thousand Russians to cross the Galician
+frontier, and to march in the direction of the Adriatic. It proved
+unnecessary, however, to continue this advance. The Piedmontese army was
+divided against itself; part proclaimed the Spanish Constitution, and, on
+the abdication of the King, called upon his cousin, the Regent, Charles
+Albert of Carignano, to march against the Austrians; part adhered to the
+rightful heir, the King's brother, Charles Felix, who was absent at Modena,
+and who, with an honesty in strong contrast to the frauds of the Neapolitan
+Court, refused to temporise with rebels, or to make any compromise with the
+Constitution. The scruples of the Prince of Carignano, after he had gone
+some way with the military party of action, paralysed the movement of
+Northern Italy. Unsupported by Piedmontese troops, the conspirators of
+Milan failed to raise any open insurrection. Austrian soldiers thronged
+westwards from the Venetian fortresses, and entered Piedmont itself; the
+collapse of the Neapolitan army destroyed the hopes of the bravest
+patriots; and the only result of the Piedmontese movement was that the
+grasp of Austria closed more tightly on its subject provinces, while the
+martyrs of Italian freedom passed out of the sight of the world, out of the
+range of all human communication, buried for years to come in the silent,
+unvisited prison of the North. [329]
+
+[The French Ultra Royalists urging attack on Spain.]
+
+Thus the victory of absolutism was completed, and the law was laid down to
+Europe that a people seeking its liberties elsewhere than in the grace and
+spontaneous generosity of its legitimate sovereign became a fit object of
+attack for the armies of the three Great Powers. It will be seen in a later
+chapter how Metternich persuaded the Czar to include under the anathema
+issued by the Congress of Laibach (May, 1821) [330] the outbreak of the
+Greeks, which at this moment began, and how Lord Castlereagh supported the
+Austrian Minister in denying to these rebels against the Sultan all right
+or claim to the consideration of Europe. Spain was for the present left
+unmolested; but the military operations of 1821 prepared the way for a
+similar crusade against that country by occasioning the downfall of
+Richelieu's Ministry, and throwing the government of France entirely into
+the hands of the Ultra-Royalists. All parties in the French Chamber,
+whether they condemned or approved the suppression of Neapolitan liberty,
+censured a policy which had kept France in inaction, and made Austria
+supreme in Italy. The Ultra-Royalists profited by the general discontent to
+overthrow the Minister whom they had promised to support (Dec., 1821); and
+from this time a war with Spain, conducted either by France alone or in
+combination with the three Eastern Powers, became the dearest hope of the
+rank and file of the dominant faction. Villele, their nominal chief,
+remained what he had been before, a statesman among fanatics, and desired
+to maintain the attitude of observation as long as this should be possible.
+A body of troops had been stationed on the southern frontier in 1820 to
+prevent all intercourse with the Spanish districts afflicted with the
+yellow fever. This epidemic had passed away, but the number of the troops
+was now raised to a hundred thousand. It was, however, the hope of Villele
+that hostilities might be averted unless the Spaniards should themselves
+provoke a combat, or, by resorting to extreme measures against King
+Ferdinand, should compel Louis XVIII. to intervene on behalf of his
+kinsman. The more violent section of the French Cabinet, represented by
+Montmorency, the Foreign Minister, called for an immediate march on Madrid,
+or proposed to delay operations only until France should secure the support
+of the other Continental Powers.
+
+[Spain from 1820 to 1822.]
+
+[Ferdinand plots with the Serviles against the Constitution.]
+
+The condition of Spain in the year 1822 gave ample encouragement to those
+who longed to employ the arms of France in the royalist cause. The hopes of
+peaceful reform, which for the first few months after the revolution had
+been shared even by foreign politicians at Madrid, had long vanished. In
+the moment of popular victory Ferdinand had brought the leaders of the
+Cortes from their prisons and placed them in office. These men showed a
+dignified forgetfulness of the injuries which they had suffered. Misfortune
+had calmed their impetuosity, and taught them more of the real condition of
+the Spanish people. They entered upon their task with seriousness and good
+faith, and would have proved the best friends of constitutional monarchy if
+Ferdinand had had the least intention of co-operating with them loyally.
+But they found themselves encountered from the first by a double enemy. The
+clergy, who had overthrown the Constitution six years before, intrigued or
+openly declared against it as soon as it was revived; the more violent of
+the Liberals, with Riego at their head, abandoned themselves to
+extravagances like those of the club-orators of Paris in 1791, and did
+their best to make any peaceable administration impossible. After combating
+these anarchists, or Exaltados, with some success, the Ministry was forced
+to call in their aid, when, at the instigation of the Papal Nuncio, the
+King placed his veto upon a law dissolving most of the monasteries [331]
+(Oct., 1820). Ferdinand now openly combined with the enemies of the
+Constitution, and attempted to transfer the command of the army to one of
+his own agents. The plot failed; the Ministry sent the alarm over the whole
+country, and Ferdinand stood convicted before his people as a conspirator
+against the Constitution which he had sworn to defend. The agitation of the
+clubs, which the Ministry had hitherto suppressed, broke out anew. A storm
+of accusations assailed Ferdinand himself. He was compelled at the end of
+the year 1820 to banish from Madrid most of the persons who had been his
+confidants; and although his dethronement was not yet proposed, he had
+already become, far more than Louis XVI. of France under similar
+conditions, the recognised enemy of the revolution, and the suspected
+patron of every treason against the nation.
+
+[The Ministry between the Exaltados and Serviles, 1821.]
+
+[Attempted coup d'etat, July 6, 1822.]
+
+[Royalists revolt in the north.]
+
+The attack of the despotic Courts on Naples in the spring of 1821
+heightened the fury of parties in Spain, encouraging the Serviles, or
+Absolutists, in their plots, and forcing the Ministry to yield to the cry
+for more violent measures against the enemies of the Constitution. In the
+south of Spain the Exaltados gained possession of the principal military
+and civil commands, and openly refused obedience to the central
+administration when it attempted to interfere with their action Seville,
+Carthagena, and Cadiz acted as if they were independent Republics and even
+spoke of separation from Spain. Defied by its own subordinates in the
+provinces, and unable to look to the King for any sincere support, the
+moderate governing party lost all hold upon the nation. In the Cortes
+elected in 1822 the Exaltados formed the majority, and Riego was appointed
+President. Ferdinand now began to concert measures of action with the
+French Ultra-Royalists. The Serviles, led by priests, and supported by
+French money, broke into open rebellion in the north. When the session of
+the Cortes ended, the King attempted to overthrow his enemies by military
+force. Three battalions of the Royal Guard, which had been withdrawn from
+Madrid, received secret orders to march upon the capital (July 6, 1822),
+where Ferdinand was expected to place himself at their head. They were,
+however, met and defeated in the streets by other regiments, and Ferdinand,
+vainly attempting to dissociate himself from the action of his partisans,
+found his crown, if not his life, in peril. He wrote to Louis XVIII. that
+he was a prisoner. Though the French King gave nothing more than good
+counsel, the Ultra-Royalists in the French Cabinet and in the army now
+strained every nerve to accelerate a war between the two countries. The
+Spanish Absolutists seized the town of Seo d'Urgel, and there set up a
+provisional government. Civil war spread over the northern provinces. The
+Ministry, which was now formed of Riego's friends, demanded and obtained
+from the Cortes dictatorial powers like those which the French Committee of
+Public Safety had wielded in 1793, but with far other result. Spain found
+no Danton, no Carnot, at this crisis, when the very highest powers of
+intellect and will would have been necessary to arouse and to arm a people
+far less disposed to fight for liberty than the French were in 1793. One
+man alone, General Mina, checked and overthrew the rebel leaders of the
+north with an activity superior to their own. The Government, boastful and
+violent in its measures, effected scarcely anything in the organisation of
+a national force, or in preparing the means of resistance against those
+foreign armies with whose attack the country was now plainly threatened.
+
+[England and the Congress of 1822.]
+
+When the Congress of Laibach broke up in the spring of 1821. its members
+determined to renew their meeting in the following year, in order to decide
+whether the Austrian army might then be withdrawn from Naples, and to
+discuss other questions affecting their common interests. The progress of
+the Greek insurrection and a growing strife between Russia and Turkey had
+since then thrown all Italian difficulties into the shade. The Eastern
+question stood in the front rank of European politics; next in importance
+came the affairs of Spain. It was certain that these, far more than the
+occupation of Naples, would supply the real business of the Congress of
+1822. England had a far greater interest in both questions than in the
+Italian negotiations of the two previous years. It was felt that the system
+of abstention which England had then followed could be pursued no longer,
+and that the country must be represented not by some casual and wandering
+diplomatist, but by its leading Minister, Lord Castlereagh. The intentions
+of the other Powers in regard to Spain were matter of doubt; it was the
+fixed policy of Great Britain to leave the Spanish revolution in Europe to
+run its own course, and to persuade the other Powers to do the same. But
+the difficulties connected with Spain did not stop at the Spanish frontier.
+The South American colonies had now in great part secured their
+independence. They had developed a trade with Great Britain which made it
+impossible for this country to ignore their flag and the decisions of their
+law courts. The British navigation-laws had already been modified by
+Parliament in favour of their shipping; and although it was no business of
+the English Government to grant a formal title to communities which had
+made themselves free, the practical recognition of the American States by
+the appointment of diplomatic agents could in several cases not be justly
+delayed. Therefore, without interfering with any colonies which were still
+fighting or still negotiating with Spain, the British Minister proposed to
+inform the Allied cabinets of the intention of this country to accredit
+agents to some of the South American Republics, and to recommend to them
+the adoption of a similar policy.
+
+[Death of Castlereagh, Aug. 12, 1822.]
+
+Such was the tenour of the instructions which, a few weeks before his
+expected departure for the Continent, Castlereagh drew up for his own
+guidance, and submitted to the Cabinet and the King. [332] Had he lived to
+fulfil the mission with which he was charged, the recognition of the South
+American Republics, which adds so bright a ray to the fame of Canning,
+would probably have been the work of the man who, more than any other, is
+associated in popular belief with the traditions of a hated and outworn
+system of oppression. Two more years of life, two more years of change in
+the relations of England to the Continent, would have given Castlereagh a
+different figure in the history both of Greece and of America. No English
+statesman in modern times has been so severely judged. Circumstances, down
+to the close of his career, withheld from Castlereagh the opportunities
+which fell to his successor; ties from which others were free made it hard
+for him to accelerate the breach with the Allies of 1814. Antagonists
+showed Castlereagh no mercy, no justice. The man whom Byron disgraced
+himself by ridiculing after his death possessed in a rich measure the
+qualities which, in private life, attract esteem and love. His public life,
+if tainted in earlier days by the low political morality of the time, rose
+high above that of every Continental statesman of similar rank, with the
+single exception of Stein. The best testimony to his integrity is the
+irritation which it caused to Talleyrand. [333] If the consciousness of
+labour unflaggingly pursued in the public cause, and animated on the whole
+by a pure and earnest purpose, could have calmed the distress of a breaking
+mind, the decline of Castlereagh's days might have been one of peace. His
+countrymen would have recognised that, if blind to the rights of nations,
+Castlereagh had set to foreign rulers the example of truth and good faith.
+But the burden of his life was too heavy to bear. Mists of despondency
+obscured the outlines of the real world, and struck chill into his heart.
+Death, self-invoked, brought relief to the over-wrought brain, and laid
+Castlereagh, with all his cares, in everlasting sleep.
+
+[Canning Foreign Secretary. Wellington deputed to the Congress, Sept.,
+1822.]
+
+[Congress of Verona, Oct., 1822.]
+
+The vacant post was filled by Canning, by far the most gifted of the band
+of statesmen who had begun their public life in the school of Pitt.
+Wellington undertook to represent England at the Congress of 1822, which
+was now about to open at Vienna. His departure was, however, delayed for
+several weeks, and the preliminary meeting, at which it had been intended
+to transact all business not relating to Italy, was almost over before his
+arrival. Wellington accordingly travelled on to Verona, where Italian
+affairs were to be dealt with; and the Italian Conference, which the
+British Government had not intended to recognise, thus became the real
+Congress of 1822. Anxious as Lord Castlereagh had been on the question of
+foreign interference with Spain, he hardly understood the imminence of the
+danger. In passing through Paris, Wellington learnt for the first time that
+a French or European invasion of Spain would be the foremost object of
+discussion among the Powers; and on reaching Verona he made the unwelcome
+discovery that the Czar was bent upon sending a Russian army to take part,
+as the mandatary of Europe, in overthrowing the Spanish Constitution.
+Alexander's desire was to obtain a joint declaration from the Congress like
+that which had been issued against Naples by the three Courts at Troppau,
+but one even more formidable, since France might be expected in the present
+case to give its concurrence, which had been withheld before. France indeed
+occupied, according to the absolutist theory of the day, the same position
+in regard to a Jacobin Spain as Austria in regard to a Jacobin Naples, and
+might perhaps claim to play the leading military part in the crusade of
+repression. But the work was likely to be a much more difficult one than
+that of 1821. The French troops, said the Czar, were not trustworthy; and
+there was a party in France which might take advantage of the war to
+proclaim the second Napoleon or the Republic. King Louis XVIII. could not
+therefore be allowed to grapple with Spain alone. It was necessary that the
+principal force employed by the alliance should be one whose loyalty and
+military qualities were above suspicion: the generals who had marched from
+Moscow to Paris were not likely to fail beyond the Pyrenees: and a campaign
+of the Russian army in Western Europe promised to relieve the Czar of some
+of the discontent of his soldiers, who had been turned back after entering
+Galicia in the previous year, and who had not been allowed to assist their
+fellow-believers in Greece in their struggle against the Sultan. [334]
+
+[No joint declaration by made by the Congress against Spain.]
+
+Wellington had ascertained, while in Paris, that King Louis XVIII. and
+Villele were determined under no circumstances to give Russian troops a
+passage through France. His knowledge of this fact enabled him to speak
+with some confidence to Alexander. It was the earnest desire of the English
+Government to avert war, and its first object was therefore to prevent the
+Congress, as a body, from sending an ultimatum to Spain. If all the Powers
+united in a declaration like that of Troppau, war was inevitable; if France
+were left to settle its own disputes with its neighbour, English mediation
+might possibly preserve peace. The statement of Wellington, that England
+would rather sever itself from the great alliance than consent to a joint
+declaration against Spain, had no doubt its effect in preventing such a
+declaration being proposed; but a still weightier reason against it was the
+direct contradiction between the intentions of the French Government and
+those of the Czar. If the Czar was determined to be the soldier of Europe,
+while on the other hand King Louis absolutely denied him a passage through
+France, it was impossible that the Congress should threaten Spain with a
+collective attack. No great expenditure of diplomacy was therefore
+necessary to prevent the summary framing of a decree against Spain like
+that which had been framed against Naples two years before. In the first
+despatches which he sent back to England Wellington expressed his belief
+that the deliberations of the Powers would end in a decision to leave the
+Spaniards to themselves.
+
+[Course of the negotiation against Spain.]
+
+But the danger was only averted in appearance. The impulse to war was too
+strong among the French Ultra-Royalists for the Congress to keep silence on
+Spanish affairs. Villele indeed still hoped for peace, and, unlike other
+members of his Cabinet, he desired that, if war should arise, France should
+maintain entire freedom of action, and enter upon the struggle as an
+independent Power, not as the instrument of the European concert. This did
+not prevent him, however, from desiring to ascertain what assistance would
+be forthcoming, if France should be hard pressed by its enemy. Instructions
+were given to the French envoys at Verona to sound the Allies on this
+question. [335] It was out of the inquiry so suggested that a negotiation
+sprang which virtually combined all Europe against Spain. The envoy
+Montmorency, acting in the spirit of the war party, demanded of all the
+Powers whether, in the event of France withdrawing its ambassador from
+Madrid, they would do the same, and whether, in case of war, France would
+receive their moral and material support. Wellington in his reply protested
+against the framing of hypothetical cases; the other envoys answered
+Montmorency's questions in the affirmative. The next step was taken by
+Metternich, who urged that certain definite acts of the Spanish people or
+Government ought to be specified as rendering war obligatory on France and
+its allies, and also that, with a view of strengthening the Royalist party
+in Spain, notes ought to be presented by all the ambassadors at Madrid,
+demanding a change in the Constitution. This proposal was in its turn
+submitted to Wellington and rejected by him. It was accepted by the other
+plenipotentiaries, and the acts of the Spanish people were specified on
+which war should necessarily follow. These were, the commission of any act
+of violence against a member of the royal family, the deposition of the
+King, or an attempt to change the dynasty. A secret clause was added to the
+second part of the agreement, to the effect that if the Spanish Government
+made no satisfactory answer to the notes requiring a change in the
+Constitution, all the ambassadors should be immediately withdrawn. A draft
+of the notes to be presented was sketched; and Montmorency, who thought
+that he had probably gone too far in his stipulations, returned to Paris to
+submit the drafts to the King before handing them over to the ambassadors
+at Paris for transmission to Madrid.
+
+[Villele and Montmorency.]
+
+[Speech of Louis XVIII., Jan. 27, 1823.]
+
+It was with great dissatisfaction that Villele saw how his colleague had
+committed France to the direction of the three Eastern Powers. There was no
+likelihood that the Spanish Government would make the least concession of
+the kind required, and in that case France stood pledged, if the action of
+Montmorency was ratified, to withdraw its ambassador from Madrid at once.
+Villele accordingly addressed himself to the ambassadors at Paris, asking
+that the despatch of the notes might be postponed. No notice was taken of
+his request: the notes were despatched forthwith. Roused by this slight,
+Villele appealed to the King not to submit to the dictation of foreign
+Courts. Louis XVIII. declared in his favour against all the rest of the
+Cabinet, and Montmorency had to retire from office. But the decision of the
+King meant that he disapproved of the negotiations of Verona as shackling
+the movements of France, not that he had freed himself from the influence
+of the war-party. Chateaubriand, the most reckless agitator for
+hostilities, was appointed Foreign Minister. The mediation of Great Britain
+was rejected; [336] and in his speech at the opening of the Chambers of
+1823, King Louis himself virtually published the declaration of war.
+
+[England in 1823.]
+
+[French invasion of Spain, April, 1823.]
+
+The ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts had already presented their
+notes at Madrid demanding a change in the Constitution; and, after
+receiving a high-spirited answer from the Ministers, they had quitted the
+country. Canning, while using every diplomatic effort to prevent an unjust
+war, had made it clear to the Spaniards that England could not render them
+armed assistance. The reasons against such an intervention were indeed
+overwhelming. Russia, Austria, and Prussia would have taken the field
+rather than have permitted the Spanish Constitution to triumph; and
+although, if leagued with Spain in a really national defence like that of
+1808, Great Britain might perhaps have protected the Peninsula against all
+the Powers of Europe combined, it was far otherwise when the cause at stake
+was one to which a majority of the Spanish nation had shown itself to be
+indifferent, and against which the northern provinces had actually taken up
+arms. The Government and the Cortes were therefore left to defend
+themselves as best they could against their enemies. They displayed their
+weakness by enacting laws of extreme severity against deserters, and by
+retiring, along with the recalcitrant King, from Madrid to Seville. On the
+7th of April the French troops, led by the Duke of Angouleme, crossed the
+frontier. The priests and a great part of the peasantry welcomed them as
+deliverers: the forces opposed to them fell back without striking a blow.
+As the invader advanced towards the capital, gangs of royalists, often led
+by monks, spread such terror and devastation over the northern provinces
+that the presence of foreign troops became the only safeguard for the
+peaceable inhabitants. [337] Madrid itself was threatened by the corps of a
+freebooter named Bessieres. The commandant sent his surrender to the French
+while they were still at some distance, begging them to advance as quickly
+as possible in order to save the city from pillage. The message had
+scarcely been sent when Bessieres and his bandits appeared in the suburbs.
+The governor drove them back, and kept the royalist mob within the city at
+bay for four days more. On the 23rd of May the advance-guard of the French
+army entered the capital.
+
+[Angouleme and the Regency, and the ambassadors.]
+
+It had been the desire of King Louis XVIII. and Angouleme to save Spain
+from the violence of royalist and priestly fanaticism. On reaching Madrid,
+Angouleme intended to appoint a provisional, government himself; he was,
+however, compelled by orders from Paris to leave the election in the hands
+of the Council of Castille, and a Regency came into power whose first acts
+showed in what spirit the victory of the French was to be used. Edicts were
+issued declaring all the acts of the Cortes affecting the monastic orders
+to be null and void, dismissing all officials appointed since March 7,
+1820, and subjecting to examination those who, then being in office, had
+not resigned their posts. [338] The arrival of the ambassadors of the three
+Eastern Powers encouraged the Regency in their antagonism to the French
+commander. It was believed that the Cabinet of Paris was unwilling to
+restore King Ferdinand as an absolute monarch, and intended to obtain from
+him the grant of institutions resembling those of the French Charta. Any
+such limitation of absolute power was, however, an object of horror to the
+three despotic Courts. Their ambassadors formed themselves into a council
+with the express object of resisting the supposed policy of Angouleme. The
+Regency grew bolder, and gave the signal for general retribution upon the
+Liberals by publishing an order depriving all persons who had served in the
+voluntary militia since March, 1820, of their offices, pensions, and
+titles. The work inaugurated in the capital was carried much further in the
+provinces. The friends of the Constitution, and even soldiers who were
+protected by their capitulation with the French, were thrown into prison by
+the new local authorities. The violence of the reaction reached such a
+height that Angouleme, now on the march to Cadiz, was compelled to publish
+an ordinance forbidding arrests to be made without the consent of a French
+commanding officer, and ordering his generals to release the persons who
+had been arbitrarily imprisoned. The council of ambassadors, blind in their
+jealousy of France to the danger of an uncontrolled restoration, drew up a
+protest against his ordinance, and desired that the officers of the Regency
+should be left to work their will.
+
+[The Cortes at Cadiz.]
+
+[Ferdinand liberated, Oct. 1.]
+
+After spending some weeks in idle debates at Seville, the Cortes had been
+compelled by the appearance of the French on the Sierra Morena to retire to
+Cadiz. As King Ferdinand refused to accompany them, he was declared
+temporarily insane, and forced to make the journey (June 12). Angouleme,
+following the French vanguard after a considerable interval, appeared
+before Cadiz in August, and sent a note to King Ferdinand, recommending him
+to publish an amnesty, and to promise the restoration of the mediaeval
+Cortes. It was hoped that the terms suggested in this note might be
+accepted by the Government in Cadiz as a basis of peace, and so render an
+attack upon the city unnecessary. The Ministry, however, returned a defiant
+answer in the King's name. The siege of Cadiz accordingly began in earnest.
+On the 30th of August the fort of the Trocadero was stormed; three weeks
+later the city was bombarded. In reply to all proposals for negotiation
+Angouleme stated that he could only treat when King Ferdinand was within
+his own lines. There was not the least hope of prolonging the defence of
+Cadiz with success, for the combat was dying out even in those few
+districts of Spain where the constitutional troops had fought with energy.
+Ferdinand himself pretended that he bore no grudge against his Ministers,
+and that the Liberals had nothing to fear from his release. On the 30th of
+September he signed, as if with great satisfaction, an absolute and
+universal amnesty. [339] On the following day he was conveyed with his
+family across the bay to Angouleme's head-quarters.
+
+[Violence of the Restoration.]
+
+The war was over: the real results of the French invasion now came into
+sight. Ferdinand had not been twelve hours in the French camp when,
+surrounded by monks and royalist desperadoes, he published a proclamation
+invalidating every act of the constitutional Government of the last three
+years, on the ground that his sanction had been given under constraint. The
+same proclamation ratified the acts of the Regency of Madrid. As the
+Regency of Madrid had declared all persons concerned in the removal of the
+King to Cadiz to be liable to the penalties of high treason, Ferdinand had
+in fact ratified a sentence of death against several of the men from whom
+he had just parted in friendship. [340] Many of these victims of the King's
+perfidy were sent into safety by the French. But Angouleme was powerless to
+influence Ferdinand's policy and conduct. Don Saez, the King's confessor,
+was made First Secretary of State. On the 4th of October an edict was
+issued banishing for ever from Madrid, and from the country fifty miles
+round it, every person who during the last three years had sat in the
+Cortes, or who had been a Minister, counsellor of State, judge, commander,
+official in any public office, magistrate, or officer in the so-called
+voluntary militia. It was ordered that throughout Spain a solemn service
+should be celebrated in expiation of the insults offered to the Holy
+Sacrament; that missions should be sent over the land to combat the
+pernicious and heretical doctrines associated with the late outbreak, and
+that the bishops should relegate to monasteries of the strictest observance
+the priests who had acted as the agents of an impious faction. [341] Thus
+the war of revenge was openly declared against the defeated party. It was
+in vain that Angouleme indignantly reproached the King, and that the
+ambassadors of the three Eastern Courts pressed him to draw up at least
+some kind of amnesty. Ferdinand travelled slowly towards Madrid, saying
+that he could take no such step until he reached the capital. On the 7th of
+November, Riego was hanged. Thousands of persons were thrown into prison,
+or compelled to fly from the country. Except where order was preserved by
+the French, life and property were at the mercy of royalist mobs and the
+priests who led them; and although the influence of the Russian statesman
+Pozzo di Borgo at length brought a respectable Ministry into office, this
+only roused the fury of the clerical party, and led to a cry for the
+deposition of the King, and for the elevation of his more fanatical
+brother, Don Carlos, to the throne. Military commissions were instituted at
+the beginning of 1824 for the trial of accused persons, and a pretended
+amnesty, published six months later, included in its fifteen classes of
+exception the participators in almost every act of the revolution.
+Ordinance followed upon ordinance, multiplying the acts punishable with
+death, and exterminating the literature which was believed to be the source
+of all religious and social heterodoxy. Every movement of life was watched
+by the police; every expression of political opinion was made high treason.
+Young men were shot for being freemasons; women were sent to prison for ten
+years for possessing a portrait of Riego. The relation of the restored
+Government to its subjects was in fact that which belonged to a state of
+civil war. Insurrections arose among the fanatics who were now taking the
+name of the Carlist or Apostolic party, as well as among a despairing
+remnant of the Constitutionalists. After a feeble outbreak of the latter at
+Tarifa, a hundred and twelve persons were put to death by the military
+commissions within eighteen days. [342] It was not until the summer of 1825
+that the jurisdiction of these tribunals and the Reign of Terror ended.
+
+[England prohibits the conquest of Spanish colonies by France or its
+allies.]
+
+[England recognises the independence of the colonies. 1824-5.]
+
+France had won a cheap and inglorious victory. The three Eastern Courts had
+seen their principle of absolutism triumph at the cost of everything that
+makes government morally better than anarchy. One consolation remained for
+those who felt that there was little hope for freedom on the Continent of
+Europe. The crusade against Spanish liberty had put an end for ever to the
+possibility of a joint conquest of Spanish America in the interest of
+despotism. The attitude of England was no longer what it had been in 1818.
+When the Czar had proposed at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle that the
+allied monarchs should suppress the republican principle beyond the seas,
+Castlereagh had only stated that England could bear no part in such an
+enterprise; he had not said that England would effectually prevent others
+from attempting it. This was the resolution by which Canning, isolated and
+baffled by the conspiracy of Verona, proved that England could still do
+something to protect its own interest and the interests of mankind against
+a league of autocrats. There is indeed little doubt that the independence
+of the Spanish colonies would have been recognised by Great Britain soon
+after the war of 1823, whoever might have been our Minister for Foreign
+Affairs, but this recognition was a different matter in the hands of
+Canning from what it would have been in the hands of his predecessor. The
+contrast between the two men was one of spirit rather than of avowed rules
+of action. Where Castlereagh offered apologies to the Continental
+sovereigns, Canning uttered defiance [343] The treaties of 1815, which
+connected England so closely with the foreign courts, were no work of his;
+though he sought not to repudiate them, he delighted to show that in spite
+of them England has still its own policy, its own sympathies, its own
+traditions. In face of the council of kings and its assumption of universal
+jurisdiction, he publicly described himself as an enthusiast for the
+independence of nations. If others saw little evidence that France intended
+to recompense itself for its services to Ferdinand by appropriating some of
+his rebellious colonies, Canning was quick to lay hold of every suspicious
+circumstance. At the beginning of the war of 1823 he gave a formal warning
+to the ambassador of Louis XVIII. that France would not be permitted to
+bring any of these provinces under its dominion, whether by conquest or
+cession. [344] When the war was over, he rejected the invitation of
+Ferdinand's Government to take part in a conference at Paris, where the
+affairs of South America were to be laid before the Allied Powers. [345]
+What these Powers might or might not think on the subject of America was
+now a matter of indifference, for the policy of England was fixed, and it
+was useless to debate upon a conclusion that could not be altered. British
+consular agents were appointed in most of the colonies before the close of
+the year 1823; and after some interval the independence of Buenos Ayres,
+Colombia, and Mexico were formally recognised by the conclusion of
+commercial treaties. "I called the New World into existence," cried
+Canning, when reproached with permitting the French occupation of Spain,
+"in order to redress the balance of the Old." The boast, famous in our
+Parliamentary history, has left an erroneous impression of the part really
+played by Canning at this crisis. He did not call the New World into
+existence; he did not even assist it in winning independence, as France had
+assisted the United States fifty years before; but when this independence
+had been won, he threw over it the aegis of Great Britain, declaring that
+no other European Power should reimpose the yoke which Spain had not been
+able to maintain.
+
+[Affairs in Portugal.]
+
+[Constitution granted by Petro, May, 1826.]
+
+The overthrow of the Spanish Constitution by foreign arms led to a series
+of events in Portugal which forced England to a more direct intervention in
+the Peninsula than had yet been necessary, and heightened the conflict that
+had sprung up between its policy and that of Continental absolutism. The
+same parties and the same passions, political and religious, existed in
+Portugal as in Spain, and the enemies of the Constitution found the same
+support at foreign Courts. The King of Portugal, John VI., was a weak but
+not ill-meaning man; his wife, who was a sister of Ferdinand of Spain, and
+his son Don Miguel were the chiefs of the conspiracy against the Cortes. In
+June, 1823, a military revolt, arranged by Miguel, brought the existing
+form of government to an end: the King promised, however, when dissolving
+the Cortes, that a Constitution should be bestowed by himself upon
+Portugal; and he seems to have intended to keep his word. The ambassadors
+of France and Austria were, however, busy in throwing hindrances in the
+way, and Don Miguel prepared to use violence to prevent his father from
+making any concession to the Liberals. King John, in fear for his life,
+applied to England for troops; Canning declined to land soldiers at Lisbon,
+but sent a squadron, with orders to give the King protection. The winter of
+1823 was passed in intrigues; in May, 1824, Miguel arrested the Ministers
+and surrounded the King's palace with troops. After several days of
+confusion King John made his escape to the British ships, and Miguel, who
+was alternately cowardly and audacious, then made his submission, and was
+ordered to leave the country. King John died in the spring of 1826 without
+having granted a Constitution. Pedro, his eldest son, had already been made
+Emperor of Brazil; and, as it was impossible that Portugal and Brazil could
+again be united, it was arranged that Pedro's daughter, when of sufficient
+age, should marry her uncle Miguel, and so save Portugal from the danger of
+a contested succession. Before renouncing the crown of Portugal, Pedro
+granted a Constitution to that country. A Regency had already been
+appointed by King John, in which neither the Queen-dowager nor Miguel was
+included.
+
+[Desertion of Portuguese soldiery, 1826.]
+
+[Spain permits the deserters to attack Portugal.]
+
+[Canning sends troops to Lisbon, Dec., 1826.]
+
+Miguel had gone to Vienna. Although a sort of Caliban in character and
+understanding, this Prince met with the welcome due to a kinsman of the
+Imperial house, and to a representative of the good cause of absolutism. He
+was received by Metternich with great interest, and his fortunes were taken
+under the protection of the Austrian Court. In due time, it was hoped this
+savage and ignorant churl would do yeoman's service to Austrian principles
+in the Peninsula. But the Regency and the new Constitution of Portugal had
+not to wait for the tardy operation of Metternich's covert hostility. The
+soldiery who had risen at Miguel's bidding in 1823 now proclaimed him King,
+and deserted to Spanish soil. Within the Spanish frontier they were
+received by Ferdinand's representatives with open arms. The demands made by
+the Portuguese ambassador at Madrid for their dispersion and for the
+surrender of their weapons were evaded. The cause of these armed bands on
+the frontier became the cause of the Clerical and Ultra-Royalist party over
+all Europe. Money was sent to them from France and Austria. They were
+joined by troops of Spanish Carlists or Apostolicals; they were fed,
+clothed, and organised, if not by the Spanish Government itself, at least
+by those over whose action the Spanish Government exercised control. [346]
+Thus raised to considerable military strength, they made incursions into
+Portugal, and at last attempted a regular invasion. The Regency of Lisbon,
+justly treating these outrages as the act of the Spanish Government, and
+appealing to the treaties which bound Great Britain to defend Portugal
+against foreign attack, demanded the assistance of this country. More was
+involved in the action taken by Canning than a possible contest with Spain;
+the seriousness of the danger lay in the fact that Spain was still occupied
+by French armies, and that a war with Spain might, and probably would,
+involve a war with France, if not with other Continental Powers. But the
+English Ministry waited only for the confirmation of the alleged facts by
+their own ambassador. The treaty-rights of Portugal were undoubted; the
+temper of the English Parliament and nation, strained to the utmost by the
+events of the last three years, was such that a war against Ferdinand and
+against the destroyers of Spanish liberty would have caused more rejoicing
+than alarm. Nine days after the formal demand of the Portuguese arrived,
+four days after their complaint was substantiated by the report of our
+ambassador, Canning announced to the House of Commons that British troops
+were actually on the way to Lisbon. In words that alarmed many of his own
+party, and roused the bitter indignation of every Continental Court,
+Canning warned those whose acts threatened to force England into war, that
+the war, if war arose, would be a war of opinion, and that England, however
+earnestly she might endeavour to avoid it, could not avoid seeing ranked
+under her banner all the restless and discontented of any nation with which
+she might come into conflict. As for the Portuguese Constitution which
+formed the real object of the Spanish attack, it had not, Canning said,
+been given at the instance of Great Britain, but he prayed that Heaven
+might prosper it. It was impossible to doubt that a Minister who spoke
+thus, and who, even under expressions of regret, hinted at any alliance
+with the revolutionary elements in France and Spain, was formidably in
+earnest. The words and the action of Canning produced the effect which he
+desired. The Government of Ferdinand discovered the means of checking the
+activity of the Apostolicals: the presence of the British troops at Lisbon
+enabled the Portuguese Regency to throw all its forces upon the invaders
+and to drive them from the country. They were disbanded when they
+re-crossed the Spanish frontier; the French Court loudly condemned their
+immoral enterprise; and the Constitution of Portugal seemed, at least for
+the moment, to have triumphed over its open and its secret enemies.
+
+[The policy of Canning.]
+
+The tone of the English Government had indeed changed since the time when
+Metternich could express a public hope that the three Eastern Powers would
+have the approval of this country in their attack upon the Constitution of
+Naples. In 1820 such a profession might perhaps have passed for a mistake;
+in 1826 it would have been a palpable absurdity. Both in England and on the
+Continent it was felt that the difference between the earlier and the later
+spirit of our policy was summed up in the contrast between Canning and
+Castlereagh. It has become an article of historical faith that
+Castlereagh's melancholy death brought one period of our foreign policy to
+a close and inaugurated another: it has been said that Canning liberated
+England from its Continental connexions; it has even been claimed for him
+that he performed for Europe no less a task than the dissolution of the
+Holy Alliance. [347] The figure of Canning is indeed one that will for ever
+fill a great space in European history; and the more that is known of the
+opposition which he encountered both from his sovereign and from his great
+rival Wellington, the greater must be our admiration for his clear, strong
+mind, and for the conquering force of his character. But the legend which
+represents English policy as taking an absolutely new departure in 1822
+does not correspond to the truth of history. Canning was a member of the
+Cabinet from 1816 to 1820; it is a poor compliment to him to suppose that
+he either exercised no influence upon his colleagues or acquiesced in a
+policy of which he disapproved; and the history of the Congress of
+Aix-la-Chapelle proves that his counsels had even at that time gained the
+ascendant. The admission made by Castlereagh in 1820, after Canning had
+left the Cabinet, that Austria, as a neighbouring and endangered State, had
+a right to suppress the revolutionary constitution of Naples, would
+probably not have gained Canning's assent; in all other points, the action
+of our Government at Troppau and Laibach might have been his own. Canning
+loved to speak of his system as one of neutrality, and of non-interference
+in that struggle between the principles of despotism and of democracy which
+seemed to be spreading over Europe. He avowed his sympathy for Spain as the
+object of an unjust and unprovoked war, but he most solemnly warned the
+Spaniards not to expect English assistance. He prayed that the Constitution
+of Portugal might prosper, but he expressly disclaimed all connection with
+its origin, and defended Portugal not because it was a Constitutional
+State, but because England was bound by treaties to defend it against
+foreign invasion. The arguments against intervention on behalf of Spain
+which Canning addressed to the English sympathisers with that country might
+have been uttered by Castlereagh; the denial of the right of foreign Powers
+to attack the Spanish Constitution, with which Castlereagh headed his own
+instructions for Verona, might have been written by Canning.
+
+[Canning and the European concert.]
+
+The statements that Canning withdrew England from the Continental system,
+and that he dissolved the Holy Alliance, cannot be accepted without large
+correction. The general relations existing between the Great Powers were
+based, not on the ridiculous and obsolete treaty of Holy Alliance, but on
+the Acts which were signed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. The first
+of these was the secret Quadruple Treaty which bound England and the three
+Eastern Powers to attack France in case a revolution in that country should
+endanger the peace of Europe; the second was the general declaration of all
+the five Powers that they would act in amity and take counsel with one
+another. From the first of these alliances Canning certainly did not
+withdraw England. He would perhaps have done so in 1823 if the Quadruple
+Treaty had bound England to maintain the House of Bourbon on the French
+throne; but it had been expressly stated that the deposition of the
+Bourbons would not necessarily and in itself be considered by England as
+endangering the peace of Europe. This treaty remained in full force up to
+Canning's death; and if a revolutionary army had marched from Paris upon
+Antwerp, he would certainly have claimed the assistance of the three
+Eastern Powers. With respect to the general concert of Europe, established
+or confirmed by the declaration of Aix-la-Chapelle, this had always been
+one of varying extent and solidity. Both France and England had held
+themselves aloof at Troppau. The federative action was strongest and most
+mischievous not before but after the death of Castlereagh, and in the
+period that followed the Congress of Verona; for though the war against
+Spain was conducted by France alone, the three Eastern Powers had virtually
+made themselves responsible for the success of the enterprise, and it was
+the influence of their ambassadors at Paris and Madrid which prevented any
+restrictions from being imposed upon Ferdinand's restored sovereignty.
+
+Canning is invested with a spurious glory when it is said that his action
+in Spain and in Portugal broke up the league of the Continental Courts.
+Canning indeed shaped the policy of our own country with equal independence
+and wisdom, but the political centre of Europe was at this time not London
+but Vienna. The keystone of the European fabric was the union of Austria
+and Russia, and this union was endangered, not by anything that could take
+place in the Spanish Peninsula, but by the conflicting interests of these
+two great States in regard to the Ottoman Empire. From the moment when the
+Treaty of Paris was signed, every Austrian politician fixed his gaze upon
+the roads leading to the Lower Danube, and anxiously noted the signs of
+coming war, or of continued peace, between Russia and the Porte. [348] It
+was the triumph of Metternich to have diverted the Czar's thoughts during
+the succeeding years from his grievances against Turkey, and to have
+baffled the Russian diplomatists and generals who, like Capodistrias,
+sought to spur on their master to enterprises of Eastern conquest. At the
+Congress of Verona the shifting and incoherent manoeuvres of Austrian
+statecraft can indeed only be understood on the supposition that Metternich
+was thinking all the time less of Spain than of Turkey, and struggling at
+whatever cost to maintain that personal influence over Alexander which had
+hitherto prevented the outbreak of war in the East. But the antagonism so
+long suppressed broke out at last. The progress of the Greek insurrection
+brought Austria and Russia not indeed into war, but into the most
+embittered hostility with one another. It was on this rock that the
+ungainly craft which men called the Holy Alliance at length struck and went
+to pieces. Canning played his part well in the question of the East, but he
+did not create this question. There were forces at work which, without his
+intervention, would probably have made an end of the despotic amities of
+1815. It is not necessary to the title of a great statesman that he should
+have called into being the elements which make a new political order
+possible; it is sufficient praise that he should have known how to turn
+them to account.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+Condition of Greece: its Races and Institutions--The Greek Church--Communal
+System--The AEgaean Islands--The Phanariots--Greek Intellectual Revival;
+Koraes--Beginning of Greek National Movement; Contact of Greece with the
+French Revolution and Napoleon--The Hetaeria Philike--Hypsilanti's Attempt
+in the Danubian Provinces; its Failure--Revolt of the Morea: Massacres:
+Execution of Gregorius, and Terrorism at Constantinople--Attitude of
+Russia, Austria, and England--Extension of the Revolt: Affairs at
+Hydra--The Greek Leaders--Fall of Tripolitza--The Massacre of Chios--
+Failure of the Turks in the Campaign of 1822--Dissensions of the
+Greeks--Mahmud calls upon Mehemet Ali for Aid--Ibrahim conquers Crete and
+invades the Morea--Siege of Missolonghi--Philhellenism in Europe--Russian
+Proposal for Intervention--Conspiracies in Russia: Death of Alexander:
+Accession of Nicholas--Military Insurrection at St. Petersburg--
+Anglo-Russian Protocol--Treaty between England, Russia, and France--Death
+of Canning--Navarino--War between Russia and Turkey--Campaigns of 1828 and
+1829--Treaty of Adrianople--Capodistrias President of Greece--Leopold
+accepts and then declines the Greek Crown--Murder of Capodistrias--Otho,
+King of Greece.
+
+
+[Greece in the Napoleonic age.]
+
+Of the Christian races which at the beginning of the third decade of this
+century peopled the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Greek was
+that which had been least visibly affected by the political and military
+events of the Napoleonic age. Servia, after a long struggle, had in the
+year 1817 gained local autonomy under its own princes, although Turkish
+troops still garrisoned its fortresses, and the sovereignty of the Sultan
+was acknowledged by the payment of tribute. The Romanic districts,
+Wallachia and Moldavia, which, in the famous interview of Tilsit, Napoleon
+had bidden the Czar to make his own, were restored by Russia to the Porte
+in the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, but under conditions which virtually
+established a Russian protectorate. Greece, with the exception of the
+Ionian Islands, had neither been the scene of any military operations, nor
+formed the subject of any treaty. Yet the age of the French Revolution and
+of the Napoleonic wars had silently wrought in the Greek nation the last of
+a great series of changes which fitted it to take its place among the free
+peoples of Europe. The signs were there from which those who could read the
+future might have gathered that the political resurrection of Greece was
+near at hand. There were some who, with equal insight and patriotism,
+sought during this period to lay the intellectual foundation for that
+national independence which they foresaw that their children would win with
+the sword.
+
+[Greece in the eighteenth century.]
+
+The forward movement of the Greek nation may be said, in general terms, to
+have become visible during the first half of the eighteenth century.
+Serfage had then disappeared; the peasant was either a free-holder, or a
+farmer paying a rent in kind for his land. In the gradual and unobserved
+emancipation of the labouring class the first condition of national revival
+had already been fulfilled. The peasantry had been formed which, when the
+conflict with the Turk broke out, bore the brunt of the long struggle. In
+comparison with the Prussian serf, the Greek cultivator at the beginning of
+the eighteenth century was an independent man: in comparison with the
+English labourer, he was well fed and well housed. The evils to which the
+Greek population was exposed, wherever Greeks and Turks lived together,
+were those which brutalised or degraded the Christian races in every
+Ottoman province. There was no redress for injury inflicted by a Mohammedan
+official or neighbour. If a wealthy Turk murdered a Greek in the fields,
+burnt down his house, and outraged his family, there was no court where the
+offender could be brought to justice. The term by which the Turk described
+his Christian neighbour was "our rayah," that is, "our subject." A
+Mohammedan landowner might terrorise the entire population around him,
+carry off the women, flog and imprison the men, and yet feel that he had
+committed no offence against the law; for no law existed but the Koran, and
+no Turkish court of justice but that of the Kadi, where the complaint of
+the Christian passed for nothing.
+
+This was the monstrous relation that existed between the dominant and the
+subject nationalities, not in Greece only, but in every part of the Ottoman
+Empire where Mohammedans and Christians inhabited the same districts. The
+second great and general evil was the extortion practised by the
+tax-gatherers, and this fell upon the poorer Mohammedans equally with the
+Christians, except in regard to the poll-tax, or haratsch, the badge of
+servitude, which was levied on Christians alone. All land paid tithe to the
+State; and until the tax-gatherer had paid his visit it was not permitted
+to the peasant to cut the ripe crop. This rule enabled the tax-gatherer,
+whether a Mohammedan or a Christian, to inflict ruin upon those who did not
+bribe himself or his masters; for by merely postponing his visit he could
+destroy the value of the harvest. Round this central institution of tyranny
+and waste, there gathered, except in the districts protected by municipal
+privileges, every form of corruption natural to a society where the State
+heard no appeals, and made no inquiry into the processes employed by those
+to whom it sold the taxes. What was possible in the way of extortion was
+best seen in the phenomenon of well-built villages being left tenantless,
+and the population of rich districts dying out in a time of peace, without
+pestilence, without insurrection, without any greater wrong on the part of
+the Sultan's government than that normal indifference which permitted the
+existence of a community to depend upon the moderation or the caprice of
+the individual possessors of force.
+
+[Origin of modern Greece Byzantine, not classic.]
+
+[Slavonic and Albanian elements.]
+
+Such was the framework, or, as it may be said, the common-law of the mixed
+Turkish and Christian society of the Ottoman Empire. On this background we
+have now to trace the social and political features which stood out in
+Greek life, which preserved the race from losing its separate nationality,
+and which made the ultimate recovery of its independence possible. In the
+first outburst of sympathy and delight with which every generous heart in
+western Europe hailed the standard of Hellenic freedom upraised in 1821,
+the twenty centuries which separated the Greece of literature from the
+Greece of to-day were strangely forgotten. The imagination went straight
+back to Socrates and Leonidas, and pictured in the islander or the hillsman
+who rose against Mahmud II. the counterpart of those glorious beings who
+gave to Europe the ideals of intellectual energy, of plastic beauty, and of
+poetic truth. The illusion was a happy one, if it excited on behalf of a
+brave people an interest which Servia or Montenegro might have failed to
+gain; but it led to a reaction when disappointments came; it gave
+inordinate importance to the question of the physical descent of the
+Greeks; and it produced a false impression of the causes which had led up
+to the war of independence, and of the qualities, the habits, the bonds of
+union, which exercised the greatest power over the nation. These were, to a
+great extent, unlike anything existing in the ancient world; they had
+originated in Byzantine, not in classic Greece; and where the scenes of old
+Hellenic history appeared to be repeating themselves, it was due more to
+the continuing influence of the same seas and the same mountains than to
+the survival of any political fragments of the past. The Greek population
+had received a strong Slavonic infusion many centuries before. More
+recently, Albanian settlers had expelled the inhabitants from certain
+districts both in the mainland and in the Morea. Attica, Boeotia, Corinth,
+and Argolis were at the outbreak of the war of independence peopled in the
+main by a race of Albanian descent, who still used, along with some Greek,
+the Albanian language. [349] The sense of a separate nationality was,
+however, weak among these settlers, who, unlike some small Albanian
+communities in the west of the Morea, were Christians, not Mohammedans.
+Neighbourhood, commerce, identity of religion and similarity of local
+institutions were turning these Albanians into Greeks; and no community of
+pure Hellenic descent played a greater part in the national war, or
+exhibited more of the maritime energy and daring which we associate
+peculiarly with the Hellenic name, than the islanders of Hydra and Spetza,
+who had crossed from the Albanian parts of the Morea and taken possession
+of these desert rocks not a hundred years before. The same phenomenon of an
+assimilation of Greeks and Albanians was seen in southern Epirus, the
+border-ground between the two races. The Suliotes, Albanian mountaineers,
+whose military exploits form one of the most extraordinary chapters in
+history, showed signs of Greek influences before the Greek war of
+independence began, and in this war they made no distinction between the
+Greek cause and their own. Even the rule of the ferocious Ali Pasha at
+Janina had been favourable to the extension of Greek civilisation in
+Epirus. Under this Mohammedan tyrant Janina contained more schools than
+Athens. The Greek population of the district increased; and in the sense of
+a common religious antagonism to the Mohammedan, the Greek and the Albanian
+Christians in Epirus forgot their difference of race.
+
+[The Greek Church.]
+
+[Lower clergy.]
+
+[The Patriarch an imperial functionary.]
+
+[The Bishops civil magistrates.]
+
+The central element in modern Greek life was the religious profession of
+the Orthodox Eastern Church. Where, as in parts of Crete, the Greek adopted
+Mohammedanism, all the other elements of his nationality together did not
+prevent him from amalgamating with the Turk. The sound and popular forces
+of the Church belonged to the lower clergy, who, unlike the priests of the
+Roman Church, were married and shared the life of the people. If ignorant
+and bigoted, they were nevertheless the real guardians of national spirit;
+and if their creed was a superstition rather than a religion, it at least
+kept the Greeks in a wholesome antagonism to the superstition of their
+masters. The higher clergy stood in many respects in a different position.
+The Patriarch of Constantinople was a great officer of the Porte. His
+dignities and his civil jurisdiction had been restored and even enlarged by
+the Mohammedan conquerors of the Greek Empire, with the express object of
+employing the Church as a means of securing obedience to themselves: and it
+was quite in keeping with the history of this great office that, when the
+Greek national insurrection at last broke out, the Patriarch Gregorius IV.
+should have consented, though unwillingly, to launch the curse of the
+Church against it. The Patriarch gained his office by purchase, or through
+intrigues at the Divan; he paid an enormous annual backsheesh for it; and
+he was liable to be murdered or deposed as soon as his Mussulman patrons
+lost favour with the Sultan, or a higher bid was made for his office by a
+rival ecclesiastic. To satisfy the claims of the Palace the Patriarch was
+compelled to be an extortioner himself. The bishoprics in their turn were
+sold in his ante-chambers, and the Bishops made up the purchase-money by
+fleecing their clergy. But in spite of a deserved reputation for venality,
+the Bishops in Greece exercised very great influence, both as ecclesiastics
+and as civil magistrates. Whether their jurisdiction in lawsuits between
+Christians arose from the custom of referring disputes to their arbitration
+or was expressly granted to them by the Sultan, they virtually displaced in
+all Greek communities the court of the Kadi, and afforded the merchant or
+the farmer a tribunal where his own law was administered in his own
+language. Even a Mohammedan in dispute with a Christian would sometimes
+consent to bring the matter before the Bishops' Court rather than enforce
+his right to obtain the dilatory and capricious decision of an Ottoman
+judge.
+
+[Communal organisation.]
+
+[The Morea.]
+
+The condition of the Greeks living in the country that now forms the
+Hellenic Kingdom and in the AEgaean Islands exhibited strong local contrasts.
+It was, however, common to all that, while the Turk held the powers of
+State in his hand, the details of local administration in each district
+were left to the inhabitants, the Turk caring nothing about these matters
+so long as the due amount of taxes was paid and the due supply of sailors
+provided. The apportionment of taxes among households and villages seems to
+have been the germ of self-government from which several types of municipal
+organisation, some of them of great importance in the history of the Greek
+nation, developed. In the Paschalik of the Morea the taxes were usually
+farmed by the Voivodes, or Beys, the Turkish governors of the twenty-three
+provinces into which the Morea was divided. But in each village or township
+the inhabitants elected officers called Proestoi, who, besides collecting
+the taxes and managing the affairs of their own communities, met in a
+district-assembly, and there determined what share of the district-taxation
+each community should bear. One Greek officer, called Primate, and one
+Mohammedan, called Ayan, were elected to represent the district, and to
+take part in the council of the Pasha of the Morea, who resided at
+Tripolitza. [350] The Primates exercised considerable power. Created
+originally by the Porte to expedite the collection of the revenue, they
+became a Greek aristocracy. They were indeed an aristocracy of no very
+noble kind. Agents of a tyrannical master, they shared the vices of the
+tyrant and of the slave. Often farmers of the taxes themselves, obsequious
+and intriguing in the palace of the Pasha at Tripolitza, grasping and
+despotic in their native districts, they were described as a species of
+Christian Turk. But whatever their vices, they saved the Greeks from being
+left without leaders. They formed a class accustomed to act in common,
+conversant with details of administration, and especially with the
+machinery for collecting and distributing supplies. It was this financial
+experience of the Primates of the Morea which gave to the rebellion of the
+Greeks what little unity of organisation it exhibited in its earliest
+stage.
+
+[Northern Greece. The Armatoli and the Klephts.]
+
+On the north of the Gulf of Corinth the features of the communal system
+were less distinct than in the Morea. There was, however, in the
+mountain-country of AEtolia and Pindus a rough military organisation which
+had done great service to Greece in keeping alive the national spirit and
+habits of personal independence. The Turks had found a local militia
+established in this wild region at the time of their conquest, and had not
+interfered with it for some centuries. The Armatoli, or native soldiery,
+recruited from peasants, shepherds, and muleteers, kept Mohammedan
+influences at a distance, until, in the eighteenth century, the Sultans
+made it a fixed rule of policy to diminish their numbers and to reduce the
+power of their captains. Before 1820 the Armatoli had become comparatively
+few and weak; but as they declined, bands of Klephts, or brigands, grew in
+importance; and the mountaineer who was no longer allowed to practise arms
+as a guardian of order, enlisted himself among the robbers. Like the
+freebooters of our own northern border, these brigands became the heroes of
+song. Though they plundered the Greek as well as the Mohammedan, the
+national spirit approved their exploits. It was, no doubt, something, that
+the physical energy of the marauder and the habit of encountering danger
+should not be wholly on the side of the Turk and the Albanian. But the
+influence of the Klephts in sustaining Greek nationality has been
+overrated. They had but recently become numerous, and the earlier
+organisation of the northern Armatoli was that to which the sound and
+vigorous character of the Greek peasantry in these regions, the finest part
+of the Greek race on the mainland, was really due. [351]
+
+[The AEgaean Islands.]
+
+[Chios.]
+
+In the islands of the AEgaean the condition of the Greeks was on the whole
+happy and prosperous. Some of these islands had no Turkish population; in
+others the caprice of a Sultana, the goodwill of the Capitan Pasha who
+governed the Archipelago, or the judicious offer of a sum of money when
+money was wanted by the Porte, had so lightened the burden of Ottoman
+sovereignty, that the Greek island-community possessed more liberty than
+was to be found in any part of Europe, except Switzerland. The taxes
+payable to the central government, including the haratsch or poll-tax
+levied on all Christians, had often been commuted for a fixed sum, which
+was raised without the interposition of the Turkish tax-gatherer. In Hydra,
+Spetza, and Psara, the so-called nautical islands, the supremacy of the
+Turk was felt only in the obligation to furnish sailors to the Ottoman
+navy, and in the payment of a tribute of about L100 per annum. The
+government of these three islands was entirely in the hands of the
+inhabitants. In Chios, though a considerable Mussulman population existed
+by the side of the Greek, there was every sign of peace and prosperity.
+Each island bore its own peculiar social character, and had its municipal
+institutions of more or less value. The Hydriote was quarrelsome,
+turbulent, quick to use the knife, but outspoken, honest in dealing, and an
+excellent sailor. The picture of Chian life, as drawn even by those who
+have judged the Greeks most severely, is one of singular beauty and
+interest; the picture of a self-governing society in which the family
+trained the citizen in its own bosom, and in which, while commerce enriched
+all, the industry of the poor within their homes and in their gardens was
+refined by the practice of an art. The skill which gave its value to the
+embroidery and to the dyes of Chios was exercised by those who also worked
+the hand-loom and cultivated the mastic and the rose. The taste and the
+labour of man requited nature's gifts of sky, soil, and sea; and in the
+pursuit of occupations which stimulated, not deadened, the faculties of the
+worker, idleness and intemperance were alike unknown. [352] How bright a
+scene of industry, when compared with the grime and squalor of the English
+factory-town, where the human and the inanimate machine grind out their
+yearly mountains of iron-ware and calico, in order that the employer may
+vie with his neighbours in soulless ostentation, and the workman consume
+his millions upon millions in drink.
+
+[The Greeks have ecclesiastical power in other Turkish provinces.]
+
+The territory where the Greeks formed the great majority of the population
+included, beyond the boundaries of the present Hellenic Kingdom, the
+islands adjacent to the coast of Asia Minor, Crete, and the Chalcidic
+peninsula in Macedonia. But the activity of the race was not confined
+within these limits. If the Greek was a subject in his own country, he was
+master in the lands of some of his neighbours. A Greek might exercise power
+over other Christian subjects of the Porte either as an ecclesiastic, or as
+the delegate of the Sultan in certain fixed branches of the administration.
+The authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognised over the
+whole of the European provinces of Turkey, except Servia. The Bishops in
+all these provinces were Greeks; the services of the Church were conducted
+in the Greek tongue; the revenues of the greater part of the Church-lands,
+and the fees of all the ecclesiastical courts, went into Greek pockets. In
+things religious, and in that wide range of civil affairs which in
+communities belonging to the Eastern Church appertains to the higher
+religious office, the Greeks had in fact regained the ascendancy which they
+had possessed under the Byzantine Empire. The dream of the Churchman was
+not the creation of an independent kingdom of Greece, but the restoration
+of the Eastern Empire under Greek supremacy. When it was seen that the Slav
+and the Rouman came to the Greek for law, for commercial training, for
+religious teaching, and looked to the Patriarch of Constantinople as the
+ultimate judge of all disputes, it was natural that the belief should arise
+that, when the Turk passed away, the Greek would step into his place. But
+the influence of the Greeks, great as it appeared to be, did not in reality
+reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be
+foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at
+work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and
+plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a
+rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his
+children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the
+Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353]
+In Roumania, the only feeling towards the Greek intruder was one of intense
+hatred.
+
+[The Phanariot officials of the Porte.]
+
+[Greek Hospodars.]
+
+Four great offices of the Ottoman Empire were always held by Greeks. These
+were the offices of Dragoman, [354] or Secretary, of the Porte, Dragoman of
+the Fleet, and the governorships, called Hospodariates, of Wallachia and
+Moldavia. The varied business of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the
+administration of its revenues, the conduct of its law-courts, had drawn a
+multitude of pushing and well-educated Greeks to the quarter of
+Constantinople called the Phanar, in which the palace of the Patriarch is
+situated. Merchants and professional men inhabited the same district. These
+Greeks of the capital, the so-called Phanariots, gradually made their way
+into the Ottoman administration as Turkish energy declined, and the
+conquering race found that it could no longer dispense with the weapons of
+calculation and diplomacy. The Treaty of Carlowitz, made in 1699, after the
+unsuccessful war in which the Turks laid siege to Vienna, was negotiated on
+behalf of the Porte by Alexander Maurokordatos, a Chian by birth, who had
+become physician to the Sultan and was virtually the Foreign Minister of
+Turkey. His sons, Nicholas and Constantine, were made Hospodars of
+Wallachia and Moldavia early in the eighteenth century; and from this time
+forward, until the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, the governorships of
+the Roumanian provinces were entrusted to Phanariot families. The result
+was that a troop of Greek adventurers passed to the north of the Danube,
+and seized upon every office of profit in these unfortunate lands. There
+were indeed individuals among the Hospodars, especially among the
+Maurokordati, who rendered good service to their Roumanian subjects; but on
+the whole the Phanariot rule was grasping, dishonest, and cruel. [355] Its
+importance in relation to Greece was not that it Hellenised the Danubian
+countries, for that it signally failed to do; but that it raised the
+standard of Greek education, and enlarged the range of Greek thought, by
+opening a political and administrative career to ambitious men. The
+connection of the Phanariots with education was indeed an exceedingly close
+one. Alexander Maurokordatos was the ardent and generous founder of schools
+for the instruction of his countrymen in Constantinople as well as in other
+cities, and for the improvement of the existing language of Greece. His
+example was freely followed throughout the eighteenth century. It is,
+indeed, one of the best features in the Greek character that the owner of
+wealth has so often been, and still so often is, the promoter of the
+culture of his race. As in Germany in the last century, and in Hungary and
+Bohemia at a more recent date, the national revival of Greece was preceded
+by a striking revival of interest in the national language.
+
+[Greek intellectual movement in the eighteenth century.]
+
+The knowledge of ancient Greek was never wholly lost among the priesthood,
+but it had become useless. Nothing was read but the ecclesiastic
+commonplace of a pedantic age; and in the schools kept by the clergy before
+the eighteenth century the ancient language was taught only as a means of
+imparting divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like
+Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age
+of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the
+speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each
+district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that
+of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of
+performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that
+the Greek learnt to call himself Hellen, the name of his forefathers,
+instead of Romaios, a Roman. As the new schools grew up and the old ones
+were renovated or transformed, education ceased to be merely literary. In
+the second half of the eighteenth century science returned in a humble form
+to the land that had given it birth, and the range of instruction was
+widened by men who had studied law, physics, and moral philosophy at
+foreign Universities. Something of the liberal spirit of the inquirers of
+Western Europe arose among the best Greek teachers. Though no attack was
+made upon the doctrines of the Church, and no direct attack was made upon
+the authority of the Sultan, the duty of religious toleration was
+proclaimed in a land where bigotry had hitherto reigned supreme, and the
+political freedom of ancient Greece was held up as a glorious ideal to a
+less happy age. Some of the higher clergy and of the Phanariot instruments
+of Turkish rule took fright at the independent spirit of the new learning,
+and for a while it seemed as if the intellectual as well as the political
+progress of Greece might be endangered by ecclesiastical ill-will. But the
+attachment of the Greek people to the Church was so strong and so universal
+that, although satire might be directed against the Bishops, a breach with
+the Church formed no part of the design of any patriot. The antagonism
+between episcopal and national feeling, strongest about the end of the
+eighteenth century, declined during succeeding years, and had almost
+disappeared before the outbreak of the war of liberation.
+
+[Koraes, 1748-1833.]
+
+[The language of Modern Greece.]
+
+The greatest scholar of modern Greece was also one of its greatest
+patriots. Koraes, known as the legislator of the Greek language, was born
+in 1748, of Chian parents settled at Smyrna. The love of learning, combined
+with an extreme independence of character, made residence insupportable to
+him in a land where the Turk was always within sight, and where few
+opportunities existed for gaining wide knowledge. His parents permitted him
+to spend some years at Amsterdam, where a branch of their business was
+established. Recalled to Smyrna at the age of thirty, Koraes almost
+abandoned human society. The hand of a beautiful heiress could not tempt
+him from the austere and solitary life of the scholar; and quitting his
+home, he passed through the medical school of Montpellier, and settled at
+Paris. He was here when the French Revolution began. The inspiration of
+that time gave to his vast learning and inborn energy a directly patriotic
+aim. For forty years Koraes pursued the work of serving Greece by the means
+open to the scholar. The political writings in which he addressed the
+Greeks themselves or appealed to foreigners in favour of Greece, admirable
+as they are, do not form the basis of his fame. The peculiar task of Koraes
+was to give to the reviving Greek nation the national literature and the
+form of expression which every civilised people reckons among its most
+cherished bonds of unity. Master, down to the minutest details, of the
+entire range of Greek writings, and of the history of the Greek language
+from classical times down to our own century, Koraes was able to select the
+Hellenic authors, Christian as well as Pagan, whose works were best suited
+for his countrymen in their actual condition, and to illustrate them as no
+one could who had not himself been born and bred among Greeks. This was one
+side of Koraes' literary task. The other was to direct the language of the
+future Hellenic kingdom into its true course. Classical writing was still
+understood by the educated in Greece, but the spoken language of the people
+was something widely different. Turkish and Albanian influences had
+barbarised the vocabulary; centuries of ignorance had given play to every
+natural irregularity of local dialect. When the restoration of Greek
+independence came within view, there were some who proposed to revive
+artificially each form used in the ancient language, and thus, without any
+real blending, to add the old to the new: others, seeing this to be
+impossible, desired that the common idiom, corrupt as it was, should be
+accepted as a literary language. Koraes chose the middle and the rational
+path. Taking the best written Greek of the day as his material, he
+recommended that the forms of classical Greek, where they were not wholly
+obsolete, should be fixed in the grammar of the language. While ridiculing
+the attempt to restore modes of expression which, even in the written
+language, had wholly passed out of use, he proposed to expunge all words
+that were in fact not Greek at all, but foreign, and to replace them by
+terms formed according to the natural laws of the language. The Greek,
+therefore, which Koraes desired to see his countrymen recognise as their
+language, and which he himself used in his writings, was the written Greek
+of the most cultivated persons of his time, purged of its foreign elements,
+and methodised by a constant reference to a classical model, which,
+however, it was not to imitate pedantically. The correctness of this theory
+has been proved by its complete success. The patois which, if it had been
+recognised as the language of the Greek kingdom, would now have made
+Herodotus and Plato foreign authors in Athens, is indeed still preserved in
+familiar conversation, but it is little used in writing and not taught in
+schools. A language year by year more closely approximating in its forms to
+that of classical Greece unites the Greeks both with their past and among
+themselves, and serves as the instrument of a widening Hellenic
+civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. The political object of Koraes
+has been completely attained. No people in Europe is now prouder of its
+native tongue, or turns it to better account in education, than his
+countrymen. In literature, the renovated language has still its work before
+it. The lyric poetry that has been written in Greece since the time of
+Koraes is not wanting, if a foreigner may express an opinion, in tenderness
+and grace The writer who shall ennoble Greek prose with the energy and
+directness of the ancient style has yet to arise [356]
+
+[Development of Greek commerce, 1750-1820.]
+
+[The Treaty of Kainardji, 1774.]
+
+The intellectual advance of the Greeks in the eighteenth century was
+closely connected with the development of their commerce, and this in its
+turn was connected with events in the greater cycle of European history. A
+period of comparative peace and order in the Levantine waters, following
+the final expulsion of the Venetians from the Morea in 1718, gave play to
+the natural aptitude of the Greek islanders for coasting-trade. Then ships,
+still small and unfit to venture on long voyages, plied between the
+harbours in the AEgaean and in the Black Sea, and brought profit to their
+owners in spite of the imposition of burdens from which not only many of
+the Mussulman subjects of the Sultan, but foreign nations protected by
+commercial treaties, were free. It was at this epoch, after Venice had lost
+its commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Russia began to
+exercise a direct influence upon the fortunes of Greece. The Empress
+Catherine had formed the design of conquering Constantinople, and intended,
+under the title of Protectress of the Christian Church, to use the Greeks
+as her allies. In the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey in
+1768, a Russian expeditionary force landed in the Morea, and the Greeks
+were persuaded to take up arms. The Moreotes themselves paid dearly for the
+trust which they had placed in the orthodox Empress. They were virtually
+abandoned to the vengeance of their oppressors; but to Greece at large the
+conditions on which peace was made proved of immense benefit. The Treaty of
+Kainardji, signed in 1774, gave Russia the express right to make
+representations at Constantinople on behalf of the Christian inhabitants of
+the Danubian provinces; it also bound the Sultan to observe certain
+conditions in his treatment of the Greek islanders. Out of these clauses,
+Russian diplomacy constructed a general right of interference on behalf of
+any Christian subjects of the Porte. The Treaty also opened the Black Sea
+to Russian ships of commerce, and conferred upon Russia the commercial
+privileges of the most favoured nation. [357] The result of this compact
+was a very remarkable one. The Russian Government permitted hundreds of
+Greek shipowners to hoist its own flag, and so changed the footing of Greek
+merchantmen in every port of the Ottoman Empire. The burdens which had
+placed the Greek trader at a disadvantage, when compared with the
+Mohammedan, vanished. A host of Russian consular agents, often Greeks
+themselves, was scattered over the Levant. Eager for opportunities of
+attaching the Greeks to their Russian patrons, quick to make their
+newly-won power felt by the Turks, these men extracted a definite meaning
+from the clauses of the Treaty of Kainardji, by which the Porte had bound
+itself to observe the rights of its Christian subjects. The sense of
+security in the course of their business, no less than the emancipation
+from commercial fetters, gave an immense impulse to Greek traders. Their
+ships were enlarged; voyages, hitherto limited to the Levant, were extended
+to England and even to America; and a considerable armament of cannon was
+placed on board each ship for defence against the attack of Algerian
+pirates.
+
+[Foundation of Odessa, 1792.]
+
+[Death of Rhegas, 1798.]
+
+[Influence of the French Revolution on Greece.]
+
+Before the end of the eighteenth century another war between Turkey and
+Russia, resulting in the cession of the district of Oczakoff on the
+northern shore of the Black Sea, made the Greeks both carriers and vendors
+of the corn-export of Southern Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on
+the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity
+were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many
+a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of L3,000 to be a
+large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London
+firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England
+during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much
+of the Mediterranean trade that was lost by France and its dependencies.
+The increasing intelligence of the people was shown in the fact that
+foreigners were no longer employed by Greek merchants as their travelling
+agents in distant countries; there were countrymen enough of their own who
+could negotiate with an Englishman or a Dane in his own language. The
+richest Greeks were no doubt those of Odessa and Salonica, not of Hellas
+proper; but even the little islands of Hydra and Spetza, the refuge of the
+Moreotes whom Catherine had forsaken in 1770, now became communities of no
+small wealth and spirit. Psara, which was purely Greek, formed with these
+Albanian colonies the nucleus of an AEgaean naval Power. The Ottoman
+Government, cowed by its recent defeats, and perhaps glad to see the means
+of increasing its resources, made no attempt to check the growth of the
+Hellenic armed marine. Under the very eyes of the Sultan, the Hydriote and
+Psarian captains, men as venturesome as the sea-kings of ancient Greece,
+accumulated the artillery which was hereafter to hold its own against many
+an Ottoman man-of-war, and to sweep the Turkish merchantmen from the
+AEgaean. Eighteen years before the Greek insurrection broke out, Koraes,
+calling the attention of Western Europe to the progress made by his
+country, wrote the following significant words:--"If the Ottoman Government
+could have foreseen that the Greeks would create a merchant-navy, composed
+of several hundred vessels, most of them regularly armed, it would have
+crushed the movement at its commencement. It is impossible to calculate the
+effects which may result from the creation of this marine, or the influence
+which it may exert both upon the destiny of the oppressed nation and upon
+that of its oppressors." [358] Like its classic sisterland in the
+Mediterranean, Greece was stirred by the far-sounding voices of the French
+Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the revival of a supposed
+antique Republicanism, the victories of Hoche and Bonaparte, successively
+kindled the enthusiasm of a race already restless under the Turkish yoke.
+France drew to itself some of the hopes that had hitherto been fixed
+entirely upon Russia. Images and ideas of classic freedom invaded the
+domain where the Church had hitherto been all in all; the very sailors
+began to call their boats by the names of Spartan and Athenian heroes, as
+well as by those of saints and martyrs. In 1797 Venice fell, and Bonaparte
+seized its Greek possessions, the Ionian Islands. There was something of
+the forms of liberation in the establishment of French rule; the
+inhabitants of Zante were at least permitted to make a bonfire of the
+stately wigs worn by their Venetian masters. Great changes seemed to be
+near at hand. It was not yet understood that France fought for empire, not
+for justice; and the man who, above all others, represented the early
+spirit of the revolution among the Greeks, the poet Rhegas, looked to
+Bonaparte to give the signal for the rising of the whole of the Christian
+populations subject to Mohammedan rule. Rhegas, if he was not a wise
+politician, was a thoroughly brave man, and he was able to serve his
+country as a martyr. While engaged in Austria in conspiracies against the
+Sultan's Government, and probably in intrigues with Bernadotte, French
+ambassador at Vienna, he was arrested by the agents of Thugut, and handed
+over to the Turks. He was put to death at Belgrade, with five of his
+companions, in May, 1798. The songs of Rhegas soon passed through every
+household in Greece. They were a precious treasure to his countrymen, and
+they have immortalised his name as a patriot. But the work which he had
+begun languished for a time after his death. The series of events which
+followed Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt extinguished the hope of the
+liberation of Greece by the French Republic. Among the higher Greek clergy
+the alliance with the godless followers of Voltaire was seen with no
+favourable eye. The Porte was even able to find a Christian Patriarch to
+set his name to a pastoral, warning the faithful against the sin of
+rebellion, and reminding them that, while Satan was creating the Lutherans
+and Calvinists, the infinite mercy of God had raised up the Ottoman Power
+in order that the Orthodox Church might be preserved pure from the heresies
+of the West. [359]
+
+[The Ionian Islands. 1798-1815.]
+
+[Ali Pasha, 1798-1821.]
+
+From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by
+the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali
+Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was
+deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the
+coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under
+the protection of the Czar and the Sultan. It was in the native
+administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace
+of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias,
+whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter
+the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and
+conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall
+of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest
+Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant
+rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives,
+some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most
+famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht
+of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of
+England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither
+rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes,
+vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian
+Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought
+at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his
+violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow
+alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's
+court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers,
+merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope
+round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.
+[360] Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be
+the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's
+physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among
+these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For
+good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually
+independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and
+when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed
+round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most
+powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own
+independence.
+
+[The Hetaeria Philike.]
+
+The secret society, which under the name of Hetaeria Philike, or association
+of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after
+it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on
+behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte. The founders of this society
+were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn
+more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from
+those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of
+the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire.
+It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had
+secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a
+society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias
+had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress
+of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise. The real
+chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the
+instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by
+scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a
+general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they
+wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetaeria was
+an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in
+exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in
+its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the
+course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the
+adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had
+received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them
+until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the
+condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or
+outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of
+Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not
+hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no
+less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the
+sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by
+oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when
+the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer
+on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart,
+that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.
+
+[Capodistrias and Hypsilanti.]
+
+Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs
+of the Hetaeria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian
+leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no
+dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire
+rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of
+Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love
+the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection
+of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetaeria besought him to place
+himself at its head. Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man
+the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting
+Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year
+recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all
+personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece
+better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous
+enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetaerists, who then turned to a
+soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander
+Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as
+Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the
+designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to
+attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to
+believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not
+long be withheld. [361] Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery
+of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at
+Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetaeria, and entered upon
+a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the
+campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single
+qualification.
+
+[The Heraerist plan.]
+
+In October, 1820, the leading Hetaerists met in council at Ismail to decide
+whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or
+in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of
+Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the
+exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish
+soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty
+of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's
+consent. It does not appear that the Hetaerists had yet formed any
+calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had
+certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks,
+or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne.
+The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided
+that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus.
+Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him,
+reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.
+[362] And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian
+population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the
+feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards
+themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found
+favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should
+first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own
+grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the
+insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served
+in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his
+countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetaerists that Wladimiresco might have
+a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see
+the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief
+in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to
+command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of
+the Sultan.
+
+[Hypsilanti in Roumania March, 1821.]
+
+The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821,
+while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed
+the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon
+Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetaerists began their own insurrection
+by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a
+conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let
+loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down.
+Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few
+hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called
+upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great
+European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos,
+the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and
+supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men,
+some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads
+to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his
+disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he
+might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing
+on the north of the Danube.
+
+[The Czar disavows the movement.]
+
+But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he
+began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and
+conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks
+more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of
+the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar,
+who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this
+moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary
+influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men
+to put down the revolution in Piedmont. He received with dismay a letter
+from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in
+the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and
+then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread
+conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the
+Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was
+published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated
+and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The
+Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now
+issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers.
+Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek
+revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the
+revolutions of Italy and Spain. [363]
+
+[The enterprise fails.]
+
+The disavowal of the Hetaerist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its
+success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that
+the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in
+contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one
+believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from
+Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops
+crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the
+Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in
+his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It
+was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek
+from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his
+treason to the Hetaerist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a
+doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged. The
+Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled
+ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in
+Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives
+dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four
+hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to
+the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their
+number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive
+into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the
+tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who
+could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in
+the explosion, together with his assailants.
+
+[Revolt of Morea, April 2, 1891.]
+
+The Hetaerist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and
+with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern
+Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain
+reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an
+alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the
+Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek
+nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the
+crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of
+servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in
+the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the AEgaean.
+Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the
+Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the
+Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as
+hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on
+their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection
+or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the
+decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the
+Morea. The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from
+the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they
+sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the
+whole earth." This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the
+revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their
+country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to
+defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men,
+women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a
+few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred,
+the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had
+numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was
+collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which
+the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer. [364]
+
+[Terrorism at Constantinople.]
+
+[Execution of the Patriarch, April 22.]
+
+The news of the revolt of the Morea and of the massacre of Mohammedans
+reached Constantinople, striking terror into the politicians of the Turkish
+capital, and rousing the Sultan Mahmud to a vengeance tiger-like in its
+ferocity, but deliberate and calculated like every bloody deed of this
+resolute and able sovereign. Reprisals had already been made upon the
+Greeks at Constantinople for the acts of Hypsilanti, and a number of
+innocent persons had been put to death by the executioner, but no general
+attack upon the Christians had been suggested, nor had the work of
+punishment passed out of the hands of the government itself. Now, however,
+the fury of the Mohammedan populace was let loose upon the infidel. The
+Sultan called upon his subjects to arm themselves in defence of their
+faith. Executions were redoubled; soldiers and mobs devastated Greek
+settlements on the Bosphorus; and on the most sacred day of the Greek
+Church a blow was struck which sent a thrill over Eastern Europe. The
+Patriarch of Constantinople had celebrated the service which ushers in the
+dawn of Easter Sunday, when he was summoned by the Dragoman of the Porte to
+appear before a Synod hastily assembled. There an order of the Sultan was
+read declaring Gregorius IV. a traitor, and degrading him from his office.
+The Synod was commanded to elect his successor. It did so. While the new
+Archbishop was receiving his investiture, Gregorius was led out, and was
+hanged, still wearing his sacred robes, at the gate of his palace. His body
+remained during Easter Sunday and the two following days at the place of
+execution. It was then given to the Jews to be insulted, dragged through
+the streets, and cast into the sea. The Archbishops of Adrianople,
+Salonica, and Tirnovo suffered death on the same Easter Sunday. The body of
+Gregorius, floating in the waves, was picked up by a Greek ship and carried
+to Odessa. Brought, as it was believed, by a miracle to Christian soil, the
+relics of the Patriarch received at the hands of the Russian government the
+funeral honours of a martyr. Gregorius had no doubt had dealings with the
+Hetaerists; but he was put to death untried; and whatever may have been the
+real extent of his offence, he was executed not for this but in order to
+strike terror into the Sultan's Christian subjects.
+
+[Massacre of Christians, April-October.]
+
+[Effect on Russia.]
+
+[Russian ambassador leaves Constantinople, July 27.]
+
+During the succeeding months, in Asia Minor as well as in Macedonia and at
+Constantinople itself, there were wholesale massacres of the Christians,
+and the churches of the Greeks were pillaged or destroyed by their enemies,
+both Jews and Turks. Smyrna, Adrianople, and Salonica, in so far as these
+towns were Greek, were put to the sack; thousands of the inhabitants were
+slain by the armed mobs who held command, or were sold into slavery. It was
+only the fear of a war with Russia which at length forced Sultan Mahmud to
+stop these deeds of outrage and to restore some of the conditions of
+civilised life in the part of his dominions which was not in revolt. The
+Russian army and nation would have avenged the execution of the Patriarch
+by immediate war if popular instincts had governed its ruler. Strogonoff,
+the ambassador at Constantinople, at once proposed to the envoys of the
+other Powers to unite in calling up war-ships for the protection of the
+Christians. Joint action was, however, declined by Lord Strangford, the
+representative of England, and the Porte was encouraged by the attitude of
+this politician to treat the threats of Strogonoff with indifference. There
+was an interval during which the destiny of a great part of Eastern Europe
+depended upon the fluctuations of a single infirm will. The Czar had
+thoroughly identified himself while at Laibach with the principles and the
+policy of European conservatism, and had assented to the declaration in
+which Metternich placed the Greek rebellion, together with the Spanish and
+Italian insurrections, under the ban of Europe. Returning to St.
+Petersburg, Alexander, in spite of the veil that intercepts from every
+sovereign the real thoughts and utterances of his people, found himself
+within the range of widely different influences. Russian passions were not
+roused by what might pass in Italy or Spain. The Russian priest, the
+soldier, the peasant understood nothing of theories of federal
+intervention, and of the connection between Neapolitan despotism and the
+treaties of 1815: but his blood boiled when he heard that the chief priest
+of his Church had been murdered by the Sultan, and that a handful of his
+brethren were fighting for their faith unhelped. Alexander felt to some
+extent the throb of national spirit. There had been a time in his life when
+a single hour of strong emotion or of overpowering persuasion had made him
+renounce every obligation and unite with Napoleon against his own allies;
+and there were those who in 1821 believed that the Czar would as suddenly
+break loose from his engagements with Metternich and throw himself, with a
+fanatical army and nation, into a crusade against the Turk. Sultan Mahmud
+had himself given to the Russian party of action a ground for denouncing
+him in the name of Russian honour and interests independently of all that
+related to Greece. In order to prevent the escape of suspected persons, the
+Porte had ordered Russian vessels to be searched at Constantinople, and it
+had forced all corn-ships coming from the Euxine to discharge their cargoes
+at the Bosphorus, under the apprehension that the corn-supplies of the
+capital would be cut off by Greek vessels in command of the AEgaean.
+Further, Russia had by treaty the right to insist that the Danubian
+Principalities should be governed by their civil authorities, the
+Hospodars, and not by Turkish Pashas, insurrection in Wallachia had been
+put down, but the rule of Hospodars had not been restored; Turkish
+generals, at the head of their forces, still administered their provinces
+under military law. On all these points Russia had at least the semblance
+of grievances of its own. The outrages which shocked all Europe were not
+the only wrong which Russian pride called upon the Czar to redress. The
+influence of Capodistrias revived at St. Petersburg. A despatch was sent to
+Constantinople declaring that the Porte had begun a war for life or death
+with the Christian religion, and that its continued existence among the
+Powers of Europe must depend upon its undertaking to restore the churches
+which had been destroyed, to guarantee the inviolability of Christian
+worship in the future, and to discriminate in its punishments between the
+innocent and the guilty. Presenting ultimatum from his master, Strogonoff,
+in accordance with his instructions, demanded a written answer within eight
+days. No such answer came. On the 27th of July the ambassador quitted
+Constantinople. War seemed to be on the point of breaking out.
+
+[Eastern policy of Austria.]
+
+The capital where these events were watched with the greatest apprehension
+was Vienna. The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire have always been most
+intimately connected with those of Austria; and although the long struggle
+of the House of Hapsburg with Napoleon and its wars in recent times with
+Prussia and with Italy have made the western aspect of Austrian policy more
+prominent and more familiar than its eastern one, the eastern interests of
+the monarchy have always been at least as important in the eyes of its
+actual rulers. Before the year 1720 Austria, not Russia, was the great
+enemy of Turkey and the aggressive Power of the east of Europe. After 1780
+the Emperor Joseph had united with Catherine of Russia in a plan for
+dividing the Sultan's dominions in Europe, and actually waged a war for
+this purpose. In 1795 the alliance, with the same object, had been
+prospectively revived by Thugut; in 1809, after the Treaty of Tilsit,
+Metternich had determined in the last resort to combine with Napoleon and
+Alexander in dismembering Turkey, if all diplomatic means should fail to
+prevent a joint attack on the Porte by France and Russia. But this
+resolution had been adopted by Metternich only as a matter of necessity,
+and in view of a combination which threatened to reduce Austria to the
+position of a vassal State. Metternich's own definite and consistent policy
+after 1814 was the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. His statesmanship
+was, as a rule, governed by fear; and his fear of Alexander was second only
+to his old fear of Napoleon. Times were changed since Joseph and Thugut
+could hope to enter upon a game of aggression with Russia upon equal terms.
+The Austrian army had been beaten in every battle that it had fought during
+nearly twenty years. Province after province had been severed from it,
+without, except in the Tyrol, raising a hand in its support; and when in
+1821 the Minister compared Austria's actual Empire and position in Europe,
+won and maintained in great part by his own diplomacy, with the ruin to
+which a series of wars had brought it ten years before, he might well thank
+Heaven that international Congresses were still so much in favour with the
+Courts, and tremble at the clash of arms which from the remote Morea
+threatened to call Napoleon's northern conquerors once more into the field
+[365]
+
+[Eastern policy of England.]
+
+England was not, like Austria, exposed to actual danger by the advance of
+Russia towards the AEgaean; but the growth of Russian power had been viewed
+with alarm by English politicians since 1788, when Pitt had formed a triple
+alliance with Prussia and Holland for the purpose of defending the Porte
+against the attacks of Catherine and Joseph. The interest of Great Britain
+in the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire had not been laid down as a
+principle before that date, nor was it then acknowledged by the Whig party.
+It was asserted by Pitt from considerations relating to the European
+balance of power, not, as in our own times, with a direct reference to
+England's position in India. The course of events from 1792 to 1807 made
+England and Russia for awhile natural allies; but this friendship was
+turned into hostility by the Treaty of Tilsit; and although after a few
+years Alexander was again fighting for the same cause as Great Britain, and
+the public opinion of this country enthusiastically hailed the issue of the
+Moscow campaign, English statesmen never forgot the interview upon the
+Niemen, and never, in the brightest moments of victory, regarded Alexander
+without some secret misgivings. During the campaign of 1814 in France,
+Castlereagh's willingness to negotiate with Bonaparte was due in great part
+to the fear that Alexander's high-wrought resolutions would collapse before
+Napoleon could be thoroughly crushed, and that reaction would carry him
+into a worse peace than that which he then disdained. [366] The
+negotiations at the Congress of Vienna brought Great Britain and Russia, as
+it has been seen, into an antagonism which threatened to end in the resort
+to arms; and the tension which then and for some time afterwards existed
+between the two governments led English Ministers to speak, certainly in
+exaggerated and misleading language, of the mutual hostility of the English
+and the Russian nations. From 1815 to 1821 the Czar had been jealously
+watched. It had been rumoured over and over again that he was preparing to
+invade the Ottoman Empire; and when the rebellion of the Greeks broke out,
+the one thought of Castlereagh and his colleagues was that Russia must be
+prevented from throwing itself into the fray, and that the interests of
+Great Britain required that the authority of the Sultan should as soon as
+possible be restored throughout his dominions.
+
+[Fears of new period of warfare.]
+
+[Metternich and the Greeks.]
+
+Both at London therefore and at Vienna the rebellion of Greece was viewed
+by governments only as an unfortunate disturbance which was likely to
+excite war between Russia and its neighbours, and to imperil the peace of
+Europe at large. It may seem strange that the spectacle of a nation rising
+to assert its independence should not even have aroused the question
+whether its claims deserved to be considered. But to do justice at least to
+the English Ministers of 1821, it must be remembered how terrible, how
+overpowering, were the memories left by the twenty years of European war
+that had closed in 1815, and at how vast a cost to mankind the regeneration
+of Greece would have been effected, if, as then seemed probable, it had
+ranged the Great Powers again in arms against one another, and re-kindled
+the spirit of military aggression which for a whole generation had made
+Europe the prey of rival coalitions. It is impossible to read the letter in
+which Castlereagh pleaded with the Czar to sacrifice his own glory and
+popularity to the preservation of European peace, without perceiving in
+what profound earnestness the English statesman sought to avert the renewal
+of an epoch of conflict, and how much the apprehension of coming calamity
+predominated in his own mind over the mere jealousy of an extension of
+Russian power. [367] If Castlereagh had no thought for Greece itself, it
+was because the larger interests of Europe wholly absorbed him, and because
+he lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better
+adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national
+rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked
+as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of
+Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much
+narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to
+the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the
+liberal movement of Germany. In his empty and pedantic philosophy of human
+action, Metternich linked together every form of national aspiration and
+unrest as something presumptuous and wanton. He understood nothing of the
+debt that mankind owes to the spirit of freedom. He was just as ready to
+dogmatise upon the wickedness of the English Reform Bill as he was to trace
+the hand of Capodistrias in every tumult in Servia or the Morea: and even
+if there had been no fear of Russian aggression in the background, he would
+instinctively have condemned the Greek revolt when he saw that the
+light-headed professors in the German Universities were beginning to
+agitate in its favour, and that the recalcitrant minor Courts regarded it
+with some degree of sympathy.
+
+[Alexander adheres to policy of peace.]
+
+[Capdostrias retires, Aug 1822.]
+
+The policy of Metternich in the Eastern Question had for its object the
+maintenance of the existing order of things; and as it was certain that
+some satisfaction or other must be given to Russian pride, Metternich's
+counsel was that the grievances of the Czar which were specifically Russian
+should be clearly distinguished from questions relating to the independence
+of Greece; and that on the former the Porte should be recommended to agree
+with its adversary quickly, the good offices of Europe being employed
+within given limits on the Czar's behalf; so that, the Russian causes of
+complaint being removed, Alexander might without loss of honour leave the
+Greeks to be subdued, and resume the diplomatic relations with
+Constantinople which had been so perilously severed by Strogonoff's
+departure. It remained for the Czar to decide whether, as head of Russia
+and protector of the Christians of the East, he would solve the Eastern
+Question by his own sword, or whether, constant to the principle and ideal
+of international action to which he had devoted himself since 1815, he
+would commit his cause to the joint mediation of Europe, and accept such
+solution of the problem as his allies might attain. In the latter case it
+was clear that no blow would be struck on behalf of Greece. For a year or
+more the balance wavered; at length the note of triumph sounded in the
+Austrian Cabinet. Capodistrias, the representative of the Greek cause at
+St. Petersburg, rightly measured the force of the opposing impulses in the
+Czar's mind. He saw that Alexander, interested as he was in Italy and
+Spain, would never break with that federation of the Courts which he had
+himself created, nor shake off the influences of legitimism which had
+dominated him since the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. Submitting when
+contention had become hopeless, and anticipating his inevitable fall by a
+voluntary retirement from public affairs, Capodistrias, still high in
+credit and reputation, quitted St. Petersburg under the form leave of
+absence, and withdrew to Geneva, there to await events, and to enjoy the
+distinction of a patriot whom love for Greece had constrained to abandon
+one of the most splendid positions in Europe. Grave, melancholy, and
+austere, as one who suffered with his country, Capodistrias remained in
+private life till the vanquished cause had become the victorious one, and
+the liberated Greek nation called him to place himself at its head.
+
+[Extension of the Greek revolt.]
+
+[Central Greece.]
+
+[Fall of Ali Pasha, Feb., 1822.]
+
+[Chalcidice.]
+
+An international diplomatic campaign of vast activity and duration began in
+the year 1821, but the contest of arms was left, as Metternich desired, to
+the Greeks and the Turks alone. The first act of the war was the
+insurrection of the Morea: the second was the extension of this
+insurrection over parts of Continental Greece and the Archipelago, and its
+summary extinction by the Turk in certain districts, which in consequence
+remained for the future outside the area of hostilities, and so were not
+ultimately included in the Hellenic Kingdom. Central Greece, that is, the
+country lying immediately north of the Corinthian Gulf, broke into revolt a
+few weeks later than the Morea. The rising against the Mohammedans was
+distinguished by the same merciless spirit: the men were generally
+massacred; the women, if not killed, were for the most part sold into
+slavery; and when, after an interval of three years, Lord Byron came to
+Missolonghi, he found that a miserable band of twenty-three captive women
+formed the sole remnant of the Turkish population of that town. Thessaly,
+with some exceptions, remained passive, and its inaction was of the utmost
+service to the Turkish cause; for Ali Pasha in Epirus was now being
+besieged by the Sultan's armies, and if Thessaly had risen in the rear of
+these troops, they could scarcely have escaped destruction. Khurshid, the
+Ottoman commander conducting the siege of Janina, held firmly to his task,
+in spite of the danger which threatened his communications, and in spite of
+the circumstance that his whole household had fallen into the hands of the
+Moreot insurgents. His tenacity saved the border-provinces for the Ottoman
+Empire. No combination was effected between Ali and the Greeks, and at the
+beginning of 1822 the Albanian chieftain lost both his stronghold and his
+life. In the remoter district of Chalcidice, on the Macedonian coast, where
+the promontory of Athos and the two parallel peninsulas run out into the
+AEgaean, and a Greek population, clearly severed from the Slavic inhabitants
+of the mainland, maintained its own communal and religious organisation,
+the national revolt broke out under Hetaerist leaders. The monks of Mount
+Athos, like their neighbours, took up arms. But there was little sympathy
+between the privileged chiefs of these abbeys and the desperate men who had
+come to head the revolt. The struggle was soon abandoned; and, partly by
+force of arms, partly by negotiation, the authority of the Sultan was
+restored without much difficulty throughout this region.
+
+[The AEgaean Islands.]
+
+The settlements of the AEgaean which first raised the flag of Greek
+independence were the so-called Nautical Islands, Hydra, Spetza, and Psara,
+where the absence of a Turkish population and the enjoyment of a century of
+self-government had allowed the bold qualities of an energetic maritime
+race to grow to their full vigour. Hydra and Spetza were close to the Greek
+coast, Psara was on the farther side of the archipelago, almost within view
+of Asia Minor; so that in joining the insurrection its inhabitants showed
+great heroism, for they were exposed to the first attack of any Turkish
+force that could maintain itself for a few hours at sea, and the whole
+adjacent mainland was the recruiting-ground of the Sultan. At Hydra the
+revolt against the Ottoman was connected with the internal struggles of the
+little community, and these in their turn were connected with the great
+economical changes of Europe which, at the opposite end of the continent,
+and in a widely different society, led to the enactment of the English Corn
+Laws, and to the strife of classes which resulted from them. During
+Napoleon's wars the carrying-trade of most nations had become extinct;
+little corn reached England, and few besides Greek ships navigated the
+Euxine and Mediterranean. When peace opened the markets and the ports of
+all nations, just as the renewed importation of foreign corn threatened to
+lower the profits of English farmers and the rents of English landlords, so
+the reviving freedom of navigation made an end of the monopoly of the
+Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in
+Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the
+profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of
+the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political
+opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination
+to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to
+lose, declared for Greek independence. There was a struggle in which for
+awhile nothing but the commonest impulses of need and rapacity came into
+play; but the greater cause proved its power: Hydra threw in its lot with
+Greece; and although private greed and ill-faith, as well as great cruelty,
+too often disgraced both the Hydriote crews and those of the other islands,
+the nucleus of a naval force was now formed which made the achievement of
+Greek independence possible. The three islands which led the way were soon
+followed by the wealthier and more populous Samos and by the greater part
+of the Archipelago. Crete, inhabited by a mixed Greek and Turkish
+population, also took up arms, and was for years to come the scene of a
+bloody and destructive warfare.
+
+[The Greek leaders.]
+
+Within the Morea the first shock of the revolt had made the Greeks masters
+of everything outside the fortified towns. The reduction of these places
+was at once undertaken by the insurgents. Tripolitza, lately the seat of
+the Turkish government, was the centre of operations, and in the
+neighbourhood of this town the first provisional government of the Greeks,
+called the Senate of Kaltesti, was established. Demetrius Hypsilanti, a
+brother of the Hetaerist leader, whose failure in Roumania was not yet
+known, landed in the Morea and claimed supreme power. He was tumultuously
+welcomed by the peasant-soldiers, though the Primates, who had hitherto
+held undisputed sway, bore him no good will. Two other men became prominent
+at this time as leaders in the Greek war of liberation. These were
+Maurokordatos, a descendant of the Hospodars of Wallachia--a politician
+superior to all his rivals in knowledge and breadth of view, but wanting in
+the faculty of action required by the times--and Kolokotrones, a type of
+the rough fighting Klepht; a mere savage in attainments, scarcely able to
+read or write, cunning, grossly avaricious and faithless, incapable of
+appreciating either military or moral discipline, but a born soldier in his
+own irregular way, and a hero among peasants as ignorant as himself. There
+was yet another, who, if his character had been equal to his station, would
+have been placed at the head of the government of the Morea. This was
+Petrobei, chief of the family of Mauromichalis, ruler of the rugged
+district of Maina, in the south-west of Peloponnesus, where the Turk had
+never established more than nominal sovereignty. A jovial, princely person,
+exercising among his clansmen a mild Homeric sway, Petrobei, surrounded by
+his nine vigorous sons, was the most picturesque figure in Greece. But he
+had no genius for great things. A sovereignty, which in other hands might
+have expanded to national dominion, remained with Petrobei a mere ornament
+and curiosity; and the power of the deeply-rooted clan-spirit of the Maina
+only made itself felt when, at a later period, the organisation of a united
+Hellenic State demanded its sacrifice.
+
+[Fall of Tripolitza, Oct. 5, 1821.]
+
+Anarchy, egotism, and ill-faith disgraced the Greek insurrection from its
+beginning to its close. There were, indeed, some men of unblemished honour
+among the leaders, and the peasantry in the ranks fought with the most
+determined courage year after year; but the action of most of those who
+figured as representatives of the people brought discredit upon the
+national cause. Their first successes were accompanied by gross treachery
+and cruelty. Had the Greek leaders been Bourbon kings, nurtured in all the
+sanctities of divine right, instead of tax-gatherers and cattle-lifters,
+truants from the wild school of Turkish violence and deceit, they could not
+have perjured themselves with lighter hearts. On the surrender of Navarino,
+in August, 1821, after a formal capitulation providing for the safety of
+its Turkish inhabitants, men, women, and children were indiscriminately
+massacred. The capture of Tripolitza, which took place two months later,
+was changed from a peaceful triumph into a scene of frightful slaughter by
+the avarice of individual chiefs, who, while negotiations were pending,
+made their way into the town, and bargained with rich inhabitants to give
+them protection in return for their money and jewels. The soldiery, who had
+undergone the labours of the siege for six months, saw that their reward
+was being pilfered from them. Defying all orders, and in the absence of
+Demetrius Hypsilanti, the commander-in-chief, they rushed upon the
+fortifications of Tripolitza, and carried them by storm. A general massacre
+of the inhabitants followed. For three days the work of carnage was
+continued in the streets and houses, until few out of a population of many
+thousands remained living. According to the testimony of Kolokotrones
+himself, the roads were so choked with the dead, that as he rode from the
+gateway to the citadel his horse's hoofs never touched the ground. [368]
+
+[The Massacre of Chios, April-June, 1822.]
+
+In the opening scenes of the Greek insurrection the barbarity of Christians
+and of Ottomans was perhaps on a level. The Greek revenged himself with the
+ferocity of the slave who breaks his fetters; the Turk resorted to
+wholesale massacre and extermination as the normal means of government in
+troubled times. And as experience has shown that the savagery of the
+European yields in one generation to the influences of civilised rule,
+while the Turk remains as inhuman to-day as he was under Mahmud II., so the
+history of 1822 proved that the most devilish passions of the Greek were in
+the end but a poor match for disciplined Turkish prowess in the work of
+butchery. It was no easy matter for the Sultan to requite himself for the
+sack of Tripolitza upon Kolokotrones and his victorious soldiers; but there
+was a peaceful and inoffensive population elsewhere, which offered all the
+conditions for free, unstinted, and unimperilled vengeance which the Turk
+desires. A body of Samian troops had landed in Chios, and endeavoured, but
+with little success, to excite the inhabitants to revolt, the absence of
+the Greek fleet rendering them an almost certain prey to the Sultan's
+troops on the mainland. The Samian leader nevertheless refused to abandon
+the enterprise, and laid siege to the citadel, in which there was a Turkish
+garrison. Before this fortress could be reduced, a relieving army of seven
+thousand Turks, with hosts of fanatical volunteers, landed on the island.
+The Samians fled; the miserable population of Chios was given up to
+massacre. For week after week the soldiery and the roving hordes of
+Ottomans slew, pillaged, and sold into slavery at their pleasure. In parts
+of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they
+were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes
+by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of
+those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The
+slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The
+gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its
+fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation
+more free from the vices of its type: on no community had there fallen in
+modern times so terrible a catastrophe. The estimates of the destruction of
+life at Chios are loosely framed; among the lowest is that which sets the
+number of the slain and the enslaved at thirty thousand. The island, lately
+thronging with life and activity, became a thinly-populated place. After a
+long period of depression and the slow return of some fraction of its
+former prosperity, convulsions of nature have in our own day again made
+Chios a ruin. A new life may arise when the Turk is no longer master of its
+shores, but the old history of Chios is closed for ever.
+
+[Exploit of Kanaris, June 18th, 1822.]
+
+The impression made upon public opinion in Europe by the massacre of 1822
+was a deep and lasting one, although it caused no immediate change in the
+action of Governments. The general feeling of sympathy for the Greeks and
+hatred for the Turks, which ultimately forced the Governments to take up a
+different policy, was intensified by a brilliant deed of daring by which a
+Greek captain avenged the Chians upon their devastor, and by the unexpected
+success gained by the insurgents on the mainland against powerful armies of
+the Sultan. The Greek executive, which was now headed by Maurokordatos, had
+been guilty of gross neglect in not sending over the fleet in time to
+prevent the Turks from landing in Chios. When once this landing had been
+effected, the ships which afterwards arrived were powerless to prevent the
+massacre, and nothing could be attempted except against the Turkish fleet
+itself. The instrument of destruction employed by the Greeks was the
+fire-ship, which had been used with success against the Turk in these same
+waters in the war of 1770. The sacred month of the Ramazan was closing, and
+on the night of June 18, Kara Ali, the Turkish commander, celebrated the
+festival of Bairam with above a thousand men on board his flag-ship. The
+vessel was illuminated with coloured lanterns. In the midst of the
+festivities, Constantine Kanaris, a Psarian captain, brought his fire-ship
+unobserved right up to the Turkish man-of-war, and drove his bowsprit
+firmly into one of her portholes; then, after setting fire to the
+combustibles, he stepped quietly into a row-boat, and made away. A breeze
+was blowing, and in a moment the Turkish crew were enveloped in a mass of
+flames. The powder on board exploded; the boats were sunk; and the vessel,
+with its doomed crew, burned to the water-edge, its companions sheering off
+to save themselves from the shower of blazing fragments that fell all
+around. Kara Ali was killed by a broken mast; a few of his men saved their
+lives by swimming or were picked up by rescuers; the rest perished. Such
+was the consternation caused by the deed of Kanaris, that the Ottoman fleet
+forthwith quitted the AEgaean waters, and took refuge under the guns of the
+Dardanelles. Kanaris, unknown before, became from this exploit a famous man
+in Europe. It was to no stroke of fortune or mere audacity that he owed his
+success, but to the finest combination of nerve and nautical skill. His
+feat, which others were constantly attempting, but with little success, to
+imitate, was repeated by him in the same year. He was the most brilliant of
+Greek seamen, a simple and modest hero; and after his splendid achievements
+in the war of liberation, he served his country well in a political career.
+Down to his death in a hale old age, he was with justice the idol and pride
+of the Greek nation.
+
+[Double invasion of Greece 1822.]
+
+[Destruction of the Pilhellenes near Arta, July 16.]
+
+[Unsuccessful siege of Missolonghi, Nov., 1822.]
+
+The fall of the Albanian rebel, Ali Pasha, in the spring of 1822 made it
+possible for Sultan Mahmud, who had hitherto been crippled by the
+resistance of Janina, to throw his whole land-force against the Hellenic
+revolt; and the Greeks of the mainland, who had as yet had to deal only
+with scattered detachments or isolated garrisons, now found themselves
+exposed to the attack of two powerful armies. Kurshid, the conqueror of Ali
+Pasha, took up his headquarters at Larissa in Thessaly, and from this base
+the two invading armies marched southwards on diverging lines. The first,
+under Omer Brionis, was ordered to make its way through Southern Epirus to
+the western entrance of the Corinthian Gulf, and there to cross into the
+Morea; the second, under Dramali, to reduce Central Greece, and enter the
+Morea by the isthmus of Corinth; the conquest of Tripolitza and the relief
+of the Turkish coast-fortresses which were still uncaptured being the
+ultimate end to be accomplished by the two armies in combination with one
+another and with the Ottoman fleet. Not less than fifty thousand men were
+under the orders of the Turkish commanders, the division of Dramali being
+by far the larger of the two. Against this formidable enemy the Greeks
+possessed poor means of defence, nor were their prospects improved when
+Maurokordatos, the President, determined to take a military command, and to
+place himself at the head of the troops in Western Greece. There were
+indeed urgent reasons for striking with all possible force in this quarter.
+The Suliotes, after seventeen years of exile in Corfu, had returned to
+their mountains, and were now making common cause with Greece. They were
+both the military outwork of the insurrection, and the political link
+between the Hellenes and the Christian communities of Albania, whose action
+might become of decisive importance in the struggle against the Turks.
+Maurokordatos rightly judged the relief of Suli to be the first and most
+pressing duty of the Government. Under a capable leader this effort would
+not have been beyond the power of the Greeks; directed by a politician who
+knew nothing of military affairs, it was perilous in the highest degree.
+Maurokordatos, taking the command out of abler hands, pushed his troops
+forward to the neighbourhood of Arta, mismanaged everything, and after
+committing a most important post to Botzares, an Albanian chieftain of
+doubtful fidelity, left two small regiments exposed to the attack of the
+Turks in mass. One of these regiments, called the corps of Philhellenes,
+was composed of foreign officers who had volunteered to serve in the Greek
+cause as common soldiers. Its discipline was far superior to anything that
+existed among the Greeks themselves; and at its head were men who had
+fought in Napoleon's campaigns. But this corps, which might have become the
+nucleus of a regular army, was sacrificed to the incapacity of the general
+and the treachery of his confederate. Betrayed and abandoned by the
+Albanian, the Philhellenes met the attack of the Turks gallantly, and
+almost all perished. Maurokordatos and the remnant of the Greek troops now
+retired to Missolonghi. The Suliotes, left to their own resources, were
+once more compelled to quit their mountain home, and to take refuge in
+Corfu. Their resistance, however, delayed the Turks for some months, and it
+was not until the beginning of November that the army of Omer Brionis,
+after conquering the intermediate territory, appeared in front of
+Missolonghi. Here the presence of Maurokordatos produced a better effect
+than in the field. He declared that he would never leave the town as long
+as a man remained to fight the Turks. Defences were erected, and the
+besiegers kept at bay for two months. On the 6th of January, 1823, Brionis
+ordered an assault. It was beaten back with heavy loss; and the Ottoman
+commander, hopeless of maintaining his position throughout the winter,
+abandoned his artillery, and retired into the interior of the country.
+[369]
+
+[Dramali passes the Isthmus of Corinth, July 1822.]
+
+[His retreat and destruction, Aug., 1822.]
+
+In the meantime Dramali had advanced from Thessaly with twenty-four
+thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry, the most formidable armament
+that had been seen in Greece since the final struggle between the Turks and
+Venetians in 1715. At the terror of his approach all hopes of resistance
+vanished. He marched through Boeotia and Attica, devastating the country,
+and reached the isthmus of Corinth in July, 1822. The mountain passes were
+abandoned by the Greeks; the Government, whose seat was at Argos,
+dispersed; and Dramali moved on to Nauplia, where the Turkish garrison was
+on the point of surrendering to the Greeks. The entrance to the Morea had
+been won; the very shadow of a Greek government had disappeared, and the
+definite suppression of the revolt seemed now to be close at hand. But two
+fatal errors of the enemy saved the Greek cause. Dramali neglected to
+garrison the passes through which he had advanced; and the commander of the
+Ottoman fleet, which ought to have met the land-force at Nauplia, disobeyed
+his instructions and sailed on to Patras. Two Greeks, at this crisis of
+their country's history, proved themselves equal to the call of events.
+Demetrius Hypsilanti, now President of the Legislature, refused to fly with
+his colleagues, and threw himself, with a few hundred men, into the
+Acropolis of Argos. Kolokotrones, hastening to Tripolitza, called out every
+man capable of bearing arms, and hurried back to Argos, where the Turks
+were still held at bay by the defenders of the citadel. Dramali could no
+longer think of marching into the interior of the Morea. The gallantry of
+Demetrius had given time for the assemblage of a considerable force, and
+the Ottoman general now discovered the ruinous effect of his neglect to
+garrison the passes in his rear. These were seized by Kolokotrones. The
+summer-drought threatened the Turkish army with famine; the fleet which
+would have rendered them independent of land-supplies was a hundred miles
+away; and Dramali, who had lately seen all Greece at his feet, now found
+himself compelled to force his way back through the enemy to the isthmus of
+Corinth. The measures taken by Kolokotrones to intercept his retreat were
+skilfully planned, and had they been adequately executed not a man of the
+Ottoman army would have escaped. It was only through the disorder and the
+cupidity of the Greeks themselves that a portion of Dramali's force
+succeeded in cutting its way back to Corinth. Baggage was plundered while
+the retreating enemy ought to have been annihilated, and divisions which
+ought to have co-operated in the main attack sought trifling successes of
+their own. But the losses and the demoralisation of the Turkish army were
+as ruinous to it as total destruction. Dramali himself fell ill and died;
+and the remnant of his troops which had escaped from the enemy's hands
+perished in the neighbourhood of Corinth from sickness and want.
+
+[Greek Civil Wars, 1824.]
+
+The decisive events of 1822 opened the eyes of European Governments to the
+real character of the Greek national rising, and to the probability of its
+ultimate success. The forces of Turkey were exhausted for the moment, and
+during the succeeding year no military operations could be undertaken by
+the Sultan on anything like the same scale. It would perhaps have been
+better for the Greeks themselves if the struggle had been more continuously
+sustained. Nothing but foreign pressure could give unity to the efforts of
+a race distracted by so many local rivalries, and so many personal
+ambitions and animosities. Scarcely was the extremity of danger passed when
+civil war began among the Greeks themselves. Kolokotrones set himself up in
+opposition to the Legislature, and seized on some of the strong places in
+the Morea. This first outbreak of the so-called military party against the
+civil authorities was, however, of no great importance. The Primates of the
+Morea took part with the representatives of the islands and of Central
+Greece against the disturber of the peace, and an accommodation was soon
+arranged. Konduriottes, a rich ship-owner of Hydra, was made President,
+with Kolettes, a politician of great influence in Central Greece, as his
+Minister. But in place of the earlier antagonism between soldier and
+civilian, a new and more dangerous antagonism, that of district against
+district, now threatened the existence of Greece. The tendency of the new
+government to sacrifice everything to the interest of the islands at once
+became evident. Konduriottes was a thoroughly incompetent man, and made
+himself ridiculous by appointing his friends, the Hydriote sea-captains, to
+the highest military and civil posts. Rebellion again broke out, and
+Kolokotrones was joined by his old antagonists, the Primates of the Morea.
+A serious struggle ensued, and the government, which was really conducted
+by Kolettes, displayed an energy that surprised both its friends and its
+foes. The Morea was invaded by a powerful force from Hydra. No mercy was
+shown to the districts which supported the rebels. Kolokotrones was
+thoroughly defeated, and compelled to give himself up to the Government. He
+was carried to Hydra and thrown into prison, where he remained until new
+peril again rendered his services indispensable to Greece.
+
+[Mahmud calls for the help of Egypt.]
+
+After the destruction of Dramali's army and the failure of the Ottoman navy
+to effect any result whatever, the Sultan appears to have conceived a doubt
+whether the subjugation of Greece might not in fact be a task beyond his
+own unaided power. Even if the mainland were conquered, it was certain that
+the Turkish fleet could never reduce the islands, nor prevent the passage
+of supplies and reinforcements from these to the ports of the Morea.
+Strenuous as Mahmud had hitherto shown himself in crushing his vassals who,
+like Ali Pasha, attempted to establish an authority independent of the
+central government, he now found himself compelled to apply to the most
+dangerous of them all for assistance. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, had
+risen to power in the disturbed time that followed the expulsion of
+Napoleon's forces from Egypt. His fleet was more powerful than that of
+Turkey. He had organised an army composed of Arabs, negroes, and fellahs,
+and had introduced into it, by means of French officers, the military
+system and discipline of Europe. The same reform had been attempted in
+Turkey seventeen years before by Mahmud's predecessor, Selim III., but it
+had been successfully resisted by the soldiery of Constantinople, and Selim
+had paid for his innovations with his life. Mahmud, silent and tenacious,
+had long been planning the destruction of the Janissaries, the mutinous and
+degraded representatives of a once irresistible force, who would now
+neither fight themselves nor permit their rulers to organise any more
+effective body of troops in their stead. It is possible that the Sultan may
+have believed that a victory won over the enemies of Islam by the
+re-modelled forces of Egypt would facilitate the execution of his own plans
+of military reform; it is also possible that he may not have been unwilling
+to see his vassal's resources dissipated by a distant and hazardous
+enterprise. Not without some profound conviction of the urgency of the
+present need, not without some sinister calculation as to the means of
+dealing with an eventual rival in the future, was the offer of
+aggrandisement--if we may judge from the whole tenor of Sultan Mahmud's
+career and policy--made to the Pasha of Egypt by his jealous and far-seeing
+master. The Pasha was invited to assume the supreme command of the Ottoman
+forces by land and sea, and was promised the island of Crete in return for
+his co-operation against the Hellenic revolt. Messages to this effect
+reached Alexandria at the beginning of 1824. Mehemet, whose ambition had no
+limits, welcomed the proposals of his sovereign with ardour, and, while
+declining the command for himself, accepted it on behalf of Ibrahim, his
+adopted son.
+
+[Turkish-Egyptian plans.]
+
+[Egyptians conquer Crete, April, 1824.]
+
+[Destruction of Psara, July, 1824.]
+
+The most vigorous preparations for war were now made at Alexandria. The
+army was raised to 90,000 men, and new ships were added to the navy from
+English dockyards. A scheme was framed for the combined operation of the
+Egyptian and the Turkish forces which appeared to render the ultimate
+conquest of Greece certain. It was agreed that the island of Crete, which
+is not sixty miles distant from the southern extremity of the Morea, should
+be occupied by Ibrahim, and employed as his place of arms; that
+simultaneous or joint attacks should then be made upon the principal
+islands of the AEgaean; and that after the capture of these strongholds and
+the destruction of the maritime resources of the Greeks, Ibrahim's troops
+should pass over the narrow sea between Crete and the Morea, and complete
+their work by the reduction of the mainland, thus left destitute of all
+chance of succour from without. Crete, like Sicily, is a natural
+stepping-stone between Europe and Africa; and when once the assistance of
+Egypt was invoked by the Sultan, it was obvious that Crete became the
+position which above all others it was necessary for the Greeks to watch
+and to defend. But the wretched Government of Konduriottes was occupied
+with its domestic struggles. The appeal of the Cretans for protection
+remained unanswered, and in the spring of 1824 a strong Egyptian force
+landed on this island, captured its fortresses, and suppressed the
+resistance of the inhabitants with the most frightful cruelty. The base of
+operations had been won, and the combined attacks of the Egyptian and
+Turkish fleets upon the smaller islands followed. Casos, about thirty miles
+east of Crete, was surprised by the Egyptians, and its population
+exterminated. Psara was selected for the attack of the Turkish fleet. Since
+the beginning of the insurrection the Psariotes had been the scourge and
+terror of the Ottoman coasts. The services that they had rendered in the
+Greek navy had been priceless; and if there was one spot of Greek soil
+which ought to have been protected as long as a single boat's crew remained
+afloat, it was the little rock of Psara. Yet, in spite of repeated
+warnings, the Greek Government allowed the Turkish fleet to pass the
+Dardanelles unobserved, and some clumsy feints were enough to blind it to
+the real object of an expedition whose aim was known to all Europe. There
+were ample means for succouring the islanders, as subsequent events proved;
+but when the Turkish admiral, Khosrew, with 10,000 men on board, appeared
+before Psara, the Greek fleet was far away. The Psariotes themselves were
+over-confident. They trusted to their batteries on land, and believed their
+rocks to be impregnable. They were soon undeceived. While a corps of
+Albanians scaled the cliffs behind the town, the Turks gained a footing in
+front, and overwhelmed their gallant enemy by weight of numbers. No mercy
+was asked or given. Eight thousand of the Psarians were slain or carried
+away as slaves. Not more than one-third of the population succeeded in
+escaping to the neighbouring islands. [370]
+
+[Greek successes off the coast of Asia Minor, September, 1824.]
+
+[Ibrahim reaches Crete. December, 1824.]
+
+The first part of the Turko-Egyptian plan had thus been successfully
+accomplished, and if Khosrew had attacked Samos immediately after his first
+victory, this island would probably have fallen before help could arrive.
+But, like other Turkish commanders, Khosrew loved intervals of repose, and
+he now sailed off to Mytilene to celebrate the festival of Bairam. In the
+meantime the catastrophe of Psara had aroused the Hydriote Government to a
+sense of its danger. A strong fleet was sent across the AEgaean, and adequate
+measures were taken to defend Samos both by land and sea. The Turkish fleet
+was attacked with some success, and though Ibrahim with the Egyptian
+contingent now reached the coast of Asia Minor, the Greeks proved
+themselves superior to their adversaries combined. The operations of the
+Mussulman commanders led to no result; they were harassed and terrified by
+the Greek fireships; and when at length all hope of a joint conquest of
+Samos had been abandoned, and Ibrahim set sail for Crete to carry out his
+own final enterprise alone, he was met on the high seas by the Greeks, and
+driven back to the coast of Asia Minor. During the autumn of 1824 the
+disasters of the preceding months were to some extent retrieved, and the
+situation of the Egyptian fleet would have become one of some peril if the
+Greeks had maintained their guard throughout the winter. But they
+underrated the energy of Ibrahim, and surrendered themselves to the belief
+that he would not repeat the attempt to reach Crete until the following
+spring. Careless, or deluded by false information, they returned to Hydra,
+and left the seas unwatched. Ibrahim saw his opportunity, and, setting sail
+for Crete at the beginning of December, he reached it without falling in
+with the enemy.
+
+[Ibrahim in the Morea, Feb., 1825.]
+
+The snowy heights of Taygetus are visible on a clear winter's day from the
+Cretan coast; yet, with their enemy actually in view of them, the Greeks
+neglected to guard the passage to the Morea. On the 22nd of February, 1825,
+Ibrahim crossed the sea unopposed and landed five thousand men at Modon. He
+was even able to return to Crete and bring over a second contingent of
+superior strength before any steps were taken to hinder his movements. The
+fate of the mainland was now settled. Ibrahim marched from Modon upon
+Navarino, defeated the Greek forces on the way, and captured the garrison
+placed in the Island of Sphakteria--the scene of the first famous surrender
+of the Spartans--before the Greek fleet could arrive to relieve it. The
+forts of Navarino then capitulated, and Ibrahim pushed on his victorious
+march towards the centre of the Morea. It was in vain that the old chief
+Kolokotrones was brought from his prison at Hydra to take supreme command.
+The conqueror of Dramali was unable to resist the onslaught of Ibrahim's
+regiments, recruited from the fierce races of the Soudan, and fighting
+with the same arms and under the same discipline as the best troops in
+Europe. Kolokotrones was driven back through Tripolitza, and retired as the
+Russians had retired from Moscow, leaving a deserted capital behind him.
+Ibrahim gave his troops no rest; he hurried onwards against Nauplia, and on
+the 24th of June reached the summit of the mountain-pass that looks down
+upon the Argolic Gulf. "Ah, little island," he cried, as he saw the rock of
+Hydra stretched below him, "how long wilt thou escape me?" At Nauplia
+itself the Egyptian commander rode up to the very gates and scanned the
+defences, which he hoped to carry at the first assault. Here, however, a
+check awaited him. In the midst of general flight and panic, Demetrius
+Hypsilanti was again the undaunted soldier. He threw himself with some few
+hundreds of men into the mills of Lerna, and there beat back Ibrahim's
+vanguard when it attempted to carry this post by storm. The Egyptian
+recognised that with men like these in front of him Nauplia could be
+reduced only by a regular siege. He retired for a while upon Tripolitza,
+and thence sent out his harrying columns, slaughtering and devastating in
+every direction. It seemed to be his design not merely to exhaust the
+resources of his enemy but to render the Morea a desert, and to exterminate
+its population. In the very birthplace of European civilisation, it was
+said, this savage, who had already been nominated Pasha of the Morea,
+intended to extinguish the European race and name, and to found for himself
+upon the ashes of Greece a new barbaric state composed of African negroes
+and fellaheen. That such design had actually been formed was denied by the
+Turkish government in answer to official inquiries, and its existence was
+not capable of proof. But the brutality of one age is the stupidity of the
+next, and Ibrahim's violence recoiled upon himself. Nothing in the whole
+struggle between the Sultan and the Greeks gave so irresistible an argument
+to the Philhellenes throughout Europe, or so directly overcame the scruples
+of Governments in regard to an armed intervention in favour of Greece, as
+Ibrahim's alleged policy of extermination and re-settlement. The days were
+past when Europe could permit its weakest member to be torn from it and
+added to the Mohammedan world.
+
+[Siege of Missolongi, April, 1825-April, 1826.]
+
+One episode of the deepest tragic interest yet remained in the
+Turko-Hellenic conflict before the Powers of Europe stepped in and struck
+with weapons stronger than those which had fallen from dying hands. The
+town of Missolonghi was now beleaguered by the Turks, who had invaded
+Western Greece while Ibrahim was overrunning the Morea. Missolonghi had
+already once been besieged without success; and, as in the case of
+Saragossa, the first deliverance appears to have inspired the townspeople
+with the resolution, maintained even more heroically at Missolonghi than at
+the Spanish city, to die rather than capitulate. From the time when
+Reschid, the Turkish commander, opened the second attack by land and sea in
+the spring of 1825, the garrison and the inhabitants met every movement of
+the enemy with the most obstinate resistance. It was in vain that Reschid
+broke through the defences with his artillery, and threw mass after mass
+upon the breaches which he made. For month after month the assaults of the
+Turks were uniformly repelled, until at length the arrival of a Hydriote
+squadron forced the Turkish fleet to retire from its position, and made the
+situation of Reschid himself one of considerable danger. And now, as winter
+approached, and the guerilla bands in the rear of the besiegers grew more
+and more active, the Egyptian army with its leader was called from the
+Morea to carry out the task in which the Turks had failed. The Hydriote
+sea-captains had departed, believing their presence to be no longer needed;
+and although they subsequently returned for a short time, their services
+were grudgingly rendered and ineffective. Ibrahim, settling down to his
+work at the beginning of 1826, conducted his operations with the utmost
+vigour, boasting that he would accomplish in fourteen days what the Turks
+could not effect in nine months. But his veteran soldiers were thoroughly
+defeated when they met the Greeks hand to hand; and the Egyptian, furious
+with his enemy, his allies, and his own officers, confessed that
+Missolonghi could only be taken by blockade. He now ordered a fleet of
+flat-bottomed boats to be constructed and launched upon the lagoons that
+lie between Missolonghi and the open sea. Missolonghi was thus completely
+surrounded; and when the Greek admirals appeared for the last time and
+endeavoured to force an entrance through the shallows, they found the
+besieger in full command of waters inaccessible to themselves, and after
+one unsuccessful effort abandoned Missolonghi to its fate. In the third
+week of April, 1826, exactly a year after the commencement of the siege,
+the supply of food was exhausted. The resolution, long made, that the
+entire population, men, women, and children, should fall by the enemy's
+sword rather than surrender, was now actually carried out. On the night of
+the 22nd of April all the Missolonghiots, with the exception of those whom
+age, exhaustion, or illness made unable to leave their homes, were drawn up
+in bands at the city gates, the women armed and dressed as men, the
+children carrying pistols. Preceded by a body of soldiers, they crossed the
+moat under Turkish fire. The attack of the vanguard carried everything
+before it, and a way was cut through the Turkish lines. But at this moment
+some cry of confusion was mistaken by those who were still on the bridges
+for an order to retreat. A portion of the non-combatants returned into the
+town, and with them the rearguard of the military escort. The leading
+divisions, however, continued their march forward, and would have escaped
+with the loss of some of the women and children, had not treachery already
+made the Turkish commander acquainted with the routes which they intended
+to follow. They had cleared the Turkish camp, and were expecting to meet
+the bands of Greek armatoli, who had promised to fall upon the enemy's
+rear, when, instead of friends, they encountered troop after troop of
+Ottoman cavalry and of Albanians placed in ambush along the road between
+Missolonghi and the mountains. Here, exhausted and surprised, they were cut
+down without mercy, and out of a body numbering several thousand not more
+than fifteen hundred men, with a few women and children, ultimately reached
+places of safety. Missolonghi itself was entered by the Turks during the
+sortie. The soldiers who had fallen back during the confusion on the
+bridges, proved that they had not acted from cowardice. They fought
+unflinchingly to the last, and three bands, establishing themselves in the
+three powder magazines of the town, set fire to them when surrounded by the
+Turks, and perished in the explosion Some thousands of women and children
+were captured around and within the town, or wandering on the mountains;
+but the Turks had few other prisoners. The men were dead or free.
+
+[Fall of the Acropolis of Athens, June 5, 1827.]
+
+From Missolonghi the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled eastward, and the
+Acropolis of Athens was in its turn the object of a long and arduous siege.
+The Government, which now held scarcely any territory on the mainland
+except Nauplia, where it was itself threatened by Ibrahim, made the most
+vigorous efforts to prevent the Acropolis from falling into Reschid's
+hands. All, however, was in vain. The English officers, Church and
+Cochrane, who were now placed at the head of the military and naval forces
+of Greece, failed ignominiously in the attacks which they made on Reschid's
+besieging army; and the garrison capitulated on June 5, 1827. But the time
+was past when the liberation of Greece could be prevented by any Ottoman
+victory. The heroic defence of the Missolonghiots had achieved its end.
+Greece had fought long enough to enlist the Powers of Europe on its side;
+and in the same month that Missolonghi fell the policy of non-intervention
+was definitely abandoned by those Governments which were best able to carry
+their intentions into effect. If the struggle had ended during the first
+three years of the insurrection, no hand would have been raised to prevent
+the restoration of the Sultan's rule. Russia then lay as if spell-bound
+beneath the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance; and although in the second year
+of the war the death of Castlereagh and the accession of Canning to power
+had given Greece a powerful friend instead of a powerful foe within the
+British Ministry, it was long before England stirred from its neutrality.
+Canning indeed made no secret of his sympathies for Greece, and of his
+desire to give the weaker belligerent such help as a neutral might afford;
+but when he took up office the time had not come when intervention would
+have been useful or possible. Changes in the policy of other great Powers
+and in the situation of the belligerents themselves were, he considered,
+necessary before the influence of England could be successfully employed in
+establishing peace in the East.
+
+[First Russian project of joint intervention, 12 Jan., 1824.]
+
+A vigorous movement of public opinion in favour of Greece made itself felt
+throughout Western Europe as the struggle continued; and the vivid and
+romantic interest excited over the whole civilised world by the death of
+Lord Byron in 1823, among the people whom he had come to free, probably
+served the Greek cause better than all that Byron could have achieved had
+his life been prolonged. In France and England, where public opinion had
+great influence on the action of the Government, as well as in Germany,
+where it had none whatever, societies were formed for assisting the Greeks
+with arms, stores, and money. The first proposal, however, for a joint
+intervention in favour of Greece came from St. Petersburg. The undisguised
+good-will of Canning towards the insurgents led the Czar's Government to
+anticipate that England itself might soon assume that championship of the
+Greek cause which Russia, at the bidding of Metternich and of Canning's
+predecessor, had up to that time declined. If the Greeks were to be
+befriended, it was intolerable that others should play the part of the
+patron. Accordingly, on the 12th of January, 1824, a note was submitted in
+the Czar's name to all the Courts of Europe, containing a plan for a
+settlement of the Greek question, which it was proposed that the great
+Powers of Europe should enforce upon Turkey either by means of an armed
+demonstration or by the threat of breaking off all diplomatic relations.
+According to this scheme, Greece, apart from the islands, was to be divided
+into three Principalities, each tributary to the Sultan and garrisoned by
+Turkish troops, but in other respects autonomous, like the Principalities
+of Moldavia and Wallachia. The islands were to retain their municipal
+organisation as before. In one respect this scheme was superior to all that
+have succeeded it, for it included in the territory of the Greeks both
+Crete and Epirus; in all other respects it was framed in the interest of
+Russia alone. Its object was simply to create a second group of provinces,
+like those on the Danube, which should afford Russia a constant opportunity
+for interfering with the Ottoman Empire, and which at the same time should
+prevent the Greeks from establishing an independent and self-supporting
+State. The design cannot be called insidious, for its object was so
+palpable that not a single politician in Europe was deceived by it; and a
+very simple ruse of Metternich's was enough to draw from the Russian
+Government an explicit declaration against the independence of Greece,
+which was described by the Czar as a mere chimera. But of all the parties
+concerned, the Greeks themselves were loudest in denounciation of the
+Russian plan. Their Government sent a protest against it to London, and was
+assured by Canning in reply that the support of this country should never
+be given to any scheme for disposing of the Greeks without their own
+consent. Elsewhere the Czar's note was received with expressions of
+politeness due to a Court which it might be dangerous to contradict; and a
+series of conferences was opened at St. Petersburg for the purpose of
+discussing propositions which no one intended to carry into execution.
+Though Canning ordered the British ambassador at St. Petersburg to
+dissociate himself from these proceedings, the conferences dragged on, with
+long adjournments, from the spring of 1824 to the summer of the following
+year. [371]
+
+[Discontent and conspiracies in Russia.]
+
+In the meantime a strong spirit of discontent was rising in the Russian
+army and nation. The religious feeling no less than the pride of the people
+was deeply wounded by Alexander's refusal to aid the Greeks in their
+struggle, and by the pitiful results of his attempted diplomatic concert.
+Alone among the European nations the Russians understood the ecclesiastical
+character of the Greek insurrection, and owed nothing of their sympathy
+with it to the spell of classical literature and art. It is characteristic
+of the strength of the religious element in the political views of the
+Russian people, that the floods of the Neva which overwhelmed St.
+Petersburg in the winter of 1825 should have been regarded as a sign of
+divine anger at the Czar's inaction in the struggle between the Crescent
+and the Cross. But other causes of discontent were not wanting in Russia.
+Though Alexander had forgotten his promises to introduce constitutional
+rule, there were many, especially in the army, who had not done so.
+Officers who served in the invasion of France in 1815, and in the three
+years' occupation which followed it, returned from Western Europe with
+ideas of social progress and of constitutional rights which they could
+never have gathered in their own country. And when the bright hopes which
+had been excited by the recognition of these same ideas by the Czar passed
+away, and Russia settled down into the routine of despotism and corruption,
+the old unquestioning loyalty of the army was no longer proof against the
+workings of the revolutionary spirit. In a land where legal means of
+opposition to government and of the initiation of reform were wholly
+wanting, discontent was forced into its most dangerous form, that of
+military conspiracy. The army was honeycombed with secret societies. Both
+in the north and in the south of Russia men of influence worked among the
+younger officers, and gained a strong body of adherents to their design of
+establishing a constitution by force. The southern army contained the most
+resolute and daring conspirators. These men had definitely abandoned the
+hope of effecting any public reform as long as Alexander lived, and they
+determined to sacrifice the sovereign, as his father and others before him
+had been sacrificed, to the political necessities of the time. If the
+evidence subsequently given by those implicated in the conspiracy is worthy
+of credit, a definite plan had been formed for the assassination of the
+Czar in the presence of his troops at one of the great reviews intended to
+be held in the south of Russia in the autumn of 1825. On the death of the
+monarch a provisional government was at once to be established, and a
+constitution proclaimed.
+
+[Death of the Czar, Dec. 1, 1825.]
+
+Alexander, aware of the rising indignation of his people, and irritated
+beyond endurance by the failure of his diplomatic efforts, had dissolved
+the St. Petersburg Conferences in August, 1825, and declared that Russia
+would henceforth act according to its own discretion. He quitted St.
+Petersburg and travelled to the Black Sea, accompanied by some of the
+leaders of the war-party. Here, plunged in a profound melancholy, conscious
+that all his early hopes had only served to surround him with conspirators,
+and that his sacrifice of Russia's military interests to international
+peace had only rendered his country impotent before all Europe, he still
+hesitated to make the final determination between peace and war. A certain
+mystery hung over his movements, his acts, and his intentions. Suddenly,
+while all Europe waited for the signal that should end the interval of
+suspense, the news was sent out from a lonely port on the Black Sea that
+the Czar was dead. Alexander, still under fifty years of age, had welcomed
+the illness which carried him from a world of cares, and closed a career in
+which anguish and disappointment had succeeded to such intoxicating glory
+and such unbounded hope. Young as he still was for one who had reigned
+twenty-four years, Alexander was of all men the most life-weary. Power,
+pleasure, excitement, had lavished on him hours of such existence as none
+but Napoleon among all his contemporaries had enjoyed. They had left him
+nothing but the solace of religious resignation, and the belief that a
+Power higher than his own might yet fulfil the purposes in which he himself
+had failed. Ever in the midst of great acts and great events, he had missed
+greatness himself. Where he had been best was exactly where men inferior to
+himself considered him to have been worst--in his hopes; and these hopes he
+had himself abandoned and renounced. Strength, insight, unity of purpose,
+the qualities which enable men to mould events, appeared in him but
+momentarily or in semblance. For want of them the large and fair horizon of
+his earlier years was first obscured and then wholly blotted out from his
+view, till in the end nothing but his pietism and his generosity
+distinguished him from the politicians of repression whose instrument he
+had become.
+
+[Military insurrection at St. Petersburg, Dec 26, 1825.]
+
+The sudden death of Alexander threw the Russian Court into the greatest
+confusion, for it was not known who was to succeed him. The heir to the
+throne was his brother Constantine, an ignorant and brutal savage, who had
+just sufficient sense not to desire to be Czar of Russia, though he
+considered himself good enough to tyrannise over the Poles. Constantine had
+renounced his right to the crown some years before, but the renunciation
+had not been made public, nor had the Grand Duke Nicholas, Constantine's
+younger brother, been made aware that the succession was irrevocably fixed
+upon himself. Accordingly, when the news of Alexander's death reached St.
+Petersburg, and the document embodying Constantine's abdication was brought
+from the archives by the officials to whose keeping it had been entrusted,
+Nicholas refused to acknowledge it as binding, and caused the troops to
+take the oath of allegiance to Constantine, who was then at Warsaw.
+Constantine, on the other hand, proclaimed his brother emperor. An
+interregnum of three weeks followed, during which messages passed between
+Warsaw and St. Petersburg, Nicholas positively refusing to accept the crown
+unless by his elder brother's direct command. This at length arrived, and
+on the 26th of December Nicholas assumed the rank of sovereign. But the
+interval of uncertainty had been turned to good account by the conspirators
+at St. Petersburg. The oath already taken by the soldiers to Constantine
+enabled the officers who were concerned in the plot to denounce Nicholas as
+a usurper, and to disguise their real designs under the cloak of loyalty to
+the legitimate Czar. Ignorant of the very meaning of a constitution, the
+common soldiers mutinied because they were told to do so; and it is said
+that they shouted the word Constitution, believing it to be the name of
+Constantine's wife. When summoned to take the oath to Nicholas, the Moscow
+Regiment refused it, and marched off to the place in front of the Senate
+House, where it formed square, and repulsed an attack made upon it by the
+Cavalry of the Guard. Companies from other regiments now joined the
+mutineers, and symptoms of insurrection began to show themselves among the
+civil population. Nicholas himself did not display the energy of character
+which distinguished him through all his later life; on the contrary, his
+attitude was for some time rather that of resignation than of
+self-confidence. Whether some doubt as to the justice of his cause haunted
+him, or a trial like that to which he was now exposed was necessary to
+bring to its full strength the iron quality of his nature, it is certain
+that the conduct of the new Czar during these critical hours gave to those
+around him little indication of the indomitable will which was hence forth
+to govern Russia. Though the great mass of the army remained obedient, it
+was but slowly brought up to the scene of revolt. Officers of high rank
+were sent to harangue the insurgents, and one of these, General
+Miloradovitsch, a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, was mortally wounded
+while endeavouring to make himself heard. It was not until evening that the
+artillery was ordered into action, and the command given by the Czar to
+fire grape-shot among the insurgents. The effect was decisive. The
+mutineers fled before a fire which they were unable to return, and within a
+few minutes the insurrection was over. It had possessed no chief of any
+military capacity; its leaders were missing at the moment when a forward
+march or an attack on the palace of the Czar might have given them the
+victory; and among the soldiers at large there was not the least desire to
+take part in any movement against the established system of Russia. The
+only effect left by the conspiracy within Russia itself was seen in the
+rigorous and uncompromising severity with which Nicholas henceforward
+enforced the principle of autocratic rule. The illusions of the previous
+reign were at an end. A man with the education and the ideas of a
+drill-sergeant and the religious assurance of a Covenanter was on the
+throne; rebellion had done its worst against him; and woe to those who in
+future should deviate a hair's breadth from their duty of implicit
+obedience to the sovereign's all-sufficing power. [372]
+
+[Anglo-Russian Protocol, April 4, 1826.]
+
+It has been stated, and with some probability of truth, that the military
+insurrection of 1825 disposed the new Czar to a more vigorous policy
+abroad. The conspirators, when on their trial, declared it to have been
+their intention to throw the army at once into an attack upon the Turks;
+and in so doing they would certainly have had the feeling of the nation on
+their side. Nicholas himself had little or no sympathy for the Greeks. They
+were a democratic people, and the freedom which they sought to gain was
+nothing but anarchy. "Do not speak of the Greeks," he said to the
+representative of a foreign power, "I call them the rebels." Nevertheless,
+little as Nicholas wished to serve the Greek democracy, both inclination
+and policy urged him to make an end of his predecessor's faint-hearted
+system of negotiation, and to bring the struggle in the East to a summary
+close. Canning had already, in conversation with the Russian ambassador at
+London, discussed a possible change of policy on the part of the two rival
+Courts. He now saw that time had come for establishing new relations
+between Great Britain and Russia, and for attempting that co-operation in
+the East which he had held to be impracticable during Alexander's reign.
+The Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg, nominally to offer the
+usual congratulations to the new sovereign, in reality to dissuade him from
+going to war, and to propose either the separate intervention of England or
+a joint intervention by England and Russia on behalf of Greece. The mission
+was successful. It was in vain that Metternich endeavoured to entangle the
+new Czar in the diplomatic web that had so long held his predecessor. The
+spell of the Holy Alliance was broken. Nicholas looked on the past
+influence of Austria on the Eastern Question only with resentment; he would
+hear of no more conferences of ambassadors; and on the 4th of April, 1826,
+a Protocol was signed at St. Petersburg, by which Great Britain and Russia
+fixed the conditions under which the mediation of the former Power was to
+be tendered to the Porte. Greece was to remain tributary to the Sultan; it
+was, however, to be governed by its own elected authorities, and to be
+completely independent in its commercial relations. The policy known in our
+own day as that of bag-and-baggage expulsion was to be carried out in a far
+more extended sense than that in which it has been advocated by more recent
+champions of the subject races of the East; the Protocol of 1826
+stipulating for the removal not only of Turkish officials but of the entire
+surviving Turkish population of Greece. All property belonging to the
+Turks, whether on the continent or in the islands, was to be purchased by
+the Greeks. [373]
+
+Thus was the first step taken in the negotiations which ended in the
+establishment of Hellenic independence. The Protocol, which had been
+secretly signed, was submitted after some interval to the other Courts of
+Europe. At Vienna it was received with the utmost disgust. Metternich had
+at first declared the union of England and Russia to be an impossibility.
+When this union was actually established, no language was sufficiently
+strong to express his mortification and his spite. At one moment he
+declared that Canning was a revolutionist who had entrapped the young and
+inexperienced Czar into an alliance with European radicalism; at another,
+that England had made itself the cat's-paw of Russian ambition. Not till
+now, he protested, could Europe understand what it had lost in Castlereagh.
+Nor did Metternich confine himself to lamentations. While his
+representatives at Paris and Berlin spared no effort to excite the
+suspicion of those Courts against the Anglo-Russian project of
+intervention, the Austrian ambassador at London worked upon King George's
+personal hostility to Canning, and conspired against the Minister with that
+important section of the English aristocracy which was still influenced by
+the traditional regard for Austria. Berlin, however, was the only field
+where Metternich's diplomacy still held its own. King Frederick William had
+not yet had time to acquire the habit of submission to the young Czar
+Nicholas, and was therefore saved the pain of deciding which of two masters
+he should obey. In spite of his own sympathy for the Greeks, he declined to
+connect Prussia with the proposed joint-intervention, and remained passive,
+justifying this course by the absence of any material interests of Prussia
+in the East. Being neither a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire nor a maritime
+Power, Prussia had in fact no direct means of making its influence felt.
+
+[Treaty between England, Russia and France, July, 1827.]
+
+France, on whose action much more depended, was now governed wholly in the
+interests of the Legitimist party. Louis XVIII. had died in 1824, and the
+Count of Artois had succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles X.
+The principles of the Legitimists would logically have made them defenders
+of the hereditary rights of the Sultan against his rebellious subjects; but
+the Sultan, unlike Ferdinand of Spain, was not a Bourbon nor even a
+Christian; and in a case where the legitimate prince was an infidel and the
+rebels were Christians, the conscience of the most pious Legitimist might
+well recoil from the perilous task of deciding between the divine rights of
+the Crown and the divine rights of the Church, and choose, in so painful an
+emergency, the simpler course of gratifying the national love of action.
+There existed, both among Liberals and among Ultramontanes, a real sympathy
+for Greece, and this interest was almost the only one in which all French
+political sections felt that they had something in common. Liberals
+rejoiced in the prospect of making a new free State in Europe; Catholics,
+like Charles X. himself, remembered Saint Louis and the Crusades;
+diplomatists understood the extreme importance of the impending breach
+between Austria and Russia, and of the opportunity of allying France with
+the latter Power. Thus the natural and disinterested impulse of the greater
+part of the public coincided exactly with the dictates of a far-seeing
+policy; and the Government, in spite of its Legitimist principles and of
+some assurances given to Metternich in person when he visited Paris in
+1825, determined to accept the policy of the Anglo-Russian intervention in
+the East, and to participate in the active measures about to be taken by
+the two Powers. The Protocol of St. Petersburg formed the basis of a
+definitive treaty which was signed at London in July, 1827. By this act
+England, Russia, and France undertook to put an end to the conflict in the
+East, which, through the injury done to the commerce of all nations, had
+become a matter of European concern. The contending parties were to be
+summoned to accept the mediation of the Powers and to consent to an
+armistice. Greece was to be made autonomous, under the paramount
+sovereignty of the Sultan; the Mohammedan population of the Greek provinces
+was, as in the Protocol of St. Petersburg, to be entirely removed; and the
+Greeks were to enter upon possession of all Turkish property within their
+limits, paying an indemnity to the former owners. Each of the three
+contracting Governments pledged itself to seek no increase of territory in
+the East, and no special commercial advantages. In the secret articles of
+the treaty provisions were made for the case of the rejection by the Turks
+of the proposed offer of mediation. Should the armistice not be granted
+within one month, the Powers agreed that they would announce to each
+belligerent their intention to prevent further encounters, and that they
+would take the necessary steps for enforcing this declaration, without,
+however, taking part in hostilities themselves. Instructions in conformity
+with the Treaty were to be sent to the Admirals commanding the
+Mediterranean squadrons of the three Powers. [374]
+
+[Death of Canning, August, 1827.]
+
+[Policy of Canning.]
+
+Scarcely was the Treaty of London signed when Canning died. He had
+definitely broken from the policy of his predecessors, that policy which,
+for the sake of guarding against Russia's advance, had condemned the
+Christian races of the East to 1827. eternal subjection to the Turk, and
+bound up Great Britain with the Austrian system of resistance to the very
+principle and name of national independence. Canning was no blind friend to
+Russia. As keenly as any of his adversaries he appreciated the importance
+of England's interests in the East; of all English statesmen of that time
+he would have been the last to submit to any diminution of England's just
+influence or power. But, unlike his predecessors, he saw that there were
+great forces at work which, whether with England's concurrence or in spite
+of it, would accomplish that revolution in the East for which the time was
+now come; and he was statesman enough not to acquiesce in the belief that
+the welfare of England was in permanent and necessary antagonism to the
+moral interests of mankind and the better spirit of the age. Therefore,
+instead of attempting to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or
+holding aloof and resorting to threats and armaments while Russia
+accomplished the liberation of Greece by itself, he united with Russia in
+this work, and relied on concerted action as the best preventive against
+the undue extension of Russia's influence in the East. In committing
+England to armed intervention, Canning no doubt hoped that the settlement
+of the Greek question arranged by the Powers would be peacefully accepted
+by the Sultan, and that a separate war between Russia and the Porte, on
+this or any other issue, would be averted. Neither of these hopes was
+realised. The joint-intervention had to be enforced by arms, and no sooner
+had the Allies struck their common blow than a war between Turkey and
+Russia followed. How far the course of events might have been modified had
+Canning's life not been cut short it is impossible to say; but whether his
+statesmanship might or might not have averted war on the Danube, the
+balance of results proved his policy to have been the right one. Greece was
+established as an independent State, to supply in the future a valuable
+element of resistance to Slavic preponderance in the Levant; and the
+encounter between Russia and Turkey, so long dreaded, produced none of
+those disastrous effects which had been anticipated from it. On the
+relative value of Canning's statesmanship as compared with that of his
+predecessors, the mind of England and of Europe has long been made up. He
+stands among those who have given to this country its claim to the respect
+of mankind. His monument, as well as his justification, is the existence of
+national freedom in the East; and when half a century later a British
+Government reverted to the principle of nonintervention, as it had been
+understood by Castlereagh, and declined to enter into any effective
+co-operation with Russia for the emancipation of Bulgaria, even then, when
+the precedent of Canning's action in 1827 stood in direct and glaring
+contradiction to the policy of the hour, no effective attempt was made by
+the leaders of the party to which Canning had belonged to impugn his
+authority, or to explain away his example. It might indeed be alleged that
+Canning had not explicitly resolved on the application of force; but those
+who could maintain that Canning would, like Wellington, have used the
+language of apology and regret when Turkish obstinacy had made it
+impossible to effect the object of his intervention by any other means, had
+indeed read the history of Canning's career in vain. [375]
+
+[Intervention of the Admirals, Sept., 1927.]
+
+The death of Canning, which brought his rival, the Duke of Wellington,
+after a short interval to the head of affairs, caused at the moment no
+avowed change in the execution of his plans. In accordance with the
+provisions of the Treaty of London the mediation of the allied Powers was
+at once tendered to the belligerents, and an armistice demanded. The
+armistice was accepted by the Greeks; it was contemptuously refused by the
+Turks. In consequence of this refusal the state of war continued, as it
+would have been absurd to ask the Greeks to sit still and be massacred
+because the enemy declined to lay down his arms. The Turk being the party
+resisting the mediation agreed upon, it became necessary to deprive him of
+the power of continuing hostilities. Heavy reinforcements had just arrived
+from Egypt, and an expedition was on the point of sailing from Navarino,
+the gathering place of Ibrahim's forces, against Hydra, the capture of
+which would have definitely made an end of the Greek insurrection. Admiral
+Codrington, the commander of the British fleet, and the French Admiral De
+Rigny, were now off the coast of Greece. They addressed themselves to
+Ibrahim, and required from him a promise that he would make no movement
+until further orders should arrive from Constantinople. Ibrahim made this
+promise verbally on the 25th of September. A few days later, however,
+Ibrahim learnt that while he himself was compelled to be inactive, the
+Greeks, continuing hostilities as they were entitled to do, had won a
+brilliant naval victory under Captain Hastings within the Gulf of Corinth.
+Unable to control his anger, he sailed out from the harbour of Navarino,
+and made for Patras. Codrington, who had stationed his fleet at Zante,
+heard of the movement, and at once threw himself across the track of the
+Egyptian, whom he compelled to turn back by an energetic threat to sink his
+fleet. Had the French and Russian contingents been at hand, Codrington
+would have taken advantage of Ibrahim's sortie to cut him off from all
+Greek harbours, and to force him to return direct to Alexandria, thus
+peaceably accomplishing the object of the intervention. This, however, to
+the misfortune of Ibrahim's seamen, the English admiral could not do alone.
+Ibrahim re-entered Navarino, and there found the orders of the Sultan for
+which it had been agreed that he should wait. These orders were dictated by
+true Turkish infatuation. They bade Ibrahim continue the subjugation of the
+Morea with the utmost vigour, and promised him the assistance of Reschid
+Pasha, his rival in the siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, perfectly reckless
+of the consequences, now sent out his devastating columns again. No life,
+and nothing that could support life, was spared. Not only were the crops
+ravaged, but the fruit-trees, which are the permanent support of the
+country, were cut down at the roots. Clouds of fire and smoke from burning
+villages showed the English officers who approached the coast in what
+spirit the Turk met their proposals for a pacification. "It is supposed
+that if Ibrahim remained in Greece," wrote Captain Hamilton, "more than a
+third of its inhabitants would die of absolute starvation."
+
+[Battle of Navarino, Oct. 20th, 1827.]
+
+It became necessary to act quickly, the more so as the season was far
+advanced, and a winter blockade of Ibrahim's fleet was impossible. A
+message was sent to the Egyptian head-quarters, requiring that hostilities
+should cease, that the Morea should be evacuated, and the Turko-Egyptian
+fleet return to Constantinople and Alexandria. In answer to this message
+there came back a statement that Ibrahim had left Navarino for the interior
+of the country, and that it was not known where to find him. Nothing now
+remained for the admirals but to make their presence felt. On the 18th of
+October it was resolved that the English, French, and Russian fleets, which
+were now united, should enter the harbour of Navarino in battle order. The
+movement was called a demonstration, and in so far as the admirals had not
+actually determined upon making an attack, it was not directly a hostile
+measure; but every gun was ready to open fire, and it was well understood
+that any act of resistance on the part of the opposite fleet would result
+in hostilities. Codrington, as senior officer, took command of the allied
+squadron, and the instructions which he gave to his colleagues for the
+event of a general engagement concluded with Nelson's words, that no
+captain could do very wrong who placed his ship alongside that of an enemy.
+
+Thus, ready to strike hard, the English admiral sailed into the harbour of
+Navarino at noon on October 20, followed by the French and the Russians.
+The allied fleet advanced to within pistol-shot of the Ottoman ships and
+there anchored. A little to the windward of the position assigned to the
+English corvette _Dartmouth_ there lay a Turkish fire-ship. A request
+was made that this dangerous vessel might be removed to a safer distance;
+it was refused, and a boat's crew was then sent to cut its cable. The boat
+was received with musketry fire. This was answered by the _Dartmouth_
+and by a French ship, and the battle soon became general. Codrington, still
+desirous to avoid bloodshed, sent his pilot to Moharem Bey, who commanded
+in Ibrahim's absence, proposing to withhold fire on both sides. Moharem
+replied with cannon-shot, killing the pilot and striking Codrington's own
+vessel. This exhausted the patience of the English admiral, who forthwith
+made his adversary a mere wreck. The entire fleets on both sides were now
+engaged. The Turks had a superiority of eight hundred guns, and fought with
+courage. For four hours the battle raged at close quarters in the
+land-locked harbour, while twenty thousand of Ibrahim's soldiers watched
+from the surrounding hills the struggle in which they could take no part.
+But the result of the combat was never for a moment doubtful. The confusion
+and bad discipline of the Turkish fleet made it an easy prey. Vessel after
+vessel was sunk or blown to pieces, and before evening fell the work of the
+allies was done. When Ibrahim returned from his journey on the following
+day he found the harbour of Navarino strewed with wrecks and dead bodies.
+Four thousand of his seamen had fallen; the fleet which was to have
+accomplished the reduction of Hydra was utterly ruined. [376]
+
+[Inaction of England after Navarino.]
+
+Over all Greece it was at once felt that the nation was saved. The
+intervention of the Powers had been sudden and decisive beyond the most
+sanguine hopes; and though this intervention might be intended to establish
+something less than the complete independence of Greece, the violence of
+the first collision bade fair to carry the work far beyond the bounds
+originally assigned to it. The attitude of the Porte after the news of the
+battle of Navarino reached Constantinople was exactly that which its worst
+enemies might have desired. So far from abating anything in its resistance
+to the mediation of the three Powers, it declared the attack made upon its
+navy to be a crime and an outrage, and claimed satisfaction for it from the
+ambassadors of the Allied Powers. Arguments proved useless, and the united
+demand for an armistice with the Greeks having been finally and
+contemptuously refused, the ambassadors, in accordance with their
+instructions, quitted the Turkish capital (Dec. 8). Had Canning been still
+living, it is probable that the first blow of Navarino would have been
+immediately followed by the measures necessary to make the Sultan submit to
+the Treaty of London, and that the forces of Great Britain would have been
+applied with sufficient vigour to render any isolated action on the part of
+Russia both unnecessary and impossible. But at this critical moment a
+paralysis fell over the English Government. Canning's policy was so much
+his own, he had dragged his colleagues so forcibly with him in spite of
+themselves, that when his place was left empty no one had the courage
+either to fulfil or to reverse his intentions, and the men who succeeded
+him acted as if they were trespassers in the fortress which Canning had
+taken by storm. The very ground on which Wellington, no less than Canning,
+had justified the agreement made with Russia in 1826 was the necessity of
+preventing Russia from acting alone; and when Russian and Turkish ships had
+actually fought at Navarino, and war was all but formally declared, it
+became more imperative than ever that Great Britain should keep the most
+vigorous hold upon its rival, and by steady, consistent pressure let it be
+known to both Turks and Russians that the terms of the Treaty of London and
+no others must be enforced. To retire from action immediately after dealing
+the Sultan one dire, irrevocable blow, without following up this stroke or
+attaining the end agreed upon--to leave Russia to take up the armed
+compulsion where England had dropped it, and to win from its crippled
+adversary the gains of a private and isolated war--was surely the weakest
+of all possible policies that could have been adopted. Yet this was the
+policy followed by English Ministers during that interval of transition and
+incoherence that passed between Canning's death and the introduction of the
+Reform Bill.
+
+[War between Russia and Turkey, April, 1828.]
+
+By the Russian Government nothing was more ardently desired than a contest
+with Turkey, in which England and France, after they had destroyed the
+Turkish fleet, should be mere on-lookers, debarred by the folly of the
+Porte itself from prohibiting or controlling hostilities between it and its
+neighbour. There might indeed be some want of a pretext for war, since all
+the points of contention between Russia and Turkey other than those
+relating to Greece had been finally settled in Russia's favour by a Treaty
+signed at Akerman in October, 1826. But the spirit of infatuation had
+seized the Sultan, or a secret hope that the Western Powers would in the
+last resort throw over the Court of St. Petersburg led him to hurry on
+hostilities by a direct challenge to Russia. A proclamation which reads
+like the work of some frantic dervish, though said to have been composed by
+Mahmud himself, called the Mussulman world to arms. Russia was denounced as
+the instigator of the Greek rebellion, and the arch-enemy of Islam. The
+Treaty of Akerman was declared to have been extorted by compulsion and to
+have been signed only for the purpose of gaining time. "Russia has imparted
+its own madness to the other Powers and persuaded them to make an alliance
+to free the Rayah from his Ottoman master. But the Turk does not count his
+enemies. The law forbids the people of Islam to permit any injury to be
+done to their religion; and if all the unbelievers together unite against
+them, they will enter on the war as a sacred duty, and trust in God for
+protection." This proclamation was followed by a levy of troops and the
+expulsion of most of the Christian residents in Constantinople. Russia
+needed no other pretext. The fanatical outburst of the Sultan was treated
+by the Court of St. Petersburg as if it had been the deliberate expression
+of some civilised Power, and was answered on the 26th of April, 1828, by a
+declaration of war. In order to soften the effect of this step and to reap
+the full benefit of its subsisting relations with France and England,
+Russia gave a provisional undertaking to confine its operations as a
+belligerent to the mainland and the Black Sea, and within the Mediterranean
+to act still as one of the allied neutrals under the terms of the Treaty of
+London.
+
+[Military condition of Turkey.]
+
+The moment seized by Russia for the declaration of war was one singularly
+favourable to itself and unfortunate for its adversary. Not only had the
+Turkish fleet been destroyed by the neutrals, but the old Turkish force of
+the Janissaries had been destroyed by its own master, and the new-modelled
+regiments which were to replace it had not yet been organised. The Sultan
+had determined in 1826 to postpone his long-planned military reform no
+longer, and to stake everything on one bold stroke against the Janissaries.
+Troops enough were brought up from the other side of the Bosphorus to make
+Mahmud certain of victory. The Janissaries were summoned to contribute a
+proportion of their number to the regiments about to be formed on the
+European pattern; and when they proudly refused to do so and raised the
+standard of open rebellion they were cut to pieces and exterminated by
+Mahmud's Anatolian soldiers in the midst of Constantinople. [377] The
+principal difficulty in the way of a reform of the Turkish army was thus
+removed and the work of reorganisation was earnestly taken in hand; but
+before there was time to complete it the enemy entered the field. Mahmud
+had to meet the attack of Russia with an army greatly diminished in number,
+and confused by the admixture of European and Turkish discipline. The
+resources of the empire were exhausted by the long struggle with Greece,
+and, above all, the destruction of the Janissaries had left behind it an
+exasperation which made the Sultan believe that rebellion might at any
+moment break out in his own capital. Nevertheless, in spite of its inherent
+weakness and of all the disadvantages under which it entered into war,
+Turkey succeeded in prolonging its resistance through two campaigns, and
+might, with better counsels, have tried the fortune of a third.
+
+[Military condition of Russia.]
+
+The actual military resources of Russia were in 1828 much below what they
+were believed to be by all Europe. The destruction of Napoleon's army in
+1812 and the subsequent exploits of Alexander in the campaigns which ended
+in the capture of Paris had left behind them an impression of Russian
+energy and power which was far from corresponding with the reality, and
+which, though disturbed by the events of 1828, had by no means vanished at
+the time of the Crimean War. The courage and patience of the Russian
+soldier were certainly not over-rated; but the progress supposed to have
+been made in Russian military organisation since the campaign of 1799, when
+it was regarded in England and Austria as little above that of savages, was
+for the most part imaginary. The proofs of a radically bad system--scanty
+numbers, failing supplies, immense sickness--were never more conspicuous
+than in 1828. Though Russia had been preparing for war for at least seven
+years, scarcely seventy thousand soldiers could be collected on the Pruth.
+The general was Wittgenstein, one of the heroes of 1812, but now a veteran
+past effective work. Nicholas came to the camp to make things worse by
+headstrong interference. The best Russian officer, Paskiewitsch, was put in
+command of the forces about to operate in Asia Minor, and there, thrown on
+his own resources and free to create a system of his own, he achieved
+results in strong contrast to the failure of the Russian arms on the
+Danube.
+
+[Campaign of 1828.]
+
+In entering on the campaign of 1828, it was necessary for the Czar to avoid
+giving any unnecessary causes of anxiety to Austria, which had already made
+unsuccessful attempts to form a coalition against him. The line of
+operations was therefore removed as far as possible from the Austrian
+frontier; and after the Roumanian principalities had been peacefully
+occupied, the Danube was crossed at a short distance above the point where
+its mouths divide (June 7). The Turks had no intention of meeting the enemy
+in a pitched battle; they confined themselves to the defence of fortresses,
+the form of warfare to which, since the decline of the military art in
+Turkey, the patience and abstemiousness of the race best fit them. Ibraila
+and Silistria on the Danube, Varna and Shumla in the neighbourhood of the
+Balkans, were their principal strongholds; of these Ibraila was at once
+besieged by a considerable force, while Silistria was watched by a weak
+contingent, and the vanguard of the Russian army pushed on through the
+Dobrudscha towards the Black Sea, where, with the capture of the minor
+coast-towns, it expected to enter into communication with the fleet. The
+first few weeks of the campaign were marked by considerable successes.
+Ibraila capitulated on the 18th of June, and the military posts in the
+Dobrudscha fell one after another into the hands of the invaders, who met
+with no effective resistance in this district. But their serious work was
+only now beginning. The Russian army, in spite of its weakness, was divided
+into three parts, occupied severally in front of Silistria, Shumla, and
+Varna. At Shumla the mass of the Turkish army, under Omer Brionis, was
+concentrated. The force brought against it by the invader was inadequate to
+its task, and the attempts which were made to lure the Turkish army from
+its entrenched camp into the open field proved unsuccessful. The
+difficulties of the siege proved so great that Wittgenstein after a while
+proposed to abandon offensive operations at this point, and to leave a mere
+corps of observation before the enemy until Varna should have fallen. This,
+however, was forbidden by the Czar. As the Russians wasted away before
+Shumla with sickness and fatigue, the Turks gained strength, and on the
+24th of September Omer broke out from his entrenchments and moved eastwards
+to the relief of Varna. Nicholas again over-ruled his generals, and ordered
+his cousin, Prince Eugene of Wuertemberg, to attack the advancing Ottomans
+with the troops then actually at his disposal. Eugene did so, and suffered
+a severe defeat. A vigorous movement of the Turks would probably have made
+an end of the campaign, but Omer held back at the critical moment, and on
+the 10th of October Varna surrendered. This, however, was the only conquest
+made by the Russians. The season was too far advanced for them either to
+cross the Balkans or to push forward operations against the uncaptured
+fortresses. Shumla and Silistria remained in the hands of their defenders,
+and the Russians, after suffering enormous losses in proportion to the
+smallness of their numbers, withdrew to Varna and the Danube, to resume the
+campaign in the spring of the following year. [378]
+
+[Campaign of 1829.]
+
+The spirits of the Turks and of their European friends were raised by the
+unexpected failure of the Czar's arms. Metternich resumed his efforts to
+form a coalition, and tempted French Ministers with the prospect of
+recovering the Rhenish provinces, but in vain. The Sultan began
+negotiations, but broke them off when he found that the events of the
+campaign had made no difference in the enemy's tone. The prestige of Russia
+was in fact at stake, and Nicholas would probably have faced a war with
+Austria and Turkey combined rather than have made peace without restoring
+the much-diminished reputation of his troops. The winter was therefore
+spent in bringing up distant reserves. Wittgenstein was removed from his
+command; the Czar withdrew from military operations in which he had done
+nothing but mischief; and Diebitsch, a Prussian by birth and training, was
+placed at the head of the army, untrammelled by the sovereign presence or
+counsels which had hampered his predecessor. The intention of the new
+commander was to cross the Balkans as soon as Silistria should have fallen,
+without waiting for the capture of Shumla. In pursuance of this design the
+fleet was despatched early in the spring of 1829 to seize a port beyond the
+mountain-range. Diebitsch then placed a corps in front of Silistria, and
+made his preparations for the southward march; but before any progress had
+been made in the siege the Turks themselves took the field. Reschid Pasha,
+now Grand Vizier, moved eastwards from Shumla at the beginning of May
+against the weak Russian contingent that still lay in winter quarters
+between that place and Varna. The superiority of his force promised him
+an easy victory; but after winning some unimportant successes, and
+advancing to a considerable distance from his stronghold, he allowed
+himself to be held at bay until Diebitsch, with the army of the Danube,
+was ready to fall upon his rear. The errors of the Turks had given to the
+Russian commander, who hastened across Bulgaria on hearing of his
+colleague's peril, the choice of destroying their army, or of seizing
+Shumla by a _coup-de-main_. Diebitsch determined upon attacking his
+enemy in the open field, and on the 10th of June Reschid's army, attempting
+to regain the roads to Shumla, was put to total rout at Kulewtscha. A
+fortnight later Silistria surrendered, and Diebitsch, reinforced by the
+troops that had besieged that fortress, was now able to commence his
+march across the Balkans.
+
+[Crossing of the Balkans, July, 1829.]
+
+Rumour magnified into hundreds of thousands the scanty columns which for
+the first time carried the Russian flag over the Balkan range. Resistance
+everywhere collapsed. The mountains were crossed without difficulty, and on
+the 19th of August the invaders appeared before Adrianople, which
+immediately surrendered. Putting on the boldest countenance in order to
+conceal his real weakness, Diebitsch now struck out right and left, and
+sent detachments both to the Euxine and the Aegean coast. The fleet
+co-operated with him, and the ports of the Black Sea, almost as far south
+as the Bosphorus, fell into the invaders' hands. The centre of the army
+began to march upon Constantinople. If the Sultan had known the real
+numbers of the force which threatened his capital, a force not exceeding
+twenty thousand men, he would probably have recognised that his assailant's
+position was a more dangerous one than his own. Diebitsch had advanced into
+the heart of the enemy's country with a mere handful of men. Sickness was
+daily thinning his ranks; his troops were dispersed over a wide area from
+sea to sea; and the warlike tribes of Albania threatened to fall upon his
+communications from the west. For a moment the Sultan spoke of fighting
+upon the walls of Constantinople; but the fear of rebellion within his own
+capital, the discovery of conspiracies, and the disasters sustained by his
+arms in Asia, where Kars and Erzeroum had fallen into the enemy's hands,
+soon led him to make overtures of peace and to accept the moderate terms
+which the Russian Government, aware of its own difficulties, was willing to
+grant. It would have been folly for the Czar to stimulate the growing
+suspicion of England and to court the attack of Austria by prolonging
+hostilities; and although King Charles X. and the French Cabinet, reverting
+to the ideas of Tilsit, proposed a partition of the Ottoman Empire, and a
+general re-arrangement of the map of Europe which would have given Belgium
+and the Palatinate to France, the plan was originated too late to produce
+any effect. [379] Russia had everything to lose and nothing to gain by a
+European war. It had reduced Turkey to submission, and might fairly hope to
+maintain its ascendency at Constantinople during coming years without
+making any of those great territorial changes which would have given its
+rivals a pretext for intervening on the Sultan's behalf. Under the guise of
+a generous forbearance the Czar extricated himself from a dangerous
+position with credit and advantage. As much had been won as could be
+maintained without hazard; and on the 14th of September peace was concluded
+in Adrianople.
+
+[Treaty of Adrianople, Sept. 14, 1829.]
+
+The Treaty of Adrianople gave Russia a slight increase of territory in
+Asia, incorporating with the Czar's dominions the ports of Anapa and Poti
+on the eastern coast of the Black Sea; but its most important provisions
+were those which confirmed and extended the Protectorate exercised by the
+Czar over the Danubian Principalities, and guaranteed the commercial rights
+of Russian subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire both by land and sea. In
+order more effectively to exclude the Sultan's influence from Wallachia and
+Moldavia, the office of Hospodar, hitherto tenable for seven years, was now
+made an appointment for life, and the Sultan specifically engaged to permit
+no interference on the part of his neighbouring Pashas with the affairs of
+these provinces. No fortified point was to be retained by the Turks on the
+left bank of the Danube; no Mussulman was to be permitted to reside within
+the Principalities; and those possessing landed estates there were to sell
+them within eighteen months. The Porte pledged itself never again to detain
+Russian ships of commerce coming from the Black Sea, and acknowledged that
+such an act would amount to an infraction of treaties justifying Russia in
+having recourse to reprisals. The Straits of Constantinople and the
+Dardanelles were declared free and open to the merchant ships of all Powers
+at peace with the Porte, upon the same conditions which were stipulated for
+vessels under the Russian flag. The same freedom of trade and navigation
+was recognised within the Black Sea. All treaties and conventions hitherto
+concluded between Turkey and Russia were recognised as in force, except in
+so far as modified by the present agreement. The Porte further gave its
+adhesion to the Treaty of London relating to Greece, and to an Act entered
+into by the Allied Powers in March, 1829, for regulating the Greek
+frontier. An indemnity in money was declared to be owing to Russia; and as
+the amount of this remained to be fixed by mutual agreement, the means were
+still left open to the Russian Government for exercising a gentle pressure
+at Constantinople, or for rewarding the compliance of the conquered. [380]
+
+[Capodistrias elected President of Greece, April, 1827.]
+
+The war between Turkey and Russia, while it left the European frontier
+between the belligerents unchanged, exercised a two-fold influence upon the
+settlement of Greece. On the one hand, by exciting the fears and suspicions
+of Great Britain, it caused the Government of our own country, under the
+Duke of Wellington, to insist on the limitation of the Greek State to the
+narrowest possible area; [381] on the other hand, by reducing Turkey itself
+almost to the condition of a Russian dependency, it led to the abandonment
+of the desire to maintain the Sultan's supremacy in any form over the
+emancipated provinces, and resulted in the establishment of an absolutely
+independent Hellenic kingdom. An important change had taken place within
+Greece itself just at the time when the allied Powers determined upon
+intervention. The parts of the local leaders were played out, and in April,
+1827, Capodistrias, ex-Minister of Russia, was elected President for seven
+years. Capodistrias accepted the call. He was then, as he had been
+throughout the insurrection, at a distance from Greece; and before making
+his way thither, he visited the principal Courts of Europe, with the view
+of ascertaining what moral or financial support he should be likely to
+receive from them. His interview with the Czar Nicholas led to a clear
+statement by that sovereign of the conditions which he expected
+Capodistrias, in return for Russia's continued friendship, to fulfil.
+Greece was to be rescued from revolution: in other words, personal was to
+be substituted for popular government. The State was to remain tributary to
+the Sultan: that is, in both Greece and Turkey the door was to be kept open
+for Russia's interference. Whether Capodistrias had any intention of
+fulfilling the latter condition is doubtful. His love for Greece and his
+own personal ambition prevented his regard for Russia, strong though this
+might be, from making him the mere instrument of the Court of St.
+Petersburg; and while outwardly acquiescing in the Czar's decision that
+Greece should remain a tributary State, he probably resolved from the first
+to aim at establishing its complete independence. With regard to the Czar's
+demand that the system of local self-government should be superseded within
+Greece itself by one of autocratic rule, Capodistrias was in harmony with
+his patron. He had been the Minister of a centralised despotism himself.
+His experience was wholly that of the official of an absolute sovereign;
+and although Capodistrias had represented the more liberal tendencies of
+the Russian Court when it was a question of arguing against Metternich
+about the complete or the partial restoration of despotic rule in Italy, he
+had no real acquaintance and no real sympathy with the action of free
+institutions, and moved in the same circle of ideas as the autocratic
+reformers of the eighteenth century, of whom Joseph II. was the type. [382]
+
+[The Protocols of Nov., 1828, and March, 1829.]
+
+The Turks were still masters of the Morea when Capodistrias reached Greece.
+The battle of Navarino had not caused Ibrahim to relax his hold upon the
+fortresses, and it was deemed necessary by the Allies to send a French
+army-corps to dislodge him from his position. This expeditionary force,
+under General Maison, landed in Greece in the summer of 1828, and Ibrahim,
+not wishing to fight to the bitter end, contented himself with burning
+Tripolitza to the ground and sowing it with salt, and then withdrew. The
+war between Turkey and Russia had now begun. Capodistrias assisted the
+Russian fleet in blockading the Dardanelles, and thereby gained for himself
+the marked ill-will of the British Government. At a conference held in
+London by the representatives of France, England, and Russia, in November,
+1828, it was resolved that the operations of the Allies should be limited
+to the Morea and the islands. Capodistrias, in consequence of this
+decision, took the most vigorous measures for continuing the war against
+Turkey. What the allies refused to guarantee must be won by force of arms;
+and during the winter of 1829, while Russia pressed upon Turkey from the
+Danube, Capodistrias succeeded in reconquering Missolonghi and the whole
+tract of country immediately to the north of the Gulf of Corinth. The
+Porte, in prolonging its resistance after the November conference, played
+as usual into its enemy's hands. The negotiations at London were resumed in
+a spirit somewhat more favourable to Greece, and a Protocol was signed on
+the 22nd of March, 1829, extending the northern frontier of Greece up to a
+line drawn from the Gulf of Arta to the Gulf of Volo. Greece, according to
+this Protocol, was still to remain under the Sultan's suzerainty: its ruler
+was to be a hereditary prince belonging to one of the reigning European
+families, but not to any of the three allied Courts. [383]
+
+[Leopold accepts the Greek Crown, Feb., 1830.]
+
+The mediation of Great Britain was now offered to the Porte upon the terms
+thus laid down, and for the fourteenth time its mediation was rejected. But
+the end was near at hand. Diebitsch crossed the Balkans, and it was in vain
+that the Sultan then proposed the terms which he had scouted in November.
+The Treaty of Adrianople enforced the decisions of the March Protocol.
+Greece escaped from a limitation of its frontier, which would have left
+both Athens and Missolonghi Turkish territory. The principle of the
+admission of the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth within the Hellenic
+State was established, and nothing remained for the friends of the Porte
+but to cut down to the narrowest possible area the district which had been
+loosely indicated in the London Protocol. While Russia, satisfied with its
+own successes against the Ottoman Empire and anxious to play the part of
+patron of the conquered, ceased to interest itself in Greece, the
+Government of Great Britain contested every inch of territory proposed to
+be ceded to the new State, and finally induced the Powers to agree upon a
+boundary-line which did not even in letter fulfil the conditions of the
+treaty. Northern Acarnania and part of AEtolia were severed from Greece,
+and the frontier was drawn from the mouth of the river Achelous to a spot
+near Thermopylae. On the other hand, as Russian influence now appeared to
+be firmly established and likely to remain paramount at Constantinople, the
+Western Powers had no motive to maintain the Sultan's supremacy over
+Greece. This was accordingly by common consent abandoned; and the Hellenic
+Kingdom, confined within miserably narrow limits on the mainland, and
+including neither Crete nor Samos among its islands, was ultimately offered
+in full sovereignty to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of
+Charlotte, daughter of George IV. After some negotiations, in which Leopold
+vainly asked for a better frontier, he accepted the Greek crown on the 11th
+of February, 1830.
+
+[Government of Capodistrias.]
+
+In the meantime, Capodistrias was struggling hard to govern and to organise
+according to his own conceptions a land in which every element of anarchy,
+ruin, and confusion appeared to be arrayed against the restoration of
+civilised life. The country was devastated, depopulated, and in some places
+utterly barbarised. Out of a population of little more than a million, it
+was reckoned that three hundred thousand had perished during the conflict
+with the Turk. The whole fabric of political and social order had to be
+erected anew; and, difficult as this task would have been for the wisest
+ruler, it was rendered much more difficult by the conflict between
+Capodistrias' own ideal and the character of the people among whom he had
+to work. Communal or local self-government lay at the very root of Greek
+nationality. In many different forms this intense provincialism had
+maintained itself unimpaired up to the end of the war, in spite of national
+assemblies and national armaments. The Hydriote ship-owners, the Primates
+of the Morea, the guerilla leaders of the north, had each a type of life
+and a body of institutions as distinct as the dialects which they spoke or
+the saints whom they cherished in their local sanctuaries. If antagonistic
+in some respects to national unity, this vigorous local life had
+nevertheless been a source of national energy while Greece had still its
+independence to win; and now that national independence was won, it might
+well have been made the basis of a popular and effective system of
+self-government. But to Capodistrias, as to greater men of that age, the
+unity of the State meant the uniformity of all its parts; and, shutting his
+eyes to all the obstacles in his path, he set himself to create an
+administrative system as rigorously centralised as that which France had
+received from Napoleon. Conscious of his own intellectual superiority over
+his countrymen, conscious of his own integrity and of the sacrifice of all
+his personal wealth in his country's service, he put no measure on his
+expressions of scorn for the freebooters and peculators whom he believed to
+make up the Greek official world, and he both acted and spoke as if, in the
+literal sense of the words, all who ever came before him were thieves and
+robbers. The peasants of the mainland, who had suffered scarcely less from
+Klephts and Primates than from Turks, welcomed Capodistrias' levelling
+despotism, and to the end his name was popular among them; but among the
+classes which had supplied the leaders in the long struggle for
+independence, and especially among the ship-owners of the Archipelago, who
+felt the contempt expressed by Capodistrias for their seven years' efforts
+to be grossly unjust, a spirit of opposition arose which soon made it
+evident that Capodistrias would need better instruments than those which he
+had around him to carry out his task of remodelling Greece.
+
+[Leopold renounces the crown, May, 1830.]
+
+It was in the midst of this growing antagonism that the news reached
+Capodistrias that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg had been appointed King of Greece.
+The resolution made by the Powers in March, 1829, that the sovereign of
+Greece should belong to some reigning house, had perhaps not wholly
+destroyed the hopes of Capodistrias that he might become Prince or Hospodar
+of Greece himself. There were difficulties in the way of filling the
+throne, and these difficulties, after the appointment of Leopold,
+Capodistrias certainly did not seek to lessen. His subtlety, his command of
+the indirect methods of effecting a purpose, were so great and so habitual
+to him that there was little chance of his taking any overt step for
+preventing Leopold's accession to the crown; there appears, however, to be
+evidence that he repressed the indications of assent which the Greeks
+attempted to offer to Leopold; and a series of letters written by him to
+that prince was probably intended, though in the most guarded language, to
+give Leopold the impression that the task which awaited him was a hopeless
+one. Leopold himself, at the very time when he accepted the crown, was
+wavering in his purpose. He saw with perfect clearness that the territory
+granted to the Greek State was too small to secure either its peace or its
+independence. The severance of Acarnania and Northern AEtolia meant the
+abandonment of the most energetic part of the Greek inland population, and
+a probable state of incessant warfare upon the northern frontier; the
+relinquishment of Crete meant that Greece, bankrupt as it was, must
+maintain a navy to protect the south coast of the Morea from Turkish
+attack. These considerations had been urged upon the Powers by Leopold
+before he accepted the crown, and he had been induced for the moment to
+withdraw them. But he had never fully acquiesced in the arrangements
+imposed upon him: he remained irresolute for some months; and at last,
+whether led to this decision by the letters of Capodistrias or by some
+other influences, he declared the conditions under which he was called upon
+to rule Greece to be intolerable, and renounced the crown (May, 1830).
+[384]
+
+[Government and death of Capodistrias.]
+
+Capodistrias thus found himself delivered from his rival, and again face to
+face with the task to which duty or ambition called him. The candidature of
+Leopold had embittered the relations between Capodistrias and all who
+confronted him in Greece, for it gave him the means of measuring their
+hostility to himself by the fervour of their addresses to this unknown
+foreigner. A dark shadow fell over his government. As difficulties
+thickened and resistance grew everywhere more determined, the President
+showed himself harsher and less scrupulous in the choice of his means. The
+men about him were untrustworthy; to crush them, he filled the offices of
+government with relatives and creatures of his own who were at once
+tyrannous and incapable. Thwarted and checked, he met opposition by
+imprisonment and measures of violence, suspended the law-courts, and
+introduced the espionage and the police-system of St. Petersburg. At length
+armed rebellion broke out, and while Miaoulis, the Hydriote admiral, blew
+up the best ships of the Greek navy to prevent them falling into the
+President's hands, the wild district of Maina, which had never admitted the
+Turkish tax-gatherer, refused to pay taxes to the Hellenic State. The
+revolt was summarily quelled by Capodistrias, and several members of the
+family of Mauromichalis, including the chief Petrobei, formerly feudal
+ruler of Maina, were arrested. Some personal insult, imaginary or real, was
+moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother
+of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks,
+had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son
+and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the
+Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a
+pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had
+been warned that his life was sought, but had refused to make any change in
+his habits, or to allow himself to be attended by a guard.
+
+[Otho King of Greece, Feb. 1, 1833.]
+
+The death of Capodistrias excited sympathies and regrets which to a great
+extent silenced criticism upon his government, and which have made his name
+one of those most honoured by the Greek nation. His fall threw the country
+into anarchy. An attempt was made by his brother Augustine to retain
+autocratic power, but the result was universal dissension and the
+interference of the foreigner. At length the Powers united in finding a
+second sovereign for Greece, and brought the weary scene of disorder to a
+close. Prince Otho of Bavaria was sent to reign at Athens, and with him
+there came a group of Bavarian officials to whom the Courts of Europe
+persuaded themselves that the future of Greece might be safely entrusted. A
+frontier somewhat better than that which had been offered to Leopold was
+granted to the new sovereign, but neither Crete, Thessaly, nor Epirus was
+included within his kingdom. Thus hemmed in within intolerably narrow
+limits, while burdened with the expenses of an independent state, alike
+unable to meet the calls upon its national exchequer and to exclude the
+intrigues of foreign Courts, Greece offered during the next generation
+little that justified the hopes that had been raised as to its future. But
+the belief of mankind in the invigorating power of national independence is
+not wholly vain, nor, even under the most hostile conditions, will the
+efforts of a liberated people fail to attract the hope and the envy of
+those branches of its race which still remain in subjection. Poor and
+inglorious as the Greek kingdom was, it excited the restless longings not
+only of Greeks under Turkish bondage, but of the prosperous Ionian Islands
+under English rule; and in 1864 the first step in the expansion of the
+Hellenic kingdom was accomplished by the transfer of these islands from
+Great Britain to Greece. Our own day has seen Greece further strengthened
+and enriched by the annexation of Thessaly. The commercial and educational
+development of the kingdom is now as vigorous as that of any State in
+Europe: in agriculture and in manufacturing industry it still lingers far
+behind. Following the example of Cavour and the Sardinian statesmen who
+judged no cost too great in preparing for Italian union, the rulers of
+Greece burden the national finances with the support of an army and navy
+excessive in comparison both with the resources and with the present
+requirements of the State. To the ideal of a great political future the
+material progress of the land has been largely sacrificed. Whether, in the
+re-adjustment of frontiers which must follow upon the gradual extrusion of
+the Turk from Eastern Europe, Greece will gain from its expenditure
+advantages proportionate to the undoubted evils which it has involved, the
+future alone can decide.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+France before 1830--Reign of Charles X.--Ministry of Martignac--Ministry of
+Polignac--The Duke of Orleans--War in Algiers--The July Ordinances--
+Revolution of July--Louis Philippe King--Nature and Effects of the July
+Revolution--Affairs in Belgium--The Belgian Revolution--The Great
+Powers--Intervention, and Establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium--Affairs
+of Poland--Insurrection at Warsaw--War between Russia and Poland--Overthrow
+of the Poles: End of the Polish Constitution--Affairs of Italy--
+Insurrection in the Papal States--France and Austria--Austrian
+Intervention--Ancona occupied by the French--Affairs of Germany--Prussia;
+the Zollverein--Brunswick, Hanover, Saxony--The Palatinate--Reaction in
+Germany--Exiles in Switzerland; Incursion into Savoy--Dispersion of the
+Exiles--France under Louis Philippe: Successive Risings--Period of
+Parliamentary Activity--England after 1830: The Reform Bill.
+
+
+When the Congress of Vienna re-arranged the map of Europe after Napoleon's
+fall, Lord Castlereagh expressed the opinion that no prudent statesman
+would forecast a duration of more than seven years for any settlement that
+might then be made. At the end of a period twice as long the Treaties of
+1815 were still the public law of Europe. The grave had peacefully closed
+over Napoleon; the revolutionary forces of France had given no sign of
+returning life. As the Bourbon monarchy struck root, and the elements of
+opposition grew daily weaker in France, the perils that lately filled all
+minds appeared to grow obsolete, and the very Power against which the
+anti-revolutionary treaties of 1815 had been directed took its place, as of
+natural right, by the side of Austria and Russia in the struggle against
+revolution. The attack of Louis XVIII. upon the Spanish Constitutionalists
+marked the complete reconciliation of France with the Continental dynasties
+which had combined against it in 1815; and from this time the Treaties of
+Chaumont and Aix-la-Chapelle, though their provisions might be still
+unchallenged, ceased to represent the actual relations existing between the
+Powers. There was no longer a moral union of the Courts against a supposed
+French revolutionary State; on the contrary, when Eastern affairs reached
+their crisis, Russia detached itself from its Hapsburg ally, and definitely
+allied itself with France. If after the Peace of Adrianople any one Power
+stood isolated, it was Austria; and if Europe was threatened by renewed
+aggression, it was not under revolutionary leaders or with revolutionary
+watchwords, but as the result of an alliance between Charles X. and the
+Czar of Russia. After the Bourbon Cabinet had resolved to seek an extension
+of French territory at whatever sacrifice of the balance of power in the
+East, Europe could hardly expect that the Court of St. Petersburg would
+long reject the advantages offered to it. The frontiers of 1815 seemed
+likely to be obliterated by an enterprise which would bring Russia to the
+Danube and France to the Rhine. From this danger the settlement of 1815 was
+saved by the course of events that took place within France itself. The
+Revolution of 1830, insignificant in its immediate effects upon the French
+people, largely influenced the governments and the nations of Europe; and
+while within certain narrow limits it gave a stimulus to constitutional
+liberty, its more general result was to revive the union of the three
+Eastern Courts which had broken down in 1826, and to reunite the principal
+members of the Holy Alliance by the sense of a common interest against the
+Liberalism of the West.
+
+[Government of Charles X., 1824-1827.]
+
+In the person of Charles X. reaction and clericalism had ascended the
+French throne. The minister, Villele, who had won power in 1820 as the
+representative of the Ultra-Royalists, had indeed learnt wisdom while in
+office, and down to the death of Louis XVIII. in 1824 he had kept in check
+the more violent section of his party. But he now retained his post only at
+the price of compliance with the Court, and gave the authority of his name
+to measures which his own judgment condemned. It was characteristic of
+Charles X. and of the reactionaries around him that out of trifling matters
+they provoked more exasperation than a prudent Government would have
+aroused by changes of infinitely greater importance. Thus in a
+sacrilege-law which was introduced in 1825 they disgusted all reasonable
+men by attempting to revive the barbarous mediaeval punishment of amputation
+of the hand; and in a measure conferring some fractional rights upon the
+eldest son in cases of intestacy they alarmed the whole nation by a
+preamble declaring the French principle of the equal division of
+inheritances to be incompatible with monarchy. Coming from a Government
+which had thus already forfeited public confidence, a law granting the
+emigrants a compensation of L40,000,000 for their estates which had been
+confiscated during the Revolution excited the strongest opposition,
+although, apart from questions of equity, it benefited the nation by for
+ever setting at rest all doubt as to the title of the purchasers of the
+confiscated lands. The financial operations by which, in order to provide
+the vast sum allotted to the emigrants, the national debt was converted
+from a five per cent, to a three per cent, stock, alienated all
+stockholders and especially the powerful bankers of Paris. But more than
+any single legislative act, the alliance of the Government with the
+priestly order, and the encouragement given by it to monastic corporations,
+whose existence in France was contrary to law, offended the nation. The
+Jesuits were indicted before the law-courts by Montlosier, himself a
+Royalist and a member of the old noblesse. A vehement controversy sprang up
+between the ecclesiastics and their opponents, in which the Court was not
+spared. The Government, which had lately repealed the law of censorship,
+now restored it by edict. The climax of its unpopularity was reached; its
+hold upon the Chamber was gone, and the very measure by which Villele, when
+at the height of his power, had endeavoured to give permanence to his
+administration, proved its ruin. He had abolished the system of partial
+renovation, by which one-fifth of the Chamber of Deputies was annually
+returned, and substituted for it the English system of septennial
+Parliaments with general elections. In 1827 King Charles, believing his
+Ministers to be stronger in the country than in the Chamber, exercised his
+prerogative of dissolution. The result was the total defeat of the
+Government, and the return of an assembly in which the Liberal opposition
+outnumbered the partisans of the Court by three to one. Villele's Ministry
+now resigned. King Charles, unwilling to choose his successor from the
+Parliamentary majority, thought for a moment of violent resistance, but
+subsequently adopted other counsels, and, without sincerely intending to
+bow to the national will, called to office the Vicomte de Martignac, a
+member of the right centre, and the representative of a policy of
+conciliation and moderate reform (January 2, 1828).
+
+[Ministry of Martignac, 1828-29.]
+
+[Polignac Minister, Aug. 9, 1829.]
+
+It was not the fault of this Minister that the last chance of union between
+the French nation and the elder Bourbon line was thrown away. Martignac
+brought forward a measure of decentralisation conferring upon the local
+authorities powers which, though limited, were larger than they had
+possessed at any time since the foundation of the Consulate; and he
+appealed to the Liberal sections of the Chamber to assist him in winning an
+instalment of self-government which France might well have accepted with
+satisfaction. But the spirit of opposition within the Assembly was too
+strong for a coalition of moderate men, and the Liberals made the success
+of Martignac's plan impossible by insisting on concessions which the
+Minister was unable to grant. The reactionists were ready to combine with
+their opponents. King Charles himself was in secret antagonism to his
+Minister, and watched with malicious joy his failure to control the
+majority in the Chamber. Instead of throwing all his influence on to the
+side of Martignac, and rallying all doubtful forces by the pronounced
+support of the Crown, he welcomed Martignac's defeat as a proof of the
+uselessness of all concessions, and dismissed the Minister from office,
+declaring that the course of events had fulfilled his own belief in the
+impossibility of governing in accord with a Parliament. The names of the
+Ministers who were now called to power excited anxiety and alarm not only
+in France but throughout the political circles of Europe. They were the
+names of men known as the most violent and embittered partisans of
+reaction; men whose presence in the councils of the King could mean nothing
+but a direct attack upon the existing Parliamentary system of France. At
+the head was Jules Polignac, then French ambassador at London, a man
+half-crazed with religious delusions, who had suffered a long imprisonment
+for his share in Cadoudal's attempt to kill Napoleon, and on his return to
+France in 1814 had refused to swear to the Charta because it granted
+religious freedom to non-Catholics. Among the subordinate members of the
+Ministry were General Bourmont, who had deserted to the English at
+Waterloo, and La Bourdonnaye, the champion of the reactionary Terrorists in
+1816. [385]
+
+[Prospects in 1830. The Orleanists.]
+
+The Ministry having been appointed immediately after the close of the
+session of 1829, an interval of several months passed before they were
+brought face to face with the Chambers. During this interval the prospect
+of a conflict with the Crown became familiar to the public mind, though no
+general impression existed that an actual change of dynasty was close at
+hand. The Bonapartists were without a leader, Napoleon's son, their natural
+head, being in the power of the Austrian Court; the Republicans were
+neither numerous nor well organised, and the fatal memories of 1793 still
+weighed upon the nation; the great body of those who contemplated
+resistance to King Charles X. looked only to a Parliamentary struggle, or,
+in the last resort, to the refusal of payment of taxes in case of a breach
+of the Constitution. There was, however, a small and dexterous group of
+politicians which, at a distance from all the old parties, schemed for the
+dethronement of the reigning branch of the House of Bourbon, and for the
+elevation of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, to the throne. The chief of
+this intrigue was Talleyrand. Slighted and thwarted by the Court, the old
+diplomatist watched for the signs of a falling Government, and when the
+familiar omens met his view he turned to the quarter from which its
+successor was most likely to arise. Louis Philippe stood high in credit
+with all circles of Parliamentary Liberals. His history had been a strange
+and eventful one. He was the son of that Orleans who, after calling himself
+Egalite, and voting for the death of his cousin, Louis XVI., had himself
+perished during the Reign of Terror. Young Louis Philippe had been a member
+of the Jacobin Club, and had fought for the Republic at Jemappes. Then,
+exiled and reduced to penury, he had earned his bread by teaching
+mathematics in Switzerland, and had been a wanderer in the new as well as
+in the old world. After awhile his fortunes brightened. A marriage with the
+daughter of Ferdinand of Sicily restored him to those relations with the
+reigning houses of Europe which had been forfeited by his father, and
+inspired him with the hope of gaining a crown. During Napoleon's invasion
+of Spain he had caballed with politicians in that country who were inclined
+to accept a substitute for their absent sovereign; at another time he had
+entertained hopes of being made king of the Ionian Islands. After the peace
+of Paris, when the allied sovereigns and their ministers visited England,
+Louis Philippe was sent over by his father-in-law to intrigue among them
+against Murat, and in pursuance of this object he made himself acquainted
+not only with every foreign statesman then in London but with every leading
+English politician. He afterwards settled in France, and was reinstated in
+the vast possessions of the House of Orleans, which, though confiscated,
+had not for the most part been sold during the Revolution. His position at
+Paris under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. was a peculiar one. Without taking
+any direct part in politics or entering into any avowed opposition to the
+Court, he made his home, the Palais Royale, a gathering-place for all that
+was most distinguished in the new political and literary society of the
+capital; and while the Tuileries affected the pomp and the ceremoniousness
+of the old regime, the Duke of Orleans moved with the familiarity of a
+citizen among citizens. He was a clever, ready, sensible man, equal, as it
+seemed, to any practical task likely to come in his way, but in reality
+void of any deep insight, of any far-reaching aspiration, of any profound
+conviction. His affectation of a straightforward middle-class geniality
+covered a decided tendency towards intrigue and a strong love of personal
+power. Later events indeed gave rise to the belief that, while professing
+the utmost loyalty to Charles X., Louis Philippe had been scheming to oust
+him from his throne; but the evidence really points the other way, and
+indicates that, whatever secret hopes may have suggested themselves to the
+Duke, his strongest sentiment during the Revolution of 1830 was the fear of
+being driven into exile himself, and of losing his possessions. He was not
+indeed of a chivalrous nature; but when the Crown came in his way, he was
+guilty of no worse offence than some shabby evasions of promises.
+
+[Meeting and Prorogation of the Chambers, March, 1830.]
+
+Early in March, 1830, the French Chambers assembled after their recess. The
+speech of King Charles at the opening of the session was resolute and even
+threatening. It was answered by an address from the Lower House, requesting
+him to dismiss his Ministers. The deputation which presented this address
+was received by the King in a style that left no doubt as to his
+intentions, and on the following day the Chambers were prorogued for six
+months. It was known that they would not be permitted to meet again, and
+preparations for a renewed general election were at once made with the
+utmost vigour by both parties throughout France. The Court unsparingly
+applied all the means of pressure familiar to French governments; it
+moreover expected to influence public opinion by some striking success in
+arms or in diplomacy abroad. The negotiations with Russia for the
+acquisition of Belgium were still before the Cabinet, and a quarrel with
+the Dey of Algiers gave Polignac the opportunity of beginning a war of
+conquest in Africa. General Bourmont left the War Office, to wipe out the
+infamy still attaching to his name by a campaign against the Arabs; and the
+Government trusted that, even in the event of defeat at the elections, the
+nation at large would at the most critical moment be rallied to its side by
+an announcement of the capture of Algiers.
+
+[Polignac's project.]
+
+While the dissolution of Parliament was impending, Polignac laid before the
+King a memorial expressing his own views on the courses open to Government
+in case of the elections proving adverse. The Charta contained a clause
+which, in loose and ill-chosen language, declared it to be the function of
+the King "to make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the
+execution of the laws and for the security of the State." These words,
+which no doubt referred to the exercise of the King's normal and
+constitutional powers, were interpreted by Polignac as authorising the King
+to suspend the Constitution itself, if the Representative Assembly should
+be at variance with the King's Ministers. Polignac in fact entertained the
+same view of the relation between executive and deliberative bodies as
+those Jacobin directors who made the _coup-d'etat_ of Fructidor, 1797;
+and the measures which he ultimately adopted were, though in a softened
+form, those adopted by Barras and Lareveillere after the Royalist elections
+in the sixth year of the Republic. To suspend the Constitution was not, he
+suggested, to violate the Charta, for the Charta empowered the sovereign to
+issue the ordinances necessary for the security of the State; and who but
+the sovereign and his advisers could be the judges of this necessity? This
+was simple enough; there was nevertheless among Polignac's colleagues some
+doubt both as to the wisdom and as to the legality of his plans. King
+Charles who, with all his bigotry, was anxious not to violate the letter of
+the Charta, brooded long over the clause which defined the sovereign's
+powers. At length he persuaded himself that his Minister's interpretation
+was the correct one, accepted the resignation of the dissentients within
+the Cabinet, and gave his sanction to the course which Polignac
+recommended. [386]
+
+[Elections of 1830.]
+
+The result of the general election, which took place in June, surpassed all
+the hopes of the Opposition and all the fears of the Court. The entire body
+of Deputies which had voted the obnoxious address to the Crown in March was
+returned, and the partisans of Government lost in addition fifty seats. The
+Cabinet, which had not up to this time resolved upon the details of its
+action, now deliberated upon several projects submitted to it, and, after
+rejecting all plans that might have led to a compromise, determined to
+declare the elections null and void, to silence the press, and to supersede
+the existing electoral system by one that should secure the mastery of the
+Government both at the polling-booths and in the Chamber itself. All this
+was to be done by Royal Edict, and before the meeting of the new
+Parliament. The date fixed for the opening of the Chambers had been placed
+as late as possible in order to give time to General Bourmont to win the
+victory in Africa from which the Court expected to reap so rich a harvest
+of prestige. On the 9th of July news arrived that Algiers had fallen. The
+announcement, which was everywhere made with the utmost pomp, fell flat on
+the country. The conflict between the Court and the nation absorbed all
+minds, and the rapturous congratulations of Bishops and Prefects scarcely
+misled even the blind _coterie_ of the Tuileries. Public opinion was
+no doubt with the Opposition; King Charles, however, had no belief that the
+populace of Paris, which alone was to be dreaded as a fighting body, would
+take up arms on behalf of the middle-class voters and journalists against
+whom his Ordinances were to be directed. The populace neither read nor
+voted: why should it concern itself with constitutional law? Or why, in a
+matter that related only to the King and the Bourgeoisie, should it not
+take part with the King against this new and bastard aristocracy which
+lived on others' labour? Politicians who could not fight were troublesome
+only when they were permitted to speak and to write. There was force enough
+at the King's command to close the gates of the Chamber of Deputies, and to
+break up the printing-presses of the journals; and if King Louis XVI. had
+at last fallen by the hands of men of violence, it was only because he had
+made concessions at first to orators and politicians. Therefore, without
+dreaming that an armed struggle would be the immediate result of their
+action, King Charles and Polignac determined to prevent the meeting of the
+Chamber, and to publish, a week before the date fixed for its opening, the
+Edicts which were to silence the brawl of faction and to vindicate
+monarchical government in France.
+
+[The Ordinances, July 26, 1830.]
+
+Accordingly, on the 26th of July, a series of Ordinances appeared in the
+_Moniteur_, signed by the King and counter-signed by the Ministers.
+The first Ordinance forbade the publication of any journal without royal
+permission; the second dissolved the Chamber of Deputies; the third raised
+the property-qualification of voters, established a system of
+double-election, altered the duration of Parliaments, and re-enacted the
+obsolete clause of the Charta confining the initiative in all legislation
+to the Government. Other Ordinances convoked a Chamber to be elected under
+the new rules, and called to the Council of State a number of the most
+notorious Ultra-Royalists and fanatics in France. Taken together, the
+Ordinances left scarcely anything standing of the Constitutional and
+Parliamentary system of the day. The blow fell first on the press, and the
+first step in resistance was taken by the journalists of Paris, who, under
+the leadership of the young Thiers, editor of the _National_,
+published a protest declaring that they would treat the Ordinances as
+illegal, and calling upon the Chambers and nation to join in this
+resistance. For a while the journalists seemed likely to stand alone. Paris
+at large remained quiet, and a body of the recently elected Deputies, to
+whom the journalists appealed as representatives of the nation, proved
+themselves incapable of any action or decision whatsoever. It was not from
+these timid politicians, but from a body of obscure Republicans, that the
+impulse proceeded which overthrew the Bourbon throne. Unrepresented in
+Parliament and unrepresented in the press, there were a few active men who
+had handed down the traditions of 1792, and who, in sympathy with the
+Carbonari and other conspirators abroad, had during recent years founded
+secret societies in Paris, and enlisted in the Republican cause a certain
+number of workmen, of students, and of youths of the middle classes. While
+the journalists discussed legal means of resistance, and the Deputies
+awaited events, the Republican leaders met and determined upon armed
+revolt. They were assisted, probably without direct concert, by the
+printing firms and other employers of labour, who, in view of the general
+suspension of the newspapers, closed their establishments on the morning of
+July 27, and turned their workmen into the streets.
+
+[July 27.]
+
+[July 28.]
+
+Thus on the day after the appearance of the Edicts the aspect of Paris
+changed. Crowds gathered, and revolutionary cries were raised. Marmont, who
+was suddenly ordered to take command of the troops, placed them around the
+Tuileries, and captured two barricades which were erected in the
+neighbourhood; but the populace was not yet armed, and no serious conflict
+took place. In the evening Lafayette reached Paris, and the revolution had
+now a real, though not an avowed, leader. A body of his adherents met
+during the night at the office of the _National_, and, in spite of
+Thiers' resistance, decided upon a general insurrection. Thiers himself,
+who desired nothing but a legal and Parliamentary attack upon Charles X.,
+quitted Paris to await events. The men who had out-voted him placed
+themselves in communication with all the district committees of Paris, and
+began the actual work of revolt by distributing arms. On the morning of
+Wednesday, July 28th, the first armed bands attacked and captured the
+arsenals and several private depots of weapons and ammunition. Barricades
+were erected everywhere. The insurgents swelled from hundreds to thousands,
+and, converging on the old rallying-point of the Commune of Paris, they
+seized the Hotel de Ville, and hoisted the tricolor flag on its roof.
+Marmont wrote to the King, declaring the position to be most serious, and
+advising concession; he then put his troops in motion, and succeeded, after
+a severe conflict, in capturing several points of vantage, and in expelling
+the rebels from the Hotel de Ville.
+
+[July 29.]
+
+In the meantime the Deputies, who were assembled at the house of one of
+their number in pursuance of an agreement made on the previous day, gained
+sufficient courage to adopt a protest declaring that in spite of the
+Ordinances they were still the legal representatives of the nation. They
+moreover sent a deputation to Marmont, begging him to put a stop to the
+fighting, and offering their assistance in restoring order if the King
+would withdraw his Edicts. Marmont replied that he could do nothing without
+the King's command, but he despatched a second letter to St. Cloud, urging
+compliance. The only answer which he received was a command to concentrate
+his troops and to act in masses. The result of this was that the positions
+which had been won by hard fighting were abandoned before evening, and that
+the troops, famished and exhausted, were marched back through the streets
+of Paris to the Tuileries. On the march some fraternised with the people,
+others were surrounded and disarmed. All eastern Paris now fell into the
+hands of the insurgents; the middle-class, as in 1789 and 1792, remained
+inactive, and allowed the contest to be decided by the populace and the
+soldiery. Messages from the capital constantly reached St. Cloud, but the
+King so little understood his danger and so confidently reckoned on the
+victory of the troops in the Tuileries that he played whist as usual during
+the evening; and when the Duc de Mortemart, French Ambassador at St.
+Petersburg, arrived at nightfall, and pressed for an audience, the King
+refused to receive him until the next morning. When morning came, the march
+of the insurgents against the Tuileries began. Position after position fell
+into their hands. The regiments stationed in the Place Vendome abandoned
+their commander, and marched off to place themselves at the disposal of the
+Deputies. Marmont ordered the Swiss Guard, which had hitherto defended the
+Louvre, to replace them; and in doing so he left the Louvre for a moment
+without any garrison. The insurgents saw the building empty, and rushed
+into it. From the windows they commanded the Court of the Tuileries, where
+the troops in reserve were posted; and soon after mid-day all was over. A
+few isolated battalions fought and perished, but the mass of the soldiery
+with their commander fell back upon the Place de la Concorde, and then
+evacuated Paris. [387]
+
+The Duke of Orleans was all this time in hiding. He had been warned that
+the Court intended to arrest him, and, whether from fear of the Court or of
+the populace, he had secreted himself at a hunting-lodge in his woods,
+allowing none but his wife and his sister to know where he was concealed.
+His partisans, of whom the rich and popular banker, Laffitte, was the most
+influential among the Deputies, were watching for an opportunity to bring
+forward his name; but their chances of success seemed slight. The Deputies
+at large wished only for the withdrawal of the Ordinances, and were wholly
+averse from a change of dynasty. It was only through the obstinacy of King
+Charles himself, and as the result of a series of accidents, that the Crown
+passed from the elder Bourbon line. King Charles would not hear of
+withdrawing the Ordinances until the Tuileries had actually fallen; he then
+gave way and charged the Duc de Mortemart to form a new Ministry, drawn
+from the ranks of the Opposition. But instead of formally repealing the
+Edicts by a public Decree, he sent two messengers to Paris to communicate
+his change of purpose to the Deputies by word of mouth. The messengers
+betook themselves to the Hotel de Ville, where a municipal committee under
+Lafayette had been installed; and, when they could produce no written
+authority for their statements, they were referred by this committee to the
+general body of Deputies, which was now sitting at Laffitte's house. The
+Deputies also demanded a written guarantee. Laffitte and Thiers spoke in
+favour of the Duke of Orleans, but the Assembly at large was still willing
+to negotiate with Charles X., and only required the presence of the Duc de
+Mortemart himself, and a copy of the Decree repealing the Ordinances.
+
+[July 30.]
+
+It was now near midnight. The messengers returned to St. Cloud, and were
+not permitted to deliver their intelligence until the King awoke next
+morning. Charles then signed the necessary document, and Mortemart set out
+for Paris; but the night's delay had given the Orleanists time to act, and
+before the King was up Thiers had placarded the streets of Paris with a
+proclamation extolling Orleans as the prince devoted to the cause of the
+Revolution, as the soldier of Jemappes, and the only constitutional King
+now possible. Some hours after this manifesto had appeared the Deputies
+again assembled at Laffitte's house, and waited for the appearance of
+Mortemart. But they waited in vain. Mortemart's carriage was stopped on the
+road from St. Cloud, and he was compelled to make his way on foot by a long
+circuit and across a score of barricades. When he approached Laffitte's
+house, half dead with heat and fatigue, he found that the Deputies had
+adjourned to the Palais Bourbon, and, instead of following them, he ended
+his journey at the Luxemburg, where the Peers were assembled. His absence
+was turned to good account by the Orleanists. At the morning session the
+proposition was openly made to call Louis Philippe to power; and when the
+Deputies reassembled in the afternoon and the Minister still failed to
+present himself, it was resolved to send a body of Peers and Deputies to
+Louis Philippe to invite him to come to Paris and to assume the office of
+Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. No opposition was offered to this
+proposal in the House of Peers, and a deputation accordingly set out to
+search for Louis Philippe at his country house at Neuilly. The prince was
+not to be found; but his sister, who received the deputation, undertook
+that he should duly appear in Paris. She then communicated with her brother
+in his hiding-place, and induced him, in spite of the resistance of his
+wife, to set out for the capital. He arrived at the Palais Royale late on
+the night of the 30th. Early the next morning he received a deputation from
+the Assembly, and accepted the powers which they offered him. A
+proclamation was then published, announcing to the Parisians that in order
+to save the country from anarchy and civil war the Duke of Orleans had
+assumed the office of Lieutenant-General of the kingdom.
+
+[The Hotel de Ville.]
+
+But there existed another authority in Paris beside the Assembly of
+Representatives, and one that was not altogether disposed to permit Louis
+Philippe and his satellites to reap the fruits of the people's victory.
+Lafayette and the Municipal Committee, which occupied the Hotel de Ville,
+had transformed themselves into a provisional government, and sat
+surrounded by the armed mob which had captured the Tuileries two days
+before. No single person who had fought in the streets had risked his life
+for the sake of making Louis Philippe king; in so far as the Parisians had
+fought for any definite political idea, they had fought for the Republic.
+It was necessary to reconcile both the populace and the provisional
+government to the assumption of power by the new Regent; and with this
+object Louis Philippe himself proceeded to the Hotel de Ville, accompanied
+by an escort of Deputies and Peers. It was a hazardous moment when he
+entered the crowd on the Place de Greve; but Louis Philippe's readiness of
+speech stood him in good stead, and he made his way unhurt through the
+throng into the building, where Lafayette received him. Compliments and
+promises were showered upon this veteran of 1789, who presently appeared on
+a balcony and embraced Louis Philippe, while the Prince grasped the
+tricolor flag, the flag which had not waved in Paris since 1815. The
+spectacle was successful. The multitude shouted applause; and the few
+determined men who still doubted the sincerity of a Bourbon and demanded
+the proclamation of the Republic were put off with the promise of an
+ultimate appeal to the French people.
+
+[Charles X.]
+
+In the meantime Charles X. had withdrawn to Rambouillet, accompanied by the
+members of his family and by a considerable body of troops. Here the news
+reached him that Orleans had accepted from the Chambers the office of
+Lieutenant-General. It was a severe blow to the old king, who, while others
+doubted of Louis Philippe's loyalty, had still maintained his trust in this
+prince's fidelity. For a moment he thought of retiring beyond the Loire and
+risking a civil war; but the troops now began to disperse, and Charles,
+recognising that his cause was hopeless, abdicated together with the
+Dauphin in favour of his grandson the young Chambord, then called Duc de
+Bordeaux. He wrote to Louis Philippe, appointing him, as if on his own
+initiative, Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, and required him to proclaim
+Henry V. king, and to undertake the government during the new sovereign's
+minority. It is doubtful whether Louis Philippe had at this time formed any
+distinct resolve, and whether his answer to Charles X. was inspired by mere
+good nature or by conscious falsehood; for while replying officially that
+he would lay the king's letter before the Chambers, he privately wrote to
+Charles X. that he would retain his new office only until he could safely
+place the Duc de Bordeaux upon the throne. Having thus soothed the old
+man's pride, Louis Philippe requested him to hasten his departure from the
+neighbourhood of Paris; and when Charles ignored the message, he sent out
+some bands of the National Guard to terrify him into flight. This device
+succeeded, and the royal family, still preserving the melancholy ceremonial
+of a court, moved slowly through France towards the western coast. At
+Cherbourg they took ship and crossed to England, where they were received
+as private persons. Among the British nation at large the exiled Bourbons
+excited but little sympathy. They were, however, permitted to take up their
+abode in the palace of Holyrood, and here Charles X. resided for two years.
+But neither the climate nor the society of the Scottish capital offered any
+attraction to the old and failing chief of a fallen dynasty. He sought a
+more congenial shelter in Austria, and died at Goritz in November, 1836.
+
+[Louis Philippe made King, Aug. 7.]
+
+The first public notice of the abdication of King Charles was given by
+Louis Philippe in the Chamber of Deputies, which was convoked by him, as
+Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, on the 3rd of August. In addressing the
+Deputies, Louis Philippe stated that he had received a letter containing
+the abdication both of the King and of the Dauphin, but he uttered no
+single word regarding the Duc de Bordeaux, in whose favour both his
+grandfather and his uncle had renounced their rights. Had Louis Philippe
+mentioned that the abdications were in fact conditional, and had he
+declared himself protector of the Duc de Bordeaux during his minority,
+there is little doubt that the legitimate heir would have been peaceably
+accepted both by the Chamber and by Paris. Louis Philippe himself had up to
+this time done nothing that was inconsistent with the assumption of a mere
+Regency; the Chamber had not desired a change of dynasty; and, with the
+exception of Lafayette, the men who had actually made the Revolution bore
+as little goodwill to an Orleanist as to a Bourbon monarchy. But from the
+time when Louis Philippe passed over in silence the claims of the grandson
+of Charles X., his own accession to the throne became inevitable. It was
+left to an obscure Deputy to propose that the crown should be offered to
+Louis Philippe, accompanied by certain conditions couched in the form of
+modifications of the Charta. The proposal was carried in the Chamber on the
+7th of August, and the whole body of representatives marched to the Palais
+Royale to acquaint the prince with its resolution. Louis Philippe, after
+some conventional expressions of regret, declared that he could not resist
+the call of his country. When the Lower Chamber had thus disposed of the
+crown, the House of Peers, which had proved itself a nullity throughout the
+crisis, adopted the same resolution, and tendered its congratulations in a
+similar fashion. Two days later Louis Philippe took the oath to the Charta
+as modified by the Assembly, and was proclaimed King of the French.
+
+[Nature of the Revolution of 1830.]
+
+Thus ended a revolution, which, though greeted with enthusiasm at the time,
+has lost much of its splendour and importance in the later judgment of
+mankind. In comparison with the Revolution of 1789, the movement which
+overthrew the Bourbons in 1830 was a mere flutter on the surface. It was
+unconnected with any great change in men's ideas, and it left no great
+social or legislative changes behind it. Occasioned by a breach of the
+constitution on the part of the Executive Government, it resulted mainly in
+the transfer of administrative power from one set of politicians to
+another: the alterations which it introduced into the constitution itself
+were of no great importance. France neither had an absolute Government
+before 1830, nor had it a popular Government afterwards. Instead of a
+representative of divine right, attended by guards of nobles and counselled
+by Jesuit confessors, there was now a citizen-king, who walked about the
+streets of Paris with an umbrella under his arm and sent his sons to the
+public schools, but who had at heart as keen a devotion to dynastic
+interests as either of his predecessors, and a much greater capacity for
+personal rule. The bonds which kept the entire local administration of
+France in dependence upon the central authority were not loosened;
+officialism remained as strong as ever; the franchise was still limited to
+a mere fraction of the nation. On the other hand, within the administration
+itself the change wrought by the July Revolution was real and lasting. It
+extinguished the political power of the clerical interest. Not only were
+the Bishops removed from the House of Peers, but throughout all departments
+of Government the influence of the clergy, which had been so strong under
+Charles X., vanished away. The State took a distinctly secular colour. The
+system of public education was regulated with such police-like
+exclusiveness that priests who insisted upon opening schools of their own
+for Catholic teaching were enabled to figure as champions of civil liberty
+and of freedom of opinion against despotic power. The noblesse lost
+whatever political influence it had regained during the Restoration. The
+few surviving Regicides who had been banished in 1815 were recalled to
+France, among them the terrorist Barrere, who was once more returned to the
+Assembly. But the real winners in the Revolution of 1830 were not the men
+of extremes, but the middle-class of France. This was the class which Louis
+Philippe truly represented; and the force which for eighteen years kept
+Louis Philippe on the throne was the middle-class force of the National
+Guard of Paris. Against this sober, prosaic, unimaginative power there
+struggled the hot and restless spirit which had been let loose by the
+overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty, and which, fired at once with the
+political ideal of a Republic, with dreams of the regeneration of Europe by
+French armies, and with the growing antagonism between the labouring class
+and the owners of property, threatened for awhile to overthrow the
+newly-constituted monarchy in France, and to plunge Europe into war. The
+return of the tricolor flag, the long-silenced strains of the Republic and
+the Empire, the sense of victory with which men on the popular side
+witnessed the expulsion of the dynasty which had been forced upon France
+after Waterloo, revived that half-romantic military ardour which had
+undertaken the liberation of Europe in 1792. France appeared once more in
+the eyes of enthusiasts as the deliverer of nations. The realities of the
+past epoch of French military aggression, its robberies, its corruption,
+the execrations of its victims, were forgotten; and when one people after
+another took up the shout of liberty that was raised in Paris, and
+insurrections broke out in every quarter of Europe, it was with difficulty
+that Louis Philippe and the few men of caution about him could prevent the
+French nation from rushing into war.
+
+[Affairs in Belgium.]
+
+The State first affected by the events of July was the kingdom of the
+Netherlands. The creation of this kingdom, in which the Belgian provinces
+formerly subject to Austria were united with Holland to serve as an
+effective barrier against French aggression on the north, had been one of
+Pitt's most cherished schemes, and it had been carried into effect ten
+years after his death by the Congress of Vienna. National and religious
+incongruities had been little considered by the statesmen of that day, and
+at the very moment of union the Catholic bishops of Belgium had protested
+against a constitution which gave equal toleration to all religions under
+the rule of a Protestant King. The Belgians had been uninterruptedly united
+with France for the twenty years preceding 1814; the French language was
+not only the language of their literature, but the spoken language of the
+upper classes; and though the Flemish portion of the population was nearly
+related to the Dutch, this element had not then asserted itself with the
+distinctness and energy which it has since developed. The antagonism
+between the northern and the southern Netherlands, though not insuperable,
+was sufficiently great to make a harmonious union between the two countries
+a work of difficulty, and the Government of The Hague had not taken the
+right course to conciliate its opponents. The Belgians, though more
+numerous, were represented by fewer members in the National Assembly than
+the Dutch. Offices were filled by strangers from Holland; finance was
+governed by a regard for Dutch interests; and the Dutch language was made
+the official language for the whole kingdom. But the chief grievances were
+undoubtedly connected with the claims of the clerical party in Belgium to a
+monopoly of spiritual power and the exclusive control of education. The one
+really irreconcilable enemy of the Protestant House of Orange was the
+Church; and the governing impulse in the conflicts which preceded the
+dissolution of the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830 sprang from the same
+clerical interest which had thrown Belgium into revolt against the Emperor
+Joseph forty years before. There was again seen the same strange phenomenon
+of a combination between the Church and a popular or even revolutionary
+party. For the sake of an alliance against a constitution distasteful to
+both, the clergy of Belgium accepted the democratic principles of the
+political Opposition, and the Opposition consented for a while to desist
+from their attacks upon the Papacy. The contract was faithfully observed on
+both sides until the object for which it was made was attained. [388]
+
+[Belgian Revolution, August, 1830.]
+
+For some months before the Revolution of July, 1830, the antagonism between
+the Belgians and their Government had been so violent that no great shock
+from outside was necessary to produce an outbreak. The convulsions of Paris
+were at once felt at Brussels, and on the 25th of August the performance of
+a revolutionary opera in that city gave the signal for the commencement of
+insurrection. From the capital the rebellion spread from town to town
+throughout the southern Netherlands. The King summoned the Estates General,
+and agreed to the establishment of an administration for Belgium separate
+from that of Holland: but the storm was not allayed; and the appearance of
+a body of Dutch troops at Brussels was sufficient to dispel the expectation
+of a peaceful settlement. Barricades were erected; a conflict took place in
+the streets; and the troops, unable to carry the city by assault, retired
+to the outskirts and kept up a desultory attack for several days. They then
+withdrew, and a provisional government, which was immediately established,
+declared the independence of Belgium. For a moment there appeared some
+possibility that the Crown Prince of Holland, who had from the first
+assumed the part of mediator, might be accepted as sovereign of the
+newly-formed State; but the growing violence of the insurrection, the
+activity of French emissaries and volunteers, and the bombardment of
+Antwerp by the Dutch soldiers who garrisoned its citadel, made an end of
+all such hopes. Belgium had won its independence, and its connection with
+the House of Orange could be re-established only by force of arms.
+
+[France and the Belgian Revolution.]
+
+[France and England.]
+
+The accomplishment of this revolution in one of the smallest Continental
+States threatened to involve all Europe in war. Though not actually
+effected under the auspices of a French army, it was undoubtedly to some
+extent effected in alliance with the French revolutionary party. It broke
+up a kingdom established by the European Treaties of 1814; and it was so
+closely connected with the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy as to be
+scarcely distinguishable from those cases in which the European Powers had
+pledged themselves to call their armies into the field. Louis Philippe,
+however, had been recognised by most of the European Courts as the only
+possible alternative to a French Republic; and a general disposition
+existed to second any sincere effort that should be made by him to prevent
+the French nation from rushing into war. This was especially the case with
+England; and it was to England that Louis Philippe turned for co-operation
+in the settlement of the Belgian question. Louis Philippe himself had every
+possible reason for desiring to keep the peace. If war broke out, France
+would be opposed to all the Continental Powers together. Success was in the
+last degree improbable; it could only be hoped for by a revival of the
+revolutionary methods and propaganda of 1793; and failure, even for a
+moment, would certainly cost him his throne, and possibly his life. His
+interest no less than his temperament made him the strenuous, though
+concealed, opponent of the war-party in the Assembly; and he found in the
+old diplomatist who had served alike under the Bourbons, the Republic, and
+the Empire, an ally thoroughly capable of pursuing his own wise though
+unpopular policy of friendship and co-operation with England. Talleyrand,
+while others were crying for a revenge for Waterloo, saw that the first
+necessity for France was to rescue it from its isolation; and as at the
+Congress of Vienna he had detached Austria and England from the two
+northern Courts, so now, before attempting to gain any extension of
+territory, he sought to make France safe against the hostility of the
+Continent by allying it with at least one great Power. Russia had become an
+enemy instead of a friend. The expulsion of the Bourbons had given mortal
+offence to the Czar Nicholas, and neither Austria nor Prussia was likely to
+enter into close relations with a Government founded upon revolution.
+England alone seemed a possible ally, and it was to England that the French
+statesman of peace turned in the Belgian crisis. Talleyrand, now nearly
+eighty years old, came as ambassador to London, where he had served in
+1792. He addressed himself to Wellington and to the new King, William IV.,
+assuring them that, under the Government of Louis Philippe, France would
+not seek to use the Belgian revolution for its own aggrandisement; and,
+with his old aptness in the invention of general principles to suit a
+particular case, he laid down the principle of non-intervention as one that
+ought for the future to govern the policy of Europe. His efforts were
+successful. So complete an understanding was established between France and
+England on the Belgian question, that all fear of an armed intervention of
+the Eastern Courts on behalf of the King of Holland, which would have
+rendered a war with France inevitable, passed away. The regulation of
+Belgian affairs was submitted to a Conference at London. Hostilities were
+stopped, and the independence of the new kingdom was recognised in
+principle by the Conference before the end of the year. A Protocol defining
+the frontiers of Belgium and Holland, and apportioning to each State its
+share in the national debt, was signed by the representatives of the Powers
+in January, 1831. [389]
+
+[Leopold elected King, June 4.]
+
+Thus far, a crisis which threatened the peace of Europe had been surmounted
+with unexpected ease. But the first stage of the difficulty alone was
+passed; it still remained for the Powers to provide a king for Belgium, and
+to gain the consent of the Dutch and Belgian Governments to the territorial
+arrangements drawn up for them. The Belgians themselves, with whom a
+connection with France was popular, were disposed to elect as their
+sovereign the Duc de Nemours, second son of Louis Philippe; and although
+Louis Philippe officially refused his sanction to this scheme, which in the
+eyes of all Europe would have turned Belgium into a French dependency, he
+privately encouraged its prosecution after a Bonapartist candidate, the son
+of Eugene Beauharnais, had appeared in the field. The result was that the
+Duc de Nemours was elected king on the 3rd of February, 1831. Against this
+appointment the Conference of the Powers at London had already pronounced
+its veto, and the British Government let it be understood that it would
+resist any such extension of French influence by force. Louis Philippe now
+finally refused the crown for his son, and, the Bonapartist candidate being
+withdrawn, the two rival Powers agreed in recommending Prince Leopold of
+Saxe-Coburg, on the understanding that, if elected King of Belgium, he
+should marry a daughter of Louis Philippe. The Belgians fell in with the
+advice given them, and elected Leopold on the 4th of June. He accepted the
+crown, subject to the condition that the London Conference should modify in
+favour of Belgium some of the provisions relating to the frontiers and to
+the finances of the new State which had been laid down by the Conference,
+and which the Belgian Government had hitherto refused to accept.
+
+[Settlement of the Belgian frontier.]
+
+The difficulty of arranging the Belgian frontier arose principally from the
+position of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. This territory, though subject to
+Austria before the French Revolution, had always been treated as distinct
+from the body of the Austrian Netherlands. When, at the peace of 1814, it
+was given to the King of Holland in substitution for the ancient
+possessions of his family at Nassau, its old character as a member of the
+German federal union was restored to it, so that the King of Holland in
+respect of this portion of his dominions became a German prince, and the
+fortress of Luxemburg, the strongest in Europe after Gibraltar, was liable
+to occupation by German troops. The population of the Duchy had, however,
+joined the Belgians in their revolt, and, with the exception of the
+fortress itself, the territory had passed into possession of the Belgian
+Government. In spite of this actual overthrow of Dutch rule, the Conference
+of London had attached such preponderating importance to the military and
+international relations of Luxemburg that it had excluded the whole of the
+Duchy from the new Belgian State, and declared it still to form part of the
+dominions of the King of Holland. The first demand of Leopold was for the
+reversal or modification of this decision, and the Powers so far gave way
+as to substitute for the declaration of January a series of articles, in
+which the question of Luxemburg was reserved for future settlement. The
+King of Holland had assented to the January declaration; on hearing of its
+abandonment, he took up arms, and threw fifty thousand men into Belgium.
+Leopold appealed to France for assistance, and a French army immediately
+crossed the frontier. The Dutch now withdrew, and the French in their turn
+were recalled, after Leopold had signed a treaty undertaking to raze the
+fortifications of five towns on his southern border. The Conference again
+took up its work, and produced a third scheme, in which the territory of
+Luxemburg was divided between Holland and Belgium. This was accepted by
+Belgium, and rejected by Holland. The consequence was that a treaty was
+made between Leopold and the Powers; and at the beginning of 1832 the
+kingdom of Belgium, as defined by the third award of the Conference, was
+recognised by all the Courts, Lord Palmerston on behalf of England
+resolutely refusing to France even the slightest addition of territory, on
+the ground that, if annexations once began, all security for the
+continuance of peace would be at an end. On this wise and firm policy the
+concert of Europe in the establishment of the Belgian kingdom was
+successfully maintained; and it only remained for the Western Powers to
+overcome the resistance of the King of Holland, who still held the citadel
+of Antwerp and declined to listen either to reason or authority. A French
+army corps was charged with the task of besieging the citadel; an English
+fleet blockaded the river Scheldt. After a severe bombardment the citadel
+surrendered. Hostilities ceased, and negotiations for a definitive
+settlement recommenced. As, however, the Belgians were in actual occupation
+of all Luxemburg with the exception of the fortress, they had no motive to
+accelerate a settlement which would deprive them of part of their existing
+possessions; on the other hand, the King of Holland held back through mere
+obstinacy. Thus the provisional state of affairs was prolonged for year
+after year, and it was not until April, 1839, that the final Treaty of
+Peace between Belgium and Holland was executed.
+
+[Affairs of Poland.]
+
+The consent of the Eastern Powers to the overthrow of the kingdom of the
+United Netherlands, and to the establishment of a State based upon a
+revolutionary movement, would probably have been harder to gain if in the
+autumn of 1830 Russia had been free to act with all its strength. But at
+this moment an outbreak took place in Poland, which required the
+concentration of all the Czar's forces within his own border. The conflict
+was rather a war of one armed nation against another than the insurrection
+of a people against its government. Poland--that is to say, the territory
+which had formerly constituted the Grand Duchy of Warsaw--had, by the
+treaties of 1814, been established as a separate kingdom, subject to the
+Czar of Russia, but not forming part of the Russian Empire. It possessed an
+administration and an army of its own, and the meetings of its Diet gave to
+it a species of parliamentary government to which there was nothing
+analogous within Russia proper. During the reign of Alexander the
+constitutional system of Poland had, on the whole, been respected; and
+although the real supremacy of an absolute monarch at St. Petersburg had
+caused the Diet to act as a body in opposition to the Russian Government,
+the personal connection existing between Alexander and the Poles had
+prevented any overt rebellion during his own life-time. But with the
+accession of Nicholas all such individual sympathy passed away, and the
+hard realities of the actual relation between Poland and the Court of
+Russia came into full view. In the conspiracies of 1825 a great number of
+Poles were implicated. Eight of these persons, after a preliminary inquiry,
+were placed on trial before the Senate at Warsaw, which, in spite of strong
+evidence of their guilt, acquitted them. Pending the decision, Nicholas
+declined to convoke the Diet: he also stationed Russian troops in Poland,
+and violated the constitution by placing Russians in all branches of the
+administration. Even without these grievances the hostility of the mass of
+the Polish noblesse to Russia would probably have led sooner or later to
+insurrection. The peasantry, ignorant and degraded, were but instruments in
+the hands of their territorial masters. In so far as Poland had rights of
+self-government, these rights belonged almost exclusively to the nobles, or
+landed proprietors, a class so numerous that they have usually been
+mistaken in Western Europe for the Polish nation itself. The so-called
+emancipation of the serfs, effected by Napoleon after wresting the Grand
+Duchy of Warsaw from Prussia in 1807, had done little for the mass of the
+population; for, while abolishing the legal condition of servitude,
+Napoleon had given the peasant no vestige of proprietorship in his holding,
+and had consequently left him as much at the mercy of his landlord as he
+was before. The name of freedom appears in fact to have worked actual
+injury to the peasant; for in the enjoyment of a pretended power of free
+contract he was left without that protection of the officers of State
+which, under the Prussian regime from 1795 to 1807, had shielded him from
+the tyranny of his lord. It has been the fatal, the irremediable bane of
+Poland that its noblesse, until too late, saw no country, no right, no law,
+outside itself. The very measures of interference on the part of the Czar
+which this caste resented as unconstitutional were in part directed against
+the abuse of its own privileges; and although in 1830 a section of the
+nobles had learnt the secret of their country's fall, and were prepared to
+give the serf the real emancipation of proprietorship, no universal impulse
+worked in this direction, nor could the wrong of ages be undone in the
+tumult of war and revolution.
+
+[Insurrection at Warsaw, Nov. 29.]
+
+A sharp distinction existed between the narrow circle of the highest
+aristocracy of Poland and the mass of the poor and warlike noblesse. The
+former, represented by men like Czartoryski, the friend of Alexander I. and
+ex-Minister of Russia, understood the hopelessness of any immediate
+struggle with the superior power, and advocated the politic development of
+such national institutions as were given to Poland by the constitution of
+1815, institutions which were certainly sufficient to preserve Poland from
+absorption by Russia, and to keep alive the idea of the ultimate
+establishment of its independence. It was among the lesser nobility, among
+the subordinate officers of the army and the population of Warsaw itself,
+who jointly formed the so-called democratic party, that the spirit of
+revolt was strongest. Plans for an outbreak had been made during the
+Turkish war of 1828; but unhappily this opportunity, which might have been
+used with fatal effect against Russia, was neglected, and it was left for
+the French Revolution of 1830 to kindle an untimely and ineffective flame.
+The memory of Napoleon's campaigns and the wild voices of French democracy
+filled the patriots at Warsaw with vain hopes of a military union with
+western Liberalism, and overpowered the counsels of men who understood the
+state of Europe better. Revolt broke out on the 29th of November, 1830. The
+Polish regiments in Warsaw joined the insurrection, and the Russian troops,
+under the Grand Duke Constantine, withdrew from the capital, where their
+leader had narrowly escaped with his life. [390]
+
+[Attempted negotiation with the Czar.]
+
+The Government of Poland had up to this time been in the hands of a Council
+nominated by the Czar as King of Poland, and controlled by instructions
+from a secretary at St. Petersburg. The chief of the Council was Lubecki, a
+Pole devoted to the Emperor Nicholas. On the victory of the insurrection at
+Warsaw, the Council was dissolved and a provisional Government installed.
+Though the revolt was the work of the so-called democratic party, the
+influence of the old governing families of the highest aristocracy was
+still so great that power was by common consent placed in their hands.
+Czartoryski became president, and the policy adopted by himself and his
+colleagues was that of friendly negotiation with Russia. The insurrection
+of November was treated not as the beginning of a national revolt, but as a
+mere disturbance occasioned by unconstitutional acts of the Government. So
+little did the committee understand the character of the Emperor Nicholas,
+as to imagine that after the expulsion of his soldiers and the overthrow of
+his Ministers at Warsaw he would peaceably make the concessions required of
+him, and undertake for the future faithfully to observe the Polish
+constitution. Lubecki and a second official were sent to St. Petersburg to
+present these demands, and further (though this was not seriously intended)
+to ask that the constitution should be introduced into all the Russian
+provinces which had once formed part of the Polish State. The reception
+given to the envoys at the frontier was of an ominous character. They were
+required to describe themselves as officers about to present a report to
+the Czar, inasmuch as no representatives of rebels in arms could be
+received into Russia. Lubecki appears now to have shaken the dust of Poland
+off his feet; his colleague pursued his mission, and was admitted to the
+Czar's presence. Nicholas, while expressing himself in language of injured
+tenderness, and disclaiming all desire to punish the innocent with the
+guilty, let it be understood that Poland had but two alternatives,
+unconditional submission or annihilation. The messenger who in the
+meanwhile carried back to Warsaw the first despatches of the envoy reported
+that the roads were already filled with Russian regiments moving on their
+prey.
+
+[Diebitsch invades Poland, Feb. 1831.]
+
+Six weeks of precious time were lost through the illusion of the Polish
+Government that an accommodation with the Emperor Nicholas was possible.
+Had the insurrection at Warsaw been instantly followed by a general levy
+and the invasion of Lithuania, the resources of this large province might
+possibly have been thrown into the scale against Russia. Though the mass of
+the Lithuanian population, in spite or several centuries of union with
+Poland, had never been assimilated to the dominant race, and remained in
+language and creed more nearly allied to the Russians than the Poles, the
+nobles formed an integral part of the Polish nation, and possessed
+sufficient power over their serfs to drive them into the field to fight for
+they knew not what. The Russian garrisons in Lithuania were not strong, and
+might easily have been overpowered by a sudden attack. When once the
+population of Warsaw had risen in arms against Nicholas, the only
+possibility of success lay in the extension of the revolt over the whole of
+the semi-Polish provinces, and in a general call to arms. But beside other
+considerations which disinclined the higher aristocracy at Warsaw to
+extreme measures, they were influenced by a belief that the Powers of
+Europe might intervene on behalf of the constitution of the Polish kingdom
+as established by the treaty of Vienna; while, if the struggle passed
+beyond the borders of that kingdom, it would become a revolutionary
+movement to which no Court could lend its support. It was not until the
+envoy returned from St. Petersburg bearing the answer of the Emperor
+Nicholas that the democratic party carried all before it, and all hopes of
+a peaceful compromise vanished away. The Diet then passed a resolution
+declaring that the House of Romanoff had forfeited the Polish crown, and
+preparations began for a struggle for life or death with Russia. But the
+first moments when Russia stood unguarded and unready had been lost beyond
+recall. Troops had thronged westwards into Lithuania; the garrisons in the
+fortresses had been raised to their full strength; and in February, 1831,
+Diebitsch took up the offensive, and crossed the Polish frontier with a
+hundred and twenty thousand men.
+
+[Campaign in Poland, 1831.]
+
+[Capture of Warsaw, Sept. 8, 1831.]
+
+The Polish army, though far inferior in numbers to the enemy which it had
+to meet, was no contemptible foe. Among its officers there were many who
+had served in Napoleon's campaigns; it possessed, however, no general
+habituated to independent command; and the spirit of insubordination and
+self-will, which had wrought so much ruin in Poland, was still ready to
+break out when defeat had impaired the authority of the nominal chiefs. In
+the first encounters the advancing Russian army was gallantly met; and,
+although the Poles were forced to fall back upon Warsaw, the losses
+sustained by Diebitsch were so serious that he had to stay his operations
+and to wait for reinforcements. In March the Poles took up the offensive
+and surprised several isolated divisions of the enemy; their general,
+however, failed to push his advantages with the necessary energy and
+swiftness; the junction of the Russians was at length effected, and on the
+26th of May the Poles were defeated after obstinate resistance in a pitched
+battle at Ostrolenka. Cholera now broke out in the Russian camp. Both
+Diebitsch and the Grand Duke Constantine were carried off in the midst of
+the campaign, and some months more were added to the struggle of Poland,
+hopeless as this had now become. Incursions were made into Lithuania and
+Podolia, but without result. Paskiewitch, the conqueror of Kars, was called
+up to take the post left vacant by the death of his rival. New masses of
+Russian troops came in place of those who had perished in battle and in the
+hospitals; and while the Governments of Western Europe lifted no hand on
+behalf of Polish independence, Prussia, alarmed lest the revolt should
+spread into its own Polish provinces, assisted the operations of the
+Russian general by supplying stores and munition of war. Blow after blow
+fell upon the Polish cause. Warsaw itself became the prey of disorder,
+intrigue, and treachery; and at length the Russian army made its entrance
+into the capital, and the last soldiers of Poland laid down their arms, or
+crossed into Prussian or Austrian territory. The revolt had been rashly and
+unwisely begun: its results were fatal and lamentable. The constitution of
+Poland was abolished; it ceased to be a separate kingdom, and became a
+province of the Russian Empire. Its defenders were exiles over the face of
+Europe or forgotten in Siberia. All that might have been won by the gradual
+development of its constitutional liberties without breach with the Czar's
+sovereignty was sacrificed. The future of Poland, like that of Russia
+itself, now depended on the enlightenment and courage of the Imperial
+Government, and on that alone. The very existence of a Polish nationality
+and language seemed for a while to be threatened by the measures of
+repression that followed the victory of 1831: and if it be true that
+Russian autocracy has at length done for the Polish peasants what their
+native masters during centuries of ascendency refused to do, this
+emancipation would probably not have come the later for the preservation of
+some relics of political independence, nor would it have had the less value
+if unaccompanied by the proscription of so great a part of that class which
+had once been held to constitute the Polish nation. [391]
+
+[Insurrection in the Papal States, Feb., 1831.]
+
+During the conflict on the banks of the Vistula, the attitude of the
+Austrian Government had been one of watchful neutrality. Its own Polish
+territory was not seriously menaced with disturbance, for in a great part
+of Galicia the population, being of Ruthenian stock and belonging to the
+Greek Church, had nothing in common with the Polish and Catholic noblesse
+of their province, and looked back upon the days of Polish dominion as a
+time of suffering and wrong. Austria's danger in any period of European
+convulsion lay as yet rather on the side of Italy than on the East, and the
+vigour of its policy in that quarter contrasted with the equanimity with
+which it watched the struggle of its Slavic neighbours. Since the
+suppression of the Neapolitan constitutional movement in 1821, the
+Carbonari and other secret societies of Italy had lost nothing of their
+activity. Their head-quarters had been removed from Southern Italy to the
+Papal States, and the numerous Italian exiles in France and elsewhere kept
+up a busy communication at once with French revolutionary leaders like
+Lafayette and with the enemies of the established governments in Italy
+itself. The death of Pope Pius VIII., on November 30, 1830, and the
+consequent paralysis of authority within the Ecclesiastical States, came at
+an opportune moment; assurances of support arrived from Paris; and the
+Italian leaders resolved upon a general insurrection throughout the minor
+Principalities on the 5th of February, 1831. Anticipating the signal,
+Menotti, chief of a band of patriots at Modena, who appears to have been
+lured on by the Grand Duke himself, assembled his partisans on February 3.
+He was overpowered and imprisoned; but the outbreak of the insurrection in
+Bologna, and its rapid extension over the northern part of the Papal
+States, soon caused the Grand Duke to fly to Austrian territory, carrying
+his prisoner Menotti with him, whom he subsequently put to death. The new
+Pope, Gregory XVI., had scarcely been elected when the report reached him
+that Bologna had declared the temporal power of the Papacy to be at an end.
+Uncertain of the character of the revolt, he despatched Cardinal Benvenuti
+northwards, to employ conciliation or force as occasion might require. The
+Legate fell into the hands of the insurgents; the revolt spread southwards;
+and Gregory, now hopeless of subduing it by the forces at his own command,
+called upon Austria for assistance. [392]
+
+[Attitude of France.]
+
+The principle which, since the Revolution of July, the government of France
+had repeatedly laid down as the future basis of European politics was that
+of non-intervention. It had disclaimed any purpose of interfering with the
+affairs of its neighbours, and had required in return that no foreign
+intervention should take place in districts which, like Belgium and Savoy,
+adjoined its own frontier. But there existed no real unity of purpose in
+the councils of Louis Philippe. The Ministry had one voice for the
+representatives of foreign powers, another for the Chamber of Deputies, and
+another for Lafayette and the bands of exiles and conspirators who were
+under his protection. The head of the government at the beginning of 1831
+was Laffitte, a weak politician, dominated by revolutionary sympathies and
+phrases, but incapable of any sustained or resolute action, and equally
+incapable of resisting Louis Philippe after the King had concluded his
+performance of popular leader, and assumed his real character as the wary
+and self-seeking chief of a reigning house. Whether the actual course of
+French policy would be governed by the passions of the streets or by the
+timorousness of Louis Philippe was from day to day a matter of conjecture.
+The official answer given to the inquiries of the Austrian ambassador as to
+the intentions of France in case of an Austrian intervention in Italy was,
+that such intervention might be tolerated in Parma and Modena, which
+belonged to sovereigns immediately connected with the Hapsburgs, but that
+if it was extended to the Papal States war with France would be probable,
+and if extended to Piedmont, certain. On this reply Metternich, who saw
+Austria's own dominion in Italy once more menaced by the success of an
+insurrectionary movement, had to form his decision. He could count on the
+support of Russia in case of war; he knew well the fears of Louis Philippe,
+and knew that he could work on these fears both by pointing to the presence
+of the young Louis Bonaparte and his brother with the Italian insurgents as
+evidence of the Bonapartist character of the movement, and by hinting that
+in the last resort he might himself let loose upon France Napoleon's son,
+the Duke of Reichstadt, now growing to manhood at Vienna, before whom Louis
+Philippe's throne would have collapsed as speedily as that of Louis XVIII.
+in 1814. Where weakness existed, Metternich was quick to divine it and to
+take advantage of it. He rightly gauged Louis Philippe. Taking at their
+true value the threats of the French Government, he declared that it was
+better for Austria to fall, if necessary, by war than by revolution; and,
+resolving at all hazards to suppress the Roman insurrection, he gave orders
+to the Austrian troops to enter the Papal States.
+
+[Austrians suppress Roman revolt, March, 1831.]
+
+[Casimir Perier, March, 1831.]
+
+The military resistance which the insurgents could offer to the advance of
+the Pope's Austrian deliverers was insignificant, and order was soon
+restored. But all Europe expected the outbreak of war between Austria and
+France. The French ambassador at Constantinople had gone so far as to offer
+the Sultan an offensive and defensive alliance, and to urge him to make
+preparations for an attack upon both Austria and Russia on their southern
+frontiers. A despatch from the ambassador reached Paris describing the
+warlike overtures he had made to the Porte. Louis Philippe saw that if this
+despatch reached the hands of Laffitte and the war party in the Council of
+Ministers the preservation of peace would be almost impossible. In concert
+with Sebastiani, the Foreign Minister, he concealed the despatch from
+Laffitte. The Premier discovered the trick that had been played upon him,
+and tendered his resignation. It was gladly accepted by Louis Philippe.
+Laffitte quitted office, begging pardon of God and man for the part that he
+had taken in raising Louis Philippe to the throne. His successor was
+Casimir Perier, a man of very different mould; resolute, clear-headed, and
+immovably true to his word; a constitutional statesman of the strictest
+type, intolerant of any species of disorder, and a despiser of popular
+movements, but equally proof against royal intrigues, and as keen to
+maintain the constitutional system of France against the Court on one side
+and the populace on the other as he was to earn for France the respect of
+foreign powers by the abandonment of a policy of adventure, and the steady
+adherence to the principles of international obligation which he had laid
+down. Under his firm hand the intrigues of the French Government with
+foreign revolutionists ceased; it was felt throughout Europe that peace was
+still possible, and that if war was undertaken by France it would be
+undertaken only under conditions which would make any moral union of all
+the great Powers against France impossible. The Austrian expedition into
+the Papal States had already begun, and the revolutionary Government had
+been suppressed; the most therefore that Casimir Perier could demand was
+that the evacuation of the occupied territory should take place as soon as
+possible, and that Austria should add its voice to that of the other Powers
+in urging the Papal Government to reform its abuses. Both demands were
+granted. For the first time Austria appeared as the advocate of something
+like a constitutional system. A Conference held at Rome agreed upon a
+scheme of reforms to be recommended to the Pope; the prospects of peace
+grew daily fairer; and in July, 1831, the last Austrian soldiers quitted
+the Ecclesiastical States. [393]
+
+[Second Austrian intervention, Jan., 1832.]
+
+[French occupy Ancona, February, 1832.]
+
+It now remained to be seen whether Pope Gregory and his cardinals had the
+intelligence and good-will necessary for carrying out the reforms on the
+promise of which France had abstained from active intervention. If any such
+hopes existed they were doomed to speedy disappointment. The apparatus of
+priestly maladministration was restored in all its ancient deformity. An
+amnesty which had been promised by the Legate Benvenuti was disregarded,
+and the Pope set himself to strengthen his authority by enlisting new bands
+of ruffians and adventurers under the standard of St. Peter. Again
+insurrection broke out, and again at the Pope's request the Austrians
+crossed the frontier (January, 1832). Though their appearance was fatal to
+the cause of liberty, they were actually welcomed as protectors in towns
+which had been exposed to the tender mercies of the Papal condottieri.
+There was no disorder, no severity, where the Austrian commandants held
+sway; but their mere presence in central Italy was a threat to European
+peace; and Casimir Perier was not the man to permit Austria to dominate in
+Italy at its will. Without waiting for negotiations, he despatched a French
+force to Ancona, and seized this town before the Austrians could approach
+it. The rival Powers were now face to face in Italy; but Perier had no
+intention of forcing on war if his opponent was still willing to keep the
+peace. Austria accepted the situation, and made no attempt to expel the
+French from the position they had seized. Casimir Perier, now on his
+death-bed, defended the step that he had taken against the remonstrances of
+ambassadors and against the protests of the Pope, and declared the presence
+of the French at Ancona to be no incentive to rebellion, but the mere
+assertion of the rights of a Power which had as good a claim to be in
+central Italy as Austria itself. Had his life been prolonged, he would
+probably have insisted upon the execution of the reforms which the Powers
+had urged upon the Papal government, and have made the occupation of Ancona
+an effectual means for reaching this end. But with his death the wrongs of
+the Italians themselves and the question of a reformed government in the
+Papal States gradually passed out of sight. France and Austria jealously
+watched one another on the debatable land; the occupation became a mere
+incident of the balance of power, and was prolonged for year after year,
+until, in 1838, the Austrians having finally withdrawn all their troops,
+the French peacefully handed over the citadel of Ancona to the Holy See.
+
+[Prussia in 1830.]
+
+[The Zollverein, 1828-1836.]
+
+The arena in which we have next to follow the effects of the July
+Revolution, in action and counter-action, is Germany. It has been seen that
+in the southern German States an element of representative government, if
+weak, yet not wholly ineffective, had come into being soon after 1815, and
+had survived the reactionary measures initiated by the conference of
+Ministers at Carlsbad. In Prussia the promises of King Frederick William to
+his people had never been fulfilled. Years had passed since exaggerated
+rumours of conspiracy had served as an excuse for withholding the
+Constitution. Hardenberg had long been dead; the foreign policy of the
+country had taken a freer tone; the rigours of the police-system had
+departed; but the nation remained as completely excluded from any share in
+the government as it had been before Napoleon's fall. It had in fact become
+clear that during the lifetime of King Frederick William things must be
+allowed to remain in their existing condition; and the affection of the
+people for their sovereign, who had been so long and so closely united with
+Prussia in its sufferings and in its glories, caused a general willingness
+to postpone the demand for constitutional reform until the succeeding
+reign. The substantial merits of the administration might moreover have
+reconciled a less submissive people than the Prussians to the absolute
+government under which they lived. Under a wise and enlightened financial
+policy the country was becoming visibly richer. Obstacles to commercial
+development were removed, communications opened; and finally, by a series
+of treaties with the neighbouring German States, the foundations were laid
+for that Customs-Union which, under the name of the Zollverein, ultimately
+embraced almost the whole of non-Austrian Germany. As one Principality
+after another attached itself to the Prussian system, the products of the
+various regions of Germany, hitherto blocked by the frontier dues of each
+petty State, moved freely through the land, while the costs attending the
+taxation of foreign imports, now concentrated upon the external line of
+frontier, were enormously diminished. Patient, sagacious, and even liberal
+in its negotiations with its weaker neighbours, Prussia silently connected
+with itself through the ties of financial union States which had hitherto
+looked to Austria as their natural head. The semblance of political union
+was carefully avoided, but the germs of political union were nevertheless
+present in the growing community of material interests. The reputation of
+the Prussian Government, no less than the welfare of the Prussian people,
+was advanced by each successive step in the extension of the Zollverein;
+and although the earlier stages alone had been passed in the years before
+1830, enough had already been done to affect public opinion; and the
+general sense of material progress combined with other influences to close
+Prussia to the revolutionary tendencies of that year.
+
+[Insurrections in Brunswick and Cassel.]
+
+[Constitutions in Hanover and Saxony, 1830-1833.]
+
+There were, however, other States in northern Germany which had all the
+defects of Prussian autocracy without any of its redeeming qualities. In
+Brunswick and in Hesse Cassel despotism existed in its most contemptible
+form; the violence of a half-crazy youth in the one case, and the caprices
+of an obstinate dotard in the other, rendering authority a mere nuisance to
+those who were subject to it. Here accordingly revolution broke out. The
+threatened princes had made themselves too generally obnoxious or
+ridiculous for any hand to be raised in their defence. Their disappearance
+excited no more than the inevitable lament from Metternich; and in both
+States systems of representative government were introduced by their
+successors. In Hanover and in Saxony agitation also began in favour of
+Parliamentary rule. The disturbance that arose was not of a serious
+character, and it was met by the Courts in a conciliatory spirit.
+Constitutions were granted, the liberty of the Press extended, and trial by
+jury established. On the whole, the movement of 1830, as it affected
+northern Germany, was rationally directed and salutary in its results.
+Changes of real value were accomplished with a sparing employment of
+revolutionary means, and, in the more important cases, through the friendly
+co-operation of the sovereigns with their subjects. It was not the fault of
+those who had asked for the same degree of liberty in northern Germany
+which the south already possessed, that Germany at large again experienced
+the miseries of reaction and repression which had afflicted it ten years
+before.
+
+[Movement in the Palatinate.]
+
+Like Belgium and the Rhenish Provinces, the Bavarian Palatinate had for
+twenty years been incorporated with France. Its inhabitants had grown
+accustomed to the French law and French institutions, and had caught
+something of the political animation which returned to France after
+Napoleon's fall. Accordingly when the government of Munich, alarmed by the
+July Revolution, showed an inclination towards repressive measures, the
+Palatinate, severed from the rest of the Bavarian monarchy and in immediate
+contact with France, became the focus of a revolutionary agitation. The
+Press had already attained some activity and some influence in this
+province; and although the leaders of the party of progress were still to a
+great extent Professors, they had so far advanced upon the patriots of 1818
+as to understand that the liberation of the German people was not to be
+effected by the lecturers and the scholars of the Universities. The design
+had been formed of enlisting all classes of the public on the side of
+reform, both by the dissemination of political literature and by the
+establishment of societies not limited, as in 1818, to academic circles,
+but embracing traders as well as soldiers and professional men. Even the
+peasant was to be reached and instructed in his interests as a citizen. It
+was thought that much might be effected by associating together all the
+Oppositions in the numerous German Parliaments; but a more striking feature
+of the revolutionary movement which began in the Palatinate, and one
+strongly distinguishing it from the earlier agitation of Jena and Erfurt,
+was its cosmopolitan character. France in its triumph and Poland in its
+death-struggle excited equal interest and sympathy. In each the cause of
+European liberty appeared to be at stake. The Polish banner was saluted in
+the Palatinate by the side of that of united Germany; and from that time
+forward in almost every revolutionary movement of Europe, down to the
+insurrection of the Commune of Paris in 1871, Polish exiles have been
+active both in the organisation of revolt and in the field.
+
+[Reaction in Germany.]
+
+Until the fall of Warsaw, in September, 1831, the German governments,
+uncertain of the course which events might take in Europe, had shown a
+certain willingness to meet the complaints of their subjects, and had in
+especial relaxed the supervision exercised over the press. The fall of
+Warsaw, which quieted so many alarms, and made the Emperor Nicholas once
+more a power outside his own dominions, inaugurated a period of reaction in
+Germany. The Diet began the campaign against democracy by suppressing
+various liberal newspapers, and amongst them the principal journal of the
+Palatinate. It was against this movement of regression that the agitation
+in the Palatinate and elsewhere was now directed. A festival, or
+demonstration, was held at the Castle of Hambach, near Zweibruecken, at
+which a body of enthusiasts called upon the German people to unite against
+their oppressors, and some even urged an immediate appeal to arms (May 27,
+1832). Similar meetings, though on a smaller scale, were held in other
+parts of Germany. Wild words abounded, and the connection of the German
+revolutionists with that body of opponents of all established governments
+which had its council-chamber at Paris and its head in Lafayette was openly
+avowed. Weak and insignificant as the German demagogues were, their
+extravagance gave to Metternich and to the Diet sufficient pretext for
+revising the reactionary measures of 1819. Once more the subordination of
+all representative bodies to the sovereign's authority was laid down by the
+Diet as a binding principle for every German state. The refusal of taxes by
+any legislature was declared to be an act of rebellion which would be met
+by the armed intervention of the central Powers. All political meetings and
+associations were forbidden; the Press was silenced; the introduction of
+German books printed abroad was prohibited, and the Universities were again
+placed under the watch of the police (July, 1832). [394]
+
+[Attempt at Frankfort, April, 1833.]
+
+If among the minor sovereigns of Germany there were some who, as in Baden,
+sincerely desired the development of free institutions, the authority
+exercised by Metternich and his adherents in reaction bore down all the
+resistance that these courts could offer, and the hand of despotism fell
+everywhere heavily upon the party of political progress. The majority of
+German Liberals, not yet prepared for recourse to revolutionary measures,
+submitted to the pressure of the times, and disclaimed all sympathy with
+illegal acts; a minority, recognising that nothing was now to be gained by
+constitutional means, entered into conspiracies, and determined to liberate
+Germany by force. One insignificant group, relying upon the armed
+co-operation of Polish bands in France, and deceived by promises of support
+from some Wuertemberg soldiers, actually rose in insurrection at Frankfort.
+A guard-house was seized, and a few soldiers captured; but the citizens of
+Frankfort stood aloof, and order was soon restored (April, 1833). It was
+not to be expected that the reactionary courts should fail to draw full
+advantage from this ill-timed outbreak of their enemies. Prussian troops
+marched into Frankfort, and Metternich had no difficulty in carrying
+through the Diet a decree establishing a commission to superintend and to
+report upon the proceedings instituted against political offenders
+throughout Germany. For several years these investigations continued, and
+the campaign against the opponents of government was carried on with
+various degrees of rigour in the different states. About two thousand
+persons altogether were brought to trial: in Prussia thirty-nine sentences
+of death were pronounced, but not executed. In the struggle against
+revolution the forces of monarchy had definitely won the victory. Germany
+again experienced, as it had in 1819, that the federal institutions which
+were to have given it unity existed only for the purposes of repression.
+The breach between the nation and its rulers, in spite of the apparent
+failure of the democratic party, remained far deeper and wider than it had
+been before; and although Metternich, victor once more over the growing
+restlessness of the age, slumbered on for another decade in fancied
+security, the last of his triumphs had now been won, and the next uprising
+proved how blind was that boasted statesmanship which deemed the sources of
+danger exhausted when once its symptoms had been driven beneath the
+surface.
+
+[Conspirators and exiles.]
+
+[Dispersion of the Swiss exiles, 1834.]
+
+In half the states of Europe there were now bodies of exasperated,
+uncompromising men, who devoted their lives to plotting against
+governments, and who formed, in their community of interest and purpose, a
+sort of obverse of the Holy Alliance, a federation of kings' enemies, a
+league of principle and creed, in which liberty and human right stood
+towards established rule as light to darkness. As the grasp of authority
+closed everywhere more tightly upon its baffled foes, more and more of
+these men passed into exile. Among them was the Genoese Mazzini, who, after
+suffering imprisonment in 1831, withdrew to Marseilles, and there, in
+combination with various secret societies, planned an incursion into the
+Italian province of Savoy. It was at first intended that this enterprise
+should be executed simultaneously with the German rising at Frankfort.
+Delays, however, arose, and it was not until the beginning of the following
+year that the little army, which numbered more Poles than Italians, was
+ready for its task. The incursion was made from Geneva in February, 1834,
+and ended disastrously. [395] Mazzini returned to Switzerland, where
+hundreds of exiles, secure under the shelter of the Republic, devised
+schemes of attack upon the despots of Europe, and even rioted in honour of
+freedom in the streets of the Swiss cities which protected them. The effect
+of the revolutionary movement of the time in consolidating the alliance of
+the three Eastern Powers, so rudely broken by the Greek War of Liberation,
+now came clearly into view. The sovereigns of Russia and Austria had met at
+Muenchengraetz in Bohemia in the previous autumn, and, in concert with
+Prussia, had resolved upon common principles of action if their
+intervention should be required against disturbers of order. Notes were now
+addressed from every quarter to the Swiss Government, requiring the
+expulsion of all persons concerned in enterprises against the peace of
+neighbouring States. Some resistance to this demand was made by individual
+cantons; but the extravagance of many of the refugees themselves alienated
+popular sympathy, and the greater part of them were forced to quit
+Switzerland and to seek shelter in England or in America. With the
+dispersion of the central band of exiles the open alliance which had
+existed between the revolutionists of Europe gradually passed away. The
+brotherhood of the kings had proved a stern reality, the brotherhood of the
+peoples a delusive vision. Mazzini indeed, who up to this time had scarcely
+emerged from the rabble of revolutionary leaders, was yet to prove how
+deeply the genius, the elevation, the fervour of one man struggling against
+the powers of the world may influence the history of his age; but the fire
+that purified the fine gold charred and consumed the baser elements; and of
+those who had hoped the most after 1830, many now sank into despair, or
+gave up their lives to mere restless agitation and intrigue.
+
+[Difficulties of Louis Philippe.]
+
+[Insurrections, 1832-1834.]
+
+[Repressive Laws, Sept., 1835.]
+
+It was in France that the revolutionary movement was longest maintained.
+During the first year of Louis Philippe's rule the opposition to his
+government was inspired not so much by Republicanism as by a wild and
+inconsiderate sympathy with the peoples who were fighting for liberty
+elsewhere, and by a headstrong impulse to take up arms on their behalf. The
+famous decree of the Convention in 1792, which promised the assistance of
+France to every nation in revolt against its rulers, was in fact the true
+expression of what was felt by a great part of the French nation in 1831;
+and in the eyes of these enthusiasts it was the unpardonable offence of
+Louis Philippe against the honour of France that he allowed Poland and
+Italy to succumb without drawing his sword against their conquerors. That
+France would have had to fight the three Eastern Powers combined, if it had
+allied itself with those in revolt against any one of the three, passed for
+nothing among the clamorous minority in the Chamber and among the orators
+of Paris. The pacific policy of Casimir Perier was misunderstood; it passed
+for mere poltroonery, when in fact it was the only policy that could save
+France from a recurrence of the calamities of 1815. There were other causes
+for the growing unpopularity of the King and of his Ministers, but the
+first was their policy of peace. As the attacks of his opponents became
+more and more bitter, the government of Casimir Perier took more and more
+of a repressive character. Disappointment at the small results produced in
+France itself by the Revolution of July worked powerfully in men's minds.
+The forces that had been set in motion against Charles X. were not to be
+laid at rest at the bidding of those who had profited by them, and a
+Republican party gradually took definite shape and organisation. Tumult
+succeeded tumult. In the summer of 1832 the funeral of General Lamarque, a
+popular soldier, gave the signal for insurrection at Paris. There was
+severe fighting in the streets; the National Guard, however, proved true to
+the king, and shared with the army in the honours of its victory.
+Repressive measures and an unbroken series of prosecutions against
+seditious writers followed this first armed attack upon the established
+government. The bitterness of the Opposition, the discontent of the working
+classes, far surpassed anything that had been known under Charles X. The
+whole country was agitated by revolutionary societies and revolutionary
+propaganda. Disputes between masters and workmen, which, in consequence of
+the growth of French manufacturing industry, now became both frequent and
+important, began to take a political colour. Polish and Italian exiles
+connected their own designs with attacks to be made upon the French
+Government from within; and at length, in April, 1834, after the passing of
+a law against trades-unions, the working classes of Lyons, who were on
+strike against their employers, were induced to rise in revolt. After
+several days' fighting the insurrection was suppressed. Simultaneous
+outbreaks took place at St. Etienne, Grenoble, and many other places in the
+south and centre of France; and on a report of the success of the
+insurgents reaching Paris, the Republic was proclaimed and barricades were
+erected. Again civil war raged in the streets, and again the forces of
+Government gained the victory. A year more passed, during which the
+investigations into the late revolt and the trial of a host of prisoners
+served rather to agitate than to reassure the public mind; and in the
+summer of 1835 an attempt was made upon the life of the King so terrible
+and destructive in its effects as to amount to a public calamity. An
+infernal machine composed of a hundred gun-barrels was fired by a Corsican
+named Fieschi, as the King with a large suite was riding through the
+streets of Paris on the anniversary of the Revolution of July. Fourteen
+persons were killed on the spot, among whom was Mortier, one of the oldest
+of the marshals of France; many others were fatally or severely injured.
+The King, however, with his three sons, escaped unhurt, and the repressive
+laws that followed this outrage marked the close of open revolutionary
+agitation in France. Whether in consequence of the stringency of the new
+laws, or of the exhaustion of a party discredited in public estimation by
+the crimes of a few of its members and the recklessness of many more, the
+constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe now seemed to have finally
+vanquished its opponents. Repeated attempts were made on the life of the
+King, but they possessed for the most part little political significance.
+Order was welcome to the nation at large; and though in the growth of a
+socialistic theory and creed of life which dates from this epoch there lay
+a danger to Governments greater than any purely political, Socialism was as
+yet the affair of thinkers rather than of active workers either in the
+industrial or in the Parliamentary world. The Government had beaten its
+enemies outside the Chamber. Within the Chamber, the parties of extremes
+ceased to exercise any real influence. Groups were formed, and rival
+leaders played against one another for office; but they were separated by
+no far-reaching differences of aim, and by no real antagonism of
+constitutional principle. During the succeeding years of Louis Philippe's
+reign there was little visible on the surface but the normal rivalry of
+parties under a constitutional monarchy. The middle-class retained its
+monopoly of power: authority, centralised as before, maintained its old
+prestige in France, and softened opposition by judicious gifts of office
+and emolument. Revolutionary passion seemed to have died away: and the
+triumphs or reverses of party-leaders in the Chamber of Deputies succeeded
+to the harassing and doubtful conflict between Government and insurrection.
+
+[The English Reform movement.]
+
+The near coincidence in time between the French Revolution of 1830 and the
+passing of the English Reform Bill is apt to suggest to those who look for
+the operation of wide general causes in history that the English Reform
+movement should be viewed as a part of the great current of political
+change which then traversed the continent of Europe. But on a closer
+examination this view is scarcely borne out by facts, and the coincidence
+of the two epochs of change appears to be little more than accidental. The
+general unity that runs through the history of the more advanced
+continental states is indeed stronger than appears to a superficial reader
+of history; but this correspondence of tendency does not always embrace
+England; on the contrary, the conditions peculiar to England usually
+preponderate over those common to England and other countries, exhibiting
+at times more of contrast than of similarity, as in the case of the
+Napoleonic epoch, when the causes which drew together the western half of
+the continent operated powerfully to exclude our own country from the
+current influences of the time, and made the England of 1815, in opinion,
+in religion, and in taste much more insular than the England of 1780. The
+revolution which overthrew Charles X. did no doubt encourage and stimulate
+the party of Reform in Great Britain; but, unlike the Belgian, the German,
+and the Italian movements, the English Reform movement would unquestionably
+have run the same course and achieved the same results even if the revolt
+against the ordinances of Charles X. had been successfully repressed, and
+the Bourbon monarchy had maintained itself in increased strength and
+reputation. A Reform of Parliament had been acknowledged to be necessary
+forty years before. Pitt had actually proposed it in 1785, and but for the
+outbreak of the French Revolution would probably have carried it into
+effect before the close of the last century. The development of English
+manufacturing industry which took place between 1790 and 1830, accompanied
+by the rapid growth of towns and the enrichment of the urban middle class,
+rendered the design of Pitt, which would have transferred the
+representation of the decayed boroughs to the counties alone, obsolete, and
+made the claims of the new centres of population too strong to be resisted.
+In theory the representative system of the country was completely
+transformed; but never was a measure which seemed to open the way to such
+boundless possibilities of change so thoroughly safe and so thoroughly
+conservative. In spite of the increased influence won by the wealthy part
+of the commercial classes, the House of Commons continued to be drawn
+mainly from the territorial aristocracy. Cabinet after Cabinet was formed
+with scarcely a single member included in it who was not himself a man of
+title, or closely connected with the nobility: the social influence of rank
+was not diminished; and although such measures as the Reform of Municipal
+Corporations attested the increased energy of the Legislature, no party in
+the House of Commons was weaker than that which supported the democratic
+demands for the Ballot and for Triennial Parliaments, nor was the repeal of
+the Corn Laws seriously considered until famine had made it inevitable.
+That the widespread misery which existed in England after 1832, as the
+result of the excessive increase of our population and the failure alike of
+law and of philanthropy to keep pace with the exigencies of a vast
+industrial growth, should have been so quietly borne, proves how great was
+the success of the Reform Bill as a measure of conciliation between
+Government and people. But the crowning justification of the changes made
+in 1832, and the complete and final answer to those who had opposed them as
+revolutionary, was not afforded until 1848, when, in the midst of European
+convulsion, the monarchy and the constitution of England remained unshaken.
+Bold as the legislation of Lord Grey appeared to men who had been brought
+up amidst the reactionary influences dominant in England since 1793, the
+Reform Bill belongs not to the class of great creative measures which have
+inaugurated new periods in the life of nations, but to the class of those
+which, while least affecting the general order of society, have most
+contributed to political stability and to the avoidance of revolutionary
+change.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+France and England after 1830--Affairs of Portugal--Don Miguel--Don Pedro
+invades Portugal--Ferdinand of Spain--The Pragmatic Sanction--Death of
+Ferdinand: Regency of Christina--The Constitution--Quadruple Alliance--
+Miguel and Carlos expelled from Portugal--Carlos enters Spain--The Basque
+Provinces--Carlist War: Zumalacarregui--The Spanish Government seeks French
+assistance, which is refused--Constitution of 1837--End of the War--Regency
+of Espartero--Isabella Queen--Affairs of the Ottoman Empire--Ibrahim
+invades Syria; his victories--Rivalry of France and Russia at
+Constantinople--Peace of Kutaya and Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi--Effect of
+this Treaty--France and Mehemet Ali--Commerce of the Levant--Second War
+between Mehemet and the Porte--Ottoman disasters--The Policy of the Great
+Powers--Quadruple Treaty without France--Ibrahim expelled from Syria--Final
+Settlement--Turkey after 1840--Attempted reforms of Reschid Pasha.
+
+
+[France and England after 1830.]
+
+Alliances of opinion usually cover the pursuit on one or both sides of some
+definite interest; and to this rule the alliance which appeared to be
+springing up between France and England after the changes of 1830 was no
+exception. In the popular view, the bond of union between the two States
+was a common attachment to principles of liberty; and on the part of the
+Whig statesmen who now governed England this sympathy with free
+constitutional systems abroad was certainly a powerful force: but other
+motives than mere community of sentiment combined to draw the two
+Governments together, and in the case of France these immediate interests
+greatly outweighed any abstract preference for a constitutional ally. Louis
+Philippe had an avowed and obstinate enemy in the Czar of Russia, who had
+been his predecessor's friend: the Court of Vienna tolerated usurpers only
+where worse mischief would follow from attacking them; Prussia had no
+motive for abandoning the connexions which it had maintained since 1815. As
+the union between the three Eastern Courts grew closer in consequence of
+the outbreak of revolution beyond the borders of France, a good
+understanding with Great Britain became more and more obviously the right
+policy for Louis Philippe; on the other hand, the friendship of France
+seemed likely to secure England from falling back into that isolated
+position which it had occupied when the Holy Alliance laid down the law to
+Europe, and averted the danger to which the Ottoman Empire, as well as the
+peace of the world, had been exposed by the combination of French with
+Russian schemes of aggrandizement. If Canning, left without an ally in
+Europe, had called the new world into existence to redress the balance of
+the old, his Whig successors might well look with some satisfaction on that
+shifting of the weights which had brought over one of the Great Powers to
+the side of England, and anticipate, in the concert of the two great
+Western States, the establishment of a permanent force in European politics
+which should hold in check the reactionary influences of Vienna and St.
+Petersburg. To some extent these views were realised. A general relation of
+friendliness was recognised as subsisting between the Governments of Paris
+and London, and in certain European complications their intervention was
+arranged in common. But even here the element of mistrust was seldom
+absent; and while English Ministers jealously watched each action of their
+neighbour, the French Government rarely allowed the ties of an informal
+alliance to interfere with the prosecution of its own views. Although down
+to the close of Louis Philippe's reign the good understanding between
+England and France was still nominally in existence, all real confidence
+had then long vanished; and on more than one occasion the preservation of
+peace between the two nations had been seriously endangered.
+
+[Affairs of Portugal, 1826-1830.]
+
+It was in the establishment of the kingdom of Belgium that the combined
+action of France and England produced its first and most successful result.
+A second demand was made upon the Governments of the two constitutional
+Powers by the conflicts which agitated the Spanish Peninsula, and which
+were stimulated in the general interests of absolutism by both the Austrian
+and the Russian Court. The intervention of Canning in 1826 on behalf of the
+constitutional Regency of Portugal against the foreign supporters of Don
+Miguel, the head of the clerical and reactionary party, had not permanently
+restored peace to that country. Miguel indeed accepted the constitution,
+and, after betrothing himself to the infant sovereign, Donna Maria, who was
+still with her father Pedro, in Brazil, entered upon the Regency which his
+elder brother had promised to him. But his actions soon disproved the
+professions of loyalty to the constitution which he had made; and after
+dissolving the Cortes, and re-assembling the mediaeval Estates, he caused
+himself to be proclaimed King (June, 1828). A reign of terror followed. The
+constitutionalists were completely crushed. Miguel's own brutal violence
+gave an example to all the fanatics and ruffians who surrounded him; and
+after an unsuccessful appeal to arms, those of the adherents of Donna Maria
+and the constitution who escaped from imprisonment or execution took refuge
+in England or in the Azore islands, where Miguel had not been able to
+establish his authority. Though Miguel was not officially recognised as
+Sovereign by most of the foreign Courts, his victory was everywhere seen
+with satisfaction by the partisans of absolutism; and in Great Britain,
+where the Duke of Wellington was still in power, the precedent of Canning's
+intervention was condemned, and a strict neutrality maintained. Not only
+was all assistance refused to Donna Maria, but her adherents who had taken
+refuge in England were prevented from making this country the basis of any
+operations against the usurper.
+
+[Invasion of Portugal by Pedro. July, 1832.]
+
+Such was the situation of Portuguese affairs when the events of 1830
+brought an entirely new spirit into the foreign policy of both England and
+France. Miguel, however, had no inclination to adapt his own policy to the
+change of circumstances; on the contrary, he challenged the hostility of
+both governments by persisting in a series of wanton attacks upon English
+and French subjects resident at Lisbon. Satisfaction was demanded, and
+exacted by force. English and French squadrons successively appeared in the
+Tagus. Lord Palmerston, now Foreign Secretary in the Ministry of Earl Grey,
+was content with obtaining a pecuniary indemnity for his countrymen,
+accompanied by a public apology from the Portuguese Government: the French
+admiral, finding some difficulty in obtaining redress, carried off the best
+ships of Don Miguel's navy. [396] A weightier blow was, however, soon to
+fall upon the usurper. His brother, the Emperor Pedro, threatened with
+revolution in Brazil, resolved to return to Europe and to enforce the
+rights of his daughter to the throne of Portugal. Pedro arrived in London
+in July, 1831, and was permitted by the Government to raise troops and to
+secure the services of some of the best naval officers of this country. The
+gathering place of his forces was Terceira, one of the Azore islands, and
+in the summer of 1832 a sufficiently strong body of troops was collected to
+undertake the reconquest of Portugal. A landing was made at Oporto, and
+this city fell into the hands of Don Pedro without resistance. Miguel,
+however, now marched against his brother, and laid siege to Oporto. For
+nearly a year no progress was made by either side; at length the arrival of
+volunteers from various countries, among whom was Captain Charles Napier,
+enabled Pedro to divide his forces and to make a new attack on Portugal
+from the south. Napier, in command of the fleet, annihilated the navy of
+Don Miguel off St. Vincent; his colleague, Villa Flor, landed and marched
+on Lisbon. The resistance of the enemy was overcome, and on the 28th of
+July, 1833, Don Pedro entered the capital. But the war was not yet at an
+end, for Miguel's cause was as closely identified with the interests of
+European absolutism as that of his brother was with constitutional right,
+and assistance both in troops and money continued to arrive at his camp.
+The struggle threatened to prove a long and obstinate one, when a new turn
+was given to events in the Peninsula by the death of Ferdinand, King of
+Spain.
+
+[Death of Ferdinand, Sept., 1833.]
+
+Since the restoration of absolute Government in Spain in 1823, Ferdinand,
+in spite of his own abject weakness and ignorance, had not given complete
+satisfaction to the fanatics of the clerical party. Some vestiges of
+statesmanship, some sense of political necessity, as well as the influence
+of foreign counsellors, had prevented the Government of Madrid from
+completely identifying itself with the monks and zealots who had first
+risen against the constitution of 1820, and who now sought to establish the
+absolute supremacy of the Church. The Inquisition had not been restored,
+and this alone was enough to stamp the King as a renegade in the eyes of
+the ferocious and implacable champions of mediaeval bigotry. Under the name
+of Apostolicals, these reactionaries had at times broken into open
+rebellion. Their impatience had, however, on the whole been restrained by
+the knowledge that in the King's brother and heir, Don Carlos, they had an
+adherent whose devotion to the priestly cause was beyond suspicion, and who
+might be expected soon to ascend the throne. Ferdinand had been thrice
+married; he was childless; his state of health miserable; and his life
+likely to be a short one. The succession to the throne of Spain had
+moreover, since 1713, been governed by the Salic Law, so that even in the
+event of Ferdinand leaving female issue Don Carlos would nevertheless
+inherit the crown. These confident hopes were rudely disturbed by the
+marriage of the King with his cousin Maria Christina of Naples, followed by
+an edict, known as the Pragmatic Sanction, repealing the Salic Law which
+had been introduced with the first Bourbon, and restoring the ancient
+Castilian custom under which women were capable of succeeding to the crown.
+A daughter, Isabella, was shortly afterwards born to the new Queen. On the
+legality of the Pragmatic Sanction the opinions of publicists differed; it
+was judged, however, by Europe at large not from the point of view of
+antiquarian theory, but with direct reference to its immediate effect. The
+three Eastern Courts emphatically condemned it, as an interference with
+established monarchical right, and as a blow to the cause of European
+absolutism through the alliance which it would almost certainly produce
+between the supplanters of Don Carlos and the Liberals of the Spanish
+Peninsula. [397] To the clerical and reactionary party at Madrid, it
+amounted to nothing less than a sentence of destruction, and the utmost
+pressure was brought to bear upon the weak and dying King with the object
+of inducing him to undo the alleged wrong which he had done to his brother.
+In a moment of prostration Ferdinand revoked the Pragmatic Sanction; but,
+subsequently, regaining some degree of strength, he re-enacted it, and
+appointed Christina Regent during the continuance of his illness. Don
+Carlos, protesting against the violation of his rights, had betaken himself
+to Portugal, where he made common cause with Miguel. His adherents had no
+intention of submitting to the change of succession. Their resentment was
+scarcely restrained during Ferdinand's life-time, and when, in September,
+1833, his long-expected death took place, and the child Isabella was
+declared Queen under the Regency of her mother, open rebellion broke out,
+and Carlos was proclaimed King in several of the northern provinces.
+
+[The Regency and the Carlists.]
+
+[Quadruple Treaty, April 22, 1834.]
+
+[Miguel and Carlos removed, May, 1834.]
+
+For the moment the forces of the Regency seemed to be far superior to those
+of the insurgents, and Don Carlos failed to take advantage of the first
+outburst of enthusiasm and to place himself at the head of his followers.
+He remained in Portugal, while Christina, as had been expected, drew nearer
+to the Spanish Liberals, and ultimately called to power a Liberal minister,
+Martinez de la Rosa, under whom a constitution was given to Spain by Royal
+Statute (April 10, 1834). At the same time negotiations were opened with
+Portugal and with the Western Powers, in the hope of forming an alliance
+which should drive both Miguel and Carlos from the Peninsula. On the 22nd
+of April, 1834, a Quadruple Treaty was signed at London, in which the
+Spanish Government undertook to send an army into Portugal against Miguel,
+the Court of Lisbon pledging itself in return to use all the means in its
+power to expel Don Carlos from Portuguese territory. England engaged to
+co-operate by means of its fleet. The assistance of France, if it should be
+deemed necessary for the attainment of the objects of the Treaty, was to be
+rendered in such manner as should be settled by common consent. In
+pursuance of the policy of the Treaty, and even before the formal
+engagement was signed, a Spanish division under General Rodil crossed the
+frontier and marched against Miguel. The forces of the usurper were
+defeated. The appearance of the English fleet and the publication of the
+Treaty of Quadruple Alliance rendered further resistance hopeless, and on
+the 22nd of May Miguel made his submission, and in return for a large
+pension renounced all rights to the crown, and undertook to quit the
+Peninsula for ever. Don Carlos, refusing similar conditions, went on board
+an English ship, and was conducted to London. [398]
+
+[Carlos appears in Spain.]
+
+With respect to Portugal, the Quadruple Alliance had completely attained
+its object; and in so far as the Carlist cause was strengthened by the
+continuance of civil war in the neighbouring country, this source of
+strength was no doubt withdrawn from it. But in its effect upon Don Carlos
+himself the action of the Quadruple Alliance was worse than useless. While
+fulfilling the letter of the Treaty, which stipulated for the expulsion of
+the two pretenders from the Peninsula, the English Admiral had removed
+Carlos from Portugal, where he was comparatively harmless, and had taken no
+effective guarantee that he should not re-appear in Spain itself and
+enforce his claim by arms. Carlos had not been made a prisoner of war; he
+had made no promises and incurred no obligations; nor could the British
+Government, after his arrival in this country, keep him in perpetual
+restraint. Quitting England after a short residence, he travelled in
+disguise through France, crossed the Pyrenees, and appeared on the 10th of
+July, 1834, at the headquarters of the Carlist insurgents in Navarre.
+
+[The Basque Provinces.]
+
+In the country immediately below the western Pyrenees, the so-called Basque
+Provinces, lay the chief strength of the Carlist rebellion. These
+provinces, which were among the most thriving and industrious parts of
+Spain, might seem by their very superiority an unlikely home for a movement
+which was directed against everything favourable to liberty, tolerance, and
+progress in the Spanish kingdom. But the identification of the Basques with
+the Carlist cause was due in fact to local, not to general, causes; and in
+fighting to impose a bigoted despot upon the Spanish people, they were in
+truth fighting to protect themselves from a closer incorporation with
+Spain. Down to the year 1812, the Basque provinces had preserved more than
+half of the essentials of independence. Owing to their position on the
+French frontier, the Spanish monarchy, while destroying all local
+independence in the interior of Spain, had uniformly treated the Basques
+with the same indulgence which the Government of Great Britain has shown to
+the Channel Islands, and which the French monarchy, though in a less
+degree, showed to the frontier province of Alsace in the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries. The customs-frontier of the north of Spain was drawn
+to the south of these districts. The inhabitants imported what they pleased
+from France without paying any duties; while the heavy import-dues levied
+at the border of the neighbouring Spanish provinces gave them the
+opportunity of carrying on an easy and lucrative system of smuggling. The
+local administration remained to a great extent in the hands of the people
+themselves; each village preserved its active corporate life; and the
+effect of this survival of a vigorous local freedom was seen in the
+remarkable contrast described by travellers between the aspect of the
+Basque districts and that of Spain at large. The Fueros, or local rights,
+as the Basques considered them, were in reality, when viewed as part of the
+order of the Spanish State, a series of exceptional privileges; and it was
+inevitable that the framers of the Constitution of 1812, in their attempt
+to create a modern administrative and political system doing justice to the
+whole of the nation, should sweep away the distinctions which had hitherto
+marked off one group of provinces from the rest of the community. The
+continuance of war until the return of Ferdinand, and the overthrow of the
+Constitution, prevented the plans of the Cortes from being at that time
+carried into effect; but the revolution of 1820 brought them into actual
+operation, and the Basques found themselves, as a result of the victory of
+Liberal principles, compelled to pay duties on their imports, robbed of the
+profits of their smuggling, and supplanted in the management of their local
+affairs by an army of officials from Madrid. They had gained by the
+Constitution little that they had not possessed before, and their losses
+were immediate, tangible, and substantial. The result was, that although
+the larger towns, like Bilbao, remained true to modern ideas, the country
+districts, led chiefly by priests, took up arms on behalf of the absolute
+monarchy, assisted the French in the restoration of despotism in 1823, and
+remained the permanent enemies of the constitutional cause. [399] On the
+death of Ferdinand they declared at once for Don Carlos, and rose in
+rebellion against the Government of Queen Christina, by which they
+considered the privileges of the Basque Provinces and the interests of
+Catholic orthodoxy to be alike threatened.
+
+[Carlist victories, 1834-5.]
+
+There was little in the character of Don Carlos to stimulate the loyalty
+even of his most benighted partizans. Of military and political capacity he
+was totally destitute, and his continued absence in Portugal when the
+conflict had actually begun proved him to be wanting in the natural
+impulses of a brave man. It was, however, his fortune to be served by a
+soldier of extraordinary energy and skill; and the first reverses of the
+Carlists were speedily repaired, and a system of warfare organised which
+made an end of the hopes of easy conquest with which the Government of
+Christina had met the insurrection. Fighting in a worthless cause, and
+commanding resources scarcely superior to those of a brigand chief, the
+Carlist leader, Zumalacarregui, inflicted defeat after defeat upon the
+generals who were sent to destroy him. The mountainous character of the
+country and the universal hostility of the inhabitants made the exertions
+of a regular soldiery useless against the alternate flights and surprises
+of men who knew every mountain track, and who gained information of the
+enemy's movements from every cottager. Terror was added by Zumalacarregui
+to all his other methods for demoralising his adversary. In the exercise of
+reprisals he repeatedly murdered all his prisoners in cold blood, and gave
+to the war so savage a character that foreign Governments at last felt
+compelled to urge upon the belligerents some regard for the usages of the
+civilised world. The appearance of Don Carlos himself in the summer of 1834
+raised still higher the confidence already inspired by the victories of his
+general. It was in vain that the old constitutionalist soldier, Mina, who
+had won so great a name in these provinces in 1823, returned after long
+exile to the scene of his exploits. Enfeebled and suffering, he was no
+longer able to place himself at the head of his troops, and he soon sought
+to be relieved from a hopeless task. His successor, the War Minister
+Valdes, took the field announcing his determination to act upon a new
+system, and to operate with his troops in mass instead of pursuing the
+enemy's bands with detachments. The result of this change of tactics was a
+defeat more ruinous and complete than had befallen any of Valdes'
+predecessors. He with difficulty withdrew the remainder of his army from
+the insurgent provinces; and the Carlist leader master of the open country
+up to the borders of Castile, prepared to cross the Ebro and to march upon
+Madrid. [400]
+
+[Request to France for assistance, May, 1835.]
+
+The Ministers of Queen Christina, who had up till this time professed
+themselves confident in their power to deal with the insurrection, could
+now no longer conceal the real state of affairs. Valdes himself declared
+that the rebellion could not be subdued without foreign aid; and after
+prolonged discussion in the Cabinet it was determined to appeal to France
+for armed assistance. The flight of Don Carlos from England had already
+caused an additional article to be added to the Treaty of the Quadruple
+Alliance, in which France undertook so to watch the frontier of the
+Pyrenees that no reinforcements or munition of war should reach the
+Carlists from that side, while England promised to supply the troops of
+Queen Christina with arms and stores, and, if necessary, to render
+assistance with a naval force (18th August, 1834). The foreign supplies
+sent to the Carlists had thus been cut off both by land and sea; but more
+active assistance seemed indispensable if Madrid was to be saved from
+falling into the enemy's hands. The request was made to Louis Philippe's
+Government to occupy the Basque Provinces with a corps of twelve thousand
+men. Reasons of weight might be addressed to the French Court in favour of
+direct intervention. The victory of Don Carlos would place upon the throne
+of Spain a representative of all those reactionary influences throughout
+Europe which were in secret or in open hostility to the House of Orleans,
+and definitely mark the failure of that policy which had led France to
+combine with England in expelling Don Miguel from Portugal. On the other
+hand, the experience gained from earlier military enterprises in Spain
+might well deter even bolder politicians than those about Louis Philippe
+from venturing upon a task whose ultimate issues no man could confidently
+forecast. Napoleon had wrecked his empire in the struggle beyond the
+Pyrenees not less than in the march to Moscow: and the expedition of 1823,
+though free from military difficulties, had exposed France to the
+humiliating responsibility for every brutal act of a despotism which, in
+the very moment of its restoration, had scorned the advice of its
+restorers. The constitutional Government which invoked French assistance
+might, moreover, at any moment give place to a democratic faction which
+already harassed it within the Cortes, and which, in its alliance with the
+populace in many of the great cities, threatened to throw Spain into
+anarchy, or to restore the ill-omened constitution of 1812. But above all,
+the attitude of the three Eastern Powers bade the ruler of France hesitate
+before committing himself to a military occupation of Spanish territory.
+Their sympathies were with Don Carlos, and the active participation of
+France in the quarrel might possibly call their opposing forces into the
+field and provoke a general war. In view of the evident dangers arising out
+of the proposed intervention, the French Government, taking its stand on
+that clause of the Quadruple Treaty which provided that the assistance of
+France should be rendered in such manner as might be agreed upon by all the
+parties to the Treaty, addressed itself to Great Britain, inquiring whether
+this country would undertake a joint responsibility in the enterprise and
+share with France the consequences to which it might give birth. Lord
+Palmerston in reply declined to give the assurance required. He stated that
+no objection would be raised by the British Government to the entry of
+French troops into Spain, but that such intervention must be regarded as
+the work of France alone, and be undertaken by France at its own peril.
+This answer sufficed for Louis Philippe and his Ministers. The Spanish
+Government was informed that the grant of military assistance was
+impossible, and that the entire public opinion of France would condemn so
+dangerous an undertaking. As a proof of goodwill, permission was given to
+Queen Christina to enrol volunteers both in England and France. Arms were
+supplied; and some thousands of needy or adventurous men ultimately made
+their way from our own country as well as from France, to earn under
+Colonel De Lacy Evans and other leaders a scanty harvest of profit or
+renown.
+
+[Continuance of the war.]
+
+The first result of the rejection of the Spanish demand for the direct
+intervention of France was the downfall of the Minister by whom this demand
+had been made. His successor, Toreno, though a well-known patriot, proved
+unable to stem the tide of revolution that was breaking over the country.
+City after city set up its own Junta, and acted as if the central
+government had ceased to exist. Again the appeal for help was made to Louis
+Philippe, and now, not so much to avert the victory of Don Carlos as to
+save Spain from anarchy and from the constitution of 1812. Before an answer
+could arrive, Toreno in his turn had passed away. Mendizabal, a banker who
+had been entrusted with financial business at London, and who had entered
+into friendly relations with Lord Palmerston, was called to office, as a
+politician acceptable to the democratic party, and the advocate of a close
+connection with England rather than with France. In spite of the confident
+professions of the Minister, and in spite of some assistance actually
+rendered by the English fleet, no real progress was made in subduing the
+Carlists, or in restoring administrative and financial order. The death of
+Zumalacarregui, who was forced by Don Carlos to turn northwards and besiege
+Bilbao instead of marching upon Madrid immediately after his victories, had
+checked the progress of the rebellion at a critical moment; but the
+Government, distracted and bankrupt, could not use the opportunity which
+thus offered itself, and the war soon blazed out anew not only in the
+Basque Provinces but throughout the north of Spain. For year after year the
+monotonous struggle continued, while Cortes succeeded Cortes and faction
+supplanted faction, until there remained scarcely an officer who had not
+lost his reputation or a politician who was not useless and discredited.
+
+[Constitution of 1837.]
+
+[End of the war, Sept., 1839.]
+
+The Queen Regent, who from the necessities of her situation had for awhile
+been the representative of the popular cause, gradually identified herself
+with the interests opposed to democratic change; and although her name was
+still treated with some respect, and her policy was habitually attributed
+to the misleading advice of courtiers, her real position was well
+understood at Madrid, and her own resistance was known to be the principal
+obstacle to the restoration of the Constitution of 1812. It was therefore
+determined to overcome this resistance by force; and on the 13th of August,
+1836, a regiment of the garrison of Madrid, won over by the Exaltados,
+marched upon the palace of La Granja, invaded the Queen's apartments, and
+compelled her to sign an edict restoring the Constitution of 1812 until the
+Cortes should establish that or some other. Scenes of riot and murder
+followed in the capital. Men of moderate opinions, alarmed at the approach
+of anarchy, prepared to unite with Don Carlos. King Louis Philippe, who had
+just consented to strengthen the French legion by the addition of some
+thousands of trained soldiers, now broke entirely from the Spanish
+connection, and dismissed his Ministers who refused to acquiesce in this
+change of policy. Meanwhile the Eastern Powers and all rational partisans
+of absolutism besought Don Carlos to give those assurances which would
+satisfy the wavering mass among his opponents, and place him on the throne
+without the sacrifice of any right that was worth preserving. It seemed as
+if the opportunity was too clear to be misunderstood; but the obstinacy and
+narrowness of Don Carlos were proof against every call of fortune. Refusing
+to enter into any sort of engagement, he rendered it impossible for men to
+submit to him who were not willing to accept absolutism pure and simple. On
+the other hand, a majority of the Cortes, whose eyes were now opened to the
+dangers around them, accepted such modifications of the Constitution of
+1812 that political stability again appeared possible (June, 1837). The
+danger of a general transference of all moderate elements in the State to
+the side of Don Carlos was averted; and, although the Carlist armies took
+up the offensive, menaced the capital, and made incursions into every part
+of Spain, the darkest period of the war was now over; and when, after
+undertaking in person the march upon Madrid, Don Carlos swerved aside and
+ultimately fell back in confusion to the Ebro, the suppression of the
+rebellion became a certainty. General Espartero, with whom such distinction
+remained as was to be gathered in this miserable war, forced back the
+adversary step by step, and carried fire and sword into the Basque
+Provinces, employing a system of devastation which alone seemed capable of
+exhausting the endurance of the people. Reduced to the last extremity, the
+Carlist leaders turned their arms against one another. The priests
+excommunicated the generals, and the generals shot the priests; and
+finally, on the 14th September, after the surrender of almost all his
+troops to Espartero, Don Carlos crossed the French frontier, and the
+conflict which during six years had barbarised and disgraced the Spanish
+nation, reached its close.
+
+[End of the Regency, Isabella, Queen, Nov., 1843.]
+
+The triumph of Queen Christina over her rivals was not of long duration.
+Confronted by a strong democratic party both in the Cortes and in the
+country, she endeavoured in vain to govern by the aid of Ministers of her
+own choice. Her popularity had vanished away. The scandals of her private
+life gave just offence to the nation, and fatally weakened her political
+authority. Forced by insurrection to bestow office on Espartero, as the
+chief of the Progressist party, she found that the concessions demanded by
+this general were more than she could grant, and in preference to
+submitting to them she resigned the Regency, and quitted Spain (Oct.,
+1840). Espartero, after some interval, was himself appointed Regent by the
+Cortes. For two years he maintained himself in power, then in his turn he
+fell before the combined attack of his political opponents and the extreme
+men of his own party, and passed into exile. There remained in Spain no
+single person qualified to fill the vacant Regency, and in default of all
+other expedients the young princess Isabella, who was now in her fourteenth
+year, was declared of full age, and placed on the throne (Nov., 1843).
+Christina returned to Madrid. After some rapid changes of Ministry, a more
+durable Government was formed from the Moderado party under General
+Narvaez; and in comparison with the period that had just ended, the first
+few years of the new reign were years of recovery and order.
+
+[War between Mehemet Ali and the Porte, 1832.]
+
+The withdrawal of Louis Philippe from his engagements after the
+capitulation of Maria Christina to the soldiery at La Granja in 1836 had
+diminished the confidence placed in the King by the British Ministry; but
+it had not destroyed the relations of friendship existing between the two
+Governments. Far more serious causes of difference arose out of the course
+of events in the East, and the extension of the power of Mehemet Ali,
+Viceroy of Egypt. The struggle between Mehemet and his sovereign, long
+foreseen, broke out in the year 1832. After the establishment of the
+Hellenic Kingdom, the island of Crete had been given to Mehemet in return
+for his services to the Ottoman cause by land and sea. This concession,
+however, was far from satisfying the ambition of the Viceroy, and a quarrel
+with Abdallah, Pasha of Acre, gave him the opportunity of throwing an army
+into Palestine without directly rebelling against his sovereign (Nov.,
+1831). Ibrahim, in command of his father's forces, laid siege to Acre; and
+had this fortress at once fallen, it would probably have been allowed by
+the Sultan to remain in its conqueror's hands as an addition to his own
+province, since the Turkish army was not ready for war, and it was no
+uncommon thing in the Ottoman Empire for one provincial governor to possess
+himself of territory at the expense of another. So obstinate, however, was
+the defence of Acre that time was given to the Porte to make preparations
+for war; and in the spring of 1832, after the issue of a proclamation
+declaring Mehemet and his son to be rebels, a Turkish army led by Hussein
+Pasha entered Syria.
+
+[Ibrahim conquers Syria and Asia Minor.]
+
+Ibrahim, while the siege of Acre was proceeding, had overrun the
+surrounding country. He was now in possession of all the interior of
+Palestine, and the tribes of Lebanon had joined him in the expectation of
+gaining relief from the burdens of Turkish misgovernment. The fall of Acre,
+while the relieving army was still near Antioch, enabled him to throw his
+full strength against his opponent in the valley of the Orontes. It was the
+intention of the Turkish general, whose forces, though superior in number,
+had not the European training of Ibrahim's regiments, to meet the assault
+of the Egyptians in an entrenched camp near Hama. The commander of the
+vanguard, however, pushed forward beyond this point, and when far in
+advance of the main body of the army was suddenly attacked by Ibrahim at
+Homs. Taken at a moment of complete disorder, the Turks were put to the
+rout. Their overthrow and flight so alarmed the general-in-chief that he
+determined to fall back upon Aleppo, leaving Antioch and all the valley of
+the Orontes to the enemy. Aleppo was reached, but the governor, won over by
+Ibrahim, closed the gates of the city against the famishing army, and
+forced Hussein to continue his retreat to the mountains which form the
+barrier between Syria and Cilicia. Here, at the pass of Beilan, he was
+attacked by Ibrahim, outmanoeuvred, and forced to retreat with heavy loss
+(July 29). The pursuit was continued through the province of Cilicia.
+Hussein's army, now completely demoralised, made its escape to the centre
+of Asia Minor; the Egyptian, after advancing as far as Mount Taurus and
+occupying the passes in this range, took up his quarters in the conquered
+country in order to refresh his army and to await reinforcements. After two
+months' halt he renewed his march, crossed Mount Taurus and occupied
+Konieh, the capital of this district. Here the last and decisive blow was
+struck. A new Turkish army, led by Reschid Pasha, Ibrahim's colleague in
+the siege of Missolonghi, advanced from the north. Against his own advice,
+Reschid was compelled by orders from Constantinople to risk everything in
+an engagement. He attacked Ibrahim at Konieh on the 21st of December, and
+was completely defeated. Reschid himself was made a prisoner; his army
+dispersed; the last forces of the Sultan were exhausted, and the road to
+the Bosphorus lay open before the Egyptian invader.
+
+[Russian aid offered to the Sultan.]
+
+[Peace of Kutaya, April, 1833.]
+
+In this extremity the Sultan looked around for help; nor were offers of
+assistance wanting. The Emperor Nicholas had since the Treaty of Adrianople
+assumed the part of the magnanimous friend; his belief was that the Ottoman
+Empire might by judicious management and without further conquest be
+brought into a state of habitual dependence upon Russia; and before the
+result of the battle of Konieh was known General Muravieff had arrived at
+Constantinople bringing the offer of Russian help both by land and sea, and
+tendering his own personal services in the restoration of peace. Mahmud had
+to some extent been won over by the Czar's politic forbearance in the
+execution of the Treaty of Adrianople. His hatred of Mehemet Ali was a
+consuming passion; and in spite of the general conviction both of his
+people and of his advisers that no possible concession to a rebellious
+vassal could be so fatal as the protection of the hereditary enemy of
+Islam, he was disposed to accept the Russian tender of assistance. As a
+preliminary, Muravieff was sent to Alexandria with permission to cede Acre
+to Mehemet Ali, if in return the Viceroy would make over his fleet to the
+Sultan. These were conditions on which no reasonable man could have
+expected that Mehemet would make peace; and the intention of the Russian
+Court probably was that Muravieff's mission should fail. The envoy soon
+returned to Constantinople announcing that his terms were rejected. Mahmud
+now requested that Russian ships might be sent to the Bosphorus, and to the
+dismay of the French and English embassies a Russian squadron appeared
+before the capital. Admiral Roussin, the French ambassador, addressed a
+protest to the Sultan and threatened to leave Constantinople. His
+remonstrances induced Mahmud to consent to some more serious negotiation
+being opened with Mehemet Ali. A French envoy was authorised to promise the
+Viceroy the governorship of Tripoli in Syria as well as Acre; his
+overtures, however, were not more acceptable than those of Muravieff, and
+Mehemet openly declared that if peace were not concluded on his own terms
+within six weeks, he should order Ibrahim, who had halted at Kutaya, to
+continue his march on the Bosphorus. Thoroughly alarmed at this threat, and
+believing that no Turkish force could keep Ibrahim out of the capital,
+Mahmud applied to Russia for more ships and also for troops. Again Admiral
+Roussin urged upon the Sultan that if Syria could be reconquered only by
+Russian forces it was more than lost to the Porte. His arguments were
+supported by the Divan, and with such effect that a French diplomatist was
+sent to Ibrahim with power to negotiate for peace on any terms.
+Preliminaries were signed at Kutaya under French mediation on the 10th of
+April, 1833, by which the Sultan made over to his vassal not only the whole
+of Syria but the province of Adana which lies between Mount Taurus and the
+Mediterranean. After some delay these Preliminaries were ratified by
+Mahmud; and Ibrahim, after his dazzling success both in war and in
+diplomacy, commenced the evacuation of northern Anatolia.
+
+[Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, July, 1833.]
+
+For the moment it appeared that French influence had decisively prevailed
+at Constantinople, and that the troops of the Czar had been summoned from
+Sebastopol only to be dismissed with the ironical compliments of those who
+were most anxious to get rid of them. But this was not really the case.
+Whether the fluctuations in the Sultan's policy had been due to mere fear
+and irresolution, or whether they had to some extent proceeded from the
+desire to play off one Power against another, it was to Russia, not France,
+that his final confidence was given. The soldiers of the Czar were encamped
+by the side of the Turks on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus; his ships
+lay below Constantinople. Here on the 8th of July a Treaty was signed at
+the palace of Unkiar Skelessi, [401] in which Russia and Turkey entered
+into a defensive alliance of the most intimate character, each Power
+pledging itself to render assistance to the other, not only against the
+attack of an external enemy, but in every event where its peace and
+security might be endangered. Russia undertook, in cases where its support
+should be required, to provide whatever amount of troops the Sultan should
+consider necessary both by sea and land, the Porte being charged with no
+part of the expense beyond that of the provisioning of the troops. The
+duration of the Treaty was fixed in the first instance for eight years. A
+secret article, which, however, was soon afterwards published, declared
+that, in order to diminish the burdens of the Porte, the Czar would not
+demand the material help to which the Treaty entitled him; while, in
+substitution for such assistance, the Porte undertook, when Russia should
+be at war, to close the Dardanelles to the war-ships of all nations.
+
+[Effect of this Treaty.]
+
+By the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, Russia came nearer than it has at any
+time before or since to that complete ascendency at Constantinople which
+has been the modern object of its policy. The success of its diplomatists
+had in fact been too great; for, if the abstract right of the Sultan to
+choose his own allies had not yet been disputed by Europe at large, the
+clause in the Treaty which related to the Dardanelles touched the interests
+of every Power which possessed a naval station in the Mediterranean. By the
+public law of Europe the Black Sea, which until the eighteenth century was
+encompassed entirely by the Sultan's territory, formed no part of the open
+waters of the world, but a Turkish lake to which access was given through
+the Dardanelles only at the pleasure of the Porte. When, in the eighteenth
+century, Russia gained a footing on the northern shore of the Euxine, this
+carried with it no right to send war-ships through the straits into the
+Mediterranean, nor had any Power at war with Russia the right to send a
+fleet into the Black Sea otherwise than by the Sultan's consent. The Treaty
+of Unkiar Skelessi, in making Turkey the ally of Russia against all its
+enemies, converted the entrance to the Black Sea into a Russian fortified
+post, from behind which Russia could freely send forth its ships of war
+into the Mediterranean, while its own ports and arsenals remained secure
+against attack. England and France, which were the States whose interests
+were principally affected, protested against the Treaty, and stated they
+reserved to themselves the right of taking such action in regard to it as
+occasion might demand. Nor did the opposition rest with the protests of
+diplomatists. The attention both of the English nation and of its
+Government was drawn far more than hitherto to the future of the Ottoman
+Empire. Political writers exposed with unwearied vigour, and not without
+exaggeration, the designs of the Court of St. Petersburg in Asia as well as
+in Europe; and to this time, rather than to any earlier period, belongs the
+first growth of that strong national antagonism to Russia which found its
+satisfaction in the Crimean War, and which has by no means lost its power
+at the present day.
+
+[France and Mehemet Ali.]
+
+In desiring to check the extension of Russia's influence in the Levant,
+Great Britain and France were at one. The lines of policy, however,
+followed by these two States were widely divergent. Great Britain sought to
+maintain the Sultan's power in its integrity; France became in an
+increasing degree the patron and the friend of Mehemet Ali. Since the
+expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1798, which was itself the execution of
+a design formed in the reign of Louis XVI., Egypt had largely retained its
+hold on the imagination of the leading classes in France. Its monuments,
+its relics of a mighty past, touched a livelier chord among French men of
+letters and science than India has at any time found among ourselves; and
+although the hope of national conquest vanished with Napoleon's overthrow,
+Egypt continued to afford a field of enterprise to many a civil and
+military adventurer. Mehemet's army and navy were organised by French
+officers; he was surrounded by French agents and men of business; and after
+the conquest of Algiers had brought France on to the southern shore of the
+Mediterranean, the advantages of a close political relation with Egypt did
+not escape the notice of statesmen who saw in Gibraltar and Malta the most
+striking evidences of English maritime power. Moreover the personal fame of
+Mehemet strongly affected French opinion. His brilliant military reforms,
+his vigorous administration, and his specious achievements in finance
+created in the minds of those who were too far off to know the effects of
+his tyranny the belief that at the hands of this man the East might yet
+awaken to new life. Thus, from a real conviction of the superiority of
+Mehemet's rule over that of the House of Osman no less than from
+considerations of purely national policy, the French Government, without
+any public or official bond of union, gradually became the acknowledged
+supporters of the Egyptian conqueror, and connected his interests with
+their own.
+
+[Rule of Mehemet and Ibrahim.]
+
+Sultan Mahmud had ratified the Preliminaries of Kutaya with wrath in his
+heart; and from this time all his energies were bent upon the creation of a
+force which should wrest back the lost provinces and take revenge upon his
+rebellious vassal. As eager as Mehemet himself to reconstruct his form of
+government upon the models of the West, though far less capable of
+impressing upon his work the stamp of a single guiding will, thwarted
+moreover by the jealous interference of Russia whenever his reforms seemed
+likely to produce any important result, he nevertheless succeeded in
+introducing something of European system and discipline into his army under
+the guidance of foreign soldiers, among whom was a man then little known,
+but destined long afterwards to fill Europe with his fame, the Prussian
+staff-officer Moltke. On the other side Mehemet and Ibrahim knew well that
+the peace was no more than an armed truce, and that what had been won by
+arms could only be maintained by constant readiness to meet attack. Under
+pressure of this military necessity, Ibrahim sacrificed whatever sources of
+strength were open to him in the hatred borne by his new subjects to the
+Turkish yoke, and in their hopes of relief from oppression under his own
+rule. Welcomed at first as a deliverer, he soon proved a heavier
+task-master than any who had gone before him. The conscription was
+rigorously enforced; taxation became more burdensome; the tribes who had
+enjoyed a wild independence in the mountains were disarmed and reduced to
+the level of their fellow-subjects. Thus the discontent which had so
+greatly facilitated the conquest of the border-provinces soon turned
+against the conqueror himself, and one uprising after another shook
+Ibrahim's hold upon Mount Lebanon and the Syrian desert. The Sultan watched
+each outbreak against his adversary with grim joy, impatient for the moment
+when the re-organisation of his own forces should enable him to re-enter
+the field and to strike an overwhelming blow.
+
+[The commerce of the Levant.]
+
+With all its characteristics of superior intelligence in the choice of
+means, the system of Mehemet All was in its end that of the genuine
+Oriental despot. His final object was to convert as many as possible of his
+subjects into soldiers, and to draw into his treasury the profits of the
+labour of all the rest. With this aim he gradually ousted from their rights
+of proprietorship the greater part of the land-owners of Egypt, and finally
+proclaimed the entire soil to be State-domain, appropriating at prices
+fixed by himself the whole of its produce. The natural commercial
+intercourse of his dominions gave place to a system of monopolies carried
+on by the Government itself. Rapidly as this system, which was introduced
+into the newly-conquered provinces, filled the coffers of Mehemet Ali, it
+offered to the Sultan, whose paramount authority was still acknowledged,
+the means of inflicting a deadly injury upon him by a series of commercial
+treaties with the European Powers, granting to western traders a free
+market throughout the Ottoman Empire. Resistance to such a measure would
+expose Mehemet to the hostility of the whole mercantile interest of Europe;
+submission to it would involve the loss of a great part of that revenue on
+which his military power depended. It was probably with this result in
+view, rather than from any more obvious motive, that in the year 1838 the
+Sultan concluded a new commercial Treaty with England, which was soon
+followed by similar agreements with other States.
+
+[Campaign of Nissib, June, 1839.]
+
+The import of the Sultan's commercial policy was not lost upon Mehemet, who
+had already determined to declare himself independent. He saw that war was
+inevitable, and bade Ibrahim collect his forces in the neighbourhood of
+Aleppo, while the generals of the Sultan massed on the upper Euphrates the
+troops that had been successfully employed in subduing the wild tribes of
+Kurdistan. The storm was seen to be gathering, and the representatives of
+foreign Powers urged the Sultan, but in vain, to refrain from an enterprise
+which might shatter his empire. Mahmud was now a dying man. Exhausted by
+physical excess and by the stress and passion of his long reign, he bore in
+his heart the same unquenchable hatreds as of old; and while assuring the
+ambassadors of his intention to maintain the peace, he despatched a letter
+to his commander-in-chief, without the knowledge of any single person,
+ordering him to commence hostilities. The Turkish army crossed the frontier
+on the 23rd of May, 1839. In the operations which followed, the advice and
+protests of Moltke and the other European officers at head-quarters were
+persistently disregarded. The Turks were outmanoeuvred and cut off from
+their communications, and on the 24th of June the onslaught of Ibrahim
+swept them from their position at Nissib in utter rout. The whole of their
+artillery and stores fell into the hands of the enemy: the army dispersed.
+Mahmud did not live to hear of the catastrophe. Six days after the battle
+of Nissib was fought, and while the messenger who bore the news was still
+in Anatolia, he expired, leaving the throne to his son, Abdul Medjid, a
+youth of sixteen. Scarcely had the new Sultan been proclaimed when it
+became known that the Admiral, Achmet Fewzi, who had been instructed to
+attack the Syrian coast, had sailed into the port of Alexandria, and handed
+over the Turkish fleet to Mehemet Ali himself.
+
+[Relations of the Powers to Mehemet.]
+
+[Quadruple Treaty without France. July, 1840.]
+
+The very suddenness of these disasters, which left the Ottoman Empire
+rulerless and without defence by land or sea, contributed ultimately to its
+preservation, inasmuch as it impelled the Powers to combined action, which,
+under less urgent pressure, would probably not have been attainable. On the
+announcement of the exorbitant conditions of peace demanded by Mehemet, the
+ambassadors addressed a collective note to the Divan, requesting that no
+answer might be made until the Courts had arrived at some common
+resolution. Soon afterwards the French and English fleets appeared at the
+Dardanelles, nominally to protect Constantinople against the attack of the
+Viceroy, in reality to guard against any sudden movement on the part of
+Russia. This display of force was, however, not necessary, for the Czar, in
+spite of some expressions to the contrary, had already convinced himself
+that it was impossible to act upon the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi and to
+make the protectorate of Turkey the affair of Russia alone. The tone which
+had been taken by the English Government during the last preceding years
+proved that any attempt to exercise exclusive power at Constantinople would
+have been followed by war with Great Britain, in which most, if not all, of
+the European Powers would have stood on the side of the latter. Abandoning
+therefore the hope of attaining sole control, the Russian Government
+addressed itself to the task of widening as far as possible the existing
+divergence between England and France. Nor was this difficult. The Cabinet
+of the Tuileries desired to see Mehemet Ali issue with increased strength
+from the conflict, or even to establish his dynasty at Constantinople in
+place of the House of Osman. Lord Palmerston, always jealous and suspicious
+of Louis Philippe, refused to believe that the growth of Russian power
+could be checked by dividing the Ottoman Empire, or that any system of
+Eastern policy could be safely based on the personal qualities of a ruler
+now past his seventieth year. [402] He had moreover his own causes of
+discontent with Mehemet. The possibility of establishing an overland route
+to India either by way of the Euphrates or of the Red Sea had lately been
+engaging the attention of the English Government, and Mehemet had not
+improved his position by raising obstacles to either line of passage. It
+was partly in consequence of the hostility of Mehemet, who was now master
+of a great part of Arabia, and of his known devotion to French interests,
+that the port of Aden in the Red Sea was at this time occupied by England.
+If, while Russia accepted the necessity of combined European action and
+drew nearer to its rival, France persisted in maintaining the claim of
+the Viceroy to extended dominion, the exclusion of France from the
+European concert was the only possible result. There was no doubt as to
+the attitude of the remaining Powers. Metternich, whether from genuine
+pedantry, or in order to avoid the expression of those fears of Russia
+which really governed his Eastern policy, repeated his threadbare
+platitudes on the necessity of supporting legitimate dynasties against
+rebels, and spoke of the victor of Konieh and Nissib as if he had been a
+Spanish constitutionalist or a recalcitrant German professor. The Court
+of Berlin followed in the same general course. In all Europe Mehemet Ali
+had not a single ally, with the exception of the Government of Louis
+Philippe. Under these circumstances it was of little avail to the Viceroy
+that his army stood on Turkish soil without a foe before it, and that the
+Sultan's fleet lay within his own harbour of Alexandria. The intrigues by
+which he hoped to snatch a hasty peace from the inexperience of the young
+Sultan failed, and he learnt in October that no arrangement which he
+might make with the Porte without the concurrence of the Powers would be
+recognised as valid. In the meantime Russia was suggesting to the English
+Government one project after another for joint military action with the
+object of driving Mehemet from Syria and restoring this province to the
+Porte; and at the beginning of the following year it was determined on
+Metternich's proposition that a Conference should forthwith be held in
+London for the settlement of Eastern affairs. The irreconcilable
+difference between the intentions of France and those of the other Powers
+at once became evident. France proposed that all Syria and Egypt should
+be given in hereditary dominion to Mehemet Ali, with no further
+obligation towards the Porte than the payment of a yearly tribute. The
+counter-proposal of England was that Mehemet, recognising the Sultan's
+authority, should have the hereditary government of Egypt alone, that he
+should entirely withdraw from all Northern Syria, and hold Palestine only
+as an ordinary governor appointed by the Porte for his lifetime. To this
+proposition all the Powers with the exception of France gave their
+assent. Continued negotiation only brought into stronger relief the
+obstinacy of Lord Palmerston, and proved the impossibility of attaining
+complete agreement. At length, when it had been discovered that the
+French Cabinet was attempting to conduct a separate mediation, the Four
+Powers, without going through the form of asking for French sanction,
+signed on the 15th of July a Treaty with the Sultan pledging themselves
+to enforce upon Mehemet Ali the terms arranged. The Sultan undertook in
+the first instance to offer Mehemet Egypt in perpetuity and southern
+Syria for his lifetime. If this offer was not accepted within ten days,
+Egypt alone was to be offered. If at the end of twenty days Mehemet still
+remained obstinate, that offer in its turn was to be withdrawn, and the
+Sultan and the Allies were to take such measures as the interests of the
+Ottoman Empire might require. [403]
+
+[Warlike spirit in France, 1840.]
+
+The publication of this Treaty, excluding France as it did from the concert
+of Europe, produced a storm of indignation at Paris. Thiers, who more than
+any man had by his writings stimulated the spirit of aggressive warfare
+among the French people and revived the worship of Napoleon, was now at the
+head of the Government. His jealousy for the prestige of France, his
+comparative indifference to other matters when once the national honour
+appeared to be committed, his sanguine estimate of the power of his
+country, rendered him a peculiarly dangerous Minister at the existing
+crisis. It was not the wrongs or the danger of Mehemet Ali, but the slight
+offered to France, and the revived League of the Powers which had humbled
+it in 1814, that excited the passion of the Minister and the nation. Syria
+was forgotten; the cry was for the recovery of the frontier of the Rhine,
+and for revenge for Waterloo. New regiments were enrolled, the fleet
+strengthened, and the long-delayed fortification of Paris begun. Thiers
+himself probably looked forward to a campaign in Italy, anticipating that
+successfully conducted by Napoleon III. in 1859, rather than to an attack
+upon Prussia; but the general opinion both in France itself and in other
+states was that, if war should break out, an invasion of Germany was
+inevitable. The prospect of this invasion roused in a manner little
+expected the spirit of the German people. Even in the smaller states, and
+in the Rhenish provinces themselves, which for twenty years had shared the
+fortunes of France, and in which the introduction of Prussian rule in 1814
+had been decidedly unpopular, a strong national movement carried everything
+before it; and the year 1840 added to the patriotic minstrelsy of Germany a
+war-song, written by a Rhenish citizen, not less famous than those of 1813
+and 1870. [404] That there were revolutionary forces smouldering throughout
+Europe, from which France might in a general war have gained some
+assistance, the events of 1848 sufficiently proved; but to no single
+Government would a revolutionary war have been fraught with more imminent
+peril than to that of France itself, and to no one was this conviction more
+habitually present than to King Louis Philippe. Relying upon his influence
+within the Chamber of Deputies, itself a body representing the wealth and
+the caution rather than the hot spirit of France, the King refused to read
+at the opening of the session in October the speech drawn up for him by
+Thiers, and accepted the consequent resignation of the Ministry. Guizot,
+who was ambassador in London, and an advocate for submission to the will of
+Europe, was called to office, and succeeded after long debate in gaining a
+vote of confidence from the Chamber. Though preparations for war continued,
+a policy of peace was now assured. Mehemet Ali was left to his fate; and
+the stubborn assurance of Lord Palmerston, which had caused so much
+annoyance to the English Ministry itself, received a striking justification
+in the face of all Europe.
+
+[Ibrahim expelled from Syria, Sept.-Nov., 1840.]
+
+[Final settlement, Feb., 1841.]
+
+[The Dardanelles.]
+
+The operations of the Allies against Mehemet Ali had now begun. While
+Prussia kept guard on the Rhine, and Russia undertook to protect
+Constantinople against any forward movement of Ibrahim, an Anglo-Austrian
+naval squadron combined with a Turkish land-force in attacking the Syrian
+coast-towns. The mountain-tribes of the interior were again in revolt. Arms
+supplied to them by the Allies, and the insurrection soon spread over the
+greater part of Syria. Ibrahim prepared for an obstinate defence, but his
+dispositions were frustrated by the extension of the area of conflict, and
+he was unable to prevent the coast-towns from falling one after another
+into the hands of the Allies. On the capture of Acre by Sir Charles Napier
+he abandoned all hope of maintaining himself any longer in Syria, and made
+his way with the wreck of his army towards the Egyptian frontier. Napier
+had already arrived before Alexandria, and there executed a convention with
+the Viceroy, by which the latter, abandoning all claim upon his other
+provinces, and undertaking to restore the Turkish fleet, was assured of the
+hereditary possession of Egypt. The convention was one which the English
+admiral had no authority to conclude, but it contained substantially the
+terms which the Allies intended to enforce; and after Mehemet had made a
+formal act of submission to the Sultan, the hereditary government of Egypt
+was conferred upon himself and his family by a decree published by the
+Sultan and sanctioned by the Powers. This compromise had been proposed by
+the French Government after the expiry of the twenty days named in the
+Treaty of July, and immediately before the fall of M. Thiers, but
+Palmerston would not then listen to any demand made under open or implied
+threats of war. Since that time a new and pacific Ministry had come into
+office; it was no part of Palmerston's policy to keep alive the antagonism
+between England and France; and he readily accepted an arrangement which,
+while it saved France from witnessing the total destruction of an ally,
+left Egypt to a ruler who, whatever his faults, had certainly shown a
+greater capacity for government than any Oriental of that age. It remained
+for the Powers to place upon record some authoritative statement of the law
+recognised by Europe with regard to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Russia
+had already virtually consented to the abrogation of the Treaty of Unkiar
+Skelessi. It now joined with all the other Powers, including France, in a
+declaration that the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire which forbade the
+passage of these straits to the war-ships of all nations, except when the
+Porte itself should be at war, was accepted by Europe at large. Russia thus
+surrendered its chance of gaining by any separate arrangement with Turkey
+the permanent right of sending its fleets from the Black Sea into the
+Mediterranean, and so becoming a Mediterranean Power. On the other hand,
+Sebastopol and the arsenals of the Euxine remained safe against the attack
+of any maritime Power, unless Turkey itself should take up arms against the
+Czar. Having regard to the great superiority of England over Russia at sea,
+and to the accessibility and importance of the Euxine coast towns, it is an
+open question whether the removal of all international restrictions upon
+the passage of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles would not be more to the
+advantage of England than of its rival. This opinion, however, had not been
+urged before the Crimean War, nor has it yet been accepted in our own
+country.
+
+[Turkey after 1840.]
+
+[Legislation of Reschid.]
+
+The conclusion of the struggle of 1840 marked with great definiteness the
+real position which the Ottoman Empire was henceforth to occupy in its
+relations to the western world. Rescued by Europe at large from the
+alternatives of destruction at the hands of Ibrahim or complete vassalage
+under Russia, the Porte entered upon the condition nominally of an
+independent European State, really of a State existing under the protection
+of Europe, and responsible to Europe as well for its domestic government as
+for its alliances and for the conduct of its foreign policy. The necessity
+of conciliating the public opinion of the West was well understood by the
+Turkish statesman who had taken the leading part in the negotiations which
+freed the Porte from dependence upon Russia. Reschid Pasha, the younger,
+Foreign Minister at the accession of the new Sultan, had gained in an
+unusual degree the regard and the confidence of the European Ministers with
+whom, as a diplomatist, he had been brought into contact. As the author of
+a wide system of reforms, it was his ambition so to purify and renovate the
+internal administration of the Ottoman Empire that the contrasts which it
+presented to the civilised order of the West should gradually disappear,
+and that Turkey should become not only in name but in reality a member of
+the European world. Stimulated no doubt by the achievements of Mehemet Ali,
+and anxious to win over to the side of the Porte the interest which
+Mehemet's partial adoption of European methods and ideas had excited on his
+behalf, Reschid in his scheme of reform paid an ostentatious homage to the
+principles of western administration and law, proclaiming the security of
+person and property, prohibiting the irregular infliction of punishment,
+recognising the civil rights of Christians and Jews, and transferring the
+collection of taxes from the provincial governors to the officers of the
+central authority. The friends of the Ottoman State, less experienced then
+than now in the value of laws made in a society where there exists no power
+that can enforce them, and where the agents of government are themselves
+the most lawless of all the public enemies, hailed in Reschid's enlightened
+legislation the opening of a new epoch in the life of the Christian and
+Oriental races subject to the Sultan. But the fall of the Minister before a
+palace-intrigue soon proved on how slight a foundation these hopes were
+built. Like other Turkish reformers, Reschid had entered upon a hopeless
+task; and the name of the man who was once honoured as the regenerator of a
+great Empire is now almost forgotten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+Europe during the Thirty-years' Peace--Italy and Austria--Mazzini--The
+House of Savoy--Gioberti--Election of Pius IX.--Reforms expected--
+Revolution at Palermo--Agitation in Northern Italy--Lombardy--State of
+the Austrian Empire--Growth of Hungarian National Spirit--The Magyars and
+Slavs--Transylvania--Parties among the Magyars--Kossuth--The Slavic
+National Movements in Austria--The Government enters on Reform in
+Hungary--Policy of the Opposition--The Rural System of Austria--
+Insurrection in Galicia: the Nobles and the Peasants--Agrarian
+Edict--Public Opinion in Vienna--Prussia--Accession and Character of King
+Frederick William IV.--Convocation of the United Diet--Its Debates and
+Dissolution--France--The Spanish Marriages--Reform Movement--Socialism--
+Revolution of February--End of the Orleanist Monarchy.
+
+
+The characteristic of Continental history during the second quarter of this
+century is the sense of unrest. The long period of European peace which
+began in 1815 was not one of internal repose; the very absence of those
+engrossing and imperious interests which belong to a time of warfare gave
+freer play to the feelings of discontent and the vague longings for a
+better political order which remained behind after the convulsions of the
+revolutionary epoch and the military rule of Napoleon had passed away.
+During thirty years of peace the breach had been widening between those
+Governments which still represented the system of 1815, and the peoples
+over whom they ruled. Ideas of liberty, awakenings of national sense, were
+far more widely diffused in Europe than at the time of the revolutionary
+war. The seed then prematurely forced into an atmosphere of storm and
+reaction had borne its fruit: other growths, fertilised or accelerated by
+Western Liberalism, but not belonging to the same family, were springing up
+in unexpected strength, and in regions which had hitherto lain outside the
+movement of the modern world. New forces antagonistic to Government had
+come into being, penetrating an area unaffected by the constitutional
+struggles of the Mediterranean States, or by the weaker political efforts
+of Germany. In the homes of the Magyar and the Slavic subjects of Austria,
+so torpid throughout the agitation of an earlier time, the passion of
+nationality was every hour gaining new might. The older popular causes,
+vanquished for the moment by one reaction after another, had silently
+established a far stronger hold on men's minds. Working, some in exile and
+conspiracy, others through such form of political literature as the
+jealousy of Governments permitted, the leaders of the democratic movement
+upon the Continent created a power before which the established order at
+length succumbed. They had not created, nor was it possible under the
+circumstances that they should create, an order which was capable of taking
+its place.
+
+[Italy. 1831-1848.]
+
+Italy, rather than France, forms the central figure in any retrospect of
+Europe immediately before 1848 in which the larger forces at work are not
+obscured by those for the moment more prominent. The failure of the
+insurrection of 1831 had left Austria more visibly than before master over
+the Italian people even in those provinces in which Austria was not
+nominally sovereign. It had become clear that no effort after reform could
+be successful either in the Papal States or in the kingdom of Naples so
+long as Austria held Lombardy and Venice. The expulsion of the foreigner
+was therefore not merely the task of those who sought to give the Italian
+race its separate and independent national existence, it was the task of
+all who would extinguish oppression and misgovernment in any part of the
+Italian peninsula. Until the power of Austria was broken, it was vain to
+take up arms against the tyranny of the Duke of Modena or any other
+contemptible oppressor. Austria itself had twice taught this lesson; and if
+the restoration of Neapolitan despotism in 1821 could be justified by the
+disorderly character of the Government then suppressed, the circumstances
+attending the restoration of the Pope's authority in 1831 had extinguished
+Austria's claim to any sort of moral respect; for Metternich himself had
+united with the other European Courts in declaring the necessity for
+reforms in the Papal Government, and of these reforms, though a single
+earnest word from Austria would have enforced their execution, not one had
+been carried into effect. Gradually, but with increasing force as each
+unhappy year passed by, the conviction gained weight among all men of
+serious thought that the problem to be faced was nothing less than the
+destruction of the Austrian yoke. Whether proclaimed as an article of faith
+or veiled in diplomatic reserve, this belief formed the common ground among
+men whose views on the immediate future of Italy differed in almost every
+other particular.
+
+[Mazzini.]
+
+Three main currents of opinion are to be traced in the ferment of ideas
+which preceded the Italian revolution of 1848. At a time not rich in
+intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who
+are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that
+of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a
+conspirator in the eyes of all Governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the
+world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his
+influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country's
+regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated
+the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the
+visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital
+conditions of Italian revival--the expulsion of the foreigner and the
+establishment of a single national Government--proves him to have been a
+thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed
+deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric
+not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the
+immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to
+live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the
+Italy of his ideal was a Republic embracing every member of the race,
+purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man
+to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and
+consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini
+adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience
+with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of
+those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with
+foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his
+teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence
+was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to United Italy services
+which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great Republican scarcely
+less than to its ablest friends.
+
+[Hopes of Piedmont.]
+
+Widely separated from the school of Mazzini in temper and intention was the
+group of politicians and military men, belonging mostly to Piedmont, who
+looked to the sovereign and the army of this State as the one hope of Italy
+in its struggle against foreign rule. The House of Savoy, though foreign in
+its origin, was, and had been for centuries, a really national dynasty. It
+was, moreover, by interest and traditional policy, the rival rather than
+the friend of Austria in Northern Italy. If the fear of revolution had at
+times brought the Court of Turin into close alliance with Vienna, the
+connection had but thinly veiled the lasting antagonism of two States
+which, as neighbours, had habitually sought expansion each at the other's
+cost. Lombardy, according to the expression of an older time, was the
+artichoke which the Kings of Piedmont were destined to devour leaf by leaf.
+Austria, on the other hand, sought extension towards the Alps: it had in
+1799 clearly shown its intention of excluding the House of Savoy altogether
+from the Italian mainland; and the remembrance of this epoch had led the
+restored dynasty in 1815 to resist the plans of Metternich for establishing
+a league of all the princes of Italy under Austria's protection. The
+sovereign, moreover, who after the failure of the constitutional movement
+of 1821 had mounted the throne surrounded by Austrian bayonets, was no
+longer alive. Charles Albert of Carignano, who had at that time played so
+ambiguous a part, and whom Metternich had subsequently endeavoured to
+exclude from the succession, was on the throne. He had made his peace with
+absolutism by fighting in Spain against the Cortes in 1823; and since his
+accession to the throne he had rigorously suppressed the agitation of
+Mazzini's partizans within his own dominions. But in spite of strong
+clerical and reactionary influences around him, he had lately shown an
+independence of spirit in his dealings with Austria which raised him in the
+estimation of his subjects; and it was believed that his opinions had been
+deeply affected by the predominance which the idea of national independence
+was now gaining over that of merely democratic change. If the earlier
+career of Charles Albert himself cast some doubt upon his personal
+sincerity, and much more upon his constancy of purpose, there was at least
+in Piedmont an army thoroughly national in its sentiment, and capable of
+taking the lead whenever the opportunity should arise for uniting Italy
+against the foreigner. In no other Italian State was there an effective
+military force, or one so little adulterated with foreign elements.
+
+[Hopes of the Papacy.]
+
+A third current of opinion in these years of hope and of illusion was that
+represented in the writings of Gioberti, the depicter of a new and glorious
+Italy, regenerated not by philosophic republicanism or the sword of a
+temporal monarch, but by the moral force of a reformed and reforming
+Papacy. The conception of the Catholic Church as a great Liberal power,
+strange and fantastic as it now appears, was no dream of an isolated
+Italian enthusiast; it was an idea which, after the French Revolution of
+1830, and the establishment of a government at once anti-clerical and
+anti-democratic, powerfully influenced some of the best minds in France,
+and found in Montalembert and Lamennais exponents who commanded the ear of
+Europe. If the corruption of the Papacy had been at once the spiritual and
+the political death of Italy, its renovation in purity and in strength
+would be also the resurrection of the Italian people. Other lands had
+sought, and sought in vain, to work out their problems under the guidance
+of leaders antagonistic to the Church, and of popular doctrines divorced
+from religious faith. To Italy belonged the prerogative of spiritual power.
+By this power, aroused from the torpor of ages, and speaking, as it had
+once spoken, to the very conscience of mankind, the gates of a glorious
+future would be thrown open. Conspirators might fret, and politicians
+scheme, but the day on which the new life of Italy would begin would be
+that day when the head of the Church, taking his place as chief of a
+federation of Italian States, should raise the banner of freedom and
+national right, and princes and people alike should follow the
+all-inspiring voice.
+
+[Election of Pius IX., June, 1846.]
+
+[Reforms expected from Pius.]
+
+[Ferrara, June, 1847.]
+
+A monk, ignorant of everything but cloister lore, benighted, tyrannical,
+the companion in his private life of a few jolly priests and a gossiping
+barber, was not an alluring emblem of the Church of the future. But in 1846
+Pope Gregory XVI., who for the last five years had been engaged in one
+incessant struggle against insurgents, conspirators, and reformers, and
+whose prisons were crowded with the best of his subjects, passed away.
+[405] His successor, Mastai Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was elected under
+the title of Pius IX., after the candidate favoured by Austria had failed
+to secure the requisite number of votes (June 17). The choice of this
+kindly and popular prelate was to some extent a tribute to Italian feeling;
+and for the next eighteen months it appeared as it Gioberti had really
+divined the secret of the age. The first act of the new Pope was the
+publication of a universal amnesty for political offences. The prison doors
+throughout his dominions were thrown open, and men who had been sentenced
+to confinement for life returned in exultation to their homes. The act
+created a profound impression throughout Italy, and each good-humoured
+utterance of Pius confirmed the belief that great changes were at hand. A
+wild enthusiasm seized upon Rome. The population abandoned itself to
+festivals in honour of the Pontiff and of the approaching restoration of
+Roman liberty. Little was done; not much was actually promised; everything
+was believed. The principle of representative government was discerned in
+the new Council of State now placed by the side of the College of
+Cardinals; a more serious concession was made to popular feeling in the
+permission given to the citizens of Rome, and afterwards to those of the
+provinces, to enrol themselves in a civic guard. But the climax of
+excitement was reached when, in answer to a threatening movement of
+Austria, occasioned by the growing agitation throughout Central Italy, the
+Papal Court protested against the action of its late protector. By the
+Treaties of Vienna Austria had gained the right to garrison the citadel of
+Ferrara, though this town lay within the Ecclesiastical States. Placing a
+new interpretation on the expression used in the Treaties, the Austrian
+Government occupied the town of Ferrara itself (June 17th, 1847). The
+movement was universally understood to be the preliminary to a new
+occupation of the Papal States, like that of 1831; and the protests of the
+Pope against the violation of his territory gave to the controversy a
+European importance. The English and French fleets appeared at Naples; the
+King of Sardinia openly announced his intention to take the field against
+Austria if war should break out. By the efforts of neutral Powers a
+compromise on the occupation of Ferrara was at length arranged; but the
+passions which had been excited were not appeased, and the Pope remained in
+popular imagination the champion of Italian independence against Austria,
+as well as the apostle of constitutional Government and the rights of the
+people.
+
+[Revolution at Palermo, Jan., 1848.]
+
+In the meantime the agitation begun in Rome was spreading through the north
+and the south of the peninsula, and beyond the Sicilian Straits. The
+centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa in December, 1746,
+was celebrated throughout central Italy with popular demonstrations which
+gave Austria warning of the storm about to burst upon it. In the south,
+however, impatience under domestic tyranny was a far more powerful force
+than the distant hope of national independence. Sicily had never forgotten
+the separate rights which it had once enjoyed, and the constitution given
+to it under the auspices of England in 1812. Communications passed between
+the Sicilian leaders and the opponents of the Bourbon Government on the
+mainland, and in the autumn of 1847 simultaneous risings took place in
+Calabria and at Messina. These were repressed without difficulty; but the
+fire smouldered far and wide, and on the 13th of January, 1848, the
+population of Palermo rose in revolt. For fourteen days the conflict
+between the people and the Neapolitan troops continued. The city was
+bombarded, but in the end the people were victorious, and a provisional
+government was formed by the leaders of the insurrection. One Sicilian town
+after another followed the example of the capital, and expelled its
+Neapolitan garrison. Threatened by revolution in Naples itself, King
+Ferdinand II., grandson of the despot of 1821, now imitated the policy of
+his predecessor, and proclaimed a constitution. A Liberal Ministry was
+formed, but no word was said as to the autonomy claimed by Sicily, and
+promised, as it would seem, by the leaders of the popular party on the
+mainland. After the first excitement of success was past, it became clear
+that the Sicilians were as widely at variance with the newly-formed
+Government at Naples as with that which they had overthrown.
+
+[Agitation in Austrian Italy.]
+
+The insurrection of Palermo gave a new stimulus and imparted more of
+revolutionary colour to the popular movement throughout Italy.
+Constitutions were granted in Piedmont and Tuscany. In the Austrian
+provinces national exasperation against the rule of the foreigner grew
+daily more menacing. Radetzky, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, had long
+foreseen the impending struggle, and had endeavoured, but not with complete
+success, to impress his own views upon the imperial Government. Verona had
+been made the centre of a great system of fortifications, and the strength
+of the army under Radetzky's command had been considerably increased, but
+it was not until the eleventh hour that Metternich abandoned the hope of
+tiding over difficulties by his old system of police and spies, and
+permitted the establishment of undisguised military rule. In order to
+injure the finances of Austria, a general resolution had been made by the
+patriotic societies of Upper Italy to abstain from the use of tobacco, from
+which the Government drew a large part of its revenue. On the first Sunday
+in 1848 Austrian officers, smoking in the streets of Milan, were attacked
+by the people. The troops were called to arms: a conflict took place, and
+enough blood was shed to give to the tumult the importance of an actual
+revolt. In Padua and elsewhere similar outbreaks followed. Radetzky issued
+a general order to his troops, declaring that the Emperor was determined to
+defend his Italian dominion whether against an external or domestic foe.
+Martial law was proclaimed; and for a moment, although Piedmont gave signs
+of throwing itself into the Italian movement, the awe of Austria's military
+power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished
+world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the
+eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution.
+
+[Austria.]
+
+[Affairs in Hungary.]
+
+It was to the absence of all stirring public life, not to any real
+assimilative power or any high intelligence in administration, that the
+House of Hapsburg owed, during the eighteenth century, the continued union
+of that motley of nations or races which successive conquests, marriages,
+and treaties had brought under its dominion. The violence of the attack
+made by the Emperor Joseph upon all provincial rights first re-awakened the
+slumbering spirit of Hungary; but the national movement of that time, which
+excited such strong hopes and alarms, had been succeeded by a long period
+of stagnation, and during the Napoleonic wars the repression of everything
+that appealed to any distinctively national spirit had become more avowedly
+than before the settled principle of the Austrian Court. In 1812 the
+Hungarian Diet had resisted the financial measures of the Government. The
+consequence was that, in spite of the law requiring its convocation every
+three years, the Diet was not again summoned till 1825. During the
+intermediate period, the Emperor raised taxes and levies by edict alone.
+Deprived of its constitutional representation, the Hungarian nobility
+pursued its opposition to the encroachments of the Crown in the Sessions of
+each county. At these assemblies, to which there existed no parallel in the
+western and more advanced States of the Continent, each resident land-owner
+who belonged to the very numerous caste of the noblesse was entitled to
+speak and to vote. Retaining, in addition to the right of free discussion
+and petition, the appointment of local officials, as well as a considerable
+share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-assemblies,
+handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were
+probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great
+monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits,
+oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and
+caste, the mass of the Magyar nobility had indeed proved as impervious to
+the humanising influences of the eighteenth century as they had to the
+solicitations of despotism. The Magnates, or highest order of noblesse, who
+formed a separate chamber in the Diet, had been to some extent
+denationalised; they were at once more European in their culture, and more
+submissive to the Austrian Court. In banishing political discussion from
+the Diet to the County Sessions, the Emperor's Government had intensified
+the provincial spirit which it sought to extinguish. Too numerous to be won
+over by personal inducements, and remote from the imperial agencies which
+had worked so effectively through the Chamber of Magnates, the lesser
+nobility of Hungary during these years of absolutism carried the habit of
+political discussion to their homes, and learnt to baffle the imperial
+Government by withholding all help and all information from its subordinate
+agents. Each county-assembly became a little Parliament, and a centre of
+resistance to the usurpation of the Crown. The stimulus given to the
+national spirit by this struggle against unconstitutional rule was seen not
+less in the vigorous attacks made upon the Government on the re-assembling
+of the Diet in 1825, than in the demand that Magyar, and not Latin as
+heretofore, should be the language used in recording the proceedings of the
+Diet, and in which communications should pass between the Upper and the
+Lower House.
+
+[Magyars and Slavs.]
+
+There lay in this demand for the recognition of the national language the
+germ of a conflict of race against race which was least of all suspected by
+those by whom the demand was made. Hungary, as a political unity,
+comprised, besides the Slavic kingdom of Croatia, wide regions in which the
+inhabitants were of Slavic or Roumanian race, and where the Magyar was
+known only as a feudal lord. The district in which the population at large
+belonged to the Magyar stock did not exceed one-half of the kingdom. For
+the other races of Hungary, who were probably twice as numerous as
+themselves, the Magyars entertained the utmost contempt, attributing to
+them the moral qualities of the savage, and denying to them the possession
+of any nationality whatever. In a country combining so many elements
+ill-blended with one another, and all alike subject to a German Court at
+Vienna, Latin, as the language of the Church and formerly the language of
+international communication, had served well as a neutral means of
+expression in public affairs. There might be Croatian deputies in the Diet
+who could not speak Magyar; the Magyars could not understand Croatian; both
+could understand and could without much effort express themselves in the
+species of Latin which passed muster at Presburg and at Vienna. Yet no
+freedom of handling could convert a dead language into a living one; and
+when the love of country and of ancient right became once more among the
+Magyars an inspiring passion, it naturally sought a nobler and more
+spontaneous utterance than dog-latin. Though no law was passed upon the
+subject in the Parliament in which it was first mooted, speakers in the
+Diet of 1832 used their mother-tongue; and when the Viennese Government
+forbade the publication of the debates, reports were circulated in
+manuscript through the country by Kossuth, a young deputy, who after the
+dissolution of the Diet in 1836 paid for his defiance of the Emperor by
+three years' imprisonment.
+
+[Hungary after 1830.]
+
+[The Diet of 1832-36.]
+
+[Szechenyi.]
+
+Hungary now seemed to be entering upon an epoch of varied and rapid
+national development. The barriers which separated it from the Western
+world were disappearing. The literature, the ideas, the inventions of
+Western Europe were penetrating its archaic society, and transforming a
+movement which in its origin had been conservative and aristocratic into
+one of far-reaching progress and reform. Alone among the opponents of
+absolute power on the Continent, the Magyars had based their resistance on
+positive constitutional right, on prescription, and the settled usage of
+the past; and throughout the conflict with the Crown between 1812 and 1825
+legal right was on the side not of the Emperor but of those whom he
+attempted to coerce. With excellent judgment the Hungarian leaders had
+during these years abstained from raising any demand for reforms,
+appreciating the advantage of a purely defensive position in a combat with
+a Court pledged in the eyes of all Europe, as Austria was, to the defence
+of legitimate rights. This policy had gained its end; the Emperor, after
+thirteen years of conflict, had been forced to re-convoke the Diet, and to
+abandon the hope of effecting a work in which his uncle, Joseph II., had
+failed. But, the constitution once saved, that narrow and exclusive body of
+rights for which the nobility had contended no longer satisfied the needs
+or the conscience of the time. [406] Opinion was moving fast; the claims of
+the towns and of the rural population were making themselves felt; the
+agitation that followed the overthrow of the Bourbons in 1830 reached
+Hungary too, not so much through French influence as through the Polish war
+of independence, in which the Magyars saw a struggle not unlike their own,
+enlisting their warmest sympathies for the Polish armies so long as they
+kept the field, and for the exiles who came among them when the conflict
+was over. By the side of the old defenders of class-privilege there arose
+men imbued with the spirit of modern Liberalism. The laws governing the
+relation of the peasant to his lord, which remained nearly as they had been
+left by Maria Theresa, were dealt with by the Diet of 1832 in so liberal a
+spirit that the Austrian Government, formerly far in advance of Hungarian
+opinion on this subject, refused its assent to many of the measures passed.
+Great schemes of social and material improvement also aroused the public
+hopes in these years. The better minds became conscious of the real aspect
+of Hungarian life in comparison with that of civilised Europe--of its
+poverty, its inertia, its boorishness. Extraordinary energy was thrown into
+the work of advance by Count Szechenyi, a nobleman whose imagination had
+been fired by the contrast which the busy industry of Great Britain and the
+practical interests of its higher classes presented to the torpor of his
+own country. It is to him that Hungary owes the bridge uniting its double
+capital at Pesth, and that Europe owes the unimpeded navigation of the
+Danube, which he first rendered possible by the destruction of the rocks
+known as the Iron Gates at Orsova. Sanguine, lavishly generous, an ardent
+patriot, Szechenyi endeavoured to arouse men of his own rank, the great and
+the powerful in Hungary, to the sense of what was due from them to their
+country as leaders in its industrial development. He was no revolutionist,
+nor was he an enemy to Austria. A peaceful political future would best have
+accorded with his own designs for raising Hungary to its due place among
+nations.
+
+[Transylvania.]
+
+That the Hungarian movement of this time was converted from one of fruitful
+progress into an embittered political conflict ending in civil war was due,
+among other causes, to the action of the Austrian Cabinet itself. Wherever
+constitutional right existed, there Austria saw a natural enemy. The
+province of Transylvania, containing a mixed population of Magyars,
+Germans, and Roumanians, had, like Hungary, a Diet of its own, which Diet
+ought to have been summoned every year. It was, however, not once assembled
+between 1811 and 1834. In the agitation at length provoked in Transylvania
+by this disregard of constitutional right, the Magyar element naturally
+took the lead, and so gained complete ascendancy in the province. When the
+Diet met in 1834, its language and conduct were defiant in the highest
+degree. It was speedily dissolved, and the scandal occasioned by its
+proceedings disturbed the last days of the Emperor Francis, who died in
+1835, leaving the throne to his son Ferdinand, an invalid incapable of any
+serious exertion. It soon appeared that nothing was changed in the
+principles of the Imperial Government, and that whatever hopes had been
+formed of the establishment of a freer system under the new reign were
+delusive. The leader of the Transylvanian Opposition was Count Wesselenyi,
+himself a Magnate in Hungary, who, after the dissolution of the Diet,
+betook himself to the Sessions of the Hungarian counties, and there
+delivered speeches against the Court which led to his being arrested and
+brought to trial for high treason. His cause was taken up by the Hungarian
+Diet, as one in which the rights of the local assemblies were involved. The
+plea of privilege was, however, urged in vain, and the sentence of exile
+which was passed upon Count Wesselenyi became a new source of contention
+between the Crown and the Magyar Estates. [407]
+
+[Parties among the Magyars.]
+
+[The Diet of 1843.]
+
+The enmity of Government was now a sufficient passport to popular favour.
+On emerging from his prison under a general amnesty in 1840, Kossuth
+undertook the direction of a Magyar journal at Pesth, which at once gained
+an immense influence throughout the country. The spokesman of a new
+generation, Kossuth represented an entirely different order of ideas from
+those of the orthodox defenders of the Hungarian Constitution. They had
+been conservative and aristocratic; he was revolutionary: their weapons had
+been drawn from the storehouse of Hungarian positive law; his inspiration
+was from the Liberalism of western Europe. Thus within the national party
+itself there grew up sections in more or less pronounced antagonism to one
+another, though all were united by a passionate devotion to Hungary and by
+an unbounded faith in its future. Szechenyi, and those who with him
+subordinated political to material ends, regarded Kossuth as a dangerous
+theorist. Between the more impetuous and the more cautious reformers stood
+the recognised Parliamentary leaders of the Liberals, among whom Deak had
+already given proof of political capacity of no common order. In Kossuth's
+journal the national problems of the time were discussed both by his
+opponents and by his friends. Publicity gave greater range as well as
+greater animation to the conflict of ideas; and the rapid development of
+opinion during these years was seen in the large and ambitious measures
+which occupied the Diet of 1843. Electoral and municipal reform, the
+creation of a code of criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury, the
+abolition of the immunity of the nobles from taxation; all these, and
+similar legislative projects, displayed at once the energy of the time and
+the influence of western Europe in transforming the political conceptions
+of the Hungarian nation. Hitherto the forty-three Free Cities had possessed
+but a single vote in the Diet, as against the sixty-three votes possessed
+by the Counties. It was now generally admitted that this anomaly could not
+continue; but inasmuch as civic rights were themselves monopolised by small
+privileged orders among the townsmen, the problem of constitutional reform
+carried with it that of a reform of the municipalities. Hungary in short
+was now face to face with the task of converting its ancient system of the
+representation of the privileged orders into the modern system of a
+representation of the nation at large. Arduous at every epoch and in every
+country, this work was one of almost insuperable difficulty in Hungary,
+through the close connection with the absolute monarchy of Austria; through
+the existence of a body of poor noblesse, numbered at two hundred thousand,
+who, though strong in patriotic sentiment, bitterly resented any attack
+upon their own freedom from taxation; and above all through the variety of
+races in Hungary, and the attitude assumed by the Magyars, as the dominant
+nationality, towards the Slavs around them. In proportion as the energy of
+the Magyars and their confidence in the victory of the national cause
+mounted high, so rose their disdain of all claims beside their own within
+the Hungarian kingdom. It was resolved by the Lower Chamber of the Diet of
+1843 that no language but Magyar should be permitted in debate, and that at
+the end of ten years every person not capable of speaking the Magyar
+language should be excluded from all public employment. The Magnates
+softened the latter provision by excepting from it the holders of merely
+local offices in Slavic districts; against the prohibition of Latin in the
+Diet the Croatians appealed to the Emperor. A rescript arrived from Vienna
+placing a veto upon the resolution. So violent was the storm excited in the
+Diet itself by this rescript, and so threatening the language of the
+national leaders outside, that the Cabinet, after a short interval, revoked
+its decision, and accepted a compromise which, while establishing Magyar as
+the official language of the kingdom, and requiring that it should be
+taught even in Croatian schools, permitted the use of Latin in the Diet for
+the next six years. In the meantime the Diet had shouted down every speaker
+who began with the usual Latin formula, and fighting had taken place in
+Agram, the Croatian capital, between the national and the Magyar factions.
+
+[The Slavic national movements.]
+
+It was in vain that the effort was made at Presburg to resist all claims
+but those of one race. The same quickening breath which had stirred the
+Magyar nation to new life had also passed over the branches of the Slavic
+family within the Austrian dominions far and near. In Bohemia a revival of
+interest in the Czech language and literature, which began about 1820, had
+in the following decade gained a distinctly political character. Societies
+originally or professedly founded for literary objects had become the
+centres of a popular movement directed towards the emancipation of the
+Czech elements in Bohemia from German ascendancy, and the restoration of
+something of a national character to the institutions of the kingdom. Among
+the southern Slavs, with whom Hungary was more directly concerned, the
+national movement first became visible rather later. Its earliest
+manifestations took, just as in Bohemia, a literary or linguistic form.
+Projects for the formation of a common language which, under the name of
+Illyrian, should draw together all the Slavic populations between the
+Adriatic and the Black Sea, occupied for a while the fancy of the learned;
+but the more ambitious part of this design, which had given some umbrage to
+the Turkish Government, was abandoned in obedience to instructions from
+Vienna; and the movement first gained political importance when its scope
+was limited to the Croatian and Slavonic districts of Hungary, and it was
+endowed with the distinct task of resisting the imposition of Magyar as an
+official language. In addition to their representation in the Diet of the
+Kingdom at Presburg, the Croatian landowners had their own Provincial Diet
+at Agram. In this they possessed not only a common centre of action, but an
+organ of communication with the Imperial Government at Vienna, which
+rendered them some support in their resistance to Magyar pretensions. Later
+events gave currency to the belief that a conflict of races in Hungary was
+deliberately stimulated by the Austrian Court in its own interest. But the
+whole temper and principle of Metternich's rule was opposed to the
+development of national spirit, whether in one race or another; and the
+patronage which the Croats appeared at this time to receive at Vienna was
+probably no more than an instinctive act of conservatism, intended to
+maintain the balance of interests, and to reduce within the narrowest
+possible limits such changes as might prove inevitable.
+
+[Agitation after 1843.]
+
+Of all the important measures of reform which were brought before the
+Hungarian Diet of 1843, one alone had become law. The rest were either
+rejected by the Chamber of Magnates after passing the Lower House, or were
+thrown out in the Lower House in spite of the approval of the majority, in
+consequence of peremptory instructions sent to Presburg by the county
+assemblies. The representative of a Hungarian constituency was not free to
+vote at his discretion; he was the delegate of the body of nobles which
+sent him, and was legally bound to give his vote in accordance with the
+instructions which he might from time to time receive. However zealous the
+Legislature itself, it was therefore liable to be paralysed by external
+pressure as soon as any question was raised which touched the privileges of
+the noble caste. This was especially the case with all projects involving
+the expenditure of public revenue. Until the nobles bore their share of
+taxation it was impossible that Hungary should emerge from a condition of
+beggarly need; yet, be the inclination of the Diet what it might, it was
+controlled by bodies of stubborn squires or yeomen in each county, who
+fully understood their own power, and stoutly forbade the passing of any
+measure which imposed a share of the public burdens upon themselves. The
+impossibility of carrying out reforms tinder existing conditions had been
+demonstrated by the failures of 1843. In order to overcome the obstruction
+as well of the Magnates as of the county assemblies, it was necessary that
+an appeal should be made to the country at large, and that a force of
+public sentiment should be aroused which should both overmaster the
+existing array of special interests, and give birth to legislation merging
+them for the future in a comprehensive system of really national
+institutions. To this task the Liberal Opposition addressed itself; and
+although large differences existed within the party, and the action of
+Kossuth, who now exchanged the career of the journalist for that of the
+orator, was little fettered by the opinions of his colleagues, the general
+result did not disappoint the hopes that had been formed. Political
+associations and clubs took vigorous root in the country. The magic of
+Kossuth's oratory left every hearer a more patriotic, if not a wiser man;
+and an awakening passion for the public good seemed for a while to throw
+all private interests into the shade.
+
+[Government Policy of Reform.]
+
+[Programme of the Opposition.]
+
+It now became plain to all but the blindest that great changes were
+inevitable; and at the instance of the more intelligent among the
+Conservative party in Hungary the Imperial Government resolved to enter the
+lists with a policy of reform, and, if possible, to wrest the helm from the
+men who were becoming masters of the nation. In order to secure a majority
+in the Diet, it was deemed requisite by the Government first to gain a
+predominant influence in the county-assemblies. As a preliminary step, most
+of the Lieutenants of counties, to whose high dignity no practical
+functions attached, were removed from their posts, and superseded by paid
+administrators, appointed from Vienna. Count Apponyi, one of the most
+vigorous of the conservative and aristocratic reformers, was placed at the
+head of the Ministry. In due time the proposals of the Government were made
+public. They comprised the taxation of the nobles, a reform of the
+municipalities, modifications in the land-system, and a variety of economic
+measures intended directly to promote the material development of the
+country. The latter were framed to some extent on the lines laid down by
+Szechenyi, who now, in bitter antagonism to Kossuth, accepted office under
+the Government, and gave to it the prestige of his great name. It remained
+for the Opposition to place their own counter-proposals before the country.
+Differences within the party were smoothed over, and a manifesto, drawn up
+by Deak, gave statesmanlike expression to the aims of the national leaders.
+Embracing every reform included in the policy of the Government, it added
+to them others which the Government had not ventured to face, and gave to
+the whole the character of a vindication of its own rights by the nation,
+in contrast to a scheme of administrative reform worked out by the officers
+of the Crown. Thus while it enforced the taxation of the nobles, it claimed
+for the Diet the right of control over every branch of the national
+expenditure. It demanded increased liberty for the Press, and an unfettered
+right of political association; and finally, while doing homage to the
+unity of the Crown, it required that the Government of Hungary should be
+one in direct accord with the national representation in the Diet, and that
+the habitual effort of the Court of Vienna to place this kingdom on the
+same footing as the Emperor's non-constitutional provinces should be
+abandoned. With the rival programmes of the Government and the Opposition
+before it, the country proceeded to the elections of 1847. Hopefulness and
+enthusiasm abounded on every side; and at the close of the year the Diet
+assembled from which so great a work was expected, and which was destined
+within so short a time to witness, in storm and revolution, the passing
+away of the ancient order of Hungarian life.
+
+[The Rural System of Hungary.]
+
+The directly constitutional problems with which the Diet of Presburg had to
+deal were peculiar to Hungary itself, and did not exist in the other parts
+of the Austrian Empire. There were, however, social problems which were not
+less urgently forcing themselves upon public attention alike in Hungary and
+in those provinces which enjoyed no constitutional rights. The chief of
+these was the condition of the peasant-population. In the greater part of
+the Austrian dominions, though serfage had long been abolished, society was
+still based upon the manorial system. The peasant held his land subject to
+the obligation of labouring on his lord's domain for a certain number of
+days in the year, and of rendering him other customary services: the
+manor-court, though checked by the neighbourhood of crown-officers,
+retained its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently performed duties of
+police. Hence the proposed extinction of the so-called feudal tie, and the
+conversion of the semi-dependent cultivator into a freeholder bound only to
+the payment of a fixed money-charge, or rendered free of all obligation by
+the surrender of a part of his holding, involved in many districts the
+institution of new public authorities and a general reorganisation of the
+minor local powers. From this task the Austrian Government had shrunk in
+mere lethargy, even when, as in 1835, proposals for change had come from
+the landowners themselves. The work begun by Maria Theresa and Joseph
+remained untouched, though thirty years of peace had given abundant
+opportunity for its completion, and the legislation of Hardenberg in 1810
+afforded precedents covering at least part of the field.
+
+[Insurrection in Galicia, Feb., 1846.]
+
+[Rural Edict, Dec., 1845.]
+
+At length events occurred which roused the drowsiest heads in Vienna from
+their slumbers. The party of action among the Polish refugees at Paris had
+determined to strike another blow for the independence of their country.
+Instead, however, of repeating the insurrection of Warsaw, it was arranged
+that the revolt should commence in Prussian and Austrian Poland, and the
+beginning of the year 1846 was fixed for the uprising. In Prussia the
+Government crushed the conspirators before a blow could be struck. In
+Austria, though ample warning was given, the precautions taken were
+insufficient. General Collin occupied the Free City of Cracow, where the
+revolutionary committee had its headquarters; but the troops under his
+command were so weak that he was soon compelled to retreat, and to await
+the arrival of reinforcements. Meanwhile the landowners in the district of
+Tarnow in northern Galicia raised the standard of insurrection, and sought
+to arm the country. The Ruthenian peasantry, however, among whom they
+lived, owed all that was tolerable in their condition to the protection of
+the Austrian crown-officers, and detested the memory of an independent
+Poland. Instead of following their lords into the field, they gave
+information of their movements, and asked instructions from the nearest
+Austrian authorities. They were bidden to seize upon any persons who
+instigated them to rebellion, and to bring them into the towns. A war of
+the peasants against the nobles forthwith broke out. Murder, pillage, and
+incendiary fires brought both the Polish insurrection and its leaders to a
+miserable end. The Polish nobles, unwilling to acknowledge the humiliating
+truth that their own peasants were their bitterest enemies, charged the
+Austrian Government with having set a price on their heads, and with having
+instigated the peasants to a communistic revolt. Metternich, disgraced by
+the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices,
+insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the
+peasantry upon the nobles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by
+attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by
+brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility
+incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was
+undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in
+the rest of the Austrian monarchy. The Arcadian contentment of the rural
+population, which had been the boast, and in some degree the real strength,
+of Austria, was at an end. Conscious that the problem which it had so long
+evaded must at length be faced, the Government of Vienna prepared to deal
+with the conditions of land-tenure by legislation extending over the whole
+of the Empire. But the courage which was necessary for an adequate solution
+of the difficulty nowhere existed within the official world, and the Edict
+which conveyed the last words of the Imperial Government on this vital
+question contained nothing more than a series of provisions for
+facilitating voluntary settlements between the peasants and their lords. In
+the quality of this enactment the Court of Vienna gave the measure of its
+own weakness. The opportunity of breaking with traditions of impotence had
+presented itself and had been lost. Revolution was at the gates; and in the
+unsatisfied claim of the rural population the Government had handed over to
+its adversaries a weapon of the greatest power. [408]
+
+[Vienna.]
+
+In the purely German provinces of Austria there lingered whatever of the
+spirit of tranquillity was still to be found within the Empire. This,
+however, was not the case in the districts into which the influence of the
+capital extended. Vienna had of late grown out of its old careless spirit.
+The home in past years of a population notoriously pleasure-loving,
+good-humoured, and indifferent to public affairs, it had now taken
+something of a more serious character. The death of the Emperor Francis,
+who to the last generation of Viennese had been as fixed a part of the
+order of things as the river Danube, was not unconnected with this change
+in the public tone. So long as the old Emperor lived, all thought that was
+given to political affairs was energy thrown away. By his death not only
+had the State lost an ultimate controlling power, if dull, yet practised
+and tenacious, but this loss was palpable to all the world. The void stood
+bare and unrelieved before the public eye. The notorious imbecility of the
+Emperor Ferdinand, the barren and antiquated formalism of Metternich and of
+that entire system which seemed to be incorporated in him, made Government
+an object of general satire, and in some quarters of rankling contempt. In
+proportion as the culture and intelligence of the capital exceeded that of
+other towns, so much the more galling was the pressure of that part of the
+general system of tutelage which was especially directed against the
+independence of the mind. The censorship was exercised with grotesque
+stupidity. It was still the aim of Government to isolate Austria from the
+ideas and the speculation of other lands, and to shape the intellectual
+world of the Emperor's subjects into that precise form which tradition
+prescribed as suitable for the members of a well-regulated State. In
+poetry, the works of Lord Byron were excluded from circulation, where
+custom-house officers and market-inspectors chose to enforce the law; in
+history and political literature, the leading writers of modern times lay
+under the same ban. Native production was much more effectively controlled.
+Whoever wrote in a newspaper, or lectured at a University, or published a
+work of imagination, was expected to deliver himself of something agreeable
+to the constituted authorities, or was reduced to silence. Far as Vienna
+fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation
+inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was
+keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare
+against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the
+Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the
+educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. Still
+quiescent, but ready to unite against the Government when opportunity
+should arrive, there stood, in addition to the unorganised mass of the
+middle ranks, certain political associations and students' societies, a
+vigorous Jewish element, and the usual contingent furnished by poverty and
+discontent in every great city from among the labouring population.
+Military force sufficient to keep the capital in subjection was not
+wanting; but the foresight and the vigour necessary to cope with the first
+onset of revolution were nowhere to be found among the holders of power.
+
+[Prussia.]
+
+[Frederick William IV., 1840.]
+
+At Berlin the solid order of Prussian absolutism already shook to its
+foundation. With King Frederick William III., whose long reign ended in
+1840, there departed the half-filial, half-spiritless acquiescence of the
+nation in the denial of the liberties which had been so solemnly promised
+to it at the epoch of Napoleon's fall. The new Sovereign, Frederick William
+IV., ascended the throne amid high national hopes. The very contrast which
+his warm, exuberant nature offered to the silent, reserved disposition of
+his father impressed the public for awhile in his favour. In the more
+shining personal qualities he far excelled all his immediate kindred. His
+artistic and literary sympathies, his aptitude of mind and readiness of
+speech, appeared to mark the man of a new age, and encouraged the belief
+that, in spite of the mediaeval dreams and reactionary theories to which,
+as prince, he had surrendered himself, he would, as King, appreciate the
+needs of the time, and give to Prussia the free institutions which the
+nation demanded. The first acts of the new reign were generously conceived.
+Political offenders were freely pardoned. Men who had suffered for their
+opinions were restored to their posts in the Universities and the public
+service, or selected for promotion. But when the King approached the
+constitutional question, his utterances were unsatisfactory. Though
+undoubtedly in favour of some reform, he gave no sanction to the idea of a
+really national representation, but seemed rather to seek occasions to
+condemn it. Other omens of ill import were not wanting. Allying his
+Government with a narrow school of theologians, the King offended men of
+independent mind, and transgressed against the best traditions of Prussian
+administration. The prestige of the new reign was soon exhausted. Those who
+had believed Frederick William to be a man of genius now denounced him as a
+vaporous, inflated dilettante; his enthusiasm was seen to indicate nothing
+in particular; his sonorous commonplaces fell flat on second delivery. Not
+only in his own kingdom, but in the minor German States, which looked to
+Prussia as the future leader of a free Germany, the opinion rapidly gained
+ground that Frederick William IV. was to be numbered among the enemies
+rather than the friends of the good cause.
+
+[United Diet convoked at Berlin, Feb. 3, 1847.]
+
+In the Edicts by which the last King of Prussia had promised his people a
+Constitution, it had been laid down that the representative body was to
+spring from the Provincial Estates, and that it was to possess, in addition
+to its purely consultative functions in legislation, a real power of
+control over all State loans and over all proposed additions to taxation.
+The interdependence of the promised Parliament and the Provincial Estates
+had been seen at the time to endanger the success of Hardenberg's scheme;
+nevertheless, it was this conception which King Frederick William IV. made
+the very centre of his Constitutional policy. A devotee to the distant
+past, he spoke of the Provincial Estates, which in their present form had
+existed only since 1823, as if they were a great national and historic
+institution which had come down unchanged through centuries. His first
+experiment was the summoning of a Committee from these bodies to consider
+certain financial projects with which the Government was occupied (1842).
+The labours of the Committee were insignificant, nor was its treatment at
+the hands of the Crown Ministers of a serious character. Frederick William,
+however, continued to meditate over his plans, and appointed a Commission
+to examine the project drawn up at his desire by the Cabinet. The agitation
+in favour of Parliamentary Government became more and more pressing among
+the educated classes; and at length, in spite of some opposition from his
+brother, the Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor of Germany, the King
+determined to fulfil his father's promise and to convoke a General Assembly
+at Berlin. On the 3rd of February, 1847, there appeared a Royal Patent,
+which summoned all the Provincial Estates to the capital to meet as a
+United Diet of the Kingdom. The Diet was to be divided into two Chambers,
+the Upper Chamber including the Royal Princes and highest nobles, the Lower
+the representatives of the knights, towns, and peasants. The right of
+legislation was not granted to the Diet; it had, however, the right of
+presenting petitions on internal affairs. State-loans and new taxes were
+not, in time of peace, to be raised without its consent. No regular
+interval was fixed for the future meetings of the Diet, and its financial
+rights were moreover reduced by other provisions, which enacted that a
+United Committee from the Provincial Estates was to meet every four years
+for certain definite objects, and that a special Delegation was to sit each
+year for the transaction of business relating to the National Debt. [409]
+
+[King Frederick William and the Diet.]
+
+The nature of the General Assembly convoked by this Edict, the functions
+conferred upon it, and the guarantees offered for Representative Government
+in the future, so little corresponded with the requirements of the nation,
+that the question was at once raised in Liberal circles whether the
+concessions thus tendered by the King ought to be accepted or rejected. The
+doubt which existed as to the disposition of the monarch himself was
+increased by the speech from the throne at the opening of the Diet (April
+11). In a vigorous harangue extending over half an hour, King Frederick
+William, while he said much that was appropriate to the occasion, denounced
+the spirit of revolution that was working in the Prussian Press, warned the
+Deputies that they had been summoned not to advocate political theories,
+but to protect each the rights of his own order, and declared that no power
+on earth should induce him to change his natural relation to his people
+into a constitutional one, or to permit a written sheet of paper to
+intervene like a second Providence between Prussia and the Almighty. So
+vehement was the language of the King, and so uncompromising his tone, that
+the proposal was forthwith made at a private conference that the Deputies
+should quit Berlin in a body. This extreme course was not adopted; it was
+determined instead to present an address to the King, laying before him in
+respectful language the shortcomings in the Patent of February 3rd. In the
+debate on this address began the Parliamentary history of Prussia. The
+Liberal majority in the Lower Chamber, anxious to base their cause on some
+foundation of positive law, treated the Edicts of Frederick William III.
+defining the rights of the future Representative Body as actual statutes of
+the realm, although the late King had never called a Representative Body
+into existence. From this point of view the functions now given to
+Committees and Delegations were so much illegally withdrawn from the rights
+of the Diet. The Government, on the other hand, denied that the Diet
+possessed any rights or claims whatever beyond those assigned to it by the
+Patent of February 3rd, to which it owed its origin. In receiving the
+address of the Chambers, the King, while expressing a desire to see the
+Constitution further developed, repeated the principle already laid down
+by his Ministers, and refused to acknowledge any obligation outside those
+which he had himself created.
+
+[Proceedings and Dissolution of the Diet.]
+
+When, after a series of debates on the political questions at issue, the
+actual business of the Session began, the relations between the Government
+and the Assembly grew worse rather than better. The principal measures
+submitted were the grant of a State-guarantee to certain land-banks
+established for the purpose of extinguishing the rent-charges on peasants'
+holdings, and the issue of a public loan for the construction of railways
+by the State. Alleging that the former measure was not directly one of
+taxation, the Government, in laying it before the Diet, declared that they
+asked only for an opinion, and denied that the Diet possessed any right of
+decision. Thus challenged, as it were, to make good its claims, the Diet
+not only declined to assent to this guarantee, but set its veto on the
+proposed railway-loan. Both projects were in themselves admitted to be to
+the advantage of the State; their rejection by the Diet was an emphatic
+vindication of constitutional rights which the Government seemed indisposed
+to acknowledge. Opposition grew more and more embittered; and when, as a
+preliminary to the dissolution of the Diet, the King ordered its members to
+proceed to the election of the Committees and Delegation named in the Edict
+of February 3rd, an important group declined to take part in the elections,
+or consented to do so only under reservations, on the ground that the Diet,
+and that alone, possessed the constitutional control over finance which the
+King was about to commit to other bodies. Indignant at this protest, the
+King absented himself from the ceremony which brought the Diet to a close
+(June 26th). Amid general irritation and resentment the Assembly broke up.
+Nothing had resulted from its convocation but a direct exhibition of the
+antagonism of purpose existing between the Sovereign and the national
+representatives. Moderate men were alienated by the doctrines promulgated
+from the Throne; and an experiment which, if more wisely conducted, might
+possibly at the eleventh hour have saved all Germany from revolution, left
+the Monarchy discredited and exposed to the attack of the most violent of
+its foes.
+
+[Louis Philippe.]
+
+The train was now laid throughout central Europe; it needed but a flash
+from Paris to kindle the fire far and wide. That the Crown which Louis
+Philippe owed to one popular outbreak might be wrested from him by another,
+had been a thought constantly present not only to the King himself but to
+foreign observers during the earlier years of his reign. The period of
+comparative peace by which the first Republican movements after 1830 had
+been succeeded, the busy working of the Parliamentary system, the keen and
+successful pursuit of wealth which seemed to have mastered all other
+impulses in France, had made these fears a thing of the past. The Orleanist
+Monarchy had taken its place among the accredited institutions of Europe;
+its chief, aged, but vigorous in mind, looked forward to the future of his
+dynasty, and occupied himself with plans for extending its influence or its
+sway beyond the limits of France itself. At one time Louis Philippe had
+hoped to connect his family by marriage with the Courts of Vienna or
+Berlin; this project had not met with encouragement; so much the more
+eagerly did the King watch for opportunities in another direction, and
+devise plans for restoring the family-union between France and Spain which
+had been established by Louis XIV. and which had so largely influenced the
+history of Europe down to the overthrow of the Bourbon Monarchy. The Crown
+of Spain was now held by a young girl; her sister was the next in
+succession; to make the House of Orleans as powerful at Madrid as it was at
+Paris seemed under these circumstances no impossible task to a King and a
+Minister who, in the interests of the dynasty, were prepared to make some
+sacrifice of honour and good faith.
+
+[The Spanish Marriage, October, 1846.]
+
+While the Carlist War was still continuing, Lord Palmerston had convinced
+himself that Louis Philippe intended to marry the young Queen Isabella, if
+possible, to one of his sons. Some years later this project was
+unofficially mentioned by Guizot to the English statesman, who at once
+caused it to be understood that England would not permit the union.
+Abandoning this scheme, Louis Philippe then demanded, by a misconstruction
+of the Treaty of Utrecht, that the Queen's choice of a husband should be
+limited to the Bourbons of the Spanish or Neapolitan line. To this claim
+Lord Aberdeen, who had become Foreign Secretary in 1841, declined to give
+his assent; he stated, however, that no step would be taken by England in
+antagonism to such marriage, if it should be deemed desirable at Madrid.
+Louis Philippe now suggested that his youngest son, the Duke of
+Montpensier, should wed the Infanta Fernanda, sister of the Queen of Spain.
+On the express understanding that this marriage should not take place until
+the Queen should herself have been married and have had children, the
+English Cabinet assented to the proposal. That the marriages should not be
+simultaneous was treated by both Governments as the very heart and
+substance of the arrangement, inasmuch as the failure of children by the
+Queen's marriage would make her sister, or her sister's heir, inheritor of
+the Throne. This was repeatedly acknowledged by Louis Philippe and his
+Minister, Guizot, in the course of communications with the British Court
+which extended over some years. Nevertheless, in 1846, the French
+Ambassador at Madrid, in conjunction with the Queen's mother, Maria
+Christina, succeeded in carrying out a plan by which the conditions laid
+down at London and accepted at Paris were utterly frustrated. Of the
+Queen's Spanish cousins, there was one, Don Francisco, who was known to be
+physically unfit for marriage. To this person it was determined by Maria
+Christina and the French Ambassador that the young Isabella should be
+united, her sister being simultaneously married to the Duke of Montpensier.
+So flagrantly was this arrangement in contradiction to the promises made at
+the Tuileries, that, when intelligence of it arrived at Paris, Louis
+Philippe declared for a moment that the Ambassador must be disavowed and
+disgraced. Guizot, however, was of better heart than his master, and asked
+for delay. In the very crisis of the King's perplexity the return of Lord
+Palmerston to office, and the mention by him of a Prince of Saxe-Coburg as
+one of the candidates for the Spanish Queen's hand, afforded Guizot a
+pretext for declaring that Great Britain had violated its engagements
+towards the House of Bourbon by promoting the candidature of a Coburg. In
+reality the British Government had not only taken no part in assisting the
+candidature of the Coburg Prince, but had directly opposed it. This,
+however, was urged in vain at the Tuileries. Whatever may have been the
+original intentions of Louis Philippe or of Guizot, the temptation of
+securing the probable succession to the Spanish Crown was too strong to be
+resisted. Preliminaries were pushed forward with the utmost haste, and on
+the 10th of October, 1846, the marriages of Queen Isabella and her sister,
+as arranged by the French Ambassador and the Queen-Mother, were
+simultaneously solemnised at Madrid. [410]
+
+[Louis Philippe and Guizot, 1847.]
+
+Few intrigues have been more disgraceful than that of the Spanish
+Marriages; none more futile. The course of history mocked its ulterior
+purposes; its immediate results were wholly to the injury of the House of
+Orleans. The cordial understanding between France and Great Britain, which
+had been revived after the differences of 1840, was now finally shattered,
+Louis Philippe stood convicted before his people of sacrificing a valuable
+alliance to purely dynastic ends; his Minister, the austere and
+sanctimonious Guizot, had to defend himself against charges which would
+have covered with shame the most hardened man of the world. Thus stripped
+of its garb of moral superiority, condemned as at once unscrupulous and
+unpatriotic, the Orleanist Monarchy had to meet the storm of popular
+discontent which was gathering over France as well as over neighbouring
+lands. For the lost friendship of England it was necessary to seek a
+substitute in the support of some Continental Power. Throwing himself into
+the reactionary policy of the Court of Vienna, Guizot endeavoured to
+establish a diplomatic concert from which England should be excluded, as
+France had been in 1840. There were circumstances which gave some
+countenance to the design. The uncompromising vigour with which Lord
+Palmerston supported the Liberal movement now becoming so formidable in
+Italy made every absolute Government in Europe his enemy; and had time been
+granted, the despotic Courts would possibly have united with France in some
+more or less open combination against the English Minister. But the moments
+were now numbered; and ere the projected league could take substance, the
+whirlwind descended before which Louis Philippe and his Minister were the
+first to fall.
+
+[Demand for Parliamentary Reform.]
+
+A demand for the reform of the French Parliamentary system had been made
+when Guizot was entering upon office in the midst of the Oriental crisis of
+1840. It had then been silenced and repressed by all the means at the
+disposal of the Executive; King Louis Philippe being convinced that with a
+more democratic Chamber the maintenance of his own policy of peace would be
+impossible. The demand was now raised again with far greater energy.
+Although the franchise had been lowered after the Revolution of July, it
+was still so high that not one person in a hundred and fifty possessed a
+vote, while the property-qualification which was imposed upon the Deputies
+themselves excluded from the Chamber all but men of substantial wealth.
+Moreover, there existed no law prohibiting the holders of administrative
+posts under the Government from sitting in the Assembly. The consequence
+was that more than one-third of the Deputies were either officials who had
+secured election, or representatives who since their election had accepted
+from Government appointments of greater or less value. Though Parliamentary
+talent abounded, it was impossible that a Chamber so composed could be the
+representative of the nation at large. The narrowness of the franchise, the
+wealth of the Deputies themselves, made them, in all questions affecting
+the social condition of the people, a mere club of capitalists; the
+influence which the Crown exercised through the bestowal of offices
+converted those who ought to have been its controllers into its dependents,
+the more so as its patronage was lavished on nominal opponents even more
+freely than on avowed friends. Against King Louis Philippe the majority in
+the Chamber had in fact ceased to possess a will of its own. It represented
+wealth; it represented to some extent the common-sense of France; but on
+all current matters of dispute it only represented the executive government
+in another form. So thoroughly had the nation lost all hope in the Assembly
+during the last years of Louis Philippe, that even the elections had ceased
+to excite interest. On the other hand, the belief in the general prevalence
+of corruption was every day receiving new warrant. A series of State-trials
+disclosed the grossest frauds in every branch of the administration, and
+proved that political influence was habitually used for purposes of
+pecuniary gain. Taxed with his tolerance of a system scarcely
+distinguishable from its abuses, the Minister could only turn to his own
+nominees in the Chamber and ask them whether they felt themselves
+corrupted; invited to consider some measure of Parliamentary reform, he
+scornfully asserted his policy of resistance. Thus, hopeless of obtaining
+satisfaction either from the Government or from the Chamber itself, the
+leaders of the Opposition resolved in 1847 to appeal to the country at
+large; and an agitation for Parliamentary reform, based on the methods
+employed by O'Connell in Ireland, soon spread through the principal towns
+of France.
+
+[Socialism.]
+
+But there were other ideas and other forces active among the labouring
+population of Paris than those familiar to the politicians of the Assembly.
+Theories of Socialism, the property of a few thinkers and readers during
+the earlier years of Louis Philippe's reign, had now sunk deep among the
+masses, and become, in a rough and easily apprehended form, the creed of
+the poor. From the time when Napoleon's fall had restored to France its
+faculty of thought, and, as it were, turned the soldier's eyes again upon
+his home, those questionings as to the basis of the social union which had
+occupied men's minds at an earlier epoch were once more felt and uttered.
+The problem was still what it had been in the eighteenth century; the
+answer was that of a later age. Kings, priests, and nobles had been
+overthrown, but misery still covered the world. In the teaching of
+Saint-Simon, under the Restoration, religious conceptions blended with a
+great industrial scheme; in the Utopia of Fourier, produced at the same
+fruitful period, whatever was valuable belonged to its suggestions in
+co-operative production. But whether the doctrine propounded was that of
+philosopher, or sage, or charlatan, in every case the same leading ideas
+were visible;--the insufficiency of the individual in isolation, the
+industrial basis of all social life, the concern of the community, or of
+its supreme authority, in the organisation of labour. It was naturally in
+no remote or complex form that the idea of a new social order took
+possession of the mind of the workman in the faubourgs of Paris. He read in
+Louis Blanc, the latest and most intelligible of his teachers of the right
+to labour, of the duty of the State to provide work for its citizens. This
+was something actual and tangible. For this he was ready upon occasion to
+take up arms; not for the purpose of extending the franchise to another
+handful of the Bourgeoisie, or of shifting the profits of government from
+one set of place-hunters to another. In antagonism to the ruling Minister
+the Reformers in the Chamber and the Socialists in the streets might for a
+moment unite their forces: but their ends were irreconcilable, and the
+allies of to-day were necessarily the foes of to-morrow.
+
+[The February Revolution, 1848.]
+
+[Feb. 22nd.]
+
+At the close of the year 1847 the last Parliament of the Orleanist Monarchy
+assembled. The speech from the Throne, delivered by Louis Philippe himself,
+denounced in strong terms the agitation for Reform which had been carried
+on during the preceding months, though this agitation had, on the whole,
+been the work of the so-called Dynastic Opposition, which, while demanding
+electoral reform, was sincerely loyal to the Monarchy. The King's words
+were a challenge; and in the debate on the Address, the challenge was taken
+up by all ranks of Monarchical Liberals as well as by the small Republican
+section in the Assembly. The Government, however, was still secure of its
+majority. Defeated in the votes on the Address, the Opposition determined,
+by way of protest, to attend a banquet to be held in the Champs Elysees on
+the 22nd of February by the Reform-party in Western Paris. It was at first
+desired that by some friendly arrangement with the Government, which had
+declared the banquet illegal, the possibility of recourse to violence
+should be avoided. Misunderstandings, however, arose, and the Government
+finally prohibited the banquet, and made preparations for meeting any
+disturbance with force of arms. The Deputies, anxious to employ none but
+legal means of resistance, now resolved not to attend the banquet; on the
+other hand, the Democratic and Socialist leaders welcomed a possible
+opportunity for revolt. On the morning of the 22nd masses of men poured
+westwards from the workmen's quarter. The city was in confusion all day,
+and the erection of barricades began. Troops were posted in the streets; no
+serious attack, however, was made by either side, and at nightfall quiet
+returned.
+
+[Feb. 23rd.]
+
+On the next morning the National Guard of Paris was called to arms.
+Throughout the struggle between Louis Philippe and the populace of Paris in
+the earlier years of his reign, the National Guard, which was drawn
+principally from the trading classes, had fought steadily for the King.
+Now, however, it was at one with the Liberal Opposition in the Assembly,
+and loudly demanded the dismissal of the Ministers. While some of the
+battalions interposed between the regular troops and the populace and
+averted a conflict, others proceeded to the Chamber with petitions for
+Reform. Obstinately as Louis Philippe had hitherto refused all concession,
+the announcement of the threatened defection of the National Guard at
+length convinced him that resistance was impossible. He accepted Guizot's
+resignation, and the Chamber heard from the fallen Minister himself that he
+had ceased to hold office. Although the King declined for awhile to commit
+the formation of a Ministry to Thiers, the recognised chief of the
+Opposition, and endeavoured to place a politician more acceptable to
+himself in office, it was felt that with the fall of Guizot all real
+resistance to Reform was broken. Nothing more was asked by the
+Parliamentary Opposition or by the middle-class of Paris. The victory
+seemed to be won, the crisis at an end. In the western part of the capital
+congratulation and good-humour succeeded to the fear of conflict. The
+troops fraternised with the citizens and the National Guard; and when
+darkness came on, the boulevards were illuminated as if for a national
+festival.
+
+[Feb. 24th.]
+
+In the midst, however, of this rejoicing, and while the chiefs of the
+revolutionary societies, fearing that the opportunity had been lost for
+striking a blow at the Monarchy, exhorted the defenders of the barricades
+to maintain their positions, a band of workmen came into conflict,
+accidentally or of set purpose, with the troops in front of the Foreign
+Office. A volley was fired, which killed or wounded eighty persons. Placing
+the dead bodies on a waggon, and carrying them by torchlight through the
+streets in the workmen's quarter, the insurrectionary leaders called the
+people to arms. The tocsin sounded throughout the night; on the next
+morning the populace marched against the Tuileries. In consequence of the
+fall of the Ministry and the supposed reconciliation of the King with the
+People, whatever military dispositions had been begun had since been
+abandoned. At isolated points the troops fought bravely; but there was no
+systematic defence. Shattered by the strain of the previous days, and
+dismayed by the indifference of the National Guard when he rode out among
+them, the King, who at every epoch of his long life had shown such
+conspicuous courage in the presence of danger, now lost all nerve and all
+faculty of action. He signed an act of abdication in favour of his
+grandson, the Count of Paris, and fled. Behind him the victorious mob burst
+into the Tuileries and devastated it from cellar to roof. The Legislative
+Chamber, where an attempt was made to proclaim the Count of Paris King, was
+in its turn invaded. In uproar and tumult a Provisional Government was
+installed at the Hotel de Ville; and ere the day closed the news went out
+to Europe that the House of Orleans had ceased to reign, and that the
+Republic had been proclaimed. It was not over France alone, it was over the
+Continent at large, that the tide of revolution was breaking.
+
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VOLUME III.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+Europe in 1789 and in 1848--Agitation in Western Germany before and
+after the Revolution at Paris--Austria and Hungary--The March
+Revolution at Vienna--Flight of Metternich--The Hungarian Diet--Hungary
+wins its independence--Bohemian movement--Autonomy promised to Bohemia--
+Insurrection of Lombardy--Of Venice--Piedmont makes war on Austria--A
+general Italian war against Austria imminent--The March Days at
+Berlin--Frederick William IV.--A National Assembly promised--
+Schleswig-Holstein--Insurrection in Holstein--War between Germany and
+Denmark--The German Ante-Parliament--Republican rising in Baden--Meeting
+of the German National Assembly at Frankfort--Europe generally in March,
+1848--The French Provisional Government--The National Workshops--The
+Government and the Red Republicans--French National Assembly--Riot of May
+15--Measures against the National Workshops--The Four Days of June--
+Cavaignac--Louis Napoleon--He is elected to the Assembly--Elected
+President.
+
+
+[Europe in 1789 and 1848.]
+
+There were few statesmen living in 1848 who, like Metternich and like Louis
+Philippe, could remember the outbreak of the French Revolution. To those
+who could so look back across the space of sixty years, a comparison of the
+European movements that followed the successive onslaughts upon authority
+in France afforded some measure of the change that had passed over the
+political atmosphere of the Continent within a single lifetime. The
+Revolution of 1789, deeply as it stirred men's minds in neighbouring
+countries, had occasioned no popular outbreak on a large scale outside
+France. The expulsion of Charles X. in 1830 had been followed by national
+uprisings in Italy, Poland, and Belgium, and by a struggle for
+constitutional government in the smaller States of Northern Germany. The
+downfall of Louis Philippe in 1848 at once convulsed the whole of central
+Europe. From the Rhenish Provinces to the Ottoman frontier there was no
+government but the Swiss Republic that was not menaced; there was no race
+which did not assert its claim to a more or less complete independence.
+Communities whose long slumber had been undisturbed by the shocks of the
+Napoleonic period now vibrated with those same impulses which, since 1815,
+no pressure of absolute power had been able wholly to extinguish in Italy
+and Germany. The borders of the region of political discontent had been
+enlarged; where apathy, or immemorial loyalty to some distant crown, had
+long closed the ear to the voices of the new age, now all was restlessness,
+all eager expectation of the dawning epoch of national life. This was
+especially the case with the Slavic races included in the Austrian Empire,
+races which during the earlier years of this century had been wholly mute.
+These in their turn now felt the breath of patriotism, and claimed the
+right of self-government. Distinct as the ideas of national independence
+and of constitutional liberty are in themselves, they were not distinct in
+their operation over a great part of Europe in 1848; and this epoch will be
+wrongly conceived if it is viewed as no more than a repetition on a large
+scale of the democratic outbreak of Paris with which it opened. More was
+sought in Europe in 1848 than the substitution of popular for monarchical
+or aristocratic rule. The effort to make the State one with the nation
+excited wider interests than the effort to enlarge and equalise citizen
+rights; and it is in the action of this principle of nationality that we
+find the explanation of tendencies of the epoch which appear at first view
+to be in direct conflict with one another. In Germany a single race was
+divided under many Governments: here the national instinct impelled to
+unity. In Austria a variety of races was held together by one crown: here
+the national instinct impelled to separation. In both these States, as in
+Italy, where the predominance of the foreigner and the continuance of
+despotic government were in a peculiar manner connected with one another,
+the efforts of 1848 failed; but the problems which then agitated Europe
+could not long be set aside, and the solution of them complete, in the case
+of Germany and Italy, partial and tentative in the case of Austria, renders
+the succeeding twenty-five years a memorable period in European history.
+
+[Agitation in Western Germany.]
+
+The sudden disappearance of the Orleanist monarchy and the proclamation of
+the Republic at Paris struck with dismay the Governments beyond the Rhine.
+Difficulties were already gathering round them, opposition among their own
+subjects was daily becoming more formidable and more outspoken. In Western
+Germany a meeting of Liberal deputies had been held in the autumn of 1847,
+in which the reform of the Federal Constitution and the establishment of a
+German Parliament had been demanded: a Republican or revolutionary party,
+small but virulent, had also its own avowed policy and its recognised
+organs in the press. No sooner had the news of the Revolution at Paris
+passed the frontier than in all the minor German States the cry for reform
+became irresistible. Ministers everywhere resigned; the popular demands
+were granted; and men were called to office whose names were identified
+with the struggle for the freedom of the Press, for trial by jury, and for
+the reform of the Federal Constitution. The Federal Diet itself, so long
+the instrument of absolutism, bowed beneath the stress of the time,
+abolished the laws of censorship, and invited the Governments to send
+Commissioners to Frankfort to discuss the reorganisation of Germany. It was
+not, however, at Frankfort or at the minor capitals that the conflict
+between authority and its antagonists was to be decided. Vienna, the
+stronghold of absolutism, the sanctuary from which so many interdicts had
+gone forth against freedom in every part of Europe, was itself invaded by
+the revolutionary spirit. The clear sky darkened, and Metternich found
+himself powerless before the storm.
+
+[Austria.]
+
+There had been until 1848 so complete an absence of political life in the
+Austrian capital, that, when the conviction suddenly burst upon all minds
+that the ancient order was doomed, there were neither party-leaders to
+confront the Government, nor plans of reform upon which any considerable
+body of men were agreed. The first utterances of public discontent were
+petitions drawn up by the Chamber of Commerce and by literary associations.
+These were vague in purport and far from aggressive in their tone. A
+sterner note sounded when intelligence reached the capital of the
+resolutions that had been passed by the Hungarian Lower House on the 3rd of
+March, and of the language in which these had been enforced by Kossuth.
+Casting aside all reserve, the Magyar leader had declared that the reigning
+dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry
+drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government
+throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese
+system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which
+paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary
+can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of
+government in direct antagonism to every constitutional principle. Our task
+it is to found a happier future on the brotherhood of all the Austrian
+races, and to substitute for the union enforced by bayonets and police the
+enduring bond of a free constitution." When the Hungarian Assembly had thus
+taken into its own hands the cause of the rest of the monarchy, it was not
+for the citizens of Vienna to fall short in the extent of their demands.
+The idea of a Constitution for the Empire at large was generally accepted
+and it was proposed that an address embodying this demand should be sent in
+to the Emperor by the Provincial Estates of Lower Austria, whose meeting
+happened to be fixed for the 13th of March. In the meantime the students
+made themselves the heroes of the hour. The agitation of the city
+increased; rumours of State bankruptcy and of the impending repudiation of
+the paper currency filled all classes with the belief that some catastrophe
+was near at hand. [411]
+
+[The March Revolution at Vienna.]
+
+The Provincial Estates of Lower Austria had long fallen into such
+insignificance that in ordinary times their proceedings were hardly noticed
+by the capital. The accident that they were now to assemble in the midst of
+a great crisis elevated them to a sudden importance. It was believed that
+the decisive word would be spoken in the course of their debates; and on
+the morning of the 13th of March masses of the populace, led by a
+procession of students, assembled round the Hall of the Diet. While the
+debate proceeded within, street-orators inflamed the passions of the crowd
+outside. The tumult deepened; and when at length a note was let down from
+one of the windows of the Hall stating that the Diet were inclining to
+half-measures, the mob broke into uproar, and an attack was made upon the
+Diet Hall itself. The leading members of the Estates were compelled to
+place themselves at the head of a deputation, which proceeded to the
+Emperor's palace in order to enforce the demands of the people. The Emperor
+himself, who at no time was capable of paying serious attention to
+business, remained invisible during this and the two following days; the
+deputation was received by Metternich and the principal officers of State,
+who were assembled in council. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets became
+denser and more excited; soldiers approached, to protect the Diet Hall and
+to guard the environs of the palace; there was an interval of confusion;
+and on the advance of a new regiment, which was mistaken for an attack, the
+mob who had stormed the Diet Hall hurled the shattered furniture from the
+windows upon the soldiers' heads. A volley was now fired, which cost
+several lives. At the sound of the firing still deeper agitation seized the
+city. Barricades were erected, and the people and soldiers fought hand to
+hand. As evening came on, deputation after deputation pressed into the
+palace to urge concession upon the Government. Metternich, who, almost
+alone in the Council, had made light of the popular uprising, now at length
+consented to certain definite measures of reform. He retired into an
+adjoining room to draft an order abolishing the censorship of the Press.
+During his absence the cry was raised among the deputations that thronged
+the Council-chamber, "Down with Metternich!" The old man returned, and
+found himself abandoned by his colleagues. There were some among them,
+members of the Imperial family, who had long been his opponents; others who
+had in vain urged him to make concessions before it was too late.
+Metternich saw that the end of his career was come; he spoke a few words,
+marked by all the dignity and self-possession of his greatest days, and
+withdrew, to place his resignation in the Emperor's hands.
+
+[Flight of Metternich.]
+
+For thirty-nine years Metternich had been so completely identified with the
+Austrian system of government that in his fall that entire system seemed to
+have vanished away. The tumult of the capital subsided on the mere
+announcement of his resignation, though the hatred which he had excited
+rendered it unsafe for him to remain within reach of hostile hands. He was
+conveyed from Vienna by a faithful secretary on the night of the 14th of
+March, and, after remaining for a few days in concealment, crossed the
+Saxon frontier. His exile was destined to be of some duration, but no exile
+was ever more cheerfully borne, or sweetened by a profounder satisfaction
+at the evils which a mad world had brought upon itself by driving from it
+its one thoroughly wise and just statesman. Betaking himself in the general
+crash of the Continental Courts to Great Britain, which was still as safe
+as when he had visited it fifty-five years before, Metternich received a
+kindly welcome from the Duke of Wellington and the leaders of English
+society; and when the London season was over he sought and found at
+Brighton something of the liveliness and the sunshine of his own southern
+home. [412]
+
+[The Hungarian Diet.]
+
+The action of the Hungarian Diet under Kossuth's leadership had powerfully
+influenced the course of events at Vienna. The Viennese outbreak in its
+turn gave irresistible force to the Hungarian national movement. Up to the
+13th of March the Chamber of Magnates had withheld their assent from the
+resolution passed by the Lower House in favour of a national executive;
+they now accepted it without a single hostile vote; and on the 15th a
+deputation was sent to Vienna to lay before the Emperor an address
+demanding not only the establishment of a responsible Ministry but the
+freedom of the Press, trial by jury, equality of religion, and a system of
+national education. At the moment when this deputation reached Vienna the
+Government was formally announcing its compliance with the popular demand
+for a Constitution for the whole of the Empire. The Hungarians were
+escorted in triumph through the streets, and were received on the following
+day by the Emperor himself, who expressed a general concurrence with the
+terms of the address. The deputation returned to Presburg, and the
+Palatine, or representative of the sovereign in Hungary, the Archduke
+Stephen, forthwith charged Count Batthyany, one of the most popular of the
+Magyar nobles, with the formation of a national Ministry. Thus far the Diet
+had been in the van of the Hungarian movement; it now sank almost into
+insignificance by the side of the revolutionary organisation at Pesth,
+where all the ardour and all the patriotism of the Magyar race glowed in
+their native force untempered by the political experience of the statesmen
+who were collected at Presburg, and unchecked by any of those influences
+which belong to the neighbourhood of an Imperial Court. At Pesth there
+broke out an agitation at once so democratic and so intensely national that
+all considerations of policy and of regard for the Austrian Government
+which might have affected the action of the Diet were swept away before it.
+Kossuth, himself the genuine representative of the capital, became supreme.
+At his bidding the Diet passed a law abolishing the departments of the
+Central Government by which the control of the Court over the Hungarian
+body politic had been exercised. A list of Ministers was submitted and
+approved, including not only those who were needed for the transaction of
+domestic business, but Ministers of War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs; and
+in order that the entire nation might rally round its Government, the
+peasantry were at one stroke emancipated from all services attaching to the
+land, and converted into free proprietors. Of the compensation to be paid
+to the lords for the loss of these services, no more was said than that it
+was a debt of honour to be discharged by the nation.
+
+[Hungary wins independence.]
+
+Within the next few days the measures thus carried through the Diet by
+Kossuth were presented for the Emperor's ratification at Vienna. The fall
+of Metternich, important as it was, had not in reality produced that effect
+upon the Austrian Government which was expected from it by popular opinion.
+The new Cabinet at Vienna was drawn from the ranks of the official
+hierarchy; and although some of its members were more liberally disposed
+than their late chief, they had all alike passed their lives in the
+traditions of the ancient system, and were far from intending to make
+themselves the willing agents of revolution. These men saw clearly enough
+that the action of the Diet at Presburg amounted to nothing less than the
+separation of Hungary from the Austrian Empire. With the Ministries of War,
+Finance, and Foreign Affairs established in independence of the central
+government, there would remain no link between Hungary and the Hereditary
+States but the person of a titular, and, for the present time, an imbecile
+sovereign. Powerless and distracted, Metternich's successors looked in all
+directions for counsel. The Palatine argued that three courses were open to
+the Austrian Government. It might endeavour to crush the Hungarian movement
+by force of arms; for this purpose, however, the troops available were
+insufficient: or it might withdraw from the country altogether, leaving the
+peasants to attack the nobles, as they had done in Galicia; this was a
+dishonourable policy, and the action of the Diet had, moreover, secured to
+the peasant everything that he could gain by a social insurrection: or
+finally, the Government might yield for the moment to the inevitable, make
+terms with Batthyany's Ministry, and quietly prepare for vigorous
+resistance when opportunity should arrive. The last method was that which
+the Palatine recommended; the Court inclined in the same direction, but it
+was unwilling to submit without making some further trial of the temper of
+its antagonists. A rescript was accordingly sent to Presburg, announcing
+that the Ministry formed by Count Batthyany was accepted by the Emperor,
+but that the central offices which the Diet had abolished must be
+preserved, and the functions of the Ministers of War and Finance be reduced
+to those of chiefs of departments, dependent on the orders of a higher
+authority at Vienna. From the delay that had taken place in the despatch of
+this answer the nationalist leaders at Pesth and at Presburg had augured no
+good result. Its publication brought the country to the verge of armed
+revolt. Batthyany refused to accept office under the conditions named; the
+Palatine himself declared that he could remain in Hungary no longer.
+Terrified at the result of its own challenge, the Court now withdrew from
+the position that it had taken up, and accepted the scheme of the Diet in
+its integrity, stipulating only that the disposal of the army outside
+Hungary in time of war, and the appointment to the higher commands, should
+remain with the Imperial Government. [413]
+
+[Bohemian movement.]
+
+[Autonomy promised.]
+
+Hungary had thus made good its position as an independent State connected
+with Austria only through the person of its monarch. Vast and momentous as
+was the change, fatal as it might well appear to those who could conceive
+of no unity but the unity of a central government, the victory of the
+Magyars appears to have excited no feeling among the German Liberals at
+Vienna but one of satisfaction. So odious, so detested, was the fallen
+system of despotism, that every victory won by its adversaries was hailed
+as a triumph of the good cause, be the remoter issues what they might. Even
+where a powerful German element, such as did not exist in Hungary itself,
+was threatened by the assertion of provincial claims, the Government could
+not hope for the support of the capital if it should offer resistance. The
+example of the Magyars was speedily followed by the Czechs in Bohemia.
+Forgotten and obliterated among the nationalities of Europe, the Czechs had
+preserved in their language, and in that almost alone, the emblem of their
+national independence. Within the borders of Bohemia there was so large a
+German population that the ultimate absorption of the Slavic element by
+this wealthier and privileged body had at an earlier time seemed not
+unlikely. Since 1830, however, the Czech national movement had been
+gradually gaining ground. In the first days of the agitation of 1848 an
+effort had been made to impress a purely constitutional form upon the
+demands made in the name of the people of Prague, and so to render the
+union of all classes possible. This policy, however, received its deathblow
+from the Revolution in Vienna and from the victory of the Magyars. The
+leadership at Prague passed from men of position and experience,
+representing rather the intelligence of the German element in Bohemia than
+the patriotism of the Czechs, to the nationalist orators who commanded the
+streets. An attempt made by the Cabinet at Vienna to evade the demands
+drawn up under the influence of the more moderate politicians resulted only
+in the downfall of this party, and in the tender of a new series of demands
+of far more revolutionary character. The population of Prague were
+beginning to organise a national guard; arms were being distributed;
+authority had collapsed. The Government was now forced to consent to
+everything that was asked of it, and a legislative Assembly with an
+independent local administration was promised to Bohemia. To this Assembly,
+as soon as it should meet, the new institutions of the kingdom were to be
+submitted.
+
+[Insurrection of Lombardy, March 18.]
+
+Thus far, if the authority of the Court of Vienna, had been virtually
+shaken off by a great part of its subjects, the Emperor had at least not
+seen these subjects in avowed rebellion against the House of Hapsburg, nor
+supported in their resistance by the arms of a foreign Power. South of the
+Alps the dynastic connection was openly severed, and the rule of Austria
+declared for ever at an end. Lombardy had since the beginning of the year
+1848 been held in check only by the display of great military force. The
+Revolution at Paris had excited both hopes and fears; the Revolution at
+Vienna was instantly followed by revolt in Milan. Radetzky, the Austrian
+commander, a veteran who had served with honour in every campaign since
+that against the Turks in 1788, had long foreseen the approach of an armed
+conflict; yet when the actual crisis arrived his dispositions had not been
+made for meeting it. The troops in Milan were ill placed; the offices of
+Government were moreover separated by half the breadth of the city from the
+military head-quarters. Thus when on the 18th of March the insurrection
+broke out, it carried everything before it. The Vice-Governor, O'Donell,
+was captured, and compelled to sign his name to decrees handing over the
+government of the city to the Municipal Council. Radetzky now threw his
+soldiers upon the barricades, and penetrated to the centre of the city; but
+he was unable to maintain himself there under the ceaseless fire from the
+windows and the housetops, and withdrew on the night of the 19th to the
+line of fortifications. Fighting continued during the next two days in the
+outskirts and at the gates of the city. The garrisons of all the
+neighbouring towns were summoned to the assistance of their general, but
+the Italians broke up the bridges and roads, and one detachment alone out
+of all the troops in Lombardy succeeded in reaching Milan. A report now
+arrived at Radetzky's camp that the King of Piedmont was on the march
+against him. Preferring the loss of Milan to the possible capture of his
+army, he determined to evacuate the city. On the night of the 22nd of March
+the retreat was begun, and Radetzky fell back upon the Mincio and Verona,
+which he himself had made the centre of the Austrian system of defence in
+Upper Italy. [414]
+
+[Insurrection of Venice.]
+
+[Piedmont makes war.]
+
+Venice had already followed the example of the Lombard capital. The tidings
+received from Vienna after the 13th of March appear to have completely
+bewildered both the military and the civil authorities on the Adriatic
+coast. They released their political prisoners, among whom was Daniel
+Manin, an able and determined foe of Austria; they entered into
+constitutional discussions with the popular leaders; they permitted the
+formation of a national guard, and finally handed over to this guard the
+arsenals and the dockyards with all their stores. From this time all was
+over. Manin proclaimed the Republic of St. Mark, and became the chief of a
+Provisional Government. The Italian regiments in garrison joined the
+national cause; the ships of war at Pola, manned chiefly by Italian
+sailors, were only prevented from sailing to the assistance of the rebels
+by batteries that were levelled against them from the shore. Thus without a
+blow being struck Venice was lost to Austria. The insurrection spread
+westwards and northwards through city and village in the interior, till
+there remained to Austria nothing but the fortresses on the Adige and the
+Mincio, where Radetzky, deaf to the counsels of timidity, held his ground
+unshaken. The national rising carried Piedmont with it. It was in vain that
+the British envoy at Turin urged the King to enter into no conflict with
+Austria. On the 24th of March Charles Albert published a proclamation
+promising his help to the Lombards. Two days later his troops entered
+Milan. [415]
+
+[General war against Austria, beginning in Italy.]
+
+Austria had for thirty years consistently laid down the principle that its
+own sovereignty in Upper Italy vested it with the right to control the
+political system of every other State in the peninsula. It had twice
+enforced this principle by arms: first in its intervention in Naples in
+1820, afterwards in its occupation of the Roman States in 1831. The
+Government of Vienna had, as it were with fixed intention, made it
+impossible that its presence in any part of Italy should be regarded as the
+presence of an ordinary neighbour, entitled to quiet possession until some
+new provocation should be given. The Italians would have proved themselves
+the simplest of mankind if, having any reasonable hope of military success,
+they had listened to the counsels of Palmerston and other statesmen who
+urged them not to take advantage of the difficulties in which Austria was
+now placed. The paralysis of the Austrian State was indeed the one
+unanswerable argument for immediate war. So long as the Emperor retained
+his ascendency in any part of Italy, his interests could not permanently
+suffer the independence of the rest. If the Italians should chivalrously
+wait until the Cabinet of Vienna had recovered its strength, it was quite
+certain that their next efforts in the cause of internal liberty would be
+as ruthlessly crushed as their last. Every clearsighted patriot understood
+that the time for a great national effort had arrived. In some respects the
+political condition of Italy seemed favourable to such united action. Since
+the insurrection of Palermo in January, 1848, absolutism had everywhere
+fallen. Ministries had come into existence containing at least a fair
+proportion of men who were in real sympathy with the national feeling.
+Above all, the Pope seemed disposed to place himself at the head of a
+patriotic union against the foreigner. Thus, whatever might be the secret
+inclinations of the reigning Houses, they were unable for the moment to
+resist the call to arms. Without an actual declaration of war troops were
+sent northwards from Naples, from Florence, and from Rome, to take part, as
+it was supposed, in the national struggle by the side of the King of
+Piedmont. Volunteers thronged to the standards. The Papal benediction
+seemed for once to rest on the cause of manhood and independence. On the
+other hand, the very impetus which had brought Liberal Ministries into
+power threatened to pass into a phase of violence and disorder. The
+concessions already made were mocked by men who expected to win all the
+victories of democracy in an hour. It remained to be seen whether there
+existed in Italy the political sagacity which, triumphing over all local
+jealousies, could bend to one great aim the passions of the multitude and
+the fears of the Courts, or whether the cause of the whole nation would be
+wrecked in an ignoble strife between demagogues and reactionists, between
+the rabble of the street and the camarilla round the throne. [416]
+
+[The March Days at Berlin.]
+
+Austria had with one hand held down Italy, with the other it had weighed on
+Germany. Though the Revolutionary movement was in full course on the east
+of the Rhine before Metternich's fall, it received, especially at Berlin, a
+great impetus from this event. Since the beginning of March the Prussian
+capital had worn an unwonted aspect. In this city of military discipline
+public meetings had been held day after day, and the streets had been
+blocked by excited crowds. Deputations which laid before the King demands
+similar to those now made in every German town received halting and evasive
+answers. Excitement increased, and on the 13th of March encounters began
+between the citizens and the troops, which, though insignificant, served to
+exasperate the people and its leaders. The King appeared to be wavering
+between resistance and concession until the Revolution at Vienna, which
+became known at Berlin on the 15th of March, brought affairs to their
+crisis. On the 17th the tumult in the streets suddenly ceased; it was
+understood that the following day would see the Government either
+reconciled with the people or forced to deal with an insurrection on a
+great scale. Accordingly on the morning of the 18th crowds made their way
+towards the palace, which was surrounded by troops. About midday there
+appeared a Royal edict summoning the Prussian United Diet for the 2nd of
+April, and announcing that the King had determined to promote the creation
+of a Parliament for all Germany and the establishment of Constitutional
+Government in every German State. This manifesto drew fresh masses towards
+the palace, desirous, it would seem, to express their satisfaction; its
+contents, however, were imperfectly understood by the assembly already in
+front of the palace, which the King vainly attempted to address. When
+called upon to disperse, the multitude refused to do so, and answered by
+cries for the withdrawal of the soldiery. In the midst of the confusion two
+shots were fired from the ranks without orders; a panic followed, in which,
+for no known reason, the cavalry and infantry threw themselves upon the
+people. The crowd was immediately put to flight, but the combat was taken
+up by the population of Berlin. Barricades appeared in the streets;
+fighting continued during the evening and night. Meanwhile the King, who
+was shocked and distressed at the course that events had taken, received
+deputations begging that the troops might be withdrawn from the city.
+Frederick William endeavoured for awhile to make the surrender of the
+barricades the condition for an armistice; but as night went on the troops
+became exhausted, and although they had gained ground, the resistance of
+the people was not overcome. Whether doubtful of the ultimate issue of the
+conflict or unwilling to permit further bloodshed, the King gave way, and
+at daybreak on the 19th ordered the troops to be withdrawn. His intention
+was that they should continue to garrison the palace, but the order was
+misunderstood, and the troops were removed to the outside of Berlin. The
+palace was thus left unprotected, and, although no injury was inflicted
+upon its inmates, the King was made to feel that the people could now
+command his homage. The bodies of the dead were brought into the court of
+the palace; their wounds were laid bare, and the King, who appeared in a
+balcony, was compelled to descend into the court, and to stand before them
+with uncovered head. Definite political expression was given to the changed
+state of affairs by the appointment of a new Ministry. [417]
+
+The conflict between the troops and the people at Berlin was described, and
+with truth, as the result of a misunderstanding. Frederick William had
+already determined to yield to the principal demands of his subjects; nor
+on the part of the inhabitants of Berlin had there existed any general
+hostility towards the sovereign, although a small group of agitators, in
+part foreign, had probably sought to bring about an armed attack on the
+throne. Accordingly, when once the combat was broken off, there seemed to
+be no important obstacle to a reconciliation between the King and the
+people. Frederick William chose a course which spared and even gratified
+his own self-love. In the political faith of all German Liberals the
+establishment of German unity was now an even more important article than
+the introduction of free institutions into each particular State. The
+Revolution at Berlin had indeed been occasioned by the King's delay in
+granting internal reform; but these domestic disputes might well be
+forgotten if in the great cause of German unity the Prussians saw their
+King rising to the needs of the hour. Accordingly the first resolution of
+Frederick William, after quiet had returned to the capital, was to appear
+in public state as the champion of the Fatherland. A proclamation announced
+on the morning of the 21st of March that the King had placed himself at the
+head of the German nation, and that he would on that day appear on
+horseback wearing the old German colours. In due time Frederick William
+came forth at the head of a procession, wearing the tricolor of gold,
+white, and black, which since 1815 had been so dear to the patriots and so
+odious to the Governments of Germany. As he passed through the streets he
+was saluted as Emperor, but he repudiated the title, asserting with oaths
+and imprecations that he intended to rob no German prince of his
+sovereignty. At each stage of his theatrical progress he repeated to
+appropriate auditors his sounding but ambiguous allusions to the duties
+imposed upon him by the common danger. A manifesto, published at the close
+of the day, summed up the utterances of the monarch in a somewhat less
+rhetorical form. "Germany is in ferment within, and exposed from without to
+danger from more than one side. Deliverance from this danger can come only
+from the most intimate union of the German princes and people under a
+single leadership. I take this leadership upon me for the hour of peril. I
+have to-day assumed the old German colours, and placed myself and my people
+under the venerable banner of the German Empire. Prussia henceforth is
+merged in Germany." [418]
+
+[National Assembly promised.]
+
+The ride of the King through Berlin, and his assumption of the character of
+German leader, however little it pleased the minor sovereigns, or gratified
+the Liberals of the smaller States, who considered that such National
+authority ought to be conferred by the nation, not assumed by a prince, was
+successful for the moment in restoring to the King some popularity among
+his own subjects. He could now without humiliation proceed with the
+concessions which had been interrupted by the tragical events of the 18th
+of March. In answer to a deputation from Breslau, which urged that the
+Chamber formed by the union of the Provincial Diets should be replaced by a
+Constituent Assembly, the King promised that a national Representative
+Assembly should be convoked as soon as the United Diet had passed the
+necessary electoral law. To this National Assembly the Government would
+submit measures securing the liberty of the individual, the right of public
+meeting and of associations, trial by jury, the responsibility of
+Ministers, and the independence of the judicature. A civic militia was to
+be formed, with the right of choosing its own officers, and the standing
+army was to take the oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Hereditary
+jurisdictions and manorial rights of police were to be abolished; equality
+before the law was to be universally enforced; in short, the entire scheme
+of reforms demanded by the Constitutional Liberals of Prussia was to be
+carried into effect. In Berlin, as in every other capital in Germany, the
+victory of the party of progress now seemed to be assured. The Government
+no longer represented a power hostile to popular rights; and when, on the
+22nd of March, the King spontaneously paid the last honours to those who
+had fallen in combat with his troops, as the long funeral procession passed
+his palace, it was generally believed that his expression of feeling was
+sincere.
+
+[Schleswig-Holstein.]
+
+In the passage of his address in which King Frederick William spoke of the
+external dangers threatening Germany, he referred to apprehensions which
+had for a while been current that the second French Republic would revive
+the aggressive energy of the first. This fear proved baseless;
+nevertheless, for a sovereign who really intended to act as the champion of
+the German nation at large, the probability of war with a neighbouring
+Power was far from remote. The cause of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein,
+which were in rebellion against the Danish Crown, excited the utmost
+interest and sympathy in Germany. The population of these provinces, with
+the exception of certain districts in Schleswig, was German; Holstein was
+actually a member of the German Federation. The legal relation of the
+Duchies to Denmark was, according to the popular view, very nearly that of
+Hanover to England before 1837. The King of Denmark was also Duke of
+Schleswig and of Holstein, but these were no more an integral portion of
+the Danish State than Hanover was of the British Empire; and the laws of
+succession were moreover different in Schleswig-Holstein, the Crown being
+transmitted by males, while in Denmark females were capable of succession.
+On the part of the Danes it was admitted that in certain districts in
+Holstein the Salic law held good; it was, however, maintained that in the
+remainder of Holstein and in all Schleswig the rules of succession were the
+same as in Denmark. The Danish Government denied that Schleswig-Holstein
+formed a unity in itself, as alleged by the Germans, and that it possessed
+separate national rights as against the authority of the King's Government
+at Copenhagen. The real heart of the difficulty lay in the fact that the
+population of the Duchies was German. So long as the Germans as a race
+possessed no national feeling, the union of the Duchies with the Danish
+Monarchy had not been felt as a grievance. It happened, however, that the
+great revival of German patriotism resulting from the War of Liberation in
+1813 was almost simultaneous with the severance of Norway from the Danish
+Crown, which compelled the Government of Copenhagen to increase very
+heavily the burdens imposed on its German subjects in the Duchies. From
+this time discontent gained ground, especially in Altona and Kiel, where
+society was as thoroughly German as in the neighbouring city of Hamburg.
+After 1830, when Provincial Estates were established in Schleswig and
+Holstein, the German movement became formidable. The reaction, however,
+which marked the succeeding period generally in Europe prevailed in Denmark
+too, and it was not until 1844, when a posthumous work of Lornsen, the
+exiled leader of the German party, vindicated the historical rights of the
+Duchies, that the claims of German nationality in these provinces were
+again vigorously urged. From this time the separation of Schleswig-Holstein
+from Denmark became a question of practical politics. The King of Denmark,
+Christain VIII., had but one son, who, though long married, was childless,
+and with whom the male line of the reigning House would expire. In answer
+to an address of the Danish Provincial Estates calling upon the King to
+declare the unity of the Monarchy and the validity of the Danish law of
+succession for all its parts, the Holstein Estates passed a resolution in
+November, 1844, that the Duchies were an independent body, governed by the
+rule of male descent, and indivisible. After an interval of two years,
+during which a Commission examined the succession-laws, King Christian
+published a declaration that the succession was the same in Schleswig as in
+Denmark proper, and that, as regarded those parts of Holstein where a
+different rule of succession existed, he would spare no effort to maintain
+the unity of the Monarchy. On this the Provincial Estates both of Schleswig
+and of Holstein addressed protests to the King, who refused to accept them.
+The deputies now resigned in a mass, whilst on behalf of Holstein an appeal
+was made to the German Federal Diet. The Diet merely replied by a
+declaration of rights; but in Germany at large the keenest interest was
+aroused on behalf of these severed members of the race who were so
+resolutely struggling against incorporation with a foreign Power. The
+deputies themselves, passing from village to village, excited a strenuous
+spirit of resistance throughout the Duchies, which was met by the Danish
+Government with measures of repression more severe than any which it had
+hitherto employed. [419]
+
+[Insurrection in Holstein, March 24.]
+
+[War between Germany and Denmark.]
+
+Such was the situation of affairs when, on the 20th of January, 1848, King
+Christian VIII. died, leaving the throne to Frederick VII., the last of the
+male line of his House. Frederick's first act was to publish the draft of a
+Constitution, in which all parts of the Monarchy were treated as on the
+same footing. Before the delegates could assemble to whom the completion of
+this work was referred, the shock of the Paris Revolution reached the North
+Sea ports. A public meeting at Altona demanded the establishment of a
+separate constitution for Schleswig-Holstein, and the admission of
+Schleswig into the German Federation. The Provincial Estates accepted this
+resolution, and sent a deputation to Copenhagen to present this and other
+demands to the King. But in the course of the next few days a popular
+movement at Copenhagen brought into power a thoroughly Danish Ministry,
+pledged to the incorporation of Schleswig with Denmark as an integral part
+of the Kingdom. Without waiting to learn the answer made by the King to the
+deputation, the Holsteiners now took affairs into their own hands. A
+Provisional Government was formed at Kiel (March 24), the troops joined the
+people, and the insurrection instantly spread over the whole province. As
+the proposal to change the law of succession to the throne had originated
+with the King of Denmark, the cause of the Holsteiners was from one point
+of view that of established right. The King of Prussia, accepting the
+positions laid down by the Holstein Estates in 1844, declared that he would
+defend the claims of the legitimate heir by force of arms, and ordered his
+troops to enter Holstein. The Diet of Frankfort, now forced to express the
+universal will of Germany, demanded that Schleswig, as the sister State of
+Holstein, should enter the Federation. On the passing of this resolution,
+the envoy who represented the Denmark. King of Denmark at the Diet, as Duke
+of Holstein, quitted Frankfort, and a state of war ensued between Denmark
+on the one side and Prussia with the German Federation on the other.
+
+[The German Ante-Parliament, March 30-April 4.]
+
+[Republican rising in Baden.]
+
+The passionate impulse of the German people towards unity had already
+called into being an organ for the expression of national sentiment, which,
+if without any legal or constitutional authority, was yet strong enough to
+impose its will upon the old and discredited Federal Diet and upon most of
+the surviving Governments. At the invitation of a Committee, about five
+hundred Liberals who had in one form or another taken part in public
+affairs assembled at Frankfort on the 30th of March to make the necessary
+preparations for the meeting of a German national Parliament. This
+Assembly, which is known as the Ante-Parliament, sat but for five days. Its
+resolutions, so far as regarded the method of electing the new Parliament,
+and the inclusion of new districts in the German Federation, were accepted
+by the Diet, and in the main carried into effect. Its denunciation of
+persons concerned in the repressive measures of 1819 and subsequent
+reactionary epochs was followed by the immediate retirement of all members
+of the Diet whose careers dated back to those detested days. But in the
+most important work that was expected from the Ante-Parliament, the
+settlement of a draft-Constitution to be laid before the future National
+Assembly as a basis for its deliberations, nothing whatever was
+accomplished. The debates that took place from the 31st of March to the 4th
+of April were little more than a trial of strength between the Monarchical
+and Republican parties. The Republicans, far outnumbered when they
+submitted a constitutional scheme of their own, proposed, after this
+repulse, that the existing Assembly should continue in session until the
+National Parliament met; in other words, that it should take upon itself
+the functions and character of a National Convention. Defeated also on this
+proposal, the leaders of the extreme section of the Republican party,
+strangely miscalculating their real strength, determined on armed
+insurrection. Uniting with a body of German refugees beyond the Rhine, who
+were themselves assisted by French and Polish soldiers of revolution, they
+raised the Republican standard in Baden, and for a few days maintained a
+hopeless and inglorious struggle against the troops which were sent to
+suppress them. Even in Baden, which had long been in advance of all other
+German States in democratic sentiment, and which was peculiarly open to
+Republican influences from France and Switzerland, the movement was not
+seriously supported by the population, and in the remainder of Germany it
+received no countenance whatever. The leaders found themselves ruined men.
+The best of them fled to the United States, where, in the great struggle
+against slavery thirteen years later, they rendered better service to their
+adopted than they had ever rendered to their natural Fatherland.
+
+[Meeting of the German National Assembly, May 18.]
+
+On breaking up on the 4th of April, the Ante-Parliament left behind it a
+Committee of Fifty, whose task it was to continue the work of preparation
+for the National Assembly to which it had itself contributed so little. One
+thing alone had been clearly established, that the future Constitution of
+Germany was not to be Republican. That the existing Governments could not
+be safely ignored by the National Assembly in its work of founding the new
+Federal Constitution for Germany was clear to those who were not blinded by
+the enthusiasm of the moment. In the Committee of Fifty and elsewhere plans
+were suggested for giving to the Governments a representation within the
+Constituent Assembly, or for uniting their representatives in a Chamber
+co-ordinate with this, so that each step in the construction of the new
+Federal order should be at once the work of the nation and of the
+Governments. Such plans were suggested and discussed; but in the haste and
+inexperience of the time they were brought to no conclusion. The opening of
+the National Assembly had been fixed for the 18th of May, and this brief
+interval had expired before the few sagacious men who understood the
+necessity of co-operation between the Governments and the Parliament had
+decided upon any common course of action. To the mass of patriots it was
+enough that Germany, after thirty years of disappointment, had at last won
+its national representation. Before this imposing image of the united race,
+Kings, Courts, and armies, it was fondly thought, must bow. Thus, in the
+midst of universal hope, the elections were held throughout Germany in its
+utmost federal extent, from the Baltic to the Italian border; Bohemia
+alone, where the Czech majority resisted any closer union with Germany,
+declining to send representatives to Frankfort. In the body of deputies
+elected there were to be found almost all the foremost Liberal politicians
+of every German community; a few still vigorous champions of the time of
+the War of Liberation, chief among them the poet Arndt; patriots who in the
+evil days that followed had suffered imprisonment and exile; historians,
+professors, critics, who in the sacred cause of liberty have, like
+Gervinus, inflicted upon their readers worse miseries than ever they
+themselves endured at the hands of unregenerate kings; theologians,
+journalists; in short, the whole group of leaders under whom Germany
+expected to enter into the promised land of national unity and freedom. No
+Imperial coronation ever brought to Frankfort so many honoured guests, or
+attracted to the same degree the sympathy of the German race. Greeted with
+the cheers of the citizens of Frankfort, whose civic militia lined the
+streets, the members of the Assembly marched in procession on the afternoon
+of the 18th of May from the ancient banqueting-hall of the Kaisers, where
+they had gathered, to the Church of St. Paul, which had been chosen as
+their Senate House. Their President and officers were elected on the
+following day. Arndt, who in the frantic confusion of the first meeting had
+been unrecognised and shouted down, was called into the Tribune, but could
+speak only a few words for tears. The Assembly voted him its thanks for his
+famous song, "What is the German's Fatherland?" and requested that he would
+add to it another stanza commemorating the union of the race at length
+visibly realised in that great Parliament. Four days after the opening of
+the General Assembly of Frankfort, the Prussian national Parliament began
+its sessions at Berlin. [420]
+
+[Europe generally in March, 1848.]
+
+At this point the first act in the Revolutionary drama of 1848 in Germany,
+as in Europe generally, may be considered to have reached its close. A
+certain unity marks the memorable epoch known generally as the March Days
+and the events immediately succeeding. Revolution is universal; it scarcely
+meets with resistance; its views seem on the point of being achieved; the
+baffled aspirations of the last half-century seem on the point of being
+fulfilled. There exists no longer in Central Europe such a thing as an
+autocratic Government; and, while the French Republic maintains an
+unexpected attitude of peace, Germany and Italy, under the leadership of
+old dynasties now penetrated with a new spirit, appear to be on the point
+of achieving each its own work of Federal union and of the expulsion of the
+foreigner from its national soil. All Italy prepares to move under Charles
+Albert to force the Austrians from their last strongholds on the Mincio and
+the Adige; all Germany is with the troops of Frederick William of Prussia
+as they enter Holstein to rescue this and the neighbouring German province
+from the Dane. In Radetzky's camp alone, and at the Court of St.
+Petersburg, the old monarchical order of Europe still survives. How
+powerful were these two isolated centres of anti-popular energy the world
+was soon to see. Yet they would not have turned back the tide of European
+affairs and given one more victory to reaction had they not had their
+allies in the hatred of race to race, in the incapacity and the errors of
+peoples and those who represented them; above all, in the enormous
+difficulties which, even had the generation been one of sages and martyrs,
+the political circumstances of the time would in themselves have opposed to
+the accomplishment of the ends desired.
+
+[The French Provisional Government.]
+
+[The National Workshops.]
+
+France had given to Central Europe the signal for the Revolution of 1848,
+and it was in France, where the conflict was not one for national
+independence but for political and social interests, that the Revolution
+most rapidly ran its course and first exhausted its powers. On the flight
+of Louis Philippe authority had been entrusted by the Chamber of Deputies
+to a Provisional Government, whose most prominent member was the orator and
+poet Lamartine. Installed at the Hotel de Ville, this Government had with
+difficulty prevented the mob from substituting the Red Flag for the
+Tricolor, and from proceeding at once to realise the plans of its own
+leaders. The majority of the Provisional Government were Republicans of a
+moderate type, representing the ideas of the urban middle classes rather
+than those of the workmen; but by their side were Ledru Rollin, a
+rhetorician dominated by the phrases of 1793, and Louis Blanc, who
+considered all political change as but an instrument for advancing the
+organisation of labour and for the emancipation of the artisan from
+servitude, by the establishment of State-directed industries affording
+appropriate employment and adequate remuneration to all. Among the first
+proclamations of the Provisional Government was one in which, in answer to
+a petition demanding the recognition of the Right to Labour, they undertook
+to guarantee employment to every citizen. This engagement, the heaviest
+perhaps that was ever voluntarily assumed by any Government, was followed
+in a few days by the opening of national workshops. That in the midst of a
+Revolution which took all parties by surprise plans for the conduct of a
+series of industrial enterprises by the State should have been seriously
+examined was impossible. The Government had paid homage to an abstract
+idea; they were without a conception of the mode in which it was to be
+realised. What articles were to be made, what works were to be executed, no
+one knew. The mere direction of destitute workmen to the centres where they
+were to be employed was a task for which a new branch of the administration
+had to be created. When this was achieved, the men collected proved useless
+for all purposes of industry. Their numbers increased enormously, rising in
+the course of four weeks from fourteen to sixty-five thousand. The
+Revolution had itself caused a financial and commercial panic, interrupting
+all the ordinary occupations of business, and depriving masses of men of
+the means of earning a livelihood. These, with others who had no intention
+of working, thronged to the State workshops; while the certainty of
+obtaining wages from the public purse occasioned a series of strikes of
+workmen against their employers and the abandonment of private factories.
+The chocks which had been intended to confine enrolment at the public works
+to persons already domiciled in Paris completely failed; from all the
+neighbouring departments the idle and the hungry streamed into the capital.
+Every abuse incidental to a system of public relief was present in Paris in
+its most exaggerated form; every element of experience, of wisdom, of
+precaution, was absent. If, instead of a group of benevolent theorists, the
+experiment of 1848 had had for its authors a company of millionaires
+anxious to dispel all hope that mankind might ever rise to a higher order
+than that of unrestricted competition of man against man, it could not have
+been conducted under more fatal conditions. [421]
+
+[The Provisional Government and the Red Republicans.]
+
+[Elections, April 23.]
+
+The leaders of the democracy in Paris had from the first considered that
+the decision upon the form of Government to be established in France in
+place of the Orleanist monarchy belonged rather to themselves than to the
+nation at large. They distrusted, and with good reason, the results of the
+General Election which, by a decree of the Provisional Government, was to
+be held in the course of April. A circular issued by Ledru Rollin, Minister
+of the Interior, without the knowledge of his colleagues, to the
+Commissioners by whom he had replaced the Prefects of the Monarchy gave the
+first open indication of this alarm, and of the means of violence and
+intimidation by which the party which Ledru Rollin represented hoped to
+impose its will upon the country. The Commissioners were informed in plain
+language that, as agents of a revolutionary authority, their powers were
+unlimited, and that their task was to exclude from election all persons who
+were not animated by revolutionary spirit, and pure from any taint of
+association with the past. If the circular had been the work of the
+Government, and not of a single member of it who was at variance with most
+of his colleagues and whose words were far more formidable than his
+actions, it would have clearly foreshadowed a return to the system of 1793.
+But the isolation of Ledru Rollin was well understood. The attitude of the
+Government generally was so little in accordance with the views of the Red
+Republicans that on the 16th of April a demonstration was organised with
+the object of compelling them to postpone the elections. The prompt
+appearance in arms of the National Guard, which still represented the
+middle classes of Paris, baffled the design of the leaders of the mob, and
+gave to Lamartine and the majority in the Government a decisive victory
+over their revolutionary colleague. The elections were held at the time
+appointed; and, in spite of the institution of universal suffrage, they
+resulted in the return of a body of Deputies not widely different from
+those who had hitherto appeared in French Parliaments. The great majority
+were indeed Republicans by profession, but of a moderate type; and the
+session had no sooner opened than it became clear that the relation between
+the Socialist democracy of Paris and the National Representatives could
+only be one of more or less violent antagonism.
+
+[The National Assembly, May 4.]
+
+[Riot of May 15.]
+
+[Measures against the National Workshops.]
+
+The first act of the Assembly, which met on the 4th of May, was to declare
+that the Provisional Government had deserved well of the country, and to
+reinstate most of its members in office under the title of an Executive
+Commission. Ledru Rollin's offences were condoned, as those of a man
+popular with the democracy, and likely on the whole to yield to the
+influence of his colleagues. Louis Blanc and his confederate, Albert, as
+really dangerous persons, were excluded. The Jacobin leaders now proceeded
+to organise an attack on the Assembly by main force. On the 15th of May the
+attempt was made. Under pretence of tendering a petition on behalf of
+Poland, a mob invaded the Legislative Chamber, declared the Assembly
+dissolved, and put the Deputies to flight. But the triumph was of short
+duration. The National Guard, whose commander alone was responsible for the
+failure of measures of defence, soon rallied in force; the leaders of the
+insurgents, some of whom had installed themselves as a Provisional
+Government at the Hotel de Ville, were made captive; and after an interval
+of a few hours the Assembly resumed possession of the Palais Bourbon. The
+dishonour done to the national representation by the scandalous scenes of
+the 15th of May, as well as the decisively proved superiority of the
+National Guard over the half armed mob, encouraged the Assembly to declare
+open war against the so-called social democracy, and to decree the
+abolition of the national workshops. The enormous growth of these
+establishments, which now included over a hundred thousand men, threatened
+to ruin the public finances; the demoralisation which they engendered
+seemed likely to destroy whatever was sound in the life of the working
+classes of Paris. Of honest industry there was scarcely a trace to be found
+among the masses who were receiving their daily wages from the State.
+Whatever the sincerity of those who had founded the national workshops,
+whatever the anxiety for employment on the part of those who first resorted
+to them, they had now become mere hives of disorder, where the resources of
+the State were lavished in accumulating a force for its own overthrow. It
+was necessary, at whatever risk, to extinguish the evil. Plans for the
+gradual dispersion of the army of workmen were drawn up by Committees and
+discussed by the Assembly. If put in force with no more than the necessary
+delay, these plans might perhaps have rendered a peaceful solution of the
+difficulty possible. But the Government hesitated, and finally, when a
+decision could no longer be avoided, determined upon measures more violent
+and more sudden than those which the Committees had recommended. On the
+21st of June an order was published that all occupants of the public
+workshops between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five must enlist in the
+army or cease to receive support from the State, and that the removal of
+the workmen who had come into Paris from the provinces, for which
+preparations had already been made, must be at once effected. [422]
+
+[The Four Days of June, 23-26.]
+
+The publication of this order was the signal for an appeal to arms. The
+legions of the national workshops were in themselves a half-organised force
+equal in number to several army-corps, and now animated by something like
+the spirit of military union. The revolt, which began on the morning of the
+23rd of June, was conducted as no revolt in Pans had ever been conducted
+before. The eastern part of the city was turned into a maze of barricades.
+Though the insurgents had not artillery, they were in other respects fairly
+armed. The terrible nature of the conflict impending now became evident to
+the Assembly. General Cavaignac, Minister of War, was placed in command,
+and subsequently invested with supreme authority, the Executive Commission
+resigning its powers. All the troops in the neighbourhood of Paris were at
+once summoned to the capital, Cavaignac well understood that any attempt to
+hold the insurrection in check by means of scattered posts would only end,
+as in 1830, by the capture or the demoralisation of the troops. He treated
+Paris as one great battle-field in which the enemy must be attacked in mass
+and driven by main force from all his positions. At times the effort
+appeared almost beyond the power of the forces engaged, and the insurgents,
+sheltered by huge barricades and firing from the windows of houses, seemed
+likely to remain masters of the field. The struggle continued for four
+days, but Cavaignac's artillery and the discipline of his troops at last
+crushed resistance; and after the Archbishop of Paris had been mortally
+wounded in a heroic effort to stop further bloodshed, the last bands of the
+insurgents, driven back into the north-eastern quarter of the city, and
+there attacked with artillery in front and flank, were forced to lay down
+their arms.
+
+[Fears left by the events of June.]
+
+Such was the conflict of the Four Days of June, a conflict memorable as one
+in which the combatants fought not for a political principle or form of
+Government, but for the preservation or the overthrow of society based on
+the institution of private property. The National Guard, with some
+exceptions, fought side by side with the regiments of the line, braved the
+same perils, and sustained an equal loss. The workmen threw themselves the
+more passionately into the struggle, inasmuch as defeat threatened them
+with deprivation of the very means of life. On both sides acts of savagery
+were committed which the fury of the conflict could not excuse. The
+vengeance of the conquerors in the moment of success appears, however, to
+have been less unrelenting than that which followed the overthrow of the
+Commune in 1871, though, after the struggle was over, the Assembly had no
+scruple in transporting without trial the whole mass of prisoners taken
+with arms in their hands. Cavaignac's victory left the classes for whom he
+had fought terror-stricken at the peril from which they had escaped, and
+almost hopeless of their own security under any popular form of Government
+in the future. Against the rash and weak concessions to popular demands
+that had been made by the administration since February, especially in the
+matter of taxation and finance, there was now a deep, if not loudly
+proclaimed, reaction. The national workshops disappeared; grants were made
+by the Legislature for the assistance of the masses who were left without
+resource, but the money was bestowed in charitable relief or in the form of
+loans to associations, not as wages from the State. On every side among the
+holders of property the cry was for a return to sound principles of finance
+in the economy of the State, and for the establishment of a strong central
+power.
+
+[Cavaignac and Louis Napoleon.]
+
+[Louis Napoleon elected Deputy but resigns, June 14.]
+
+General Cavaignac after the restoration of order had laid down the supreme
+authority which had been conferred on him, but at the desire of the
+Assembly he continued to exercise it until the new Constitution should be
+drawn up and an Executive appointed in accordance with its provisions.
+Events had suddenly raised Cavaignac from obscurity to eminence, and seemed
+to mark him out as the future ruler of France. But he displayed during the
+six months following the suppression of the revolt no great capacity for
+government, and his virtues as well as his defects made against his
+personal success. A sincere Republican, while at the same time a rigid
+upholder of law, he refused to lend himself to those who were, except in
+name, enemies of Republicanism; and in his official acts and utterances he
+spared the feelings of the reactionary classes as little as he would have
+spared those of rioters and Socialists. As the influence of Cavaignac
+declined, another name began to fill men's thoughts. Louis Napoleon, son of
+the Emperor's brother Louis, King of Holland, had while still in exile been
+elected to the National Assembly by four Departments. He was as yet almost
+unknown except by name to his fellow-countrymen. Born in the Tuileries in
+1808, he had been involved as a child in the ruin of the Empire, and had
+passed into banishment with his mother Hortense, under the law that
+expelled from France all members of Napoleon's family. He had been brought
+up at Augsburg and on the shores of the Lake of Constance, and as a
+volunteer in a Swiss camp of artillery he had gained some little
+acquaintance with military life. In 1831 he had joined the insurgents in
+the Romagna who were in arms against the Papal Government. The death of his
+own elder brother, followed in 1832 by that of Napoleon's son, the Duke of
+Reichstadt, made him chief of the house of Bonaparte. Though far more of a
+recluse than a man of action, though so little of his own nation that he
+could not pronounce a sentence of French without a marked German accent,
+and had never even seen a French play performed, he now became possessed by
+the fixed idea that he was one day to wear the French Crown. A few obscure
+adventurers attached themselves to his fortunes, and in 1836 he appeared at
+Strasburg and presented himself to the troops as Emperor. The enterprise
+ended in failure and ridicule. Louis Napoleon was shipped to America by the
+Orleanist Government, which supplied him with money, and thought it
+unnecessary even to bring him to trial. He recrossed the Atlantic, made his
+home in England, and in 1840 repeated at Boulogne the attempt that had
+failed at Strasburg. The result was again disastrous. He was now sentenced
+to perpetual imprisonment, and passed the next six years in captivity at
+Ham, where he produced a treatise on the Napoleonic Ideas, and certain
+fragments on political and social questions. The enthusiasm for Napoleon,
+of which there had been little trace in France since 1815, was now
+reviving; the sufferings of the epoch of conquest were forgotten; the
+steady maintenance of peace by Louis Philippe seemed humiliating to young
+and ardent spirits who had not known the actual presence of the foreigner.
+In literature two men of eminence worked powerfully upon the national
+imagination. The history of Thiers gave the nation a great stage-picture of
+Napoleon's exploits; Beranger's lyrics invested his exile at St. Helena
+with an irresistible, though spurious, pathos. Thus, little as the world
+concerned itself with the prisoner at Ham, the tendencies of the time were
+working in his favour; and his confinement, which lasted six years and was
+terminated by his escape and return to England, appears to have deepened
+his brooding nature, and to have strengthened rather than diminished his
+confidence in himself. On the overthrow of Louis Philippe he visited Paris,
+but was requested by the Provisional Government, on the ground of the
+unrepealed law banishing the Bonaparte family, to quit the country. He
+obeyed, probably foreseeing that the difficulties of the Republic would
+create better opportunities for his reappearance. Meanwhile the group of
+unknown men who sought their fortunes in a Napoleonic restoration busily
+canvassed and wrote on behalf of the Prince, and with such success that, in
+the supplementary elections that were held at the beginning of June, he
+obtained a fourfold triumph. The Assembly, in spite of the efforts of the
+Government, pronounced his return valid. Yet with rare self-command the
+Prince still adhered to his policy of reserve, resigning his seat on the
+ground that his election had been made a pretext for movements of which he
+disapproved, while at the same time he declared in his letter to the
+President of the Assembly that if duties should be imposed upon him by the
+people he should know how to fulfil them. [423]
+
+[Louis Napoleon again elected, Sept. 17.]
+
+[Louis Napoleon elected President, Dec. 10.]
+
+From this time Louis Napoleon was a recognised aspirant to power. The
+Constitution of the Republic was now being drawn up by the Assembly. The
+Executive Commission had disappeared in the convulsion of June; Cavaignac
+was holding the balance between parties rather than governing himself. In
+the midst of the debates on the Constitution Louis Napoleon was again
+returned elected, to the Assembly by the votes of five Departments. He saw
+that he ought to remain no longer in the background, and, accepting the
+call of the electors, he took his seat in the Chamber. It was clear that he
+would become a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, and that the
+popularity of his name among the masses was enormous. He had twice
+presented himself to France as the heir to Napoleon's throne; he had never
+directly abandoned his dynastic claim; he had but recently declared, in
+almost threatening language, that he should know how to fulfil the duties
+that the people might impose upon him. Yet with all these facts before it
+the Assembly, misled by the puerile rhetoric of Lamartine, decided that in
+the new Constitution the President of the Republic, in whom was vested the
+executive power, should be chosen by the direct vote of all Frenchmen, and
+rejected the amendment of M. Grevy, who, with real insight into the future,
+declared that such direct election by the people could only give France a
+Dictator, and demanded that the President should be appointed not by the
+masses but by the Chamber. Thus was the way paved for Louis Napoleon's
+march to power. The events of June had dispelled any attraction that he had
+hitherto felt towards Socialistic theories. He saw that France required an
+upholder of order and of property. In his address to the nation announcing
+his candidature for the Presidency he declared that he would shrink from no
+sacrifice in defending society, so audaciously attacked; that he would
+devote himself without reserve to the maintenance of the Republic, and make
+it his pride to leave to his successor at the end of four years authority
+strengthened, liberty unimpaired, and real progress accomplished. Behind
+these generalities the address dexterously touched on the special wants of
+classes and parties, and promised something to each. The French nation in
+the election which followed showed that it believed in Louis Napoleon even
+more than he did in himself. If there existed in the opinion of the great
+mass any element beyond the mere instinct of self-defence against real or
+supposed schemes of spoliation, it was reverence for Napoleon's memory. Out
+of seven millions of votes given, Louis Napoleon received above five,
+Cavaignac, who alone entered into serious competition with him, receiving
+about a fourth part of that number. Lamartine and the men who ten months
+before had represented all the hopes of the nation now found but a handful
+of supporters. Though none yet openly spoke of Monarchy, on all sides there
+was the desire for the restoration of power. The day-dreams of the second
+Republic had fled. France had shown that its choice lay only between a
+soldier who had crushed rebellion and a stranger who brought no title to
+its confidence but an Imperial name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+Austria and Italy--Vienna from March to May--Flight of the Emperor--
+Bohemian National Movement--Windischgraetz subdues Prague--Campaign
+around Verona--Papal Allocution--Naples in May--Negotiations as to
+Lombardy--Reconquest of Venetia--Battle of Custozza--The Austrians enter
+Milan--Austrian Court and Hungary--The Serbs in Southern Hungary--Serb
+Congress at Carlowitz--Jellacic--Affairs of Croatia--Jellacic, the Court
+and the Hungarian Movement--Murder of Lamberg--Manifesto of October 3
+Vienna on October 6--The Emperor at Olmuetz--Windischgraetz conquers
+Vienna--The Parliament at Kremsier--Schwarzenberg Minister--Ferdinand
+abdicates--Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament--Unitary Edict--
+Hungary--The Roumanians in Transylvania--The Austrian Army occupies
+Pesth--Hungarian Government at Debreczin--The Austrians driven out of
+Hungary--Declaration of Hungarian Independence--Russian Intervention--
+The Hungarian Summer Campaign--Capitulation of Vilagos--Italy--Murder of
+Rossi--Tuscany--The March Campaign in Lombardy--Novara--Abdication of
+Charles Albert--Victor Emmanuel--Restoration in Tuscany--French
+Intervention in Rome--Defeat of Oudinot--Oudinot and Lesseps--The French
+enter Rome--The Restored Pontifical Government--Fall of Venice--
+Ferdinand reconquers Sicily Germany--The National Assembly at Frankfort--
+The Armistice of Malmoe--Berlin from April to September--The Prussian
+Army--Last days of the Prussian Parliament--Prussian Constitution
+granted by Edict--The German National Assembly and Austria--Frederick
+William IV. elected Emperor--He refuses the Crown--End of the National
+Assembly--Prussia attempts to form a separate Union--The Union
+Parliament at Erfurt--Action of Austria--Hesse Cassel--The Diet of
+Frankfort restored--Olmuetz--Schleswig-Holstein--Germany after 1849--
+Austria after 1851--France after 1848--Louis Napoleon--The October
+Message--Law Limiting the Franchise--Louis Napoleon and the Army--
+Proposed Revision of the Constitution--The Coup d'Etat--Napoleon III.
+Emperor
+
+
+[Austria and Italy.]
+
+The plain of Northern Italy has ever been an arena on which the contest
+between interests greater than those of Italy itself has been brought to an
+issue, and it may perhaps be truly said that in the struggle between
+established Governments and Revolution through out Central Europe in 1848
+the real turning point, if it can anywhere be fixed, lay rather in the
+fortunes of a campaign in Lombardy than in any single combination of events
+at Vienna or Berlin. The very existence of the Austrian Monarchy depended
+on the victory of Radetzky's forces over the national movement at the head
+of which Piedmont had now placed itself. If Italian independence should be
+established upon the ruin of the Austrian arms, and the influence and
+example of the victorious Italian people be thrown into the scale against
+the Imperial Government in its struggle with the separatist forces that
+convulsed every part of the Austrian dominions, it was scarcely possible
+that any stroke of fortune or policy could save the Empire of the Hapsburgs
+from dissolution. But on the prostration or recovery of Austria, as
+represented by its central power at Vienna, the future of Germany in great
+part depended. Whatever compromise might be effected between popular and
+monarchical forces in the other German States if left free from Austria's
+interference, the whole influence of a resurgent Austrian power could not
+but be directed against the principles of popular sovereignty and national
+union. The Parliament of Frankfort might then in vain affect to fulfil its
+mandate without reckoning with the Court of Vienna. All this was indeed
+obscured in the tempests that for a while shut out the political horizon.
+The Liberals of Northern Germany had little sympathy with the Italian cause
+in the decisive days of 1848. Their inclinations went rather with the
+combatant who, though bent on maintaining an oppressive dominion, was
+nevertheless a member of the German race and paid homage for the moment to
+Constitutional rights. Yet, as later events were to prove, the fetters
+which crushed liberty beyond the Alps could fit as closely on to German
+limbs; and in the warfare of Upper Italy for its own freedom the battle of
+German Liberalism was in no small measure fought and lost.
+
+[Vienna from March to May.]
+
+Metternich once banished from Vienna, the first popular demand was for a
+Constitution. His successors in office, with a certain characteristic
+pedantry, devoted their studies to the Belgian Constitution of 1831; and
+after some weeks a Constitution was published by edict for the
+non-Hungarian part of the Empire, including a Parliament of two Chambers,
+the Lower to be chosen by indirect election, the Upper consisting of
+nominees of the Crown and representatives of the great landowners. The
+provisions of this Constitution in favour of the Crown and the Aristocracy,
+as well as the arbitrary mode of its promulgation, displeased the Viennese.
+Agitation recommenced in the city; unpopular officials were roughly handled
+the Press grew ever more violent and more scurrilous. One strange result of
+the tutelage in which Austrian society had been held was that the students
+of the University became, and for some time continued to be, the most
+important political body of the capital. Their principal rivals in
+influence were the National Guard drawn from citizens of the middle class,
+the workmen as yet remaining in the background. Neither in the Hall of the
+University nor at the taverns where the civic militia discussed the events
+of the hour did the office-drawn Constitution find favour. On the 13th of
+May it was determined, with the view of exercising stronger pressure upon
+the Government, that the existing committees of the National Guard and of
+the students should be superseded by one central committee representing
+both bodies. The elections to this committee had been held, and its
+sittings had begun, when the commander of the National Guard declared such
+proceedings to be inconsistent with military discipline, and ordered the
+dissolution of the committee. Riots followed, during which the students and
+the mob made their way into the Emperor's palace and demanded from his
+Ministers not only the re-establishment of the central committee but the
+abolition of the Upper Chamber in the projected Constitution, and the
+removal of the checks imposed on popular sovereignty by a limited franchise
+and the system of indirect elections. On point after point the Ministry
+gave way; and, in spite of the resistance and reproaches of the Imperial
+household, they obtained the Emperor's signature to a document promising
+that for the future all the important military posts in the city should be
+held by the National Guard jointly with the regular troops, that the latter
+should never be called out except on the requisition of the National Guard,
+and that the projected Constitution should remain without force until it
+should have been submitted for confirmation to a single Constituent
+Assembly elected by universal suffrage.
+
+[Flight of the Emperor, May 17.]
+
+[Tumult of May 26.]
+
+The weakness of the Emperor's intelligence rendered him a mere puppet in
+the hands of those who for the moment exercised control over his actions.
+During the riot of the 15th of May he obeyed his Ministers; a few hours
+afterwards he fell under the sway of the Court party, and consented to fly
+from Vienna. On the 18th the Viennese learnt to their astonishment that
+Ferdinand was far on the road to the Tyrol. Soon afterwards a manifesto was
+published, stating that the violence and anarchy of the capital had
+compelled the Emperor to transfer his residence to Innsbruck; that he
+remained true, however, to the promises made in March and to their
+legitimate consequences; and that proof must be given of the return of the
+Viennese to their old sentiments of loyalty before he could again appear
+among them. A certain revulsion of feeling in the Emperor's favour now
+became manifest in the capital, and emboldened the Ministers to take the
+first step necessary towards obtaining his return, namely the dissolution
+of the Students' Legion. They could count with some confidence on the
+support of the wealthier part of the middle class, who were now becoming
+wearied of the students' extravagances and alarmed at the interruption of
+business caused by the Revolution; moreover, the ordinary termination of
+the academic year was near at hand. The order was accordingly given for the
+dissolution of the Legion and the closing of the University. But the
+students met the order with the stoutest resistance. The workmen poured in
+from the suburbs to join in their defence. Barricades were erected, and the
+insurrection of March seemed on the point of being renewed. Once more the
+Government gave way, and not only revoked its order, but declared itself
+incapable of preserving tranquillity in the capital unless it should
+receive the assistance of the leaders of the people. With the full
+concurrence of the Ministers, a Committee of Public Safety was formed,
+representing at once the students, the middle class, and the workmen; and
+it entered upon its duties with an authority exceeding, within the limits
+of the capital, that of the shadowy functionaries of State. [424]
+
+[Bohemian national movement.]
+
+[Windischgraetz subdues Prague, June 12-17.]
+
+In the meantime the antagonism between the Czechs and the Germans in
+Bohemia was daily becoming more bitter. The influence of the party of
+compromise, which had been dominant in the early days of March, had
+disappeared before the ill-timed attempt of the German national leaders at
+Frankfort to include Bohemia within the territory sending representatives
+to the German national Parliament. By consenting to this incorporation the
+Czech population would have definitely renounced its newly asserted claim
+to nationality. If the growth of democratic spirit at Vienna was
+accompanied by a more intense German national feeling in the capital, the
+popular movements at Vienna and at Prague must necessarily pass into a
+relation of conflict with one another. On the flight of the Emperor
+becoming known at Prague, Count Thun, the governor, who was also the chief
+of the moderate Bohemian party, invited Ferdinand to make Prague the seat
+of his Government. This invitation, which would have directly connected the
+Crown with Czech national interests, was not accepted. The rasher
+politicians, chiefly students and workmen, continued to hold their meetings
+and to patrol the streets; and a Congress of Slavs from all parts of the
+Empire, which was opened on the 2nd of June, excited national passions
+still further. So threatening grew the attitude of the students and workmen
+that Count Windischgraetz, commander of the troops at Prague, prepared to
+act with artillery. On the 12th of June, the day on which the Congress of
+Slavs broke up, fighting began. Windischgraetz, whose wife was killed by a
+bullet, appears to have acted with calmness, and to have sought to arrive
+at some peaceful settlement. He withdrew his troops, and desisted from a
+bombardment that he had begun, on the understanding that the barricades
+which had been erected should be removed. This condition was not fulfilled.
+New acts of violence occurred in the city, and on the 17th Windischgraetz
+reopened fire. On the following day Prague surrendered, and Windischgraetz
+re-entered the city as Dictator. The autonomy of Bohemia was at an end. The
+army had for the first time acted with effect against a popular rising; the
+first blow had been struck on behalf of the central power against the
+revolution which till now had seemed about to dissolve the Austrian State
+into its fragments.
+
+[Campaign around Verona, April-May.]
+
+At this point the dominant interest in Austrian affairs passes from the
+capital and the northern provinces to Radetzky's army and the Italians with
+whom it stood face to face. Once convinced of the necessity of a retreat
+from Milan, the Austrian commander had moved with sufficient rapidity to
+save Verona and Mantua from passing into the hands of the insurgents. He
+was thus enabled to place his army in one of the best defensive positions
+in Europe, the Quadrilateral flanked by the rivers Mincio and Adige, and
+protected by the fortresses of Verona, Mantua, Peschiera, and Legnano. With
+his front on the Mincio he awaited at once the attack of the Piedmontese
+and the arrival of reinforcements from the north-east. On the 8th of April
+the first attack was made, and after a sharp engagement at Goito the
+passage of the Mincio was effected by the Sardinian army. Siege was now
+laid to Peschiera; and while a Tuscan contingent watched Mantua, the bulk
+of Charles Albert's forces operated farther northward with the view of
+cutting off Verona from the roads to the Tyrol. This result was for a
+moment achieved, but the troops at the King's disposal were far too weak
+for the task of reducing the fortresses; and in an attempt that was made on
+the 6th of May to drive the Austrians out of their positions in front of
+Verona, Charles Albert was defeated at Santa Lucia and compelled to fall
+back towards the Mincio. [425]
+
+[Papal Allocution, April 29.]
+
+[Naples in May.]
+
+A pause in the war ensued, filled by political events of evil omen for
+Italy. Of all the princes who had permitted their troops to march
+northwards to the assistance of the Lombards, not one was acting in full
+sincerity. The first to show himself in his true colours was the Pope. On
+the 29th of April an Allocution was addressed to the Cardinals, in which
+Pius disavowed all participation in the war against Austria, and declared
+that his own troops should do no more than defend the integrity of the
+Roman States. Though at the moment an outburst of popular indignation in
+Rome forced a still more liberal Ministry into power, and Durando, the
+Papal general, continued his advance into Venetia, the Pope's renunciation
+of his supposed national leadership produced the effect which its author
+desired, encouraging every open and every secret enemy of the Italian
+cause, and perplexing those who had believed themselves to be engaged in a
+sacred as well as a patriotic war. In Naples things hurried far more
+rapidly to a catastrophe. Elections had been held to the Chamber of
+Deputies, which was to be opened on the 15th of May, and most of the
+members returned were men who, while devoted to the Italian national cause
+were neither Republicans nor enemies of the Bourbon dynasty, but anxious to
+co-operate with their King in the work of Constitutional reform.
+Politicians of another character, however, commanded the streets of Naples.
+Rumours were spread that the Court was on the point of restoring despotic
+government and abandoning the Italian cause. Disorder and agitation
+increased from day to day; and after the Deputies had arrived in the city
+and begun a series of informal meetings preparatory to the opening of the
+Parliament, an ill-advised act of Ferdinand gave to the party of disorder,
+who were weakly represented in the Assembly, occasion for an insurrection.
+After promulgating the Constitution on February both, Ferdinand had agreed
+that it should be submitted to the two Chambers for revision. He notified,
+however, to the Representatives on the eve of the opening of Parliament
+that they would be required to take an oath of fidelity to the
+Constitution. They urged that such an oath would deprive them of their
+right of revision. The King, after some hours, consented to a change in the
+formula of the oath; but his demand had already thrown the city into
+tumult. Barricades were erected, the Deputies in vain endeavouring to calm
+the rioters and to prevent a conflict with the troops. While negotiations
+were still in progress shots were fired. The troops now threw themselves
+upon the people; there was a struggle, short in duration, but sanguinary
+and merciless; the barricades were captured, some hundreds of the
+insurgents slain, and Ferdinand was once more absolute master of Naples.
+The Assembly was dissolved on the day after that on which it should have
+met. Orders were at once sent by the King to General Pepe, commander of the
+troops that were on the march to Lombardy, to return with his army to
+Naples. Though Pepe continued true to the national cause, and endeavoured
+to lead his army forward from Bologna in defiance of the King's
+instructions, his troops now melted away; and when he crossed the Po and
+placed himself under the standard of Charles Albert in Venetia there
+remained with him scarcely fifteen hundred men.
+
+[Negotiations as to Lombardy.]
+
+[Reconquest of Venetia, June, July.]
+
+It thus became clear before the end of May that the Lombards would receive
+no considerable help from the Southern States in their struggle for
+freedom, and that the promised league of the Governments in the national
+cause was but a dream from which there was a bitter awakening. Nor in
+Northern Italy itself was there the unity in aim and action without which
+success was impossible. The Republican party accused the King and the
+Provisional Government at Milan of an unwillingness to arm the people;
+Charles Albert on his part regarded every Republican as an enemy. On
+entering Lombardy the King had stated that no question as to the political
+organisation of the future should be raised until the war was ended;
+nevertheless, before a fortress had been captured, he had allowed Modena
+and Parma to declare themselves incorporated with the Piedmontese monarchy;
+and, in spite of Mazzini's protest, their example was followed by Lombardy
+and some Venetian districts. In the recriminations that passed between the
+Republicans and the Monarchists it was even suggested that Austria had
+friends of its own in certain classes of the population. This was not the
+view taken by the Viennese Government, which from the first appears to have
+considered its cause in Lombardy as virtually lost. The mediation of Great
+Britain was invoked by Metternich's successors, and a willingness expressed
+to grant to the Italian provinces complete autonomy under the Emperor's
+sceptre. Palmerston, in reply to the supplications of a Court which had
+hitherto cursed his influence, urged that Lombardy and the greater part of
+Venetia should be ceded to the King of Piedmont. The Austrian Government
+would have given up Lombardy to their enemy; they hesitated to increase his
+power to the extent demanded by Palmerston, the more so as the French
+Ministry was known to be jealous of the aggrandisement of Sardinia, and to
+desire the establishment of weak Republics like those formed in 1796.
+Withdrawing from its negotiations at London, the Emperor's Cabinet now
+entered into direct communication with the Provisional Government at Milan,
+and, without making any reference to Piedmont or Venice, offered complete
+independence to Lombardy. As the union of this province with Piedmont had
+already been voted by its inhabitants, the offer was at once rejected.
+Moreover, even it the Italians had shown a disposition to compromise their
+cause and abandon Venice, Radetzky would not have broken off the combat
+while any possibility remained of winning over the Emperor from the side
+of the peace-party. In reply to instructions directing him to offer an
+armistice to the enemy, he sent Prince Felix Schwarzenberg to Innsbruck to
+implore the Emperor to trust to the valour of his soldiers and to continue
+the combat. Already there were signs that the victory would ultimately be
+with Austria. Reinforcements had cut their way through the insurgent
+territory and reached Verona; and although a movement by which Radetzky
+threatened to sever Charles Albert's communications was frustrated by a
+second engagement at Goito, and Peschiera passed into the besiegers' hands,
+this was the last success won by the Italians. Throwing himself suddenly
+eastwards, Radetzky appeared before Vicenza, and compelled this city, with
+the entire Papal army, commanded by General Durando, to capitulate. The
+fall of Vicenza was followed June, July, by that of the other cities on the
+Venetian mainland till Venice alone on the east of the Adige defied the
+Austrian arms. As the invader pressed onward, an Assembly which Manin had
+convoked at Venice decided on union with Piedmont. Manin himself had been
+the most zealous opponent of what he considered the sacrifice of Venetian
+independence. He gave way nevertheless at the last, and made no attempt to
+fetter the decision of the Assembly; but when this decision had been given
+he handed over the conduct of affairs to others, and retired for awhile
+into private life, declining to serve under a king. [426]
+
+[Battle of Custozza July 25.]
+
+[Austrians re-enter Milan, Aug. 6.]
+
+Charles Albert now renewed his attempt to wrest the central fortresses from
+the Austrians. Leaving half his army at Peschiera and farther north, he
+proceeded with the other half to blockade Mantua. Radetzky took advantage
+of the unskilful generalship of his opponent, and threw himself upon the
+weakly guarded centre of the long Sardinian line. The King perceived his
+error, and sought to unite with his the northern detachments, now separated
+from him by the Mincio. His efforts were baffled, and on the 25th of July,
+after a brave resistance, his troops were defeated at Custozza. The retreat
+across the Mincio was conducted in fair order, but disasters sustained by
+the northern division, which should have held the enemy in check, destroyed
+all hope, and the retreat then became a flight. Radetzky followed in close
+pursuit. Charles Albert entered Milan, but declared himself unable to
+defend the city. A storm of indignation broke out against the unhappy King
+amongst the Milanese, whom he was declared to have betrayed. The palace
+where he had taken up his quarters was besieged by the mob; his life was
+threatened; and he escaped with difficulty on the night of August 5th under
+the protection of General La Marmora and a few faithful Guards. A
+capitulation was signed, and as the Piedmontese army evacuated the city
+Radetzky's troops entered it in triumph. Not less than sixty thousand of
+the inhabitants, according to Italian statements, abandoned their homes and
+sought refuge in Switzerland or Piedmont rather than submit to the
+conqueror's rule. Radetzky could now have followed his retreating enemy
+without difficulty to Turin, and have crushed Piedmont itself under foot;
+but the fear of France and Great Britain checked his career of victory, and
+hostilities were brought to a close by an armistice at Vigevano on August
+9th. [427]
+
+[The Austrian Court and Hungary.]
+
+The effects of Radetzky's triumph were felt in every province of the
+Empire. The first open expression given to the changed state of affairs was
+the return of the Imperial Court from its refuge at Innsbruck to Vienna.
+The election promised in May had been held, and an Assembly representing
+all the non-Hungarian parts of the Monarchy, with the exception of the
+Italian provinces, had been opened by the Archduke John, as representative
+of the Emperor, on the 22nd of July. Ministers and Deputies united in
+demanding the return of the Emperor to the capital. With Radetzky and
+Windischgraetz within call, the Emperor could now with some confidence face
+his students and his Parliament. But of far greater importance than the
+return of the Court to Vienna was the attitude which it now assumed towards
+the Diet and the national Government of Hungary. The concessions made in
+April, inevitable as they were, had in fact raised Hungary to the position
+of an independent State. When such matters as the employment of Hungarian
+troops against Italy or the distribution of the burden of taxation came
+into question, the Emperor had to treat with the Hungarian Ministry almost
+as if it represented a foreign and a rival Power. For some months this
+humiliation had to be borne, and the appearance of fidelity to the new
+Constitutional law maintained. But a deep, resentful hatred against the
+Magyar cause penetrated the circles in which the old military and official
+absolutism of Austria yet survived; and behind the men and the policy still
+representing with some degree of sincerity the new order of things, there
+gathered the passions and the intrigues of a reaction that waited only for
+the outbreak of civil war within Hungary itself, and the restoration of
+confidence to the Austrian army, to draw the sword against its foe.
+Already, while Italy was still unsubdued, and the Emperor was scarcely safe
+in his palace at Vienna, the popular forces that might be employed against
+the Government at Pesth came into view.
+
+[The Serbs in Southern Hungary.]
+
+[Serb Congress at Carlowitz, May 13-15.]
+
+In one of the stormy sessions of the Hungarian Diet at the time when the
+attempt was first made to impose the Magyar language upon Croatia the
+Illyrian leader, Gai, had thus addressed the Assembly: "You Magyars are an
+island in the ocean of Slavism. Take heed that its waves do not rise and
+overwhelm you." The agitation of the spring of 1848 first revealed in its
+full extent the peril thus foreshadowed. Croatia had for above a year been
+in almost open mutiny, but the spirit of revolt now spread through the
+whole of the Serb population of Southern Hungary, from the eastern limits
+of Slavonia, [428] across the plain known as the Banat beyond the junction
+of the Theiss and the Danube, up to the borders of Transylvania. The Serbs
+had been welcomed into these provinces in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries by the sovereigns of Austria as a bulwark against the Turks.
+Charters had been given to them, which were still preserved, promising them
+a distinct political administration under their own elected Voivode, and
+ecclesiastical independence under their own Patriarch of the Greek Church.
+[429] These provincial rights had fared much as others in the Austrian
+Empire. The Patriarch and the Voivode had disappeared, and the Banat had
+been completely merged in Hungary. Enough, however, of Serb nationality
+remained to kindle at the summons of 1848, and to resent with a sudden
+fierceness the determination of the Magyar rulers at Pesth that the Magyar
+language, as the language of State, should thenceforward bind together all
+the races of Hungary in the enjoyment of a common national life. The Serbs
+had demanded from Kossuth and his colleagues the restoration of the local
+and ecclesiastical autonomy of which the Hapsburgs had deprived them, and
+the recognition of their own national language and customs. They found, or
+believed, that instead of a German they were now to have a Magyar lord, and
+one more near, more energetic, more aggressive. Their reply to Kossuth's
+defence of Magyar ascendency was the summoning of a Congress of Serbs at
+Carlowitz on the Lower Danube. Here it was declared that the Serbs of
+Austria formed a free and independent nation under the Austrian sceptre and
+the common Hungarian Crown. A Voivode was elected and the limits of his
+province were defined. A National Committee was charged with the duty of
+organising a Government and of entering into intimate connection with the
+neighbouring Slavic Kingdom of Croatia.
+
+[Jellacic in Croatia.]
+
+At Agram, the Croatian capital, all established authority had sunk in the
+catastrophe of March, and a National Committee had assumed power. It
+happened that the office of Governor, or Ban, of Croatia was then vacant.
+The Committee sent a deputation to Vienna requesting that the colonel of
+the first Croatian regiment, Jellacic, might be appointed. Without waiting
+for the arrival of the deputation, the Court, by a patent dated the 23rd of
+March, nominated Jellacic to the vacant post. The date of this appointment,
+and the assumption of office by Jellacic on the 14th of April, the very day
+before the Hungarian Ministry entered upon its powers, have been considered
+proof that a secret understanding existed from the first between Jellacic
+and the Court. No further evidence of this secret relation has, however,
+been made public, and the belief long current among all friends of the
+Magyar cause that Croatia was deliberately instigated to revolt against the
+Hungarian Government by persons around the Emperor seems to rest on no
+solid foundation. The Croats would have been unlike all other communities
+in the Austrian Empire if they had not risen under the national impulse of
+1848. They had been murmuring against Magyar ascendency for years past, and
+the fire long smouldering now probably burst into flame here as elsewhere
+without the touch of an incendiary hand. With regard to Jellacic's sudden
+appointment it is possible that the Court, powerless to check the Croatian
+movement, may have desired to escape the appearance of compulsion by
+spontaneously conferring office on the popular soldier, who was at least
+more likely to regard the Emperor's interests than the lawyers and
+demagogues around him. Whether Jellacic was at this time genuinely
+concerned for Croatian autonomy, or whether from the first, while he
+apparently acted with the Croatian nationalists his deepest sympathies were
+with the Austrian army, and his sole design was that of serving the
+Imperial Crown with or without its own avowed concurrence, it is impossible
+to say. That, like most of his countrymen, he cordially hated the Magyars,
+is beyond doubt. The general impression left by his character hardly
+accords with the Magyar conception of him as the profound and far-sighted
+conspirator--he would seem, on the contrary, to have been a man easily
+yielding to the impulses of the moment, and capable of playing
+contradictory parts with little sense of his own inconsistency. [430]
+
+[Affairs of Croatia April 14-June 16.]
+
+Installed in office, Jellacic cast to the winds all consideration due to
+the Emperor's personal engagements towards Hungary, and forthwith permitted
+the Magyar officials to be driven out of the country. On the 2nd of May he
+issued an order forbidding all Croatian authorities to correspond with the
+Government at Pesth. Batthyany, the Hungarian Premier, at once hurried to
+Vienna, and obtained from the Emperor a letter commanding Jellacic to
+submit to the Hungarian Ministry. As the Ban paid no attention to this
+mandate, General Hrabowsky, commander of the troops in the southern
+provinces, received orders from Pesth to annul all that Jellacic had done,
+to suspend him from his office, and to bring him to trial for high treason.
+Nothing daunted, Jellacic on his own authority convoked the Diet of Croatia
+for the 5th of June; the populace of Agram, on hearing of Hrabowsky's
+mission, burnt the Palatine in effigy. This was a direct outrage on the
+Imperial family, and Batthyany turned it to account. The Emperor had just
+been driven from Vienna by the riot of the 15th of May. Batthyany sought
+him at Innsbruck, and by assuring him of the support of his loyal
+Hungarians against both the Italians and the Viennese obtained his
+signature on June 10th to a rescript vehemently condemning the Ban's action
+and suspending him from office. Jellacic had already been summoned to
+appear at Innsbruck. He set out, taking with him a deputation of Croats and
+Serbs, and leaving behind him a popular Assembly sitting at Agram, in
+which, besides the representatives of Croatia, there were seventy Deputies
+from the Serb provinces. On the very day on which the Ban reached
+Innsbruck, the Imperial order condemning him and suspending him from his
+functions was published by Batthyany at Pesth. Nor was the situation made
+easier by the almost simultaneous announcement that civil war had broken
+out on the Lower Danube, and that General Hrabowsky, on attempting to
+occupy Carlowitz, had been attacked and compelled to retreat by the Serbs
+under their national leader Stratimirovic. [431]
+
+[Jellacic, the Court, and the Hungarian Government.]
+
+It is said that the Emperor Ferdinand, during deliberations in council on
+which the fate of the Austrian Empire depended, was accustomed to occupy
+himself with counting the number of carriages that passed from right and
+left respectively under the windows. In the struggle between Croatia and
+Hungary he appears to have avoided even the formal exercise of authority,
+preferring to commit the decision between the contending parties to the
+Archduke John, as mediator or judge. John was too deeply immersed in other
+business to give much attention to the matter. What really passed between
+Jellacic and the Imperial family at Innsbruck is unknown. The official
+request of the Ban was for the withdrawal or suppression of the rescript
+signed by the Emperor on June 10th. Prince Esterhazy, who represented the
+Hungarian Government at Innsbruck, was ready to make this concession; but
+before the document could be revoked, it had been made public by Batthyany.
+With the object of proving his fidelity to the Court, Jellacic now
+published an address to the Croatian regiments serving in Lombardy,
+entreating them not to be diverted from their duty to the Emperor in the
+field by any report of danger to their rights and their nationality nearer
+home. So great was Jellacic's influence with his countrymen that an appeal
+from him of opposite tenor would probably have caused the Croatian
+regiments to quit Radetzky in a mass, and so have brought the war in Italy
+to an ignominious end. His action won for him a great popularity in the
+higher ranks of the Austrian army, and probably gained for him, even if he
+did not possess it before, the secret confidence of the Court. That some
+understanding now existed is almost certain, for, in spite of the
+unrepealed declaration of June 10th, and the postponement of the Archduke's
+judgment, Jellacic was permitted to return to Croatia and to resume his
+government. The Diet at Agram occupied itself with far-reaching schemes for
+a confederation of the southern Slavs; but its discussions were of no
+practical effect, and after some weeks it was extinguished under the form
+of an adjournment. From this time Jellacic held dictatorial power. It was
+unnecessary for him in his relations with Hungary any longer to keep up the
+fiction of a mere defence of Croatian rights; he appeared openly as the
+champion of Austrian unity. In negotiations which he held with Batthyany at
+Vienna during the last days of July, he demanded the restoration of single
+Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs for the whole Austrian
+Empire. The demand was indignantly refused, and the chieftains of the two
+rival races quitted Vienna to prepare for war.
+
+[Imminent breach between Austria and Hungary.]
+
+[Jellacic restored to office, Sept. 3. He marches on Pesth.]
+
+The Hungarian National Parliament, elected under the new Constitution, had
+been opened at Pesth on July 5th. Great efforts had been made, in view of
+the difficulties with Croatia and of the suspected intrigues between the
+Ban and the Court party, to induce the Emperor Ferdinand to appear at Pesth
+in person. He excused himself from this on the ground of illness, but sent
+a letter to the Parliament condemning not only in his own name but in that
+of every member of the Imperial family the resistance offered to the
+Hungarian Government in the southern provinces. If words bore any meaning,
+the Emperor stood pledged to a loyal co-operation with the Hungarian
+Ministers in defence of the unity and the constitution of the Hungarian
+Kingdom as established by the laws of April. Yet at this very time the
+Minister of War at Vienna was encouraging Austrian officers to join the
+Serb insurgents. Kossuth, who conducted most of the business of the
+Hungarian Government in the Lower Chamber at Pesth, made no secret of his
+hostility to the central powers. While his colleagues sought to avoid a
+breach with the other half of the Monarchy, it seemed to be Kossuth's
+object rather to provoke it. In calling for a levy of two hundred thousand
+men to crash the Slavic rebellion, he openly denounced the Viennese
+Ministry and the Court as its promoters. In leading the debate upon the
+Italian War, he endeavoured without the knowledge of his colleagues to
+make the cession of the territory west of the Adige a condition of
+Hungary's participation in the struggle. As Minister of Finance, he spared
+neither word nor act to demonstrate his contempt for the financial
+interests of Austria. Whether a gentler policy on the part of the most
+powerful statesman in Hungary might have averted the impending conflict it
+is vain to ask; but in the uncompromising enmity of Kossuth the Austrian
+Court found its own excuse for acts in which shamelessness seemed almost to
+rise into political virtue. No sooner had Radetzky's victories and the fall
+of Milan brought the Emperor back to Vienna than the new policy came into
+effect. The veto of the sovereign was placed upon the laws passed by the
+Diet at Pesth for the defence of the Kingdom. The Hungarian Government was
+required to reinstate Jellacic in his dignities, to enter into negotiations
+at Vienna with him and the Austrian Ministry, and finally to desist from
+all military preparations against the rebellious provinces. In answer to
+these demands the Diet sent a hundred of its members to Vienna to claim
+from the Emperor the fulfilment of his plighted word. The miserable man
+received them on the 9th of September with protestations of his sincerity;
+but even before the deputation had passed the palace-gates, there appeared
+in the official gazette a letter under the Emperor's own hand replacing
+Jellacic in office and acquitting him of every charge that had been brought
+against him. It was for this formal recognition alone that Jellacic had
+been waiting. On the 11th of September he crossed the Drave with his army,
+and began his march against the Hungarian capital. [432]
+
+[Mission of Lamberg. He is murdered at Pesth, Sept. 28.]
+
+The Ministry now in office at Vienna was composed in part of men who had
+been known as reformers in the early days of 1848; but the old order was
+represented by Count Wessenberg, who had been Metternich's assistant at the
+Congress of Vienna, and by Latour, the War Minister, a soldier of high
+birth whose career dated back to the campaign of Austerlitz. Whatever
+contempt might be felt by one section of the Cabinet for the other, its
+members were able to unite against the independence of Hungary as they had
+united against the independence of Italy. They handed in to the Emperor a
+memorial in which the very concessions to which they owed their own
+existence as a Constitutional Ministry were made a ground for declaring the
+laws establishing Hungarian autonomy null and void. In a tissue of
+transparent sophistries they argued that the Emperor's promise of a
+Constitution to all his dominions on the 15th of March disabled him from
+assenting, without the advice of his Viennese Ministry, to the resolutions
+subsequently passed by the Hungarian Diet, although the union between
+Hungary and the other Hereditary States had from the first rested solely on
+the person of the monarch, and no German official had ever pretended to
+exercise authority over Hungarians otherwise than by order of the sovereign
+as Hungarian King. The publication of this Cabinet memorial, which appeared
+in the journals at Pesth on the 15th of September, gave plain warning to
+the Hungarians that, if they were not to be attacked by Jellacic and the
+Austrian army simultaneously, they must make some compromise with the
+Government at Vienna. Batthyany was inclined to concession, and after
+resigning office in consequence of the Emperor's desertion he had already
+re-assumed his post with colleagues disposed to accept his own pacific
+policy. Kossuth spoke openly of war with Austria and of a dictatorship. As
+Jellacic advanced towards Pesth, the Palatine took command of the Hungarian
+army and marched southwards. On reaching Lake Baloton, on whose southern
+shore the Croats were encamped, he requested a personal conference with
+Jellacic, and sailed to the appointed place of meeting. But he waited in
+vain for the Ban; and rightly interpreting this rejection of his overtures,
+he fled from the army and laid down his office. The Emperor now sent
+General Lamberg from Vienna with orders to assume the supreme command alike
+over the Magyar and the Croatian forces, and to prevent an encounter. On
+the success of Lamberg's mission hung the last chance of reconciliation
+between Hungary and Austria. Batthyany, still clinging to the hope of
+peace, set out for the camp in order to meet the envoy on his arrival.
+Lamberg, desirous of obtaining the necessary credentials from the Hungarian
+Government, made his way to Pesth. There he found Kossuth and a Committee
+of Six installed in power. Under their influence the Diet passed a
+resolution forbidding Lamberg to assume command of the Hungarian troops,
+and declaring him a traitor if he should attempt to do so. The report
+spread through Pesth that Lamberg had come to seize the citadel and bombard
+the town; and before he could reach a place of safety he was attacked and
+murdered by a raging mob. It was in vain that Batthyany, who now laid down
+his office, besought the Government at Vienna to take no rash step of
+vengeance. The pretext for annihilating Hungarian independence had been
+given, and the mask was cast aside. A manifesto published by the Emperor on
+the 3rd of October declared the Hungarian Parliament dissolved, and its
+acts null and void. Martial law was proclaimed, and Jellacic appointed
+commander of all the forces and representative of the sovereign. In the
+course of the next few days it was expected that he would enter Pesth as
+conqueror.
+
+[Manifesto of Oct. 3.]
+
+[Tumult of Oct. 6 at Vienna. Latour murdered.]
+
+In the meantime, however confidently the Government might reckon on
+Jellacic's victory, the passions of revolution were again breaking loose in
+Vienna itself. Increasing misery among the poor, financial panics, the
+reviving efforts of professional agitators, had renewed the disturbances of
+the spring in forms which alarmed the middle classes almost as much as the
+holders of power. The conflict of the Government with Hungary brought
+affairs to a crisis. After discovering the uselessness of negotiations with
+the Emperor, the Hungarian Parliament had sent some of its ablest members
+to request an audience from the Assembly sitting at Vienna, in order that
+the representatives of the western half of the Empire might, even at the
+last moment, have the opportunity of pronouncing a judgment upon the action
+of the Court. The most numerous group in the Assembly was formed by the
+Czech deputies from Bohemia. As Slavs, the Bohemian deputies had
+sympathised with the Croats and Serbs in their struggle against Magyar
+ascendency, and in their eyes Jellacic was still the champion of a national
+cause. Blinded by their sympathies of race to the danger involved to all
+nationalities alike by the restoration of absolutism, the Czech majority,
+in spite of a singularly impressive warning given by a leader of the German
+Liberals, refused a hearing to the Hungarian representatives. The Magyars,
+repelled by the Assembly, sought and found allies in the democracy of
+Vienna itself. The popular clubs rang with acclamations for the cause of
+Hungarian freedom and with invectives against the Czech instruments of
+tyranny. In the midst of this deepening agitation tidings arrived at Vienna
+that Jellacic had been repulsed in his march on Pesth and forced to retire
+within the Austrian frontier. It became necessary for the Viennese
+Government to throw its own forces into the struggle, and an order was
+given by Latour to the regiments in the capital to set out for the scene of
+warfare. This order had, however, been anticipated by the democratic
+leaders, and a portion of the troops had been won over to the popular side.
+Latour's commands were resisted; and upon an attempt being made to enforce
+the departure of the troops, the regiments fired on one another (October
+6th). The battalions of the National Guard which rallied to the support of
+the Government were overpowered by those belonging to the working men's
+districts. The insurrection was victorious; the Ministers submitted once
+more to the masters of the streets, and the orders given to the troops were
+withdrawn. But the fiercer part of the mob was not satisfied with a
+political victory. There were criminals and madmen among its leaders who,
+after the offices of Government had been stormed and Latour had been
+captured, determined upon his death. It was in vain that some of the
+keenest political opponents of the Minister sought at the peril of their
+own lives to protect him from his murderers. He was dragged into the court
+in front of the War Office, and there slain with ferocious and yet
+deliberate barbarity. [433]
+
+[The Emperor at Olmuetz.]
+
+[Windischgraetz marches on Vienna.]
+
+The Emperor, while the city was still in tumult, had in his usual fashion
+promised that the popular demands should be satisfied; but as soon as he
+was unobserved he fled from Vienna, and in his flight he was followed by
+the Czech deputies and many German Conservatives, who declared that their
+lives were no longer safe in the capital. Most of the Ministers gathered
+round the Emperor at Olmuetz in Moravia; the Assembly, however, continued to
+hold its sittings in Vienna, and the Finance Minister, apparently under
+instructions from the Court, remained at his post, and treated the Assembly
+as still possessed of legal powers. But for all practical purposes the
+western half of the Austrian Empire had now ceased to have any Government
+whatever; and the real state of affairs was bluntly exposed in a manifesto
+published by Count Windischgraetz at Prague on the 11th of October, in
+which, without professing to have received any commission from the Emperor,
+he announced his intention of marching on Vienna in order to protect the
+sovereign and maintain the unity of the Empire. In due course the Emperor
+ratified the action of his energetic soldier; Windischgraetz was appointed
+to the supreme command over all the troops of the Empire with the exception
+of Radetzky's army, and his march against Vienna was begun.
+
+[Windischgraetz conquers Vienna, Oct. 26-Nov. 1.]
+
+To the Hungarian Parliament, exasperated by the decree ordering its own
+dissolution and the war openly levied against the country by the Court in
+alliance with Jellacic, the revolt of the capital seemed to bring a sudden
+deliverance from all danger. The Viennese had saved Hungary, and the Diet
+was willing, if summoned by the Assembly at Vienna, to send its troops to
+the defence of the capital. But the urgency of the need was not understood
+on either side till too late. The Viennese Assembly, treating itself as a
+legitimate and constitutional power threatened by a group of soldiers who
+had usurped the monarch's authority, hesitated to compromise its legal
+character by calling in a Hungarian army. The Magyar generals on the other
+hand were so anxious not to pass beyond the strict defence of their own
+kingdom, that, in the absence of communication from a Viennese authority,
+they twice withdrew from Austrian soil after following Jellacic in pursuit
+beyond the frontier. It was not until Windischgraetz had encamped within
+sight of Vienna, and had detained as a rebel the envoy sent to him by the
+Hungarian Government, that Kossuth's will prevailed over the scruples of
+weaker men, and the Hungarian army marched against the besiegers. In the
+meantime Windischgraetz had begun his attack on the suburbs, which were
+weakly defended by the National Guard and by companies of students and
+volunteers, the nominal commander being one Messenhauser, formerly an
+officer in the regular army, who was assisted by a soldier of far greater
+merit than himself, the Polish general Bem. Among those who fought were two
+members of the German Parliament of Frankfort, Robert Blum and Froebel, who
+had been sent to mediate between the Emperor and his subjects, but had
+remained at Vienna as combatants. The besiegers had captured the outskirts
+of the city, and negotiations for surrender were in progress, when, on the
+30th of October, Messenhauser from the top of the cathedral tower saw
+beyond the line of the besiegers on the south-east the smoke of battle, and
+announced that the Hungarian army was approaching. An engagement had in
+fact begun on the plain of Schwechat between the Hungarians and Jellacic,
+reinforced by divisions of Windischgraetz's troops. In a moment of wild
+excitement the defenders of the capital threw themselves once more upon
+their foe, disregarding the offer of surrender that had been already made.
+But the tide of battle at Schwechat turned against the Hungarians. They
+were compelled to retreat, and Windischgraetz, reopening his cannonade upon
+the rebels who were also violators of their truce, became in a few hours
+master of Vienna. He made his entry on the 31st of October, and treated
+Vienna as a conquered city. The troops had behaved with ferocity during the
+combat in the suburbs, and slaughtered scores of unarmed persons. No
+Oriental tyrant ever addressed his fallen foes with greater insolence and
+contempt for human right than Windischgraetz in the proclamations which, on
+assuming government, he addressed to the Viennese; yet, whatever might be
+the number of persons arrested and imprisoned, the number now put to death
+was not great. The victims were indeed carefully selected; the most
+prominent being Robert Blum, in whom, as a leader of the German Liberals
+and a Deputy of the German Parliament inviolable by law, the Austrian
+Government struck ostentatiously at the Parliament itself and at German
+democracy at large.
+
+[The Parliament at Kremsier, Nov. 22.]
+
+[Schwarzenberg Minister.]
+
+In the subjugation of Vienna the army had again proved itself the real
+political power in Austria; but the time had not yet arrived when absolute
+government could be openly restored. The Bohemian deputies, fatally as they
+had injured the cause of constitutional rule by their secession from
+Vienna, were still in earnest in the cause of provincial autonomy, and
+would vehemently have repelled the charge of an alliance with despotism.
+Even the mutilated Parliament of Vienna had been recognised by the Court as
+in lawful session until the 22nd of October, when an order was issued
+proroguing the Parliament and bidding it re-assemble a month later at
+Kremsier, in Moravia. There were indications in the weeks succeeding the
+fall of Vienna of a conflict between the reactionary and the more liberal
+influences surrounding the Emperor, and of an impending _coup d'etat_:
+but counsels of prudence prevailed for the moment; the Assembly was
+permitted to meet at Kremsier, and professions of constitutional principle
+were still made with every show of sincerity. A new Ministry, however, came
+into office, with Prince Felix Schwarzenberg at its head. Schwarzenberg
+belonged to one of the greatest Austrian families. He had been ambassador
+at Naples when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and had quitted the city
+with words of menace when insult was offered to the Austrian flag.
+Exchanging diplomacy for war, he served under Radetzky, and was soon
+recognised as the statesman in whom the army, as a political power, found
+its own peculiar representative. His career had hitherto been illustrated
+chiefly by scandals of private life so flagrant that England and other
+countries where he had held diplomatic posts had insisted on his removal;
+but the cynical and reckless audacity of the man rose in his new calling as
+Minister of Austria to something of political greatness. Few statesmen have
+been more daring than Schwarzenberg; few have pushed to more excessive
+lengths the advantages to be derived from the moral or the material
+weakness of an adversary. His rule was the debauch of forces respited in
+their extremity for one last and worst exertion. Like the Roman Sulla, he
+gave to a condemned and perishing cause the passing semblance of restored
+vigour, and died before the next great wave of change swept his creations
+away.
+
+[Ferdinand abdicates, Dec. 2. Francis Joseph Emperor.]
+
+[Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament, March 7, 1849.]
+
+[The Unitary Constitutional Edict, March, 1849.]
+
+Schwarzenberg's first act was the deposition of his sovereign. The
+imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand had long suggested his abdication or
+dethronement, and the time for decisive action had now arrived. He gladly
+withdrew into private life: the crown, declined by his brother and heir,
+was passed on to his nephew, Francis Joseph, a youth of eighteen. This
+prince had at least not made in person, not uttered with his own lips, not
+signed with his own hand, those solemn engagements with the Hungarian
+nation which Austria was now about to annihilate with fire and sword. He
+had not moved in friendly intercourse with men who were henceforth doomed
+to the scaffold. He came to the throne as little implicated in the acts of
+his predecessor as any nominal chief of a State could be; as fitting an
+instrument in the hands of Court and army as any reactionary faction could
+desire. Helpless and well-meaning, Francis Joseph, while his troops poured
+into Hungary, played for a while in Austria the part of a loyal observer of
+his Parliament; then, when the moment had come for its destruction, he
+obeyed his soldier-minister as Ferdinand had in earlier days obeyed the
+students, and signed the decree for its dissolution (March 4, 1849). The
+Assembly, during its sittings at Vienna, had accomplished one important
+task: it had freed the peasantry from the burdens attaching to their land
+and converted them into independent proprietors. This part of its work
+survived it, and remained almost the sole gain that Austria derived from
+the struggle of 1848. After the removal to Kremsier, a Committee of the
+Assembly had been engaged with the formation of a Constitution for Austria,
+and the draft was now completed. In the course of debate something had been
+gained by the representatives of the German and the Slavic races in the way
+of respect for one another's interests and prejudices; some political
+knowledge had been acquired; some approach made to an adjustment between
+the claims of the central power and of provincial autonomy. If the
+Constitution sketched at Kremsier had come into being, it would at least
+have given to Western Austria and to Galicia, which belonged to this half
+of the Empire, a system of government based on popular desires and worthy,
+on the part of the Crown, of a fair trial. But, apart from its own defects
+from the monarchical point of view, this Constitution rested on the
+division of the Empire into two independent parts; it assumed the
+separation of Hungary from the other Hereditary States; and of a separate
+Hungarian Kingdom the Minister now in power would hear no longer. That
+Hungary had for centuries possessed and maintained its rights; that, with
+the single exception of the English, no nation in Europe had equalled the
+Magyars in the stubborn and unwearied defence of Constitutional law; that,
+in an age when national spirit was far less hotly inflamed, the Emperor
+Joseph had well-nigh lost his throne and wrecked his Empire in the attempt
+to subject this resolute race to a centralised administration, was nothing
+to Schwarzenberg and the soldiers who were now trampling upon revolution.
+Hungary was declared to have forfeited by rebellion alike its ancient
+rights and the contracts of 1848. The dissolution of the Parliament of
+Kremsier was followed by the publication of an edict affecting to bestow a
+uniform and centralised Constitution upon the entire Austrian Empire. All
+existing public rights were thereby extinguished; and, inasmuch as the new
+Constitution, in so far as it provided for a representative system, never
+came into existence, but remained in abeyance until it was formally
+abrogated in 1851, the real effect of the Unitary Edict of March, 1849,
+which professed to close the period of revolution by granting the same
+rights to all, was to establish absolute government and the rule of the
+sword throughout the Emperor's dominions. Provincial institutions giving to
+some of the German and Slavic districts a shadowy control of their own
+local affairs only marked the distinction between the favoured and the
+dreaded parts of the Empire. Ten years passed before freedom again came
+within sight of the Austrian peoples. [434]
+
+[Hungary.]
+
+[The Roumanians in Transylvania.]
+
+The Hungarian Diet, on learning of the transfer of the crown from Ferdinand
+to Francis Joseph, had refused to acknowledge this act as valid, on the
+ground that it had taken place without the consent of the Legislature, and
+that Francis Joseph had not been crowned King of Hungary. Ferdinand was
+treated as still the reigning sovereign, and the war now became, according
+to the Hungarian view, more than ever a war in defence of established
+right, inasmuch as the assailants of Hungary were not only violators of a
+settled constitution but agents of a usurping prince. The whole nation was
+summoned to arms; and in order that there might be no faltering at
+headquarters, the command over the forces on the Danube was given by
+Kossuth to Goergei, a young officer of whom little was yet known to the
+world but that he had executed Count Eugene Zichy, a powerful noble, for
+holding communications with Jellacic. It was the design of the Austrian
+Government to attack Hungary at once by the line of the Danube and from the
+frontier of Galicia on the north-east. The Serbs were to be led forward
+from their border-provinces against the capital; and another race, which
+centuries of oppression had filled with bitter hatred of the Magyars, was
+to be thrown into the struggle. The mass of the population of Transylvania
+belonged to the Roumanian stock. The Magyars, here known by the name of
+Szeklers, and a community of Germans, descended from immigrants who settled
+in Transylvania about the twelfth century, formed a small but a privileged
+minority, in whose presence the Roumanian peasantry, poor, savage, and
+absolutely without political rights, felt themselves before 1848 scarcely
+removed from serfdom. In the Diet of Transylvania the Magyars held command,
+and in spite of the resistance of the Germans, they had succeeded in
+carrying an Act, in May, 1848, uniting the country with Hungary. This Act
+had been ratified by the Emperor Ferdinand, but it was followed by a
+widespread insurrection of the Roumanian peasantry, who were already
+asserting their claims as a separate nation and demanding equality with
+their oppressors. The rising of the Roumanians had indeed more of the
+character of an agrarian revolt than of a movement for national
+independence. It was marked by atrocious cruelty; and although the Hapsburg
+standard was raised, the Austrian commandant, General Puchner, hesitated
+long before lending the insurgents his countenance. At length, in October,
+he declared against the Hungarian Government. The union of the regular
+troops with the peasantry overpowered for a time all resistance. The towns
+fell under Austrian sway, and although the Szeklers were not yet disarmed,
+Transylvania seemed to be lost to Hungary. General Puchner received orders
+to lead his troops, with the newly formed Roumanian militia, westward into
+the Banat, in order to co-operate in the attack which was to overwhelm the
+Hungarians from every quarter of the kingdom. [435]
+
+[The Austrians occupy Pesth, Jan. 5, 1849.]
+
+On the 15th of December, Windischgraetz, in command of the main Austrian
+army, crossed the river Leitha, the border between German and Magyar
+territory. Goergei, who was opposed to him, had from the first declared that
+Pesth must be abandoned and a war of defence carried on in Central Hungary.
+Kossuth, however, had scorned this counsel, and announced that he would
+defend Pesth to the last. The backwardness of the Hungarian preparations
+and the disorder of the new levies justified the young general, who from
+this time assumed the attitude of contempt and hostility towards the
+Committee of Defence. Kossuth had in fact been strangely served by fortune
+in his choice of Goergei. He had raised him to command on account of one
+irretrievable act of severity against an Austrian partisan, and without any
+proof of his military capacity. In the untried soldier he had found a
+general of unusual skill; in the supposed devotee to Magyar patriotism he
+had found a military politician as self-willed and as insubordinate as any
+who have ever distracted the councils of a falling State. Dissensions and
+misunderstandings aggravated the weakness of the Hungarians in the field.
+Position after position was lost, and it soon became evident that the
+Parliament and Government could remain no longer at Pesth. They withdrew to
+Debreczin beyond the Theiss, and on the 5th of January, 1849, Windischgraetz
+made his entry into the capital. [436]
+
+[The Hungarian Government at Debreczin.]
+
+[Kossuth and Goergei.]
+
+The Austrians now supposed the war to be at an end. It was in fact but
+beginning. The fortress of Comorn, on the upper Danube, remained in the
+hands of the Magyars; and by conducting his retreat northwards into a
+mountainous country where the Austrians could not follow him Goergei gained
+the power either of operating against Windischgraetz's communications or of
+combining with the army of General Klapka, who was charged with the defence
+of Hungary against an enemy advancing from Galicia. While Windischgraetz
+remained inactive at Pesth, Klapka met and defeated an Austrian division
+under General Schlick which had crossed the Carpathians and was moving
+southwards towards Debreczin. Goergei now threw himself eastwards upon the
+line of retreat of the beaten enemy, and Schlick's army only escaped
+capture by abandoning its communications and seeking refuge with
+Windischgraetz at Pesth. A concentration of the Magyar forces was effected
+on the Theiss, and the command over the entire army was given by Kossuth to
+Dembinski, a Pole who had gained distinction in the wars of Napoleon and in
+the campaign of 1831. Goergei, acting as the representative of the officers
+who had been in the service before the Revolution, had published an address
+declaring that the army would fight for no cause but that of the
+Constitution as established by Ferdinand, the legitimate King, and that it
+would accept no commands but those of the Ministers whom Ferdinand had
+appointed. Interpreting this manifesto as a direct act of defiance, and as
+a warning that the army might under Goergei's command make terms on its own
+authority with the Austrian Government, Kossuth resorted to the dangerous
+experiment of superseding the national commanders by a Pole who was
+connected with the revolutionary party throughout Europe. The act was
+disastrous in its moral effects upon the army; and, as a general, Dembinski
+entirely failed to justify his reputation. After permitting Schlick's corps
+to escape him he moved forwards from the Theiss against Pesth. He was met
+by the Austrians and defeated at Kapolna (February 26). Both armies retired
+to their earlier positions, and, after a declaration from the Magyar
+generals that they would no longer obey his orders, Dembinski was removed
+from his command, though he remained in Hungary to interfere once more with
+evil effect before the end of the war.
+
+[The Austrians driven out of Hungary, April.]
+
+The struggle between Austria and Hungary had reached this stage when the
+Constitution merging all provincial rights in one centralised system was
+published by Schwarzenberg. The Croats, the Serbs, the Roumanians, who had
+so credulously flocked to the Emperor's banner under the belief that they
+were fighting for their own independence, at length discovered their
+delusion. Their enthusiasm sank; the bolder among them even attempted to
+detach their countrymen from the Austrian cause; but it was too late to
+undo what had already been done. Jellacic, now undistinguishable from any
+other Austrian general, mocked the politicians of Agram who still babbled
+of Croatian autonomy: Stratimirovic, the national leader of the Serbs, sank
+before his rival the Patriarch of Carlowitz, a Churchman who preferred
+ecclesiastical immunities granted by the Emperor of Austria to independence
+won on the field of battle by his countrymen. Had a wiser or more generous
+statesmanship controlled the Hungarian Government in the first months of
+its activity, a union between the Magyars and the subordinate races against
+Viennese centralisation might perhaps even now have been effected. But
+distrust and animosity had risen too high for the mediators between Slav
+and Magyar to attain any real success, nor was any distinct promise of
+self-government even now to be drawn from the offers of concession which
+were held out at Debreczin. An interval of dazzling triumph seemed indeed
+to justify the Hungarian Government in holding fast to its sovereign
+claims. In the hands of able leaders no task seemed too hard for Magyar
+troops to accomplish. Bem, arriving in Transylvania without a soldier,
+created a new army, and by a series of extraordinary marches and surprises
+not only overthrew the Austrian and Roumanian troops opposed to him, but
+expelled a corps of Russians whom General Puchner in his extremity had
+invited to garrison Hermannstadt. Goergei, resuming in the first week of
+April the movement in which Dembinski had failed, inflicted upon the
+Austrians a series of defeats that drove them back to the walls of Pesth;
+while Klapka, advancing on Comorn, effected the relief of this fortress,
+and planted in the rear of the Austrians a force which threatened to cut
+them off from Vienna. It was in vain that the Austrian Government removed
+Windischgraetz from his command. His successor found that a force superior
+to his own was gathering round him on every side. He saw that Hungary was
+lost; and leaving a garrison in the fortress of Buda, he led off his army
+in haste from the capital, and only paused in his retreat when he had
+reached the Austrian frontier.
+
+[Declaration of Hungarian Independence, April 19.]
+
+The Magyars, rallying from their first defeats, had brilliantly achieved
+the liberation of their land. The Court of Vienna, attempting in right of
+superior force to overthrow an established constitution, had proved itself
+the inferior power; and in mingled exaltation and resentment it was natural
+that the party and the leaders who had been foremost in the national
+struggle of Hungary should deem a renewed union with Austria impossible,
+and submission to the Hapsburg crown an indignity. On the 19th of April,
+after the defeat of Windischgraetz but before the evacuation of Pesth, the
+Diet declared that the House of Hapsburg had forfeited its throne, and
+proclaimed Hungary an independent State. No statement was made as to the
+future form of government, but everything indicated that Hungary, if
+successful in maintaining its independence, would become a Republic, with
+Kossuth, who was now appointed Governor, for its chief. Even in the
+revolutionary severance of ancient ties homage was paid to the legal and
+constitutional bent of the Hungarian mind. Nothing was said in the
+Declaration of April 19th of the rights of man; there was no Parisian
+commonplace on the sovereignty of the people. The necessity of Hungarian
+independence was deduced from the offences which the Austrian House had
+committed against the written and unwritten law of the land, offences
+continued through centuries and crowned by the invasion under
+Windischgraetz, by the destruction of the Hungarian Constitution in the
+edict of March 9th, and by the introduction of the Russians into
+Transylvania. Though coloured and exaggerated by Magyar patriotism, the
+charges made against the Hapsburg dynasty were on the whole in accordance
+with historical fact; and if the affairs of States were to be guided by no
+other considerations than those relating to the performance of contracts,
+Hungary had certainly established its right to be quit of partnership with
+Austria and of its Austrian sovereign. But the judgment of history has
+condemned Kossuth's declaration of Hungarian independence in the midst of
+the struggle of 1849 as a great political error. It served no useful
+purpose; it deepened the antagonism already existing between the Government
+and a large part of the army; and while it added to the sources of internal
+discord, it gave colour to the intervention of Russia as against a
+revolutionary cause. Apart from its disastrous effect upon the immediate
+course of events, it was based upon a narrow and inadequate view both of
+the needs and of the possibilities of the future. Even in the interests of
+the Magyar nation itself as a European power, it may well be doubted
+whether in severance from Austria such influence and such weight could
+possibly have been won by a race numerically weak and surrounded by hostile
+nationalities, as the ability and the political energy of the Magyars have
+since won for them in the direction of the accumulated forces of the
+Austro-Hungarian Empire.
+
+[Russian intervention against Hungary.]
+
+It has generally been considered a fatal error on the part of the Hungarian
+commanders that, after expelling the Austrian army, they did not at once
+march upon Vienna, but returned to lay siege to the fortress of Buda, which
+resisted long enough to enable the Austrian Government to reorganise and to
+multiply its forces. But the intervention of Russia would probably have
+been fatal to Hungarian independence, even if Vienna had been captured and
+a democratic government established there for a while in opposition to the
+Court at Olmuetz. The plan of a Russian intervention, though this
+intervention was now explained by the community of interest between Polish
+and Hungarian rebels, was no new thing. Soon after the outbreak of the
+March Revolution the Czar had desired to send his troops both into Prussia
+and into Austria as the restorers of monarchical authority. His help was
+declined on behalf of the King of Prussia; in Austria the project had been
+discussed at successive moments of danger, and after the overthrow of the
+Imperial troops in Transylvania by Bem the proffered aid was accepted. The
+Russians who then occupied Hermannstadt did not, however, enter the country
+as combatants; their task was to garrison certain positions still held by
+the Austrians, and so to set free the Emperor's troops for service in the
+field. On the declaration of Hungarian independence, it became necessary
+for Francis Joseph to accept his protector's help without qualification or
+disguise. An army of eighty thousand Russians marched across Galicia to
+assist the Austrians in grappling with an enemy before whom, when
+single-handed, they had succumbed. Other Russian divisions, while Austria
+massed its troops on the Upper Danube, entered Transylvania from the south
+and east, and the Magyars in the summer of 1849 found themselves compelled
+to defend their country against forces three times more numerous than their
+own. [437]
+
+[The summer campaign in Hungary, July-August, 1849.]
+
+[Capitulation of Vilagos, August 13.]
+
+[Vengeance of Austria.]
+
+When it became known that the Czar had determined to throw all his strength
+into the scale, Kossuth saw that no ordinary operations of war could
+possibly avert defeat, and called upon his countrymen to destroy their
+homes and property at the approach of the enemy, and to leave to the
+invader a flaming and devastated solitude. But the area of warfare was too
+vast for the execution of this design, even if the nation had been prepared
+for so desperate a course. The defence of Hungary was left to its armies,
+and Goergei became the leading figure in the calamitous epoch that followed.
+While the Government prepared to retire to Szegedin, far in the south-east,
+Goergei took post on the Upper Danube, to meet the powerful force which the
+Emperor of Austria had placed under the orders of General Haynau, a soldier
+whose mingled energy and ferocity in Italy had marked him out as a fitting
+scourge for the Hungarians, and had won for him supreme civil as well as
+military powers. Goergei naturally believed that the first object of the
+Austrian commander would be to effect a junction with the Russians, who,
+under Paskiewitsch, the conqueror of Kars in 1829, were now crossing the
+Carpathians; and he therefore directed all his efforts against the left of
+the Austrian line. While he was unsuccessfully attacking the enemy on the
+river Waag north of Comorn, Haynau with the mass of his forces advanced on
+the right bank of the Danube, and captured Raab (June 28th). Goergei threw
+himself southwards, but his efforts to stop Haynau were in vain, and the
+Austrians occupied Pesth (July 11th). The Russians meanwhile were advancing
+southwards by an independent line of march. Their vanguard reached the
+Danube and the Upper Theiss, and Goergei seemed to be enveloped by the
+enemy. The Hungarian Government adjured him to hasten towards Szegedin and
+Arad, where Kossuth was concentrating all the other divisions for a final
+struggle; but Goergei held on to his position about Comorn until his retreat
+could only be effected by means of a vast detour northwards, and before he
+could reach Arad all was lost. Dembinski was again in command. Charged with
+the defence of the passage of the Theiss about Szegedin, he failed to
+prevent the Austrians from crossing the river, and on the 5th of August was
+defeated at Czoreg with heavy loss. Kossuth now gave the command to Bern,
+who had hurried from Transylvania, where overpowering forces had at length
+wrested victory from his grasp. Bern fought the last battle of the campaign
+at Temesvar. He was overthrown and driven eastwards, but succeeded in
+leading a remnant of his army across the Moldavian frontier and so escaped
+capture. Goergei, who was now close to Arad, had some strange fancy that it
+would dishonour his army to seek refuge on neutral soil. He turned
+northwards so as to encounter Russian and not Austrian regiments, and
+without striking a blow, without stipulating even for the lives of the
+civilians in his camp, he led his army within the Russian lines at Vilagos,
+and surrendered unconditionally to the generals of the Czar. His own life
+was spared; no mercy was shown to those who were handed over as his
+fellow-prisoners by the Russian to the Austrian Government, or who were
+seized by Haynau as his troops advanced. Tribunals more resembling those of
+the French Reign of Terror than the Courts of a civilised Government sent
+the noblest patriots and soldiers of Hungary to the scaffold. To the deep
+disgrace of the Austrian Crown, Count Batthyany, the Minister of Ferdinand,
+was included among those whose lives were sacrificed. The vengeance of the
+conqueror seemed the more frenzied and the more insatiable because it had
+only been rendered possible by foreign aid. Crushed under an iron rule,
+exhausted by war, the prey of a Government which knew only how to employ
+its subject-races as gaolers over one another, Hungary passed for some
+years into silence and almost into despair. Every vestige of its old
+constitutional rights was extinguished. Its territory was curtailed by the
+separation of Transylvania and Croatia; its administration was handed over
+to Germans from Vienna. A conscription, enforced not for the ends of
+military service but as the surest means of breaking the national spirit,
+enrolled its youth in Austrian regiments, and banished them to the
+extremities of the empire. No darker period was known in the history of
+Hungary since the wars of the seventeenth century than that which followed
+the catastrophe of 1849. [438]
+
+[Italian affairs, August, 1848-March, 1849.]
+
+[Murder of Rossi, Nov. 15. Flight of Pius IX.]
+
+[Roman Republic, Feb. 9, 1849.]
+
+[Tuscany.]
+
+The gloom which followed Austrian victory was now descending not on Hungary
+alone but on Italy also. The armistice made between Radetzky and the King
+of Piedmont at Vigevano in August, 1848, lasted for seven months, during
+which the British and French Governments endeavoured, but in vain, to
+arrange terms of peace between the combatants. With military tyranny in its
+most brutal form crushing down Lombardy, it was impossible that Charles
+Albert should renounce the work of deliverance to which he had pledged
+himself. Austria, on the other hand, had now sufficiently recovered its
+strength to repudiate the concessions which it had offered at an earlier
+time, and Schwarzenberg on assuming power announced that the Emperor would
+maintain Lombardy at every cost. The prospects of Sardinia as regarded help
+from the rest of the Peninsula were far worse than when it took up arms in
+the spring of 1848. Projects of a general Italian federation, of a military
+union between the central States and Piedmont, of an Italian Constituent
+Assembly, had succeeded one another and left no result. Naples had fallen
+back into absolutism; Rome and Tuscany, from which aid might still have
+been expected, were distracted by internal contentions, and hastening as it
+seemed towards anarchy. After the defeat of Charles Albert at Custozza,
+Pius IX., who was still uneasily playing his part as a constitutional
+sovereign, had called to office Pellegrino Rossi, an Italian patriot of an
+earlier time, who had since been ambassador of Louis Philippe at Rome, and
+by his connection with the Orleanist Monarchy had incurred the hatred of
+the Republican party throughout Italy. Rossi, as a vigorous and independent
+reformer, was as much detested in clerical and reactionary circles as he
+was by the demagogues and their followers. This, however, profited him
+nothing; and on the 15th of November, as he was proceeding to the opening
+of the Chambers, he was assassinated by an unknown hand. Terrified by this
+crime, and by an attack upon his own palace by which it was followed, Pius
+fled to Gaeta and placed himself under the protection of the King of
+Naples. A Constituent Assembly was summoned and a Republic proclaimed at
+Rome, between which and the Sardinian Government there was so little
+community of feeling that Charles Albert would, if the Pope had accepted
+his protection, have sent his troops to restore him to a position of
+security. In Tuscany affairs were in a similar condition. The Grand Duke
+had for some months been regarded as a sincere, though reserved, friend of
+the Italian cause, and he had even spoken of surrendering his crown if this
+should be for the good of the Italian nation. When, however, the Pope had
+fled to Gaeta, and the project was openly avowed of uniting Tuscany with
+the Roman States in a Republic, the Grand Duke, moved more by the
+fulminations of Pius against his despoilers than by care for his own crown,
+fled in his turn, leaving the Republicans masters of Florence. A miserable
+exhibition of vanity, riot, and braggadocio was given to the world by the
+politicians of the Tuscan State. Alike in Florence and in Rome all sense of
+the true needs of the moment, of the absolute uselessness of internal
+changes of Government if Austria was to maintain its dominion, seemed to
+have vanished from men's minds. Republican phantoms distracted the heart
+and the understanding; no soldier, no military administrator arose till too
+late by the side of the rhetoricians and mob-leaders who filled the stage;
+and when, on the 19th of March, the armistice was brought to a close in
+Upper Italy, Piedmont took the field alone. [439]
+
+[The Match campaign, 1849.]
+
+[Battle of Novara, March 23.]
+
+The campaign which now began lasted but for five days. While Charles Albert
+scattered his forces from Lago Maggiore to Stradella on the south of the
+Po, hoping to move by the northern road upon Milan, Radetzky concentrated
+his troops near Pavia, where he intended to cross the Ticino. In an evil
+moment Charles Albert had given the command of his army to Chrzanowski, a
+Pole, and had entrusted its southern division, composed chiefly of Lombard
+volunteers, to another Pole, Ramorino, who had been engaged in Mazzini's
+incursion into Savoy in 1833. Ramorino had then, rightly or wrongly,
+incurred the charge of treachery. His relations with Chrzanowski were of
+the worst character, and the habit of military obedience was as much
+wanting to him as the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign from whom he
+had now accepted a command. The wilfulness of this adventurer made the
+Piedmontese army an easy prey. Ramorino was posted on the south of the Po,
+near its junction with the Ticino, but received orders on the commencement
+of hostilities to move northwards and defend the passage of the Ticino at
+Pavia, breaking up the bridges behind him. Instead of obeying this order he
+kept his division lingering about Stradella. Radetzky, approaching the
+Ticino at Pavia, found the passage unguarded. He crossed the river with the
+mass of his army, and, cutting off Ramorino's division, threw himself upon
+the flank of the scattered Piedmontese. Charles Albert, whose headquarters
+were at Novara, hurried southwards. Before he could concentrate his troops,
+he was attacked at Mortara by the Austrians and driven back. The line of
+retreat upon Turin and Alessandria was already lost; an attempt was made to
+hold Novara against the advancing Austrians. The battle which was fought in
+front of this town on the 23rd of March ended with the utter overthrow of
+the Sardinian army. So complete was the demoralisation of the troops that
+the cavalry were compelled to attack bodies of half-maddened infantry in
+the streets of Novara in order to save the town from pillage. [440]
+
+[Abdication of Charles Albert.]
+
+Charles Albert had throughout the battle of the 23rd appeared to seek
+death. The reproaches levelled against him for the abandonment of Milan in
+the previous year, the charges of treachery which awoke to new life the
+miserable record of his waverings in 1821, had sunk into the very depths of
+his being. Weak and irresolute in his earlier political career, harsh and
+illiberal towards the pioneers of Italian freedom during a great part of
+his reign, Charles had thrown his whole heart and soul into the final
+struggle of his country against Austria. This struggle lost, life had
+nothing more for him. The personal hatred borne towards him by the rulers
+of Austria caused him to believe that easier terms of peace might be
+granted to Piedmont if another sovereign were on its throne, and his
+resolution, in case of defeat, was fixed and settled. When night fell after
+the battle of Novara he called together his generals, and in their presence
+abdicated his crown. Bidding an eternal farewell to his son Victor
+Emmanuel, who knelt weeping before him, he quitted the army accompanied by
+but one attendant, and passed unrecognised through the enemy's guards. He
+left his queen, his capital, unvisited as he journeyed into exile. The
+brief residue of his life was spent in solitude near Oporto. Six months
+after the battle of Novara he was carried to the grave.
+
+[Beginning of Victor Emmanuel's reign.]
+
+It may be truly said of Charles Albert that nothing in his reign became him
+like the ending of it. Hopeless as the conflict of 1849 might well appear,
+it proved that there was one sovereign in Italy who was willing to stake
+his throne, his life, the whole sum of his personal interests, for the
+national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should
+encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest
+statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of
+Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara,
+have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last
+unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The
+faults of the Government of Turin during Charles Albert's years of peace
+had ceased to have any bearing on Italian affairs; the sharpest tongues no
+longer repeated, the most credulous ear no longer harboured the slanders of
+1848; the man who, beaten and outnumbered, had for hours sat immovable in
+front of the Austrian cannon at Novara had, in the depth of his misfortune,
+given to his son not the crown of Piedmont only but the crown of Italy.
+Honour, patriotism, had made the young Victor Emmanuel the hope of the
+Sardinian army; the same honour and patriotism carried him safely past the
+lures which Austria set for the inheritor of a ruined kingdom, and gave in
+the first hours of his reign an earnest of the policy which was to end in
+Italian union. It was necessary for him to visit Radetzky in his camp in
+order to arrange the preliminaries of peace. There, amid flatteries offered
+to him at his father's expense, it was notified to him that if he would
+annul the Constitution that his father had made, he might reckon not only
+on an easy quittance with the conqueror, but on the friendship and support
+of Austria. This demand, though strenuously pressed in later negotiations,
+Victor Emmanuel unconditionally refused. He had to endure for a while the
+presence of Austrian troops in his kingdom, and to furnish an indemnity
+which fell heavily on so small a State; but the liberties of his people
+remained intact, and the pledge given by his father inviolate. Amid the
+ruin of all hopes and the bankruptcy of all other royal reputations
+throughout Italy, there proved to be one man, one government, in which the
+Italian people could trust. This compensation at least was given in the
+disasters of 1849, that the traitors to the cause of Italy and of freedom
+could not again deceive, nor the dream of a federation of princes again
+obscure the necessity of a single national government. In the fidelity of
+Victor Emmanuel to the Piedmontese Constitution lay the pledge that when
+Italy's next opportunity should arrive, the chief would be there who would
+meet the nation's need.
+
+[Restoration in Tuscany.]
+
+[Rome and France.]
+
+[French intervention determined on.]
+
+The battle of Novara had not long been fought when the Grand Duke of
+Tuscany was restored to his throne under an Austrian garrison, and his late
+democratic Minister, Guerazzi, who had endeavoured by submission to the
+Court-party to avert an Austrian occupation, was sent into imprisonment. At
+Rome a far bolder spirit was shown. Mazzini had arrived in the first week
+of March, and, though his exhortation to the Roman Assembly to forget the
+offences of Charles Albert and to unite against the Austrians in Lombardy
+came too late, he was able, as one of a Triumvirate with dictatorial
+powers, to throw much of his own ardour into the Roman populace in defence
+of their own city and State. The enemy against whom Rome had to be defended
+proved indeed to be other than that against whom preparations were being
+made. The victories of Austria had aroused the apprehension of the French
+Government; and though the fall of Piedmont and Lombardy could not now be
+undone, it was determined by Louis Napoleon and his Ministers to anticipate
+Austria's restoration of the Papal power by the despatch of French troops
+to Rome. All the traditions of French national policy pointed indeed to
+such an intervention. Austria had already invaded the Roman States from the
+north, and the political conditions which in 1832 had led so pacific a
+minister as Casimir Perier to occupy Ancona were now present in much
+greater force. Louis Napoleon could not, without abandoning a recognised
+interest and surrendering something of the due influence of France, have
+permitted Austrian generals to conduct the Pope back to his capital and to
+assume the government of Central Italy. If the first impulses of the
+Revolution of 1848 had still been active in France, its intervention would
+probably have taken the form of a direct alliance with the Roman Republic;
+but public opinion had travelled far in the opposite direction since the
+Four Days of June; and the new President, if he had not forgotten his own
+youthful relations with the Carbonari, was now a suitor for the solid
+favours of French conservative and religious sentiment. His Ministers had
+not recognised the Roman Republic. They were friends, no doubt, to liberty;
+but when it was certain that the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Neapolitans,
+were determined to restore the Pope, it might be assumed that the
+continuance of the Roman Republic was an impossibility. France, as a
+Catholic and at the same time a Liberal Power, might well, under these
+circumstances, address itself to the task of reconciling Roman liberty with
+the inevitable return of the Holy Father to his temporal throne. Events
+were moving too fast for diplomacy; troops must be at once despatched, or
+the next French envoy would find Radetzky on the Tiber. The misgivings of
+the Republican part of the Assembly at Paris were stilled by French
+assurances of the generous intentions of the Government towards the Roman
+populations, and of its anxiety to shelter them from Austrian domination,
+President, Ministers, and generals resolutely shut their eyes to the
+possibility that a French occupation of Rome might be resisted by force by
+the Romans themselves; and on the 22nd of April an armament of about ten
+thousand men set sail for Civita Vecchia under the command of General
+Oudinot, a son of the Marshal of that name.
+
+[The French at Civita Vecchia, April 25, 1849.]
+
+[Oudinot attacks Rome and is repelled, April 30.]
+
+Before landing on the Italian coast, the French general sent envoys to the
+authorities at Civita Vecchia, stating that his troops came as friends, and
+demanding that they should be admitted into the town. The Municipal Council
+determined not to offer resistance, and the French thus gained a footing on
+Italian soil and a basis for their operations. Messages came from French
+diplomatists in Rome encouraging the general to advance without delay. The
+mass of the population, it was said, would welcome his appearance; the
+democratic faction, if reckless, was too small to offer any serious
+resistance, and would disappear as soon as the French should enter the
+city. On this point, however, Oudinot was speedily undeceived. In reply to
+a military envoy who was sent to assure the Triumvirs of the benevolent
+designs of the French, Mazzini bluntly answered that no reconciliation with
+the Pope was possible; and on the 26th of April the Roman Assembly called
+upon the Executive to repel force by force. Oudinot now proclaimed a state
+of siege at Civita Vecchia, seized the citadel, and disarmed the garrison.
+On the 28th he began his march on Rome. As he approached, energetic
+preparations were made for resistance. Garibaldi, who had fought at the
+head of a free corps against the Austrians in Upper Italy in 1848, had now
+brought some hundreds of his followers to Rome. A regiment of Lombard
+volunteers, under their young leader Manara, had escaped after the
+catastrophe of Novara, and had come to fight for liberty in its last
+stronghold on Italian soil. Heroes, exiles, desperadoes from all parts of
+the Peninsula, met in the streets of Rome, and imparted to its people a
+vigour and resolution of which the world had long deemed them incapable.
+Even the remnant of the Pontifical Guard took part in the work of defence.
+Oudinot, advancing with his little corps of seven thousand men, found
+himself, without heavy artillery, in front of a city still sheltered by its
+ancient fortifications, and in the presence of a body of combatants more
+resolute than his own troops and twice as numerous. He attacked on the
+30th, was checked at every point, and compelled to retreat towards Civita
+Vecchia, leaving two hundred and fifty prisoners in the hands of the enemy.
+[441]
+
+[French policy, April-May.]
+
+Insignificant as was this misfortune of the French arms, it occasioned no
+small stir in Paris and in the Assembly. The Government, which had declared
+that the armament was intended only to protect Rome against Austria, was
+vehemently reproached for its duplicity, and a vote was passed demanding
+that the expedition should not be permanently diverted from the end
+assigned to it. Had the Assembly not been on the verge of dissolution it
+would probably have forced upon the Government a real change of policy. A
+general election, however, was but a few days distant, and until the result
+of this election should be known the Ministry determined to temporise. M.
+Lesseps, since famous as the creator of the Suez Canal, was sent to Rome
+with instructions to negotiate for some peaceable settlement. More honest
+than his employers, Lesseps sought with heart and soul to fulfil his task.
+While he laboured in city and camp, the French elections for which the
+President and Ministers were waiting took place, resulting in the return of
+a Conservative and reactionary majority. The new Assembly met on the 28th
+of May. In the course of the next few days Lesseps accepted terms proposed
+by the Roman Government, which would have precluded the French from
+entering Rome. Oudinot, who had been in open conflict with the envoy
+throughout his mission, refused his sanction to the treaty, and the
+altercations between the general and the diplomatist were still at their
+height when despatches arrived from Paris announcing that the powers given
+to Lesseps were at an end, and ordering Oudinot to recommence hostilities.
+The pretence of further negotiation would have been out of place with the
+new Parliament. On the 4th of June the French general, now strongly
+reinforced, occupied the positions necessary for a regular siege of Rome.
+
+[Attempted insurrection in France, June 13.]
+
+[The French enter Rome, July 3.]
+
+Against the forces now brought into action it was impossible that the Roman
+Republic could long defend itself. One hope remained, and that was in a
+revolution within France itself. The recent elections had united on the one
+side all Conservative interests, on the other the Socialists and all the
+more extreme factions of the Republican party. It was determined that a
+trial of strength should first be made within the Assembly itself upon the
+Roman question, and that, if the majority there should stand firm, an
+appeal should be made to insurrection. Accordingly on the 11th of June,
+after the renewal of hostilities had been announced in Paris, Ledru Rollin
+demanded the impeachment of the Ministry. His motion was rejected, and the
+signal was given for an outbreak not only in the capital but in Lyons and
+other cities. But the Government were on their guard, and it was in vain
+that the resources of revolution were once more brought into play. General
+Changarnier suppressed without bloodshed a tumult in Paris on June 13th;
+and though fighting took place at Lyons, the insurrection proved feeble in
+comparison with the movements of the previous year. Louis Napoleon and his
+Ministry remained unshaken, and the siege of Rome was accordingly pressed
+to its conclusion. Oudinot, who at the beginning of the month had carried
+the positions held by the Roman troops outside the walls, opened fire with
+heavy artillery on the 14th. The defence was gallantly sustained by
+Garibaldi and his companions until the end of the month, when the breaches
+made in the walls were stormed by the enemy, and further resistance became
+impossible. The French made their entry into Rome on the 3rd of July,
+Garibaldi leading his troops northwards in order to prolong the struggle
+with the Austrians who were now in possession of Bologna, and, if possible,
+to reach Venice, which was still uncaptured. Driven to the eastern coast
+and surrounded by the enemy, he was forced to put to sea. He landed again,
+but only to be hunted over mountain and forest. His wife died by his side.
+Rescued by the devotion of Italian patriots, he made his escape to Piedmont
+and thence to America, to reappear in all the fame of his heroic deeds and
+sufferings at the next great crisis in the history of his country.
+
+[The restored Pontifical Government.]
+
+It had been an easy task for a French army to conquer Rome; it was not so
+easy for the French Government to escape from the embarrassments of its
+victory. Liberalism was still the official creed of the Republic, and the
+protection of the Roman population from a reaction under Austrian auspices
+had been one of the alleged objects of the Italian expedition. No
+stipulation had, however, been made with the Pope during the siege as to
+the future institutions of Rome; and when, on the 14th of July, the
+restorations of Papal authority was formally announced by Oudinot, Pius and
+his Minister Antonelli still remained unfettered by any binding engagement.
+Nor did the Pontiff show the least inclination to place himself in the
+power of his protectors. He remained at Gaeta, sending a Commission of
+three Cardinals to assume the government of Rome. The first acts of the
+Cardinals dispelled any illusion that the French might have formed as to
+the docility of the Holy See. In the presence of a French Republican army
+they restored the Inquisition, and appointed a Board to bring to trial all
+officials compromised in the events that had taken place since the murder
+of Rossi in November, 1848. So great was the impression made on public
+opinion by the action of the Cardinals that Louis Napoleon considered it
+well to enter the lists in person on behalf of Roman liberty; and in a
+letter to Colonel Ney, a son of the Marshal, he denounced in language of
+great violence the efforts that were being made by a party antagonistic to
+France to base the Pope's return upon proscription and tyranny. Strong in
+the support of Austria and the other Catholic Powers, the Papal Government
+at Gaeta received this menace with indifference, and even made the
+discourtesy of the President a ground for withholding concessions. Of the
+re-establishment of the Constitution granted by Pius in 1848 there was now
+no question; all that the French Ministry could hope was to save some
+fragments in the general shipwreck of representative government, and to
+avert the vengeance that seemed likely to fall upon the defeated party. A
+Pontifical edict, known as the Motu Proprio, ultimately bestowed upon the
+municipalities certain local powers, and gave to a Council, nominated by
+the Pope from among the persons chosen by the municipalities, the right of
+consultation on matters of finance. More than this Pius refused to grant,
+and when he returned to Rome it was as an absolute sovereign. In its
+efforts on behalf of the large body of persons threatened with prosecution
+the French Government was more successful. The so-called amnesty which was
+published by Antonelli with the Motu Proprio seemed indeed to have for its
+object the classification of victims rather than the announcement of
+pardon; but under pressure from the French the excepted persons were
+gradually diminished in number, and all were finally allowed to escape
+other penalties by going into exile. To those who were so driven from their
+homes Piedmont offered a refuge.
+
+[Fall of Venice, Aug. 25.]
+
+[Sicily conquered by Ferdinand, April, May.]
+
+Thus the pall of priestly absolutism and misrule fell once more over the
+Roman States, and the deeper the hostility of the educated classes to the
+restored power the more active became the system of repression. For liberty
+of person there was no security whatever, and, though the offences of 1848
+were now professedly amnestied, the prisons were soon thronged with persons
+arrested on indefinite charges and detained for an unlimited time without
+trial. Nor was Rome more unfortunate in its condition than Italy generally.
+The restoration of Austrian authority in the north was completed by the
+fall of Venice. For months after the subjugation of the mainland, Venice,
+where the Republic had again been proclaimed and Manin had been recalled to
+power, had withstood all the efforts of the Emperor's forces. Its hopes had
+been raised by the victories of the Hungarians, which for a moment seemed
+almost to undo the catastrophe of Novara. But with the extinction of all
+possibility of Hungarian aid the inevitable end came in view. Cholera and
+famine worked with the enemy; and a fortnight after Goergei had laid down
+his arms at Vilagos the long and honourable resistance of Venice ended with
+the entry of the Austrians (August 25th). In the south, Ferdinand of Naples
+was again ruling as despot throughout the full extent of his dominions.
+Palermo, which had struck the first blow for freedom in 1848, had soon
+afterwards become the seat of a Sicilian Parliament, which deposed the
+Bourbon dynasty and offered the throne of Sicily to the younger brother of
+Victor Emmanuel. To this Ferdinand replied by a fleet to Messina, which
+bombarded that city for five days and laid a great part of it in ashes. His
+violence caused the British and French fleets to interpose, and hostilities
+were suspended until the spring of 1849, the Western Powers ineffectually
+seeking to frame some compromise acceptable at once to the Sicilians and to
+the Bourbon dynasty. After the triumph of Radetzky at Novara and the
+rejection by the Sicilian Parliament of the offer of a separate
+constitution and administration for the island, Ferdinand refused to remain
+any longer inactive. His fleet and army moved southwards from Messina, and
+a victory won at the foot of Mount Etna over the Sicilian forces, followed
+by the capture of Catania, brought the struggle to a close. The Assembly at
+Palermo dispersed, and the Neapolitan troops made their entry into the
+capital without resistance on the 15th of May. It was in vain that Great
+Britain now urged Ferdinand to grant to Sicily the liberties which he had
+hitherto professed himself willing to bestow. Autocrat he was, and autocrat
+he intended to remain. On the mainland the iniquities practised by his
+agents seem to have been even worse than in Sicily, where at least some
+attempt was made to use the powers of the State for the purposes of
+material improvement. For those who had incurred the enmity of Ferdinand's
+Government there was no law and no mercy. Ten years of violence and
+oppression, denounced by the voice of freer lands, had still to be borne by
+the subjects of this obstinate tyrant ere the reckoning-day arrived, and
+the deeply rooted jealousy between Sicily and Naples, which had wrought so
+much ill to the cause of Italian freedom, was appeased by the fall of the
+Bourbon throne. [442]
+
+[Germany from May, 1848.]
+
+[The National Assembly at Frankfort.]
+
+[Archduke John chosen Administrator, June 29.]
+
+We have thus far traced the stages of conflict between the old monarchical
+order and the forces of revolution in the Austrian empire and in that
+Mediterranean land whose destiny was so closely interwoven with that of
+Austria. We have now to pass back into Germany, and to resume the history
+of the German revolution at the point where the national movement seemed to
+concentrate itself in visible form, the opening of the Parliament of
+Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. That an Assembly representing the
+entire German people, elected in unbounded enthusiasm and comprising within
+it nearly every man of political or intellectual eminence who sympathised
+with the national cause, should be able to impose its will upon the
+tottering Governments of the individual German States, was not an unnatural
+belief in the circumstances of the moment. No second Chamber represented
+the interests of the ruling Houses, nor had they within the Assembly itself
+the organs for the expression of their own real or unreal claims. With all
+the freedom of a debating club or of a sovereign authority like the French
+Convention, the Parliament of Frankfort entered upon its work of moulding
+Germany afresh, limited only by its own discretion as to what it should
+make matter of consultation with any other power. There were thirty-six
+Governments in Germany, and to negotiate with each of these on the future
+Constitution might well seem a harder task than to enforce a Constitution
+on all alike. In the creation of a provisional executive authority there
+was something of the same difficulty. Each of the larger States might, if
+consulted, resist the selection of a provisional chief from one of its
+rivals; and though the risk of bold action was not denied, the Assembly, on
+the instance of its President, Von Gagern, a former Minister of
+Hesse-Darmstadt, resolved to appoint an Administrator of the Empire by a
+direct vote of its own. The Archduke John of Austria, long known as an
+enemy of Metternich's system of repression and as a patron of the idea of
+German union, was chosen Administrator, and he accepted the office. Prussia
+and the other States acquiesced in the nomination, though the choice of a
+Hapsburg prince was unpopular with the Prussian nation and army, and did
+not improve the relations between the Frankfort Assembly and the Court of
+Berlin. [443] Schmerling, an Austrian, was placed at the head of the
+Archduke's Ministry.
+
+[The National Assembly. May-Sept.]
+
+In the preparation of a Constitution for Germany the Assembly could draw
+little help from the work of legislators in other countries. Belgium, whose
+institutions were at once recent and successful, was not a Federal State;
+the founders of the American Union had not had to reckon with four kings
+and to include in their federal territory part of the dominions of an
+emperor. Instead of grappling at once with the formidable difficulties of
+political organisation, the Committee charged with the drafting of a
+Constitution determined first to lay down the principles of civil right
+which were to be the basis of the German commonwealth. There was something
+of the scientific spirit of the Germans in thus working out the
+substructure of public law on which all other institutions were to rest;
+moreover, the remembrance of the Decrees of Carlsbad and of the other
+exceptional legislation from which Germany had so heavily suffered excited
+a strong demand for the most solemn guarantees against arbitrary departure
+from settled law in the future. Thus, regardless of the absence of any
+material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly,
+in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour,
+traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of
+personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of
+a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions,
+and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away.
+Four months had passed, and the discussion of the so-called Primary Rights
+was still unfinished, when the Assembly was warned by an outbreak of
+popular violence in Frankfort itself of the necessity of hastening towards
+a constitutional settlement.
+
+[The Armistice of Malmoe, Aug. 26.]
+
+[Outrages at Frankfort, Sept. 18.]
+
+The progress of the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish
+sovereignty had been watched with the greatest interest throughout Germany;
+and in the struggle of these provinces for their independence the rights
+and the honour of the German nation at large were held to be deeply
+involved. As the representative of the Federal authority, King Frederick
+William of Prussia had sent his troops into Holstein, and they arrived
+there in time to prevent the Danish army from following up its first
+successes and crushing the insurgent forces. Taking up the offensive,
+General Wrangel at the head of the Prussian troops succeeded in driving the
+Danes out of Schleswig, and at the beginning of May he crossed the border
+between Schleswig and Jutland and occupied the Danish fortress of
+Fredericia. His advance into purely Danish territory occasioned the
+diplomatic intervention of Russia and Great Britain; and, to the deep
+disappointment of the German nation and its Parliament, the King of Prussia
+ordered his general to retire into Schleswig. The Danes were in the
+meantime blockading the harbours and capturing the merchant-vessels of the
+Germans, as neither Prussia nor the Federal Government possessed a fleet of
+war. For some weeks hostilities were irresolutely continued in Schleswig,
+while negotiations were pursued in foreign capitals and various forms of
+compromise urged by foreign Powers. At length, on the 26th of August, an
+armistice of seven months was agreed upon at Malmoe in Sweden by the
+representatives of Denmark and Prussia, the Court of Copenhagen refusing to
+recognise the German central Government at Frankfort or to admit its envoy
+to the conferences. The terms of this armistice, when announced in Germany,
+excited the greatest indignation, inasmuch as they declared all the acts of
+the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein null and void, removed all
+German troops from the Duchies, and handed over their government during the
+duration of the armistice to a Commission of which half the members were to
+be appointed by the King of Denmark. Scornfully as Denmark had treated the
+Assembly of Frankfort, the terms of the armistice nevertheless required its
+sanction. The question was referred to a committee, which, under the
+influence of the historian Dahlmann, himself formerly an official in
+Holstein, pronounced for the rejection of the treaty. The Assembly, in a
+scene of great excitement, resolved that the execution of the measures
+attendant on the armistice should be suspended. The Ministry in consequence
+resigned, and Dahlmann was called upon to replace it by one under his own
+leadership. He proved unable to do so. Schmerling resumed office, and
+demanded that the Assembly should reverse its vote. Though in severance
+from Prussia the Central Government had no real means of carrying on a war
+with Denmark, the most passionate opposition was made to this demand. The
+armistice was, however, ultimately ratified by a small majority. Defeated
+in the Assembly, the leaders of the extreme Democratic faction allied
+themselves with the populace of Frankfort, which was ready for acts of
+violence. Tumultuous meetings were held; the deputies who had voted for the
+armistice were declared traitors to Germany. Barricades were erected, and
+although the appearance of Prussian troops prevented an assault from being
+made on the Assembly, its members were attacked in the streets, and two of
+them murdered by the mob (Sept. 17th). A Republican insurrection was once
+more attempted in Baden, but it was quelled without difficulty. [444]
+
+[Berlin, April-Sept., 1848.]
+
+The intervention of foreign Courts on behalf of Denmark had given
+ostensible ground to the Prussian Government for not pursuing the war with
+greater resolution; but though the fear of Russia undoubtedly checked King
+Frederick William, this was not the sole, nor perhaps the most powerful
+influence that worked upon him. The cause of Schleswig-Hulstein was, in
+spite of its legal basis, in the main a popular and a revolutionary one,
+and between the King of Prussia and the revolution there was an intense and
+a constantly deepening antagonism. Since the meeting of the National
+Assembly at Berlin on the 22nd of May the capital had been the scene of an
+almost unbroken course of disorder. The Assembly, which was far inferior in
+ability and character to that of Frankfort, soon showed itself unable to
+resist the influence of the populace. On the 8th of June a resolution was
+moved that the combatants in the insurrection of March deserved well of
+their country. Had this motion been carried the King would have dissolved
+the Assembly: it was outvoted, but the mob punished this concession to the
+feelings of the monarch by outrages upon the members of the majority. A
+Civic Guard was enrolled from citizens of the middle class, but it proved
+unable to maintain order, and wholly failed to acquire the political
+importance which was gained by the National Guard of Paris after the
+revolution of 1830. Exasperated by their exclusion from service in the
+Guard, the mob on the 14th of June stormed an arsenal and destroyed the
+trophies of arms which they found there. Though violence reigned in the
+streets the Assembly rejected a proposal for declaring the inviolability of
+its members, and placed itself under the protection of the citizens of
+Berlin. King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders
+of reaction gathered round him. He detested his Constitutional Ministers,
+who, between a petulant king and a suspicious Parliament, were unable to
+effect any useful work and soon found themselves compelled to relinquish
+their office. In Berlin the violence of the working classes, the
+interruption of business, the example of civil war in Paris, inclined men
+of quiet disposition to a return to settled government at any price.
+Measures brought forward by the new Ministry for the abolition of the
+patrimonial jurisdictions, the hunting-rights and other feudal privileges
+of the greater landowners, occasioned the organisation of a league for the
+defence of property, which soon became the focus of powerful conservative
+interests. Above all, the claims of the Archduke John, as Administrator of
+the Empire, to the homage of the army, and the hostile attitude assumed
+towards the army by the Prussian Parliament itself, exasperated the
+military class and encouraged the king to venture on open resistance. A
+tumult having taken place at Schweidnitz in Silesia, in which several
+persons were shot by the soldiery, the Assembly, pending an investigation
+into the circumstances, demanded that the Minister of War should publish an
+order requiring the officers of the army to work with the citizens for the
+realisation of Constitutional Government; and it called upon all officers
+not loyally inclined to a Constitutional system to resign their commissions
+as a matter of honour. Denying the right of the Chamber to act as a
+military executive, the Minister of War refused to publish the order
+required. The vote was repeated, and in the midst of threatening
+demonstrations in the streets the Ministry resigned (Sept. 7th). [445]
+
+[The Prussian army.]
+
+[Count Brandenburg Minister, Nov. 2.]
+
+[Prorogation of the Prussian Assembly, Nov. 9.]
+
+It had been the distinguishing feature of the Prussian revolution that the
+army had never for a moment wavered in its fidelity to the throne. The
+success of the insurrection of March 18th had been due to the paucity of
+troops and the errors of those in command, not to any military disaffection
+such as had paralysed authority in Paris and in the Mediterranean States.
+Each affront offered to the army by the democratic majority in the Assembly
+supplied the King with new weapons; each slight passed upon the royal
+authority deepened the indignation of the officers. The armistice of Malmoe
+brought back to the neighbourhood of the capital a general who was longing
+to crush the party of disorder, and regiments on whom he could rely; but
+though there was now no military reason for delay, it was not until the
+capture of Vienna by Windischgraetz had dealt a fatal blow at democracy in
+Germany that Frederick William determined to have done with his own
+mutinous Parliament and the mobs by which it was controlled. During
+September and October the riots and tumults in the streets of Berlin
+continued. The Assembly, which had rejected the draft of a Constitution
+submitted to it by the Cabinet, debated the clauses of one drawn up by a
+Committee of its own members, abolished nobility, orders and titles, and
+struck out from the style of the sovereign the words that described him as
+King by the Grace of God. When intelligence arrived in Berlin that the
+attack of Windischgraetz upon Vienna had actually begun, popular passion
+redoubled. The Assembly was besieged by an angry crowd, and a resolution in
+favour of the intervention of Prussia was brought forward within the House.
+This was rejected, and it was determined instead to invoke the mediation of
+the Central Government at Frankfort between the Emperor and his subjects.
+But the decision of the Assembly on this and every other point was now
+matter of indifference. Events outstripped its deliberations, and with the
+fall of Vienna its own course was run. On the 2nd of November the King
+dismissed his Ministers and called to office the Count of Brandenburg, a
+natural son of Frederick William II., a soldier in high command, and one of
+the most outspoken representatives of the monarchical spirit of the army.
+The meaning of the appointment was at once understood. A deputation from
+the Assembly conveyed its protest to the King at Potsdam. The King turned
+his back upon them without giving an answer, and on the 9th of November an
+order was issued proroguing the Assembly, and bidding it to meet on the
+27th at Brandenburg, not at Berlin.
+
+[Last days of the Prussian Assembly.]
+
+[Dissolution of the Assembly, Dec. 5.]
+
+[Prussian Constitution granted by edict.]
+
+The order of prorogation, as soon as signed by the King was brought into
+the Assembly by the Ministers, who demanded that it should be obeyed
+immediately and without discussion. The President allowing a debate to
+commence, the Ministers and seventy-eight Conservative deputies left the
+Hall. The remaining deputies, two hundred and eighty in number, then passed
+a resolution declaring that they would not meet at Brandenburg; that the
+King had no power to remove, to prorogue, or to dissolve the Assembly
+without its own consent; and that the Ministers were unfit to hold office.
+This challenge was answered by a proclamation of the Ministers declaring
+the further meeting of the deputies illegal, and calling upon the Civic
+Guard not to recognise them as a Parliament. On the following day General
+Wrangel and his troops entered Berlin and surrounded the Assembly Hall. In
+reply to the protests of the President, Wrangel answered that the
+Parliament had been prorogued and must disappear. The members peaceably
+left the Hall, but reassembled at another spot that they had selected in
+anticipation of expulsion; and for some days they were pursued by the
+military from one place of meeting to another. On the 15th of November they
+passed a resolution declaring the expenditure of state funds and the
+raising of taxes by the Government to be illegal so long as the Assembly
+should not be permitted to continue its deliberations. The Ministry on its
+part showed that it was determined not to brook resistance. The Civic Guard
+was dissolved and ordered to surrender its arms. It did so without striking
+a blow, and vanished from the scene, a memorable illustration of the
+political nullity of the middle class in Berlin as compared with that of
+Paris. The state of siege was proclaimed, the freedom of the Press and the
+right of public meeting were suspended. On the 27th of November a portion
+of the Assembly appeared, according to the King's order, at Brandenburg,
+but the numbers present were not sufficient for the transaction of
+business. The presence of the majority, however, was not required, for the
+King had determined to give no further legal opportunities to the men who
+had defied him. Treating the vote of November 15th as an act of rebellion
+on the part of those concerned in it, the King dissolved the Assembly
+(December 5th), and conferred upon Prussia a Constitution drawn up by his
+own advisers, with the promise that this Constitution should be subject to
+revision by the future representative body. Though the dissolution of the
+Assembly occasioned tumults in Breslau and Cologne it was not actively
+resented by the nation at large. The violence of the fallen body during its
+last weeks of existence had exposed it to general discredit; its vote of
+the 15th of November had been formally condemned by the Parliament of
+Frankfort; and the liberal character of the new Constitution, which agreed
+in the main with the draft-Constitution produced by the Committee of the
+Assembly, disposed moderate men to the belief that in the conflict between
+the King and the popular representatives the fault had not been on the side
+of the sovereign.
+
+[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Oct.-Dec.]
+
+In the meantime the Parliament of Frankfort, warned against longer delay by
+the disturbances of September 17th, had addressed itself in earnest to the
+settlement of the Federal Constitution of Germany. Above a host of minor
+difficulties two great problems confronted it at the outset. The first was
+the relation of the Austrian Empire, with its partly German and partly
+foreign territory, to the German national State; the other was the nature
+of the headship to be established. As it was clear that the Austrian
+Government could not apply the public law of Germany to its Slavic and
+Hungarian provinces, it was enacted in the second article of the Frankfort
+Constitution that where a German and a non-German territory had the same
+sovereign, the relation between these countries must be one of purely
+personal union under the sovereign, no part of Germany being incorporated
+into a single State with any non-German land. At the time when this article
+was drafted the disintegration of Austria seemed more probable than the
+re-establishment of its unity; no sooner, however, had Prince Schwarzenberg
+been brought into power by the subjugation of Vienna, than he made it plain
+that the government of Austria was to be centralised as it had never been
+before. In the first public declaration of his policy he announced that
+Austria would maintain its unity and permit no exterior influence to modify
+its internal organisation; that the settlement of the relations between
+Austria and Germany could only be effected after each had gained some new
+and abiding political form; and that in the meantime Austria would continue
+to fulfil its duties as a confederate. [446] The interpretation put upon
+this statement at Frankfort was that Austria, in the interest of its own
+unity, preferred not to enter the German body, but looked forward to the
+establishment of some intimate alliance with it at a future time. As the
+Court of Vienna had evidently determined not to apply to itself the second
+article of the Constitution, and an antagonism between German and Austrian
+policy came within view, Schmerling, as an Austrian subject, was induced to
+resign his office, and was succeeded in it by Gagern, hitherto President of
+the Assembly (Dec. 16th). [447]
+
+[The Frankfort Parliament and Austria, Dec., Jan.]
+
+In announcing the policy of the new Ministry, Gagern assumed the exclusion
+of Austria from the German Federation. Claiming for the Assembly, as the
+representative of the German nation, sovereign power in drawing up the
+Constitution, he denied that the Constitution could be made an object of
+negotiation with Austria. As Austria refused to fulfil the conditions of
+the second article, it must remain outside the Federation; the Ministry
+desired, however, to frame some close and special connection between
+Austria and Germany, and asked for authority to negotiate with the Court of
+Vienna for this purpose. Gagern's declaration of the exclusion of Austria
+occasioned a vehement and natural outburst of feeling among the Austrian
+deputies, and was met by their almost unanimous protest. Some days later
+there arrived a note from Schwarzenberg which struck at the root of all
+that had been done and all that was claimed by the Assembly. Repudiating
+the interpretation that had been placed upon his words, Schwarzenberg
+declared that the affairs of Germany could only be settled by an
+understanding between the Assembly and the Courts, and by an arrangement
+with Austria, which was the recognised chief of the Governments and
+intended to remain so in the new Federation. The question of the inclusion
+or exclusion of Austria now threw into the shade all the earlier
+differences between parties in the Assembly. A new dividing-line was drawn.
+On the one side appeared a group composed of the Austrian representatives,
+of Ultramontanes who feared a Protestant ascendency if Austria should be
+excluded, and of deputies from some of the smaller States who had begun to
+dread Prussian domination. On the other side was the great body of
+representatives who set before all the cause of German national union, who
+saw that this union would never be effected in any real form if it was made
+to depend upon negotiations with the Austrian Court, and who held, with the
+Minister, that to create a true German national State without the Austrian
+provinces was better than to accept a phantom of complete union in which
+the German people should be nothing and the Cabinet of Vienna everything.
+Though coalitions and intrigues of parties obscured the political prospect
+from day to day, the principles of Gagern were affirmed by a majority of
+the Assembly, and authority to negotiate some new form of connection with
+Austria, as a power outside the Federation, was granted to the Ministry.
+
+[The Federal Headship.]
+
+[King Frederick William IV. elected Emperor, March 28.]
+
+The second great difficulty of the Assembly was the settlement of the
+Federal headship. Some were for a hereditary Emperor, some for a President
+or Board, some for a monarchy alternating between the Houses of Prussia and
+Austria, some for a sovereign elected for life or for a fixed period. The
+first decision arrived at was that the head should be one of the reigning
+princes of Germany, and that he should bear the title of Emperor. Against
+the hereditary principle there was a strong and, at first, a successful
+opposition. Reserving for future discussion other questions relating to the
+imperial office, the Assembly passed the Constitution through the first
+reading on February 3rd, 1849. It was now communicated to all the German
+Governments, with the request that they would offer their opinions upon it.
+The four minor kingdoms--Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and Wuertemberg--with one
+consent declared against any Federation in which Austria should not be
+included; the Cabinet of Vienna protested against the subordination of the
+Emperor of Austria to a central power vested in any other German prince,
+and proposed that the entire Austrian Empire, with its foreign as well as
+its German elements, should enter the Federation. This note was enough to
+prove that Austria was in direct conflict with the scheme of national union
+which the Assembly had accepted; but the full peril of the situation was
+not perceived till on the 9th of March Schwarzenberg published the
+Constitution of Olmuetz, which extinguished all separate rights throughout
+the Austrian Empire, and confounded in one mass, as subjects of the Emperor
+Francis Joseph, Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Italians. The import of the
+Austrian demand now stood out clear and undisguised. Austria claimed to
+range itself with a foreign population of thirty millions within the German
+Federation; in other words, to reduce the German national union to a
+partnership with all the nationalities of Central Europe, to throw the
+weight of an overwhelming influence against any system of free
+representative government, and to expose Germany to war where no interests
+but those of the Pole or the Magyar might be at stake. So deep was the
+impression made at Frankfort by the fall of the Kremsier Parliament and the
+publication of Schwarzenberg's unitary edict, that one of the most eminent
+of the politicians who had hitherto opposed the exclusion of Austria--the
+Baden deputy Welcker--declared that further persistence in this course
+would be treason to Germany. Ranging himself with the Ministry, he
+proposed that the entire German Constitution, completed by a hereditary
+chieftainship, should be passed at a single vote on the second reading, and
+that the dignity of Emperor should be at once offered to the King of
+Prussia. Though the Assembly declined to pass the Constitution by a single
+vote, it agreed to vote upon clause by clause without discussion. The
+hereditary principle was affirmed by the narrow majority of four in a House
+of above five hundred. The second reading of the Constitution was completed
+on the 27th of March, and on the following day the election of the
+sovereign took place. Two hundred and ninety votes were given for the King
+of Prussia. Two hundred and forty-eight members, hostile to the hereditary
+principle or to the prince selected, abstained from voting. [448]
+
+[Frederick William IV.]
+
+Frederick William had from early years cherished the hope of seeing some
+closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt
+in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight.
+He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed
+to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his
+own, that by setting Prussia at the head of the constitutional movement of
+the epoch he might at any time from the commencement of his reign have
+rallied all Germany round it. Thus the revolution of 1848 burst upon him,
+and he was not the man to act or to lead in time of revolution. Even in
+1848, had he given promptly and with dignity what, after blood had been
+shed in his streets, he had to give with humiliation, he would probably
+have been acclaimed Emperor on the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort,
+and have been accepted by the universal voice of Germany. But the odium
+cast upon him by the struggle of March 18th was so great that in the
+election of a temporary Administrator of the Empire in June no single
+member at Frankfort gave him a vote. Time was needed to repair his credit,
+and while time passed Austria rose from its ruins. In the spring of 1849
+Frederick William could not have assumed the office of Emperor of Germany
+without risk of a war with Austria, even had he been willing to accept this
+office on the nomination of the Frankfort Parliament. But to accept the
+Imperial Crown from a popular Assembly was repugnant to his deepest
+convictions. Clear as the Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from
+the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had
+nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would,
+in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the
+princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown
+to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right
+would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation
+between the princes and the popular Assembly might have been endured. That
+Frederick William still aspired to German leadership in one form or another
+no one doubted; his disposition to seek or to reject an accommodation with
+the Frankfort Parliament varied with the influences which surrounded him.
+The Ministry led by the Count of Brandenburg, though anti-popular in its
+domestic measures, was desirous of arriving at some understanding with
+Gagern and the friends of German union. Shortly before the first reading of
+the Constitution at Frankfort, a note had been drafted in the Berlin
+Cabinet admitting under certain provisions the exclusion of Austria from
+the Federation, and proposing, not that the Assembly should admit the right
+of each Government to accept or reject the Constitution, but that it should
+meet in a fair spirit such recommendations as all the Governments together
+should by a joint act submit to it. This note, which would have rendered an
+agreement between the Prussian Court and the Assembly possible, Frederick
+William at first refused to sign. He was induced to do so (Jan. 23rd) by
+his confidant Bunsen, who himself was authorised to proceed to Frankfort.
+During Bunsen's absence despatches arrived at Berlin from Schwarzenberg,
+who, in his usual resolute way, proposed to dissolve the Frankfort
+Assembly, and to divide Germany between Austria, Prussia, and the four
+secondary kingdoms. Bunsen on his return found his work undone; the King
+recoiled under Austrian pressure from the position which he had taken up,
+and sent a note to Frankfort on the 16th of February, which described
+Austria as a necessary part of Germany and claimed for each separate
+Government the right to accept or reject the Constitution as it might think
+fit. Thus the acceptance of the headship by Frederick William under any
+conditions compatible with the claims of the Assembly was known to be
+doubtful when, on the 28th of March, the majority resolved to offer him the
+Imperial Crown. The disposition of the Ministry at Berlin was indeed still
+favourable to an accommodation; and when, on the 2nd of April, the members
+of the Assembly who were charged to lay its offer before Frederick William
+arrived at Berlin, they were received with such cordiality by Brandenburg
+that it was believed the King's consent had been won.
+
+[Frederick William IV. refuses the Crown, April 3.]
+
+The reply of the King to the deputation on the following day rudely
+dispelled these hopes. He declared that before he could accept the Crown
+not only must he be summoned to it by the Princes of Germany, but the
+consent of all the Governments must be given to the Constitution. In other
+words, he required that the Assembly should surrender its claims to
+legislative supremacy, and abandon all those parts of the Federal
+Constitution of which any of the existing Governments disapproved. As it
+was certain that Austria and the four minor kingdoms would never agree to
+any Federal union worthy of the name, and that the Assembly could not now,
+without renouncing its past, admit that the right of framing the
+Constitution lay outside itself, the answer of the King was understood to
+amount to a refusal. The deputation left Berlin in the sorrowful conviction
+that their mission had failed; and a note which was soon afterwards
+received at Frankfort from the King showed that this belief was
+correct. [449]
+
+[The Frankfort Constitution rejected by the Governments.]
+
+The answer of King Frederick William proved indeed much more than that he
+had refused the Crown of Germany; it proved that he would not accept the
+Constitution which the Assembly had enacted. The full import of this
+determination, and the serious nature of the crisis now impending over
+Germany, were at once understood. Though twenty-eight Governments
+successively accepted the Constitution, these were without exception petty
+States, and their united forces would scarcely have been a match for one of
+its more powerful enemies. On the 5th of April the Austrian Cabinet
+declared the Assembly to have been guilty of illegality in publishing the
+Constitution, and called upon all Austrian deputies to quit Frankfort. The
+Prussian Lower Chamber, elected under the King's recent edict, having
+protested against the state of siege in Berlin, and having passed a
+resolution in favour of the Frankfort Constitution, was forthwith
+dissolved. Within the Frankfort Parliament the resistance of Governments
+excited a patriotic resentment and caused for the moment a union of
+parties. Resolutions were passed declaring that the Assembly would adhere
+to the Constitution. A Committee was charged with the ascertainment of
+measures to be adopted for enforcing its recognition; and a note was
+addressed to all the hostile Governments demanding that they should abstain
+from proroguing or dissolving the representative bodies within their
+dominions with the view of suppressing the free utterance of opinions in
+favour of the Constitution.
+
+[End of the German National Assembly, June, 1849.]
+
+On the ground of this last demand the Prussian official Press now began to
+denounce the Assembly of Frankfort as a revolutionary body. The situation
+of affairs daily became worse. It was in vain that the Assembly appealed to
+the Governments, the legislative Chambers, the local bodies, the whole
+people, to bring the Constitution into effect. The moral force on which it
+had determined to rely proved powerless, and in despair of conquering the
+Governments by public opinion the more violent members of the democratic
+party determined to appeal to insurrection. On the 4th of May a popular
+rising began at Dresden, where the King, under the influence of Prussia,
+had dismissed those of his Ministers who urged him to accept the
+Constitution, and had dissolved his Parliament. The outbreak drove the King
+from his capital; but only five days had passed when a Prussian army-corps
+entered the city and crushed the rebellion. In this interval, short as it
+was, there had been indications that the real leaders of the insurrection
+were fighting not for the Frankfort Constitution but for a Republic, and
+that in the event of their victory a revolutionary Government, connected
+with French and Polish schemes of subversion, would come into power. In
+Baden this was made still clearer. There the Government of the Grand Duke
+had actually accepted the Frankfort Constitution, and had ordered elections
+to be held for the Federal legislative body by which the Assembly was to be
+succeeded. Insurrection nevertheless broke out. The Republic was openly
+proclaimed; the troops joined the insurgents; and a Provisional Government
+allied itself with a similar body that had sprung into being with the help
+of French and Polish refugees in the neighbouring Palatinate. Conscious
+that these insurrections must utterly ruin its own cause, the Frankfort
+Assembly on the suggestion of Gagern called upon the Archduke John to
+suppress them by force of arms, and at the same time to protect the free
+expression of opinion on behalf of the Constitution where threatened by
+Governments. John, who had long clung to his office only to further the
+ends of Austria, refused to do so, and Gagern in consequence resigned. With
+his fall ended the real political existence of the Assembly. In reply to a
+resolution which it passed on the 10th of May, calling upon John to employ
+all the forces of Germany in defence of the Constitution, the Archduke
+placed a mock-Ministry in office. The Prussian Government, declaring the
+vote of the 10th of May to be a summons to civil war, ordered all Prussian
+deputies to withdraw from the Assembly, and a few days later its example
+was imitated by Saxony and Hanover. On the 20th of May sixty-five of the
+best known of the members, including Arndt and Dahlmann, placed on record
+their belief that in the actual situation the relinquishment of the task of
+the Assembly was the least of evils, and declared their work at Frankfort
+ended. Other groups followed them till there remained only the party of the
+extreme Left, which had hitherto been a weak minority, and which in no
+sense represented the real opinions of Germany. This Rump-Parliament,
+troubling itself little with John and his Ministers, determined to withdraw
+from Frankfort, where it dreaded the appearance of Prussian troops, into
+Wuertemberg, where it might expect some support from the revolutionary
+Governments of Baden and the Palatinate. On the 6th of June a hundred and
+five deputies assembled at Stuttgart. There they proceeded to appoint a
+governing Committee for all Germany, calling upon the King of Wuertemberg to
+supply them with seven thousand soldiers, and sending out emissaries to
+stir up the neighbouring population. But the world disregarded them. The
+Government at Stuttgart, after an interval of patience, bade them begone;
+and on the 18th of June their hall was closed against them and they were
+dispersed by troops, no one raising a hand on their behalf. The overthrow
+of the insurgents who had taken up arms in Baden and the Palatinate was not
+so easy a matter. A campaign of six weeks was necessary, in which the army
+of Prussia, led by the Prince of Prussia, sustained some reverses, before
+the Republican levies were crushed, and with the fall of Rastadt the
+insurrection was brought to a close. [450]
+
+[The Baden insurrection suppressed, July, 1849.]
+
+[Prussia attempts to form a separate union.]
+
+The end of the German Parliament, on which the nation had set such high
+hopes and to which it had sent so much of what was noblest in itself,
+contrasted lamentably with the splendour of its opening. Whether a better
+result would have been attained if, instead of claiming supreme authority
+in the construction of Federal union, the Assembly had from the first
+sought the co-operation of the Governments, must remain matter of
+conjecture. Austria would under all circumstances have been the great
+hindrance in the way; and after the failure of the efforts made at
+Frankfort to establish the general union of Germany, Austria was able
+completely to frustrate the attempts which were now made at Berlin to
+establish partial union upon a different basis. In notifying to the
+Assembly his refusal of the Imperial Crown, King Frederick William had
+stated that he was resolved to place himself at the head of a Federation to
+be formed by States voluntarily uniting with him under terms to be
+subsequently arranged; and in a circular note addressed to the German
+Governments he invited such as were disposed to take counsel with Prussia
+to unite in Conference at Berlin. The opening of the Conference was fixed
+for the 17th of May. Two days before this the King issued a proclamation to
+the Prussian people announcing that in spite of the failure of the Assembly
+of Frankfort a German union was still to be formed. When the Conference
+opened at Berlin, no envoys appeared but those of Austria, Saxony, Hanover,
+and Bavaria. The Austrian representative withdrew at the end of the first
+sitting, the Bavarian rather later, leaving Prussia to lay such foundations
+as it could for German unity with the temporising support of Saxony and
+Hanover. A confederation was formed, known as the League of the Three
+Kingdoms. An undertaking was given that a Federal Parliament should be
+summoned, and that a Constitution should be made jointly by this Parliament
+and the Governments (May 26th). On the 11th of June the draft of a Federal
+Constitution was published. As the King of Prussia was apparently acting in
+good faith, and the draft-Constitution in spite of some defects seemed to
+afford a fair basis for union, the question now arose among the leaders of
+the German national movement whether the twenty-eight States which had
+accepted the ill-fated Constitution of Frankfort ought or ought not to
+enter the new Prussian League. A meeting of a hundred and fifty ex-members
+of the Frankfort Parliament was held at Gotha; and although great
+indignation was expressed by the more democratic faction, it was determined
+that the scheme now put forward by Prussia deserved a fair trial. The whole
+of the twenty-eight minor States consequently entered the League, which
+thus embraced all Germany with the exception of Austria, Bavaria and
+Wuertemberg. But the Courts of Saxony and Hanover had from the first been
+acting with duplicity. The military influence of Prussia, and the fear
+which they still felt of their own subjects, had prevented them from
+offering open resistance to the renewed work of Federation; but they had
+throughout been in communication with Austria, and were only waiting for
+the moment when the complete restoration of Austria's military strength
+should enable them to display their true colours. During the spring of
+1849, while the Conferences at Berlin were being held, Austria was still
+occupied with Hungary and Venice. The final overthrow of these enemies
+enabled it to cast its entire weight upon Germany. The result was seen in
+the action of Hanover and Saxony, which now formally seceded from the
+Federation. Prussia thus remained at the end of 1849 with no support but
+that of the twenty-eight minor States. Against it, in open or in tacit
+antagonism to the establishment of German unity in any effective form, the
+four secondary Kingdoms stood ranged by the side of Austria.
+
+[Prussia in 1849.]
+
+[The Union Parliament at Erfurt, March 1850.]
+
+It was not until the 20th of March, 1850, that the Federal Parliament,
+which had been promised ten months before on the incorporation of the new
+League, assembled at Erfurt. In the meantime reaction had gone far in many
+a German State. In Prussia, after the dissolution of the Lower Chamber on
+April 27th, 1849, the King had abrogated the electoral provisions of the
+Constitution so recently granted by himself, and had substituted for them a
+system based on the representation of classes. Treating this act as a
+breach of faith, the Democratic party had abstained from voting at the
+elections, with the result that in the Berlin Parliament of 1850
+Conservatives, Reactionists, and officials formed the great majority. The
+revision of the Prussian Constitution, promised at first as a concession to
+Liberalism, was conducted in the opposite sense. The King demanded the
+strengthening of monarchical power; the Feudalists, going far beyond him,
+attacked the municipal and social reforms of the last two years, and sought
+to lead Prussia back to the system of its mediaeval estates. It was in the
+midst of this victory of reaction in Prussia that the Federal Parliament at
+Erfurt began its sittings. Though the moderate Liberals, led by Gagern and
+other tried politicians of Frankfurt, held the majority in both Houses, a
+strong Absolutist party from Prussia confronted them, and it soon became
+clear that the Prussian Government was ready to play into the hands of this
+party. The draft of the Federal Constitution, which had been made at
+Berlin, was presented, according to the undertaking of May 28th, 1849, to
+the Erfurt Assembly. Aware of the gathering strength of the reaction and of
+the danger of delay, the Liberal majority declared itself ready to pass the
+draft into law without a single alteration. The reactionary minority
+demanded that a revision should take place; and, to the scandal of all who
+understood the methods or the spirit of Parliamentary rule, the Prussian
+Ministers united with the party which demanded alterations in the project
+which they themselves had brought forward. A compromise was ultimately
+effected; but the action of the Court of Prussia and the conduct of its
+Ministers throughout the Erfurt debates struck with deep despondency those
+who had believed that Frederick William might still effect the work in
+which the Assembly of Frankfort had failed. The trust in the King's
+sincerity or consistence of purpose sank low. The sympathy of the national
+Liberal party throughout Germany was to a great extent alienated from
+Prussia; while, if any expectation existed at Berlin that the adoption of a
+reactionary policy would disarm the hostility of the Austrian Government to
+the new League, this hope was wholly vain and baseless. [451]
+
+[Action of Austria.]
+
+Austria had from the first protested against the attempt of the King of
+Prussia to establish any new form of union in Germany, and had declared
+that it would recognise none of the conclusions of the Federal Parliament
+of Erfurt. According to the theory now advanced by the Cabinet of Vienna
+the ancient Federal Constitution of Germany was still in force. All that
+had happened since March, 1848, was so much wanton and futile
+mischief-making. The disturbance of order had at length come to an end, and
+with the exit of the rioters the legitimate powers re-entered into their
+rights. Accordingly, there could be no question of the establishment of new
+Leagues. The old relation of all the German States to one another under the
+ascendency of Austria remained in full strength; the Diet of Frankfort,
+which had merely suspended its functions and by no means suffered
+extinction, was still the legitimate central authority. That some
+modifications might be necessary in the ancient Constitution was the most
+that Austria was willing to admit. This, however, was an affair not for the
+German people but for its rulers, and Austria accordingly invited all the
+Governments to a Congress at Frankfort where the changes necessary might be
+discussed. In reply to this summons, Prussia strenuously denied that the
+old Federal Constitution was still in existence. The princes of the
+numerous petty States which were included in the new Union assembled at
+Berlin round Frederick William, and resolved that they would not attend the
+Conference at Frankfort except under reservations and conditions which
+Austria would not admit. Arguments and counter-arguments were exchanged;
+but the controversy between an old and a new Germany was one to be decided
+by force of will or force of arms, not by political logic. The struggle was
+to be one between Prussia and Austria, and the Austrian Cabinet had well
+gauged the temper of its opponent. A direct summons to submission would
+have roused all the King's pride, and have been answered by war. Before
+demanding from Frederick William the dissolution of the Union which he had
+founded, Schwarzenberg determined to fix upon a quarrel in which the King
+should be perplexed or alarmed at the results of his own policy. The
+dominant conviction in the mind of Frederick William was that of the
+sanctity of monarchical rule. If the League of Berlin could be committed to
+some enterprise hostile to monarchical power, and could be charged with an
+alliance with rebellion, Frederick William would probably falter in his
+resolutions, and a resort to arms, for which, however, Austria was well
+prepared, would become unnecessary. [452]
+
+[Hesse-Cassel.]
+
+[The Diet of Frankfort restored, Sept., 1850.]
+
+[Prussia and Austria.]
+
+[The Warsaw meeting, Oct. 29, 1850.]
+
+[Manteuffel at Olmuetz, Nov. 29.]
+
+Among the States whose Governments had been forced by public opinion to
+join the new Federation was the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The Elector
+was, like his predecessors, a thorough despot at heart, and chafed under
+the restrictions which a constitutional system imposed upon his rule.
+Acting under Austrian instigation, he dismissed his Ministers in the spring
+of 1850, and placed in office one Hassenpflug, a type of the worst and most
+violent class of petty tyrants produced by the officialism of the minor
+German States. Hassenpflug immediately quarrelled with the Estates at
+Cassel, and twice dissolved them, after which he proceeded to levy taxes by
+force. The law-courts declared his acts illegal; the officers of the army,
+when called on for assistance, began to resign. The conflict between the
+Minister and the Hessian population was in full progress when, at the
+beginning of September, Austria with its vassal Governments proclaimed the
+re-establishment of the Diet of Frankfort. Though Prussia and most of the
+twenty-eight States confederate with it treated this announcement as null
+and void, the Diet, constituted by the envoys of Austria, the four minor
+Kingdoms, and a few seceders from the Prussian Union, commenced its
+sittings. To the Diet the Elector of Hesse forthwith appealed for help
+against his subjects, and the decision was given that the refusal of the
+Hessian Estates to grant the taxes was an offence justifying the
+intervention of the central power. Fortified by this judgment, Hassenpflug
+now ordered that every person offering resistance to the Government should
+be tried by court-martial. He was baffled by the resignation of the entire
+body of officers in the Hessian army; and as this completed the
+discomfiture of the Elector, the armed intervention of Austria, as
+identified with the Diet of Frankfort, now became a certainty. But to the
+protection of the people of Hesse in their constitutional rights Prussia,
+as chief of the League which Hesse had joined, stood morally pledged. It
+remained for the King to decide between armed resistance to Austria or the
+humiliation of a total abandonment of Prussia's claim to leadership in any
+German union. Conflicting influences swayed the King in one direction and
+another. The friends of Austria and of absolutism declared that the
+employment of the Prussian army on behalf of the Hessians would make the
+King an accomplice of revolution: the bolder and more patriotic spirits
+protested against the abdication of Prussia's just claims and the evasion
+of its responsibilities towards Germany. For a moment the party of action,
+led by the Prince of Prussia, gained the ascendant. General Radowitz, the
+projector of the Union, was called to the Foreign Ministry, and Prussian
+troops entered Hesse. Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war.
+Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling
+to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came
+to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of
+the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him.
+The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin
+but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been
+in the Hungarian campaign. He resented the action of Prussia in
+Schleswig-Holstein, and was offended that King Frederick William had not
+presented himself at Warsaw in person. He declared in favour of all
+Austria's demands, and treated Count Brandenburg with such indignity that
+the Count, a high-spirited patriot, never recovered from its effect. He
+returned to Berlin only to give in his report and die. Manteuffel,
+Minister of the Interior, assured the King that the Prussian army was so
+weak in numbers and so defective in organisation that, if it took the
+field against Austria and its allies, it would meet with certain ruin.
+Bavarian troops, representing the Diet of Frankfort, now entered Hesse at
+Austria's bidding, and stood face to face with the Prussians. The moment
+had come when the decision must be made between peace and war. At a
+Council held at Berlin on November and the peace-party carried the King
+with them. Radowitz gave up office; Manteuffel, the Minister of
+repression within and of submission without, was set at the head of the
+Government. The meaning of his appointment was well understood, and with
+each new proof of the weakness of the King the tone of the Court of
+Austria became more imperious. On the 9th of November Schwarzenberg
+categorically demanded the dissolution of the Prussian Union, the
+recognition of the Federal Diet, and the evacuation of Hesse by the
+Prussian troops. The first point was at once conceded, and in hollow,
+equivocating language Manteuffel made the fact known to the members of
+the Confederacy. The other conditions not being so speedily fulfilled,
+Schwarzenberg set Austrian regiments in motion, and demanded the
+withdrawal of the Prussian troops from Hesse within twenty-four hours.
+Manteuffel begged the Austrian Minister for an interview, and, without
+waiting for an answer, set out for Olmuetz. His instructions bade him to
+press for certain concessions; none of these did he obtain, and he made
+the necessary submission without them. On the 29th of November a convention
+was signed at Olmuetz, in which Prussia recognised the German Federal
+Constitution of 1815 as still existing, undertook to withdraw all its
+troops from Hesse with the exception of a single battalion, and consented
+to the settlement of affairs both in Hesse and in Schleswig-Holstein by the
+Federal Diet. One point alone in the scheme of the Austrian statesman was
+wanting among the fruits of his victory at Olmuetz and of the negotiations
+at Dresden by which this was followed. Schwarzenberg had intended that the
+entire Austrian Empire should enter the German Federation; and if he had
+had to reckon with no opponents but the beaten and humbled Prussia, he
+would have effected his design. But the prospect of a central European
+Power, with a population of seventy millions, controlled as this would
+virtually be by the Cabinet of Vienna, alarmed other nations. England
+declared that such a combination would undo the balance of power in Europe
+and menace the independence of Germany; France protested in more
+threatening terms; and the project fell to the ground, to be remembered
+only as the boldest imagination of a statesman for whom fortune, veiling
+the Nemesis in store, seemed to set no limit to its favours.
+
+[Schleswig-Holstein.]
+
+[The German National Fleet sold by auction, June, 1852.]
+
+The cause of Schleswig-Holstein, so intimately bound up with the efforts of
+the Germans towards national union, sank with the failure of these efforts;
+and in the final humiliation of Prussia it received what might well seem
+its death-blow. The armistice of Malmoe, which was sanctioned by the
+Assembly of Frankfort in the autumn of 1848, lasted until March 26th, 1849.
+War was then recommenced by Prussia, and the lines of Dueppel were stormed
+by its troops, while the volunteer forces of Schleswig-Holstein
+unsuccessfully laid siege to Fredericia. Hostilities had continued for
+three months, when a second armistice, to last for a year, and
+Preliminaries of Peace, were agreed upon. At the conclusion of this
+armistice, in July, 1850, Prussia, in the name of Germany, made peace with
+Denmark. The inhabitants of the Duchies in consequence continued the war
+for themselves, and though defeated with great loss at Idstedt on the 24th
+of July, they remained unconquered at the end of the year. This was the
+situation of affairs when Prussia, by the Treaty of Olmuetz, agreed that the
+restored Federal Diet should take upon itself the restoration of order in
+Schleswig-Holstein, and that the troops of Prussia should unite with those
+of Austria to enforce its decrees. To the Cabinet of Vienna, the foe in
+equal measure of German national union and of every democratic cause, the
+Schleswig-Holsteiners were simply rebels in insurrection against their
+Sovereign. They were required by the Diet, under Austrian dictation, to lay
+down their arms; and commissioners from Austria and Prussia entered the
+Duchies to compel them to do so. Against Denmark, Austria, and Prussia
+together, it was impossible for Schleswig-Holstein to prolong its
+resistance. The army was dissolved, and the Duchies were handed over to the
+King of Denmark, to return to the legal status which was defined in the
+Treaties of Peace. This was the nominal condition of the transfer; but the
+Danish Government treated Schleswig as part of its national territory, and
+in the northern part of the Duchy the process of substituting Danish for
+German nationality was actively pursued. The policy of foreign Courts,
+little interested in the wish of the inhabitants, had from the beginning of
+the struggle of the Duchies against Denmark favoured the maintenance and
+consolidation of the Danish Kingdom. The claims of the Duke of
+Augustenburg, as next heir to the Duchies in the male line, were not
+considered worth the risk of a new war; and by a protocol signed at London
+on the 2nd of August, 1850, the Powers, with the exception of Prussia,
+declared themselves in favour of a single rule of succession in all parts
+of the Danish State. By a Treaty of the 8th of May, 1852, to which Prussia
+gave its assent, the pretensions of all other claimants to the disputed
+succession were set aside, and Prince Christian, of the House of
+Gluecksburg, was declared heir to the throne, the rights of the German
+Federation as established by the Treaties of 1815 being reserved. In spite
+of this reservation of Federal rights, and of the stipulations in favour of
+Schleswig and Holstein made in the earlier agreements, the Duchies appeared
+to be now practically united with the Danish State. Prussia, for a moment
+their champion, had joined with Austria in coercing their army, in
+dissolving their Government, in annulling the legislation by which the
+Parliament of Frankfort had made them participators in public rights
+thenceforward to be the inheritance of all Germans. A page in the national
+history was obliterated; Prussia had turned its back on its own
+professions; there remained but one relic from the time when the whole
+German people seemed so ardent for the emancipation of its brethren beyond
+the frontier. The national fleet, created by the Assembly of Frankfort for
+the prosecution of the struggle with Denmark, still lay at the mouth of the
+Elbe. But the same power which had determined that Germany was not to be a
+nation had also determined that it could have no national maritime
+interests. After all that had passed, authority had little call to be nice
+about appearances; and the national fleet was sold by auction, in
+accordance with a decree of the restored Diet of Frankfort, in the summer
+of 1852. [453]
+
+[Germany after 1849.]
+
+It was with deep disappointment and humiliation that the Liberals of
+Germany, and all in whom the hatred of democratic change had not
+overpowered the love of country, witnessed the issue of the movement of
+1848. In so far as that movement was one directed towards national union it
+had totally failed, and the state of things that had existed before 1848
+was restored without change. As a movement of constitutional and social
+reform, it had not been so entirely vain; nor in this respect can it be
+said that Germany after the year 1848 returned altogether to what it was
+before it. Many of the leading figures of the earlier time re-appeared
+indeed with more or less of lustre upon the stage. Metternich though
+excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity
+of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr
+who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty
+lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with
+proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years
+before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found
+that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being.
+It was not sought by the re-established Governments to undo at one stroke
+the whole of the political, the social, the agrarian legislation of the
+preceding time, as in some other periods of reaction. The nearest approach
+that was made to this was in a decree of the Diet annulling the Declaration
+of Rights drawn up by the Frankfort Assembly, and requiring the Governments
+to bring into conformity with the Federal Constitution all laws and
+institutions made since the beginning of 1848. Parliamentary government was
+thereby enfeebled, but not necessarily extinguished. Governments narrowed
+the franchise, curtailed the functions of representative assemblies, filled
+these with their creatures, coerced voters at elections; but, except in
+Austria, there was no open abandonment of constitutional forms. In some
+States, as in Saxony under the reactionary rule of Count Beust, the system
+of national representation established in 1848 was abolished and the
+earlier Estates were revived; in Prussia the two Houses of Parliament
+continued in existence, but in such dependence upon the royal authority,
+and under such strong pressure of an aristocratic and official reaction,
+that, after struggling for some years in the Lower House, the Liberal
+leaders at length withdrew in despair. The character which Government now
+assumed in Prussia was indeed far more typical of the condition of Germany
+at large than was the bold and uncompromising despotism of Prince
+Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of
+reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his
+rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to
+those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was
+a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a
+school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmuetz
+of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few
+nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This
+surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been
+necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to
+lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his
+policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy
+process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an
+oppression which was everywhere felt and yet was hard to define. Its best
+elements were those which suffered the most: its highest intellectual and
+political aims were those which most excited the suspicion of the
+Government. Its King had lost whatever was stimulating or elevated in his
+illusions. From him no second alliance with Liberalism, no further effort
+on behalf of German unity, was to be expected: the hope for Germany and for
+Prussia, if hope there was, lay in a future reign.
+
+[Austria after 1851.]
+
+[Austrian Concordat, Sept. 18, 1855.]
+
+The powerlessness of Prussia was the measure of Austrian influence and
+prestige. The contrast presented by Austria in 1848 and Austria in 1851 was
+indeed one that might well arrest political observers. Its recovery had no
+doubt been effected partly by foreign aid, and in the struggle with the
+Magyars a dangerous obligation had been incurred towards Russia; but
+scarred and riven as the fabric was within, it was complete and imposing
+without. Not one of the enemies who in 1848 had risen against the Court of
+Vienna now remained standing. In Italy, Austria had won back what had
+appeared to be hopelessly lost; in Germany it had more than vindicated its
+old claims. It had thrown its rival to the ground, and the full measure of
+its ambition was perhaps even yet not satisfied. "First to humiliate
+Prussia, then to destroy it," was the expression in which Schwarzenberg
+summed up his German policy. Whether, with his undoubted firmness and
+daring, the Minister possessed the intellectual qualities and the
+experience necessary for the successful administration of an Empire built
+up, as Austria now was, on violence and on the suppression of every
+national force, was doubted even by his admirers. The proof, however, was
+not granted to him, for a sudden death carried him off in his fourth year
+of power (April 5th, 1852). Weaker men succeeded to his task. The epoch of
+military and diplomatic triumph was now ending, the gloomier side of the
+reaction stood out unrelieved by any new succession of victories. Financial
+disorder grew worse and worse. Clericalism claimed its bond from the
+monarchy which it had helped to restore. In the struggle of the
+nationalities of Austria against the central authority the Bishops had on
+the whole thrown their influence on to the side of the Crown. The restored
+despotism owed too much to their help and depended too much on their
+continued goodwill to be able to refuse their demands. Thus the new
+centralised administration, reproducing in general the uniformity of
+government attempted by the Emperor Joseph II., contrasted with this in its
+subservience to clerical power. Ecclesiastical laws and jurisdictions were
+allowed to encroach on the laws and jurisdiction of the State; education
+was made over to the priesthood; within the Church itself the bishops were
+allowed to rule uncontrolled. The very Minister who had taken office under
+Schwarzenberg as the representative of the modern spirit, to which the
+Government still professed to render homage, became the instrument of an
+act of submission to the Papacy which marked the lowest point to which
+Austrian policy fell. Alexander Bach, a prominent Liberal in Vienna at the
+beginning of 1848, had accepted office at the price of his independence,
+and surrendered himself to the aristocratic and clerical influences that
+dominated the Court. Consistent only in his efforts to simplify the forms
+of government, to promote the ascendency of German over all other elements
+in the State, to maintain the improvement in the peasant's condition
+effected by the Parliament of Kremsier, Bach, as Minister of the Interior,
+made war in all other respects on his own earlier principles. In the former
+representative of the Liberalism of the professional classes in Vienna
+absolutism had now its most efficient instrument; and the Concordat
+negotiated by Bach with the Papacy in 1855 marked the definite submission
+of Austria to the ecclesiastical pretensions which in these years of
+political languor and discouragement gained increasing recognition
+throughout Central Europe. Ultramontanism had sought allies in many
+political camps since the revolution of 1848. It had dallied in some
+countries with Republicanism; but its truer instincts divined in the
+victory of absolutist systems its own surest gain. Accommodations between
+the Papacy and several of the German Governments were made in the years
+succeeding 1849; and from the centralised despotism of the Emperor Francis
+Joseph the Church won concessions which since the time of Maria Theresa it
+had in vain sought from any ruler of the Austrian State.
+
+[France after 1848.]
+
+[Louis Napoleon.]
+
+The European drama which began in 1848 had more of unity and more of
+concentration in its opening than in its close. In Italy it ends with the
+fall of Venice; in Germany the interest lingers till the days of Olmuetz; in
+France there is no decisive break in the action until the Coup d'Etat
+which, at the end of the year 1851, made Louis Napoleon in all but name
+Emperor of France. The six million votes which had raised Louis Napoleon to
+the Presidency of the Republic might well have filled with alarm all who
+hoped for a future of constitutional rule; yet the warning conveyed by the
+election seems to have been understood by but few. As the representative of
+order and authority, as the declared enemy of Socialism, Louis Napoleon was
+on the same side as the Parliamentary majority; he had even been supported
+in his candidature by Parliamentary leaders such as M. Thiers. His victory
+was welcomed as a victory over Socialism and the Red Republic; he had
+received some patronage from the official party of order, and it was
+expected that, as nominal chief of the State, he would act as the
+instrument of this party. He was an adventurer, but an adventurer with so
+little that was imposing about him, that it scarcely occurred to men of
+influence in Paris to credit him with the capacity for mischief. His mean
+look and spiritless address, the absurdities of his past, the
+insignificance of his political friends, caused him to be regarded during
+his first months of public life with derision rather than with fear. The
+French, said M. Thiers long afterwards, made two mistakes about Louis
+Napoleon: the first when they took him for a fool, the second when they
+took him for a man of genius. It was not until the appearance of the letter
+to Colonel Ney, in which the President ostentatiously separated himself
+from his Ministers and emphasised his personal will in the direction of the
+foreign policy of France, that suspicions of danger to the Republic from
+his ambition arose. From this time, in the narrow circle of the Ministers
+whom official duty brought into direct contact with the President, a
+constant sense of insecurity and dread of some new surprise on his part
+prevailed, though the accord which had been broken by the letter to Colonel
+Ney was for a while outwardly re-established, and the forms of
+Parliamentary government remained unimpaired.
+
+[Message of Oct. 31, 1849.]
+
+The first year of Louis Napoleon's term of office was drawing to a close
+when a message from him was delivered to the Assembly which seemed to
+announce an immediate attack upon the Constitution. The Ministry in office
+was composed of men of high Parliamentary position; it enjoyed the entire
+confidence of a great majority in the Assembly, and had enforced with at
+least sufficient energy the measures of public security which the President
+and the country seemed agreed in demanding. Suddenly, on the 31st of
+October, the President announced to the Assembly by a message carried by
+one of his aides-de-camp that the Ministry were dismissed. The reason
+assigned for their dismissal was the want of unity within the Cabinet
+itself; but the language used by the President announced much more than a
+ministerial change. "France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand,
+the will of him whom it elected on the 10th of December. The victory won on
+that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is in itself
+a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity
+within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my
+election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the
+Assembly and of the people." In order to save the Republic from anarchy, to
+maintain the prestige of France among other nations, the President declared
+that he needed men of action rather than of words; yet when the list of the
+new Ministers appeared, it contained scarcely a single name of weight.
+Louis Napoleon had called to office persons whose very obscurity had marked
+them as his own instruments, and guaranteed to him the ascendency which he
+had not hitherto possessed within the Cabinet. Satisfied with having given
+this proof of his power, he resumed the appearance of respect, if not of
+cordiality, towards the Assembly. He had learnt to beware of precipitate
+action; above two years of office were still before him; and he had now
+done enough to make it clear to all who were disposed to seek their
+fortunes in a new political cause that their services on his behalf would
+be welcomed, and any excess of zeal more than pardoned. From this time
+there grew up a party which had for its watchword the exaltation of Louis
+Napoleon and the derision of the methods of Parliamentary government.
+Journalists, unsuccessful politicians, adventurers of every description,
+were enlisted in the ranks of this obscure but active band. For their acts
+and their utterances no one was responsible but themselves. They were
+disavowed without compunction when their hardihood went too far; but their
+ventures brought them no peril, and the generosity of the President was not
+wanting to those who insisted on serving him in spite of himself.
+
+[Law limiting the Franchise, May 31, 1850.]
+
+France was still trembling with the shock of the Four Days of June; and
+measures of repression formed the common ground upon which Louis Napoleon
+and the Assembly met without fear of conflict. Certain elections which were
+held in the spring of 1850, and which gave a striking victory in Paris and
+elsewhere to Socialist or Ultra-Democratic candidates, revived the alarms
+of the owners of property, and inspired the fear that with universal
+suffrage the Legislature itself might ultimately fall into the hands of the
+Red Republicans. The principle of universal suffrage had been proclaimed
+almost by accident in the midst of the revolution of 1848. It had been
+embodied in the Constitution of that year because it was found already in
+existence. No party had seriously considered the conditions under which it
+was to be exercised, or had weighed the political qualifications of the
+mass to whom it was so lightly thrown. When election after election
+returned to the Chamber men whose principles were held to menace society
+itself, the cry arose that France must be saved from the hands of the vile
+multitude; and the President called upon a Committee of the Assembly to
+frame the necessary measures of electoral reform. Within a week the work of
+the Committee was completed, and the law which it had drafted was brought
+before the Assembly. It was proposed that, instead of a residence of six
+months, a continuous residence of three years in the same commune should be
+required of every voter, and that the fulfilment of this condition should
+be proved, not by ordinary evidence, but by one of certain specified acts,
+such as the payment of personal taxes. With modifications of little
+importance the Bill was passed by the Assembly. Whether its real effect was
+foreseen even by those who desired the greatest possible limitation of the
+franchise is doubtful; it is certain that many who supported it believed,
+in their ignorance of the practical working of electoral laws, that they
+were excluding from the franchise only the vagabond and worthless class
+which has no real place within the body politic. When the electoral lists
+drawn up in pursuance of the measure appeared, they astounded all parties
+alike. Three out of the ten millions of voters in France were
+disfranchised. Not only the inhabitants of whole quarters in the great
+cities but the poorer classes among the peasantry throughout France had
+disappeared from the electoral body. The Assembly had at one blow converted
+into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of
+bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given
+to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the
+fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national
+sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly
+which had mutilated it in the interests of class. [454]
+
+[Prospects of Louis Napoleon.]
+
+The duration of the Presidency was fixed by the Constitution of 1848 at
+four years, and it was enacted that the President should not be re-eligible
+to his dignity. By the operation of certain laws imperfectly adjusted to
+one another, the tenure of office by Louis Napoleon expired on the 8th of
+May, 1852, while the date for the dissolution of the Assembly fell within a
+few weeks of this day. France was therefore threatened with the dangers
+attending the almost simultaneous extinction of all authority. The perils
+of 1852 loomed only too visibly before the country, and Louis Napoleon
+addressed willing hearers when, in the summer of 1850, he began to hint at
+the necessity of a prolongation of his own power. The Parliamentary recess
+was employed by the President in two journeys through the Departments; the
+first through those of the south-east, where Socialism was most active, and
+where his appearance served at once to prove his own confidence and to
+invigorate the friends of authority; the second through Normandy, where the
+prevailing feeling was strongly in favour of firm government, and
+utterances could safely be made by the President which would have brought
+him into some risk at Paris. In suggesting that France required his own
+continued presence at the head of the State Louis Napoleon was not
+necessarily suggesting a violation of the law. It was provided by the
+Statutes of 1848 that the Assembly by a vote of three-fourths might order a
+revision of the Constitution; and in favour of this revision petitions were
+already being drawn up throughout the country. Were the clause forbidding
+the re-election of the President removed from the Constitution, Louis
+Napoleon might fairly believe that an immense majority of the French people
+would re-invest him with power. He would probably have been content with a
+legal re-election had this been rendered possible; but the Assembly showed
+little sign of a desire to smooth his way, and it therefore became
+necessary for him to seek the means of realising his aims in violation of
+the law. He had persuaded himself that his mission, his destiny, was to
+rule France; in other words, he had made up his mind to run such risks and
+to sanction such crimes as might be necessary to win him sovereign power.
+With the loftier impulses of ambition, motives of a meaner kind stimulated
+him to acts of energy. Never wealthy, the father of a family though
+unmarried, he had exhausted his means, and would have returned to private
+life a destitute man, if not laden with debt. When his own resolution
+flagged, there were those about him too deeply interested in his fortunes
+to allow him to draw back.
+
+[Louis Napoleon and the army.]
+
+[Dismissal of Changarnier, Jan., 1851.]
+
+It was by means of the army that Louis Napoleon intended in the last resort
+to make himself master of France, and the army had therefore to be won over
+to his personal cause. The generals who had gained distinction either in
+the Algerian wars or in the suppression of insurrection in France were
+without exception Orleanists or Republicans. Not a single officer of
+eminence was as yet included in the Bonapartist band. The President himself
+had never seen service except in a Swiss camp of exercise; beyond his name
+he possessed nothing that could possibly touch the imagination of a
+soldier. The heroic element not being discoverable in his person or his
+career, it remained to work by more material methods. Louis Napoleon had
+learnt many things in England, and had perhaps observed in the English
+elections of that period how much may be effected by the simple means of
+money-bribes and strong drink. The saviour of society was not ashamed to
+order the garrison of Paris double rations of brandy and to distribute
+innumerable doles of half a franc or less. Military banquets were given, in
+which the sergeant and the corporal sat side by side with the higher
+officers. Promotion was skilfully offered or withheld. As the generals of
+the highest position were hostile to Bonaparte, it was the easier to tempt
+their subordinates with the prospect of their places. In the acclamations
+which greeted the President at the reviews held at Paris in the autumn of
+1850, in the behaviour both of officers and men in certain regiments, it
+was seen how successful had been the emissaries of Bonapartism. The
+Committee which represented the absent Chamber in vain called the Minister
+of War to account for these irregularities. It was in vain that
+Changarnier, who, as commander both of the National Guard of Paris and of
+the first military division, seemed to hold the arbitrament between
+President and Assembly in his hands, openly declared at the beginning of
+1851 in favour of the Constitution. He was dismissed from his post; and
+although a vote of censure which followed this dismissal led to the
+resignation of the Ministry, the Assembly was unable to reinstate
+Changarnier in his command, and helplessly witnessed the authority which he
+had held pass into hostile or untrustworthy hands.
+
+[Proposed Revision of the Constitution.]
+
+[Revision of the Constitution rejected, July 19.]
+
+There now remained only one possible means of averting the attack upon the
+Constitution which was so clearly threatened, and that was by subjecting
+the Constitution itself to revision in order that Louis Napoleon might
+legally seek re-election at the end of his Presidency. An overwhelming
+current of public opinion pressed indeed in the direction of such a change.
+However gross and undisguised the initiative of the local functionaries in
+preparing the petitions which showered upon the Assembly, the national
+character of the demand could not be doubted. There was no other candidate
+whose name carried with it any genuine popularity or prestige, or around
+whom even the Parliamentary sections at enmity with the President could
+rally. The Assembly was divided not very unevenly between Legitimists,
+Orleanists, and Republicans. Had indeed the two monarchical groups been
+able to act in accord, they might have had some hope of re-establishing the
+throne; and an attempt had already been made to effect a union, on the
+understanding that the childless Comte de Chambord should recognise the
+grandson of Louis Philippe as his heir, the House of Orleans renouncing its
+claims during the lifetime of the chief of the elder line. These plans had
+been frustrated by the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to sanction any
+appeal to the popular vote, and the restoration of the monarchy was
+therefore hopeless for the present. It remained for the Assembly to decide
+whether it would facilitate Louis Napoleon's re-election as President by a
+revision of the Constitution or brave the risk of his violent usurpation of
+power. The position was a sad and even humiliating one for those who, while
+they could not disguise their real feeling towards the Prince, yet knew
+themselves unable to count on the support of the nation if they should
+resist him. The Legitimists, more sanguine in temper, kept in view an
+ultimate restoration of the monarchy, and lent themselves gladly to any
+policy which might weaken the constitutional safeguards of the Republic.
+The Republican minority alone determined to resist any proposal for
+revision, and to stake everything upon the maintenance of the constitution
+in its existing form. Weak as the Republicans were as compared with the
+other groups in the Assembly when united against them, they were yet strong
+enough to prevent the Ministry from securing that majority of three-fourths
+without which the revision of the Constitution could not be undertaken.
+Four hundred and fifty votes were given in favour of revision, two hundred
+and seventy against it (July 19th). The proposal therefore fell to the
+ground, and Louis Napoleon, who could already charge the Assembly with
+having by its majority destroyed universal suffrage, could now charge it
+with having by its minority forbidden the nation to choose its own head.
+Nothing more was needed by him. He had only to decide upon the time and the
+circumstances of the _coup d'etat_ which was to rid him of his adversaries
+and to make him master of France.
+
+[Preparations for the _coup d'etat_.]
+
+Louis Napoleon had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his
+half-brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a
+man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person
+of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince
+through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in
+Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an
+administration, but they were useful to him in discovering and winning over
+soldiers and officials of sufficient standing to give to the execution of
+the conspiracy something of the appearance of an act of Government. A
+general was needed at the War Office who would go all lengths in
+illegality. Such a man had already been found in St. Arnaud, commander of a
+brigade in Algiers, a brilliant soldier who had redeemed a disreputable
+past by years of hard service, and who was known to be ready to treat his
+French fellow-citizens exactly as he would treat the Arabs. As St. Arnaud's
+name was not yet familiar in Paris, a campaign was arranged in the summer
+of 1851 for the purpose of winning him distinction. At the cost of some
+hundreds of lives St. Arnaud was pushed into sufficient fame; and after
+receiving congratulations proportioned to his exploits from the President's
+own hand, he was summoned to Paris, in order at the right moment to be made
+Minister of War. A troop of younger officers, many of whom gained a
+lamentable celebrity as the generals of 1870, were gradually brought over
+from Algiers and placed round the Minister in the capital. The command of
+the army of Paris was given to General Magnan, who, though he preferred not
+to share in the deliberations on the _coup d'etat_, had promised his
+cooperation when the moment should arrive. The support, or at least the
+acquiescence, of the army seemed thus to be assured. The National Guard,
+which, under Changarnier, would probably have rallied in defence of the
+Assembly, had been placed under an officer pledged to keep it in inaction.
+For the management of the police Louis Napoleon had fixed upon M. Maupas,
+Prefet of the Haute Garonne. This person, to whose shamelessness we owe the
+most authentic information that exists on the _coup d'etat_, had,
+while in an inferior station, made it his business to ingratiate himself
+with the President by sending to him personally police reports which ought
+to have been sent to the Ministers. The objects and the character of M.
+Maupas were soon enough understood by Louis Napoleon. He promoted him to
+high office; sheltered him from the censure of his superiors; and, when the
+_coup d'etat_ was drawing nigh, called him to Paris, in the full and
+well-grounded confidence that, whatever the most perfidious ingenuity could
+contrive in turning the guardians of the law against the law itself, that
+M. Maupas, as Prefet of Police, might be relied upon to accomplish.
+
+[The _coup d'etat_ fixed for December.]
+
+Preparations for the _coup d'etat_ had been so far advanced in
+September that a majority of the conspirators had then urged Louis Napoleon
+to strike the blow without delay, while the members of the Assembly were
+still dispersed over France in the vacation. St. Arnaud, however, refused
+his assent, declaring that the deputies, if left free, would assemble at a
+distance from Paris, summon to them the generals loyal to the Constitution,
+and commence a civil war. He urged that, in order to avoid greater
+subsequent risks, it would be necessary to seize all the leading
+representatives and generals from whom resistance might be expected, and to
+hold them under durance until the crisis should be over. This simultaneous
+arrest of all the foremost public men in France could only be effected at a
+time when the Assembly was sitting. St. Arnaud therefore demanded that the
+_coup d'etat_ should be postponed till the winter. Another reason made
+for delay. Little as the populace of Paris loved the reactionary Assembly,
+Louis Napoleon was not altogether assured that it would quietly witness his
+own usurpation of power. In waiting until the Chamber should again be in
+session, he saw the opportunity of exhibiting his cause as that of the
+masses themselves, and of justifying his action as the sole means of
+enforcing popular rights against a legislature obstinately bent on denying
+them. Louis Napoleon's own Ministers had overthrown universal suffrage.
+This might indeed be matter for comment on the part of the censorious, but
+it was not a circumstance to stand in the way of the execution of a great
+design. Accordingly Louis Napoleon determined to demand from the Assembly
+at the opening of the winter session the repeal of the electoral law of May
+31st, and to make its refusal, on which he could confidently reckon, the
+occasion of its destruction.
+
+[Louis Napoleon demands repeal of Law of May 31.]
+
+[The Assembly refuses.]
+
+The conspirators were up to this time conspirators and nothing more. A
+Ministry still subsisted which was not initiated in the President's designs
+nor altogether at his command. On his requiring that the repeal of the law
+of May 31st should be proposed to the Assembly, the Cabinet resigned. The
+way to the highest functions of State was thus finally opened for the
+agents of the _coup d'etat_. St. Arnaud was placed at the War Office,
+Maupas at the Prefecture of Police. The colleagues assigned to them were
+too insignificant to exercise any control over their actions. At the
+reopening of the Assembly on the 4th of November an energetic message from
+the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous
+combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened
+to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded,
+with certain undefined safeguards, the re-establishment of universal
+suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist
+revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of
+Paris flattered by the homage paid to the popular vote. With very little
+delay a measure repealing the Law of May 31st was introduced into the
+Assembly. It was supported by the Republicans and by many members of the
+other groups; but the majority of the Assembly, while anxious to devise
+some compromise, refused to condemn its own work in the unqualified form on
+which the President insisted. The Bill was thrown out by seven votes.
+Forthwith the rumour of an impending _coup d'etat_ spread through
+Paris. The Questors, or members charged with the safeguarding of the
+Assembly, moved the resolutions necessary to enable them to secure
+sufficient military aid. Even now prompt action might perhaps have saved
+the Chamber. But the Republican deputies, incensed by their defeat on the
+question of universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for
+them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to
+reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for
+the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his
+colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the
+people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of
+danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the
+imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a bold enterprise,
+the President had indeed little reason to anticipate failure.
+
+[The _coup d'etat_, Dec. 2.]
+
+The execution of the _coup d'etat_ was fixed for the early morning of
+December 2nd. On the previous evening Louis Napoleon held a public
+reception at the Elysee, his quiet self-possessed manner indicating nothing
+of the struggle at hand. Before the guests dispersed the President withdrew
+to his study. There the last council of the conspirators was held, and they
+parted, each to the execution of the work assigned to him. The central
+element in the plan was the arrest of Cavaignac, of Changarnier and three
+other generals who were members of the Assembly, of eleven civilian
+deputies including M. Thiers, and of sixty-two other politicians of
+influence. Maupas summoned to the Prefecture of Police in the dead of night
+a sufficient number of his trusted agents, received each of them on his
+arrival in a separate room, and charged each with the arrest of one of the
+victims. The arrests were accomplished before dawn, and the leading
+soldiers and citizens of France met one another in the prison of Mazas. The
+Palais Bourbon, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was occupied by troops.
+The national printing establishment was seized by gendarmes, and the
+proclamations of Louis Napoleon, distributed sentence by sentence to
+different compositors, were set in type before the workmen knew upon what
+they were engaged. When day broke the Parisians found the soldiers in the
+streets, and the walls placarded with manifestoes of Louis Napoleon. The
+first of these was a decree which announced in the name of the French
+people that the National Assembly and the Council of State were dissolved,
+that universal suffrage was restored, and that the nation was convoked in
+its electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December. The second
+was a proclamation to the people, in which Louis Napoleon denounced at once
+the monarchical conspirators within the Assembly and the anarchists who
+sought to overthrow all government. His duty called upon him to save the
+Republic by an appeal to the nation. He proposed the establishment of a
+decennial executive authority, with a Senate, a Council of State, a
+Legislative Body, and other institutions borrowed from the Consulate of
+1799. If the nation refused him a majority of its votes he would summon a
+new Assembly and resign his powers; if the nation believed in the cause of
+which his name was the symbol, in France regenerated by the Revolution and
+organised by the Emperor, it would prove this by ratifying his authority. A
+third proclamation was addressed to the army. In 1830 and in 1848 the army
+had been treated as the conquered, but its voice was now to be heard.
+Common glories and sorrows united the soldiers of France with Napoleon's
+heir, and the future would unite them in common devotion to the repose and
+greatness of their country.
+
+[Paris on Dec. 2.]
+
+The full meaning of these manifestoes was not at first understood by the
+groups who read them. The Assembly was so unpopular that the announcement
+of its dissolution, with the restoration of universal suffrage, pleased
+rather than alarmed the democratic quarters of Paris. It was not until some
+hours had passed that the arrests became generally known, and that the
+first symptoms of resistance appeared. Groups of deputies assembled at the
+houses of the Parliamentary leaders; a body of fifty even succeeded in
+entering the Palais Bourbon and in commencing a debate: they were, however,
+soon dispersed by soldiers. Later in the day above two hundred members
+assembled at the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement. There they passed
+resolutions declaring the President removed from his office, and appointing
+a commander of the troops at Paris. The first officers who were sent to
+clear the Mairie flinched in the execution of their work, and withdrew for
+further orders. The Magistrates of the High Court, whose duty it was to
+order the impeachment of the President in case of the violation of his oath
+to the Constitution, assembled, and commenced the necessary proceedings;
+but before they could sign a warrant, soldiers forced their way into the
+hall and drove the judges from the Bench. In due course General Forey
+appeared with a strong body of troops at the Mairie, where the two hundred
+deputies were assembled. Refusing to disperse, they were one and all
+arrested, and conducted as prisoners between files of troops to the
+Barracks of the Quai d'Orsay. The National Guard, whose drums had been
+removed by their commander in view of any spontaneous movement to arms,
+remained invisible. Louis Napoleon rode out amidst the acclamations of the
+soldiery; and when the day closed it seemed as if Paris had resolved to
+accept the change of Government and the overthrow of the Constitution
+without a struggle.
+
+[December 3.]
+
+[December 4.]
+
+There were, however, a few resolute men at work in the workmen's quarters;
+and in the wealthier part of the city the outrage upon the National
+Representation gradually roused a spirit of resistance. On the morning of
+December 3rd the Deputy Baudin met with his death in attempting to defend a
+barricade which had been erected in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The artisans
+of eastern Paris showed, however, little inclination to take up arms on
+behalf of those who had crushed them in the Four Days of June; the
+agitation was strongest within the Boulevards, and spread westwards towards
+the stateliest district of Paris. The barricades erected on the south of
+the Boulevards were so numerous, the crowds so formidable, that towards the
+close of the day the troops were withdrawn, and it was determined that
+after a night of quiet they should make a general attack and end the
+struggle at one blow. At midday on December 4th divisions of the army
+converged from all directions upon the insurgent quarter. The barricades
+were captured or levelled by artillery, and with a loss on the part of the
+troops of twenty-eight killed, and a hundred and eighty wounded resistance
+was overcome. But the soldiers had been taught to regard the inhabitants of
+Paris as their enemies, and they bettered the instructions given them.
+Maddened by drink or panic, they commenced indiscriminate firing in the
+Boulevards after the conflict was over, and slaughtered all who either in
+the street or at the windows of the houses came within range of their
+bullets. According to official admissions, the lives of sixteen civilians
+paid for every soldier slain; independent estimates place far higher the
+number of the victims of this massacre. Two thousand arrests followed, and
+every Frenchman who appeared dangerous to Louis Napoleon's myrmidons, from
+Thiers and Victor Hugo down to the anarchist orators of the wineshops, was
+either transported, exiled, or lodged in prison. Thus was the Republic
+preserved and society saved.
+
+[The Plebiscite, Dec. 20.]
+
+[Napoleon III. Emperor, Dec. 2, 1852.]
+
+France in general received the news of the _coup d'etat_ with indifference:
+where it excited popular movements these movements were of such a character
+that Louis Napoleon drew from them the utmost profit. A certain fierce,
+blind Socialism had spread among the poorest of the rural classes in the
+centre and south of France. In these departments there were isolated
+risings, accompanied by acts of such murderous outrage and folly that a
+general terror seized the surrounding districts. In the course of a few
+days the predatory bands were dispersed, and an unsparing chastisement
+inflicted on all who were concerned in their misdeeds; but the reports sent
+to Paris were too serviceable to Louis Napoleon to be left in obscurity;
+and these brutish village-outbreaks, which collapsed at the first
+appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a
+vast Socialist revolution from which the _coup d'etat_, and that alone, had
+saved France. Terrified by the re-appearance of the Red Spectre, the French
+nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the
+accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the _plebiscite_ was,
+whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis Napoleon's authority
+and committed to him the necessary powers for establishing a Constitution
+on the basis laid down in his proclamation of December 2nd. Seven million
+votes answered this question in the affirmative, less than one-tenth of
+that number in the negative. The result was made known on the last day of
+the year 1851. On the first day of the new year Louis Napoleon attended a
+service of thanksgiving at Notre Dame, took possession of the Tuileries,
+and restored the eagle as the military emblem of France. He was now in all
+but name an absolute sovereign. The Church, the army, the ever-servile body
+of the civil administration, waited impatiently for the revival of the
+Imperial title. Nor was the saviour of society the man to shrink from
+further responsibilities. Before the year closed the people was once more
+called upon to express its will. Seven millions of votes pronounced for
+hereditary power; and on the anniversary of the _coup d'etat_ Napoleon III.
+was proclaimed Emperor of the French.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+England and France in 1851--Russia under Nicholas--The Hungarian
+Refugees--Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places--Nicholas
+and the British Ambassador--Lord Stratford de Redcliffe--Menschikoff's
+Mission--Russian Troops enter the Danubian Principalities--Lord Aberdeen's
+Cabinet--Movements of the Fleets--The Vienna Note--The Fleets pass the
+Dardanelles--Turkish Squadron destroyed at Sinope--Declaration of
+War--Policy of Austria--Policy of Prussia--The Western Powers and the
+European Concert--Siege of Silistria--The Principalities evacuated--Further
+objects of the Western Powers--Invasion of the Crimea--Battle of the
+Alma--The Flank March--Balaclava--Inkermann--Winter in the Crimea--Death of
+Nicholas--Conference of Vienna--Austria--Progress of the Siege--Plans of
+Napoleon III.--Canrobert and Pelissier--Unsuccessful Assault--Battle of the
+Tchernaya--Capture of the Malakoff--Fall of Sebastopol--Fall of
+Kars--Negotiations for Peace--The Conference of Paris--Treaty of Paris
+--The Danubian Principalities--Continued discord in the Ottoman
+Empire--Revision of the Treaty of Paris in 1871.
+
+
+[England in 1851.]
+
+The year 1851 was memorable in England as that of the Great Exhibition.
+Thirty-six years of peace, marked by an enormous development of
+manufacturing industry, by the introduction of railroads, and by the
+victory of the principle of Free Trade, had culminated in a spectacle so
+impressive and so novel that to many it seemed the emblem and harbinger of
+a new epoch in the history of mankind, in which war should cease, and the
+rivalry of nations should at length find its true scope in the advancement
+of the arts of peace. The apostles of Free Trade had idealised the cause
+for which they contended. The unhappiness and the crimes of nations had, as
+they held, been due principally to the action of governments, which plunged
+harmless millions into war for dynastic ends, and paralysed human energy by
+their own blind and senseless interference with the natural course of
+exchange. Compassion for the poor and the suffering, a just resentment
+against laws which in the supposed interest of a minority condemned the
+mass of the nation to a life of want, gave moral fervour and elevation to
+the teaching of Cobden and those who shared his spirit. Like others who
+have been constrained by a noble enthusiasm, they had their visions; and in
+their sense of the greatness of that new force which was ready to operate
+upon human life, they both forgot the incompleteness of their own doctrine,
+and under-estimated the influences which worked, and long must work, upon
+mankind in an opposite direction. In perfect sincerity the leader of
+English economical reform at the middle of this century looked forward to a
+reign of peace as the result of unfettered intercourse between the members
+of the European family. What the man of genius and conviction had
+proclaimed the charlatan repeated in his turn. Louis Napoleon appreciated
+the charm which schemes of commercial development exercised upon the
+trading classes in France. He was ready to salute the Imperial eagles as
+objects of worship and to invoke the memories of Napoleon's glory when
+addressing soldiers; when it concerned him to satisfy the commercial world,
+he was the very embodiment of peace and of peaceful industry. "Certain
+persons," he said, in an address at Bordeaux, shortly before assuming the
+title of Emperor, "say that the Empire is war. I say that the Empire is
+peace; for France desires peace, and when France is satisfied the world is
+tranquil. We have waste territories to cultivate, roads to open, harbours
+to dig, a system of railroads to complete; we have to bring all our great
+western ports into connection with the American continent by a rapidity of
+communication which we still want. We have ruins to restore, false gods to
+overthrow, truths to make triumphant. This is the sense that I attach to
+the Empire; these are the conquests which I contemplate." Never had the
+ideal of industrious peace been more impressively set before mankind than
+in the years which succeeded the convulsion of 1848. Yet the epoch on which
+Europe was then about to enter proved to be pre-eminently an epoch of war.
+In the next quarter of a century there was not one of the Great Powers
+which was not engaged in an armed struggle with its rivals. Nor were the
+wars of this period in any sense the result of accident, or disconnected
+with the stream of political tendencies which makes the history of the age.
+With one exception they left in their train great changes for which the
+time was ripe, changes which for more than a generation had been the
+recognised objects of national desire, but which persuasion and revolution
+had equally failed to bring into effect. The Crimean War alone was barren
+in positive results of a lasting nature, and may seem only to have
+postponed, at enormous cost of life, the fall of a doomed and outworn
+Power. But the time has not yet arrived when the real bearing of the
+overthrow of Russia in 1854 on the destiny of the Christian races of Turkey
+can be confidently expressed. The victory of the Sultan's protectors
+delayed the emancipation of these races for twenty years; the victory, or
+the unchecked aggression, of Russia in 1854 might possibly have closed to
+them for ever the ways to national independence.
+
+[Russian policy under Nicholas.]
+
+The plans formed by the Empress Catherine in the last century for the
+restoration of the Greek Empire under a prince of the Russian House had
+long been abandoned at St. Petersburg. The later aim of Russian policy
+found its clearest expression in the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, extorted
+from Sultan Mahmud in 1833 in the course of the first war against Mehemet
+Ali. This Treaty, if it had not been set aside by the Western Powers, would
+have made the Ottoman Empire a vassal State under the Czar's protection. In
+the concert of Europe which was called into being by the second war of
+Mehemet Ali against the Sultan in 1840, Nicholas had considered it his
+interest to act with England and the German Powers in defence of the Porte
+against its Egyptian rival and his French ally. A policy of moderation had
+been imposed upon Russia by the increased watchfulness and activity now
+displayed by the other European States in all that related to the Ottoman
+Empire. Isolated aggression had become impracticable; it was necessary for
+Russia to seek the countenance or support of some ally before venturing on
+the next step in the extension of its power southwards.
+
+[Nicholas in England, 1844.]
+
+In 1844 Nicholas visited England. The object of his journey was to sound
+the Court and Government, and to lay the foundation for concerted action
+between Russia and England, to the exclusion of France, when circumstances
+should bring about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, an event which
+the Czar believed to be not far off. Peel was then Prime Minister; Lord
+Aberdeen was Foreign Secretary. Aberdeen had begun his political career in
+a diplomatic mission to the Allied Armies in 1814. His feelings towards
+Russia were those of a loyal friend towards an old ally; and the
+remembrance of the epoch of 1814, when the young Nicholas had made
+acquaintance with Lord Aberdeen in France, appears to have given to the
+Czar a peculiar sense of confidence in the goodwill of the English Minister
+towards himself. Nicholas spoke freely with Aberdeen, as well as with Peel
+and Wellington, on the impending fall of the Ottoman Empire. "We have," he
+said, "a sick, a dying man on our hands. We must keep him alive so long as
+it is possible to do so, but we must frankly take into view all
+contingencies. I wish for no inch of Turkish soil myself, but neither will
+I permit any other Power to seize an inch of it. France, which has designs
+upon Africa, upon the Mediterranean, and upon the East, is the only Power
+to be feared. An understanding between England and Russia will preserve the
+peace of Europe." If the Czar pursued his speculations further into detail,
+of which there is no evidence, he elicited no response. He was heard with
+caution, and his visit appears to have produced nothing more than the
+formal expression of a desire on the part of the British Government that
+the existing treaty-rights of Russia should be respected by the Porte,
+together with an unmeaning promise that, if unexpected events should occur
+in Turkey, Russia and England should enter into counsel as to the best
+course of action to be pursued in common. [455]
+
+[Nicholas in 1848.]
+
+[The Hungarian refugees, 1849.]
+
+Nicholas, whether from policy or from a sense of kingly honour which at
+most times powerfully influenced him, did not avail himself of the
+prostration of the Continental Powers in 1848 to attack Turkey. He detested
+revolution, as a crime against the divinely ordered subjection of nations
+to their rulers, and would probably have felt himself degraded had he, in
+the spirit of his predecessor Catherine, turned the calamities of his
+brother-monarchs to his own separate advantage. It accorded better with his
+proud nature, possibly also with the schemes of a far-reaching policy, for
+Russia to enter the field as the protector of the Hapsburgs against the
+rebel Hungarians than for its armies to snatch from the Porte what the
+lapse of time and the goodwill of European allies would probably give to
+Russia at no distant date without a struggle. Disturbances at Bucharest and
+at Jassy led indeed to a Russian intervention in the Danubian
+Principalities in the interests of a despotic system of government; but
+Russia possessed by treaty protectorial rights over these Provinces. The
+military occupation which followed the revolt against the Hospodars was the
+subject of a convention between Turkey and Russia; it was effected by the
+armies of the two Powers jointly; and at the expiration of two years the
+Russian forces were peacefully withdrawn. More serious were the
+difficulties which arose from the flight of Kossuth and other Hungarian
+leaders into Turkey after the subjugation of Hungary by the allied Austrian
+and Russian armies. The Courts of Vienna and St. Petersburg united in
+demanding from the Porte the surrender of these refugees; the Sultan
+refused to deliver them up, and he was energetically supported by Great
+Britain, Kossuth's children on their arrival at Constantinople being
+received and cared for at the British Embassy. The tyrannous demand of the
+two Emperors, the courageous resistance of the Sultan, excited the utmost
+interest in Western Europe. By a strange turn of fortune, the Power which
+at the end of the last century had demanded from the Court of Vienna the
+Greek leader Rhegas, and had put him to death as soon as he was handed over
+by the Austrian police, was now gaining the admiration of all free nations
+as the last barrier that sheltered the champions of European liberty from
+the vengeance of despotic might. The Czar and the Emperor of Austria had
+not reckoned with the forces of public indignation aroused against them in
+the West by their attempt to wrest their enemies from the Sultan's hand.
+They withdrew their ambassadors from Constantinople and threatened to
+resort to force. But the appearance of the British and French fleets at the
+Dardanelles gave a new aspect to the dispute. The Emperors learnt that if
+they made war upon Turkey for the question at issue they would have to
+fight also against the Western Powers. The demand for the surrender of the
+refugees was withdrawn; and in undertaking to keep the principal of them
+under surveillance for a reasonable period, the Sultan gave to the two
+Imperial Courts such satisfaction as they could, without loss of dignity,
+accept. [456]
+
+[Dispute between France and Russia on the Holy Places, 1850-2.]
+
+The _coup d'etat_ of Louis Napoleon at the end of the year 1851 was
+witnessed by the Czar with sympathy and admiration as a service to the
+cause of order; but the assumption of the Imperial title by the Prince
+displeased him exceedingly. While not refusing to recognise Napoleon III.,
+he declined to address him by the term (_mon frere_) usually employed
+by monarchs in writing to one another. In addition to the question relating
+to the Hungarian refugees, a dispute concerning the Holy Places in
+Palestine threatened to cause strife between France and Russia. The same
+wave of religious and theological interest which in England produced the
+Tractarian movement brought into the arena of political life in France an
+enthusiasm for the Church long strange to the Legislature and the governing
+circles of Paris. In the Assembly of 1849 Montalembert, the spokesman of
+this militant Catholicism, was one of the foremost figures. Louis Napoleon,
+as President, sought the favour of those whom Montalembert led; and the
+same Government which restored the Pope to Rome demanded from the Porte a
+stricter enforcement of the rights of the Latin Church in the East. The
+earliest Christian legends had been localised in various spots around
+Jerusalem. These had been in the ages of faith the goal of countless
+pilgrimages, and in more recent centuries they had formed the object of
+treaties between the Porte and France. Greek monks, however, disputed
+with Latin monks for the guardianship of the Holy Places; and as the
+power of Russia grew, the privileges of the Greek monks had increased.
+The claims of the rival brotherhoods, which related to doors, keys, stars
+and lamps, might probably have been settled to the satisfaction of all
+parties within a few hours by an experienced stage-manager; in the hands
+of diplomatists bent on obtaining triumphs over one another they assumed
+dimensions that overshadowed the peace of Europe. The French and the
+Russian Ministers at Constantinople alternately tormented the Sultan in
+the character of aggrieved sacristans, until, at the beginning of 1852,
+the Porte compromised itself with both parties by adjudging to each
+rights which it professed also to secure to the other. A year more, spent
+in prevarications, in excuses, and in menaces, ended with the triumph of
+the French, with the evasion of the promises made by the Sultan to
+Russia, and with the discomfiture of the Greek Church in the person of
+the monks who officiated at the Holy Sepulchre and the Shrine of the
+Nativity. [457]
+
+[Nicholas and Sir H. Seymour, Jan., Feb., 1853.]
+
+Nicholas treated the conduct of the Porte as an outrage upon himself. A
+conflict which had broken out between the Sultan and the Montenegrins, and
+which now threatened to take a deadly form, confirmed the Czar in his
+belief that the time for resolute action had arrived. At the beginning of
+the year 1853 he addressed himself to Hamilton Seymour, British ambassador
+at St. Petersburg, in terms much stronger and clearer than those which he
+had used towards Lord Aberdeen nine years before. "The Sick Man," he said,
+"was in extremities; the time had come for a clear understanding between
+England and Russia. The occupation of Constantinople by Russian troops
+might be necessary, but the Czar would not hold it permanently. He would
+not permit any other Power to establish itself at the Bosphorus, neither
+would he permit the Ottoman Empire to be broken up into Republics to afford
+a refuge to the Mazzinis and the Kossuths of Europe. The Danubian
+Principalities were already independent States under Russian protection.
+The other possessions of the Sultan north of the Balkans might be placed on
+the same footing. England might annex Egypt and Crete." After making this
+communication to the British ambassador, and receiving the reply that
+England declined to enter into any schemes based on the fall of the Turkish
+Empire and disclaimed all desire for the annexation of any part of the
+Sultan's dominions, Nicholas despatched Prince Menschikoff to
+Constantinople, to demand from the Porte not only an immediate settlement
+of the questions relating to the Holy Places, but a Treaty guaranteeing to
+the Greek Church the undisturbed enjoyment of all its ancient rights and
+the benefit of all privileges that might be accorded by the Porte to any
+other Christian communities. [458]
+
+[The Claims of Russia.]
+
+The Treaty which Menschikoff was instructed to demand would have placed the
+Sultan and the Czar in the position of contracting parties with regard to
+the entire body of rights and privileges enjoyed by the Sultan's subjects
+of the Greek confession, and would so have made the violation of these
+rights in the case of any individual Christian a matter entitling Russia to
+interfere, or to claim satisfaction as for the breach of a Treaty
+engagement. By the Treaty of Kainardjie (1774) the Sultan had indeed bound
+himself "to protect the Christian religion and its Churches"; but this
+phrase was too indistinct to create specific matter of Treaty-obligation;
+and if it had given to Russia any general right of interference on behalf
+of members of the Greek Church, it would have given it the same right in
+behalf of all the Roman Catholics and all the Protestants in the Sultan's
+dominions, a right which the Czars had never professed to enjoy. Moreover,
+the Treaty of Kainardjie itself forbade by implication any such
+construction, for it mentioned by name one ecclesiastical building for
+whose priests the Porte did concede to Russia the right of addressing
+representations to the Sultan. Over the Danubian Principalities Russia
+possessed by the Treaty of Adrianople undoubted protectorial rights; but
+these Provinces stood on a footing quite different from that of the
+remainder of the Empire. That the Greek Church possessed by custom and by
+enactment privileges which it was the duty of the Sultan to respect, no one
+contested: the novelty of Menschikoff's claim was that the observation of
+these rights should be made matter of Treaty with Russia. The importance of
+the demand was proved by the fact that Menschikoff strictly forbade the
+Turkish Ministers to reveal it to the other Powers, and that Nicholas
+caused the English Government to be informed that the mission of his envoy
+had no other object than the final adjustment of the difficulties
+respecting the Holy Places. [459]
+
+[Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.]
+
+[Menschikoff leaves Constantinople, May 21.]
+
+[Russian troops enter the Principalities.]
+
+When Menschikoff reached Constantinople the British Embassy was in the
+hands of a subordinate officer. The Ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning, had
+recently returned to England. Stratford Canning, a cousin of the Premier,
+had been employed in the East at intervals since 1810. There had been a
+period in his career when he had desired to see the Turk expelled from
+Europe as an incurable barbarian; but the reforms of Sultan Mahmud had at a
+later time excited his warm interest and sympathy, and as Ambassador at
+Constantinople from 1842 to 1852 he had laboured strenuously for the
+regeneration of the Turkish Empire, and for the improvement of the
+condition of the Christian races under the Sultan's rule. His dauntless,
+sustained energy, his noble presence, the sincerity of his friendship
+towards the Porte, gave him an influence at Constantinople seldom, if ever,
+exercised by a foreign statesman. There were moments when he seemed to be
+achieving results of some value; but the task which he had attempted was
+one that surpassed human power; and after ten years so spent as to win for
+him the fame of the greatest ambassador by whom England has been
+represented in modern times, he declared that the prospects of Turkish
+reform were hopeless, and left Constantinople, not intending to return.
+[460] Before his successor had been appointed, the mission of Prince
+Menschikoff, the violence of his behaviour at Constantinople, and a rumour
+that he sought far more than his ostensible object, alarmed the British
+Government. Canning was asked to resume his post. Returning to
+Constantinople as Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, he communicated on his
+journey with the Courts of Paris and Vienna, and carried with him authority
+to order the Admiral of the fleet at Malta to hold his ships in readiness
+to sail for the East. He arrived at the Bosphorus on April 5th, learnt at
+once the real situation of affairs, and entered into negotiation with
+Menschikoff. The Russian, a mere child in diplomacy in comparison with his
+rival, suffered himself to be persuaded to separate the question of the
+Holy Places from that of the guarantee of the rights of the Greek Church.
+In the first matter Russia had a good cause; in the second it was advancing
+a new claim. The two being dissociated, Stratford had no difficulty in
+negotiating a compromise on the Holy Places satisfactory to the Czar's
+representative; and the demand for the Protectorate over the Greek
+Christians now stood out unobscured by those grievances of detail with
+which it had been at first interwoven. Stratford encouraged the Turkish
+Government to reject the Russian proposal. Knowing, nevertheless, that
+Menschikoff would in the last resort endeavour to intimidate the Sultan
+personally, he withheld from the Ministers, in view of this last peril, the
+strongest of all his arguments; and seeking a private audience with the
+Sultan on the 9th of May, he made known to him with great solemnity the
+authority which he had received to order the fleet at Malta to be in
+readiness to sail. The Sultan placed the natural interpretation on this
+statement, and ordered final rejection of Menschikoff's demand, though the
+Russian had consented to a modification of its form, and would now have
+accepted a note declaratory of the intentions of the Sultan towards the
+Greek Church instead of a regular Treaty. On the 21st of May Menschikoff
+quitted Constantinople; and the Czar, declaring that some guarantee must be
+held by Russia for the maintenance of the rights of the Greek Christians,
+announced that he should order his army to occupy the Danubian Provinces.
+After an interval of some weeks the Russian troops crossed the Pruth, and
+spread themselves over Moldavia and Wallachia. (June 22nd.) [461]
+
+[English Policy.]
+
+In the ordinary course of affairs the invasion of the territory of one
+Empire by the troops of another is, and can be nothing else than, an act of
+war, necessitating hostilities as a measure of defence on the part of the
+Power invaded. But the Czar protested that in taking the Danubian
+Principalities in pledge he had no intention of violating the peace; and as
+yet the common sense of the Turks, as well as the counsels that they
+received from without, bade them hesitate before issuing a declaration of
+war. Since December, 1852, Lord Aberdeen had been Prime Minister of
+England, at the head of a Cabinet formed by a coalition between followers
+of Sir Robert Peel and the Whig leaders Palmerston and Russell. [462] There
+was no man in England more pacific in disposition, or more anxious to
+remain on terms of honourable friendship with Russia, than Lord Aberdeen.
+The Czar had justly reckoned on the Premier's own forbearance; but he had
+failed to recognise the strength of those forces which, both within and
+without the Cabinet, set in the direction of armed resistance to Russia.
+Palmerston was keen for action. Lord Stratford appears to have taken it for
+granted from the first that, if a war should arise between the Sultan and
+the Czar in consequence of the rejection of Menschikoff's demand, Great
+Britain would fight in defence of the Ottoman Empire. He had not stated
+this in express terms, but the communication which he made to the Sultan
+regarding his own instructions could only have been intended to convey this
+impression. If the fleet was not to defend the Sultan, it was a mere piece
+of deceit to inform him that the Ambassador had powers to place it in
+readiness to sail; and such deceit was as alien to the character of Lord
+Stratford as the assumption of a virtual engagement towards the Sultan was
+in keeping with his imperious will and his passionate conviction of the
+duty of England. From the date of Lord Stratford's visit to the Palace,
+although no Treaty or agreement was in existence, England stood bound in
+honour, so long as the Turks should pursue the policy laid down by her
+envoy, to fulfil the expectations which this envoy had held out.
+
+[British and French fleets moved to Besika Bay, July, 1853.]
+
+[The Vienna Note, July 28.]
+
+[Constantinople in September.]
+
+[British and French fleets pass the Dardanelles, Oct. 22.]
+
+Had Lord Stratford been at the head of the Government, the policy and
+intentions of Great Britain would no doubt have been announced with such
+distinctness that the Czar could have fostered no misapprehension as to the
+results of his own acts. Palmerston, as Premier, would probably have
+adopted the same clear course, and war would either have been avoided by
+this nation or have been made with a distinct purpose and on a definite
+issue. But the Cabinet of Lord Aberdeen was at variance with itself.
+Aberdeen was ready to go to all lengths in negotiation, but he was not
+sufficiently master of his colleagues and of the representatives of England
+abroad to prevent acts and declarations which in themselves brought war
+near; above all, he failed to require from Turkey that abstention from
+hostilities on which, so long as negotiations lasted, England and the other
+Powers which proposed to make the cause of the Porte their own ought
+unquestionably to have insisted. On the announcement by the Czar that his
+army was about to enter the Principalities, the British Government
+despatched the fleet to Besika Bay near the entrance to the Dardanelles,
+and authorised Stratford to call it to the Bosphorus, in case
+Constantinople should be attacked. [463] The French fleet, which had come
+into Greek waters on Menschikoff's appearance at Constantinople, took up
+the same position. Meanwhile European diplomacy was busily engaged in
+framing schemes of compromise between the Porte and Russia. The
+representatives of the four Powers met at Vienna, and agreed upon a note
+which, as they considered, would satisfy any legitimate claims of Russia on
+behalf of the Greek Church, and at the same time impose upon the Sultan no
+further obligations towards Russia than those which already existed. [464]
+This note, however, was ill drawn, and would have opened the door to new
+claims on the part of Russia to a general Protectorate not sanctioned by
+its authors. The draft was sent to St. Petersburg, and was accepted by the
+Czar. At Constantinople its ambiguities were at once recognised; and though
+Lord Stratford in his official capacity urged its acceptance under a
+European guarantee against misconstruction, the Divan, now under the
+pressure of strong patriotic forces, refused to accept the note unless
+certain changes were made in its expressions. France, England, and Austria
+united in recommending to the Court of St. Petersburg the adoption of these
+amendments. The Czar, however, declined to admit them, and a Russian
+document, which obtained a publicity for which it was not intended, proved
+that the construction of the note which the amendments were expressly
+designed to exclude was precisely that which Russia meant to place upon it.
+The British Ministry now refused to recommend the note any longer to the
+Porte. [465] Austria, while it approved of the amendments, did not consider
+that their rejection by the Czar justified England in abandoning the note
+as the common award of the European Powers; and thus the concert of Europe
+was interrupted, England and France combining in a policy which Austria and
+Prussia were not willing to follow. In proportion as the chances of joint
+European action diminished, the ardour of the Turks themselves, and of
+those who were to be their allies, rose higher. Tumults, organised by the
+heads of the war-party, broke out at Constantinople; and although Stratford
+scorned the alarms of his French colleagues, who reported that a massacre
+of the Europeans in the capital was imminent, he thought it necessary to
+call up two vessels of war in order to provide for the security of the
+English residents and of the Sultan himself. In England Palmerston and the
+men of action in the Cabinet dragged Lord Aberdeen with them. The French
+Government pressed for vigorous measures, and in conformity with its desire
+instructions were sent from London to Lord Stratford to call the fleet to
+the Bosphorus, and to employ it in defending the territory of the Sultan
+against aggression. On the 22nd of October the British and French fleets
+passed the Dardanelles.
+
+[The ultimatum of Omar Pasha rejected, Oct. 10.]
+
+[Turkish squadron destroyed at Sinope, Nov. 30.]
+
+The Turk, sure of the protection of the Western Powers, had for some weeks
+resolved upon war; and yet the possibilities of a diplomatic settlement
+were not yet exhausted. Stratford himself had forwarded to Vienna the draft
+of an independent note which the Sultan was prepared to accept. This had
+not yet been seen at St. Petersburg. Other projects of conciliation filled
+the desks of all the leading politicians of Europe. Yet, though the belief
+generally existed that some scheme could be framed by which the Sultan,
+without sacrifice of his dignity and interest, might induce the Czar to
+evacuate the Principalities, no serious attempt was made to prevent the
+Turks from coming into collision with their enemies both by land and sea.
+The commander of the Russian troops in the Principalities having, on the
+10th of October, rejected an ultimatum requiring him to withdraw within
+fifteen days, this answer was taken as the signal for the commencement of
+hostilities. The Czar met the declaration of war with a statement that he
+would abstain from taking the offensive, and would continue merely to hold
+the Principalities as a material guarantee. Omar Pasha, the Ottoman
+commander in Bulgaria, was not permitted to observe the same passive
+attitude. Crossing the Danube, he attacked and defeated the Russians at
+Oltenitza. Thus assailed, the Czar considered that his engagement not to
+act on the offensive was at an end, and the Russian fleet, issuing from
+Sebastopol, attacked and destroyed a Turkish squadron in the harbour of
+Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea (November 30). The action was
+a piece of gross folly on the part of the Russian authorities if they still
+cherished the hopes of pacification which the Czar professed; but others
+also were at fault. Lord Stratford and the British Admiral, if they could
+not prevent the Turkish ships from remaining in the Euxine, where they were
+useless against the superior force of Russia, might at least in exercise of
+the powers given to them have sent a sufficient escort to prevent an
+encounter. But the same ill-fortune and incompleteness that had marked all
+the diplomacy of the previous months attended the counsels of the Admirals
+at the Bosphorus; and the disaster of Sinope rendered war between the
+Western Powers and Russia almost inevitable. [466]
+
+[Effect of the action at Sinope.]
+
+[Russian ships required to enter port, December.]
+
+[England and France declare war, March 27, 1854.]
+
+The Turks themselves had certainly not understood the declaration of the
+Emperor Nicholas as assuring their squadron at Sinope against attack; and
+so far was the Ottoman Admiral from being the victim of a surprise that he
+had warned his Government some days before of the probability of his own
+destruction. But to the English people, indignant with Russia since its
+destruction of Hungarian liberty and its tyrannous demand for the surrender
+of the Hungarian refugees, all that now passed heaped up the intolerable
+sum of autocratic violence and deceit. The cannonade which was continued
+against the Turkish crews at Sinope long after they had become defenceless
+gave to the battle the aspect of a massacre; the supposed promise of the
+Czar to act only on the defensive caused it to be denounced as an act of
+flagrant treachery; the circumstance that the Turkish fleet was lying
+within one of the Sultan's harbours, touching as it were the territory
+which the navy of England had undertaken to protect, imparted to the attack
+the character of a direct challenge and defiance to England. The cry rose
+loud for war. Napoleon, eager for the alliance with England, eager in
+conjunction with England to play a great part before Europe, even at the
+cost of a war from which France had nothing to gain, proposed that the
+combined fleets should pass the Bosphorus and require every Russian vessel
+sailing on the Black Sea to re-enter port. His proposal was adopted by the
+British Government. Nicholas learnt that the Russian flag was swept from
+the Euxine. It was in vain that a note upon which the representatives of
+the Powers at Vienna had once more agreed was accepted by the Porte and
+forwarded to St. Petersburg (December 31). The pride of the Czar was
+wounded beyond endurance, and at the beginning of February he recalled his
+ambassadors from London and Paris. A letter written to him by Napoleon
+III., demanding in the name of himself and the Queen of England the
+evacuation of the Principalities, was answered by a reference to the
+campaign of Moscow, Austria now informed the Western Powers that if they
+would fix a delay for the evacuation of the Principalities, the expiration
+of which should be the signal for hostilities, it would support the
+summons; and without waiting to learn whether Austria would also unite with
+them in hostilities in the event of the summons being rejected, the British
+and French Governments despatched their ultimatum to St. Petersburg.
+Austria and Prussia sought, but in vain, to reconcile the Court of St.
+Petersburg to the only measure by which peace could now be preserved. The
+ultimatum remained without an answer, and on the 27th of March England and
+France declared war.
+
+[Policy of Austria.]
+
+The Czar had at one time believed that in his Eastern schemes he was sure
+of the support of Austria; and he had strong reasons for supposing himself
+entitled to its aid. But his mode of thought was simpler than that of the
+Court of Vienna. Schwarzenberg, when it was remarked that the intervention
+of Russia in Hungary would bind the House of Hapsburg too closely to its
+protector, had made the memorable answer, "We will astonish the world by
+our ingratitude." It is possible that an instance of Austrian gratitude
+would have astonished the world most of all; but Schwarzenberg's successors
+were not the men to sacrifice a sound principle to romance. Two courses of
+Eastern policy have, under various modifications, had their advocates in
+rival schools of statesmen at Vienna. The one is that of expansion
+southward in concert with Russia; the other is that of resistance to the
+extension of Russian power, and the consequent maintenance of the integrity
+of the Ottoman Empire. During Metternich's long rule, inspired as this was
+by a faith in the Treaties and the institutions of 1815, and by the dread
+of every living, disturbing force, the second of these systems had been
+consistently followed. In 1854 the determining motive of the Court of
+Vienna was not a decided political conviction, but the certainty that if it
+united with Russia it would be brought into war with the Western Powers.
+Had Russia and Turkey been likely to remain alone in the arena, an
+arrangement for territorial compensation would possibly, as on some other
+occasions, have won for the Czar an Austrian alliance. Combination against
+Turkey was, however, at the present time, too perilous an enterprise for
+the Austrian monarchy; and, as nothing was to be gained through the war, it
+remained for the Viennese diplomatists to see that nothing was lost and as
+little as possible wasted. The presence of Russian troops in the
+Principalities, where they controlled the Danube in its course between the
+Hungarian frontier and the Black Sea, was, in default of some definite
+understanding, a danger to Austria; and Count Buol, the Minister at Vienna,
+had therefore every reason to thank the Western Powers for insisting on the
+evacuation of this district. When France and England were burning to take
+up arms, it would have been a piece of superfluous brutality towards the
+Czar for Austria to attach to its own demand for the evacuation of the
+Principalities the threat of war. But this evacuation Austria was
+determined to enforce. It refused, as did Prussia, to give to the Czar the
+assurance of its neutrality; and, inasmuch as the free navigation of the
+Danube as far as the Black Sea had now become recognised as one of the
+commercial interests of Germany at large, Prussia and the German Federation
+undertook to protect the territory of Austria, if, in taking the measures
+necessary to free the Principalities, it should itself be attacked by
+Russia. [467]
+
+[Prussia.]
+
+The King of Prussia, clouded as his mind was by political and religious
+phantasms, had nevertheless at times a larger range of view than his
+neighbours; and his opinion as to the true solution of the difficulties
+between Nicholas and the Porte, at the time of Menschikoff's mission,
+deserved more attention than it received. Frederick William proposed that
+the rights of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should be placed by
+Treaty under the guarantee of all the Great Powers. This project was
+opposed by Lord Stratford and the Turkish Ministers as an encroachment on
+the Sultan's sovereignty, and its rejection led the King to write with some
+asperity to his ambassador in London that he should seek the welfare of
+Prussia in absolute neutrality. [468] At a later period the King demanded
+from England, as the condition of any assistance from himself, a guarantee
+for the maintenance of the frontiers of Germany and Prussia. He regarded
+Napoleon III. as the representative of a revolutionary system, and believed
+that under him French armies would soon endeavour to overthrow the order of
+Europe established in 1815. That England should enter into a close alliance
+with this man excited the King's astonishment and disgust; and unless the
+Cabinet of London were prepared to give a guarantee against any future
+attack on Germany by the French Emperor, who was believed to be ready for
+every political adventure, it was vain for England to seek Prussia's aid.
+Lord Aberdeen could give no such guarantee; still less could he gratify the
+King's strangely passionate demand for the restoration of his authority in
+the Swiss canton of Neuchatel, which before 1848 had belonged in name to
+the Hohenzollerns. Many influences were brought to bear upon the King from
+the side both of England and of Russia. The English Court and Ministers,
+strenuously supported by Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, strove to enlist
+the King in an active concert of Europe against Russia by dwelling on the
+duties of Prussia as a Great Power and the dangers arising to it from
+isolation. On the other hand, the admiration felt by Frederick William for
+the Emperor Nicholas, and the old habitual friendship between Prussia and
+Russia, gave strength to the Czar's advocates at Berlin. Schemes for a
+reconstruction of Europe, which were devised by Napoleon, and supposed to
+receive some countenance from Palmerston, reached the King's ear. [469] He
+heard that Austria was to be offered the Danubian Provinces upon condition
+of giving up northern Italy; that Piedmont was to receive Lombardy, and in
+return to surrender Savoy to France; that, if Austria should decline to
+unite actively with the Western Powers, revolutionary movements were to be
+stirred up in Italy and in Hungary. Such reports kindled the King's rage.
+"Be under no illusion," he wrote to his ambassador; "tell the British
+Ministers in their private ear and on the housetops that I will not suffer
+Austria to be attacked by the revolution without drawing the sword in its
+defence. If England and France let loose revolution as their ally, be it
+where it may, I unite with Russia for life and death." Bunsen advocated the
+participation of Prussia in the European concert with more earnestness than
+success. While the King was declaiming against the lawlessness which was
+supposed to have spread from the Tuileries to Downing Street, Bunsen, on
+his own authority, sent to Berlin a project for the annexation of Russian
+territory by Prussia as a reward for its alliance with the Western Courts.
+This document fell into the hands of the Russian party at Berlin, and it
+roused the King's own indignation. Bitter reproaches were launched against
+the authors of so felonious a scheme. Bunsen could no longer retain his
+office. Other advocates of the Western alliance were dismissed from their
+places, and the policy of neutrality carried the day at Berlin.
+
+[Relation of the Western Powers to the European Concert.]
+
+The situation of the European Powers in April, 1854, was thus a very
+strange one. All the Four Powers were agreed in demanding the evacuation of
+the Principalities by Russia, and in the resolution to enforce this, if
+necessary, by arms. Protocols witnessing this agreement were signed on the
+9th of April and the 23rd of May, [470] and it was moreover declared that
+the Four Powers recognised the necessity of maintaining the independence
+and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. But France and England, while they
+made the presence of the Russians in the Principalities the avowed cause of
+war, had in reality other intentions than the mere expulsion of the
+intruder and the restoration of the state of things previously existing. It
+was their desire so to cripple Russia that it should not again be in a
+condition to menace the Ottoman Empire. This intention made it impossible
+for the British Cabinet to name, as the basis of a European league, that
+single definite object for which, and for which alone, all the Powers were
+in May, 1854, ready to unite in arms. England, the nation and the
+Government alike, chose rather to devote itself, in company with France, to
+the task of indefinitely weakening Russia than, in company with all Europe,
+to force Russia to one humiliating but inevitable act of submission.
+Whether in the prosecution of their ulterior objects the Western Courts
+might or might not receive some armed assistance from Austria and Prussia
+no man could yet predict with confidence. That Austria would to some extent
+make common cause with the Allies seemed not unlikely; that Prussia would
+do so there was no real ground to believe; on the contrary, fair warning
+had been given that there were contingencies in which Prussia might
+ultimately be found on the side of the Czar. Striving to the utmost to
+discover some principle, some object, or even some formula which might
+expand the purely defensive basis accepted by Austria and Prussia into a
+common policy of reconstructive action, the Western Powers could obtain
+nothing more definite from the Conference at Vienna than the following
+shadowy engagement:--"The Four Governments engage to endeavour in common to
+discover the guarantees most likely to attach the existence of the Ottoman
+Empire to the general equilibrium of Europe. They are ready to deliberate
+as to the employment of means calculated to accomplish the object of their
+agreement." This readiness to deliberate, so cautiously professed, was a
+quality in which during the two succeeding years the Courts of Vienna and
+Berlin were not found wanting; but the war in which England and France now
+engaged was one which they had undertaken at their own risk, and they
+discovered little anxiety on any side to share their labour.
+
+[Siege of Silistria, May.]
+
+[The Principalities evacuated, June.]
+
+During the winter of 1853 and the first weeks of the following year
+hostilities of an indecisive character continued between the Turks and the
+Russians on the Danube. At the outbreak of the war Nicholas had consulted
+the veteran Paskiewitsch as to the best road by which to march on
+Constantinople. Paskiewitsch, as a strategist, knew the danger to which a
+Russian force crossing the Danube would be exposed from the presence of
+Austrian armies on its flank; as commander in the invasion of Hungary in
+1849 he had encountered, as he believed, ill faith and base dealing on the
+part of his ally, and had repaid it with insult and scorn; he had learnt
+better than any other man the military and the moral weakness of the
+Austrian Empire in its eastern part. His answer to the Czar's inquiries
+was, "The road to Constantinople lies through Vienna." But whatever
+bitterness the Czar might have felt at the ingratitude of Francis Joseph,
+he was not ready for a war with Austria, in which he could hardly have
+avoided the assistance of revolutionary allies; moreover, if the road to
+Constantinople lay through Vienna, it might be urged that the road to
+Vienna lay through Berlin. The simpler plan was adopted of a march on the
+Balkans by way of Shumla, to which the capture of Silistria was to be the
+prelude. At the end of March the Russian vanguard passed the Danube at the
+lowest point where a crossing could be made, and advanced into the
+Dobrudscha. In May the siege of Silistria was undertaken by Paskiewitsch
+himself. But the enterprise began too late, and the strength employed both
+in the siege and in the field operations farther east was insufficient. The
+Turkish garrison, schooled by a German engineer and animated by two young
+English officers, maintained a stubborn and effective resistance. French
+and English troops had already landed at Gallipoli for the defence of
+Constantinople, and finding no enemy within range had taken ship for Varna
+on the north of the Balkans. Austria, on the 3rd of June, delivered its
+summons requiring the evacuation of the Principalities. Almost at the same
+time Paskiewitsch received a wound that disabled him, and was forced to
+surrender his command into other hands. During the succeeding fortnight the
+besiegers of Silistria were repeatedly driven back, and on the 22nd they
+were compelled to raise the siege. The Russians, now hard pressed by an
+enemy whom they had despised, withdrew to the north of the Danube. The
+retreating movement was continued during the succeeding weeks, until the
+evacuation of the Principalities was complete, and the last Russian soldier
+had recrossed the Pruth. As the invader retired, Austria sent its troops
+into these provinces, pledging itself by a convention with the Porte to
+protect them until peace should be concluded, and then to restore them to
+the Sultan.
+
+[Further objects of the Western Powers.]
+
+With the liberation of the Principalities the avowed ground of war passed
+away; but the Western Powers had no intention of making peace without
+further concessions on the part of Russia. As soon as the siege of
+Silistria was raised instructions were sent to the commanders of the allied
+armies at Varna, pressing, if not absolutely commanding, them to attack
+Sebastopol, the headquarters of Russian maritime power in the Euxine. The
+capture of Sebastopol had been indicated some months before by Napoleon
+III. as the most effective blow that could be dealt to Russia. It was from
+Sebastopol that the fleet had issued which destroyed the Turks at Sinope:
+until this arsenal had fallen, the growing naval might which pressed even
+more directly upon Constantinople than the neighbourhood of the Czar's
+armies by land could not be permanently laid low. The objects sought by
+England and France were now gradually brought into sufficient clearness to
+be communicated to the other Powers, though the more precise interpretation
+of the conditions laid down remained open for future discussion. It was
+announced that the Protectorate of Russia over the Danubian Principalities
+and Servia must be abolished; that the navigation of the Danube at its
+mouths must be freed from all obstacles; that the Treaty of July, 1841,
+relating to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, must be revised in the
+interest of the balance of power in Europe; and that the claim to any
+official Protectorate over Christian subjects of the Porte, of whatever
+rite, must be abandoned by the Czar. Though these conditions, known as the
+Four Points, were not approved by Prussia, they were accepted by Austria in
+August, 1854, and were laid before Russia as the basis of any negotiation
+for peace. The Czar declared in answer that Russia would only negotiate on
+such a basis when at the last extremity. The Allied Governments, measuring
+their enemy's weakness by his failure before Silistria, were determined to
+accept nothing less; and the attack upon Sebastopol, ordered before the
+evacuation of the Principalities, was consequently allowed to take its
+course. [471]
+
+[Sebastopol.]
+
+[The Allies land in the Crimea, Sept. 14.]
+
+[Battle of the Alma, Sept. 20.]
+
+The Roadstead, or Great Harbour, of Sebastopol runs due eastwards inland
+from a point not far from the south-western extremity of the Crimea. One
+mile from the open sea its waters divide, the larger arm still running
+eastwards till it meets the River Tchernaya, the smaller arm, known as the
+Man-of-War Harbour, bending sharply to the south. On both sides of this
+smaller harbour Sebastopol is built. To the seaward, that is from the
+smaller harbour westwards, Sebastopol and its approaches were thoroughly
+fortified. On its landward, southern, side the town had been open till
+1853, and it was still but imperfectly protected, most weakly on the
+south-eastern side. On the north of the Great Harbour Fort Constantine at
+the head of a line of strong defences guarded the entrance from the sea;
+while on the high ground immediately opposite Sebastopol and commanding the
+town there stood the Star Fort with other military constructions. The
+general features of Sebastopol were known to the Allied commanders; they
+had, however, no precise information as to the force by which it was held,
+nor as to the armament of its fortifications. It was determined that the
+landing should be made in the Bay of Eupatoria, thirty miles north of the
+fortress. Here, on the 14th of September, the Allied forces, numbering
+about thirty thousand French, twenty-seven thousand English, and seven
+thousand Turks, effected their disembarkation without meeting any
+resistance. The Russians, commanded by Prince Menschikoff, lately envoy at
+Constantinople, had taken post ten miles further south on high ground
+behind the River Alma. On the 20th of September they were attacked in front
+by the English, while the French attempted a turning movement from the sea.
+The battle was a scene of confusion, and for a moment the assault of the
+English seemed to be rolled back. But it was renewed with ever increasing
+vigour, and before the French had made any impression on the Russian left
+Lord Raglan's troops had driven the enemy from their positions. Struck on
+the flank when their front was already broken, outnumbered and badly led,
+the Russians gave up all for lost. The form of an orderly retreat was
+maintained only long enough to disguise from the conquerors the
+completeness of their victory. When night fell the Russian army abandoned
+itself to total disorder, and had the pursuit been made at once it could
+scarcely have escaped destruction. But St. Arnaud, who was in the last
+stage of mortal illness, refused, in spite of the appeal of Lord Raglan, to
+press on his wearied troops. Menschikoff, abandoning the hope of checking
+the advance of the Allies in a second battle, and anxious only to prevent
+the capture of Sebastopol by an enemy supposed to be following at his
+heels, retired into the fortress, and there sank seven of his war-ships as
+a barrier across the mouth of the Great Harbour, mooring the rest within.
+The crews were brought on shore to serve in the defence by land; the guns
+were dragged from the ships to the bastions and redoubts. Then, when it
+appeared that the Allies lingered, the Russian commander altered his plan.
+Leaving Korniloff, the Vice-Admiral, and Todleben, an officer of engineers,
+to man the existing works and to throw up new ones where the town was
+undefended, Menschikoff determined to lead off the bulk of his army into
+the interior of the Crimea, in order to keep open his communications with
+Russia, to await in freedom the arrival of reinforcements, and, if
+Sebastopol should not at once fall, to attack the Allies at his own time
+and opportunity. (September 24th.)
+
+[Flank march to south of Sebastopol.]
+
+[Ineffectual Bombardment, Sept. 17-25.]
+
+The English had lost in the battle of the Alma about two thousand men, the
+French probably less than half that number. On the morning after the
+engagement Lord Raglan proposed that the two armies should march straight
+against the fortifications lying on the north of the Great Harbour, and
+carry these by storm, so winning a position where their guns would command
+Sebastopol itself. The French, supported by Burgoyne, the chief of the
+English engineers, shrank from the risk of a front attack on works supposed
+to be more formidable than they really were, and induced Lord Raglan to
+consent to a long circuitous march which would bring the armies right round
+Sebastopol to its more open southern side, from which, it was thought, an
+assault might be successfully made. This flank-march, which was one of
+extreme risk, was carried out safely, Menschikoff himself having left
+Sebastopol, and having passed along the same road in his retreat into the
+interior a little before the appearance of the Allies. Pushing southward,
+the English reached the sea at Balaclava, and took possession of the
+harbour there, accepting the exposed eastward line between the fortress and
+the Russia is outside; the French, now commanded by Canrobert, continued
+their march westwards round the back of Sebastopol, and touched the sea at
+Kasatch Bay. The two armies were thus masters of the broken plateau which,
+rising westwards from the plain of Balaclava and the valley of the
+Tchernaya, overlooks Sebastopol on its southern side. That the garrison,
+which now consisted chiefly of sailors, could at this moment have resisted
+the onslaught of the fifty thousand troops who had won the battle of the
+Alma, the Russians themselves did not believe; [472] but once more the
+French staff, with Burgoyne, urged caution, and it was determined to wait
+for the siege-guns, which were still at sea. The decision was a fatal one.
+While the Allies chose positions for their heavy artillery and slowly
+landed and placed their guns, Korniloff and Todleben made the
+fortifications on the southern side of Sebastopol an effective barrier
+before an enemy. The sacrifice of the Russian fleet had not been in vain.
+The sailors were learning all the duties of a garrison: the cannon from the
+ships proved far more valuable on land. Three weeks of priceless time were
+given to leaders who knew how to turn every moment to account. When, on the
+17th of October, the bombardment which was to precede the assault on
+Sebastopol began, the French artillery, operating on the south-west, was
+overpowered by that of the defenders. The fleets in vain thundered against
+the solid sea-front of the fortress. At the end of eight days' cannonade,
+during which the besiegers' batteries poured such a storm of shot and shell
+upon Sebastopol as no fortress had yet withstood, the defences were still
+unbroken.
+
+[Battle of Balaclava, Oct. 25.]
+
+Menschikoff in the meantime had received the reinforcements which he
+expected, and was now ready to fall upon the besiegers from the east. His
+point of attack was the English port of Balaclava and the fortified road
+lying somewhat east of this, which formed the outer line held by the
+English and their Turkish supports. The plain of Balaclava is divided by a
+low ridge into a northern and a southern valley. Along this ridge runs the
+causeway, which had been protected by redoubts committed to a weak Turkish
+guard. On the morning of the 25th the Russians appeared in the northern
+valley. They occupied the heights rising from it on the north and east,
+attacked the causeway, captured three of the redoubts, and drove off the
+Turks, left to meet their onset alone. Lord Raglan, who watched these
+operations from the edge of the western plateau, ordered up infantry from a
+distance, but the only English troops on the spot were a light and a heavy
+brigade of cavalry, each numbering about six hundred men. The Heavy
+Brigade, under General Scarlett, was directed to move towards Balaclava
+itself, which was now threatened. While they were on the march, a dense
+column of Russian cavalry, about three thousand strong, appeared above the
+crest of the low ridge, ready, as it seemed, to overwhelm the weak troops
+before them. But in their descent from the ridge the Russians halted, and
+Scarlett with admirable courage and judgment formed his men for attack, and
+charged full into the enemy with the handful who were nearest to him. They
+cut their way into the very heart of the column; and before the Russians
+could crush them with mere weight the other regiments of the same brigade
+hurled themselves on the right and on the left against the huge inert mass.
+The Russians broke and retreated in disorder before a quarter of their
+number, leaving to Scarlett and his men the glory of an action which
+ranks with the Prussian attack at Mars-la-Tour in 1870 as the most
+brilliant cavalry operation in modern warfare. The squadrons of the Light
+Brigade, during the peril and the victory of their comrades, stood
+motionless, paralysed by the same defect of temper or intelligence in
+command which was soon to devote them to a fruitless but ever-memorable
+act of self-sacrifice. Russian infantry were carrying off the cannon from
+the conquered redoubts on the causeway, when an aide-de-camp from the
+general-in-chief brought to the Earl of Lucan, commander of the cavalry,
+an order to advance rapidly to the front, and save these guns. Lucan, who
+from his position could see neither the enemy nor the guns, believed
+himself ordered to attack the Russian artillery at the extremity of the
+northern valley, and he directed the Light Brigade to charge in this
+direction. It was in vain that the leader of the Light Brigade, Lord
+Cardigan, warned his chief, in words which were indeed but too weak, that
+there was a battery in front, a battery on each flank, and that the
+ground was covered with Russian riflemen. The order was repeated as that
+of the head of the army, and it was obeyed. Thus
+
+  "Into the valley of Death
+   Rode the Six Hundred."
+
+How they died there, the remnant not turning till they had hewn their way
+past the guns and routed the enemy's cavalry behind them, the English
+people will never forget. [473]
+
+[Battle of Inkermann, Nov. 5.]
+
+The day of Balaclava brought to each side something of victory and
+something of failure. The Russians remained masters of the road that they
+had captured, and carried off seven English guns; the English, where they
+had met the enemy, proved that they could defeat overwhelming numbers. Not
+many days passed before our infantry were put to the test which the cavalry
+had so victoriously undergone. The siege-approaches of the French had been
+rapidly advanced, and it was determined that on the 5th of November the
+long-deferred assault on Sebastopol should be made. On that very morning,
+under cover of a thick mist, the English right was assailed by massive
+columns of the enemy. Menschikoff's army had now risen to a hundred
+thousand men; he had thrown troops into Sebastopol, and had planned the
+capture of the English positions by a combined attack from Sebastopol
+itself, and by troops advancing from the lower valley of the Tchernaya
+across the bridge of Inkermann. The battle of the 5th of November, on the
+part of the English, was a soldier's battle, without generalship, without
+order, without design. The men, standing to their ground whatever their own
+number and whatever that of the foe, fought, after their ammunition was
+exhausted, with bayonets, with the butt ends of their muskets, with their
+fists and with stones. For hours the ever-surging Russian mass rolled in
+upon them; but they maintained the unequal struggle until the arrival of
+French regiments saved them from their deadly peril and the enemy were
+driven in confusion from the field. The Russian columns, marching right up
+to the guns, had been torn in pieces by artillery-fire. Their loss in
+killed and wounded was enormous, their defeat one which no ingenuity could
+disguise. Yet the battle of Inkermann had made the capture of Sebastopol,
+as it had been planned by the Allies, impossible. Their own loss was too
+great, the force which the enemy had displayed was too vast, to leave any
+hope that the fortress could be mastered by a sudden assault. The terrible
+truth soon became plain that the enterprise on which the armies had been
+sent had in fact failed, and that another enterprise of a quite different
+character, a winter siege in the presence of a superior enemy, a campaign
+for which no preparations had been made, and for which all that was most
+necessary was wanting, formed the only alternative to an evacuation of the
+Crimea.
+
+[Storm of Nov. 14.]
+
+[Winter in the Crimea.]
+
+On the 14th of November the Euxine winter began with a storm which swept
+away the tents on the exposed plateau, and wrecked twenty-one vessels
+bearing stores of ammunition and clothing. From this time rain and snow
+turned the tract between the camp and Balaclava into a morass. The loss of
+the paved road which had been captured by the Russians three weeks before
+now told with fatal effect on the British army. The only communication with
+the port of Balaclava was by a hillside track, which soon became impassable
+by carts. It was necessary to bring up supplies on the backs of horses; but
+the horses perished from famine and from excessive labour. The men were too
+few, too weak, too destitute of the helpful ways of English sailors, to
+assist in providing for themselves. Thus penned up on the bleak promontory,
+cholera-stricken, mocked rather than sustained during their benumbing toil
+with rations of uncooked meat and green coffee-berries, the British
+soldiery wasted away. Their effective force sank at midwinter to eleven
+thousand men. In the hospitals, which even at Scutari were more deadly to
+those who passed within them than the fiercest fire of the enemy, nine
+thousand men perished before the end of February. The time indeed came when
+the very Spirit of Mercy seemed to enter these abodes of woe, and in the
+presence of Florence Nightingale nature at last regained its healing power,
+pestilence no longer hung in the atmosphere which the sufferers breathed,
+and death itself grew mild. But before this new influence had vanquished
+routine the grave had closed over whole regiments of men whom it had no
+right to claim. The sufferings of other armies have been on a greater
+scale, but seldom has any body of troops furnished a heavier tale of loss
+and death in proportion to its numbers than the British army during the
+winter of the Crimean War. The unsparing exposure in the Press of the
+mismanagement under which our soldiers were perishing excited an outburst
+of indignation which overthrew Lord Aberdeen's Ministry and placed
+Palmerston in power. It also gave to Europe at large an impression that
+Great Britain no longer knew how to conduct a war, and unduly raised the
+reputation of the French military administration, whose shortcomings, great
+as they were, no French journalist dared to describe. In spite of Alma and
+Inkermann, the military prestige of England was injured, not raised, by the
+Crimean campaign; nor was it until the suppression of the Indian Mutiny
+that the true capacity of the nation in war was again vindicated before the
+world.
+
+[Death of Nicholas, March 2, 1855.]
+
+[Conference of Vienna, March-May, 1855.]
+
+[Austria.]
+
+"I have two generals who will not fail me," the Czar is reported to have
+said when he heard of Menschikoff's last defeat, "Generals January and
+February." General February fulfilled his task, but he smote the Czar too.
+In the first days of March a new monarch inherited the Russian crown. [474]
+Alexander II. ascended the throne, announcing that he would adhere to the
+policy of Peter the Great, of Catherine, and of Nicholas. But the proud
+tone was meant rather for the ear of Russia than of Europe, since Nicholas
+had already expressed his willingness to treat for peace on the basis laid
+down by the Western Powers in August, 1854. This change was not produced
+wholly by the battles of Alma and Inkermann. Prussia, finding itself
+isolated in Germany, had after some months of hesitation given a diplomatic
+sanction to the Four Points approved by Austria as indispensable conditions
+of peace. Russia thus stood forsaken, as it seemed, by its only friend, and
+Nicholas could no longer hope to escape with the mere abandonment of those
+claims which had been the occasion of the war. He consented to treat with
+his enemies on their own terms. Austria now approached still more closely
+to the Western Powers, and bound itself by treaty, in the event of peace
+not being concluded by the end of the year on the stated basis, to
+deliberate with France and England upon effectual means for obtaining the
+object of the Alliance. [475] Preparations were made for a Conference at
+Vienna, from which Prussia, still declining to pledge itself to warlike
+action in case of the failure of the negotiations, was excluded. The
+sittings of the Conference began a few days after the accession of
+Alexander II. Russia was represented by its ambassador, Prince Alexander
+Gortschakoff, who, as Minister of later years, was to play so conspicuous a
+part in undoing the work of the Crimean epoch. On the first two Articles
+forming the subject of negotiation, namely the abolition of the Russian
+Protectorate over Servia and the Principalities, and the removal of all
+impediments to the free navigation of the Danube, agreement was reached.
+On the third Article, the revision of the Treaty of July, 1841, relating
+to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, the Russian envoy and the
+representatives of the Western Powers found themselves completely at
+variance. Gortschakoff had admitted that the Treaty of 1841 must be so
+revised as to put an end to the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea;
+[476] but while the Western Governments insisted upon the exclusion of
+Russian war-vessels from these waters, Gortschakoff would consent only to
+the abolition of Russia's preponderance by the free admission of the
+war-vessels of all nations, or by some similar method of counterpoise.
+The negotiations accordingly came to an end, but not before Austria,
+disputing the contention of the Allies that the object of the third
+Article could be attained only by the specific means proposed by them,
+had brought forward a third scheme based partly upon the limitation of
+the Russian navy in the Euxine, partly upon the admission of war-ships of
+other nations. This scheme was rejected by the Western Powers, whereupon
+Austria declared that its obligations under the Treaty of December 2nd,
+1854, had now been fulfilled, and that it returned in consequence to the
+position of a neutral.
+
+Great indignation was felt and was expressed at London and Paris at this
+so-called act of desertion, and at the subsequent withdrawal of Austrian
+regiments from the positions which they had occupied in anticipation of
+war. It was alleged that in the first two conditions of peace Austria had
+seen its own special interests effectually secured; and that as soon as the
+Court of St. Petersburg had given the necessary assurances on these heads
+the Cabinet of Vienna was willing to sacrifice the other objects of the
+Alliance and to abandon the cause of the Maritime Powers, in order to
+regain, with whatever loss of honour, the friendship of the Czar. Though it
+was answered with perfect truth that Austria had never accepted the
+principle of the exclusion of Russia from the Black Sea, and was still
+ready to take up arms in defence of that system by which it considered that
+Russia's preponderance in the Black Sea might be most suitably prevented,
+this argument sounded hollow to combatants convinced of the futility of all
+methods for holding Russia in check except their own. Austria had
+grievously injured its own position and credit with the Western Powers. On
+the other hand it had wounded Russia too deeply to win from the Czar the
+forgiveness which it expected. Its policy of balance, whether best
+described as too subtle or as too impartial, had miscarried. It had
+forfeited its old, without acquiring new friendships. It remained isolated
+in Europe, and destined to meet without support and without an ally the
+blows which were soon to fall upon it.
+
+[Progress of the siege, January-May, 1855.]
+
+[Canrobert succeeded by Pelissier, May.]
+
+[Unsuccessful assault, June 18.]
+
+[Battle of the Tchernaya, Aug. 16.]
+
+[Capture of the Malakoff, Sept. 8.]
+
+[Fall of Sebastopol, Sept. 9.]
+
+The prospects of the besieging armies before Sebastopol were in some
+respects better towards the close of January, 1855, than they were when the
+Conference of Vienna commenced its sittings six weeks later. Sardinia,
+under the guidance of Cavour, had joined the Western Alliance, and was
+about to send fifteen thousand soldiers to the Crimea. A new plan of
+operations, which promised excellent results, had been adopted at
+headquarters. Up to the end of 1854 the French had directed their main
+attack against the Flagstaff bastion, a little to the west of the head of
+the Man-of-War Harbour. They were now, however, convinced by Lord Raglan
+that the true keystone to the defences of Sebastopol was the Malakoff, on
+the eastern side, and they undertook the reduction of this formidable work,
+while the British directed their efforts against the neighbouring Redan.
+[477] The heaviest fire of the besiegers being thus concentrated on a
+narrow line, it seemed as if Sebastopol must soon fall. But at the
+beginning of February a sinister change came over the French camp. General
+Niel arrived from Paris vested with powers which really placed him in
+control of the general-in-chief; and though Canrobert was but partially
+made acquainted with the Emperor's designs, he was forced to sacrifice to
+them much of his own honour and that of the army. Napoleon had determined
+to come to the Crimea himself, and at the fitting moment to end by one
+grand stroke the war which had dragged so heavily in the hands of others.
+He believed that Sebastopol could only be taken by a complete investment;
+and it was his design to land with a fresh army on the south-eastern coast
+of the Crimea, to march across the interior of the peninsula, to sweep
+Menschikoff's forces from their position above the Tchernaya, and to
+complete the investment of Sebastopol from the north. With this scheme of
+operations in view, all labour expended in the attack on Sebastopol from
+the south was effort thrown away. Canrobert, who had promised his most
+vigorous co-operation to Lord Raglan, was fettered and paralysed by the
+Emperor's emissary at headquarters. For three successive months the
+Russians not only held their own, but by means of counter-approaches won
+back from the French some of the ground that they had taken. The very
+existence of the Alliance was threatened when, after Canrobert and Lord
+Raglan had despatched a force to seize the Russian posts on the Sea of
+Azof, the French portion of this force was peremptorily recalled by the
+Emperor, in order that it might be employed in the march northwards across
+the Crimea. At length, unable to endure the miseries of the position,
+Canrobert asked to be relieved of his command. He was succeeded by General
+Pelissier. Pelissier, a resolute, energetic soldier, one moreover who did
+not owe his promotion to complicity in the _coup d'etat_, flatly
+refused to obey the Emperor's orders. Sweeping aside the flimsy schemes
+evolved at the Tuileries, he returned with all his heart to the plan agreed
+upon by the Allied commanders at the beginning of the year; and from this
+time, though disasters were still in store, they were not the result of
+faltering or disloyalty at the headquarters of the French army. The general
+assault on the Malakoff and the Redan was fixed for the 18th of June. It
+was bravely met by the Russians; the Allies were driven back with heavy
+loss, and three months more were added to the duration of the siege. Lord
+Raglan did not live to witness the last stage of the war. Exhausted by his
+labours, heartsick at the failure of the great attack, he died on the 28th
+of June, leaving the command to General Simpson, an officer far his
+inferior. As the lines of the besiegers approached nearer and nearer to the
+Russian fortifications, the army which had been defeated at Inkermann
+advanced for one last effort. Crossing the Tchernaya, it gave battle on the
+16th of August. The French and the Sardinians, with little assistance from
+the British army, won a decisive victory. Sebastopol could hope no longer
+for assistance from without, and on the 8th of September the blow which had
+failed in June was dealt once more. The French, throwing themselves in
+great strength upon the Malakoff, carried this fortress by storm, and
+frustrated every effort made for its recovery; the British, attacking the
+Redan with a miserably weak force, were beaten and overpowered. But the
+fall of the Malakoff was in itself equivalent to the capture of Sebastopol.
+A few more hours passed, and a series of tremendous explosions made known
+to the Allies that the Russian commander was blowing up his magazines and
+withdrawing to the north of the Great Harbour. The prize was at length won,
+and at the end of a siege of three hundred and fifty days what remained of
+the Czar's great fortress passed into the hands of his enemies.
+
+[Exhaustion of Russia.]
+
+[Fall of Kars, Nov. 28.]
+
+[Negotiations for peace.]
+
+The Allies had lost since their landing in the Crimea not less than a
+hundred thousand men. An enterprise undertaken in the belief that it would
+be accomplished in the course of a few weeks, and with no greater sacrifice
+of life than attends every attack upon a fortified place, had proved
+arduous and terrible almost beyond example. Yet if the Crimean campaign was
+the result of error and blindness on the part of the invaders, it was
+perhaps even more disastrous to Russia than any warfare in which an enemy
+would have been likely to engage with fuller knowledge of the conditions to
+be met. The vast distances that separated Sebastopol from the military
+depots in the interior of Russia made its defence a drain of the most
+fearful character on the levies and the resources of the country. What tens
+of thousands sank in the endless, unsheltered march without ever nearing
+the sea, what provinces were swept of their beasts of burden, when every
+larger shell fired against the enemy had to be borne hundreds of miles by
+oxen, the records of the war but vaguely make known. The total loss of the
+Russians should perhaps be reckoned at three times that of the Allies. Yet
+the fall of Sebastopol was not immediately followed by peace. The
+hesitation of the Allies in cutting off the retreat of the Russian army had
+enabled its commander to retain his hold upon the Crimea; in Asia, the
+delays of a Turkish relieving army gave to the Czar one last gleam of
+success in the capture of Kars, which, after a strenuous resistance,
+succumbed to famine on the 28th of November. But before Kars had fallen
+negotiations for peace had commenced. France was weary of the war.
+Napoleon, himself unwilling to continue it except at the price of French
+aggrandisement on the Continent, was surrounded by a band of palace
+stock-jobbers who had staked everything on the rise of the funds that would
+result from peace. It was known at every Court of Europe that the Allies
+were completely at variance with one another; that while the English
+nation, stung by the failure of its military administration during the
+winter, by the nullity of its naval operations in the Baltic, and by the
+final disaster at the Redan, was eager to prove its real power in a new
+campaign, the ruler of France, satisfied with the crowning glory of the
+Malakoff, was anxious to conclude peace on any tolerable terms. Secret
+communications from St. Petersburg were made at Paris by Baron Seebach,
+envoy of Saxony, a son-in-law of the Russian Chancellor: the Austrian
+Cabinet, still bent on acting the part of arbiter, but hopeless of the
+results of a new Conference, addressed itself to the Emperor Napoleon
+singly, and persuaded him to enter into a negotiation which was concealed
+for a while from Great Britain. The two intrigues were simultaneously
+pursued by our ally, but Seebach's proposals were such that even the
+warmest friends of Russia at the Tuileries could scarcely support them, and
+the Viennese diplomatists won the day. It was agreed that a note containing
+Preliminaries of Peace should be presented by Austria at St. Petersburg as
+its own ultimatum, after the Emperor Napoleon should have won from the
+British Government its assent to these terms without any alteration. The
+Austrian project embodied indeed the Four Points which Britain had in
+previous months fixed as the conditions of peace, and in substance it
+differed little from what, even after the fall of Sebastopol, British
+statesmen were still prepared to accept; but it was impossible that a
+scheme completed without the participation of Britain and laid down for its
+passive acceptance should be thus uncomplainingly adopted by its
+Government. Lord Palmerston required that the Four Articles enumerated
+should be understood to cover points not immediately apparent on their
+surface, and that a fifth Article should be added reserving to the Powers
+the right of demanding certain further special conditions, it being
+understood that Great Britain would require under this clause only that
+Russia should bind itself to leave the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea
+unfortified. Modified in accordance with the demand of the British
+Government, the Austrian draft was presented to the Czar at the end of
+December, with the notification that if it as not accepted by the 16th of
+January the Austrian ambassador would quit St. Petersburg. On the 15th a
+Council was held in the presence of the Czar. Nesselrode, who first gave
+his opinion, urged that the continuance of the war would plunge Russia into
+hostilities with all Europe, and advised submission to a compact which
+would last only until Russia had recovered its strength or new relations
+had arisen among the Powers. One Minister after another declared that
+Poland, Finland, the Crimea, and the Caucasus would be endangered if peace
+were not now made; the Chief of the Finances stated that Russia could not
+go through another campaign without bankruptcy. [478] At the end of the
+discussion the Council declared unanimously in favour of accepting the
+Austrian propositions; and although the national feeling was still in
+favour of resistance, there appears to have been one Russian statesman
+alone, Prince Gortschakoff, ambassador at Vienna, who sought to dissuade
+the Czar from making peace. His advice was not taken. The vote of the
+Council was followed by the despatch of plenipotentiaries to Paris, and
+here, on the 25th of February, 1856, the envoys of all the Powers, with the
+exception of Prussia, assembled in Conference, in order to frame the
+definitive Treaty of Peace. [479]
+
+[Conference of Paris, Feb. 25, 1856.]
+
+[Treaty of Paris, March 30, 1856.]
+
+In the debates which now followed, and which occupied more than a month,
+Lord Clarendon, who represented Great Britain, discovered that in each
+contested point he had to fight against the Russian and the French envoys
+combined, so completely was the Court of the Tuileries now identified with
+a policy of conciliation and friendliness towards Russia. [480] Great
+firmness, great plainness of speech was needed on the part of the British
+Government, in order to prevent the recognised objects of the war from
+being surrendered by its ally, not from a conviction that they were
+visionary or unattainable, but from unsteadiness of purpose and from the
+desire to convert a defeated enemy into a friend. The end, however, was at
+length reached, and on the 30th of March the Treaty of Paris was signed.
+The Black Sea was neutralised; its waters and ports, thrown open to the
+mercantile marine of every nation, were formally and in perpetuity
+interdicted to the war-ships both of the Powers possessing its coasts and
+of all other Powers. The Czar and the Sultan undertook not to establish or
+maintain upon its coasts any military or maritime arsenal. Russia ceded a
+portion of Bessarabia, accepting a frontier which excluded it from the
+Danube. The free navigation of this river, henceforth to be effectively
+maintained by an international Commission, was declared part of the public
+law of Europe. The Powers declared the Sublime Porte admitted to
+participate in the advantages of the public law and concert of Europe, each
+engaging to respect the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire,
+and all guaranteeing in common the strict observance of this engagement,
+and promising to consider any act tending to its violation as a question of
+general interest. The Sultan "having, in his constant solicitude for the
+welfare of his subjects, issued a firman recording his generous intentions
+towards the Christian population of his empire, [481] and having
+communicated it to the Powers," the Powers "recognised the high value of
+this communication," declaring at the same time "that it could not, in any
+case, give to them the right to interfere, either collectively or
+separately, in the relations of the Sultan to his subjects, or in the
+internal administration of his empire." The Danubian Principalities,
+augmented by the strip of Bessarabia taken from Russia, were to continue to
+enjoy, under the suzerainty of the Porte and under the guarantee of the
+Powers, all the privileges and immunities of which they were in possession,
+no exclusive protection being exercised by any of the guaranteeing
+Powers. [482]
+
+[Agreement of the Conference on rights of neutrals.]
+
+Passing beyond the immediate subjects of negotiation, the Conference
+availed itself of its international character to gain the consent of Great
+Britain to a change in the laws of maritime war. England had always
+claimed, and had always exercised, the right to seize an enemy's goods on
+the high sea though conveyed in a neutral vessel, and to search the
+merchant-ships of neutrals for this purpose. The exercise of this right had
+stirred up against England the Maritime League of 1800, and was condemned
+by nearly the whole civilised world. Nothing short of an absolute command
+of the seas made it safe or possible for a single Power to maintain a
+practice which threatened at moments of danger to turn the whole body of
+neutral States into its enemies. Moreover, if the seizure of belligerents'
+goods in neutral ships profited England when it was itself at war, it
+injured England at all times when it remained at peace during the struggles
+of other States. Similarly by the issue of privateers England inflicted
+great injury on its enemies; but its own commerce, exceeding that of every
+other State, offered to the privateers of its foes a still richer booty.
+The advantages of the existing laws of maritime war were not altogether on
+the side of England, though mistress of the seas; and in return for the
+abolition of privateering, the British Government consented to surrender
+its sharpest, but most dangerous, weapon of offence, and to permit the
+products of a hostile State to find a market in time of war. The rule was
+laid down that the goods of an enemy other than contraband of war should
+henceforth be safe under a neutral flag. Neutrals' goods discovered on an
+enemy's ship were similarly made exempt from capture.
+
+[Fictions of the Treaty of Paris as to Turkey.]
+
+The enactments of the Conference of Paris relating to commerce in time of
+hostilities have not yet been subjected to the strain of a war between
+England and any European State; its conclusions on all other subjects were
+but too soon put to the test, and have one after another been found
+wanting. If the Power which calls man into his moment of life could smile
+at the efforts and the assumptions of its creature, such smile might have
+been moved by the assembly of statesmen who, at the close of the Crimean
+War, affected to shape the future of Eastern Europe. They persuaded
+themselves that by dint of the iteration of certain phrases they could
+convert the Sultan and his hungry troop of Pashas into the chiefs of a
+European State. They imagined that the House of Osman, which in the stages
+of a continuous decline had successively lost its sway over Hungary, over
+Servia, over Southern Greece and the Danubian Provinces, and which would
+twice within the last twenty-five years have seen its Empire dashed to
+pieces by an Egyptian vassal but for the intervention of Europe, might be
+arrested in its decadence by an incantation, and be made strong enough and
+enlightened enough to govern to all time the Slavic and Greek populations
+which had still the misfortune to be included within its dominions.
+Recognising--so ran the words which read like bitter irony, but which were
+meant for nothing of the kind--the value of the Sultan's promises of
+reform, the authors of the Treaty of Paris proceeded, as if of set purpose,
+to extinguish any vestige of responsibility which might have been felt at
+Constantinople, and any spark of confidence that might still linger among
+the Christian populations, by declaring that, whether the Sultan observed
+or broke his promises, in no case could any right of intervention by Europe
+arise. The helmsman was given his course; the hatches were battened down.
+If words bore any meaning, if the Treaty of Paris was not an elaborate
+piece of imposture, the Christian subjects of the Sultan had for the
+future, whatever might be their wrongs, no redress to look for but in the
+exertion of their own power. The terms of the Treaty were in fact such as
+might have been imposed if the Western Powers had gone to war with Russia
+for some object of their own, and had been rescued, when defeated and
+overthrown, by the victorious interposition of the Porte. All was hollow,
+all based on fiction and convention. The illusions of nations in time of
+revolutionary excitement, the shallow, sentimental commonplaces of liberty
+and fraternity have afforded just matter for satire; but no democratic
+platitudes were ever more palpably devoid of connection with fact, more
+flagrantly in contradiction to the experience of the past, or more
+ignominiously to be refuted by each succeeding act of history, than the
+deliberate consecration of the idol of an Ottoman Empire as the crowning
+act of European wisdom in 1856.
+
+[The Danubian Principalities.]
+
+[Alexander Cuza Hospodar of both Provinces.]
+
+[Complete Union, 1862.]
+
+[Charles of Hohenzollern, Hereditary Prince, 1866.]
+
+Among the devotees of the Turk the English Ministers were the most
+impassioned, having indeed in the possession of India some excuse for their
+fervour on behalf of any imaginable obstacle that would keep the Russians
+out of Constantinople. The Emperor of the French had during the Conferences
+at Paris revived his project of incorporating the Danubian Principalities
+with Austria in return for the cession of Lombardy, but the Viennese
+Government had declined to enter into any such arrangement. Napoleon
+consequently entered upon a new Eastern policy. Appreciating the growing
+force of nationality in European affairs, and imagining that in the
+championship of the principle of nationality against the Treaties of 1815
+he would sooner or later find means for the aggrandisement of himself and
+France, he proposed that the Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia, while
+remaining in dependence upon the Sultan, should be united into a single
+State under a prince chosen by themselves. The English Ministry would not
+hear of this union. In their view the creation of a Roumanian Principality
+under a chief not appointed by the Porte was simply the abstraction from
+the Sultan of six million persons who at present acknowledged his
+suzerainty, and whose tribute to Constantinople ought, according to Lord
+Clarendon, to be increased. [483] Austria, fearing the effect of a
+Roumanian national movement upon its own Roumanian subjects in
+Transylvania, joined in resistance to Napoleon's scheme, and the political
+organisation of the Principalities was in consequence reserved by the
+Conference of Paris for future settlement. Elections were held in the
+spring of 1857 under a decree from the Porte, with the result that
+Moldavia, as it seemed, pronounced against union with the sister province.
+But the complaint at once arose that the Porte had falsified the popular
+vote. France and Russia had now established relations of such amity that
+their ambassadors jointly threatened to quit Constantinople if the
+elections were not annulled. A visit paid by the French Emperor to Queen
+Victoria, with the object of smoothing over the difficulties which had
+begun to threaten the Western alliance, resulted rather in increased
+misunderstandings between the two Governments as to the future of the
+Principalities than in any real agreement. The elections were annulled. New
+representative bodies met at Bucharest and Jassy, and pronounced almost
+unanimously for union (October, 1857). In the spring of 1858 the Conference
+of Paris reassembled in order to frame a final settlement of the affairs of
+the Principalities. It determined that in each Province there should be a
+Hospodar elected for life, a separate judicature, and a separate
+legislative Assembly, while a central Commission, formed by representatives
+of both Provinces, should lay before the Assemblies projects of law on
+matters of joint interest. In accordance with these provisions, Assemblies
+were elected in each Principality at the beginning of 1859. Their first
+duty was to choose the two Hospodars, but in both Provinces a unanimous
+vote fell upon the same person, Prince Alexander Cuza. The efforts of
+England and Austria to prevent union were thus baffled by the Roumanian
+people itself, and after three years the elaborate arrangements made by the
+Conference were similarly swept away, and a single Ministry and Assembly
+took the place of the dual Government. It now remained only to substitute a
+hereditary Prince for a Hospodar elected for life; and in 1866, on the
+expulsion of Alexander Cuza by his subjects, Prince Charles of
+Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant kinsman of the reigning Prussian
+sovereign, was recognised by all Europe as Hereditary Prince of Roumania.
+The suzerainty of the Porte, now reduced to the bare right to receive a
+fixed tribute, was fated to last but for a few years longer.
+
+[Continued discord in Turkish Empire.]
+
+[Revision of the Treaty of Paris, 1871.]
+
+Europe had not to wait for the establishment of Roumanian independence in
+order to judge of the foresight and the statesmanship of the authors of the
+Treaty of Paris. Scarcely a year passed without the occurrence of some
+event that cast ridicule upon the fiction of a self-regenerated Turkey, and
+upon the profession of the Powers that the epoch of external interference
+in its affairs was at an end. The active misgovernment of the Turkish
+authorities themselves, their powerlessness or want of will to prevent
+flagrant outrage and wrong among those whom they professed to rule,
+continued after the Treaty of Paris to be exactly what they had been before
+it. In 1860 massacres and civil war in Mount Lebanon led to the occupation
+of Syria by French troops. In 1861 Bosnia and Herzegovina took up arms. In
+1863 Servia expelled its Turkish garrisons. Crete, rising in the following
+year, fought long for its independence, and seemed for a moment likely to
+be united with Greece under the auspices of the Powers, but it was finally
+abandoned to its Ottoman masters. At the end of fourteen years from the
+signature of the Peace of Paris, the downfall of the French Empire enabled
+Russia to declare that it would no longer recognise the provisions of the
+Treaty which excluded its war-ships and its arsenals from the Black Sea. It
+was for this, and for this almost alone, that England had gone through the
+Crimean War. But for the determination of Lord Palmerston to exclude Russia
+from the Black Sea, peace might have been made while the Allied armies were
+still at Varna. This exclusion was alleged to be necessary in the interests
+of Europe at large; that it was really enforced not in the interest of
+Europe but in the interest of England was made sufficiently clear by the
+action of Austria and Prussia, whose statesmen, in spite of the discourses
+so freely addressed to them from London, were at least as much alive to the
+interests of their respective countries as Lord Palmerston could be on
+their behalf. Nor had France in 1854 any interest in crippling the power of
+Russia, or in Eastern affairs generally, which could be remotely compared
+with those of the possessors of India. The personal needs of Napoleon III.
+made him, while he seemed to lead, the instrument of the British Government
+for enforcing British aims, and so gave to Palmerston the momentary shaping
+of a new and superficial concert of the Powers. Masters of Sebastopol, the
+Allies had experienced little difficulty in investing their own conclusions
+with the seeming authority of Europe at large; but to bring the
+representatives of Austria and Prussia to a Council-table, to hand them the
+pen to sign a Treaty dictated by France and England, was not to bind them
+to a policy which was not their own, or to make those things interests of
+Austria and Prussia which were not their interests before. Thus when in
+1870 the French Empire fell, England stood alone as the Power concerned in
+maintaining the exclusion of Russia from the Euxine, and this exclusion it
+could enforce no longer. It was well that Palmerston had made the Treaty of
+Paris the act of Europe, but not for the reasons which Palmerston had
+imagined. The fiction had engendered no new relation in fact; it did not
+prolong for one hour the submission of Russia after it had ceased to be
+confronted in the West by a superior force; but it enabled Great Britain to
+retire without official humiliation from a position which it had conquered
+only through the help of an accidental Alliance, and which it was unable to
+maintain alone. The ghost of the Conference of 1856 was, as it were,
+conjured up in the changed world of 1871. The same forms which had once
+stamped with the seal of Europe the instrument of restraint upon Russia now
+as decorously executed its release. Britain accepted what Europe would not
+resist; and below the slopes where lay the countless dead of three nations
+Sebastopol rose from its ruins, and the ensign of Russia floated once more
+over its ships of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Piedmont after 1849--Ministry of Azeglio--Cavour Prime Minister--Designs of
+Cavour--His Crimean Policy--Cavour at the Conference of Paris--Cavour and
+Napoleon III.--The Meeting at Plombieres--Preparations in Italy--Treaty of
+January, 1859--Attempts at Mediation--Austrian Ultimatum--Campaign of
+1859--Magenta--Movement in Central Italy--Solferino--Napoleon and Prussia
+--Interview of Villafranca--Cavour resigns--Peace of Zuerich--Central Italy
+after Villafranca--The Proposed Congress--"The Pope and the Congress"--
+Cavour resumes office--Cavour and Napoleon--Union of the Duchies and the
+Romagna with Piedmont--Savoy and Nice added to France--Cavour on this
+cession--European opinion--Naples--Sicily--Garibaldi lands at Marsala--
+Capture of Palermo--The Neapolitans evacuate Sicily--Cavour and the Party
+of Action--Cavour's Policy as to Naples--Garibaldi on the Mainland--Persano
+and Villamarina at Naples--Garibaldi at Naples--The Piedmontese Army enters
+Umbria and the Marches--Fall of Ancona--Garibaldi and Cavour--The Armies on
+the Volturno--Fall of Gaeta--Cavour's Policy with regard to Rome and
+Venice--Death of Cavour--The Free Church in the Free State.
+
+
+[Piedmont after 1849.]
+
+In the gloomy years that followed 1849 the kingdom of Sardinia had stood
+out in bright relief as a State which, though crushed on the battle-field,
+had remained true to the cause of liberty while all around it the forces of
+reaction gained triumph after triumph. Its King had not the intellectual
+gifts of the maker of a great State, but he was one with whom those
+possessed of such gifts could work, and on whom they could depend. With
+certain grave private faults Victor Emmanuel had the public virtues of
+intense patriotism, of loyalty to his engagements and to his Ministers, of
+devotion to a single great aim. Little given to speculative thought, he saw
+what it most concerned him to see, that Piedmont by making itself the home
+of liberty could become the Master-State of Italy. His courage on the
+battlefield, splendid and animating as it was, distinguished him less than
+another kind of courage peculiarly his own. Ignorant and superstitious, he
+had that rare and masculine quality of soul which in the anguish of
+bereavement and on the verge of the unseen world remains proof against the
+appeal and against the terrors of a voice speaking with more than human
+authority. Rome, not less than Austria, stood across the path that led to
+Italian freedom, and employed all its art, all its spiritual force, to turn
+Victor Emmanuel from the work that lay before him. There were moments in
+his life when a man of not more than common weakness might well have
+flinched from the line of conduct on which he had resolved in hours of
+strength and of insight; there were times when a less constant mind might
+well have wavered and cast a balance between opposing systems of policy. It
+was not through heroic greatness that Victor Emmanuel rendered his
+priceless services to Italy. He was a man not conspicuously cast in a
+different mould from many another plain, strong nature, but the qualities
+which he possessed were precisely those which Italy required. Fortune,
+circumstance, position favoured him and made his glorious work possible;
+but what other Italian prince of this century, though placed on the throne
+of Piedmont, and numbering Cavour among his subjects, would have played the
+part, the simple yet all momentous part, which Victor Emmanuel played so
+well? The love and the gratitude of Italy have been lavished without stint
+on the memory of its first sovereign, who served his nation with qualities
+of so homely a type, and in whose life there was so much that needed
+pardon. The colder judgment of a later time will hardly contest the title
+of Victor Emmanuel to be ranked among those few men without whom Italian
+union would not have been achieved for another generation.
+
+[Ministry of Azeglio, 1849-52.]
+
+[Cavour Prime Minister, 1852.]
+
+On the conclusion of peace with Austria after the campaign of Novara, the
+Government and the Parliament of Turin addressed themselves to the work of
+emancipating the State from the system of ecclesiastical privilege and
+clerical ascendency which had continued in full vigour down to the last
+year of Charles Albert's reign. Since 1814 the Church had maintained, or
+had recovered, both in Piedmont and in the island of Sardinia, rights which
+had been long wrested from it in other European societies, and which were
+out of harmony with the Constitution now taking root under Victor Emmanuel.
+The clergy had still their own tribunals, and even in the case of criminal
+offences were not subject to the jurisdiction of the State. The Bishops
+possessed excessive powers and too large a share of the Church revenues;
+the parochial clergy lived in want; monasteries and convents abounded. It
+was not in any spirit of hostility towards the Church that Massimo
+d'Azeglio, whom the King called to office after Novara, commenced the work
+of reform by measures subjecting the clergy to the law-courts of the State,
+abolishing the right of sanctuary in monasteries, and limiting the power of
+corporations to acquire landed property. If the Papacy would have met
+Victor Emmanuel in a fair spirit his Government would gladly have avoided a
+dangerous and exasperating struggle; but all the forces and the passions of
+Ultramontanism were brought to bear against the proposed reforms. The
+result was that the Minister, abandoned by a section of the Conservative
+party on whom he had relied, sought the alliance of men ready for a larger
+and bolder policy, and called to office the foremost of those from whom he
+had received an independent support in the Chamber, Count Cavour. Entering
+the Cabinet in 1850 as Minister of Commerce, Cavour rapidly became the
+master of all his colleagues. On his own responsibility he sought and won
+the support of the more moderate section of the Opposition, headed by
+Rattazzi; and after a brief withdrawal from office, caused by divisions
+within the Cabinet, he returned to power in October, 1852, as Prime
+Minister.
+
+[Cavour.]
+
+Cavour, though few men have gained greater fame as diplomatists, had not
+been trained in official life. The younger son of a noble family, he had
+entered the army in 1826, and served in the Engineers; but his sympathies
+with the liberal movement of 1830 brought him into extreme disfavour with
+his chiefs. He was described by Charles Albert, then Prince of Carignano,
+as the most dangerous man in the kingdom, and was transferred at the
+instance of his own father to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard. Too
+vigorous a nature to submit to inaction, too buoyant and too sagacious to
+resort to conspiracy, he quitted the army, and soon afterwards undertook
+the management of one of the family estates, devoting himself to scientific
+agriculture on a large scale. He was a keen and successful man of business,
+but throughout the next twelve years, which he passed in fruitful private
+industry, his mind dwelt ardently on public affairs. He was filled with a
+deep discontent at the state of society which he saw around him in
+Piedmont, and at the condition of Italy at large under foreign and clerical
+rule. Repeated visits to France and England made him familiar with the
+institutions of freer lands, and gave definiteness to his political and
+social aims. [484] In 1847, when changes were following fast, he founded
+with some other Liberal nobles the journal _Risorgimento_, devoted to
+the cause of national revival; and he was one of the first who called upon
+King Charles Albert to grant a Constitution. During the stormy days of 1848
+he was at once the vigorous advocate of war with Austria and the adversary
+of Republicans and Extremists who for their own theories seemed willing to
+plunge Italy into anarchy. Though unpopular with the mob, he was elected to
+the Chamber by Turin, and continued to represent the capital after the
+peace. Up to this time there had been little opportunity for the proof of
+his extraordinary powers, but the inborn sagacity of Victor Emmanuel had
+already discerned in him a man who could not remain in a subordinate
+position. "You will see him turn you all out of your places," the King
+remarked to his Ministers, as he gave his assent to Cavour's first
+appointment to a seat in the Cabinet.
+
+[Plans of Cavour.]
+
+[Cavour's Crimean policy.]
+
+The Ministry of Azeglio had served Piedmont with honour from 1849 to 1852,
+but its leader scarcely possessed the daring and fertility of mind which
+the time required. Cavour threw into the work of government a passion and
+intelligence which soon produced results visible to all Europe. His
+devotion to Italy was as deep, as all-absorbing, as that of Mazzini
+himself, though the methods and schemes of the two men were in such
+complete antagonism. Cavour's fixed purpose was to drive Austria out of
+Italy by defeat in the battle-field, and to establish, as the first step
+towards national union, a powerful kingdom of Northern Italy under Victor
+Emmanuel. In order that the military and naval forces of Piedmont might be
+raised to the highest possible strength and efficiency, he saw that the
+resources of the country must be largely developed; and with this object he
+negotiated commercial treaties with Foreign Powers, laid down railways, and
+suppressed the greater part of the monasteries, selling their lands to
+cultivators, and devoting the proceeds of sale not to State-purposes but to
+the payment of the working clergy. Industry advanced; the heavy pressure of
+taxation was patiently borne; the army and the fleet grew apace. But the
+cause of Piedmont was one with that of the Italian nation, and it became
+its Government to demonstrate this day by day with no faltering voice or
+hand. Protection and support were given to fugitives from Austrian and
+Papal tyranny; the Press was laid open to every tale of wrong; and when,
+after an unsuccessful attempt at insurrection in Milan in 1853, for which
+Mazzini and the Republican exiles were alone responsible, the Austrian
+Government sequestrated the property of its subjects who would not return
+from Piedmont, Cavour bade his ambassador quit Vienna, and appealed to
+every Court in Europe. Nevertheless, Cavour did not believe that Italy,
+even by a simultaneous rising, could permanently expel the Austrian armies
+or conquer the Austrian fortresses. The experience of forty years pointed
+to the opposite conclusion; and while Mazzini in his exile still imagined
+that a people needed only to determine to be free in order to be free,
+Cavour schemed for an alliance which should range against the Austrian
+Emperor armed forces as numerous and as disciplined as his own. It was
+mainly with this object that Cavour plunged Sardinia into the Crimean War.
+He was not without just causes of complaint against the Czar; but the
+motive with which he sent the Sardinian troops to Sebastopol was not that
+they might take vengeance on Russia, but that they might fight side by side
+with the soldiers of England and France. That the war might lead to
+complications still unforeseen was no doubt a possibility present to
+Cavour's mind, and in that case it was no small thing that Sardinia stood
+allied to the two Western Powers; but apart from these chances of the
+future, Sardinia would have done ill to stand idle when at any moment, as
+it seemed, Austria might pass from armed neutrality into active concert
+with England and France. Had Austria so drawn the sword against Russia
+whilst Piedmont stood inactive, the influence of the Western Powers must
+for some years to come have been ranged on the side of Austria in the
+maintenance of its Italian possessions, and Piedmont could at the best have
+looked only to St. Petersburg for sympathy or support. Cavour was not
+scrupulous in his choice of means when the liberation of Italy was the end
+in view, and the charge was made against him that in joining the coalition
+against Russia he lightly entered into a war in which Piedmont had no
+direct concern. But reason and history absolve, and far more than absolve,
+the Italian statesman. If the cause of European equilibrium, for which
+England and France took up arms, was a legitimate ground of war in the case
+of these two Powers, it was not less so in the case of their ally; while if
+the ulterior results rather than the motive of a war are held to constitute
+its justification, Cavour stands out as the one politician in Europe whose
+aims in entering upon the Crimean War have been fulfilled, not mocked, by
+events. He joined in the struggle against Russia not in order to maintain
+the Ottoman Empire, but to gain an ally in liberating Italy. The Ottoman
+Empire has not been maintained; the independence of Italy has been
+established, and established by means of the alliance which Cavour gained.
+His Crimean policy is one of those excessively rare instances of
+statesmanship where action has been determined not by the driving and
+half-understood necessities of the moment, but by a distinct and true
+perception of the future. He looked only in one direction, but in that
+direction he saw clearly. Other statesmen struck blindfold, or in their
+vision of a regenerated Turkey fought for an empire of mirage. It may with
+some reason be asked whether the order of Eastern Europe would now be
+different if our own English soldiers who fell at Balaclava had been
+allowed to die in their beds: every Italian whom Cavour sent to perish on
+the Tchernaya or in the cholera-stricken camp died as directly for the
+cause of Italian independence as if he had fallen on the slopes of Custozza
+or under the walls of Rome.
+
+[Cavour at the Conference of Paris.]
+
+[Change of Austrian policy, 1856.]
+
+At the Conference of Paris in 1856 the Sardinian Premier took his place in
+right of alliance by the side of the representatives of the great Powers;
+and when the main business of the Conference was concluded, Count Buol, the
+Austrian Minister, was forced to listen to a vigorous denunciation by
+Cavour of the misgovernment that reigned in Central and Southern Italy, of
+the Austrian occupation which rendered this possible. Though the French
+were still in Rome, their presence might by courtesy be described as a
+measure of precaution rendered necessary by the intrusion of the Austrians
+farther north; and both the French and English plenipotentiaries at the
+Conference supported Cavour in his invective. Cavour returned to Italy
+without any territorial reward for the services that Piedmont had rendered
+to the Allies; but his object was attained. He had exhibited Austria
+isolated and discredited before Europe; he had given to his country a voice
+that it had never before had in the Councils of the Powers; he had produced
+a deep conviction throughout Italy that Piedmont not only could and would
+act with vigour against the national enemy, but that in its action it would
+have the help of allies. From this time the Republican and Mazzinian
+societies lost ground before the growing confidence in the House of Savoy,
+in its Minister and its army. [485] The strongest evidence of the effect of
+Cavour's Crimean policy and of his presence at the Conference of Paris was
+seen in the action of the Austrian Government itself. From 1849 to 1856 its
+rule in Northern Italy had been one not so much of severity as of brutal
+violence. Now all was changed. The Emperor came to Milan to proclaim a
+general amnesty and to win the affection of his subjects. The sequestrated
+estates were restored to their owners. Radetzky, in his ninety-second year,
+was at length allowed to pass into retirement; the government of the sword
+was declared at an end; Maximilian, the gentlest and most winning of the
+Hapsburgs, was sent with his young bride to charm away the sad memories of
+the evil time. But it was too late. The recognition shown by the Lombards
+of the Emperor's own personal friendliness indicated no reconciliation with
+Austria; and while Francis Joseph was still in Milan, King Victor Emmanuel,
+in the presence of a Lombard deputation, laid the first stone of the
+monument erected by subscriptions from all Italy in memory of those who had
+fallen in the campaigns of 1848 and 1849, the statue of a foot-soldier
+waving his sword towards the Austrian frontier. The Sardinian Press
+redoubled its attacks on Austria and its Italian vassals. The Government of
+Vienna sought satisfaction; Cavour sharply refused it; and diplomatic
+relations between the two Courts, which had been resumed since the
+Conference of Paris, were again broken off.
+
+[Cavour and Napoleon III.]
+
+[Meeting at Plombieres, July, 1858.]
+
+Of the two Western Powers, Cavour would have preferred an alliance with
+Great Britain, which had no objects of its own to seek in Italy; but when
+he found that the Government of London would not assist him by arms against
+Austria, he drew closer to the Emperor Napoleon, and supported him
+throughout his controversy with England and Austria on the settlement of
+the Danubian Principalities. Napoleon, there is no doubt, felt a real
+interest in Italy. His own early political theories formed on a study of
+the Napoleonic Empire, his youthful alliance with the Carbonari, point to a
+sympathy with the Italian national cause which was genuine if not profound,
+and which was not altogether lost in 1849, though France then acted as the
+enemy of Roman independence. If Napoleon intended to remould the
+Continental order and the Treaties of 1815 in the interests of France and
+of the principle of nationality, he could make no better beginning than by
+driving Austria from Northern Italy. It was not even necessary for him to
+devise an original policy. Early in 1848, when it seemed probable that
+Piedmont would be increased by Lombardy and part of Venetia, Lamartine had
+laid it down that France ought in that case to be compensated by Savoy, in
+order to secure its frontiers against so powerful a neighbour as the new
+Italian State. To this idea Napoleon returned. Savoy had been incorporated
+with France from 1792 to 1814; its people were more French than Italian;
+its annexation would not directly injure the interests of any great Power.
+Of the three directions in which France might stretch towards its old
+limits of the Alps and the Rhine, the direction of Savoy was by far the
+least dangerous. Belgium could not be touched without certain loss of the
+English alliance, with which Napoleon could not yet dispense; an attack
+upon the Rhenish Provinces would probably be met by all the German Powers
+together; in Savoy alone was there the chance of gaining territory without
+raising a European coalition against France. No sooner had the organisation
+of the Danubian Principalities been completed by the Conference which met
+in the spring of 1858 than Napoleon began to develop his Italian plans. An
+attempt of a very terrible character which was made upon his life by
+Orsini, a Roman exile, though at the moment it threatened to embroil
+Sardinia with France, probably stimulated him to action. In the summer of
+1858 he invited Cavour to meet him at Plombieres. The negotiations which
+there passed were not made known by the Emperor to his Ministers; they were
+communicated by Cavour to two persons only besides Victor Emmanuel. It
+seems that no written engagement was drawn up; it was verbally agreed that
+if Piedmont could, without making a revolutionary war, and without exposing
+Napoleon to the charge of aggression, incite Austria to hostilities, France
+would act as its ally. Austria was then to be expelled from Venetia as well
+as from Lombardy. Victor Emmanuel was to become sovereign of North-Italy,
+with the Roman Legations and Marches; the remainder of the Papal territory,
+except Rome itself and the adjacent district, was to be added to Tuscany,
+so constituting a new kingdom of Central Italy. The two kingdoms, together
+with Naples and Rome, were to form an Italian Confederation under the
+presidency of the Pope. France was to receive Savoy and possibly Nice. A
+marriage between the King's young daughter Clotilde and the Emperor's
+cousin Prince Jerome Napoleon was discussed, if not actually settled. [486]
+
+[Cavour in view of the French Alliance.]
+
+From this moment Cavour laboured night and day for war. His position was an
+exceedingly difficult one. Not only had he to reckon with the irresolution
+of Napoleon, and his avowed unwillingness to take up arms unless with the
+appearance of some good cause; but even supposing the goal of war reached,
+and Austria defeated, how little was there in common between Cavour's aims
+for Italy and the traditional policy of France! The first Napoleon had
+given Venice to Austria at Campo Formio; even if the new Napoleon should
+fulfil his promise and liberate all Northern Italy, his policy in regard to
+the centre and south of the Peninsula would probably be antagonistic to any
+effective union or to any further extension of the influence of the House
+of Savoy. Cavour had therefore to set in readiness for action national
+forces of such strength that Napoleon, even if he desired to draw back,
+should find it difficult to do so, and that the shaping of the future of
+the Italian people should be governed not by the schemes which the Emperor
+might devise at Paris, but by the claims and the aspirations of Italy
+itself. It was necessary for him not only to encourage and subsidise the
+National Society--a secret association whose branches in the other Italian
+States were preparing to assist Piedmont in the coming war, and to unite
+Italy under the House of Savoy--but to enter into communication with some
+of the Republican or revolutionary party who had hitherto been at enmity
+with all Crowns alike. He summoned Garibaldi in secrecy to Turin, and there
+convinced him that the war about to be waged by Victor Emmanuel was one in
+which he ought to take a prominent part. As the foremost defender of the
+Roman Republic and a revolutionary hero, Garibaldi was obnoxious to the
+French Emperor. Cavour had to conceal from Napoleon the fact that Garibaldi
+would take the field at the head of a free-corps by the side of the Allied
+armies; he had similarly to conceal from Garibaldi that one result of the
+war would be the cession of Nice, his own birthplace, to France. Thus
+plunged in intrigue, driving his Savoyards to the camp and raising from
+them the last farthing in taxation, in order that after victory they might
+be surrendered to a Foreign Power; goading Austria to some act of passion;
+inciting, yet checking and controlling, the Italian revolutionary elements;
+bargaining away the daughter of his sovereign to one of the most odious of
+mankind, Cavour staked all on the one great end of his being, the
+establishment of Italian independence. Words like those which burst from
+Danton in the storms of the Convention--"Perish my name, my reputation, so
+that France be free"--were the calm and habitual expression of Cavour's
+thought when none but an intimate friend was by to hear. [487] Such tasks
+as Cavour's are not to be achieved without means which, to a man noble in
+view as Cavour really was, it would have been more agreeable to leave
+unemployed. Those alone are entitled to pronounce judgment upon him who
+have made a nation, and made it with purer hands. It was well for English
+statesmen and philanthropists, inheritors of a world-wide empire, to
+enforce the ethics of peace and to plead for a gentlemanlike frankness and
+self-restraint in the conduct of international relations. English women had
+not been flogged by Austrian soldiers in the market-place; the treaties of
+1815 had not consecrated a foreign rule over half our race. To Cavour the
+greatest crime would have been to leave anything undone which might
+minister to Italy's liberation. [488]
+
+[Treaty of January, 1859.]
+
+[Attempts at mediation.]
+
+[Austrian ultimatum, April 23.]
+
+Napoleon seems to have considered that he would be ready to begin war in
+the spring of 1859. At the reception at the Tuileries on the 1st of January
+he addressed the Austrian ambassador in words that pointed to an
+approaching conflict; a few weeks later a marriage-contract was signed
+between Prince Napoleon and Clotilde, daughter of Victor Emmanuel, and part
+of the agreement made at Plombieres was embodied in a formal Treaty.
+Napoleon undertook to support Sardinia in a war that might arise from any
+aggressive act on the part of Austria, and, if victorious, to add both
+Lombardy and Venetia to Victor Emmanuel's dominions. France was in return
+to receive Savoy, the disposal of Nice being reserved till the restoration
+of peace. [489] Even before the Treaty was signed Victor Emmanuel had
+thrown down the challenge to Austria, declaring at the opening of the
+Parliament of Turin that he could not be insensible to the cry of suffering
+that rose from Italy. In all but technical form the imminence of war had
+been announced, when, under the influence of diplomatists and Ministers
+about him, and of a financial panic that followed his address to the
+Austrian ambassador, the irresolute mind of Napoleon shrank from its
+purpose, and months more of suspense were imposed upon Italy and Europe, to
+be terminated at last not by any effort of Napoleon's will but by the rash
+and impolitic action of Austria itself. At the instance of the Court of
+Vienna the British Government had consented to take steps towards
+mediation. Lord Cowley, Ambassador at Paris, was sent to Vienna with
+proposals which, it was believed, might form the basis for an amicable
+settlement of Italian affairs. He asked that the Papal States should be
+evacuated by both Austrian and French troops; that Austria should abandon
+the Treaties which gave it a virtual Protectorate over Modena and Parma;
+and that it should consent to the introduction of reforms in all the
+Italian Governments. Negotiations towards this end had made some progress
+when they were interrupted by a proposal sent from St. Petersburg, at the
+instance of Napoleon, that Italian affairs should be submitted to a
+European Congress. Austria was willing under certain conditions to take
+part in a Congress, but it required, as a preliminary measure, that
+Sardinia should disarm. Napoleon had now learnt that Garibaldi was to fight
+at the head of the volunteers for Victor Emmanuel. His doubts as to the
+wisdom of his own policy seem to have increased hour by hour; from Britain,
+whose friendship he still considered indispensable to him, he received the
+most urgent appeals against war; it was necessary that Cavour himself
+should visit Paris in order to prevent the Emperor from acquiescing in
+Austria's demand. In Cavour's presence Napoleon seems to have lost some of
+his fears, or to have been made to feel that it was not safe to provoke his
+confidant of Plombieres; [490] but Cavour had not long left Paris when a
+proposal was made from London, that in lieu of the separate disarmament of
+Sardinia the Powers should agree to a general disarmament, the details to
+be settled by a European Commission. This proposal received Napoleon's
+assent. He telegraphed to Cavour desiring him to join in the agreement.
+Cavour could scarcely disobey, yet at one stroke it seemed that all his
+hopes when on the very verge of fulfilment were dashed to the ground, all
+his boundless efforts for the liberation of Italy through war with Austria
+lost and thrown away. For some hours he appeared shattered by the blow.
+Strung to the extreme point of human endurance by labour scarcely remitted
+by day or night for weeks together, his strong but sanguine nature gave
+way, and for a while the few friends who saw him feared that he would take
+his own life. But the crisis passed: Cavour accepted, as inevitable, the
+condition of general disarmament; and his vigorous mind had already begun
+to work upon new plans for the future, when the report of a decision made
+at Vienna, which was soon confirmed by the arrival of an Austrian
+ultimatum, threw him into joy as intense as his previous despair. Ignoring
+the British proposal for a general disarmament, already accepted at Turin,
+the Austrian Cabinet demanded, without qualifications and under threat of
+war within three days, that Sardinia should separately disarm. It was
+believed at Vienna that Napoleon was merely seeking to gain time; that a
+conflict was inevitable; and that Austria now stood better prepared for
+immediate action than its enemies. Right or wrong in its judgment of
+Napoleon's real intentions, the Austrian Government had undeniably taken
+upon itself the part of the aggressor. Cavour had only to point to his own
+acceptance of the plan of a general disarmament, and to throw upon his
+enemy the responsibility for a disturbance of European peace. His reply was
+taken as the signal for hostilities, and on the 29th of April Austrian
+troops crossed the Ticino. A declaration of war from Paris followed without
+delay. [491]
+
+[Campaign of 1859.]
+
+[Battle of Magenta, June 4.]
+
+For months past Austria had been pouring its troops into Northern Italy. It
+had chosen its own time for the commencement of war; a feeble enemy stood
+before it, its more powerful adversary could not reach the field without
+crossing the Alps or the mountain-range above Genoa. Everything pointed to
+a vigorous offensive on the part of the Austrian generals, and in Piedmont
+itself it was believed that Turin must fall before French troops could
+assist in its defence. From Turin as a centre the Austrians could then
+strike with ease, and with superior numbers, against the detachments of the
+French army as they descended the mountains at any points in the semicircle
+from Genoa to Mont Cenis. There has seldom been a case where the necessity
+and the advantages of a particular line of strategy have been so obvious;
+yet after crossing the Ticino the Austrians, above a hundred thousand
+strong, stood as if spell-bound under their incompetent chief, Giulay.
+Meanwhile French detachments crossed Mont Cenis; others, more numerous,
+landed with the Emperor at Genoa, and established communications with the
+Piedmontese, whose headquarters were at Alessandria. Giulay now believed
+that the Allies would strike upon his communications in the direction of
+Parma. The march of Bonaparte upon Piacenza in 1796, as well as the
+campaign of Marengo, might well inspire this fear; but the real intention
+of Napoleon III. was to outflank the Austrians from the north and so to
+gain Milan. Garibaldi was already operating at the extreme left of the
+Sardinian line in the neighbourhood of Como. While the Piedmontese
+maintained their positions in the front, the French from Genoa marched
+northwards behind them, crossed the Po, and reached Vercelli before the
+Austrians discovered their manoeuvre. Giulay, still lingering between the
+Sesia and the Ticino, now called up part of his forces northwards, but not
+in time to prevent the Piedmontese from crossing the Sesia and defeating
+the troops opposed to them at Palestro (May 30). While the Austrians were
+occupied at this point, the French crossed the river farther north, and
+moved eastwards on the Ticino. Giulay was thus outflanked and compelled to
+fall back. The Allies followed him, and on the 4th of June attacked the
+Austrian army in its positions about Magenta on the road to Milan. The
+assault of Macmahon from the north gave the Allies victory after a
+hard-fought day. It was impossible for the Austrians to defend Milan; they
+retired upon the Adda and subsequently upon the Mincio, abandoning all
+Lombardy to the invaders, and calling up their troops from Bologna and the
+other occupied towns in the Papal States, in order that they might take
+part in the defence of the Venetian frontier and the fortresses that
+guarded it.
+
+[Movement in Central Italy.]
+
+The victory of the Allies was at once felt throughout Central Italy. The
+Grand Duke of Tuscany had already fled from his dominions, and the
+Dictatorship for the period of the war had been offered by a Provisional
+Government to Victor Emmanuel, who, while refusing this, had allowed his
+envoy, Boncampagni, to assume temporary powers at Florence as his
+representative. The Duke of Modena and the Duchess of Parma now quitted
+their territories. In the Romagna the disappearance of the Austrians
+resulted in the immediate overthrow of Papal authority. Everywhere the
+demand was for union with Piedmont. The calamities of the last ten years
+had taught their lesson to the Italian people. There was now nothing of the
+disorder, the extravagance, the childishness of 1848. The populations who
+had then been so divided, so suspicious, so easy a prey to demagogues, were
+now watchful, self-controlled, and anxious for the guidance of the only
+real national Government. As at Florence, so in the Duchies and in the
+Romagna, it was desired that Victor Emmanuel should assume the
+Dictatorship. The King adhered to the policy which he had adopted towards
+Tuscany, avoiding any engagement that might compromise him with Europe or
+his ally, but appointing Commissioners to enrol troops for the common war
+against Austria and to conduct the necessary work of administration in
+those districts. Farini, the historian of the Roman States, was sent to
+Modena; Azeglio, the ex-Minister, to Bologna. Each of these officers
+entered on his task in a spirit worthy of the time; each understood how
+much might be won for Italy by boldness, how much endangered or lost by
+untimely scruples. [492]
+
+[Battle of Solferino, June 24.]
+
+In his proclamations at the opening of the war Napoleon had declared that
+Italy must be freed up to the shore of the Adriatic. His address to the
+Italian people on entering Milan with Victor Emmanuel after the victory of
+Magenta breathed the same spirit. As yet, however, Lombardy alone had been
+won. The advance of the allied armies was accordingly resumed after an
+interval of some days, and on the 23rd of June they approached the
+positions held by the Austrians a little to the west of the Mincio. Francis
+Joseph had come from Vienna to take command of the army. His presence
+assisted the enemy, inasmuch as he had no plan of his own, and wavered from
+day to day between the antagonistic plans of the generals at headquarters.
+Some wished to make the Mincio the line of defence, others to hold the
+Chiese some miles farther west. The consequence was that the army marched
+backwards and forwards across the space between the two rivers according as
+one or another general gained for the moment the Emperor's confidence. It
+was while the Austrians were thus engaged that the allied armies came into
+contact with them about Solferino. On neither side was it known that the
+whole force of the enemy was close at hand. The battle of Solferino, one of
+the bloodiest of recent times, was fought almost by accident. About a
+hundred and fifty thousand men were present under Napoleon and Victor
+Emmanuel; the Austrians had a slight superiority in force. On the north,
+where Benedek with the Austrian right was attacked by the Piedmontese at
+San Martino, it seemed as if the task imposed on the Italian troops was
+beyond their power. Victor Emmanuel, fighting with the same courage as at
+Novara, saw the positions in front of his troops alternately won and lost.
+But the success of the French at Solferino in the centre decided the day,
+and the Austrians withdrew at last from their whole line with a loss in
+killed and wounded of fourteen thousand men. On the part of the Allies the
+slaughter was scarcely less.
+
+[Napoleon and Prussia.]
+
+[Interview of Villafranca, July 11.]
+
+[Peace of Villafranca.]
+
+[Treaty of Zuerich, Nov. 10.]
+
+Napoleon stood a conqueror, but a conqueror at terrible cost; and in front
+of him he saw the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, while new divisions were
+hastening from the north and east to the support of the still unbroken
+Austrian army. He might well doubt whether, even against his present
+antagonist alone, further success was possible. The fearful spectacle of
+Solferino, heightened by the effects of overpowering summer heat, probably
+affected a mind humane and sensitive and untried in the experience of war.
+The condition of the French army, there is reason to believe, was far
+different from that represented in official reports, and likely to make the
+continuance of the campaign perilous in the extreme. But beyond all this,
+the Emperor knew that if he advanced farther Prussia and all Germany might
+at any moment take up arms against him. There had been a strong outburst of
+sympathy for Austria in the south-western German States. National
+patriotism was excited by the attack of Napoleon on the chief of the German
+sovereigns, and the belief was widely spread that French conquest in Italy
+would soon be followed by French conquest on the Rhine. Prussia had
+hitherto shown reserve. It would have joined its arms with those of Austria
+if its own claims to an improved position in Germany had been granted by
+the Court of Vienna; but Francis Joseph had up to this time refused the
+concessions demanded. In the stress of his peril he might at any moment
+close with the offers which he had before rejected; even without a distinct
+agreement between the two Courts, and in mere deference to German public
+opinion, Prussia might launch against France the armies which it had
+already brought into readiness for the field. A war upon the Rhine would
+then be added to the war before the Quadrilateral, and from the risks of
+this double effort Napoleon might well shrink in the interest of France not
+less than of his own dynasty. He determined to seek an interview with
+Francis Joseph, and to ascertain on what terms peace might now be made. The
+interview took place at Villafranca, east of the Mincio, on the 11th of
+July. Francis Joseph refused to cede any part of Venetia without a further
+struggle. He was willing to give up Lombardy, and to consent to the
+establishment of an Italian Federation under the presidency of the Pope, of
+which Federation Venetia, still under Austria's rule, should be a member;
+but he required that Mantua should be left within his own frontier, and
+that the sovereigns of Tuscany and Modena should resume possession of their
+dominions. To these terms Napoleon assented, on obtaining a verbal
+agreement that the dispossessed princes should not be restored by foreign
+arms. Regarding Parma and the restoration of the Papal authority in the
+Romagna no stipulations were made. With the signature of the Preliminaries
+of Villafranca, which were to form the base of a regular Treaty to be
+negotiated at Zuerich, and to which Victor Emmanuel added his name with
+words of reservation, hostilities came to a close. The negotiations at
+Zuerich, though they lasted for several months, added nothing of importance
+to the matter of the Preliminaries, and decided nothing that had been left
+in uncertainty. The Italian Federation remained a scheme which the two
+Emperors, and they alone, undertook to promote. Piedmont entered into no
+engagement either with regard to the Duchies or with regard to Federation.
+Victor Emmanuel had in fact announced from the first that he would enter no
+League of which a province governed by Austria formed a part, and from this
+resolution he never swerved. [493]
+
+[Resignation of Cavour.]
+
+[Central Italy.]
+
+Though Lombardy was gained, the impression made upon the Italians by the
+peace of Villafranca was one of the utmost dismay. Napoleon had so
+confidently and so recently promised the liberation of all Northern Italy
+that public opinion ascribed to treachery or weakness what was in truth an
+act of political necessity. On the first rumour of the negotiations Cavour
+had hurried from Turin, but the agreement was signed before his arrival.
+The anger and the grief of Cavour are described by those who then saw him
+as terrible to witness. [494] Napoleon had not the courage to face him;
+Victor Emmanuel bore for two hours the reproaches of his Minister, who had
+now completely lost his self-control. Cavour returned to Turin, and shortly
+afterwards withdrew from office, his last act being the despatch of ten
+thousand muskets to Farini at Modena. In accordance with the terms of
+peace, instructions, which were probably not meant to be obeyed, were sent
+by Cavour's successor, Rattazzi, to the Piedmontese Commissioners in
+Central Italy, bidding them to return to Turin and to disband any forces
+that they had collected. Farini, on receipt of this order, adroitly
+divested himself of his Piedmontese citizenship, and, as an honorary
+burgher of Modena, accepted the Dictatorship from his fellow-townsmen.
+Azeglio returned to Turin, but took care before quitting the Romagna to
+place four thousand soldiers under competent leaders in a position to
+resist attack. It was not the least of Cavour's merits that he had gathered
+about him a body of men who, when his own hand was for a while withdrawn,
+could pursue his policy with so much energy and sagacity as was now shown
+by the leaders of the national movement in Central Italy. Venetia was lost
+for the present; but if Napoleon's promise was broken, districts which he
+had failed or had not intended to liberate might be united with the Italian
+Kingdom. The Duke of Modena, with six thousand men who had remained true to
+him, lay on the Austrian frontier, and threatened to march upon his
+capital. Farini mined the city gates, and armed so considerable a force
+that it became clear that the Duke would not recover his dominions without
+a serious battle. Parma placed itself under the same Dictatorship with
+Modena; in the Romagna a Provisional Government which Azeglio had left
+behind him continued his work. Tuscany, where Napoleon had hoped to find a
+throne for his cousin, pronounced for national union, and organised a
+common military force with its neighbours. During the weeks that followed
+the Peace of Villafranca, declarations signed by tens of thousands, the
+votes of representative bodies, and popular demonstrations throughout
+Central Italy, showed in an orderly and peaceful form how universal was the
+desire for union under the House of Savoy.
+
+[Cavour's Plans before Villafranca.]
+
+[Central Italy after Villafranca. July-November.]
+
+[Mazzini and Garibaldi. August-November.]
+
+Cavour, in the plans which he had made before 1859, had not looked for a
+direct and immediate result beyond the creation of an Italian Kingdom
+including the whole of the territory north of the Po. The other steps in
+the consolidation of Italy would, he believed, follow in their order. They
+might be close at hand, or they might be delayed for a while; but in the
+expulsion of Austria, in the interposition of a purely Italian State
+numbering above ten millions of inhabitants, mistress of the fortresses and
+of a powerful fleet, between Austria and those who had been its vassals,
+the essential conditions of Italian national independence would have been
+won. For the rest, Italy might be content to wait upon time and
+opportunity. But the Peace of Villafranca, leaving Venetia in the enemy's
+hands, completely changed this prospect. The fiction of an Italian
+Federation in which the Hapsburg Emperor, as lord of Venice, should forget
+his Austrian interests and play the part of Italian patriot, was too gross
+to deceive any one. Italy, on these terms, would either continue to be
+governed from Vienna, or be made a pawn in the hands of its French
+protector. What therefore Cavour had hitherto been willing to leave to
+future years now became the need of the present. "Before Villafranca," in
+his own words, "the union of Italy was a possibility; since Villafranca it
+is a necessity." Victor Emmanuel understood this too, and saw the need for
+action more clearly than Rattazzi and the Ministers who, on Cavour's
+withdrawal in July, stepped for a few months into his place. The situation
+was one that called indeed for no mean exercise of statesmanship. If Italy
+was not to be left dependent upon the foreigner and the reputation of the
+House of Savoy ruined, it was necessary not only that the Duchies of Modena
+and Parma, but that Central Italy, including Tuscany and at least the
+Romagna, should be united with the Kingdom of Piedmont; yet the
+accomplishment of this work was attended with the utmost danger. Napoleon
+himself was hoping to form Tuscany, with an augmented territory, into a
+rival Kingdom of Etruria or Central Italy, and to place his cousin on its
+throne. The Ultramontane party in France was alarmed and indignant at the
+overthrow of the Pope's authority in the Romagna, and already called upon
+the Emperor to fulfil his duties towards the Holy See. If the national
+movement should extend to Rome itself, the hostile intervention of France
+was almost inevitable. While the negotiations with Austria at Zuerich were
+still proceeding, Victor Emmanuel could not safely accept the sovereignty
+that was offered him by Tuscany and the neighbouring provinces, nor permit
+his cousin, the Prince of Carignano, to assume the regency which, during
+the period of suspense, it was proposed to confer upon him. Above all, it
+was necessary that the Government should not allow the popular forces with
+which it was co-operating to pass beyond its own control. In the critical
+period that followed the armistice of Villafranca, Mazzini approached
+Victor Emmanuel, as thirty years before he had approached his father, and
+offered his own assistance in the establishment of Italian union under the
+House of Savoy. He proposed, as the first step, to overthrow the Neapolitan
+Government by means of an expedition headed by Garibaldi, and to unite
+Sicily and Naples to the King's dominions; but he demanded in return that
+Piedmont should oppose armed resistance to any foreign intervention
+occasioned by this enterprise; and he seems also to have required that an
+attack should be made immediately afterwards upon Rome and upon Venetia. To
+these conditions the King could not accede; and Mazzini, confirmed in his
+attitude of distrust towards the Court of Turin, turned to Garibaldi, who
+was now at Modena. At his instigation Garibaldi resolved to lead an
+expedition at once against Rome itself. Napoleon was at this very moment
+promising reforms on behalf of the Pope, and warning Victor Emmanuel
+against the annexation even of the Romagna (Oct. 20th). At the risk of
+incurring the hostility of Garibaldi's followers and throwing their leader
+into opposition to the dynasty, it was necessary for the Sardinian
+Government to check him in his course. The moment was a critical one in the
+history of the House of Savoy. But the soldier of Republican Italy proved
+more tractable than its prophet. Garibaldi was persuaded to abandon or
+postpone an enterprise which could only have resulted in disaster for
+Italy; and with expressions of cordiality towards the King himself, and of
+bitter contempt for the fox-like politicians who advised him, he resigned
+his command and bade farewell to his comrades, recommending them, however,
+to remain under arms, in full confidence that they would ere long find a
+better opportunity for carrying the national flag southwards. [495]
+
+[The proposed Congress.]
+
+Soon after the Agreement of Villafranca, Napoleon had proposed to the
+British Government that a Congress of all the Powers should assemble at
+Paris in order to decide upon the many Italian questions which still
+remained unsettled. In taking upon himself the emancipation of Northern
+Italy Napoleon had, as it proved, attempted a task far beyond his own
+powers. The work had been abruptly broken off; the promised services had
+not been rendered, the stipulated reward had not been won. On the other
+hand, forces had been set in motion which he who raised them could not
+allay; populations stood in arms against the Governments which the
+Agreement of Villafranca purported to restore; the Pope's authority in the
+northern part of his dominions was at an end; the Italian League over which
+France and Austria were to join hands of benediction remained the
+laughing-stock of Europe. Napoleon's victories had added Lombardy to
+Piedmont; for the rest, except from the Italian point of view, they had
+only thrown affairs into confusion. Hesitating at the first between his
+obligations towards Austria and the maintenance of his prestige in Italy,
+perplexed between the contradictory claims of nationality and of
+Ultramontanism, Napoleon would gladly have cast upon Great Britain, or upon
+Europe at large, the task of extricating him from his embarrassment. But
+the Cabinet of London, while favourable to Italy, showed little inclination
+to entangle itself in engagements which might lead to war with Austria and
+Germany in the interest of the French Sovereign. Italian affairs, it was
+urged by Lord John Russell, might well be governed by the course of events
+within Italy itself; and, as Austria remained inactive, the principle of
+non-intervention really gained the day. The firm attitude of the population
+both in the Duchies and in the Romagna, their unanimity and self-control,
+the absence of those disorders which had so often been made a pretext for
+foreign intervention, told upon the mind of Napoleon and on the opinion of
+Europe at large. Each month that passed rendered the restoration of the
+fallen Governments a work of greater difficulty, and increased the
+confidence of the Italians in themselves. Napoleon watched and wavered.
+When the Treaty of Zuerich was signed his policy was still undetermined. By
+the prompt and liberal concession of reforms the Papal Government might
+perhaps even now have turned the balance in its favour. But the obstinate
+mind of Pius IX. was proof against every politic and every generous
+influence. The stubbornness shown by Rome, the remembrance of Antonelli's
+conduct towards the French Republic in 1849, possibly also the discovery of
+a Treaty of Alliance between the Papal Government and Austria, at length
+overcame Napoleon's hesitation in meeting the national demand of Italy, and
+gave him courage to defy both the Papal Court and the French priesthood. He
+resolved to consent to the formation of an Italian Kingdom under Victor
+Emmanuel including the northern part of the Papal territories as well as
+Tuscany and the other Duchies, and to silence the outcry which this act of
+spoliation would excite among the clerical party in France by the
+annexation of Nice and Savoy.
+
+["The Pope and the Congress," Dec. 24.]
+
+[Change of Ministry at Paris, Jan. 5, 1860.]
+
+[Cavour resumes office, Jan. 16.]
+
+The decision of the Emperor was foreshadowed by the publication on the 24th
+of December of a pamphlet entitled "The Pope and the Congress." The
+doctrine advanced in this essay was that, although a temporal authority was
+necessary to the Pope's spiritual independence, the peace and unity which
+should surround the Vicar of Christ would be best attained when his
+temporal sovereignty was reduced within the narrowest possible limits. Rome
+and the territory immediately around it, if guaranteed to the Pope by the
+Great Powers, would be sufficient for the temporal needs of the Holy See.
+The revenue lost by the separation of the remainder of the Papal
+territories might be replaced by a yearly tribute of reverence paid by the
+Catholic Powers to the Head of the Church. That the pamphlet advocating
+this policy was written at the dictation of Napoleon was not made a secret.
+Its appearance occasioned an indignant protest at Rome. The Pope announced
+that he would take no part in the proposed Congress unless the doctrines
+advanced in the pamphlet were disavowed by the French Government. Napoleon
+in reply submitted to the Pope that he would do well to purchase the
+guarantee of the Powers for the remainder of his territories by giving up
+all claim to the Romagna, which he had already lost. Pius retorted that he
+could not cede what Heaven had granted, not to himself, but to the Church;
+and that if the Powers would but clear the Romagna of Piedmontese intruders
+he would soon reconquer the rebellious province without the assistance
+either of France or of Austria. The attitude assumed by the Papal Court
+gave Napoleon a good pretext for abandoning the plan of a European
+Congress, from which he could hardly expect to obtain a grant of Nice and
+Savoy. It was announced at Paris that the Congress would be postponed; and
+on the 5th of January, 1860, the change in Napoleon's policy was publicly
+marked by the dismissal of his Foreign Minister, Walewski, and the
+appointment in his place of Thouvenel, a friend to Italian union. Ten days
+later Rattazzi gave up office at Turin, and Cavour returned to power.
+
+[Cavour and Napoleon, Jan-March.]
+
+[Union of the Duchies and the Romagna with Piedmont, March.]
+
+[Savoy and Nice ceded to France.]
+
+Rattazzi, during the six months that he had conducted affairs, had steered
+safely past some dangerous rocks; but he held the helm with an unsteady and
+untrusted hand, and he appears to have displayed an unworthy jealousy
+towards Cavour, who, while out of office, had not ceased to render what
+services he could to his country. Cavour resumed his post, with the resolve
+to defer no longer the annexation of Central Italy, but with the heavy
+consciousness that Napoleon would demand in return for his consent to this
+union the cession of Nice and Savoy. No Treaty entitled France to claim
+this reward, for the Austrians still held Venetia; but Napoleon's troops
+lay at Milan, and by a march southwards they could easily throw Italian
+affairs again into confusion, and undo all that the last six months had
+effected. Cavour would perhaps have lent himself to any European
+combination which, while directed against the extension, of France, would
+have secured the existence of the Italian Kingdom; but no such alternative
+to the French alliance proved possible; and the subsequent negotiations
+between Paris and Turin were intended only to vest with a certain
+diplomatic propriety the now inevitable transfer of territory from the
+weaker to the stronger State. A series of propositions made from London
+with the view of withdrawing from Italy both French and Austrian influence
+led the Austrian Court to acknowledge that its army would not be employed
+for the restoration of the sovereigns of Tuscany and Modena. Construing
+this statement as an admission that the stipulations of Villafranca and
+Zuerich as to the return of the fugitive princes had become impracticable,
+Napoleon now suggested that Victor Emmanuel should annex Parma and Modena,
+and assume secular power in the Romagna as Vicar of the Pope, leaving
+Tuscany to form a separate Government. The establishment of so powerful a
+kingdom on the confines of France was, he added, not in accordance with the
+traditions of French foreign policy, and in self-defence France must
+rectify its military frontier by the acquisition of Nice and Savoy (Feb.
+24th). Cavour well understood that the mention of Tuscan independence, and
+the qualified recognition of the Pope's rights in the Romagna, were no more
+than suggestions of the means of pressure by which France might enforce the
+cessions it required. He answered that, although Victor Emmanuel could not
+alienate any part of his dominions, his Government recognised the same
+popular rights in Savoy and Nice as in Central Italy; and accordingly that
+if the population of these districts declared in a legal form their desire
+to be incorporated with France, the King would not resist their will.
+Having thus consented to the necessary sacrifice, and ignoring Napoleon's
+reservations with regard to Tuscany and the Pope, Cavour gave orders that a
+popular vote should at once be taken in Tuscany, as well as in Parma,
+Modena, and the Romagna, on the question of union with Piedmont. The voting
+took place early in March, and gave an overwhelming majority in favour of
+union. The Pope issued the major excommunication against the authors,
+abettors, and agents in this work of sacrilege, and heaped curses on
+curses; but no one seemed the worse for them. Victor Emmanuel accepted the
+sovereignty that was offered to him, and on the 2nd of April the Parliament
+of the united kingdom assembled at Turin. It had already been announced to
+the inhabitants of Nice and Savoy that the King had consented to their
+union with France. The formality of a _plebiscite_ was enacted a few
+days later, and under the combined pressure of the French and Sardinian
+Governments the desired results were obtained. Not more than a few hundred
+persons protested by their vote against a transaction to which it was
+understood that the King had no choice but to submit. [496]
+
+[Cavour on the cession of Nice and Savoy.]
+
+That Victor Emmanuel had at one time been disposed to resist Cavour's
+surrender of the home of his race is well known. Above a year, however, had
+passed since the project had been accepted as the basis of the French
+alliance; and if, during the interval of suspense after Villafranca, the
+King had cherished a hope that the sacrifice might be avoided without
+prejudice either to the cause of Italy or to his own relations with
+Napoleon, Cavour had entertained no such illusions. He knew that the
+cession was an indispensable link in the chain of his own policy, that
+policy which had made it possible to defeat Austria, and which, he
+believed, would lead to the further consolidation of Italy. Looking to
+Rome, to Palermo, where the smouldering fire might at any moment blaze out,
+he could not yet dispense with the friendship of Napoleon, he could not
+provoke the one man powerful enough to shape the action of France in
+defiance of Clerical and of Legitimist aims. Rattazzi might claim credit
+for having brought Piedmont past the Treaty of Zuerich without loss of
+territory; Cavour, in a far finer spirit, took upon himself the
+responsibility for the sacrifice made to France, and bade the Parliament of
+Italy pass judgment upon his act. The cession of the border-provinces
+overshadowed what would otherwise have been the brightest scene in Italian
+history for many generations, the meeting of the first North-Italian
+Parliament at Turin. Garibaldi, coming as deputy from his birthplace, Nice,
+uttered words of scorn and injustice against the man who had made him an
+alien in Italy, and quitted the Chamber. Bitterly as Cavour felt, both now
+and down to the end of his life, the reproaches that were levelled against
+him, he allowed no trace of wounded feeling, of impatience, of the sense of
+wrong, to escape him in the masterly speech in which he justified his
+policy and won for it the ratification of the Parliament. It was not until
+a year later, when the hand of death was almost upon him, that fierce words
+addressed to him face to face by Garibaldi wrung from him the impressive
+answer, "The act that has made this gulf between us was the most painful
+duty of my life. By what I have felt myself I know what Garibaldi must have
+felt. If he refuses me his forgiveness I cannot reproach him for it." [497]
+
+[The cession in relation to Europe and Italy.]
+
+The annexation of Nice and Savoy by Napoleon was seen with extreme
+displeasure in Europe generally, and most of all in England. It directly
+affected the history of Britain by the stimulus which it gave to the
+development of the Volunteer Forces. Owing their origin to certain
+demonstrations of hostility towards England made by the French army after
+Orsini's conspiracy and the acquittal of one of his confederates in London,
+the Volunteer Forces rose in the three months that followed the annexation
+of Nice and Savoy from seventy to a hundred and eighty thousand men. If
+viewed as an indication that the ruler of France would not be content with
+the frontiers of 1815, the acquisition of the Sub-Alpine provinces might
+with some reason excite alarm; on no other ground could their transfer be
+justly condemned. Geographical position, language, commercial interests,
+separated Savoy from Piedmont and connected it with France; and though in
+certain parts of the County of Nice the Italian character predominated,
+this district as a whole bore the stamp not of Piedmont or Liguria but of
+Provence. Since the separation from France in 1815 there had always been,
+both in Nice and Savoy, a considerable party which desired reunion with
+that country. The political and social order of the Sardinian Kingdom had
+from 1815 to 1848 been so backward, so reactionary, that the middle classes
+in the border-provinces looked wistfully to France as a land where their
+own grievances had been removed and their own ideals attained. The
+constitutional system of Victor Emmanuel, and the despotic system of Louis
+Napoleon had both been too recently introduced to reverse in the minds of
+the greater number the political tradition of the preceding thirty years.
+Thus if there were a few who, like Garibaldi, himself of Genoese descent
+though born at Nice, passionately resented separation from Italy, they
+found no considerable party either in Nice or in Savoy animated by the same
+feeling. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical sentiment of Savoy rendered
+its transfer to France an actual advantage to the Italian State. The Papacy
+had here a deeply-rooted influence. The reforms begun by Azeglio's Ministry
+had been steadily resisted by a Savoyard group of deputies in the interests
+of Rome. Cavour himself, in the prosecution of his larger plans, had always
+been exposed to the danger of a coalition between this ultra-Conservative
+party and his opponents of the other extreme. It was well that in the
+conflict with the Papacy, without which there could be no such thing as a
+Kingdom of United Italy, these influences of the Savoyard Church and
+Noblesse should be removed from the Parliament and the Throne. Honourable
+as the Savoyard party of resistance had proved themselves in Parliamentary
+life, loyal and faithful as they were to their sovereign, they were yet not
+a part of the Italian nation. Their interests were not bound up with the
+cause of Italian union; their leaders were not inspired with the ideal of
+Italian national life. The forces that threatened the future of the new
+State from within were too powerful for the surrender of a priest-governed
+and half-foreign element to be considered as a real loss.
+
+[Naples.]
+
+Nice and Savoy had hardly been handed over to Napoleon when Garibaldi set
+out from Genoa to effect the liberation of Sicily and Naples. King
+Ferdinand II., known to his subjects and to Western Europe as King Bomba,
+had died a few days before the battle of Magenta, leaving the throne to his
+son Francis II. In consequence of the friendship shown by Ferdinand to
+Russia during the Crimean War, and of his refusal to amend his tyrannical
+system of government, the Western Powers had in 1856 withdrawn their
+representatives from Naples. On the accession of Francis II. diplomatic
+intercourse was renewed, and Cavour, who had been at bitter enmity with
+Ferdinand, sought to establish relations of friendship with his son. In the
+war against Austria an alliance with Naples would have been of value to
+Sardinia as a counterpoise to Napoleon's influence, and this alliance
+Cavour attempted to obtain. He was, however, unsuccessful; and after the
+Peace of Villafranca the Neapolitan Court threw itself with ardour into
+schemes for the restoration of the fallen Governments and the overthrow of
+Piedmontese authority in the Romagna by means of a coalition with Austria
+and Spain and a counterrevolutionary movement in Italy itself. A rising on
+behalf of the fugitive Grand Duke of Tuscany was to give the signal for the
+march of the Neapolitan army northwards. This rising, however, was expected
+in vain, and the great Catholic design resulted in nothing. Baffled in its
+larger aims, the Bourbon Government proposed in the spring of 1860 to
+occupy Umbria and the Marches, in order to prevent the revolutionary
+movement from spreading farther into the Papal States. Against this Cavour
+protested, and King Francis yielded to his threat to withdraw the Sardinian
+ambassador from Naples. Knowing that a conspiracy existed for the
+restoration of the House of Murat to the Neapolitan throne, which would
+have given France the ascendency in Southern Italy, Cavour now renewed his
+demand that Francis II. should enter into alliance with Piedmont, accepting
+a constitutional system of government and the national Italian policy of
+Victor Emmanuel. But neither the summons from Turin, nor the agitation of
+the Muratists, nor the warnings of Great Britain that the Bourbon dynasty
+could only avert its fall by reform, produced any real change in the spirit
+of the Neapolitan Court. Ministers were removed, but the absolutist and
+anti-national system remained the same. Meanwhile Garibaldi was gathering
+his followers round him in Genoa. On the 15th of April Victor Emmanuel
+wrote to King Francis that unless his fatal system of policy was
+immediately abandoned the Piedmontese Government itself might shortly be
+forced to become the agent of his destruction. Even this menace proved
+fruitless; and after thus fairly exposing to the Court of Naples the
+consequence of its own stubbornness, Victor Emmanuel let loose against it
+the revolutionary forces of Garibaldi.
+
+[Sicily.]
+
+[Garibaldi starts for Sicily, May 5.]
+
+[Garibaldi at Marsala, May 11.]
+
+Since the campaign of 1859 insurrectionary committees had been active in
+the principal Sicilian towns. The old desire of the Sicilian Liberals for
+the independence of the island had given place, under the influence of the
+events of the past year, to the desire for Italian union. On the
+abandonment of Garibaldi's plan for the march on Rome in November, 1859,
+the liberation of Sicily had been suggested to him as a more feasible
+enterprise, and the general himself wavered in the spring of 1860 between
+the resumption of his Roman project and an attack upon the Bourbons of
+Naples from the south. The rumour spread through Sicily that Garibaldi
+would soon appear there at the head of his followers. On the 3rd of April
+an attempt at insurrection was made at Palermo. It was repressed without
+difficulty; and although disturbances broke out in other parts of the
+island, the reports which reached Garibaldi at Genoa as to the spirit and
+prospects of the Sicilians were so disheartening that for a while he seemed
+disposed to abandon the project of invasion as hopeless for the present. It
+was only when some of the Sicilian exiles declared that they would risk the
+enterprise without him that he resolved upon immediate action. On the night
+of the 5th of May two steamships lying in the harbour of Genoa were seized,
+and on these Garibaldi with his Thousand put to sea. Cavour, though he
+would have preferred that Sicily should remain unmolested until some
+progress had been made in the consolidation of the North Italian Kingdom,
+did not venture to restrain Garibaldi's movements, with which he was well
+acquainted. He required, however, that the expedition should not touch at
+the island of Sardinia, and gave ostensible orders to his admiral, Persano,
+to seize the ships of Garibaldi if they should put into any Sardinian port.
+Garibaldi, who had sheltered the Sardinian Government from responsibility
+at the outset by the fiction of a sudden capture of the two merchant-ships,
+continued to spare Victor Emmanuel unnecessary difficulties by avoiding the
+fleet which was supposed to be on the watch for him off Cagliari in
+Sardinia, and only interrupted his voyage by a landing at a desolate spot
+on the Tuscan coast in order to take up artillery and ammunition which were
+waiting for him there. On the 11th of May, having heard from some English
+merchantmen that there were no Neapolitan vessels of war at Marsala, he
+made for this harbour. The first of his two ships entered it in safety and
+disembarked her crew; the second, running on a rock, lay for some time
+within range of the guns of a Neapolitan war-steamer which was bearing up
+towards the port. But for some unknown reason the Neapolitan commander
+delayed opening fire, and the landing of Garibaldi's followers was during
+this interval completed without loss. [498]
+
+[Garibaldi captures Palermo, May 26.]
+
+On the following day the little army, attired in the red shirts which are
+worn by cattle-ranchers in South America, marched eastwards from Marsala.
+Bands of villagers joined them as they moved through the country, and many
+unexpected adherents were gained among the priests. On the third day's
+march Neapolitan troops were seen in position at Calatafimi. They were
+attacked by Garibaldi, and, though far superior in number, were put to the
+rout. The moral effects of this first victory were very great. The
+Neapolitan commander retired into Palermo, leaving Garibaldi master of the
+western portion of the island. Insurrection spread towards the interior;
+the revolutionary party at Palermo itself regained its courage and prepared
+to co-operate with Garibaldi on his approach. On nearing the city Garibaldi
+determined that he could not risk a direct assault upon the forces which
+occupied it. He resolved, if possible, to lure part of the defenders into
+the mountains, and during their absence to throw himself into the city and
+to trust to the energy of its inhabitants to maintain himself there. This
+strategy succeeded. While the officer in command of some of the Neapolitan
+battalions, tempted by an easy victory over the ill-disciplined Sicilian
+bands opposed to him, pursued his beaten enemy into the mountains,
+Garibaldi with the best of his troops fought his way into Palermo on the
+night of May 26th. Fighting continued in the streets during the next two
+days, and the cannon of the forts and of the Neapolitan vessels in harbour
+ineffectually bombarded the city. On the 30th, at the moment when the
+absent battalions were coming again into sight, an armistice was signed on
+board the British man-of-war _Hannibal_. The Neapolitan commander gave
+up to Garibaldi the bank and public buildings, and withdrew into the forts
+outside the town. But the Government at Naples was now becoming thoroughly
+alarmed; and considering Palermo as lost, it directed the troops to be
+shipped to Messina and to Naples itself. Garibaldi was thus left in
+undisputed possession of the Sicilian capital. He remained there for nearly
+two months, assuming the government of Sicily as Dictator in the name of
+Victor Emmanuel, appointing Ministers, and levying taxes. Heavy
+reinforcements reached him from Italy. The Neapolitans, driven from the
+interior as well as from the towns occupied by the invader, now held only
+the north-eastern extremity of the island. On the 20th of July Garibaldi,
+operating both by land and sea, attacked and defeated them at Milazzo on
+the northern coast. The result of this victory was that Messina itself,
+with the exception of the citadel, was evacuated by the Neapolitans without
+resistance. Garibaldi, whose troops now numbered eighteen thousand, was
+master of the island from sea to sea, and could with confidence look
+forward to the overthrow of Bourbon authority on the Italian mainland.
+
+[The Party of Action.]
+
+During Garibaldi's stay at Palermo the antagonism between the two political
+creeds which severed those whose devotion to Italy was the strongest came
+clearly into view. This antagonism stood embodied in its extreme form in
+the contrast between Mazzini and Cavour. Mazzini, handling moral and
+political conceptions with something of the independence of a
+mathematician, laid it down as the first duty of the Italian nation to
+possess itself of Rome and Venice, regardless of difficulties that might be
+raised from without. By conviction he desired that Italy should be a
+Republic, though under certain conditions he might be willing to tolerate
+the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel. Cavour, accurately observing the play of
+political forces in Europe, conscious above all of the strength of those
+ties which still bound Napoleon to the clerical cause, knew that there were
+limits which Italy could not at present pass without ruin. The centre of
+Mazzini's hopes, an advance upon Rome itself, he knew to be an act of
+self-destruction for Italy, and this advance he was resolved at all costs
+to prevent. Cavour had not hindered the expedition to Sicily; he had not
+considered it likely to embroil Italy with its ally; but neither had he
+been the author of this enterprise. The liberation of Sicily might be
+deemed the work rather of the school of Mazzini than of Cavour. Garibaldi
+indeed was personally loyal to Victor Emmanuel; but around him there were
+men who, if not Republicans, were at least disposed to make the grant of
+Sicily to Victor Emmanuel conditional upon the king's fulfilling the will
+of the so-called Party of Action, and consenting to an attack upon Rome.
+Under the influence of these politicians Garibaldi, in reply to a
+deputation expressing to him the desire of the Sicilians for union with the
+Kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, declared that he had come to fight not for
+Sicily alone but for all Italy, and that if the annexation of Sicily was to
+take place before the union of Italy was assured, he must withdraw his hand
+from the work and retire. The effect produced by these words of Garibaldi
+was so serious that the Ministers whom he had placed in office resigned.
+Garibaldi endeavoured to substitute for them men more agreeable to the
+Party of Action, but a demonstration in Palermo itself forced him to
+nominate Sicilians in favour of immediate annexation. The public opinion of
+the island was hostile to Republicanism and to the friends of Mazzini; nor
+could the prevailing anarchy long continue without danger of a reactionary
+movement. Garibaldi himself possessed no glimmer of administrative faculty.
+After weeks of confusion and misgovernment he saw the necessity of
+accepting direction from Turin, and consented to recognise as Pro-Dictator
+of the island a nominee of Cavour, the Piedmontese Depretis. Under the
+influence of Depretis a commencement was made in the work of political and
+social reorganisation. [499]
+
+[Cavour's policy with regard to Naples.]
+
+[Garibaldi crosses to the mainland, Aug. 19.]
+
+Cavour, during Garibaldi's preparation for his descent upon Sicily and
+until the capture of Palermo, had affected to disavow and condemn the
+enterprise as one undertaken by individuals in spite of the Government, and
+at their own risk. The Piedmontese ambassador was still at Naples as the
+representative of a friendly Court; and in reply to the reproaches of
+Germany and Russia, Cavour alleged that the title of Dictator of Sicily in
+the name of Victor Emmanuel had been assumed by Garibaldi without the
+knowledge or consent of his sovereign. But whatever might be said to
+Foreign Powers, Cavour, from the time of the capture of Palermo, recognised
+that the hour had come for further steps towards Italian union; and,
+without committing himself to any definite line of action, he began already
+to contemplate the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty at Naples. It was in
+vain that King Francis now released his political prisoners, declared the
+Constitution of 1848 in force, and tendered to Piedmont the alliance which
+he had before refused. Cavour, in reply to his overtures, stated that he
+could not on his own authority pledge Piedmont to the support of a dynasty
+now almost in the agonies of dissolution, and that the matter must await
+the meeting of Parliament at Turin. Thus far the way had not been
+absolutely closed to a reconciliation between the two Courts; but after the
+victory of Garibaldi at Milazzo and the evacuation of Messina at the end of
+July Cavour cast aside all hesitation and reserve. He appears to have
+thought a renewal of the war with Austria probable, and now strained every
+nerve to become master of Naples and its fleet before Austria could take
+the field. He ordered Admiral Persano to leave two ships of war to cover
+Garibaldi's passage to the mainland, and with one ship to proceed to Naples
+himself, and there excite insurrection and win over the Neapolitan fleet to
+the flag of Victor Emmanuel. Persano reached Naples on the 3rd of August,
+and on the next day the negotiations between the two Courts were broken
+off. On the 19th Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland. His march
+upon the capital was one unbroken triumph.
+
+[Persano and Villamarina at Naples.]
+
+[Departure of King Francis, Sept. 6.]
+
+[Garibaldi enters Naples, Sept. 7.]
+
+It was the hope of Cavour that before Garibaldi could reach Naples a
+popular movement in the city itself would force the King to take flight, so
+that Garibaldi on his arrival would find the machinery of government, as
+well as the command of the fleet and the army, already in the hands of
+Victor Emmanuel's representatives. If war with Austria was really
+impending, incalculable mischief might be caused by the existence of a
+semi-independent Government at Naples, reckless, in its enthusiasm for the
+march on Rome, of the effect which its acts might produce on the French
+alliance. In any case the control of Italian affairs could but half belong
+to the King and his Minister if Garibaldi, in the full glory of his
+unparalleled exploits, should add the Dictatorship of Naples to the
+Dictatorship of Sicily. Accordingly Cavour plied every art to accelerate
+the inevitable revolution. Persano and the Sardinian ambassador,
+Villamarina, had their confederates in the Bourbon Ministry and in the
+Royal Family itself. But their efforts to drive King Francis from Naples,
+and to establish the authority of Victor Emmanuel before Garibaldi's
+arrival, were baffled partly by the tenacity of the King and Queen, partly
+by the opposition of the committees of the Party of Action, who were
+determined that power should fall into no hands but those of Garibaldi
+himself. It was not till Garibaldi had reached Salerno, and the Bourbon
+generals had one after another declined to undertake the responsibility of
+command in a battle against him, that Francis resolved on flight. It was
+now feared that he might induce the fleet to sail with him, and even that
+he might hand it over to the Austrians. The crews, it was believed, were
+willing to follow the King; the officers, though inclined to the Italian
+cause, would be powerless to prevent them. There was not an hour to lose.
+On the night of September 5th, after the King's intention to quit the
+capital had become known, Persano and Villamarina disguised themselves, and
+in company with their partisans mingled with the crews of the fleet, whom
+they induced by bribes and persuasion to empty the boilers and to cripple
+the engines of their ships. When, on the 6th, King Francis, having
+announced his intention to spare the capital bloodshed, went on board a
+mail steamer and quitted the harbour, accompanied by the ambassadors of
+Austria, Prussia, and Spain, only one vessel of the fleet of followed him.
+An urgent summons was sent to Garibaldi, whose presence was now desired by
+all parties alike in order to prevent the outbreak of disorders. Leaving
+his troops at Salerno, Garibaldi came by railroad to Naples on the morning
+of the 7th, escorted only by some of his staff. The forts were still
+garrisoned by eight thousand of the Bourbon troops, but all idea of
+resistance had been abandoned, and Garibaldi drove fearlessly through the
+city in the midst of joyous crowds. His first act as Dictator was to
+declare the ships of war belonging to the State of the Two Sicilies united
+to those of King Victor Emmanuel under Admiral Persano's command. Before
+sunset the flag of Italy was hoisted by the Neapolitan fleet. The army was
+not to be so easily incorporated with the national forces. King Francis,
+after abandoning the idea of a battle between Naples and Salerno, had
+ordered the mass of his troops to retire upon Capua in order to make a
+final struggle on the line of the Volturno, and this order had been obeyed.
+[500]
+
+[The Piedmontese army enters Umbria and the Marches. Sept. 11.]
+
+[Fall of Ancona, Sept. 25.]
+
+As soon as it had become evident that the entry of Garibaldi into Naples
+could not be anticipated by the establishment of Victor Emmanuel's own
+authority, Cavour recognised that bold and aggressive action on the part of
+the National Government was now necessity. Garibaldi made no secret or his
+intention to carry the Italian arms to Rome. The time was past when the
+national movement could be checked at the frontiers of Naples and Tuscany.
+It remained only for Cavour to throw the King's own troops into the Papal
+States before Garibaldi could move from Naples, and, while winning for
+Italy the last foot of ground that could be won without an actual conflict
+with France, to stop short at those limits where the soldiers of Napoleon
+would certainly meet an invader with their fire. The Pope was still in
+possession of the Marches, of Umbria, and of the territory between the
+Apennines and the coast from Orvieto to Terracina. Cavour had good reason
+to believe that Napoleon would not strike on behalf of the Temporal Power
+until this last narrow district was menaced. He resolved to seize upon the
+Marches and Umbria, and to brave the consequences. On the day of
+Garibaldi's entry into Naples a despatch was sent by Cavour to the Papal
+Government requiring, in the name of Victor Emmanuel, the disbandment of
+the foreign mercenaries who in the previous spring had plundered Perugia,
+and whose presence was a continued menace to the peace of Italy. The
+announcement now made by Napoleon that he must break off diplomatic
+relations with the Sardinian Government in case of the invasion of the
+Papal States produced no effect. Cavour replied that by no other means
+could he prevent revolution from mastering all Italy, and on the 10th of
+September the French ambassador quitted Turin. Without waiting for
+Antonelli's answer to his ultimatum, Cavour ordered the King's troops to
+cross the frontier. The Papal army was commanded by Lamoriciere, a French
+general who had gained some reputation in Algiers; but the resistance
+offered to the Piedmontese was unexpectedly feeble. The column which
+entered Umbria reached the southern limit without encountering any serious
+opposition except from the Irish garrison of Spoleto. In the Marches, where
+Lamoriciere had a considerable force at his disposal, the dispersion of the
+Papal troops and the incapacity shown in their command brought the campaign
+to a rapid and inglorious end. The main body of the defenders was routed on
+the Musone, near Loreto, on the 19th of September. Other divisions
+surrendered, and Ancona alone remained to Lamoriciere. Vigorously attacked
+in this fortress both by land and sea, Lamoriciere surrendered after a
+siege of eight days. Within three weeks from Garibaldi's entry into Naples
+the Piedmontese army had completed the task imposed upon it, and Victor
+Emmanuel was master of Italy as far as the Abruzzi.
+
+[Cavour, Garibaldi, and the Party of Action.]
+
+Cavour's successes had not come a day too soon, for Garibaldi, since his
+entry into Naples, was falling more and more into the hands of the Party of
+Action, and, while protesting his loyalty to Victor Emmanuel, was openly
+announcing that he would march the Party of on Rome whether the King's
+Government permitted it or no. In Sicily the officials appointed by this
+Party were proceeding with such violence that Depretis, unable to obtain
+troops from Cavour, resigned his post. Garibaldi suddenly appeared at
+Palermo on the 11th of September, appointed a new Pro-Dictator, and
+repeated to the Sicilians that their union with the Kingdom of Victor
+Emmanuel must be postponed until all members of the Italian family were
+free. But even the personal presence and the angry words of Garibaldi were
+powerless to check the strong expression of Sicilian opinion in favour of
+immediate and unconditional annexation. His visit to Palermo was answered
+by the appearance of a Sicilian deputation at Turin demanding immediate
+union, and complaining that the island was treated by Garibaldi's officers
+like a conquered province. At Naples the rash and violent utterances of the
+Dictator were equally condemned. The Ministers whom he had himself
+appointed resigned. Garibaldi replaced them by others who were almost
+Republicans, and sent a letter to Victor Emmanuel requesting him to consent
+to the march upon Rome and to dismiss Cavour. It was known in Turin that at
+this very moment Napoleon was taking steps to increase the French force in
+Rome, and to garrison the whole of the territory that still remained to the
+Pope. Victor Emmanuel understood how to reply to Garibaldi's letter. He
+remained true to his Minister, and sent orders to Villamarina at Naples in
+case Garibaldi should proclaim the Republic to break off all relations with
+him and to secure the fleet. The fall of Ancona on September 28th brought a
+timely accession of popularity and credit to Cavour. He made the Parliament
+which assembled at Turin four days later arbiter in the struggle between
+Garibaldi and himself, and received from it an almost unanimous vote of
+confidence. Garibaldi would perhaps have treated lightly any resolution of
+Parliament which conflicted with his own opinion: he shrank from a breach
+with the soldier of Novara and Solferino. Now, as at other moments of
+danger, the character and reputation of Victor Emmanuel stood Italy in good
+stead. In the enthusiasm which Garibaldi's services to Italy excited in
+every patriotic heart, there was room for thankfulness that Italy possessed
+a sovereign and a statesman strong enough even to withstand its hero when
+his heroism endangered the national cause. [501]
+
+[The armies on the Volturno.]
+
+[Meeting of Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, Oct. 26.]
+
+[Fall of Gaeta, Feb. 14, 1861.]
+
+The King of Naples had not yet abandoned the hope that one or more of the
+European Powers would intervene in his behalf. The trustworthy part of his
+army had gathered round the fortress of Capua on the Volturno, and there
+were indications that Garibaldi would here meet with far more serious
+resistance than he had yet encountered. While he was still in Naples, his
+troops, which had pushed northwards, sustained a repulse at Cajazzo.
+Emboldened by this success, the Neapolitan army at the beginning of October
+assumed the offensive. It was with difficulty that Garibaldi, placing
+himself again at the head of his forces, drove the enemy back to Capua. But
+the arms of Victor Emmanuel were now thrown into the scale. Crossing the
+Apennines, and driving before him the weak force that was intended to bar
+his way at Isernia, the King descended in the rear of the Neapolitan army.
+The Bourbon commander, warned of his approach, moved northwards on the line
+of the Garigliano, leaving a garrison to defend Capua. Garibaldi followed
+on his track, and in the neighbourhood of Teano met King Victor Emmanuel
+(October 26th). The meeting is said to have been cordial on the part of the
+King, reserved on the part of Garibaldi, who saw in the King's suite the
+men by whom he had been prevented from invading the Papal States in the
+previous year. In spite of their common patriotism the volunteers of
+Garibaldi and the army of Victor Emmanuel were rival bodies, and the
+relations between the chiefs of each camp were strained and difficult.
+Garibaldi himself returned to the siege of Capua, while the King marched
+northwards against the retreating Neapolitans. All that was great in
+Garibaldi's career was now in fact accomplished. The politicians about him
+had attempted at Naples, as in Sicily, to postpone the union with Victor
+Emmanuel's monarchy, and to convoke a Southern Parliament which should fix
+the conditions on which annexation would be permitted; but, after
+discrediting the General, they had been crushed by public opinion, and a
+popular vote which was taken at the end of October on the question of
+immediate union showed the majority in favour of this course to be
+overwhelming. After the surrender of Capua on the 2nd of November, Victor
+Emmanuel made his entry into Naples. Garibaldi, whose request for the
+Lieutenancy of Southern Italy for the space of a year with full powers was
+refused by the King, [502] declined all minor honours and rewards, and
+departed to his home, still filled with resentment against Cavour, and
+promising his soldiers that he would return in the spring and lead them to
+Rome and Venice. The reduction of Gaeta, where King Francis II. had taken
+refuge, and of the citadel of Messina, formed the last act of the war. The
+French fleet for some time prevented the Sardinians from operating against
+Gaeta from the sea, and the siege in consequence made slow progress. It was
+not until the middle of January, 1861, that Napoleon permitted the French
+admiral to quit his station. The bombardment was now opened both by land
+and sea, and after a brave resistance Gaeta surrendered on the 14th of
+February. King Francis and his young Queen, a sister of the Empress of
+Austria, were conveyed in a French steamer to the Papal States, and there
+began their life-long exile. The citadel of Messina, commanded by one of
+the few Neapolitan officers who showed any soldierly spirit, maintained its
+obstinate defence for a month after the Bourbon flag had disappeared from
+the mainland.
+
+[Cavour's policy with regard to Rome and Venice.]
+
+[The Free Church in the Free State.]
+
+Thus in the spring of 1861, within two years from the outbreak of war with
+Austria, Italy with the exception of Rome and Venice was united under
+Victor Emmanuel. Of all the European Powers, Great Britain alone watched
+the creation of the new Italian Kingdom with complete sympathy and
+approval. Austria, though it had made peace at Zuerich, declined to renew
+diplomatic intercourse with Sardinia, and protested against the assumption
+by Victor Emmanuel of the title of King of Italy. Russia, the ancient
+patron of the Neapolitan Bourbons, declared that geographical conditions
+alone prevented its intervention against their despoilers. Prussia, though
+under a new sovereign, had not yet completely severed the ties which bound
+it to Austria. Nevertheless, in spite of wide political ill-will, and of
+the passionate hostility of the clerical party throughout Europe, there was
+little probability that the work of the Italian people would be overthrown
+by external force. The problem which faced Victor Emmanuel's Government was
+not so much the frustration of reactionary designs from without as the
+determination of the true line of policy to be followed in regard to Rome
+and Venice. There were few who, like Azeglio, held that Rome might be
+permanently left outside the Italian Kingdom; there were none who held this
+of Venice. Garibaldi might be mad enough to hope for victory in a campaign
+against Austria and against France at the head of such a troop as he
+himself could muster; Cavour would have deserved ill of his country if he
+had for one moment countenanced the belief that the force which had
+overthrown the Neapolitan Bourbons could with success, or with impunity to
+Italy, measure itself against the defenders of Venetia or of Rome. Yet the
+mind of Cavour was not one which could rest in mere passive expectancy as
+to the future, or in mere condemnation of the unwise schemes of others. His
+intelligence, so luminous, so penetrating, that in its utterances we seem
+at times to be listening to the very spirit of the age, ranged over wide
+fields of moral and of spiritual interests in its forecast of the future of
+Italy, and spent its last force in one of those prophetic delineations
+whose breadth and power the world can feel, though a later time alone can
+judge of their correspondence with the destined course of history. Venice
+was less to Europe than Rome; its transfer to Italy would, Cavour believed,
+be effected either by arms or negotiations so soon as the German race
+should find a really national Government, and refuse the service which had
+hitherto been exacted from it for the maintenance of Austrian interests. It
+was to Prussia, as the representative of nationality in Germany, that
+Cavour looked as the natural ally of Italy in the vindication of that part
+of the national inheritance which still lay under the dominion of the
+Hapsburg. Rome, unlike Venice, was not only defended by foreign arms, it
+was the seat of a Power whose empire over the mind of man was not the sport
+of military or political vicissitudes. Circumstances might cause France to
+relax its grasp on Rome, but it was not to such an accident that Cavour
+looked for the incorporation of Rome with Italy. He conceived that the time
+would arrive when the Catholic world would recognise that the Church would
+best fulfil its task in complete separation from temporal power. Rome would
+then assume its natural position as the centre of the Italian State; the
+Church would be the noblest friend, not the misjudging enemy, of the
+Italian national monarchy. Cavour's own religious beliefs were perhaps less
+simple than he chose to represent them. Occupying himself, however, with
+institutions, not with dogmas, he regarded the Church in profound
+earnestness as a humanising and elevating power. He valued its independence
+so highly that even on the suppression of the Piedmontese monasteries he
+had refused to give to the State the administration of the revenue arising
+from the sale of their lands, and had formed this into a fund belonging to
+the Church itself, in order that the clergy might not become salaried
+officers of the State. Human freedom was the principle in which he trusted;
+and looking upon the Church as the greatest association formed by men, he
+believed that here too the rule of freedom, of the absence of
+State-regulation, would in the end best serve man's highest interests. With
+the passing away of the Pope's temporal power, Cavour imagined that the
+constitution of the Church itself would become more democratic, more
+responsive to the movement of the modern world. His own effort in
+ecclesiastical reform had been to improve the condition and to promote the
+independence of the lower clergy. He had hoped that each step in their
+moral and material progress would make them more national at heart; and
+though this hope had been but partially fulfilled, Cavour had never ceased
+to cherish the ideal of a national Church which, while recognising its Head
+in Rome, should cordially and without reserve accept the friendship of the
+Italian State. [503]
+
+[Death of Cavour, June 6, 1861.]
+
+[Free Church in Free State.]
+
+It was in the exposition of these principles, in the enforcement of the
+common moral interest of Italian nationality and the Catholic Church, that
+Cavour gave his last counsels to the Italian Parliament. He was not himself
+to lead the nation farther towards the Promised Land. The immense exertions
+which he had maintained during the last three years, the indignation and
+anxiety caused to him by Garibaldi's attacks, produced an illness which
+Cavour's own careless habits of life and the unskilfulness of his doctors
+rendered fatal. With dying lips he repeated to those about him the words in
+which he had summed up his policy in the Italian Parliament: "A free Church
+in a free State." [504] Other Catholic lands had adjusted by Concordats
+with the Papacy the conflicting claims of temporal and spiritual authority
+in such matters as the appointment of bishops, the regulation of schools,
+the family-rights of persons married without ecclesiastical form. Cavour
+appears to have thought that in Italy, where the whole nation was in a
+sense Catholic, the Church might as safely and as easily be left to manage
+its own affairs as in the United States, where the Catholic community is
+only one among many religious societies. His optimism, his sanguine and
+large-hearted tolerance, was never more strikingly shown than in this
+fidelity to the principle of liberty, even in the case of those who for the
+time declined all reconciliation with the Italian State. Whether Cavour's
+ideal was an impracticable fancy a later age will decide. The ascendency
+within the Church of Rome would seem as yet to have rested with the
+elements most opposed to the spirit of the time, most obstinately bent on
+setting faith and reason in irreconcilable enmity. In place of that
+democratic movement within the hierarchy and the priesthood which Cavour
+anticipated, absolutism has won a new crown in the doctrine of Papal
+Infallibility. Catholic dogma has remained impervious to the solvents which
+during the last thirty years have operated with perceptible success on the
+theology of Protestant lands. Each conquest made in the world of thought
+and knowledge is still noted as the next appropriate object of denunciation
+by the Vatican. Nevertheless the cautious spirit will be slow to conclude
+that hopes like those of Cavour were wholly vain. A single generation may
+see but little of the seed-time, nothing of the harvests that are yet to
+enrich mankind. And even if all wider interests be left out of view, enough
+remains to justify Cavour's policy of respect for the independence of the
+Church in the fact that Italy during the thirty years succeeding the
+establishment of its union has remained free from civil war. Cavour was
+wont to refer to the Constitution which the French National Assembly
+imposed upon the clergy in 1790 as the type of erroneous legislation. Had
+his own policy and that of his successors not been animated by a wiser
+spirit; had the Government of Italy, after overthrowing the Pope's temporal
+sovereignty, sought enemies among the rural priesthood and their
+congregations, the provinces added to the Italian Kingdom by Garibaldi
+would hardly have been maintained by the House of Savoy without a second
+and severer struggle. Between the ideal Italy which filled the thoughts not
+only of Mazzini but of some of the best English minds of that time--the
+land of immemorial greatness, touched once more by the divine hand and
+advancing from strength to strength as the intellectual and moral pioneer
+among nations--between this ideal and the somewhat hard and commonplace
+realities of the Italy of to-day there is indeed little enough resemblance.
+Poverty, the pressure of inordinate taxation, the physical and moral habits
+inherited from centuries of evil government,--all these have darkened in no
+common measure the conditions from which Italian national life has to be
+built up. If in spite of overwhelming difficulties each crisis has hitherto
+been surmounted; if, with all that is faulty and infirm, the omens for the
+future of Italy are still favourable, one source of its good fortune has
+been the impress given to its ecclesiastical policy by the great statesman
+to whom above all other men it owes the accomplishment of its union, and
+who, while claiming for Italy the whole of its national inheritance, yet
+determined to inflict no needless wound upon the conscience of Rome.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+Germany after 1858--The Regency in Prussia--Army re-organisation--King
+William I.--Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament--Bismarck--The
+struggle continued--Austria from 1859--The October Diploma--Resistance of
+Hungary--The Reichsrath--Russia under Alexander II.--Liberation of the
+Serfs--Poland--The Insurrection of 1863--Agrarian measures in
+Poland--Schleswig-Holstein--Death of Frederick VII.--Plans of
+Bismarck--Campaign in Schleswig--Conference of London--Treaty of
+Vienna--England and Napoleon III.--Prussia and Austria--Convention of
+Gastein--Italy--Alliance of Prussia with Italy--Proposals for a Congress
+fail--War between Austria and Prussia--Napoleon III.--Koeniggraetz--
+Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects
+for compensation to France--Austria and Hungary--Deak--Establishment of
+the Dual System in Austria-Hungary.
+
+
+[Germany from 1858.]
+
+[The Regency in Prussia, Oct. 1858.]
+
+Shortly before the events which broke the power of Austria in Italy, the
+German people believed themselves to have entered on a new political era.
+King Frederick William IV., who, since 1848, had disappointed every hope
+that had been fixed on Prussia and on himself, was compelled by mental
+disorder to withdraw from public affairs in the autumn of 1858. His
+brother, Prince William of Prussia, who had for a year acted as the King's
+representative, now assumed the Regency. In the days when King Frederick
+William still retained some vestiges of his reputation the Prince of
+Prussia had been unpopular, as the supposed head of the reactionary party;
+but the events of the last few years had exhibited him in a better aspect.
+Though strong in his belief both in the Divine right of kings in general,
+and in the necessity of a powerful monarchical rule in Prussia, he was
+disposed to tolerate, and even to treat with a certain respect, the humble
+elements of constitutional government which he found in existence. There
+was more manliness in his nature than in that of his brother, more belief
+in the worth of his own people. The espionage, the servility, the overdone
+professions of sanctity in Manteuffel's regime displeased him, but most of
+all he despised its pusillanimity in the conduct of foreign affairs. His
+heart indeed was Prussian, not German, and the destiny which created him
+the first Emperor of united Germany was not of his own making nor of his
+own seeking; but he felt that Prussia ought to hold a far greater station
+both in Germany and in Europe than it had held during his brother's reign,
+and that the elevation of the State to the position which it ought to
+occupy was the task that lay before himself. During the twelve months
+preceding the Regency the retirement of the King had not been treated as
+more than temporary, and the Prince of Prussia, though constantly at
+variance with Manteuffel's Cabinet, had therefore not considered himself at
+liberty to remove his brother's advisers. His first act on the assumption
+of the constitutional office of Regent was to dismiss the hated Ministry.
+Prince Antony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was called to office, and posts
+in the Government were given to men well known as moderate Liberals. Though
+the Regent stated in clear terms that he had no intention of forming a
+Liberal party-administration, his action satisfied public opinion. The
+troubles and the failures of 1849 had inclined men to be content with far
+less than had been asked years before. The leaders of the more advanced
+sections among the Liberals preferred for the most part to remain outside
+Parliamentary life rather than to cause embarrassment to the new
+Government; and the elections of 1859 sent to Berlin a body of
+representatives fully disposed to work with the Regent and his Ministers in
+the policy of guarded progress which they had laid down.
+
+[Revival of idea of German union.]
+
+This change of spirit in the Prussian Government, followed by the events
+that established Italian independence, told powerfully upon public opinion
+throughout Germany. Hopes that had been crushed in 1849 now revived. With
+the collapse of military despotism in the Austrian Empire the clouds of
+reaction seemed everywhere to be passing away; it was possible once more to
+think of German national union and of common liberties in which all Germans
+should share. As in 1808 the rising of the Spaniards against Napoleon had
+inspired Bluecher and his countrymen with the design of a truly national
+effort against their foreign oppressor, so in 1859 the work of Cavour
+challenged the Germans to prove that their national patriotism and their
+political aptitude were not inferior to those of the Italian people. Men
+who had been prominent in the National Assembly at Frankfort again met one
+another and spoke to the nation. In the Parliaments of several of the minor
+States resolutions were brought forward in favour of the creation of a
+central German authority. Protests were made against the infringement of
+constitutional rights that had been common during the last ten years;
+patriotic meetings and demonstrations were held; and a National Society, in
+imitation of that which had prepared the way for union with Piedmont in
+Central and Southern Italy, was formally established. There was indeed no
+such preponderating opinion in favour of Prussian leadership as had existed
+in 1848. The southern States had displayed a strong sympathy with Austria
+in its war with Napoleon III., and had regarded the neutrality of Prussia
+during the Italian campaign as a desertion of the German cause. Here there
+were few who looked with friendly eye upon Berlin. It was in the minor
+states of the north, and especially in Hesse-Cassel, where the struggle
+between the Elector and his subjects was once more breaking out, that the
+strongest hopes were directed towards the new Prussian ruler, and the
+measures of his government were the most anxiously watched.
+
+[The Regent of Prussia and the army.]
+
+[Scheme of reorganisation.]
+
+The Prince Regent was a soldier by profession and habit. He was born in
+1797, and had been present at the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube, the last fought
+by Napoleon against the Allies in 1814. During forty years he had served on
+every commission that had been occupied with Prussian military affairs; no
+man better understood the military organisation of his country, no man more
+clearly recognised its capacities and its faults. The defective condition
+of the Prussian army had been the principal, though not the sole, cause of
+the miserable submission to Austria at Olmuetz in 1850, and of the
+abandonment of all claims to German leadership on the part of the Court of
+Berlin. The Prince would himself have risked all chances of disaster rather
+than inflict upon Prussia the humiliation with which King Frederick William
+then purchased peace; but Manteuffel had convinced his sovereign that the
+army could not engage in a campaign against Austria without ruin. Military
+impotence was the only possible justification for the policy then adopted,
+and the Prince determined that Prussia should not under his own rule have
+the same excuse for any political shortcomings. The work of reorganisation
+was indeed begun during the reign of Frederick William IV., through the
+enforcement of the three-years' service to which the conscript was liable
+by law, but which had fallen during the long period of peace to two-years'
+service. The number of troops with the colours was thus largely increased,
+but no addition had been made to the yearly levy, and no improvement
+attempted in the organisation of the Landwehr. When in 1859 the order for
+mobilisation was given in consequence of the Italian war, it was discovered
+that the Landwehr battalions were almost useless. The members of this force
+were mostly married men approaching middle life, who had been too long
+engaged in other pursuits to resume their military duties with readiness,
+and whose call to the field left their families without means of support
+and chargeable upon the public purse. Too much, in the judgment of the
+reformers of the Prussian army, was required from men past youth, not
+enough from youth itself. The plan of the Prince Regent was therefore to
+enforce in the first instance with far more stringency the law imposing the
+universal obligation to military service; and, while thus raising the
+annual levy from 40,000 to 60,000 men, to extend the period of service in
+the Reserve, into which the young soldier passed on the completion of his
+three years with the colours, from two to four years. Asserting with
+greater rigour its claim to seven years in the early life of the citizen,
+the State would gain, without including the Landwehr, an effective army of
+four hundred thousand men, and would practically be able to dispense with
+the service of those who were approaching middle life, except in cases of
+great urgency. In the execution of this reform the Government could on its
+own authority enforce the increased levy and the full three years' service
+in the standing army; for the prolongation of service in the Reserve, and
+for the greater expenditure entailed by the new system, the consent of
+Parliament was necessary.
+
+[The Prussian Parliament and the army, 1859-1861.]
+
+[Accession of King William, Jan., 1861.]
+
+The general principles on which the proposed reorganisation was based were
+accepted by public opinion and by both Chambers of Parliament; it was,
+however, held by the Liberal leaders that the increase of expenditure
+might, without impairing the efficiency of the army, be avoided by
+returning to the system of two-years service with the colours, which during
+so long a period had been thought sufficient for the training of the
+soldier. The Regent, however, was convinced that the discipline and the
+instruction of three years were indispensable to the Prussian conscript,
+and he refused to accept the compromise suggested. The mobilisation of 1859
+had given him an opportunity for forming additional battalions; and
+although the Landwehr were soon dismissed to their homes the new formation
+was retained, and the place of the retiring militiamen was filled by
+conscripts of the year. The Lower Chamber, in voting the sum required in
+1860 for the increased numbers of the army, treated this arrangement as
+temporary, and limited the grant to one year; in spite of this the Regent,
+who on the death of his brother in January, 1861, became King of Prussia,
+formed the additional battalions into new regiments, and gave to these new
+regiments their names and colours. The year 1861 passed without bringing
+the questions at issue between the Government and the Chamber of Deputies
+to a settlement. Public feeling, disappointed in the reserved and
+hesitating policy which was still followed by the Court in German affairs,
+stimulated too by the rapid consolidation of the Italian monarchy, which
+the Prussian Government on its part had as yet declined to recognise, was
+becoming impatient and resentful. It seemed as if the Court of Berlin still
+shrank from committing itself to the national cause. The general confidence
+reposed in the new ruler at his accession was passing away; and when in the
+summer of 1861 the dissolution of Parliament took place, the elections
+resulted in the return not only of a Progressist majority, but of a
+majority little inclined to submit to measures of compromise, or to shrink
+from the assertion of its full constitutional rights.
+
+[First Parliament of 1862.]
+
+[Dissolution, May, 1862.]
+
+[Second Parliament of 1862.]
+
+[Bismarck becomes Minister, Sept., 1862.]
+
+The new Parliament assembled at the beginning of 1862. Under the impulse
+of public opinion, the Government was now beginning to adopt a more
+vigorous policy in German affairs, and to re-assert Prussia's claims to
+an independent leadership in defiance of the restored Diet of Frankfort.
+But the conflict with the Lower Chamber was not to be averted by revived
+energy abroad. The Army Bill, which was passed at once by the Upper
+House, was referred to a hostile Committee on reaching the Chamber of
+Deputies, and a resolution was carried insisting on the right of the
+representatives of the people to a far more effective control over the
+Budget than they had hitherto exercised. The result of this vote was the
+dissolution of Parliament by the King, and the resignation of the
+Ministry, with the exception of General Roon, Minister of War, and two of
+the most conservative among his colleagues. Prince Hohenlohe, President
+of the Upper House, became chief of the Government. There was now an open
+and undisguised conflict between the Crown and the upholders of
+Parliamentary rights. "King or Parliament" was the expression in which
+the newly-appointed Ministers themselves summed up the struggle. The
+utmost pressure was exerted by the Government in the course of the
+elections which followed, but in vain. The Progressist Party returned in
+overwhelming strength to the new Parliament; the voice of the country
+seemed unmistakably to condemn the policy to which the King and his
+advisers were committed. After a long and sterile discussion in the
+Budget Committee, the debate on the Army Bill began in the Lower House on
+the 11th of September. Its principal clauses were rejected by an almost
+unanimous vote. An attempt made by General Roon to satisfy his opponents
+by a partial and conditional admission of the principle of two-years'
+service resulted only in increased exasperation on both sides. Hohenlohe
+resigned, and the King now placed in power, at the head of a Ministry of
+conflict, the most resolute and unflinching of all his friends, the most
+contemptuous scorner of Parliamentary majorities, Herr von Bismarck. [505]
+
+[Bismarck.]
+
+The new Minister was, like Cavour, a country gentleman, and, like Cavour,
+he owed his real entry into public life to the revolutionary movement of
+1848. He had indeed held some obscure official posts before that epoch, but
+it was as a member of the United Diet which assembled at Berlin in April,
+1848, that he first attracted the attention of King or people. He was one
+of two Deputies who refused to join in the vote of thanks to Frederick
+William IV. for the Constitution which he had promised to Prussia.
+Bismarck, then thirty-three years old, was a Royalist of Royalists, the
+type, as it seemed, of the rough and masterful Junker, or Squire, of the
+older parts of Prussia, to whom all reforms from those of Stein downwards
+were hateful, all ideas but those of the barrack and the kennel alien.
+Others in the spring of 1848 lamented the concessions made by the Crown to
+the people; Bismarck had the courage to say so. When reaction came there
+were naturally many, and among them King Frederick William, who were
+interested in the man who in the heyday of constitutional enthusiasm had
+treated the whole movement as so much midsummer madness, and had remained
+faithful to monarchical authority as the one thing needful for the Prussian
+State. Bismarck continued to take a prominent part in the Parliaments of
+Berlin and Erfurt; it was not, however, till 1851 that he passed into the
+inner official circle. He was then sent as the representative of Prussia to
+the restored Diet of Frankfort. As an absolutist and a conservative,
+brought up in the traditions of the Holy Alliance, Bismarck had in earlier
+days looked up to Austria as the mainstay of monarchical order and the
+historic barrier against the flood of democratic and wind-driven sentiment
+which threatened to deluge Germany. He had even approved the surrender made
+at Olmuetz in 1850, as a matter of necessity; but the belief now grew strong
+in his mind, and was confirmed by all he saw at Frankfort, that Austria
+under Schwarzenberg's rule was no longer the Power which had been content
+to share the German leadership with Prussia in the period before 1848, but
+a Power which meant to rule in Germany uncontrolled. In contact with the
+representatives of that outworn system which Austria had resuscitated at
+Frankfort, and with the instruments of the dominant State itself, Bismarck
+soon learnt to detest the paltriness of the one and the insolence of the
+other. He declared the so-called Federal system to be a mere device for
+employing the secondary German States for the aggrandisement of Austria and
+the humiliation of Prussia. The Court of Vienna, and with it the Diet of
+Frankfort, became in his eyes the enemy of Prussian greatness and
+independence. During the Crimean war he was the vigorous opponent of an
+alliance with the Western Powers, not only from distrust of France, and
+from regard towards Russia as on the whole the most constant and the most
+natural ally of his own country, but from the conviction that Prussia ought
+to assert a national policy wholly independent of that of the Court of
+Vienna. That the Emperor of Austria was approaching more or less nearly to
+union with France and England was, in Bismarck's view, a good reason why
+Prussia should stand fast in its relations of friendship with St.
+Petersburg. [506] The policy of neutrality, which King Frederick William
+and Manteuffel adopted more out of disinclination to strenuous action than
+from any clear political view, was advocated by Bismarck for reasons which,
+if they made Europe nothing and Prussia everything, were at least inspired
+by a keen and accurate perception of Prussia's own interests in its present
+and future relations with its neighbours. When the reign of Frederick
+William ended, Bismarck, who stood high in the confidence of the new
+Regent, was sent as ambassador to St. Petersburg. He subsequently
+represented Prussia for a short time at the Court of Napoleon III., and was
+recalled by the King from Paris in the autumn of 1862 in order to be placed
+at the head of the Government. Far better versed in diplomacy than in
+ordinary administration, he assumed, together with the Presidency of the
+Cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
+
+[Bismarck and the Lower Chamber, 1862.]
+
+There were now at the head of the Prussian State three men eminently suited
+to work with one another, and to carry out, in their own rough and military
+fashion, the policy which was to unite Germany under the House of
+Hohenzollern. The King, Bismarck, and Roon were thoroughly at one in their
+aim, the enforcement of Prussia's ascendency by means of the army. The
+designs of the Minister, which expanded with success and which involved a
+certain daring in the choice of means, were at each new development so ably
+veiled or disclosed, so dexterously presented to the sovereign, as to
+overcome his hesitation on striking into many an unaccustomed path. Roon
+and his workmen, who, in the face of a hostile Parliament and a hostile
+Press, had to supply to Bismarck what a foreign alliance and enthusiastic
+national sentiment had supplied to Cavour, forged for Prussia a weapon of
+such temper that, against the enemies on whom it was employed, no
+extraordinary genius was necessary to render its thrust fatal. It was no
+doubt difficult for the Prime Minister, without alarming his sovereign and
+without risk of an immediate breach with Austria, to make his ulterior aims
+so clear as to carry the Parliament with him in the policy of military
+reorganisation. Words frank even to brutality were uttered by him, but they
+sounded more like menace and bluster than the explanation of a
+well-considered plan. "Prussia must keep its forces together," he said in
+one of his first Parliamentary appearances, "its boundaries are not those
+of a sound State. The great questions of the time are to be decided not by
+speeches and votes of majorities but by blood and iron." After the
+experience of 1848 and 1850, a not too despondent political observer might
+well have formed the conclusion that nothing less than the military
+overthrow of Austria could give to Germany any tolerable system of national
+government, or even secure to Prussia its legitimate field of action. This
+was the keystone of Bismarck's belief, but he failed to make his purpose
+and his motives intelligible to the representatives of the Prussian people.
+He was taken for a mere bully and absolutist of the old type. His personal
+characteristics, his arrogance, his sarcasm, his habit of banter,
+exasperated and inflamed. Roon was no better suited to the atmosphere of a
+popular assembly. Each encounter of the Ministers with the Chamber
+embittered the struggle and made reconciliation more difficult. The
+Parliamentary system of Prussia seemed threatened in its very existence
+when, after the rejection by the Chamber of Deputies of the clause in the
+Budget providing for the cost of the army-reorganisation, this clause was
+restored by the Upper House, and the Budget of the Government passed in its
+original form. By the terms of the Constitution the right of the Upper
+House in matters of taxation was limited to the approval or rejection of
+the Budget sent up to it from the Chamber of Representatives. It possessed
+no power of amendment. Bismarck, however, had formed the theory that in the
+event of a disagreement between the two Houses a situation arose for which
+the Constitution had not provided, and in which therefore the Crown was
+still possessed of its old absolute authority. No compromise, no
+negotiation between the two Houses, was, in his view, to be desired. He was
+resolved to govern and to levy taxes without a Budget, and had obtained the
+King's permission to close the session immediately the Upper House had
+given its vote. But before the order for prorogation could be brought down
+the President of the Lower Chamber had assembled his colleagues, and the
+unanimous vote of those present declared the action of the Upper House null
+and void. In the agitation attending this trial of strength between the
+Crown, the Ministry and the Upper House on one side and the Representative
+Chamber on the other the session of 1862 closed. [507]
+
+[King William.]
+
+[The conflict continued, 1863.]
+
+[Measures against the Press.]
+
+The Deputies, returning to their constituencies, carried with them the
+spirit of combat, and received the most demonstrative proofs of popular
+sympathy and support. Representations of great earnestness were made to the
+King, but they failed to shake in the slightest degree his confidence in
+his Minister, or to bend his fixed resolution to carry out his military
+reforms to the end. The claim of Parliament to interfere with matters of
+military organisation in Prussia touched him in his most sensitive point.
+He declared that the aim of his adversaries was nothing less than the
+establishment of a Parliamentary instead of a royal army. In perfect
+sincerity he believed that the convulsions of 1848 were on the point of
+breaking out afresh. "You mourn the conflict between the Crown and the
+national representatives," he said to the spokesman of an important
+society; "do I not mourn it? I sleep no single night." The anxiety, the
+despondency of the sovereign were shared by the friends of Prussia
+throughout Germany; its enemies saw with wonder that Bismarck in his
+struggle with the educated Liberalism of the middle classes did not shrink
+from dalliance with the Socialist leaders and their organs. When Parliament
+reassembled at the beginning of 1863 the conflict was resumed with even
+greater heat. The Lower Chamber carried an address to the King, which,
+while dwelling on the loyalty of the Prussian people to their chief,
+charged the Ministers with violating the Constitution, and demanded their
+dismissal. The King refused to receive the deputation which was to present
+the address, and in the written communication in which he replied to it he
+sharply reproved the Assembly for their errors and presumption. It was in
+vain that the Army Bill was again introduced. The House, while allowing the
+ordinary military expenditure for the year, struck out the costs of the
+reorganisation, and declared Ministers personally answerable for the sums
+expended. Each appearance of the leading members of the Cabinet now became
+the signal for contumely and altercation. The decencies of debate ceased to
+be observed on either side. When the President attempted to set some limit
+to the violence of Bismarck and Roon, and, on resistance to his authority,
+terminated the sitting, the Ministers declared that they would no longer
+appear in a Chamber where freedom of speech was denied to them. Affairs
+came to a deadlock. The Chamber again appealed to the King, and insisted
+that reconciliation between the Crown and the nation was impossible so long
+as the present Ministers remained in office. The King, now thoroughly
+indignant, charged the Assembly with attempting to win for itself supreme
+power, expressed his gratitude to his Ministers for their resistance to
+this usurpation, and declared himself too confident in the loyalty of the
+Prussian people to be intimidated by threats. His reply was followed by the
+prorogation of the Assembly (May 26th). A dissolution would have been worse
+than useless, for in the actual state of public opinion the Opposition
+would probably have triumphed throughout the country. It only remained for
+Bismarck to hold his ground, and, having silenced the Parliament for a
+while, to silence the Press also by the exercise of autocratic power. The
+Constitution authorised the King, in the absence of the Chambers, to
+publish enactments on matters of urgency having the force of laws. No
+sooner had the session been closed than an edict was issued empowering the
+Government, without resort to courts of law, to suppress any newspaper
+after two warnings. An outburst of public indignation branded this return
+to the principles of pure despotism in Prussia; but neither King nor
+Minister was to be diverted by threats or by expostulations from his
+course. The Press was effectively silenced. So profound, however, was the
+distrust now everywhere felt as to the future of Prussia, and so deep the
+resentment against the Minister in all circles where Liberal influences
+penetrated, that the Crown Prince himself, after in vain protesting against
+a policy of violence which endangered his own prospective interests in the
+Crown, publicly expressed his disapproval of the action of Government. For
+this offence he was never forgiven.
+
+[Austria from 1859.]
+
+The course which affairs were taking at Berlin excited the more bitter
+regret and disappointment among all friends of Prussia as at this very time
+it seemed that constitutional government was being successfully established
+in the western part of the Austrian Empire. The centralised military
+despotism with which Austria emerged from the convulsions of 1848 had been
+allowed ten years of undisputed sway; at the end of this time it had
+brought things to such a pass that, after a campaign in which there had
+been but one great battle, and while still in possession of a vast army and
+an unbroken chain of fortresses, Austria stood powerless to move hand or
+foot. It was not the defeat of Solferino or the cession of Lombardy that
+exhibited the prostration of Austria's power, but the fact that while the
+conditions of the Peace of Zuerich were swept away, and Italy was united
+under Victor Emmanuel in defiance of the engagements made by Napoleon III.
+at Villafranca, the Austrian Emperor was compelled to look on with folded
+arms. To have drawn the sword again, to have fired a shot in defence of the
+Pope's temporal power or on behalf of the vassal princes of Tuscany and
+Modena, would have been to risk the existence of the Austrian monarchy. The
+State was all but bankrupt; rebellion might at any moment break out in
+Hungary, which had already sent thousands of soldiers to the Italian camp.
+Peace at whatever price was necessary abroad, and at home the system of
+centralised despotism could no longer exist, come what might in its place.
+It was natural that the Emperor should but imperfectly understand at the
+first the extent of the concessions which it was necessary for him to make.
+He determined that the Provincial Councils which Schwarzenberg had promised
+in 1850 should be called into existence, and that a Council of the Empire
+(Reichsrath), drawn in part from these, should assemble at Vienna, to
+advise, though not to control, the Government in matters of finance. So
+urgent, however, were the needs of the exchequer, that the Emperor
+proceeded at once to the creation of the Central Council, and nominated its
+first members himself. (March, 1860.)
+
+[Hungary.]
+
+[Centralists and Federalists in the Council.]
+
+[The Diploma of Oct 20, 1860.]
+
+That the Hungarian members nominated by the Emperor would decline to appear
+at Vienna unless some further guarantee was given for the restoration of
+Hungarian liberty was well known. The Emperor accordingly promised to
+restore the ancient county-organisation, which had filled so great a space
+in Hungarian history before 1848, and to take steps for assembling the
+Hungarian Diet. This, with the repeal of an edict injurious to the
+Protestants, opened the way for reconciliation, and the nominated
+Hungarians took their place in the Council, though under protest that the
+existing arrangement could only be accepted as preparatory to the full
+restitution of the rights of their country. The Council continued in
+session during the summer of 1860. Its duties were financial; but the
+establishment of financial equilibrium in Austria was inseparable from the
+establishment of political stability and public confidence; and the
+Council, in its last sittings, entered on the widest constitutional
+problems. The non-German members were in the majority; and while all
+parties alike condemned the fallen absolutism, the rival declarations of
+policy submitted to the Council marked the opposition which was
+henceforward to exist between the German Liberals of Austria and the
+various Nationalist or Federalist groups. The Magyars, uniting with those
+who had been their bitterest enemies, declared that the ancient
+independence in legislation and administration of the several countries
+subject to the House of Hapsburg must be restored, each country retaining
+its own historical character. The German minority contended that the
+Emperor should bestow upon his subjects such institutions as, while based
+on the right of self-government should secure the unity of the Empire and
+the force of its central authority. All parties were for a constitutional
+system and for local liberties in one form or another; but while the
+Magyars and their supporters sought for nothing less than national
+independence, the Germans would at the most have granted a uniform system
+of provincial self-government in strict subordination to a central
+representative body drawn from the whole Empire and legislating for the
+whole Empire. The decision of the Emperor was necessarily a compromise. By
+a Diploma published on the 20th of October he promised to restore to
+Hungary its old Constitution, and to grant wide legislative rights to the
+other States of the Monarchy, establishing for the transaction of affairs
+common to the whole Empire an Imperial Council, and reserving for the
+non-Hungarian members of this Council a qualified right of legislation for
+all the Empire except Hungary. [508]
+
+[Hungary resists the establishment of a Central Council.]
+
+The Magyars had conquered their King; and all the impetuous patriotism that
+had been crushed down since the ruin of 1849 now again burst into flame.
+The County Assemblies met, and elected as their officers men who had been
+condemned to death in 1849 and who were living in exile; they swept away
+the existing law-courts, refused the taxes, and proclaimed the legislation
+of 1848 again in force. Francis Joseph seemed anxious to avert a conflict,
+and to prove both in Hungary and in the other parts of the Empire the
+sincerity of his promises of reform, on which the nature of the provincial
+Constitutions which were published immediately after the Diploma of October
+had thrown some doubt. At the instance of his Hungarian advisers he
+dismissed the chief of his Cabinet, and called to office Schmerling, who,
+in 1848, had been Prime Minister of the German National Government at
+Frankfort. Schmerling at once promised important changes in the provincial
+systems drawn up by his predecessor, but in his dealings with Hungary he
+proved far less tractable than the Magyars had expected. If the Hungarians
+had recovered their own constitutional forms, they still stood threatened
+with the supremacy of a Central Council in all that related to themselves
+in common with the rest of the Empire, and against this they rebelled. But
+from the establishment of this Council of the Empire neither the Emperor
+nor Schmerling would recede. An edict of February 26th, 1861, while it made
+good the changes promised by Schmerling in the several provincial systems,
+confirmed the general provisions of the Diploma of October, and declared
+that the Emperor would maintain the Constitution of his dominions as now
+established against an attack.
+
+[Conflict of Hungary with the Crown, 1861.]
+
+In the following April the Provincial Diets met throughout the Austrian
+Empire, and the Diet of the Hungarian Kingdom assembled at Pesth. The first
+duty of each of these bodies was to elect representatives to the Council of
+the Empire which was to meet at Vienna. Neither Hungary nor Croatia,
+however, would elect such representatives, each claiming complete
+legislative independence, and declining to recognise any such external
+authority as it was now proposed to create. The Emperor warned the
+Hungarian Diet against the consequences of its action; but the national
+spirit of the Magyars was thoroughly roused, and the County Assemblies vied
+with one another in the violence of their addresses to the Sovereign. The
+Diet, reviving the Constitutional difficulties connected with the
+abdication of Ferdinand, declared that it would only negotiate for the
+coronation of Francis Joseph after the establishment of a Hungarian
+Ministry and the restoration of Croatia and Transylvania to the Hungarian
+Kingdom. Accepting Schmerling's contention that the ancient constitutional
+rights of Hungary had been extinguished by rebellion, the Emperor insisted
+on the establishment of a Council for the whole Empire, and refused to
+recede from the declarations which he had made in the edict of February.
+The Diet hereupon protested, in a long and vigorous address to the King,
+against the validity of all laws made without its own concurrence, and
+declared that Francis Joseph had rendered an agreement between the King and
+the nation impossible. A dissolution followed. The County Assemblies took
+up the national struggle. They in their turn were suppressed; their
+officers were dismissed, and military rule was established throughout the
+land, though with explicit declarations on the part of the King that it was
+to last only till the legally existing Constitution could be brought into
+peaceful working. [509]
+
+[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]
+
+[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]
+
+[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]
+
+[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]
+
+Meanwhile the Central Representative Body, now by enlargement of its
+functions and increase in the number of its members made into a Parliament
+of the Empire, assembled at Vienna. Its real character was necessarily
+altered by the absence of representatives from Hungary; and for some time
+the Government seemed disposed to limit its competence to the affairs of
+the Cis-Leithan provinces; but after satisfying himself that no accord with
+Hungary was possible, the Emperor announced this fact to the Assembly, and
+bade it perform its part as the organ of the Empire at large, without
+regard to the abstention of those who did not choose to exercise their
+rights. The Budget for the entire Empire was accordingly submitted to the
+Assembly, and for the first time the expenditure of the Austrian State was
+laid open to public examination and criticism. The first session of this
+Parliament lasted, with adjournments, from May, 1861, to December, 1862. In
+legislation it effected little, but its relations as a whole with the
+Government remained excellent, and its long-continued activity, unbroken by
+popular disturbances, did much to raise the fallen credit of the Austrian
+State and to win for it the regard of Germany. On the close of the session
+the Provincial Diets assembled, and throughout the spring of 1863 the
+rivalry of the Austrian nationalities gave abundant animation to many a
+local capital. In the next summer the Reichsrath reassembled at Vienna.
+Though Hungary remained in a condition not far removed from rebellion, the
+Parliamentary system of Austria was gaining in strength, and indeed, as it
+seemed, at the expense of Hungary itself; for the Roumanian and German
+population of Transylvania, rejoicing in the opportunity of detaching
+themselves from the Magyars, now sent deputies to Vienna. While at Berlin
+each week that passed sharpened the antagonism between the nation and its
+Government, and made the Minister's name more odious, Austria seemed to
+have successfully broken with the traditions of its past, and to be fast
+earning for itself an honourable place among States of the constitutional
+type.
+
+One of the reproaches brought against Bismarck by the Progressist majority
+in the Parliament of Berlin was that he had isolated Prussia both in
+Germany and in Europe. That he had roused against the Government of his
+country the public opinion of Germany was true: that he had alienated
+Prussia from all Europe was not the case; on the contrary, he had
+established a closer relation between the Courts of Berlin and St.
+Petersburg than had existed at any time since the commencement of the
+Regency, and had secured for Prussia a degree of confidence and goodwill on
+the part of the Czar which, in the memorable years that were to follow,
+served it scarcely less effectively than an armed alliance. Russia, since
+the Crimean War, had seemed to be entering upon an epoch of boundless
+change. The calamities with which the reign of Nicholas had closed had
+excited in that narrow circle of Russian society where thought had any
+existence a vehement revulsion against the sterile and unchanging system of
+repression, the grinding servitude of the last thirty years. From the
+Emperor downwards all educated men believed not only that the system of
+government, but that the whole order of Russian social life, must be
+recast. The ferment of ideas which marks an age of revolution was in full
+course; but in what forms the new order was to be moulded, through what
+processes Russia was to be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia
+was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in
+the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second
+rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute
+and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid
+of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of
+purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass
+out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey or a single
+interview he should succumb to the persuasions of some rival politician. In
+no country in Europe was there such incoherence, such self-contradiction,
+such absence of unity of plan and purpose in government as in Russia, where
+all nominally depended upon a single will. Pressed and tormented by all the
+rival influences that beat upon the centre of a great empire, Alexander
+seems at times to have played off against one another as colleagues in the
+same branch of Government the representatives of the most opposite schools
+of action, and, after assenting to the plans of one group of advisers, to
+have committed the execution of these plans, by way of counterpoise, to
+those who had most opposed them. But, like other weak men, he dreaded
+nothing so much as the reproach of weakness or inconstancy; and in the
+cloud of half-formed or abandoned purposes there were some few to which he
+resolutely adhered. The chief of these, the great achievement of his reign,
+was the liberation of the serfs.
+
+[Liberation of the Serfs. March, 1861.]
+
+It was probably owing to the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 that the
+serfs had not been freed by Nicholas. That sovereign had long understood
+the necessity for the change, and in 1847 he had actually appointed a
+Commission to report on the best means of effecting it. The convulsions of
+1848, followed by the Hungarian and the Crimean Wars, threw the project
+into the background during the remainder of Nicholas's reign; but if the
+belief of the Russian people is well founded, the last injunction of the
+dying Czar to his successor was to emancipate the serfs throughout his
+empire. Alexander was little capable of grappling with so tremendous a
+problem himself; in the year 1859, however, he directed a Commission to
+make a complete inquiry into the subject, and to present a scheme of
+emancipation. The labours of the Commission extended over two years; its
+discussions were agitated, at times violent. That serfage must sooner or
+later be abolished all knew; the points on which the Commission was divided
+were the bestowal of land on the peasants and the regulation of the village
+community. European history afforded abundant precedents in emancipation,
+and under an infinite variety of detail three types of the process of
+enfranchisement were clearly distinguishable from one another. Maria
+Theresa, in liberating the serf, had required him to continue to render a
+fixed amount of labour to his lord, and had given him on this condition
+fixity of tenure in the land he occupied; the Prussian reformers had made a
+division of the land between the peasant and the lord, and extinguished all
+labour-dues; Napoleon, in enfranchising the serfs in the Duchy of Warsaw,
+had simply turned them into free men, leaving the terms of their occupation
+of land to be settled by arrangement or free contract with their former
+lords. This example had been followed in the Baltic Provinces of Russia
+itself by Alexander I. Of the three modes of emancipation, that based on
+free contract had produced the worst results for the peasant; and though
+many of the Russian landowners and their representatives in the Commission
+protested against a division of the land between themselves and their serfs
+as an act of agrarian revolution and spoliation, there were men in high
+office, and some few among the proprietors, who resolutely and successfully
+fought for the principle of independent ownership by the peasants. The
+leading spirit in this great work appears to have been Nicholas Milutine,
+Adjunct of the Minister of the Interior, Lanskoi. Milutine, who had drawn
+up the Municipal Charta of St. Petersburg, was distrusted by the Czar as a
+restless and uncompromising reformer. It was uncertain from day to day
+whether the views of the Ministry of the Interior or those of the
+territorial aristocracy would prevail; ultimately, however, under
+instructions from the Palace, the Commission accepted not only the
+principle of the division of the land, but the system of communal
+self-government by the peasants themselves. The determination of the amount
+of land to be held by the peasants of a commune and of the fixed rent to be
+paid to the lord was left in the first instance to private agreement; but
+where such agreement was not reached, the State, through arbiters elected
+at local assemblies of the nobles, decided the matter itself. The rent once
+fixed, the State enabled the commune to redeem it by advancing a capital
+sum to be recouped by a quit-rent to the State extending over forty-nine
+years. The Ukase of the Czar converting twenty-five millions of serfs into
+free proprietors, the greatest act of legislation of modern times, was
+signed on the 3rd of March, 1861, and within the next few weeks was read in
+every church of the Russian Empire. It was a strange comment on the system
+of government in Russia that in the very month in which the edict was
+published both Lanskoi and Milutine, who had been its principal authors,
+were removed from their posts. The Czar feared to leave them in power to
+superintend the actual execution of the law which they had inspired. In
+supporting them up to the final stage of its enactment Alexander had
+struggled against misgivings of his own, and against influences of vast
+strength alike at the Court, within the Government, and in the Provinces.
+With the completion of the Edict of Emancipation his power of resistance
+was exhausted, and its execution was committed by him to those who had been
+its opponents. That some of the evils which have mingled with the good in
+Russian enfranchisement might have been less had the Czar resolutely stood
+by the authors of reform and allowed them to complete their work in
+accordance with their own designs and convictions, is scarcely open to
+doubt. [510]
+
+[Poland, 1861, 1862.]
+
+It had been the belief of educated men in Russia that the emancipation of
+the serf would be but the first of a series of great organic changes,
+bringing their country more nearly to the political and social level of its
+European neighbours. This belief was not fulfilled. Work of importance was
+done in the reconstruction of the judicial system of Russia, but in the
+other reforms expected little was accomplished. An insurrection which broke
+out in Poland at the beginning of 1863 diverted the energies of the
+Government from all other objects; and in the overpowering outburst of
+Russian patriotism and national feeling which it excited, domestic reforms,
+no less than the ideals of Western civilisation, lost their interest. The
+establishment of Italian independence, coinciding in time with the general
+unsettlement and expectation of change which marked the first years of
+Alexander's reign, had stirred once more the ill-fated hopes of the Polish
+national leaders. From the beginning of the year 1861 Warsaw was the scene
+of repeated tumults. The Czar was inclined, within certain limits, to a
+policy of conciliation. The separate Legislature and separate army which
+Poland had possessed from 1815 to 1830 he was determined not to restore;
+but he was willing to give Poland a large degree of administrative
+autonomy, to confide the principal offices in its Government to natives,
+and generally to relax something of that close union with Russia which had
+been enforced by Nicholas since the rebellion of 1831. But the concessions
+of the Czar, accompanied as they were by acts of repression and severity,
+were far from satisfying the demands of Polish patriotism. It was in vain
+that Alexander in the summer of 1862 sent his brother Constantine as
+Viceroy to Warsaw, established a Polish Council of State, placed a Pole,
+Wielopolski, at the head of the Administration, superseded all the Russian
+governors of Polish provinces by natives, and gave to the municipalities
+and the districts the right of electing local councils; these concessions
+seemed nothing, and were in fact nothing, in comparison with the national
+independence which the Polish leaders claimed. The situation grew worse and
+worse. An attempt made upon the life of the Grand Duke Constantine during
+his entry into Warsaw was but one among a series of similar acts which
+discredited the Polish cause and strengthened those who at St. Petersburg
+had from the first condemned the Czar's attempts at conciliation. At length
+the Russian Government took the step which precipitated revolt. A levy of
+one in every two hundred of the population throughout the Empire had been
+ordered in the autumn of 1862. Instructions were sent from St. Petersburg
+to the effect that in raising this levy in Poland the country population
+were to be spared, and that all persons who were known to be connected with
+the disorders in the towns were to be seized as soldiers. This terrible
+sentence against an entire political class was carried out, so far as it
+lay within the power of the authorities, on the night of January 14th,
+1863. But before the imperial press-gang surrounded the houses of its
+victims a rumour of the intended blow had gone abroad. In the preceding
+hours, and during the night of the 14th, thousands fled from Warsaw and the
+other Polish towns into the forests. There they formed themselves into
+armed bands, and in the course of the next few days a guerilla warfare
+broke out wherever Russian troops were found in insufficient strength or
+off their guard. [511]
+
+[Poland and Russia.]
+
+The classes in which the national spirit of Poland lived were the so-called
+noblesse, numbering hundreds of thousands, the town populations, and the
+priesthood. The peasants, crushed and degraded, though not nominally in
+servitude, were indifferent to the national cause. On the neutrality, if
+not on the support, of the peasants the Russian Government could fairly
+reckon; within the towns it found itself at once confronted by an invisible
+national Government whose decrees were printed and promulgated by unknown
+hands, and whose sentences of death were mercilessly executed against those
+whom it condemned as enemies or traitors to the national cause. So
+extraordinary was the secrecy which covered the action of this National
+Executive, that Milutine, who was subsequently sent by the Czar to examine
+into the affairs of Poland, formed the conclusion that it had possessed
+accomplices within the Imperial Government at St. Petersburg itself. The
+Polish cause retained indeed some friends in Russia even after the outbreak
+of the insurrection; it was not until the insurrection passed the frontier
+of the kingdom and was carried by the nobles into Lithuania and Podolia
+that the entire Russian nation took up the struggle with passionate and
+vindictive ardour as one for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish
+nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast
+territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and
+where the mass of population, if not actually Russian, was almost
+indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like
+them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For
+ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with
+the Czar's dominions, and with the exception of their Polish landowners
+they were now in fact thoroughly Russian. When therefore the nobles of
+these provinces declared that Poland must be reconstituted with the limits
+of 1772, and subsequently took up arms in concert with the insurrectionary
+Government at Warsaw, the Russian people, from the Czar to the peasant,
+felt the struggle to be nothing less than one for the dismemberment or the
+preservation of their own country, and the doom of Polish nationality, at
+least for some generations, was sealed. The diplomatic intervention of the
+Western Powers on behalf of the constitutional rights of Poland under the
+Treaty of Vienna, which was to some extent supported by Austria, only
+prolonged a hopeless struggle, and gave unbounded popularity to Prince
+Gortschakoff, by whom, after a show of courteous attention during the
+earlier and still perilous stage of the insurrection, the interference of
+the Powers was resolutely and unconditionally repelled. By the spring of
+1864 the insurgents were crushed or exterminated. General Muravieff, the
+Governor of Lithuania, fulfilled his task against the mutinous nobles of
+this province with unshrinking severity, sparing neither life nor fortune
+so long as an enemy of Russia remained to be overthrown. It was at Wilna,
+the Lithuanian capital, not at Warsaw, that the terrors of Russian
+repression were the greatest. Muravieff's executions may have been less
+numerous than is commonly supposed; but in the form of pecuniary
+requisitions and fines he undoubtedly aimed at nothing less than the utter
+ruin of a great part of the class most implicated in the rebellion.
+
+[Agrarian measures in Poland.]
+
+[Agrarian measures in Poland, 1864.]
+
+In Poland itself the Czar, after some hesitation, determined once and for
+all to establish a friend to Russia in every homestead of the kingdom by
+making the peasant owner of the land on which he laboured. The
+insurrectionary Government at the outbreak of the rebellion had attempted
+to win over the peasantry by promising enactments to this effect, but no
+one had responded to their appeal. In the autumn of 1863 the Czar recalled
+Milutine from his enforced travels and directed him to proceed to Warsaw,
+in order to study the affairs of Poland on the spot, and to report on the
+measures necessary to be taken for its future government and organisation.
+Milutine obtained the assistance of some of the men who had laboured most
+earnestly with him in the enfranchisement of the Russian serfs; and in the
+course of a few weeks he returned to St. Petersburg, carrying with him the
+draft of measures which were to change the face of Poland. He recommended
+on the one hand that every political institution separating Poland from the
+rest of the Empire should be swept away, and the last traces of Polish
+independence utterly obliterated; on the other hand, that the peasants, as
+the only class on which Russia could hope to count in the future, should be
+made absolute and independent owners of the land they occupied. Prince
+Gortschakoff, who had still some regard for the opinion of Western Europe,
+and possibly some sympathy for the Polish aristocracy, resisted this daring
+policy; but the Czar accepted Milutine's counsel, and gave him a free hand
+in the execution of his agrarian scheme. The division of the land between
+the nobles and the peasants was accordingly carried out by Milutine's own
+officers under conditions very different from those adopted in Russia. The
+whole strength of the Government was thrown on to the side of the peasant
+and against the noble. Though the population was denser in Poland than in
+Russia, the peasant received on an average four times as much land; the
+compensation made to the lords (which was paid in bonds which immediately
+fell to half their nominal value) was raised not by quit-rents on the
+peasants' lands alone, as in Russia, but by a general land-tax falling
+equally on the land left to the lords, who had thus to pay a great part of
+their own compensation: above all, the questions in dispute were settled,
+not as in Russia by arbiters elected at local assemblies of the nobles, but
+by officers of the Crown. Moreover, the division of landed property was not
+made once and for all, as in Russia, but the woods and pastures remaining
+to the lords continued subject to undefined common-rights of the peasants.
+These common-rights were deliberately left unsettled in order that a source
+of contention might always be present between the greater and the lesser
+proprietors, and that the latter might continue to look to the Russian
+Government as the protector or extender of their interests. "We hold
+Poland," said a Russian statesman, "by its rights of common." [512]
+
+[Russia and Polish nationality.]
+
+Milutine, who, with all the fiery ardour of his national and levelling
+policy, seems to have been a gentle and somewhat querulous invalid, and who
+was shortly afterwards struck down by paralysis, to remain a helpless
+spectator of the European changes of the next six years, had no share in
+that warfare against the language, the religion, and the national culture
+of Poland with which Russia has pursued its victory since 1863. The public
+life of Poland he was determined to Russianise; its private and social life
+he would probably have left unmolested, relying on the goodwill of the
+great mass of peasants who owed their proprietorship to the action of the
+Czar. There were, however, politicians at Moscow and St. Petersburg who
+believed that the deep-lying instinct of nationality would for the first
+time be called into real life among these peasants by their very elevation
+from misery to independence, and that where Russia had hitherto had three
+hundred thousand enemies Milutine was preparing for it six millions. It was
+the dread of this possibility in the future, the apprehension that material
+interests might not permanently vanquish the subtler forces which pass from
+generation to generation, latent, if still unconscious, where nationality
+itself is not lost, that made the Russian Government follow up the
+political destruction of the Polish noblesse by measures directed against
+Polish nationality itself, even at the risk of alienating the class who for
+the present were effectively won over to the Czar's cause. By the side of
+its life-giving and beneficent agrarian policy Russia has pursued the
+odious system of debarring Poland from all means of culture and improvement
+associated with the use of its own language, and has aimed at eventually
+turning the Poles into Russians by the systematic impoverishment and
+extinction of all that is essentially Polish in thought, in sentiment, and
+in expression. The work may prove to be one not beyond its power; and no
+common perversity on the part of its Government would be necessary to turn
+against Russia the millions who in Poland owe all they have of prosperity
+and independence to the Czar: but should the excess of Russian
+propagandism, or the hostility of Church to Church, at some distant date
+engender a new struggle for Polish independence, this struggle will be one
+governed by other conditions than those of 1831 or 1863, and Russia will,
+for the first time, have to conquer on the Vistula not a class nor a city,
+but a nation.
+
+[Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1863.]
+
+It was a matter of no small importance to Bismarck and to Prussia that in
+the years 1863 and 1864 the Court of St. Petersburg found itself confronted
+with affairs of such seriousness in Poland. From the opportunity which was
+then presented to him of obliging an important neighbour, and of profiting
+by that neighbour's conjoined embarrassment and goodwill, Bismarck drew
+full advantage. He had always regarded the Poles as a mere nuisance in
+Europe, and heartily despised the Germans for the sympathy which they had
+shown towards Poland in 1848. When the insurrection of 1863 broke out,
+Bismarck set the policy of his own country in emphatic contrast with that
+of Austria and the Western Powers, and even entered into an arrangement
+with Russia for an eventual military combination in case the insurgents
+should pass from one side to the other of the frontier. [513] Throughout
+the struggle with the Poles, and throughout the diplomatic conflict with
+the Western Powers, the Czar had felt secure in the loyalty of the stubborn
+Minister at Berlin; and when, at the close of the Polish revolt, the events
+occurred which opened to Prussia the road to political fortune, Bismarck
+received his reward in the liberty of action given him by the Russian
+Government. The difficulties connected with Schleswig-Holstein, which,
+after a short interval of tranquillity following the settlement of 1852,
+had again begun to trouble Europe, were forced to the very front of
+Continental affairs by the death of Frederick VII., King of Denmark, in
+November, 1863. Prussia had now at its head a statesman resolved to pursue
+to their extreme limit the chances which this complication offered to his
+own country; and, more fortunate than his predecessors of 1848, Bismarck
+had not to dread the interference of the Czar of Russia as the patron and
+protector of the interests of the Danish court.
+
+[Schleswig-Holstein, 1852-1863.]
+
+[The Patent of March 30, 1863.]
+
+By the Treaty of London, signed on May 8th, 1852, all the great Powers,
+including Prussia, had recognised the principle of the integrity of the
+Danish Monarchy, and had pronounced Prince Christian of Gluecksburg to be
+heir-presumptive to the whole dominions of the reigning King. The rights of
+the German Federation in Holstein were nevertheless declared to remain
+unprejudiced; and in a Convention made with Austria and Prussia before they
+joined in this Treaty, King Frederick VII. had undertaken to conform to
+certain rules in his treatment of Schleswig as well as of Holstein. The
+Duke of Augustenburg, claimant to the succession in Schleswig-Holstein
+through the male line, had renounced his pretensions in consideration of an
+indemnity paid to him by the King of Denmark. This surrender, however, had
+not received the consent of his son and of the other members of the House
+of Augustenburg, nor had the German Federation, as such, been a party to
+the Treaty of London. Relying on the declaration of the Great Powers in
+favour of the integrity of the Danish Kingdom, Frederick VII. had resumed
+his attempts to assimilate Schleswig, and in some degree Holstein, to the
+rest of the Monarchy; and although the Provincial Estates were allowed to
+remain in existence, a national Constitution was established in October,
+1855, for the entire Danish State. Bitter complaints were made of the
+system of repression and encroachment with which the Government of
+Copenhagen was attempting to extinguish German nationality in the border
+provinces; at length, in November, 1858, under threat of armed intervention
+by the German Federation, Frederick consented to exclude Holstein from the
+operation of the new Constitution. But this did not produce peace, for the
+inhabitants of Schleswig, severed from the sister-province and now excited
+by the Italian war, raised all the more vigorous a protest against their
+own incorporation with Denmark; while in Holstein itself the Government
+incurred the charge of unconstitutional action in fixing the Budget without
+the consent of the Estates. The German Federal Diet again threatened to
+resort to force, and Denmark prepared for war. Prussia took up the cause of
+Schleswig in 1861; and even the British Government, which had hitherto
+shown far more interest in the integrity of Denmark than in the rights of
+the German provinces, now recommended that the Constitution of 1855 should
+be abolished, and that a separate legislation and administration should be
+granted to Schleswig as well as to Holstein. The Danes, however, were bent
+on preserving Schleswig as an integral part of the State, and the
+Government of King Frederick, while willing to recognise Holstein as
+outside Danish territory proper, insisted that Schleswig should be included
+within the unitary Constitution, and that Holstein should contribute a
+fixed share to the national expenditure. A manifesto to this effect,
+published by King Frederick on the 30th of March, 1863, was the immediate
+ground of the conflict now about to break out between Germany and Denmark.
+The Diet of Frankfort announced that if this proclamation were not revoked
+it should proceed to Federal execution, that is, armed intervention,
+against the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein. Still counting upon
+foreign aid or upon the impotence of the Diet, the Danish Government
+refused to change its policy, and on the 29th of September laid before the
+Parliament at Copenhagen the law incorporating Schleswig with the rest of
+the Monarchy under the new Constitution. Negotiations were thus brought to
+a close, and on the 1st of October the Diet decreed the long-threatened
+Federal execution. [514]
+
+[Death of Frederick VII., November, 1863.]
+
+[Federal execution in Holstein. December, 1863.]
+
+Affairs had reached this stage, and the execution had not yet been put in
+force, when, on the 15th of November, King Frederick VII. died. For a
+moment it appeared possible that his successor, Prince Christian of
+Gluecksburg, might avert the conflict with Germany by withdrawing from the
+position which his predecessor had taken up. But the Danish people and
+Ministry were little inclined to give way; the Constitution had passed
+through Parliament two days before King Frederick's death, and on the 18th
+of November it received the assent of the new monarch. German national
+feeling was now as strongly excited on the question of Schleswig-Holstein
+as it had been in 1848. The general cry was that the union of these
+provinces with Denmark must be treated as at an end, and their legitimate
+ruler, Frederick of Augustenburg, son of the Duke who had renounced his
+rights, be placed on the throne. The Diet of Frankfort, however, decided to
+recognise neither of the two rival sovereigns in Holstein until its own
+intervention should have taken place. Orders were given that a Saxon and a
+Hanoverian corps should enter the country; and although Prussia and Austria
+had made a secret agreement that the settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein
+question was to be conducted by themselves independently of the Diet, the
+tide of popular enthusiasm ran so high that for the moment the two leading
+Powers considered it safer not to obstruct the Federal authority, and the
+Saxon and Hanoverian troops accordingly entered Holstein as mandatories of
+the Diet at the end of 1863. The Danish Government, offering no resistance,
+withdrew its troops across the river Eider into Schleswig.
+
+[Plans of Bismarck.]
+
+[Union of Austria and Prussia.]
+
+[Austrian and Prussian troops enter Schleswig. Feb., 1864.]
+
+From this time the history of Germany is the history of the profound and
+audacious statecraft and of the overmastering will of Bismarck; the nation,
+except through its valour on the battle-field, ceases to influence the
+shaping of its own fortunes. What the German people desired in 1864 was
+that Schleswig-Holstein should be attached, under a ruler of its own, to
+the German Federation as it then existed; what Bismarck intended was that
+Schleswig-Holstein, itself incorporated more or less directly with Prussia,
+should be made the means of the destruction of the existing Federal system
+and of the expulsion of Austria from Germany. That another petty State,
+bound to Prussia by no closer tie than its other neighbours, should be
+added to the troop among whom Austria found its vassals and its
+instruments, would have been in Bismarck's eyes no gain but actual
+detriment to Germany. The German people desired one course of action;
+Bismarck had determined on something totally different; and with matchless
+resolution and skill he bore down all opposition of people and of Courts,
+and forced a reluctant nation to the goal which he had himself chosen for
+it. The first point of conflict was the apparent recognition by Bismarck of
+the rights of King Christian IX. as lawful sovereign in the Duchies as well
+as in the rest of the Danish State. By the Treaty of London Prussia had
+indeed pledged itself to this recognition; but the German Federation had
+been no party to the Treaty, and under the pressure of a vehement national
+agitation Bavaria and the minor States one after another recognised
+Frederick of Augustenburg as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck was
+accused alike by the Prussian Parliament and by the popular voice of
+Germany at large of betraying German interests to Denmark, of abusing
+Prussia's position as a Great Power, of inciting the nation to civil war.
+In vain he declared that, while surrendering no iota of German rights, the
+Government of Berlin must recognise those treaty-obligations with which its
+own legal title to a voice in the affairs of Schleswig was intimately bound
+up, and that the King of Prussia, not a multitude of irresponsible and
+ill-informed citizens, must be the judge of the measures by which German
+interests were to be effectually protected. His words made no single
+convert either in the Prussian Parliament or in the Federal Diet. At
+Frankfort the proposal made by the two leading Powers that King Christian
+should be required to annul the November Constitution, and that in case of
+his refusal Schleswig also should be occupied, was rejected, as involving
+an acknowledgment of the title of Christian as reigning sovereign. At
+Berlin the Lower Chamber refused the supplies which Bismarck demanded for
+operations in the Duchies, and formally resolved to resist his policy by
+every means at its command. But the resistance of Parliament and of Diet
+were alike in vain. By a masterpiece of diplomacy Bismarck had secured the
+support and co-operation of Austria in his own immediate Danish policy,
+though but a few months before he had incurred the bitter hatred of the
+Court of Vienna by frustrating its plans for a reorganisation of Germany by
+a Congress of princes at Frankfort, and had frankly declared to the
+Austrian ambassador at Berlin that if Austria did not transfer its
+political centre to Pesth and leave to Prussia free scope in Germany, it
+would find Prussia on the side of its enemies in the next war in which it
+might be engaged. [515] But the democratic and impassioned character of the
+agitation in the minor States in favour of the Schleswig-Holsteiners and
+their Augustenburg pretender had enabled Bismarck to represent this
+movement to the Austrian Government as a revolutionary one, and by a
+dexterous appeal to the memories of 1848 to awe the Emperor's advisers into
+direct concert with the Court of Berlin, as the representative of
+monarchical order, in dealing with a problem otherwise too likely to be
+solved by revolutionary methods and revolutionary forces. Count Rechberg,
+the Foreign Minister at Vienna, was lured into a policy which, after
+drawing upon Austria a full share of the odium of Bismarck's Danish plans,
+after forfeiting for it the goodwill of the minor States with which it
+might have kept Prussia in check, and exposing it to the risk of a European
+war, was to confer upon its rival the whole profit of the joint enterprise,
+and to furnish a pretext for the struggle by which Austria was to be
+expelled alike from Germany and from what remained to it of Italy. But of
+the nature of the toils into which he was now taking the first fatal and
+irrevocable step Count Rechberg appears to have had no suspicion. A seeming
+cordiality united the Austrian and Prussian Governments in the policy of
+defiance to the will of all the rest of Germany and to the demands of their
+own subjects. It was to no purpose that the Federal Diet vetoed the
+proposed summons to King Christian and the proposed occupation of
+Schleswig. Austria and Prussia delivered an ultimatum at Copenhagen
+demanding the repeal of the November Constitution; and on its rejection
+their troops entered Schleswig, not as the mandatories of the German
+Federation, but as the instruments of two independent and allied Powers.
+(Feb. 1, 1864.)
+
+[Campaign in Schleswig. Feb.-April, 1864.]
+
+Against the overwhelming forces by which they were thus attacked the Danes
+could only make a brave but ineffectual resistance. Their first line of
+defence was the Danewerke, a fortification extending east and west towards
+the sea from the town of Schleswig. Prince Frederick Charles, who commanded
+the Prussian right, was repulsed in an attack upon the easternmost part of
+this work at Missunde; the Austrians, however, carried some positions in
+the centre which commanded the defenders' lines, and the Danes fell back
+upon the fortified post of Dueppel, covering the narrow channel which
+separates the island of Alsen from the mainland. Here for some weeks they
+held the Prussians in check, while the Austrians, continuing the march
+northwards, entered Jutland. At length, on the 18th of April, after several
+hours of heavy bombardment, the lines of Dueppel were taken by storm and the
+defenders driven across the channel into Alsen. Unable to pursue the enemy
+across this narrow strip of sea, the Prussians joined their allies in
+Jutland, and occupied the whole of the Danish mainland as far as the Luem
+Fiord. The war, however, was not to be terminated without an attempt on the
+part of the neutral Powers to arrive at a settlement by diplomacy. A
+Conference was opened at London on the 20th of April, and after three weeks
+of negotiation the belligerents were induced to accept an armistice. As the
+troops of the German Federation, though unconcerned in the military
+operations of the two Great Powers, were in possession of Holstein, the
+Federal Government was invited to take part in the Conference. It was
+represented by Count Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, a politician who was
+soon to rise to much greater eminence; but in consequence of the diplomatic
+union of Prussia and Austria the views entertained by the Governments of
+the secondary German States had now no real bearing on the course of
+events, and Count Beust's earliest appearance on the great European stage
+was without result, except in its influence on his own career. [516]
+
+[Conference of London. April, 1864.]
+
+The first proposition laid before the Conference was that submitted by
+Bernstorff, the Prussian envoy, to the effect that Schleswig-Holstein
+should receive complete independence, the question whether King Christian
+or some other prince should be sovereign of the new State being reserved
+for future settlement. To this the Danish envoys replied that even on the
+condition of personal union with Denmark through the Crown they could not
+assent to the grant of complete independence to the Duchies. Raising their
+demand in consequence of this refusal, and declaring that the war had made
+an end of the obligations subsisting under the London Treaty of 1852, the
+two German Powers then demanded that Schleswig-Holstein should be
+completely separated from Denmark and formed into a single State under
+Frederick of Augustenburg, who in the eyes of Germany possessed the best
+claim to the succession. Lord Russell, while denying that the acts or
+defaults of Denmark could liberate Austria and Prussia from their
+engagements made with other Powers in the Treaty of London, admitted that
+no satisfactory result was likely to arise from the continued union of the
+Duchies with Denmark, and suggested that King Christian should make an
+absolute cession of Holstein and of the southern part of Schleswig,
+retaining the remainder in full sovereignty. The frontier-line he proposed
+to draw at the River Schlei. To this principle of partition both Denmark
+and the German Powers assented, but it proved impossible to reach an
+agreement on the frontier-line. Bernstorff, who had at first required
+nearly all Schleswig, abated his demands, and would have accepted a line
+drawn westward from Flensburg, so leaving to Denmark at least half the
+province, including the important position of Dueppel. The terms thus
+offered to Denmark were not unfavourable. Holstein it did not expect, and
+could scarcely desire, to retain; and the territory which would have been
+taken from it in Schleswig under this arrangement included few districts
+that were not really German. But the Government of Copenhagen, misled by
+the support given to it at the Conference by England and Russia--a support
+which was one of words only--refused to cede anything north of the town of
+Schleswig. Even when in the last resort Lord Russell proposed that the
+frontier-line should be settled by arbitration the Danish Government held
+fast to its refusal, and for the sake of a few miles of territory plunged
+once more into a struggle which, if it was not to kindle a European war of
+vast dimensions, could end only in the ruin of the Danes. The expected help
+failed them. Attacked and overthrown in the island of Alsen, the German
+flag carried to the northern extremity of their mainland, they were
+compelled to make peace on their enemies' terms. Hostilities were brought
+to a close by the signature of Preliminaries on the 1st of August; and by
+the Treaty of Vienna, concluded on the 30th of October, 1864, King
+Christian ceded his rights in the whole of Schleswig-Holstein to the
+sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, and undertook to recognise
+whatever dispositions they might make of those provinces.
+
+[Great Britain and Napoleon III.]
+
+The British Government throughout this conflict had played a sorry part, at
+one moment threatening the Germans, at another using language towards the
+Danes which might well be taken to indicate an intention of lending them
+armed support. To some extent the errors of the Cabinet were due to the
+relation which existed between Great Britain and Napoleon III. It had up to
+this time been considered both at London and at Paris that the Allies of
+the Crimea had still certain common interests in Europe; and in the
+unsuccessful intervention at St. Petersburg on behalf of Poland in 1863 the
+British and French Governments had at first gone hand in hand. But behind
+every step openly taken by Napoleon III. there was some half-formed design
+for promoting the interests of his dynasty or extending the frontiers of
+France; and if England had consented to support the diplomatic concert at
+St. Petersburg by measures of force, it would have found itself engaged in
+a war in which other ends than those relating to Poland would have been the
+foremost. Towards the close of the year 1863 Napoleon had proposed that a
+European Congress should assemble, in order to regulate not only the
+affairs of Poland but all those European questions which remained
+unsettled. This proposal had been abruptly declined by the English
+Government; and when in the course of the Danish war Lord Palmerston showed
+an inclination to take up arms if France would do the same, Napoleon was
+probably not sorry to have the opportunity of repaying England for its
+rejection of his own overtures in the previous year. He had moreover hopes
+of obtaining from Prussia an extension of the French frontier either in
+Belgium or towards the Rhine. [517] In reply to overtures from London,
+Napoleon stated that the cause of Schleswig-Holstein to some extent
+represented the principle of nationality, to which France was friendly, and
+that of all wars in which France could engage a war with Germany would be
+the least desirable. England accordingly, if it took up arms for the Danes,
+would have been compelled to enter the war alone; and although at a later
+time, when the war was over and the victors were about to divide the spoil,
+the British and French fleets ostentatiously combined in manoeuvres at
+Cherbourg, this show of union deceived no one, least of all the resolute
+and well-informed director of affairs at Berlin. To force, and force alone,
+would Bismarck have yielded. Palmerston, now sinking into old age,
+permitted Lord Russell to parody his own fierce language of twenty years
+back; but all the world, except the Danes, knew that the fangs and the
+claws were drawn, and that British foreign policy had become for the time a
+thing of snarls and grimaces.
+
+[Intentions of Bismarck as to Schleswig-Holstein.]
+
+Bismarck had not at first determined actually to annex Schleswig-Holstein
+to Prussia. He would have been content to leave it under the nominal
+sovereignty of Frederick of Augustenburg if that prince would have placed
+the entire military and naval resources of Schleswig-Holstein under the
+control of the Government of Berlin, and have accepted on behalf of his
+Duchies conditions which Bismarck considered indispensable to German
+union under Prussian leadership. In the harbour of Kiel it was not
+difficult to recognise the natural headquarters of a future German fleet;
+the narrow strip of land projecting between the two seas naturally
+suggested the formation of a canal connecting the Baltic with the German
+Ocean, and such a work could only belong to Germany at large or to its
+leading Power. Moreover, as a frontier district, Schleswig-Holstein was
+peculiarly exposed to foreign attack; certain strategical positions
+necessary for its defence must therefore be handed over to its protector.
+That Prussia should have united its forces with Austria in order to win
+for the Schleswig-Holsteiners the power of governing themselves as they
+pleased, must have seemed to Bismarck a supposition in the highest degree
+preposterous. He had taken up the cause of the Duchies not in the
+interest of the inhabitants but in the interest of Germany; and by
+Germany he understood Germany centred at Berlin and ruled by the House of
+Hohenzollern. If therefore the Augustenburg prince was not prepared to
+accept his throne on these terms, there was no room for him, and the
+provinces must be incorporated with Prussia itself. That Austria would
+not without compensation permit the Duchies thus to fall directly or
+indirectly under Prussian sway was of course well known to Bismarck; but
+so far was this from causing him any hesitation in his policy, that from
+the first he had discerned in the Schleswig-Holstein question a favourable
+pretext for the war which was to drive Austria out of Germany.
+
+[Relations of Prussia and Austria, Dec., 1854-Aug., 1865.]
+
+[Convention of Gastein, Aug. 14, 1865.]
+
+Peace with Denmark was scarcely concluded when, at the bidding of Prussia,
+reluctantly supported by Austria, the Saxon and Hanoverian troops which had
+entered Holstein as the mandatories of the Federal Diet were compelled to
+leave the country. A Provisional Government was established under the
+direction of an Austrian and a Prussian Commissioner. Bismarck had met the
+Prince of Augustenburg at Berlin some months before, and had formed an
+unfavourable opinion of the policy likely to be adopted by him towards
+Prussia. All Germany, however, was in favour of the Prince's claims, and at
+the Conference of London these claims had been supported by the Prussian
+envoy himself. In order to give some appearance of formal legality to his
+own action, Bismarck had to obtain from the Crown-jurists of Prussia a
+decision that King Christian IX. had, contrary to the general opinion of
+Germany, been the lawful inheritor of Schleswig-Holstein, and that the
+Prince of Augustenburg had therefore no rights whatever in the Duchies. As
+the claims of Christian had been transferred by the Treaty of Vienna to the
+sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, it rested with them to decide
+who should be Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and under what conditions.
+Bismarck announced at Vienna on the 22nd of February, 1865, the terms on
+which he was willing that Schleswig-Holstein should be conferred by the two
+sovereigns upon Frederick of Augustenburg. He required, in addition to
+community of finance, postal system, and railways, that Prussian law,
+including the obligation to military service, should be introduced into the
+Duchies; that their regiments should take the oath of fidelity to the King
+of Prussia, and that their principal military positions should be held by
+Prussian troops. These conditions would have made Schleswig-Holstein in all
+but name a part of the Prussian State: they were rejected both by the Court
+of Vienna and by Prince Frederick himself, and the population of
+Schleswig-Holstein almost unanimously declared against them. Both Austria
+and the Federal Diet now supported the Schleswig-Holsteiners in what
+appeared to be a struggle on behalf of their independence against Prussian
+domination; and when the Prussian Commissioner in Schleswig-Holstein
+expelled the most prominent of the adherents of Augustenburg, his Austrian
+colleague published a protest declaring the act to be one of lawless
+violence. It seemed that the outbreak of war between the two rival Powers
+could not long be delayed; but Bismarck had on this occasion moved too
+rapidly for his master, and considerations relating to the other European
+Powers made it advisable to postpone the rupture for some months. An
+agreement was patched up at Gastein by which, pending an ultimate
+settlement, the government of the two provinces was divided between their
+masters, Austria taking the administration of Holstein, Prussia that of
+Schleswig, while the little district of Lauenburg on the south was made
+over to King William in full sovereignty. An actual conflict between the
+representatives of the two rival governments at their joint headquarters in
+Schleswig-Holstein was thus averted; peace was made possible at least for
+some months longer; and the interval was granted to Bismarck which was
+still required for the education of his Sovereign in the policy of blood
+and iron, and for the completion of his own arrangements with the enemies
+of Austria outside Germany. [518]
+
+[Bismarck at Biarritz, Sept., 1865.]
+
+The natural ally of Prussia was Italy; but without the sanction of Napoleon
+III. it would have been difficult to engage Italy in a new war. Bismarck
+had therefore to gain at least the passive concurrence of the French
+Emperor in the union of Italy and Prussia against Austria. He visited
+Napoleon at Biarritz in September, 1865, and returned with the object of
+his journey achieved. The negotiation of Biarritz, if truthfully recorded,
+would probably give the key to much of the European history of the next
+five years. As at Plombieres, the French Emperor acted without his
+Ministers, and what he asked he asked without a witness. That Bismarck
+actually promised to Napoleon III. either Belgium or any part of the
+Rhenish Provinces in case of the aggrandisement of Prussia has been denied
+by him, and is not in itself probable. But there are understandings which
+prove to be understandings on one side only; politeness may be
+misinterpreted; and the world would have found Count Bismarck unendurable
+if at every friendly meeting he had been guilty of the frankness with which
+he informed the Austrian Government that its centre of action must be
+transferred from Vienna to Pesth. That Napoleon was now scheming for an
+extension of France on the north-east is certain; that Bismarck treated
+such rectification of the frontier as a matter for arrangement is hardly to
+be doubted; and if without a distinct and written agreement Napoleon was
+content to base his action on the belief that Bismarck would not withhold
+from him his reward, this only proved how great was the disparity between
+the aims which the French ruler allowed himself to cherish and his mastery
+of the arts by which alone such aims were to be realised. Napoleon desired
+to see Italy placed in possession of Venice; he probably believed at this
+time that Austria would be no unequal match for Prussia and Italy together,
+and that the natural result of a well-balanced struggle would be not only
+The completion of Italian union but the purchase of French neutrality or
+mediation by the cession of German territory west of the Rhine. It was no
+part of the duty of Count Bismarck to chill Napoleon's fancies or to teach
+him political wisdom. The Prussian statesman may have left Biarritz with
+the conviction that an attack on Germany would sooner or later follow the
+disappointment of those hopes which he had flattered and intended to mock;
+but for the present he had removed one dangerous obstacle from his path,
+and the way lay free before him to an Italian alliance if Italy itself
+should choose to combine with him in war.
+
+[Italy, 1862-65.]
+
+Since the death of Cavour the Italian Government had made no real progress
+towards the attainment of the national aims, the acquisition of Rome and
+Venice. Garibaldi, impatient of delay, had in 1862 landed again in Sicily
+and summoned his followers to march with him upon Rome. But the enterprise
+was resolutely condemned by Victor Emmanuel, and when Garibaldi crossed to
+the mainland he found the King's troops in front of him at Aspromonte.
+There was an exchange of shots, and Garibaldi fell wounded. He was treated
+with something of the distinction shown to a royal prisoner, and when his
+wound was healed he was released from captivity. His enterprise, however,
+and the indiscreet comments on it made by Rattazzi, who was now in power,
+strengthened the friends of the Papacy at the Tuileries, and resulted in
+the fall of the Italian Minister. His successor, Minghetti, deemed it
+necessary to arrive at some temporary understanding with Napoleon on the
+Roman question. The presence of French troops at Rome offended national
+feeling, and made any attempt at conciliation between the Papal Court and
+the Italian Government hopeless. In order to procure the removal of this
+foreign garrison Minghetti was willing to enter into engagements which
+seemed almost to imply the renunciation of the claim on Rome. By a
+Convention made in September, 1864, the Italian Government undertook not to
+attack the territory of the Pope, and to oppose by force every attack made
+upon it from without. Napoleon on his part engaged to withdraw his troops
+gradually from Rome as the Pope should organise his own army, and to
+complete the evacuation within two years. It was, however, stipulated in an
+Article which was intended to be kept secret, that the capital of Italy
+should be changed, the meaning of this stipulation being that Florence
+should receive the dignity which by the common consent of Italy ought to
+have been transferred from Turin to Rome and to Rome alone. The publication
+of this Article, which was followed by riots in Turin, caused the immediate
+fall of Minghetti's Cabinet. He was succeeded in office by General La
+Marmora, under whom the negotiations with Prussia were begun which, after
+long uncertainty, resulted in the alliance of 1866 and in the final
+expulsion of Austria from Italy. [519]
+
+[La Marmora.]
+
+[Govone at Berlin, March, 1866.]
+
+[Treaty of April 8, 1856.]
+
+Bismarck from the beginning of his Ministry appears to have looked forward
+to the combination of Italy and Prussia against the common enemy; but his
+plans ripened slowly. In the spring of 1865, when affairs seemed to be
+reaching a crisis in Schleswig-Holstein, the first serious overtures were
+made by the Prussian ambassador at Florence. La Marmora answered that any
+definite proposition would receive the careful attention of the Italian
+Government, but that Italy would not permit itself to be made a mere
+instrument in Prussia's hands for the intimidation of Austria. Such caution
+was both natural and necessary on the part of the Italian Minister; and his
+reserve seemed to be more than justified when, a few months later, the
+Treaty of Gastein restored Austria and Prussia to relations of friendship.
+La Marmora might now well consider himself released from all obligations
+towards the Court of Berlin: and, entering on a new line of policy, he sent
+an envoy to Vienna to ascertain if the Emperor would amicably cede Venetia
+to Italy in return for the payment of a very large sum of money and the
+assumption by Italy of part of the Austrian national debt. Had this
+transaction been effected, it would probably have changed the course of
+European history; the Emperor, however, declined to bargain away any part
+of his dominions, and so threw Italy once more into the camp of his great
+enemy. In the meantime the disputes about Schleswig-Holstein broke out
+afresh. Bismarck renewed his efforts at Florence in the spring of 1866,
+with the result that General Govone was sent to Berlin in order to discuss
+with the Prussian Minister the political and military conditions of an
+alliance. But instead of proposing immediate action, Bismarck stated to
+Govone that the question of Schleswig-Holstein was insufficient to justify
+a great war in the eyes of Europe, and that a better cause must be put
+forward, namely, the reform of the Federal system of Germany. Once more the
+subtle Italians believed that Bismarck's anxiety for a war with Austria was
+feigned, and that he sought their friendship only as a means of extorting
+from the Court of Vienna its consent to Prussia's annexation of the Danish
+Duchies. There was an apparent effort on the part of the Prussian statesman
+to avoid entering into any engagement which involved immediate action; the
+truth being that Bismarck was still in conflict with the pacific influences
+which surrounded the King, and uncertain from day to day whether his master
+would really follow him in the policy of war. He sought therefore to make
+the joint resort to arms dependent on some future act, such as the
+summoning of a German Parliament, from which the King of Prussia could not
+recede if once he should go so far. But the Italians, apparently not
+penetrating the real secret of Bismarck's hesitation, would be satisfied
+with no such indeterminate engagement; they pressed for action within a
+limited time; and in the end, after Austria had taken steps which went far
+to overcome the last scruples of King William, Bismarck consented to fix
+three months as the limit beyond which the obligation of Italy to accompany
+Prussia into war should not extend. On the 8th of April a Treaty of
+offensive and defensive alliance was signed. It was agreed that if the King
+of Prussia should within three months take up arms for the reform of the
+Federal system of Germany, Italy would immediately after the outbreak of
+hostilities declare war upon Austria. Both Powers were to engage in the
+war with their whole force, and peace was not to be made but by common
+consent, such consent not to be withheld after Austria should have agreed
+to cede Venetia to Italy and territory with an equal population to Prussia.
+[520]
+
+[Bismarck and Austria, Aug., 1865-April, 1866.]
+
+Eight months had now passed since the signature of the Convention of
+Gastem. The experiment of an understanding with Austria, which King William
+had deemed necessary, had been made, and it had failed; or rather, as
+Bismarck expressed himself in a candid moment, it had succeeded, inasmuch
+as it had cured the King of his scruples and raised him to the proper point
+of indignation against the Austrian Court. The agents in effecting this
+happy result had been the Prince of Augustenburg, the population of
+Holstein, and the Liberal party throughout Germany at large. In Schleswig,
+which the Convention of Gastein had handed over to Prussia, General
+Manteuffel, a son of the Minister of 1850, had summarily put a stop to
+every expression of public opinion, and had threatened to imprison the
+Prince if he came within his reach; in Holstein the Austrian Government had
+permitted, if it had not encouraged, the inhabitants to agitate in favour
+of the Pretender, and had allowed a mass-meeting to be held at Altona on
+the 23rd of January, where cheers were raised for Augustenburg, and the
+summoning of the Estates of Schleswig-Holstein was demanded. This was
+enough to enable Bismarck to denounce the conduct of Austria as an alliance
+with revolution. He demanded explanations from the Government of Vienna,
+and the Emperor declined to render an account of his actions. Warlike
+preparations now began, and on the 16th of March the Austrian Government
+announced that it should refer the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein to the
+Federal Diet. This was a clear departure from the terms of the Convention
+of Gastein, and from the agreement made between Austria and Prussia before
+entering into the Danish war in 1864 that the Schleswig-Holstein question
+should be settled by the two Powers independently of the German Federation.
+King William was deeply moved by such a breach of good faith; tears filled
+his eyes when he spoke of the conduct of the Austrian Emperor; and though
+pacific influences were still active around him he now began to fall in
+more cordially with the warlike policy of his Minister. The question at
+issue between Prussia and Austria expanded from the mere disposal of the
+Duchies to the reconstitution of the Federal system of Germany. In a note
+laid before the Governments of all the Minor States Bismarck declared that
+the time had come when Germany must receive a new and more effective
+organisation, and inquired how far Prussia could count on the support of
+allies if it should be attacked by Austria or forced into war. It was
+immediately after this re-opening of the whole problem of Federal reform in
+Germany that the draft of the Treaty with Italy was brought to its final
+shape by Bismarck and the Italian envoy, and sent to the Ministry at
+Florence for its approval.
+
+[Austria offers Venice, May 5.]
+
+Bismarck had now to make the best use of the three months' delay that was
+granted to him. On the day after the acceptance of the Treaty by the
+Italian Government, the Prussian representative at the Diet of Frankfort
+handed in a proposal for the summoning of a German Parliament, to be
+elected by universal suffrage. Coming from the Minister who had made
+Parliamentary government a mockery in Prussia, this proposal was scarcely
+considered as serious. Bavaria, as the chief of the secondary States, had
+already expressed its willingness to enter upon the discussion of Federal
+reform, but it asked that the two leading Powers should in the meantime
+undertake not to attack one another. Austria at once acceded to this
+request, and so forced Bismarck into giving a similar assurance. Promises
+of disarmament were then exchanged; but as Austria declined to stay the
+collection of its forces in Venetia against Italy, Bismarck was able to
+charge his adversary with insincerity in the negotiation, and preparations
+for war were resumed on both sides. Other difficulties, however, now came
+into view. The Treaty between Prussia and Italy had been made known to the
+Court of Vienna by Napoleon, whose advice La Marmora had sought before its
+conclusion, and the Austrian Emperor had thus become aware of his danger.
+He now determined to sacrifice Venetia if Italy's neutrality could be so
+secured. On the 5th of May the Italian ambassador at Paris, Count Nigra,
+was informed by Napoleon that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to him on
+behalf of Victor Emmanuel if France and Italy would not prevent Austria
+from indemnifying itself at Prussia's expense in Silesia. Without a war, at
+the price of mere inaction, Italy was offered all that it could gain by a
+struggle which was likely to be a desperate one, and which might end in
+disaster. La Marmora was in sore perplexity. Though he had formed a juster
+estimate of the capacity of the Prussian army than any other statesman or
+soldier in Europe, he was thoroughly suspicious of the intentions of the
+Prussian Government; and in sanctioning the alliance of the previous month
+he had done so half expecting that Bismarck would through the prestige of
+this alliance gain for Prussia its own objects without entering into war,
+and then leave Italy to reckon with Austria as best it might. He would
+gladly have abandoned the alliance and have accepted Austria's offer if
+Italy could have done this without disgrace. But the sense of honour was
+sufficiently strong to carry him past this temptation. He declined the
+offer made through Paris, and continued the armaments of Italy, though
+still with a secret hope that European diplomacy might find the means of
+realising the purpose of his country without war. [521]
+
+[Proposals for a Congress.]
+
+The neutral Powers were now, with various objects, bestirring themselves in
+favour of a European Congress. Napoleon believed the time to be come when
+the Treaties of 1815 might be finally obliterated by the joint act of
+Europe. He was himself ready to join Prussia with three hundred thousand
+men if the King would transfer the Rhenish Provinces to France. Demands,
+direct and indirect, were made on Count Bismarck on behalf of the Tuileries
+for cessions of territory of greater or less extent. These demands were
+neither granted nor refused. Bismarck procrastinated; he spoke of the
+obstinacy of the King his master; he inquired whether parts of Belgium or
+Switzerland would not better assimilate with France than a German province;
+he put off the Emperor's representatives by the assurance that he could
+more conveniently arrange these matters with the Emperor when he should
+himself visit Paris. On the 28th of May invitations to a Congress were
+issued by France, England, and Russia jointly, the objects of the Congress
+being defined as the settlement of the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein, of
+the differences between Austria and Italy, and of the reform of the Federal
+Constitution of Germany, in so far as these affected Europe at large. The
+invitation was accepted by Prussia and by Italy; it was accepted by Austria
+only under the condition that no arrangement should be discussed which
+should give an increase of territory or power to one of the States invited
+to the Congress. This subtly-worded condition would not indeed have
+excluded the equal aggrandisement of all. It would not have rendered the
+cession of Venetia to Italy or the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein to
+Prussia impossible; but it would either have involved the surrender of the
+former Papal territory by Italy in order that Victor Emmanuel's dominions
+should receive no increase, or, in the alternative, it would have entitled
+Austria to claim Silesia as its own equivalent for the augmentation of the
+Italian Kingdom. Such reservations would have rendered any efforts of the
+Powers to preserve peace useless, and they were accepted as tantamount to a
+refusal on the part of Austria to attend the Congress. Simultaneously with
+its answer to the neutral Powers, Austria called upon the Federal Diet to
+take the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein into its own hands, and convoked the
+Holstein Estates. Bismarck thereupon declared the Convention of Gastein to
+be at an end, and ordered General Manteuffel to lead his troops into
+Holstein. The Austrian commander, protesting that he yielded only to
+superior force, withdrew through Altona into Hanover. Austria at once
+demanded and obtained from the Diet of Frankfort the mobilisation of the
+whole of the Federal armies. The representative of Prussia, declaring that
+this act of the Diet had made an end of the existing Federal union, handed
+in the plan of his Government for the reorganisation of Germany, and
+quitted Frankfort. Diplomatic relations between Austria and Prussia were
+broken off on the 12th of June, and on the 15th Count Bismarck demanded of
+the sovereigns of Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse-Cassel, that they should on
+that very day put a stop to their military preparations and accept the
+Prussian scheme of Federal reform. Negative answers being given, Prussian
+troops immediately marched into these territories, and war began. Weimar,
+Mecklenburg, and other petty States in the north took part with Prussia:
+all the rest of Germany joined Austria. [522]
+
+[German Opinion.]
+
+The goal of Bismarck's desire, the end which he had steadily set before
+himself since entering upon his Ministry, was attained; and, if his
+calculations as to the strength of the Prussian army were not at fault,
+Austria was at length to be expelled from the German Federation by force of
+arms. But the process by which Bismarck had worked up to this result had
+ranged against him the almost unanimous opinion of Germany outside the
+military circles of Prussia itself. His final demand for the summoning of a
+German Parliament was taken as mere comedy. The guiding star of his policy
+had hitherto been the dynastic interest of the House of Hohenzollern; and
+now, when the Germans were to be plunged into war with one another, it
+seemed as if the real object of the struggle was no more than the
+annexation of the Danish Duchies and some other coveted territory to the
+Prussian Kingdom. The voice of protest and condemnation rose loud from
+every organ of public opinion. Even in Prussia itself the instances were
+few where any spontaneous support was tendered to the Government. The
+Parliament of Berlin, struggling up to the end against the all-powerful
+Minister, had seen its members prosecuted for speeches made within its own
+walls, and had at last been prorogued in order that its insubordination
+might not hamper the Crown in the moment of danger. But the mere
+disappearance of Parliament could not conceal the intensity of ill-will
+which the Minister and his policy had excited. The author of a fratricidal
+war of Germans against Germans was in the eyes of many the greatest of all
+criminals; and on the 7th of May an attempt was made by a young fanatic to
+take Bismarck's life in the streets of Berlin. The Minister owed the
+preservation of his life to the feebleness of his assailant's weapon and to
+his own vigorous arm. But the imminence of the danger affected King William
+far more than Bismarck himself. It spoke to his simple mind of supernatural
+protection and aid; it stilled his doubts; and confirmed him in the belief
+that Prussia was in this crisis the instrument for working out the
+Almighty's will.
+
+[Napoleon III.]
+
+A few days before the outbreak of hostilities the Emperor Napoleon gave
+publicity to his own view of the European situation. He attributed the
+coming war to three causes: to the faulty geographical limits of the
+Prussian State, to the desire for a better Federal system in Germany, and
+to the necessity felt by the Italian nation for securing its independence.
+These needs would, he conceived, be met by a territorial rearrangement in
+the north of Germany consolidating and augmenting the Prussian Kingdom; by
+the creation of a more effective Federal union between the secondary German
+States; and finally, by the incorporation of Venetia with Italy, Austria's
+position in Germany remaining unimpaired. Only in the event of the map of
+Europe being altered to the exclusive advantage of one Great Power would
+France require an extension of frontier. Its interests lay in the
+preservation of the equilibrium of Europe, and in the maintenance of the
+Italian Kingdom. These had already been secured by arrangements which would
+not require France to draw the sword; a watchful but unselfish neutrality
+was the policy which its Government had determined to pursue. Napoleon had
+in fact lost all control over events, and all chance of gaining the Rhenish
+Provinces, from the time when he permitted Italy to enter into the Prussian
+alliance without any stipulation that France should at its option be
+admitted as a third member of the coalition. He could not ally himself with
+Austria against his own creation, the Italian Kingdom; on the other hand,
+he had no means of extorting cessions from Prussia when once Prussia was
+sure of an ally who could bring two hundred thousand men into the field.
+His diplomacy had been successful in so far as it had assured Venetia to
+Italy whether Prussia should be victorious or overthrown, but as regarded
+France it had landed him in absolute powerlessness. He was unable to act on
+one side; he was not wanted on the other. Neutrality had become a matter
+not of choice but of necessity; and until the course of military events
+should have produced some new situation in Europe, France might well be
+watchful, but it could scarcely gain much credit for its disinterested
+part. [523]
+
+[Hanover and Hesse-Cassel conquered.]
+
+[The Bohemian Campaign, June 26-July 3.]
+
+[Battle of Koeniggraetz, July 3.]
+
+Assured against an attack from the side of the Rhine, Bismarck was able to
+throw the mass of the Prussian forces southwards against Austria, leaving
+in the north only the modest contingent which was necessary to overcome the
+resistance of Hanover and Hesse-Cassel. Through the precipitancy of a
+Prussian general, who struck without waiting for his colleagues, the
+Hanoverians gained a victory at Langensalza on the 27th of June; but other
+Prussian regiments arrived on the field a few hours later, and the
+Hanoverian army was forced to capitulate on the next day. The King made his
+escape to Austria; the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, less fortunate, was made a
+prisoner of war. Northern Germany was thus speedily reduced to submission,
+and any danger of a diversion in favour of Austria in this quarter
+disappeared. In Saxony no attempt was made to bar the way to the advancing
+Prussians. Dresden was occupied without resistance, but the Saxon army
+marched southwards in good time, and joined the Austrians in Bohemia. The
+Prussian forces, about two hundred and fifty thousand strong, now gathered
+on the Saxon and Silesian frontier, covering the line from Pirna to
+Landshut. They were composed of three armies: the first, or central, army
+under Prince Frederick Charles, a nephew of the King; the second, or
+Silesian, army under the Crown Prince; the westernmost, known as the army
+of the Elbe, under General Herwarth von Bittenfeld. Against these were
+ranged about an equal number of Austrians, led by Benedek, a general who
+had gained great distinction in the Hungarian and the Italian campaigns. It
+had at first been thought probable that Benedek, whose forces lay about
+Olmuetz, would invade Southern Silesia, and the Prussian line had therefore
+been extended far to the east. Soon, however, it appeared that the
+Austrians were unable to take up the offensive, and Benedek moved westwards
+into Bohemia. The Prussian line was now shortened, and orders were given to
+the three armies to cross the Bohemian frontier and converge in the
+direction of the town of Gitschin. General Moltke, the chief of the staff,
+directed their operations from Berlin by telegraph. The combined advance of
+the three armies was executed with extraordinary precision; and in a series
+of hard-fought combats extending from the 26th to the 29th of June the
+Austrians were driven back upon their centre, and effective communication
+was established between the three invading bodies. On the 30th the King of
+Prussia, with General Moltke and Count Bismarck, left Berlin; on the 2nd of
+July they were at headquarters at Gitschin. It had been Benedek's design to
+leave a small force to hold the Silesian army in check, and to throw the
+mass of his army westwards upon Prince Frederick Charles and overwhelm him
+before he could receive help from his colleagues. This design had been
+baffled by the energy of the Crown Prince's attack, and by the superiority
+of the Prussians in generalship, in the discipline of their troops, and in
+the weapon they carried; for though the Austrians had witnessed in the
+Danish campaign the effects of the Prussian breech-loading rifle, they had
+not thought it necessary to adopt a similar arm. Benedek, though no great
+battle had yet been fought, saw that the campaign was lost, and wrote to
+the Emperor on the 1st of July recommending him to make peace, for
+otherwise a catastrophe was inevitable. He then concentrated his army on
+high ground a few miles west of Koeniggraetz, and prepared for a defensive
+battle on the grandest scale. In spite of the losses of the past week he
+could still bring about two hundred thousand men into action. The three
+Prussian armies were now near enough to one another to combine in their
+attack, and on the night of July 2nd the King sent orders to the three
+commanders to move against Benedek before daybreak. Prince Frederick
+Charles, advancing through the village of Sadowa, was the first in the
+field. For hours his divisions sustained an unequal struggle against the
+assembled strength of the Austrians. Midday passed; the defenders now
+pressed down upon their assailants; and preparations for a retreat had been
+begun, when the long-expected message arrived that the Crown Prince was
+close at hand. The onslaught of the army of Silesia on Benedek's right,
+which was accompanied by the arrival of Herwarth at the other end of the
+field of battle, at once decided the day. It was with difficulty that the
+Austrian commander prevented the enemy from seizing the positions which
+would have cut off his retreat. He retired eastwards across the Elbe with a
+loss of eighteen thousand killed and wounded and twenty-four thousand
+prisoners. His army was ruined; and ten days after the Prussians had
+crossed the frontier the war was practically at an end. [524]
+
+[Battle of Custozza, June 24.]
+
+[Napoleon's mediation, July 5.]
+
+[Preliminaries of Nicolsburg, July 26.]
+
+[Treaty of Prague, Aug. 23.]
+
+The disaster of Koeniggraetz was too great to be neutralised by the success
+of the Austrian forces in Italy. La Marmora, who had given up his place at
+the head of the Government in order to take command of the army, crossed
+the Mincio at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, but was
+defeated by inferior numbers on the fatal ground of Custozza, and compelled
+to fall back on the Oglio. This gleam of success, which was followed by a
+naval victory at Lissa off the Istrian coast, made it easier for the
+Austrian Emperor to face the sacrifices that were now inevitable.
+Immediately after the battle of Koeniggraetz he invoked the mediation of
+Napoleon III., and ceded Venetia to him on behalf of Italy. Napoleon at
+once tendered his good offices to the belligerents, and proposed an
+armistice. His mediation was accepted in principle by the King or Prussia,
+who expressed his willingness also to grant an armistice as soon as
+preliminaries of peace were recognised by the Austrian Court. In the
+meantime, while negotiations passed between all four Governments, the
+Prussians pushed forward until their outposts came within sight of Vienna.
+If in pursuance of General Moltke's plan the Italian generals had thrown a
+corps north-eastwards from the head of the Adriatic, and so struck at the
+very heart of the Austrian monarchy, it is possible that the victors of
+Koeniggraetz might have imposed their own terms without regard to Napoleon's
+mediation, and, while adding the Italian Tyrol to Victor Emmanuel's
+dominions, have completed the union of Germany under the House of
+Hohenzollern at one stroke. But with Hungary still intact, and the Italian
+army paralysed by the dissensions of its commanders, prudence bade the
+great statesman of Berlin content himself with the advantages which he
+could reap without prolongation of the war, and without the risk of
+throwing Napoleon into the enemy's camp. He had at first required, as
+conditions of peace, that Prussia should be left free to annex Saxony,
+Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and other North German territory; that Austria
+should wholly withdraw from German affairs; and that all Germany, less the
+Austrian Provinces, should be united in a Federation under Prussian
+leadership. To gain the assent of Napoleon to these terms, Bismarck hinted
+that France might by accord with Prussia annex Belgium. Napoleon, however,
+refused to agree to the extension of Prussia's ascendency over all Germany,
+and presented a counter-project which was in its turn rejected by Bismarck.
+It was finally settled that Prussia should not be prevented from annexing
+Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-Cassel, as conquered territory that lay between
+its own Rhenish Provinces and the rest of the kingdom; that Austria should
+completely withdraw from German affairs; that Germany north of the Main,
+together with Saxony, should be included in a Federation under Prussian
+leadership; and that for the States south of the Main there should be
+reserved the right of entering into some kind of national bond with the
+Northern League. Austria escaped without loss of any of its non-Italian
+territory; it also succeeded in preserving the existence of Saxony, which,
+as in 1815, the Prussian Government had been most anxious to annex.
+Napoleon, in confining the Prussian Federation to the north of the Main,
+and in securing by a formal stipulation in the Treaty the independence of
+the Southern States, imagined himself to have broken Germany into halves,
+and to have laid the foundation of a South German League which should look
+to France as its protector. On the other hand, Bismarck by his annexation
+of Hanover and neighbouring districts had added a population of four
+millions to the Prussian Kingdom, and given it a continuous territory; he
+had forced Austria out of the German system; he had gained its sanction to
+the Federal union of all Germany north of the Main, and had at least kept
+the way open for the later extension of this union to the Southern States.
+Preliminaries of peace embodying these conditions and recognising Prussia's
+sovereignty in Schleswig-Holstein were signed at Nicolsburg on the 26th of
+July, and formed the basis of the definitive Treaty of Peace which was
+concluded at Prague on the 23rd of August. An illusory clause, added at the
+instance of Napoleon, provided that if the population of the northern
+districts of Schleswig should by a free vote express the wish to be united
+with Denmark, these districts should be ceded to the Danish Kingdom. [525]
+
+[The South German States.]
+
+[Secret Treaties of the Southern States with Prussia.]
+
+Bavaria and the south-western allies of Austria, though their military
+action was of an ineffective character, continued in arms for some weeks
+after the battle of Koeniggraetz and the suspension of hostilities arranged
+at Nicolsburg did not come into operation on their behalf till the 2nd of
+August. Before that date their forces were dispersed and their power of
+resistance broken by the Prussian generals Falckenstein and Manteuffel in a
+series of unimportant engagements and intricate manoeuvres. The City of
+Frankfort, against which Bismarck seems to have borne some personal hatred,
+was treated for a while by the conquerors with extraordinary and most
+impolitic harshness; in other respects the action of the Prussian
+Government towards these conquered States was not such as to render future
+union and friendship difficult. All the South German Governments, with the
+single exception of Baden, appealed to the Emperor Napoleon for assistance
+in the negotiations which they had opened at Berlin. But at the very moment
+when this request was made and granted Napoleon was himself demanding from
+Bismarck the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate and of the Hessian
+districts west of the Rhine. Bismarck had only to acquaint the King of
+Bavaria and the South German Ministers with the designs of their French
+protector in order to reconcile them to his own chastening, but not
+unfriendly, hand. The grandeur of a united Fatherland flashed upon minds
+hitherto impenetrable by any national ideal when it became known that
+Napoleon was bargaining for Oppenheim and Kaiserslautern. Not only were the
+insignificant questions as to the war-indemnities to be paid to Prussia and
+the frontier villages to be exchanged promptly settled, but by a series of
+secret Treaties all the South German States entered into an offensive and
+defensive alliance with the Prussian King, and engaged in case of war to
+place their entire forces at his disposal and under his command. The
+diplomacy of Napoleon III. had in the end effected for Bismarck almost more
+than his earlier intervention had frustrated, for it had made the South
+German Courts the allies of Prussia not through conquest or mere compulsion
+but out of regard for their own interests. [526] It was said by the
+opponents of the Imperial Government in France, and scarcely with
+exaggeration, that every error which it was possible to commit had, in the
+course of the year 1866, been committed by Napoleon III. One crime, one act
+of madness, remained open to the Emperor's critics, to lash him and France
+into a conflict with the Power whose union he had not been able to prevent.
+
+[Projects of compensation for France.]
+
+Prior to the battle of Koeniggraetz, it would seem that all the suggestions
+of the French Emperor relating to the acquisition of Belgium were made to
+the Prussian Government through secret agents, and that they were actually
+unknown, or known by mere hearsay, to Benedetti, the French Ambassador at
+Berlin. According to Prince Bismarck, these overtures had begun as early as
+1862, when he was himself Ambassador at Paris, and were then made verbally
+and in private notes to himself; they were the secret of Napoleon's
+neutrality during the Danish war; and were renewed through relatives and
+confidential agents of the Emperor when the struggle with Austria was seen
+to be approaching. The ignorance in which Count Benedetti was kept of his
+master's private diplomacy may to some extent explain the extraordinary
+contradictions between the accounts given by this Minister and by Prince
+Bismarck of the negotiations that passed between them in the period
+following the campaign of 1866, after Benedetti had himself been charged to
+present the demands of the French Government. In June, while the Ambassador
+was still, as it would seem, in ignorance of what was passing behind his
+back, he had informed the French Ministry that Bismarck, anxious for the
+preservation of French neutrality, had hinted at the compensations that
+might be made to France if Prussia should meet with great success in the
+coming war. According to the report of the Ambassador, made at the time,
+Count Bismarck stated that he would rather withdraw from public life than
+cede the Rhenish Provinces with Cologne and Bonn, but that he believed it
+would be possible to gain the King's ultimate consent to the cession of the
+Prussian district of Treves on the Upper Moselle, which district, together
+with Luxemburg or parts of Belgium and Switzerland, would give France an
+adequate improvement of its frontier. The Ambassador added in his report,
+by way of comment, that Count Bismarck was the only man in the kingdom who
+was disposed to make any cession of Prussian territory whatever, and that a
+unanimous and violent revulsion against France would be excited by the
+slightest indication of any intention on the part of the French Government
+to extend its frontiers towards the Rhine. He concluded his report with the
+statement that, after hearing Count Bismarck's suggestions, he had brought
+the discussion to a summary close, not wishing to leave the Prussian
+Minister under the impression that any scheme involving the seizure of
+Belgian or Swiss territory had the slightest chance of being seriously
+considered at Paris. (June 4-8.)
+
+[Demand for Rhenish territory, July 25-Aug. 7, 1866.]
+
+[The Belgian project, Aug. 16-30.]
+
+Benedetti probably wrote these last words in full sincerity. Seven weeks
+later, after the settlement of the Preliminaries at Nicolsburg, he was
+ordered to demand the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate, of the portion of
+Hesse-Darmstadt west of the Rhine, including Mainz, and of the strip of
+Prussian territory on the Saar which had been left to France in 1814 but
+taken from it in 1815. According to the statement of Prince Bismarck, which
+would seem to be exaggerated, this demand was made by Benedetti as an
+ultimatum and with direct threats of war, which were answered by Bismarck
+in language of equal violence. In any case the demand was unconditionally
+refused, and Benedetti travelled to Paris in order to describe what had
+passed at the Prussian headquarters. His report made such an impression on
+the Emperor that the demand for cessions on the Rhine was at once
+abandoned, and the Foreign Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, who had been disposed
+to enforce this by arms, was compelled to quit office. Benedetti returned
+to Berlin, and now there took place that negotiation relating to Belgium on
+which not only the narratives of the persons immediately concerned, but the
+documents written at the time, leave so much that is strange and
+unexplained. According to Benedetti, Count Bismarck was keenly anxious to
+extend the German Federation to the South of the Main, and desired with
+this object an intimate union with at least one Great Power. He sought in
+the first instance the support of France, and offered in return to
+facilitate the seizure of Belgium. The negotiation, according to Benedetti,
+failed because the Emperor Napoleon required that the fortresses in
+Southern Germany should be held by the troops of the respective States to
+which they belonged, while at the same time General Manteuffel, who had
+been sent from Berlin on a special mission to St. Petersburg, succeeded in
+effecting so intimate a union with Russia that alliance with France became
+unnecessary. According to the counter-statement of Prince Bismarck, the
+plan now proposed originated entirely with the French Ambassador, and was
+merely a repetition of proposals which had been made by Napoleon during the
+preceding four years, and which were subsequently renewed at intervals by
+secret agents almost down to the outbreak of the war of 1870. Prince
+Bismarck has stated that he dallied with these proposals only because a
+direct refusal might at any moment have caused the outbreak of war between
+France and Prussia, a catastrophe which up to the end he sought to avert.
+In any case the negotiation with Benedetti led to no conclusion, and was
+broken off by the departure of both statesmen from Berlin in the beginning
+of autumn. [527]
+
+[Prussia and North Germany after the war.]
+
+The war of 1866 had been brought to an end with extraordinary rapidity; its
+results were solid and imposing. Venice, perplexed no longer by its
+Republican traditions or by doubts of the patriotism of the House of Savoy,
+prepared to welcome King Victor Emmanuel; Bismarck, returning from the
+battle-field of Koeniggraetz, found his earlier unpopularity forgotten in the
+flood of national enthusiasm which his achievements and those of the army
+had evoked. A new epoch had begun; the antagonisms of the past were out of
+date; nobler work now stood before the Prussian people and its rulers than
+the perpetuation of a barren struggle between Crown and Parliament. By none
+was the severance from the past more openly expressed than by Bismarck
+himself; by none was it more bitterly felt than by the old Conservative
+party in Prussia, who had hitherto regarded the Minister as their own
+representative. In drawing up the Constitution of the North German
+Federation, Bismarck remained true to the principle which he had laid down
+at Frankfort before the war, that the German people must be represented by
+a Parliament elected directly by the people themselves. In the
+incorporation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and the Danish Duchies with Prussia,
+he saw that it would be impossible to win the new populations to a loyal
+union with Prussia if the King's Government continued to recognise no
+friends but the landed aristocracy and the army. He frankly declared that
+the action of the Cabinet in raising taxes without the consent of
+Parliament had been illegal, and asked for an Act of Indemnity. The
+Parliament of Berlin understood and welcomed the message of reconciliation.
+It heartily forgave the past, and on its own initiative added the name of
+Bismarck to those for whose services to the State the King asked a
+recompense. The Progressist party, which had constituted the majority in
+the last Parliament, gave place to a new combination known as the National
+Liberal party, which, while adhering to the Progressist creed in domestic
+affairs, gave its allegiance to the Foreign and the German policy of the
+Minister. Within this party many able men who in Hanover and the other
+annexed territories had been the leaders of opposition to their own
+Governments now found a larger scope and a greater political career. More
+than one of the colleagues of Bismarck who had been appointed to their
+offices in the years of conflict were allowed to pass into retirement, and
+their places were filled by men in sympathy with the National Liberals.
+With the expansion of Prussia and the establishment of its leadership in a
+German Federal union, the ruler of Prussia seemed himself to expand from
+the instrument of a military monarchy to the representative of a great
+nation.
+
+[Hungary and Austria, 1865.]
+
+To Austria the battle of Koeniggraetz brought a settlement of the conflict
+between the Crown and Hungary. The Constitution of February, 1861,
+hopefully as it had worked during its first years, had in the end fallen
+before the steady refusal of the Magyars to recognise the authority of a
+single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. Within the Reichsrath itself the
+example of Hungary told as a disintegrating force; the Poles, the Czechs
+seceded from the Assembly; the Minister, Schmerling, lost his authority,
+and was forced to resign in the summer of 1865. Soon afterwards an edict of
+the Emperor suspended the Constitution. Count Belcredi, who took office in
+Schmerling's place, attempted to arrive at an understanding with the Magyar
+leaders. The Hungarian Diet was convoked, and was opened by the King in
+person before the end of the year. Francis Joseph announced his abandonment
+of the principle that Hungary had forfeited its ancient rights by
+rebellion, and asked in return that the Diet should not insist upon
+regarding the laws of 1848 as still in force. Whatever might be the formal
+validity of those laws, it was, he urged, impossible that they should be
+brought into operation unaltered. For the common affairs of the two halves
+of the Monarchy there must be some common authority. It rested with the
+Diet to arrive at the necessary understanding with the Sovereign on this
+point, and to place on a satisfactory footing the relations of Hungary to
+Transylvania and Croatia. As soon as an accord should have been reached on
+these subjects, Francis Joseph stated that he would complete his
+reconciliation with the Magyars by being crowned King of Hungary.
+
+[Deak.]
+
+In the Assembly to which these words were addressed the majority was
+composed of men of moderate opinions, under the leadership of Francis Deak.
+Deak had drawn up the programme of the Hungarian Liberals in the election
+of 1847. He had at that time appeared to be marked out by his rare
+political capacity and the simple manliness of his character for a great,
+if not the greatest, part in the work that then lay before his country. But
+the violence of revolutionary methods was alien to his temperament. After
+serving in Batthyany's Ministry, he withdrew from public life on the
+outbreak of war with Austria, and remained in retirement during the
+dictatorship of Kossuth and the struggle of 1849. As a loyal friend to the
+Hapsburg dynasty, and a clear-sighted judge of the possibilities of the
+time, he stood apart while Kossuth dethroned the Sovereign and proclaimed
+Hungarian independence. Of the patriotism and the disinterestedness of Deak
+there was never the shadow of a doubt; a distinct political faith severed
+him from the leaders whose enterprise ended in the catastrophe which he had
+foreseen, and preserved for Hungary one statesman who could, without
+renouncing his own past and without inflicting humiliation on the
+Sovereign, stand as the mediator between Hungary and Austria when the time
+for reconciliation should arrive. Deak was little disposed to abate
+anything of what he considered the just demands of his country. It was
+under his leadership that the Diet had in 1861 refused to accept the
+Constitution which established a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy.
+The legislative independence of Hungary he was determined at all costs to
+preserve intact; rather than surrender this he had been willing in 1861 to
+see negotiations broken off and military rule restored. But when Francis
+Joseph, wearied of the sixteen years' struggle, appealed once more to
+Hungary for union and friendship, there was no man more earnestly desirous
+to reconcile the Sovereign with the nation, and to smooth down the
+opposition to the King's proposals which arose within the Diet itself, than
+Deak.
+
+[Scheme of Hungarian Committee, June 25, 1866.]
+
+Under his influence a committee was appointed to frame the necessary basis
+of negotiation. On the 25th of June, 1866, the Committee gave in its
+report. It declared against any Parliamentary union with the Cis-Leithan
+half of the Monarchy, but consented to the establishment of common
+Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, and recommended that the
+Budget necessary for these joint Ministries should be settled by
+Delegations from the Hungarian Diet and from the western Reichsrath. [528]
+The Delegations, it was proposed, should meet separately, and communicate
+their views to one another by writing. Only when agreement should not have
+been thus attained were the Delegations to unite in a single body, in which
+case the decision was to rest with an absolute majority of votes.
+
+[Negotiations with Hungary after Koeniggraetz.]
+
+[Federalism or Dualism.]
+
+[Settlement by Beust.]
+
+[Francis Joseph's Coronation, June 8, 1867.]
+
+The debates of the Diet on the proposals of King Francis Joseph had been
+long and anxious; it was not until the moment when the war with Prussia was
+breaking out that the Committee presented its report. The Diet was now
+prorogued, but immediately after the battle of Koeniggraetz the Hungarian
+leaders were called to Vienna, and negotiations were pushed forward on the
+lines laid down by the Committee. It was a matter of no small moment to the
+Court of Vienna that while bodies of Hungarian exiles had been preparing to
+attack the Empire both from the side of Silesia and of Venice, Deak and his
+friends had loyally abstained from any communication with the foreign
+enemies of the House of Hapsburg. That Hungary would now gain almost
+complete independence was certain; the question was not so much whether
+there should be an independent Parliament and Ministry at Pesth as whether
+there should not be a similarly independent Parliament and Ministry in each
+of the territories of the Crown, the Austrian Sovereign becoming the head
+of a Federation instead of the chief of a single or a dual State. Count
+Belcredi, the Minister at Vienna, was disposed towards such a Federal
+system; he was, however, now confronted within the Cabinet by a rival who
+represented a different policy. After making peace with Prussia, the
+Emperor called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Count Beust, who had
+hitherto been at the head of the Saxon Government, and who had been the
+representative of the German Federation at the London Conference of 1864.
+Beust, while ready to grant the Hungarians their independence, advocated
+the retention of the existing Reichsrath and of a single Ministry for all
+the Cis-Leithan parts of the Monarchy. His plan, which pointed to the
+maintenance of German ascendency in the western provinces, and which deeply
+offended the Czechs and the Slavic populations, was accepted by the
+Emperor: Belcredi withdrew from office, and Beust was charged, as President
+of the Cabinet, with the completion of the settlement with Hungary (Feb. 7,
+1867). Deak had hitherto left the chief ostensible part in the negotiations
+to Count Andrassy, one of the younger patriots of 1848, who had been
+condemned to be hanged, and had lived a refugee during the next ten years.
+He now came to Vienna himself, and in the course of a few days removed the
+last remaining difficulties. The King gratefully charged him with the
+formation of the Hungarian Ministry under the restored Constitution, but
+Deak declined alike all office, honours, and rewards, and Andrassy, who had
+actually been hanged in effigy, was placed at the head of the Government.
+The Diet, which had reassembled shortly before the end of 1866, greeted the
+national Ministry with enthusiasm. Alterations in the laws of 1848 proposed
+in accordance with the agreement made at Vienna, and establishing the three
+common Ministries with the system of Delegations for common affairs, were
+carried by large majorities. [529] The abdication of Ferdinand, which
+throughout the struggle of 1849 Hungary had declined to recognise, was now
+acknowledged as valid, and on the 8th of June, 1867, Francis Joseph was
+crowned King of Hungary amid the acclamations of Pesth. The gift of money
+which is made to each Hungarian monarch on his coronation Francis Joseph by
+a happy impulse distributed among the families of those who had fallen in
+fighting against him in 1849. A universal amnesty was proclaimed, no
+condition being imposed on the return of the exiles but that they should
+acknowledge the existing Constitution. Kossuth alone refused to return to
+his country so long as a Hapsburg should be its King, and proudly clung to
+ideas which were already those of the past.
+
+[Hungary since 1867.]
+
+The victory of the Magyars was indeed but too complete. Not only were Beust
+and the representatives of the western half of the Monarchy so overmatched
+by the Hungarian negotiators that in the distribution of the financial
+burdens of the Empire Hungary escaped with far too small a share, but in
+the more important problem of the relation of the Slavic and Roumanian
+populations of the Hungarian Kingdom to the dominant race no adequate steps
+were taken for the protection of these subject nationalities. That Croatia
+and Transylvania should be reunited with Hungary if the Emperor and the
+Magyars were ever to be reconciled was inevitable; and in the case of
+Croatia certain conditions were no doubt imposed, and certain local rights
+guaranteed. But on the whole the non-Magyar peoples in Hungary were handed
+over to the discretion of the ruling race. The demand of Bismarck that the
+centre of gravity of the Austrian States should be transferred from Vienna
+to Pesth had indeed been brought to pass. While in the western half of the
+Monarchy the central authority, still represented by a single Parliament,
+seemed in the succeeding years to be altogether losing its cohesive power,
+and the political life of Austria became a series of distracting
+complications, in Hungary the Magyar Government resolutely set itself to
+the task of moulding into one the nationalities over which it ruled.
+Uniting the characteristic faults with the great qualities of a race marked
+out by Nature and ancient habit for domination over more numerous but less
+aggressive neighbours, the Magyars have steadily sought to the best of
+their power to obliterate the distinctions which make Hungary in reality
+not one but several nations. They have held the Slavic and the Roumanian
+population within their borders with an iron grasp, but they have not
+gained their affection. The memory of the Russian intervention in 1849 and
+of the part then played by Serbs, by Croats and Roumanians in crushing
+Magyar independence has blinded the victors to the just claims of these
+races both within and without the Hungarian kingdom, and attached their
+sympathy to the hateful and outworn empire of the Turk. But the
+individuality of peoples is not to be blotted out in a day; nor, with all
+its striking advance in wealth, in civilisation, and in military power, has
+the Magyar State been able to free itself from the insecurity arising from
+the presence of independent communities on its immediate frontiers
+belonging to the same race as those whose language and nationality it seeks
+to repress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+Napoleon III.--The Mexican Expedition--Withdrawal of the French and death
+of Maximilian--The Luxemburg Question--Exasperation in France against
+Prussia--Austria--Italy--Mentana--Germany after 1866--The Spanish
+candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern--French declaration--Benedetti and
+King William--Withdrawal of Leopold and demand for guarantees--The
+telegram from Ems--War--Expected Alliances of France--Austria--Italy--
+Prussian plans--The French army--Causes of French inferiority--
+Weissenburg--Woerth--Spicheren--Borny--Mars-la-Tour--Gravelotte--Sedan--
+The Republic proclaimed at Paris--Favre and Bismarck--Siege of
+Paris--Gambetta at Tours--The Army of the Loire--Fall of Metz--Fighting
+at Orleans--Sortie of Champigny--The Armies of the North, of the Loire,
+of the East--Bourbaki's ruin--Capitulation of Paris and Armistice--
+Preliminaries of Peace--Germany--Establishment of the German Empire--The
+Commune of Paris--Second siege--Effects of the war as to Russia and
+Italy--Rome.
+
+
+[Napoleon III.]
+
+The reputation of Napoleon III. was perhaps at its height at the end of the
+first ten years of his reign. His victories over Russia and Austria had
+flattered the military pride of France; the flowing tide of commercial
+prosperity bore witness, as it seemed, to the blessings of a government at
+once firm and enlightened; the reconstruction of Paris dazzled a generation
+accustomed to the mean and dingy aspect of London and other capitals before
+1850, and scarcely conscious of the presence or absence of real beauty and
+dignity where it saw spaciousness and brilliance. The political faults of
+Napoleon, the shiftiness and incoherence of his designs, his want of grasp
+on reality, his absolute personal nullity as an administrator, were known
+to some few, but they had not been displayed to the world at large. He had
+done some great things, he had conspicuously failed in nothing. Had his
+reign ended before 1863, he would probably have left behind him in popular
+memory the name of a great ruler. But from this time his fortune paled. The
+repulse of his intervention on behalf of Poland in 1863 by the Russian
+Court, his petulant or miscalculating inaction during the Danish War of the
+following year, showed those to be mistaken who had imagined that the
+Emperor must always exercise a controlling power in Europe. During the
+events which formed the first stage in the consolidation of Germany his
+policy was a succession of errors. Simultaneously with the miscarriage of
+his European schemes, an enterprise which he had undertaken beyond the
+Atlantic, and which seriously weakened his resources at a time when
+concentrated strength alone could tell on European affairs, ended in
+tragedy and disgrace.
+
+[The Mexican Project.]
+
+There were in Napoleon III., as a man of State, two personalities, two
+mental existences, which blended but ill with one another. There was the
+contemplator of great human forces, the intelligent, if not deeply
+penetrative, reader of the signs of the times, the brooder through long
+years of imprisonment and exile, the child of Europe, to whom Germany,
+Italy, and England had all in turn been nearer than his own country; and
+there was the crowned adventurer, bound by his name and position to gain
+for France something that it did not possess, and to regard the greatness
+of every other nation as an impediment to the ascendency of his own.
+Napoleon correctly judged the principle of nationality to be the dominant
+force in the immediate future of Europe. He saw in Italy and in Germany
+races whose internal divisions alone had prevented them from being the
+formidable rivals of France, and yet he assisted the one nation to effect
+its union, and was not indisposed, within certain limits, to promote the
+consolidation of the other. That the acquisition of Nice and Savoy, and
+even of the Rhenish Provinces, could not in itself make up to France for
+the establishment of two great nations on its immediate frontiers Napoleon
+must have well understood: he sought to carry the principle of
+agglomeration a stage farther in the interests of France itself, and to
+form some moral, if not political, union of the Latin nations, which should
+embrace under his own ascendency communities beyond the Atlantic as well as
+those of the Old World. It was with this design that in the year 1862 he
+made the financial misdemeanours of Mexico the pretext for an expedition to
+that country, the object of which was to subvert the native Republican
+Government, and to place the Hapsburg Maximilian, as a vassal prince, on
+its throne. England and Spain had at first agreed to unite with France in
+enforcing the claims of the European creditors of Mexico; but as soon as
+Napoleon had made public his real intentions these Powers withdrew their
+forces, and the Emperor was left free to carry out his plans alone.
+
+[The Mexican Expedition, 1862-1865.]
+
+[Napoleon compelled to withdraw, 1866-7.]
+
+[Fall and Death of Maximilian.]
+
+The design of Napoleon to establish French influence in Mexico was
+connected with his attempt to break up the United States by establishing
+the independence of the Southern Confederacy, then in rebellion, through
+the mediation of the Great Powers of Europe. So long as the Civil War in
+the United States lasted, it seemed likely that Napoleon's enterprise in
+Mexico would be successful. Maximilian was placed upon the throne, and the
+Republican leader, Juarez, was driven into the extreme north of the
+country. But with the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy and the
+restoration of peace in the United States in 1865 the prospect totally
+changed. The Government of Washington refused to acknowledge any authority
+in Mexico but that of Juarez, and informed Napoleon in courteous terms that
+his troops must be withdrawn. Napoleon had bound himself by Treaty to keep
+twenty-five thousand men in Mexico for the protection of Maximilian. He
+was, however, unable to defy the order of the United States. Early in 1866
+he acquainted Maximilian with the necessities of the situation, and with
+the approaching removal of the force which alone had placed him and could
+sustain him on the throne. The unfortunate prince sent his consort, the
+daughter of the King of the Belgians, to Europe to plead against this act
+of desertion; but her efforts were vain, and her reason sank under the just
+presentiment of her husband's ruin. The utmost on which Napoleon could
+venture was the postponement of the recall of his troops till the spring of
+1867. He urged Maximilian to abdicate before it was too late; but the
+prince refused to dissociate himself from his counsellors who still
+implored him to remain. Meanwhile the Juarists pressed back towards the
+capital from north and south. As the French detachments were withdrawn
+towards the coast the entire country fell into their hands. The last French
+soldiers quitted Mexico at the beginning of March, 1867, and on the 15th of
+May, Maximilian, still lingering at Queretaro, was made prisoner by the
+Republicans. He had himself while in power ordered that the partisans of
+Juarez should be treated not as soldiers but as brigands, and that when
+captured they should be tried by court-martial and executed within
+twenty-four hours. The same severity was applied to himself. He was
+sentenced to death and shot at Queretaro on the 19th of June.
+
+[Decline of Napoleon's reputation.]
+
+Thus ended the attempt of Napoleon III. to establish the influence of
+France and of his dynasty beyond the seas. The doom of Maximilian excited
+the compassion of Europe; a deep, irreparable wound was inflicted on the
+reputation of the man who had tempted him to his treacherous throne, who
+had guaranteed him protection, and at the bidding of a superior power had
+abandoned him to his ruin. From this time, though the outward splendour of
+the Empire was undiminished, there remained scarcely anything of the
+personal prestige which Napoleon had once enjoyed in so rich a measure. He
+was no longer in the eyes of Europe or of his own country the profound,
+self-contained statesman in whose brain lay the secret of coming events; he
+was rather the gambler whom fortune was preparing to desert, the usurper
+trembling for the future of his dynasty and his crown. Premature old age
+and a harassing bodily ailment began to incapacitate him for personal
+exertion. He sought to loosen the reins in which his despotism held France,
+and to make a compromise with public opinion which was now declaring
+against him. And although his own cooler judgment set little store by any
+addition of frontier strips of alien territory to France, and he would
+probably have been best pleased to pass the remainder of his reign in
+undisturbed inaction, he deemed it necessary, after failure in Mexico had
+become inevitable, to seek some satisfaction in Europe for the injured
+pride of his country. He entered into negotiations with the King of Holland
+for the cession of Luxemburg, and had gained his assent, when rumours of
+the transaction reached the North German Press, and the project passed from
+out the control of diplomatists and became an affair of rival nations.
+
+[The Luxemburg question, Feb.-May, 1867.]
+
+Luxemburg, which was an independent Duchy ruled by the King of Holland, had
+until 1866 formed a part of the German Federation; and although Bismarck
+had not attempted to include it in his own North German Union, Prussia
+retained by the Treaties of 1815 a right to garrison the fortress of
+Luxemburg, and its troops were actually there in possession. The proposed
+transfer of the Duchy to France excited an outburst of patriotic resentment
+in the Federal Parliament at Berlin. The population of Luxemburg was indeed
+not wholly German, and it had shown the strongest disinclination to enter
+the North German league; but the connection of the Duchy with Germany in
+the past was close enough to explain the indignation roused by Napoleon's
+project among politicians who little suspected that during the previous
+year Bismarck himself had cordially recommended this annexation, and that
+up to the last moment he had been privy to the Emperor's plan. The Prussian
+Minister, though he did not affect to share the emotion of his countrymen,
+stated that his policy in regard to Luxemburg must be influenced by the
+opinion of the Federal Parliament, and he shortly afterwards caused it to
+be understood at Paris that the annexation of the Duchy to France was
+impossible. As a warning to France he had already published the Treaties of
+alliance between Prussia and the South German States, which had been made
+at the close of the war of 1866, but had hitherto been kept secret. [530]
+Other powers now began to tender their good offices. Count Beust, on behalf
+of Austria, suggested that Luxemburg should be united to Belgium, which in
+its turn should cede a small district to France. This arrangement, which
+would have been accepted at Berlin, and which, by soothing the irritation
+produced in France by Prussia's successes, would possibly have averted the
+war of 1870, was frustrated by the refusal of the King of Belgium to part
+with any of his territory--Napoleon, disclaiming all desire for territorial
+extension, now asked only for the withdrawal of the Prussian garrison from
+Luxemburg; but it was known that he was determined to enforce this demand
+by arms. The Russian Government proposed that the question should be
+settled by a Conference of the Powers at London. This proposal was accepted
+under certain conditions by France and Prussia, and the Conference
+assembled on the 7th of May. Its deliberations were completed in four days,
+and the results were summed up in the Treaty of London signed on the 11th.
+By this Treaty the Duchy of Luxemburg was declared neutral territory under
+the collective guarantee of the Powers. Prussia withdrew its garrison, and
+the King of Holland, who continued to be sovereign of the Duchy, undertook
+to demolish the fortifications of Luxemburg, and to maintain it in the
+future as an open town. [531]
+
+[Exasperation in France against Prussia.]
+
+Of the politicians of France, those who even affected to regard the
+aggrandisement of Prussia and the union of Northern Germany with
+indifference or satisfaction were a small minority. Among these was the
+Emperor, who, after his attempts to gain a Rhenish Province had been
+baffled, sought to prove in an elaborate State-paper that France had won
+more than it had lost by the extinction of the German Federation as
+established in 1815, and by the dissolution of the tie that had bound
+Austria and Prussia together as members of this body. The events of 1866
+had, he contended, broken up a system devised in evil days for the purpose
+of uniting Central Europe against France, and had restored to the Continent
+the freedom of alliances; in other words, they had made it possible for the
+South German States to connect themselves with France. If this illusion was
+really entertained by the Emperor, it was rudely dispelled by the discovery
+of the Treaties between Prussia and the Southern States and by their
+publication in the spring of 1867. But this revelation was not necessary to
+determine the attitude of the great majority of those who passed for the
+representatives of independent political opinion in France. The Ministers
+indeed were still compelled to imitate the Emperor's optimism, and a few
+enlightened men among the Opposition understood that France must be content
+to see the Germans effect their national unity; but the great body of
+unofficial politicians, to whatever party they belonged, joined in the
+bitter outcry raised at once against the aggressive Government of Prussia
+and the feeble administration at Paris, which had not found the means to
+prevent, or had actually facilitated, Prussia's successes. Thiers, who more
+than any one man had by his writings popularised the Napoleonic legend and
+accustomed the French to consider themselves entitled to a monopoly of
+national greatness on the Rhine, was the severest critic of the Emperor,
+the most zealous denouncer of the work which Bismarck had effected. It was
+only with too much reason that the Prussian Government looked forward to an
+attack by France at some earlier or later time as almost certain, and
+pressed forward the military organisation which was to give to Germany an
+army of unheard-of efficiency and strength.
+
+[France and Prussia after 1867.]
+
+There appears to be no evidence that Napoleon III. himself desired to
+attack Prussia so long as that Power should strictly observe the
+stipulations of the Treaty of Prague which provided for the independence of
+the South German States. But the current of events irresistibly impelled
+Germany to unity. The very Treaty which made the river Main the limit of
+the North German Confederacy reserved for the Southern States the right of
+attaching themselves to those of the North by some kind of national tie.
+Unless the French Emperor was resolved to acquiesce in the gradual
+development of this federal unity until, as regarded the foreigner, the
+North and the South of Germany should be a single body, he could have no
+confident hope of lasting peace. To have thus anticipated and accepted the
+future, to have removed once and for all the sleepless fears of Prussia by
+the frank recognition of its right to give all Germany effective Union,
+would have been an act too great and too wise in reality, too weak and
+self-renouncing in appearance, for any chief of a rival nation. Napoleon
+did not take this course; on the other hand, not desiring to attack Prussia
+while it remained within the limits of the Treaty of Prague, he refrained
+from seeking alliances with the object of immediate and aggressive action.
+The diplomacy of the Emperor during the period from 1866 to 1870 is indeed
+still but imperfectly known; but it would appear that his efforts were
+directed only to the formation of alliances with the view of eventual
+action when Prussia should have passed the limits which the Emperor himself
+or public opinion in Paris should, as interpreter of the Treaty of Prague,
+impose upon this Power in its dealings with the South German States.
+
+[Negotiations with Austria, 1868-69.]
+
+The Governments to which Napoleon could look for some degree of support
+were those of Austria and Italy. Count Beust, now Chancellor of the
+Austrian Monarchy, was a bitter enemy to Prussia, and a rash and
+adventurous politician, to whom the very circumstance of his sudden
+elevation from the petty sphere of Saxon politics gave a certain levity and
+unconstraint in the handling of great affairs. He cherished the idea of
+recovering Austria's ascendency in Germany, and was disposed to repel the
+extension of Russian influence westwards by boldly encouraging the Poles to
+seek for the satisfaction of their national hopes in Galicia under the
+Hapsburg Crown. To Count Beust France was the most natural of all allies.
+On the other hand, the very system which Beust had helped to establish in
+Hungary raised serious obstacles against the adoption of his own policy.
+Andrassy, the Hungarian Minister, while sharing Beust's hostility to
+Russia, declared that his countrymen had no interest in restoring Austria's
+German connection, and were in fact better without it. In these
+circumstances the negotiations of the French and the Austrian Emperor were
+conducted by a private correspondence. The interchange of letters continued
+during the years 1868 and 1869, and resulted in a promise made by Napoleon
+to support Austria if it should be attacked by Prussia, while the Emperor
+Francis Joseph promised to assist France if it should be attacked by
+Prussia and Russia together. No Treaty was made, but a general assurance
+was exchanged between the two Emperors that they would pursue a common
+policy and treat one another's interests as their own. With the view of
+forming a closer understanding the Archduke Albrecht visited Paris in
+February, 1870, and a French general was sent to Vienna to arrange the plan
+of campaign in case of war with Prussia. In such a war, if undertaken by
+the two Powers, it was hoped that Italy would join. [532]
+
+[Italy after 1866.]
+
+[Mentana, Nov. 3, 1867.]
+
+The alliance of 1866 between Prussia and Italy had left behind it in each
+of these States more of rancour than of good-will. La Marmora had from the
+beginning to the end been unfortunate in his relations with Berlin. He had
+entered into the alliance with suspicion; he would gladly have seen Venetia
+given to Italy by a European Congress without war; and when hostilities
+broke out, he had disregarded and resented what he considered an attempt of
+the Prussian Government to dictate to him the military measures to be
+pursued. On the other hand, the Prussians charged the Italian Government
+with having deliberately held back its troops after the battle of Custozza
+in pursuance of arrangements made between Napoleon and the Austrian Emperor
+on the voluntary cession of Venice, and with having endangered or minimised
+Prussia's success by enabling the Austrians to throw a great part of their
+Italian forces northwards. There was nothing of that comradeship between
+the Italian and the Prussian armies which is acquired on the field of
+battle. The personal sympathies of Victor Emmanuel were strongly on the
+side of the French Emperor; and when, at the close of the year 1866, the
+French garrison was withdrawn from Rome in pursuance of the convention made
+in September, 1864, it seemed probable that France and Italy might soon
+unite in a close alliance. But in the following year the attempts of the
+Garibaldians to overthrow the Papal Government, now left without its
+foreign defenders, embroiled Napoleon and the Italian people. Napoleon was
+unable to defy the clerical party in France; he adopted the language of
+menace in his communications with the Italian Cabinet; and when, in the
+autumn of 1867, the Garibaldians actually invaded the Roman States, he
+despatched a body of French troops under General Failly to act in support
+of those of the Pope. An encounter took place at Mentana on November 3rd,
+in which the Garibaldians, after defeating the Papal forces, were put to
+the rout by General Failly. The occupation of Civita Vecchia was renewed,
+and in the course of the debates raised at Paris on the Italian policy of
+the Government, the Prime Minister, M. Rouher, stated, with the most
+passionate emphasis that, come what might, Italy should never possess
+itself of Rome. "Never," he cried, "will France tolerate such an outrage on
+its honour and its dignity." [533]
+
+[Napoleon and Italy after Mentana.]
+
+[Italy and Austria.]
+
+The affair of Mentana, the insolent and heartless language in which General
+Failly announced his success, the reoccupation of Roman territory by French
+troops, and the declaration made by M. Rouher in the French Assembly,
+created wide and deep anger in Italy, and made an end for the time of all
+possibility of a French alliance. Napoleon was indeed, as regarded Italy,
+in an evil case. By abandoning Rome he would have turned against himself
+and his dynasty the whole clerical interest in France, whose confidence he
+had already to some extent forfeited by his policy in 1860; on the other
+hand, it was vain for him to hope for the friendship of Italy whilst he
+continued to bar the way to the fulfilment of the universal national
+desire. With the view of arriving at some compromise he proposed a European
+Conference on the Roman question; but this was resisted above all by Count
+Bismarck, whose interest it was to keep the sore open; and neither England
+nor Russia showed any anxiety to help the Pope's protector out of his
+difficulties. Napoleon sought by a correspondence with Victor Emmanuel
+during 1868 and 1869 to pave the way for a defensive alliance; but Victor
+Emmanuel was in reality as well as in name a constitutional king, and
+probably could not, even if he had desired, have committed Italy to
+engagements disapproved by the Ministry and Parliament. It was made clear
+to Napoleon that the evacuation of the Papal States must precede any treaty
+of alliance between France and Italy. Whether the Italian Government would
+have been content with a return to the conditions of the September
+Convention, or whether it made the actual possession of Rome the price of a
+treaty-engagement, is uncertain; but inasmuch as Napoleon was not at
+present prepared to evacuate Civita Vecchia, he could aim at nothing more
+than some eventual concert when the existing difficulties should have been
+removed. The Court of Vienna now became the intermediary between the two
+Powers who had united against it in 1859. Count Beust was free from the
+associations which had made any approach to friendship with the kingdom of
+Victor Emmanuel impossible for his predecessors. He entered into
+negotiations at Florence, which resulted in the conclusion of an agreement
+between the Austrian and the Italian Governments that they would act
+together and guarantee one another's territories in the event of a war
+between France and Prussia. This agreement was made with the assent of the
+Emperor Napoleon, and was understood to be preparatory to an accord with
+France itself; but it was limited to a defensive character, and it implied
+that any eventual concert with France must be arranged by the two Powers in
+combination with one another. [534]
+
+[Isolation of France.]
+
+At the beginning of 1870 the Emperor Napoleon was therefore without any
+more definite assurance of support in a war with Prussia than the promise
+of the Austrian Sovereign that he would assist France if attacked by
+Prussia and Russia together, and that he would treat the interests of
+France as his own. By withdrawing his protection from Rome Napoleon had
+undoubtedly a fair chance of building up this shadowy and remote engagement
+into a defensive alliance with both Austria and Italy. But perfect
+clearness and resolution of purpose, as well as the steady avoidance of all
+quarrels on mere incidents, were absolutely indispensable to the creation
+and the employment of such a league against the Power which alone it could
+have in view; and Prussia had now little reason to fear any such exercise
+of statesmanship on the part of Napoleon. The solution of the Roman
+question, in other words the withdrawal of the French garrison from Roman
+territory, could proceed only from some stronger stimulus than the
+declining force of Napoleon's own intelligence and will could now supply.
+This fatal problem baffled his attempts to gain alliances; and yet the
+isolation of France was but half acknowledged, but half understood; and a
+host of rash, vainglorious spirits impatiently awaited the hour that should
+call them to their revenge on Prussia for the triumphs in which it had not
+permitted France to share.
+
+[Germany, 1867-1870.]
+
+Meanwhile on the other side Count Bismarck advanced with what was most
+essential in his relations with the States of Southern Germany--the
+completion of the Treaties of Alliance by conventions assimilating the
+military systems of these States to that of Prussia. A Customs-Parliament
+was established for the whole of Germany, which, it was hoped, would be the
+precursor of a National Assembly uniting the North and the South of the
+Main. But in spite of this military and commercial approximation, the
+progress towards union was neither so rapid nor so smooth as the patriots
+of the North could desire. There was much in the harshness and
+self-assertion of the Prussian character that repelled the less disciplined
+communities of the South. Ultramontanism was strong in Bavaria; and
+throughout the minor States the most advanced of the Liberals were opposed
+to a closer union with Berlin, from dislike of its absolutist traditions
+and the heavy hand of its Government. Thus the tendency known as
+Particularism was supported in Bavaria and Wuertemberg by classes of the
+population who in most respects were in antagonism to one another; nor
+could the memories of the campaign of 1866 and the old regard for Austria
+be obliterated in a day. Bismarck did not unduly press on the work of
+consolidation. He marked and estimated the force of the obstacles which too
+rapid a development of his national policy would encounter. It is possible
+that he may even have seen indications that religious and other influences
+might imperil the military union which he had already established, and that
+he may not have been unwilling to call to his aid, as the surest of all
+preparatives for national union, the event which he had long believed to be
+inevitable at some time or other in the future, a war with France.
+
+[The Spanish candidature of Leopold of Hohenzollern.]
+
+[Leopold accepts the Spanish Crown, July 3, 1870.]
+
+Since the autumn of 1868 the throne of Spain had been vacant in consequence
+of a revolution in which General Prim had been the leading actor. It was
+not easy to discover a successor for the Bourbon Isabella; and after other
+candidatures had been vainly projected it occurred to Prim and his friends
+early in 1869 that a suitable candidate might be found in Prince Leopold of
+Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, whose elder brother had been made Prince of
+Roumania, and whose father, Prince Antony, had been Prime Minister of
+Prussia in 1859. The House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was so distantly
+related to the reigning family of Prussia that the name alone preserved the
+memory of the connection; and in actual blood-relationship Prince Leopold
+was much more nearly allied to the French Houses of Murat and Beauharnais.
+But the Sigmaringen family was distinctly Prussian by interest and
+association, and its chief, Antony, had not only been at the head of the
+Prussian Administration himself, but had, it is said, been the first to
+suggest the appointment of Bismarck to the same office. The candidature of
+a Hohenzollern might reasonably be viewed in France as an attempt to
+connect Prussia politically with Spain; and with so much reserve was this
+candidature at the first handled at Berlin that, in answer to inquiries
+made by Benedetti in the spring of 1869, the Secretary of State who
+represented Count Bismarck stated on his word of honour that the
+candidature had never been suggested. The affair was from first to last
+ostensibly treated at Berlin as one with which the Prussian Government was
+wholly unconcerned, and in which King William was interested only as head
+of the family to which Prince Leopold belonged. For twelve months after
+Benedetti's inquiries it appeared as if the project had been entirely
+abandoned; it was, however, revived in the spring of 1870, and on the 3rd
+of July the announcement was made at Paris that Prince Leopold had
+consented to accept the Crown of Spain if the Cortes should confirm his
+election.
+
+[French Declaration, July 6.]
+
+At once there broke out in the French Press a storm of indignation against
+Prussia. The organs of the Government took the lead in exciting public
+opinion. On the 6th of July the Duke of Gramont, Foreign Minister, declared
+to the Legislative Body that the attempt of a Foreign Power to place one of
+its Princes on the throne of Charles V. imperilled the interests and the
+honour of France, and that, if such a contingency were realised, the
+Government would fulfil its duty without hesitation and without weakness.
+The violent and unsparing language of this declaration, which had been
+drawn up at a Council of Ministers under the Emperor's presidency, proved
+that the Cabinet had determined either to humiliate Prussia or to take
+vengeance by arms. It was at once seen by foreign diplomatists, who during
+the preceding days had been disposed to assist in removing a reasonable
+subject of complaint, how little was the chance of any peaceable settlement
+after such a public challenge had been issued to Prussia in the Emperor's
+name. One means of averting war alone seemed possible, the voluntary
+renunciation by Prince Leopold of the offered Crown. To obtain this
+renunciation became the task of those who, unlike the French Minister of
+Foreign Affairs, were anxious to preserve peace.
+
+[Ollivier's Ministry.]
+
+The parts that were played at this crisis by the individuals who most
+influenced the Emperor Napoleon are still but imperfectly known; but there
+is no doubt that from the beginning to the end the Duke of Gramont, with
+short intermissions, pressed with insane ardour for war. The Ministry now
+in office had been called to their places in January, 1870, after the
+Emperor had made certain changes in the constitution in a Liberal
+direction, and had professed to transfer the responsibility of power from
+himself to a body of advisers possessing the confidence of the Chamber.
+Ollivier, formerly one of the leaders of the Opposition, had accepted the
+Presidency of the Cabinet. His colleagues were for the most part men new to
+official life, and little able to hold their own against such
+representatives of unreformed Imperialism as the Duke of Gramont and the
+War-Minister Leboeuf who sat beside them. Ollivier himself was one of the
+few politicians in France who understood that his countrymen must be
+content to see German unity established whether they liked it or not. He
+was entirely averse from war with Prussia on the question which had now
+arisen; but the fear that public opinion would sweep away a Liberal
+Ministry which hesitated to go all lengths in patriotic extravagance led
+him to sacrifice his own better judgment, and to accept the responsibility
+for a policy which in his heart he disapproved. Gramont's rash hand was
+given free play. Instructions were sent to Benedetti to seek the King of
+Prussia at Ems, where he was taking the waters, and to demand from him, as
+the only means of averting war, that he should order the Hohenzollern
+Prince to revoke his acceptance of the Crown. "We are in great haste,"
+Gramont added, "for we must gain the start in case of an unsatisfactory
+reply, and commence the movement of troops by Saturday in order to enter
+upon the campaign in a fortnight. Be on your guard against an answer merely
+leaving the Prince of Hohenzollern to his fate, and disclaiming on the part
+of the King any interest in his future." [535]
+
+[Benedetti and King William at Ems, July 9-14.]
+
+Benedetti's first interview with the King was on the 9th of July. He
+informed the King of the emotion that had been caused in France by the
+candidature of the Hohenzollern Prince; he dwelt on the value to both
+countries of the friendly relation between France and Prussia; and, while
+studiously avoiding language that might wound or irritate the King, he
+explained to him the requirements of the Government at Paris. The King had
+learnt beforehand what would be the substance of Benedetti's communication.
+He had probably been surprised and grieved at the serious consequences
+which Prince Leopold's action had produced in France; and although he had
+determined not to submit to dictation from Paris or to order Leopold to
+abandon his candidature, he had already, as it seems, taken steps likely to
+render the preservation of peace more probable. At the end of a
+conversation with the Ambassador, in which he asserted his complete
+independence as head of the family of Hohenzollern, he informed Benedetti
+that he had entered into communication with Leopold and his father, and
+that he expected shortly to receive a despatch from Sigmaringen. Benedetti
+rightly judged that the King, while positively refusing to meet Gramont's
+demands, was yet desirous of finding some peaceable way out of the
+difficulty; and the report of this interview which he sent to Paris was
+really a plea in favour of good sense and moderation. But Gramont was
+little disposed to accept such counsels. "I tell you plainly," he wrote to
+Benedetti on the next day, "public opinion is on fire, and will leave us
+behind it. We must begin; we wait only for your despatch to call up the
+three hundred thousand men who are waiting the summons. Write, telegraph,
+something definite. If the King will not counsel the Prince of Hohenzollern
+to resign, well, it is immediate war, and in a few days we are on the
+Rhine."
+
+[Leopold withdraws, July 12.]
+
+[Guarantee against renewal demanded.]
+
+[Benedetti and the King, July 13.]
+
+Nevertheless Benedetti's advice was not without its influence on the
+Emperor and his Ministers. Napoleon, himself wavering from hour to hour,
+now inclined to the peace-party, and during the 11th there was a pause in
+the military preparations that had been begun. On the 12th the efforts of
+disinterested Governments, probably also the suggestions of the King of
+Prussia himself, produced their effects. A telegram was received at Madrid
+from Prince Antony stating that his son's candidature was withdrawn. A few
+hours later Ollivier announced the news in the Legislative Chamber at
+Paris, and exchanged congratulations with the friends of peace, who
+considered that the matter was now at an end. But this pacific conclusion
+little suited either the war-party or the Bonapartists of the old type, who
+grudged to a Constitutional Ministry so substantial a diplomatic success.
+They at once declared that the retirement of Prince Leopold was a secondary
+matter, and that the real question was what guarantees had been received
+from Prussia against a renewal of the candidature. Gramont himself, in an
+interview with the Prussian Ambassador, Baron Werther, sketched a letter
+which he proposed that King William should send to the Emperor, stating
+that in sanctioning the candidature of Prince Leopold he had not intended
+to offend the French, and that in associating himself with the Prince's
+withdrawal he desired that all misunderstandings should be at an end
+between the two Governments. The despatch of Baron Werther conveying this
+proposition appears to have deeply offended King William, whom it reached
+about midday on the 13th. Benedetti had that morning met the King on the
+promenade at Ems, and had received from him the promise that as soon as the
+letter which was still on its way from Sigmaringen should arrive he would
+send for the Ambassador in order that he might communicate its contents at
+Paris. The letter arrived; but Baron Werther's despatch from Paris had
+arrived before it; and instead of summoning Benedetti as he had promised,
+the King sent one of his aides-de-camp to him with a message that a written
+communication had been received from Prince Leopold confirming his
+withdrawal, and that the matter was now at an end. Benedetti desired the
+aide-de-camp to inform the King that he was compelled by his instructions
+to ask for a guarantee against a renewal of the candidature. The
+aide-de-camp did as he was requested, and brought back a message that the
+King gave his entire approbation to the withdrawal of the Prince of
+Hohenzollern, but that he could do no more. Benedetti begged for an
+audience with His Majesty. The King replied that he was compelled to
+decline entering into further negotiation, and that he had said his last
+word. Though the King thus refused any further discussion, perfect courtesy
+was observed on both sides; and on the following morning the King and the
+Ambassador, who were both leaving Ems, took leave of one another at the
+railway station with the usual marks of respect.
+
+[Publication of the telegram from Ems, July 13.]
+
+[War decided at Paris, July 14.]
+
+That the guarantee which the French Government had resolved to demand would
+not be given was now perfectly certain; yet, with the candidature of Prince
+Leopold fairly extinguished, it was still possible that the cooler heads at
+Paris might carry the day, and that the Government would stop short of
+declaring war on a point on which the unanimous judgment of the other
+Powers declared it to be in the wrong. But Count Bismarck was determined
+not to let the French escape lightly from the quarrel. He had to do with an
+enemy who by his own folly had come to the brink of an aggressive war, and,
+far from facilitating his retreat, it was Bismarck's policy to lure him
+over the precipice. Not many hours after the last message had passed
+between King William and Benedetti, a telegram was officially published at
+Berlin, stating, in terms so brief as to convey the impression of an actual
+insult, that the King had refused to see the French Ambassador, and had
+informed him by an aide-de-camp that he had nothing more to communicate to
+him. This telegram was sent to the representatives of Prussia at most of
+the European Courts, and to its agents in every German capital. Narratives
+instantly gained currency, and were not contradicted by the Prussian
+Government, that Benedetti had forced himself upon the King on the
+promenade at Ems, and that in the presence of a large company the King had
+turned his back upon the Ambassador. The publication of the alleged
+telegram from Ems became known in Paris on the 14th. On that day the
+Council of Ministers met three times. At the first meeting the advocates of
+peace were still in the majority; in the afternoon, as the news from Berlin
+and the fictions describing the insult offered to the French Ambassador
+spread abroad, the agitation in Paris deepened, and the Council decided
+upon calling up the Reserves; yet the Emperor himself seemed still disposed
+for peace. It was in the interval between the second and the third meeting
+of the Council, between the hours of six and ten in the evening, that
+Napoleon finally gave way before the threats and importunities of the
+war-party. The Empress, fanatically anxious for the overthrow of a great
+Protestant Power, passionately eager for the military glory which alone
+could insure the Crown to her son, won the triumph which she was so
+bitterly to rue. At the third meeting of the Council, held shortly before
+midnight, the vote was given for war.
+
+In Germany this decision had been expected; yet it made a deep impression
+not only on the German people but on Europe at large that, when the
+declaration of war was submitted to the French Legislative Body in the form
+of a demand for supplies, no single voice was raised to condemn the war for
+its criminality and injustice: the arguments which were urged against it by
+M. Thiers and others were that the Government had fixed upon a bad cause,
+and that the occasion was inopportune. Whether the majority of the Assembly
+really desired war is even now matter of doubt. But the clamour of a
+hundred madmen within its walls, the ravings of journalists and
+incendiaries, who at such a time are to the true expression of public
+opinion what the Spanish Inquisition was to the Christian religion,
+paralysed the will and the understanding of less infatuated men. Ten votes
+alone were given in the Assembly against the grant demanded for war; to
+Europe at large it went out that the crime and the madness was that of
+France as a nation. Yet Ollivier and many of his colleagues up to the last
+moment disapproved of the war, and consented to it only because they
+believed that the nation would otherwise rush into hostilities under a
+reactionary Ministry who would serve France worse than themselves. They
+found when it was too late that the supposed national impulse, which they
+had thought irresistible, was but the outcry of a noisy minority. The
+reports of their own officers informed them that in sixteen alone out of
+the eighty-seven Departments of France was the war popular. In the other
+seventy-one it was accepted either with hesitation or regret. [536]
+
+[Initial forces of either side.]
+
+[Expected Alliances of France.]
+
+[Austria preparing.]
+
+How vast were the forces which the North German Confederation could bring
+into the field was well known to Napoleon's Government. Benedetti had kept
+his employers thoroughly informed of the progress of the North German
+military organisation; he had warned them that the South German States
+would most certainly act with the North against a foreign assailant; he had
+described with great accuracy and great penetration the nature of the tie
+that existed between Berlin and St. Petersburg, a tie which was close
+enough to secure for Prussia the goodwill, and in certain contingencies the
+armed support, of Russia, while it was loose enough not to involve Prussia
+in any Muscovite enterprise that would bring upon it the hostility of
+England and Austria. The utmost force which the French military
+administration reckoned on placing in the field at the beginning of the
+campaign was two hundred and fifty thousand men, to be raised at the end of
+three weeks by about fifty thousand more. The Prussians, even without
+reckoning on any assistance from Southern Germany, and after allowing for
+three army-corps that might be needed to watch Austria and Denmark, could
+begin the campaign with three hundred and thirty thousand. Army to army,
+the French thus stood according to the reckoning of their own War Office
+outnumbered at the outset; but Leboeuf, the War-Minister, imagined that the
+Foreign Office had made sure of alliances, and that a great part of the
+Prussian Army would not be free to act on the western frontier. Napoleon
+had in fact pushed forward his negotiations with Austria and Italy from the
+time that war became imminent. Count Beust, while clearly laying it down
+that Austria was not bound to follow France into a war made at its own
+pleasure, nevertheless felt some anxiety lest France and Prussia should
+settle their differences at Austria's expense; moreover from the victory of
+Napoleon, assisted in any degree by himself, he could fairly hope for the
+restoration of Austria's ascendency in Germany and the undoing of the work
+of 1866. It was determined at a Council held at Vienna on the 18th of July
+that Austria should for the present be neutral if Russia should not enter
+the war on the side of Prussia; but this neutrality was nothing more than a
+stage towards alliance with France if at the end of a certain brief period
+the army of Napoleon should have penetrated into Southern Germany. In a
+private despatch to the Austrian Ambassador at Paris Count Beust pointed
+out that the immediate participation of Austria in the war would bring
+Russia into the field on King William's side. "To keep Russia neutral," he
+wrote, "till the season is sufficiently advanced to prevent the
+concentration of its troops must be at present our object; but this
+neutrality is nothing more than a means for arriving at the real end of our
+policy, the only means for completing our preparations without exposing
+ourselves to premature attack by Prussia or Russia." He added that Austria
+had already entered into a negotiation with Italy with a view to the armed
+mediation of the two Powers, and strongly recommended the Emperor to place
+the Italians in possession of Rome. [537]
+
+[France, Austria, and Italy.]
+
+Negotiations were now pressed forward between Paris, Florence, and Vienna,
+for the conclusion of a triple alliance. Of the course taken by these
+negotiations contradictory accounts are given by the persons concerned in
+them. According to Prince Napoleon, Victor Emmanuel demanded possession of
+Rome and this was refused to him by the French Emperor, in consequence of
+which the project of alliance failed. According to the Duke of Gramont, no
+more was demanded by Italy than the return to the conditions of the
+September Convention; this was agreed to by the Emperor, and it was in
+pursuance of this agreement that the Papal States were evacuated by their
+French garrison on the 2nd of August. Throughout the last fortnight of
+July, after war had actually been declared, there was, if the statement of
+Gramont is to be trusted, a continuous interchange of notes, projects, and
+telegrams between the three Governments. The difficulties raised by Italy
+and Austria were speedily removed, and though some weeks were needed by
+these Powers for their military preparations, Napoleon was definitely
+assured of their armed support in case of his preliminary success. It was
+agreed that Austria and Italy, assuming at the first the position of armed
+neutrality, should jointly present an ultimatum to Prussia in September
+demanding the exact performance of the Treaty of Prague, and, failing its
+compliance with this summons in the sense understood by its enemies, that
+the two Powers would immediately declare war, their armies taking the field
+at latest on the 15th of September. That Russia would in that case assist
+Prussia was well known; but it would seem that Count Beust feared little
+from his northern enemy in an autumn campaign. The draft of the Treaty
+between Italy and Austria had actually, according to Gramont's statement,
+been accepted by the two latter Powers, and received its last amendments in
+a negotiation between the Emperor Napoleon and an Italian envoy, Count
+Vimercati, at Metz. Vimercati reached Florence with the amended draft on
+the 4th of August, and it was expected that the Treaty would be signed on
+the following day. When that day came it saw the forces of the French
+Empire dashed to pieces. [538]
+
+[Prussian Plans.]
+
+Preparations for a war with France had long occupied the general staff at
+Berlin. Before the winter of 1868 a memoir had been drawn up by General
+Moltke, containing plans for the concentration of the whole of the German
+forces, for the formation of each of the armies to be employed, and the
+positions to be occupied at the outset by each corps. On the basis of this
+memoir the arrangements for the transport of each corps from its depot to
+the frontier had subsequently been worked out in such minute detail that
+when, on the 16th of July, King William gave the order for mobilisation,
+nothing remained but to insert in the railway time-tables and
+marching-orders the day on which the movement was to commence. This
+minuteness of detail extended, however, only to that part of Moltke's plan
+which related to the assembling and first placing of the troops. The events
+of the campaign could not thus be arranged and tabulated beforehand; only
+the general object and design could be laid down. That the French would
+throw themselves with great rapidity upon Southern Germany was considered
+probable. The armies of Baden, Wuertemberg, and Bavaria were too weak, the
+military centres of the North were too far distant, for effective
+resistance to be made in this quarter to the first blows of the invader.
+Moltke therefore recommended that the Southern troops should withdraw from
+their own States and move northwards to join those of Prussia in the
+Palatinate or on the Middle Rhine, so that the entire forces of Germany
+should be thrown upon the flank or rear of the invader; while, in the event
+of the French not thus taking the offensive, France itself was to be
+invaded by the collective strength of Germany along the line from
+Saarbruecken to Landau, and its armies were to be cut off from their
+communications with Paris by vigorous movements of the invader in a
+northerly direction. [539]
+
+[German mobilisation.]
+
+The military organisation of Germany is based on the division of the
+country into districts, each of which furnishes at its own depot a small
+but complete army. The nucleus of each such corps exists in time of peace,
+with its own independent artillery, stores, and material of war. On the
+order for mobilisation being given, every man liable to military service,
+but not actually serving, joins the regiment to which he locally belongs,
+and in a given number of days each corps is ready to take the field in full
+strength. The completion of each corps at its own depot is the first stage
+in the preparation for a campaign. Not till this is effected does the
+movement of troops towards the frontier begin. The time necessary for the
+first act of preparation was, like that to be occupied in transport,
+accurately determined by the Prussian War Office. It resulted from General
+Moltke's calculations that, the order of mobilisation having been given on
+the 16th of July, the entire army with which it was intended to begin the
+campaign would be collected and in position ready to cross the frontier on
+the 4th of August, if the French should not have taken up the offensive
+before that day. But as it was apprehended that part at least of the French
+army would be thrown into Germany before that date, the westward movement
+of the German troops stopped short at a considerable distance from the
+border, in order that the troops first arriving might not be exposed to the
+attack of a superior force before their supports should be at hand. On the
+actual frontier there was placed only the handful of men required for
+reconnoitring, and for checking the enemy during the few hours that would
+be necessary to guard against the effect of a surprise.
+
+[The French Army.]
+
+The French Emperor was aware of the numerical inferiority of his army to
+that of Prussia; he hoped, however, by extreme rapidity of movement to
+penetrate Southern Germany before the Prussian army could assemble, and so,
+while forcing the Southern Governments to neutrality, to meet on the Upper
+Danube the assisting forces of Italy and Austria. It was his design to
+concentrate a hundred and fifty thousand men at Metz, a hundred thousand at
+Strasburg, and with these armies united to cross the Rhine into Baden;
+while a third army, which was to assemble at Chalons, protected the
+north-eastern frontier against an advance of the Prussians. A few days
+after the declaration of war, while the German corps were still at their
+depots in the interior, considerable forces were massed round Metz and
+Strasburg. All Europe listened for the rush of the invader and the first
+swift notes of triumph from a French army beyond the Rhine; but week after
+week passed, and the silence was still unbroken. Stories, incredible to
+those who first heard them, yet perfectly true, reached the German
+frontier-stations of actual famine at the advanced posts of the enemy, and
+of French soldiers made prisoners while digging in potato-fields to keep
+themselves alive. That Napoleon was less ready than had been anticipated
+became clear to all the world; but none yet imagined the revelations which
+each successive day was bringing at the headquarters of the French armies.
+Absence of whole regiments that figured in the official order of battle,
+defective transport, stores missing or congested, made it impossible even
+to attempt the inroad into Southern Germany within the date up to which it
+had any prospect of success. The design was abandoned, yet not in time to
+prevent the troops that were hurrying from the interior from being sent
+backwards and forwards according as the authorities had, or had not, heard
+of the change of plan. Napoleon saw that a Prussian force was gathering on
+the Middle Rhine which it would be madness to leave on his flank; he
+ordered his own commanders to operate on the corresponding line of the
+Lauter and the Saar, and despatched isolated divisions to the very
+frontier, still uncertain whether even in this direction he would be able
+to act on the offensive, or whether nothing now remained to him but to
+resist the invasion of France by a superior enemy. Ollivier had stated in
+the Assembly that he and his colleagues entered upon the war with a light
+heart; he might have added that they entered upon it with bandaged eyes.
+The Ministers seem actually not to have taken the trouble to exchange
+explanations with one another. Leboeuf, the War-Minister, had taken it
+for granted that Gramont had made arrangements with Austria which would
+compel the Prussians to keep a large part of their forces in the interior.
+Gramont, in forcing on the quarrel with Prussia, and in his negotiations
+with Austria, had taken it for granted that Leboeuf could win a series of
+victories at the outset in Southern Germany. The Emperor, to whom alone the
+entire data of the military and the diplomatic services of France were
+open, was incapable of exertion or scrutiny, purposeless, distracted with
+pain, half-imbecile.
+
+[Causes of French military inferiority.]
+
+That the Imperial military administration was rotten to the core the
+terrible events of the next few weeks sufficiently showed. Men were in high
+place whose antecedents would have shamed the better kind of brigand. The
+deficiencies of the army were made worse by the diversion of public funds
+to private necessities; the looseness, the vulgar splendour, the base
+standards of judgment of the Imperial Court infected each branch of the
+public services of France, and worked perhaps not least on those who were
+in military command. But the catastrophe of 1870 seemed to those who
+witnessed it to tell of more than the vileness of an administration; in
+England, not less than in Germany, voices of influence spoke of the doom
+that had overtaken the depravity of a sunken nation; of the triumph of
+simple manliness, of Godfearing virtue itself, in the victories of the
+German army. There may have been truth in this; yet it would require a nice
+moral discernment to appraise the exact degeneracy of the French of 1870
+from the French of 1854 who humbled Russia, or from the French of 1859 who
+triumphed at Solferino; and it would need a very comprehensive acquaintance
+with the lower forms of human pleasure to judge in what degree the
+sinfulness of Paris exceeds the sinfulness of Berlin. Had the French been
+as strict a race as the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, as devout as the
+Tyrolese who perished at Koeniggraetz, it is quite certain that, with the
+numbers which took the field against Germany in 1870, with Napoleon III. at
+the head of affairs, and the actual generals of 1870 in command, the armies
+of France could not have escaped destruction.
+
+[Cause of German Success.]
+
+The main cause of the disparity of France and Germany in 1870 was in truth
+that Prussia had had from 1862 to 1866 a Government so strong as to be able
+to force upon its subjects its own gigantic scheme of military organisation
+in defiance of the votes of Parliament and of the national will. In 1866
+Prussia, with a population of nineteen millions, brought actually into the
+field three hundred and fifty thousand men, or one in fifty-four of its
+inhabitants. There was no other government in Europe, with the possible
+exception of Russia, which could have imposed upon its subjects, without
+risking its own existence, so vast a burden of military service as that
+implied in this strength of the fighting army. Napoleon III. at the height
+of his power could not have done so; and when after Koeniggraetz he
+endeavoured to raise the forces of France to an equality with those of the
+rival Power by a system which would have brought about one in seventy of
+the population into the field, his own nominees in the Legislative Body,
+under pressure of public opinion, so weakened the scheme that the effective
+numbers of the army remained little more than they were before. The true
+parallel to the German victories of 1870 is to be found in the victories of
+the French Committee of Public Safety in 1794 and in those of the first
+Napoleon. A government so powerful as to bend the entire resources of the
+State to military ends will, whether it is one of democracy run mad, or of
+a crowned soldier of fortune, or of an ancient monarchy throwing new vigour
+into its traditional system and policy, crush in the moment of impact
+communities of equal or greater resources in which a variety of rival
+influences limit and control the central power and subordinate military to
+other interests. It was so in the triumphs of the Reign of Terror over the
+First Coalition; it was so in the triumphs of King William over Austria and
+France. But the parallel between the founders of German unity and the
+organisers of victory after 1793 extends no farther than to the sources of
+their success. Aggression and adventure have not been the sequels of the
+war of 1870. The vast armaments of Prussia were created in order to
+establish German union under the House of Hohenzollern, and they have been
+employed for no other object. It is the triumph of statesmanship, and it
+has been the glory of Prince Bismarck, after thus reaping the fruit of a
+well-timed homage to the God of Battles, to know how to quit his shrine.
+
+[The frontier, Aug. 2.]
+
+[Saarbruecken, Aug 2.]
+
+[Weissenburg, Aug 4.]
+
+[Battle of Woerth, Aug. 6.]
+
+At the end of July, twelve days after the formal declaration of war, the
+gathering forces of the Germans, over three hundred and eighty thousand
+strong, were still some distance behind the Lauter and the Saar. Napoleon,
+apparently without any clear design, had placed certain bodies of troops
+actually on the frontier at Forbach, Weissenburg, and elsewhere, while
+other troops, raising the whole number to about two hundred and fifty
+thousand, lay round Metz and Strasburg, and at points between these and the
+most advanced positions. The reconnoitring of the small German detachments
+on the frontier was conducted with extreme energy: the French appear to
+have made no reconnaissances at all, for when they determined at last to
+discover what was facing them at Saarbruecken, they advanced with
+twenty-five thousand men against one-tenth of that number. On the 2nd of
+August Frossard's corps from Forbach moved upon Saarbruecken with the
+Emperor in person. The garrison was driven out, and the town bombarded, but
+even now the reconnaissance was not continued beyond the bridge across the
+Saar which divides the two parts of the town. Forty-eight hours later the
+alignment of the German forces in their invading order was completed, and
+all was ready for an offensive campaign. The central army, commanded by
+Prince Frederick Charles, spreading east and west behind Saarbruecken,
+touched on its right the northern army commanded by General Steinmetz, on
+its left the southern army commanded by the Crown Prince, which covered the
+frontier of the Palatinate, and included the troops of Bavaria and
+Wuertemberg. The general direction of the three armies was thus from
+northwest to south-east. As the line of invasion was to be nearly due west,
+it was necessary that the first step forwards should be made by the army of
+the Crown Prince in order to bring it more nearly to a level with the
+northern corps in the march into France. On the 4th of August the Crown
+Prince crossed the Alsatian frontier and moved against Weissenburg. The
+French General Douay, who was posted here with about twelve thousand men,
+was neither reinforced nor bidden to retire. His troops met the attack of
+an enemy many times more numerous with great courage; but the struggle was
+a hopeless one, and after several hours of severe fighting the Germans were
+masters of the field. Douay fell in the battle; his troops frustrated an
+attempt made to cut off their retreat, and fell back southwards towards the
+corps of McMahon, which lay about ten miles behind them. The Crown Prince
+marched on in search of his enemy, McMahon, who could collect only
+forty-five thousand men, desired to retreat until he could gain some
+support; but the Emperor, tormented by fears of the political consequences
+of the invasion, insisted upon his giving battle. He drew up on the hills
+about Woerth, almost on the spot where in 1793 Hoche had overthrown the
+armies of the First Coalition. On the 6th of August the leading divisions
+of the Crown Prince, about a hundred thousand strong, were within striking
+distance. The superiority of the Germans in numbers was so great that
+McMahon's army might apparently have been captured or destroyed with far
+less loss than actually took place if time had been given for the movements
+which the Crown Prince's staff had in view, and for the employment of his
+full strength. But the impetuosity of divisional leaders on the morning of
+the 6th brought on a general engagement. The resistance of the French was
+of the most determined character. With one more army-corps--and the corps
+of General Failly was expected to arrive on the field--it seemed as if the
+Germans might yet be beaten back. But each hour brought additional forces
+into action in the attack, while the French commander looked in vain for
+the reinforcements that could save him from ruin. At length, when the last
+desperate charges of the Cuirassiers had shattered against the fire of
+cannon and needle-guns, and the village of Froschwiller, the centre of the
+French position, had been stormed house by house, the entire army broke and
+fled in disorder. Nine thousand prisoners, thirty-three cannon, fell into
+the hands of the conquerors. The Germans had lost ten thousand men, but
+they had utterly destroyed McMahon's army as an organised force. Its
+remnant disappeared from the scene of warfare, escaping by the western
+roads in the direction of Chalons, where first it was restored to some
+degree of order. The Crown Prince, leaving troops behind him to beleaguer
+the smaller Alsatian fortresses, marched on untroubled through the northern
+Vosges, and descended into the open country about Luneville and Nancy,
+unfortified towns which could offer no resistance to the passage of an
+enemy.
+
+[Spicheren, Aug. 6.]
+
+On the same day that the battle of Woerth was fought, the leading columns of
+the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles crossed the frontier
+at Saarbruecken. Frossard's corps, on the news of the defeat at Weissenburg,
+had withdrawn to its earlier positions between Forbach and the frontier: it
+held the steep hills of Spicheren that look down upon Saarbruecken, and the
+woods that flank the high road where this passes from Germany into France.
+As at Woerth, it was not intended that any general attack should be made on
+the 6th; a delay of twenty-four hours would have enabled the Germans to
+envelop or crush Frossard's corps with an overwhelming force. But the
+leaders of the foremost regiments threw themselves impatiently upon the
+French whom they found before them: other brigades hurried up to the sound
+of the cannon, until the struggle took the proportion of a battle, and
+after hours of fluctuating success the heights of Spicheren were carried by
+successive rushes of the infantry full in the enemy's fire. Why Frossard
+was not reinforced has never been explained, for several French divisions
+lay at no great distance westward, and the position was so strong that, if
+a pitched battle was to be fought anywhere east of Metz, few better points
+could have been chosen. But, like Douay at Weissenburg, Frossard was left
+to struggle alone against whatever forces the Germans might throw upon him.
+Napoleon, who directed the operations of the French armies from Metz,
+appears to have been now incapable of appreciating the simplest military
+necessities, of guarding against the most obvious dangers. Helplessness,
+infatuation ruled the miserable hours.
+
+[Paris after Aug. 6.]
+
+The impression made upon Europe by the battles of the 6th of August
+corresponded to the greatness of their actual military effects. There was
+an end to all thoughts of the alliance of Austria and Italy with France.
+Germany, though unaware of the full magnitude of the perils from which it
+had escaped, breathed freely after weeks of painful suspense; the very
+circumstance that the disproportion of numbers on the battle-field of
+Woerth was still unknown heightened the joy and confidence produced by the
+Crown Prince's victory, a victory in which the South German troops,
+fighting by the side of those who had been their foes in 1866, had borne
+their full part. In Paris the consternation with which the news of
+McMahon's overthrow was received was all the greater that on the previous
+day reports had been circulated of a victory won at Landau and of the
+capture of the Crown Prince with his army. The bulletin of the Emperor,
+briefly narrating McMahon's defeat and the repulse of Frossard, showed in
+its concluding words--"All may yet be retrieved"--how profound was the
+change made in the prospects of the war by that fatal day. The truth was
+at once apprehended. A storm of indignation broke out against the
+Imperial Government at Paris. The Chambers were summoned. Ollivier,
+attacked alike by the extreme Bonapartists and by the Opposition, laid
+down his office. A reactionary Ministry, headed by the Count of Palikao,
+was placed in power by the Empress, a Ministry of the last hour as it was
+justly styled by all outside it. Levies were ordered, arms and stores
+accumulated for the reserve-forces, preparations made for a siege of
+Paris itself. On the 12th the Emperor gave up the command which he had
+exercised with such miserable results, and appointed Marshal Bazaine, one
+of the heroes of the Mexican Expedition, General-in-Chief of the Army of
+the Rhine.
+
+[Napoleon at Metz. Aug. 7-11.]
+
+[Borny, Aug 14.]
+
+After the overthrow of McMahon and the victory of the Germans at Spicheren,
+there seems to have been a period of utter paralysis in the French
+headquarters at Metz. The divisions of Prince Frederick Charles and
+Steinmetz did not immediately press forward; it was necessary to allow some
+days for the advance of the Crown Prince through the Vosges; and during
+these days the French army about Metz, which, when concentrated, numbered
+nearly two hundred thousand men, might well have taken the positions
+necessary for the defence of Moselle, or in the alternative might have
+gained several marches in the retreat towards Verdun and Chalons. Only a
+small part of this body had as yet been exposed to defeat. It included in
+it the very flower of the French forces, tens of thousands of troops
+probably equal to any in Europe, and capable of forming a most formidable
+army if united to the reserves which would shortly be collected at Chalons
+or nearer Paris. But from the 7th to the 12th of August Napoleon, too cowed
+to take the necessary steps for battle in defence of the line of Moselle,
+lingered purposeless a id irresolute at Metz, unwilling to fall back from
+this fortress. It was not till the 14th that the retreat was begun. By this
+time the Germans were close at hand, and their leaders were little disposed
+to let the hesitating enemy escape them. While the leading divisions of the
+French were crossing the Moselle, Steinmetz hurried forward his troops and
+fell upon the French detachments still lying on the south-east of Metz
+about Borny and Courcelles. Bazaine suspended his movement of retreat in
+order to beat back an assailant who for once seemed to be inferior in
+strength. At the close of the day the French commander believed that he had
+gained a victory and driven the Germans off their line of advance; in
+reality he had allowed himself to be diverted from the passage of the
+Moselle at the last hour, while the Germans left under Prince Frederick
+Charles gained the river farther south, and actually began to cross it in
+order to bar his retreat.
+
+[Mars-la-Tour, Aug. 15.]
+
+From Metz westwards there is as far as the village of Gravelotte, which is
+seven miles distant, but one direct road; at Gravelotte the road forks, the
+southern arm leading towards Verdun by Vionville and Mars-la-Tour, the
+northern by Conflans. During the 15th of August the first of Bazaine's
+divisions moved as far as Vionville along the southern road; others came
+into the neighbourhood of Gravelotte, but two corps which should have
+advanced past Gravelotte on to the northern road still lay close to Metz.
+The Prussian vanguard was meanwhile crossing the Moselle southwards from
+Noveant to Pont-a-Mousson, and hurrying forwards by lines converging on the
+road taken by Bazaine. Down to the evening of the 15th it was not supposed
+at the Prussian headquarters that Bazaine could be overtaken and brought to
+battle nearer than the line of the Meuse; but on the morning of the 16th
+the cavalry-detachments which had pushed farthest to the north-west
+discovered that the heads of the French columns had still not passed
+Mars-la-Tour. An effort was instantly made to seize the road and block the
+way before the enemy. The struggle, begun by a handful of combatants on
+each side, drew to it regiment after regiment as the French battalions
+close at hand came into action, and the Prussians hurried up in wild haste
+to support their comrades who were exposed to the attack of an entire army.
+The rapidity with which the Prussian generals grasped the situation before
+them, the vigour with which they brought up their cavalry over a distance
+which no infantry could traverse in the necessary time, and without a
+moment's hesitation hurled this cavalry in charge after charge against a
+superior foe, mark the battle of Mars-la-Tour as that in which the military
+superiority of the Germans was most truly shown. Numbers in this battle had
+little to do with the result, for by better generalship Bazaine could
+certainly at any one point have overpowered his enemy. But while the
+Germans rushed like a torrent upon the true point of attack--that is the
+westernmost--Bazaine by some delusion considered it his primary object to
+prevent the Germans from thrusting themselves between the retreating army
+and Metz, and so kept a great part of his troops inactive about the
+fortress. The result was that the Germans, with a loss of sixteen thousand
+men, remained at the close of the day masters of the road at Vionville, and
+that the French army could not, without winning a victory and breaking
+through the enemy's line, resume its retreat along this line.
+
+[Gravelotte, Aug. 18.]
+
+It was expected during the 17th that Bazaine would make some attempt to
+escape by the northern road, but instead of doing so he fell back on
+Gravelotte and the heights between this and Metz, in order to fight a
+pitched battle. The position was a well-chosen one; but by midday on the
+18th the armies of Steinmetz and Prince Frederick Charles were ranged in
+front of Bazaine with a strength of two hundred and fifty thousand men, and
+in the judgment of the King these forces were equal to the attack. Again,
+as at Woerth, the precipitancy of divisional commanders caused the sacrifice
+of whole brigades before the battle was won. While the Saxon corps with
+which Moltke intended to deliver his slow but fatal blow upon the enemy's
+right flank was engaged in its long northward detour, Steinmetz pushed his
+Rhinelanders past the ravine of Gravelotte into a fire where no human being
+could survive, and the Guards, pressing forward in column over the smooth
+unsheltered slope from St. Marie to St. Privat, sank by thousands without
+reaching midway in their course. Until the final blow was dealt by the
+Saxon corps from the north flank, the ground which was won by the Prussians
+was won principally by their destructive artillery fire: their infantry
+attacks had on the whole been repelled, and at Gravelotte itself it had
+seemed for a moment as if the French were about to break the assailant's
+line. But Bazaine, as on the 16th, steadily kept his reserves at a distance
+from the points where their presence was most required, and, according to
+his own account, succeeded in bringing into action no more than a hundred
+thousand men, or less than two-thirds of the forces under his command.
+[540] At the close of the awful day, when the capture of St. Privat by the
+Saxons turned the defender's line, the French abandoned all their positions
+and drew back within the defences of Metz.
+
+[McMahon is compelled to attempt Bazaine's relief.]
+
+The Germans at once proceeded to block all the roads round the fortress,
+and Bazaine made no effort to prevent them. At the end of a few days the
+line was drawn around him in sufficient strength to resist any sudden
+attack. Steinmetz, who was responsible for a great part of the loss
+sustained at Gravelotte, was now removed from his command; his army was
+united with that under Prince Frederick Charles as the besieging force,
+while sixty thousand men, detached from this great mass, were formed into a
+separate army under Prince Albert of Saxony, and sent by way of Verdun to
+co-operate with the Crown Prince against McMahon. The Government at Paris
+knew but imperfectly what was passing around Metz from day to day; it knew,
+however, that if Metz should be given up for lost the hour of its own fall
+could not be averted. One forlorn hope remained, to throw the army which
+McMahon was gathering at Chalons north-eastward to Bazaine's relief, though
+the Crown Prince stood between Chalons and Metz, and could reach every
+point in the line of march more rapidly than McMahon himself. Napoleon had
+quitted Metz on the evening of the 15th; on the 17th a council of war was
+held at Chalons, at which it was determined to fall back upon Paris and to
+await the attack of the Crown Prince under the forts of the capital. No
+sooner was this decision announced to the Government at Paris than the
+Empress telegraphed to her husband warning him to consider what would be
+the effects of his return, and insisting that an attempt should be made to
+relieve Bazaine. [541] McMahon, against his own better judgment, consented
+to the northern march. He moved in the first instance to Rheims in order to
+conceal his intention from the enemy, but by doing this he lost some days.
+On the 23rd, in pursuance of arrangements made with Bazaine, whose
+messengers were still able to escape the Prussian watch, he set out
+north-eastwards in the direction of Montmedy.
+
+[German movement northwards, Aug 26.]
+
+[Battle of Sedan, Sept. 1.]
+
+[Capitulation of Sedan, Sept. 2.]
+
+The movement was discovered by the Prussian cavalry and reported at the
+headquarters at Bar-le-Duc on the 25th. Instantly the westward march of the
+Crown Prince was arrested, and his army, with that of the Prince of Saxony,
+was thrown northwards in forced marches towards Sedan. On reaching Le
+Chesne, west of the Meuse, on the 27th, McMahon became aware of the enemy's
+presence. He saw that his plan was discovered, and resolved to retreat
+westwards before it was too late. The Emperor, who had attached himself to
+the army, consented, but again the Government at Paris interfered with
+fatal effect. More anxious for the safety of the dynasty than for the
+existence of the army, the Empress and her advisers insisted that McMahon
+should continue his advance. Napoleon seems now to have abdicated all
+authority and thrown to the winds all responsibility. He allowed the march
+to be resumed in the direction of Mouzon and Stenay. Failly's corps, which
+formed the right wing, was attacked on the 29th before it could reach the
+passage of the Meuse at the latter place, and was driven northwards to
+Beaumont. Here the commander strangely imagined himself to be in security.
+He was surprised in his camp on the following day, defeated, and driven
+northwards towards Mouzon. Meanwhile the left of McMahon's army had crossed
+the Meuse and moved eastwards to Carignan, so that his troops were severed
+by the river and at some distance from one another. Part of Failly's men
+were made prisoners in the struggle on the south, or dispersed on the west
+of the Meuse; the remainder, with their commander, made a hurried and
+disorderly escape beyond the river, and neglected to break down the bridges
+by which they had passed. McMahon saw that if the advance was continued his
+divisions would one after another fall into the enemy's hands. He recalled
+the troops which had reached Carignan, and concentrated his army about
+Sedan to fight a pitched battle. The passages of the Meuse above and below
+Sedan were seized by the Germans. Two hundred and forty thousand men were
+at Moltke's disposal; McMahon had about half that number. The task of the
+Germans was not so much to defeat the enemy as to prevent them from
+escaping to the Belgian frontier. On the morning of September 1st, while on
+the east of Sedan the Bavarians after a desperate resistance stormed the
+village of Bazeilles, Hessian and Prussian regiments crossed the Meuse at
+Donchery several miles to the west. From either end of this line corps
+after corps now pushed northwards round the French positions, driving in
+the enemy wherever they found them, and, converging under the eyes of the
+Prussian King, his general, and his Minister, each into its place in the
+arc of fire before which the French Empire was to perish. The movement was
+as admirably executed as designed. The French fought furiously but in vain:
+the mere mass of the enemy, the mere narrowing of the once completed
+circle, crushed down resistance without the clumsy havoc of Gravelotte.
+From point after point the defenders were forced back within Sedan itself.
+The streets were choked with hordes of beaten infantry and cavalry; the
+Germans had but to take one more step forward and the whole of their
+batteries would command the town. Towards evening there was a pause in the
+firing, in order that the French might offer negotiations for surrender;
+but no sign of surrender was made, and the Bavarian cannon resumed their
+fire, throwing shells into the town itself. Napoleon now caused a white
+flag to be displayed on the fortress, and sent a letter to the King of
+Prussia, stating that as he had not been able to die in the midst of his
+troops, nothing remained for him but to surrender his sword into the hands
+of his Majesty. The surrender was accepted by King William, who added that
+General Moltke would act on his behalf in arranging terms of capitulation.
+General Wimpffen, who had succeeded to the command of the French army on
+the disablement of McMahon by a wound, acted on behalf of Napoleon. The
+negotiations continued till late in the night, the French general pressing
+for permission for his troops to be disarmed in Belgium, while Moltke
+insisted on the surrender of the entire army as prisoners of war. Fearing
+the effect of an appeal by Napoleon himself to the King's kindly nature,
+Bismarck had taken steps to remove his sovereign to a distance until the
+terms of surrender should be signed. At daybreak on September 2nd Napoleon
+sought the Prussian headquarters. He was met on the road by Bismarck, who
+remained in conversation with him till the capitulation was completed on
+the terms required by the Germans. He then conducted Napoleon to the
+neighbouring chateau of Bellevue, where King William, the Crown Prince, and
+the Prince of Saxony visited him. One pang had still to be borne by the
+unhappy man. Down to his interview with the King, Napoleon had imagined
+that all the German armies together had operated against him at Sedan, and
+he must consequently have still had some hope that his own ruin might have
+purchased the deliverance of Bazaine. He learnt accidentally from the King
+that Prince Frederick Charles had never stirred from before Metz. A
+convulsion of anguish passed over his face: his eyes filled with tears.
+There was no motive for a prolonged interview between the conqueror and the
+conquered, for, as a prisoner, Napoleon could not discuss conditions of
+peace. After some minutes of conversation the King departed for the
+Prussian headquarters. Napoleon remained in the chateau until the morning
+of the next day, and then began his journey towards the place chosen for
+his captivity, the palace of Wilhelmshoehe at Cassel. [542]
+
+[The Republic Proclaimed, Sept. 4.]
+
+[Circular of Jules Favre, Sept. 6.]
+
+Rumours of disaster had reached Paris in the last days of August, but to
+each successive report of evil the Government replied with lying boasts of
+success, until on the 3rd of September it was forced to announce a
+catastrophe far surpassing the worst anticipations of the previous days.
+With the Emperor and his entire army in the enemy's hands, no one supposed
+that the dynasty could any longer remain on the throne: the only question
+was by what form of government the Empire should be succeeded. The
+Legislative Chamber assembled in the dead of night; Jules Favre proposed
+the deposition of the Emperor, and was heard in silence. The Assembly
+adjourned for some hours. On the morning of the 4th, Thiers, who sought to
+keep the way open for an Orleanist restoration, moved that a Committee of
+Government should be appointed by the Chamber itself, and that elections to
+a new Assembly should be held as soon as circumstances should permit.
+Before this and other propositions of the same nature could be put to the
+vote, the Chamber was invaded by the mob. Gambetta, with most of the
+Deputies for Paris, proceeded to the Hotel de Ville, and there proclaimed
+the Republic. The Empress fled; a Government of National Defence came into
+existence, with General Trochu at its head, Jules Favre assuming the
+Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Gambetta that of the Interior. No hand was
+raised in defence of the Napoleonic dynasty or of the institutions of the
+Empire. The Legislative Chamber and the Senate disappeared without even
+making an attempt to prolong their own existence. Thiers, without approving
+of the Republic or the mode in which it had come into being, recommended
+his friends to accept the new Government, and gave it his own support. On
+the 6th of September a circular of Jules Favre, addressed to the
+representatives of France at all the European Courts, justified the
+overthrow of the Napoleonic Empire, and claimed for the Government by which
+it was succeeded the goodwill of the neutral Powers. Napoleon III. was
+charged with the responsibility for the war: with the fall of his dynasty,
+it was urged, the reasons for a continuance of the struggle had ceased to
+exist. France only asked for a lasting peace. Such peace, however, must
+leave the territory of France inviolate, for peace with dishonour would be
+but the prelude to a new war of extermination. "Not an inch of our soil
+will we cede"--so ran the formula--"not a stone of our fortresses." [543]
+
+[Favre and Bismarck, Sept. 29.]
+
+The German Chancellor had nothing ready in the way of rhetoric equal to his
+antagonist's phrases; but as soon as the battle of Sedan was won it was
+settled at the Prussian headquarters that peace would not be made without
+the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince Bismarck has stated that his
+own policy would have stopped at the acquisition of Strasburg: Moltke,
+however, and the chiefs of the army pronounced that Germany could not be
+secure against invasion while Metz remained in the hands of France, and
+this opinion was accepted by the King. For a moment it was imagined that
+the victory of Sedan had given the conqueror peace on his own terms. This
+hope, however, speedily disappeared, and the march upon Paris was resumed
+by the army of the Crown Prince without waste of time. In the third week of
+September the invaders approached the capital. Favre, in spite of his
+declaration of the 6th, was not indisposed to enter upon negotiations; and,
+trusting to his own arts of persuasion, he sought an interview with the
+German Chancellor, which was granted to him at Ferrieres on the 19th, and
+continued on the following day. Bismarck hesitated to treat the holders of
+office in Paris as an established Government; he was willing to grant an
+armistice in order that elections might be held for a National Assembly
+with which Germany could treat for peace; but he required, as a condition
+of the armistice, that Strasburg and Toul should be surrendered. Toul was
+already at the last extremity; Strasburg was not capable of holding out ten
+days longer; but of this the Government at Paris was not aware. The
+conditions demanded by Bismarck were rejected as insulting to France, and
+the war was left to take its course. Already, while Favre was negotiating
+at Ferrieres, the German vanguard was pressing round to the west of Paris.
+A body of French troops which attacked them on the 19th at Chatillon was
+put to the rout and fled in panic. Versailles was occupied on the same day,
+and the line of investment was shortly afterwards completed around the
+capital.
+
+[Siege of Paris, Sept. 19.]
+
+[Tours.]
+
+[Gambetta at Tours.]
+
+The second act in the war now began. Paris had been fortified by Thiers
+about 1840, at the time when it seemed likely that France might be engaged
+in war with a coalition on the affairs of Mehemet Ali. The forts were not
+distant enough from the city to protect it altogether from artillery with
+the lengthened range of 1870; they were sufficient, however, to render an
+assault out of the question, and to compel the besieger to rely mainly on
+the slow operation of famine. It had been reckoned by the engineers of 1840
+that food enough might be collected to enable the city to stand a
+two-months' siege; so vast, however, were the supplies collected in 1870
+that, with double the population, Paris had provisions for above four
+months. In spite therefore of the capture and destruction of its armies the
+cause of France was not hopeless, if, while Paris and Metz occupied four
+hundred thousand of the invaders, the population of the provinces should
+take up the struggle with enthusiasm, and furnish after some months of
+military exercise troops more numerous than those which France had lost, to
+attack the besiegers from all points at once and to fall upon their
+communications. To organise such a national resistance was, however,
+impossible for any Government within the besieged capital itself. It was
+therefore determined to establish a second seat of Government on the Loire;
+and before the lines were drawn round Paris three members of the Ministry,
+with M. Cremieux at their head, set out for Tours. Cremieux, however, who
+was an aged lawyer, proved quite unequal to his task. His authority was
+disputed in the west and the south. Revolutionary movements threatened to
+break up the unity of the national defence. A stronger hand, a more
+commanding will, was needed. Such a hand, such a will belonged to Gambetta,
+who on the 7th of October left Paris in order to undertake the government
+of the provinces and the organisation of the national armies. The circle of
+the besiegers was now too closely drawn for the ordinary means of travel to
+be possible. Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon, and
+reached Tours in safety, where he immediately threw his feeble colleagues
+into the background and concentrated all power in his own vigorous grasp.
+The effect of his presence was at once felt throughout France. There was an
+end of the disorders in the great cities, and of all attempts at rivalry
+with the central power. Gambetta had the faults of rashness, of excessive
+self-confidence, of defective regard for scientific authority in matters
+where he himself was ignorant: but he possessed in an extraordinary degree
+the qualities necessary for a Dictator at such a national crisis:
+boundless, indomitable courage; a simple, elemental passion of love for his
+country that left absolutely no place for hesitations or reserve in the
+prosecution of the one object for which France then existed, the war. He
+carried the nation with him like a whirlwind. Whatever share the military
+errors of Gambetta and his rash personal interference with commanders may
+have had in the ultimate defeat of France, without him it would never have
+been known of what efforts France was capable. The proof of his capacity
+was seen in the hatred and the fear with which down to the time of his
+death he inspired the German people. Had there been at the head of the army
+of Metz a man of one-tenth of Gambetta's effective force, it is possible
+that France might have closed the war, if not with success, at least with
+undiminished territory.
+
+[Fall of Strasburg, Sept. 28.]
+
+[The army of the Loire.]
+
+[Tann takes Orleans, Oct. 12.]
+
+Before Gambetta left Paris the fall of Strasburg set free the army under
+General Werder by which it had been besieged, and enabled the Germans to
+establish a civil Government in Alsace, the western frontier of the new
+Province having been already so accurately studied that, when peace was
+made in 1871, the frontier-line was drawn not upon one of the earlier
+French maps but on the map now published by the German staff. It was
+Gambetta's first task to divide France into districts, each with its own
+military centre, its own army, and its own commander. Four such districts
+were made: the centres were Lille, Le Mans, Bourges, and Besancon. At
+Bourges and in the neighbourhood considerable progress had already been
+made in organisation. Early in October German cavalry-detachments,
+exploring southwards, found that French troops were gathering on the Loire.
+The Bavarian General Von der Tann was detached by Moltke from the besieging
+army at Paris, and ordered to make himself master of Orleans. Von der Tann
+hastened southwards, defeated the French outside Orleans on the 11th of
+October, and occupied this city, the French retiring towards Bourges.
+Gambetta removed the defeated commander, and set in his place General
+Aurelle de Paladines. Von der Tann was directed to cross the Loire and
+destroy the arsenals at Bourges; he reported, however, that this task was
+beyond his power, in consequence of which Moltke ordered General Werder
+with the army of Strasburg to move westwards against Bourges, after
+dispersing the weak forces that were gathering about Besancon. Werder set
+out on his dangerous march, but he had not proceeded far when an army of
+very different power was thrown into the scale against the French levies on
+the Loire.
+
+[Bazaine at Metz.]
+
+[Capitulation of Metz, Oct. 27.]
+
+In the battle of Gravelotte, fought on the 18th of August, the French
+troops had been so handled by Bazaine as to render it doubtful whether he
+really intended to break through the enemy's line and escape from Metz. At
+what period political designs inconsistent with his military duty first
+took possession of Bazaine's thoughts is uncertain. He had played a
+political part in Mexico; it is probable that as soon as he found himself
+at the head of the one effective army of France, and saw Napoleon
+hopelessly discredited, he began to aim at personal power. Before the
+downfall of the Empire he had evidently adopted a scheme of inaction with
+the object of preserving his army entire: even the sortie by which it had
+been arranged that he should assist McMahon on the day before Sedan was
+feebly and irresolutely conducted. After the proclamation of the Republic
+Bazaine's inaction became still more marked. The intrigues of an adventurer
+named Regnier, who endeavoured to open a negotiation between the Prussians
+and the exiled Empress Eugenie, encouraged him in his determination to keep
+his soldiers from fulfilling their duty to France. Week after week passed
+by; a fifth of the besieging army was struck down with sickness; yet
+Bazaine made no effort to break through, or even to diminish the number of
+men who were consuming the supplies of Metz by giving to separate
+detachments the opportunity of escape. On the 12th of October, after the
+pretence of a sortie on the north, he entered into communication with the
+German headquarters at Versailles. Bismarck offered to grant a free
+departure to the army of Metz on condition that the fortress should be
+placed in his hands, that the army should undertake to act on behalf of the
+Empress, and that the Empress should pledge herself to accept the Prussian
+conditions of peace, whatever these might be. General Boyer was sent to
+England to acquaint the Empress with these propositions. They were declined
+by her, and after a fortnight had been spent in manoeuvres for a
+Bonapartist restoration. Bazaine found himself at the end of his resources.
+On the 27th the capitulation of Metz was signed. The fortress itself, with
+incalculable cannon and material of war, and an army of a hundred and
+seventy thousand men, including twenty-six thousand sick and wounded in the
+hospitals, passed into the hands of the Germans. [544]
+
+[Bazaine.]
+
+Bazaine was at a later time tried by a court-martial, found guilty of the
+neglect of duty, and sentenced to death. That sentence was not executed;
+but if there is an infamy that is worse than death, such infamy will to all
+time cling to his name. In the circumstances in which France was placed no
+effort, no sacrifice of life could have been too great for the commander of
+the army at Metz. To retain the besiegers in full strength before the
+fortress would not have required the half of Bazaine's actual force. If
+half his army had fallen on the field of battle in successive attempts to
+cut their way through the enemy, brave men would no doubt have perished;
+but even had their efforts failed their deaths would have purchased for
+Metz the power to hold out for weeks or for months longer. The civil
+population of Metz was but sixty thousand, its army was three times as
+numerous; unlike Paris, it saw its stores consumed not by helpless millions
+of women and children, but by soldiers whose duty it was to aid the defence
+of their country at whatever cost. Their duty, if they could not cut their
+way through, was to die fighting; and had they shown hesitation, which was
+not the case, Bazaine should have died at their head. That Bazaine would
+have fulfilled his duty even if Napoleon III. had remained on the throne is
+more than doubtful, for his inaction had begun before the catastrophe of
+Sedan. His pretext after that time was that the government of France had
+fallen into the hands of men of disorder, and that it was more important
+for his army to save France from the Government than from the invader. He
+was the only man in France who thought so. The Government of September 4th,
+whatever its faults, was good enough for tens of thousands of brave men,
+Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, who flocked without distinction of
+party to its banners: it might have been good enough for Marshal Bazaine.
+But France had to pay the penalty for the political, the moral indifference
+which could acquiesce in the Coup d'Etat of 1851, in the servility of the
+Empire, in many a vile and boasted deed in Mexico, in China, in Algiers.
+Such indifference found its Nemesis in a Bazaine.
+
+[Tann driven from Orleans, Nov. 9.]
+
+[Battles of Orleans, Nov. 28-Dec. 2.]
+
+[Sortie of Champigny, Nov. 29-Dec. 4.]
+
+[Battle of Amiens, Nov. 27.]
+
+The surrender of Metz and the release of the great army of Prince Frederick
+Charles by which it was besieged fatally changed the conditions of the
+French war of national defence. Two hundred thousand of the victorious
+troops of Germany under some of their ablest generals were set free to
+attack the still untrained levies on the Loire and in the north of France,
+which, with more time for organisation, might well have forced the Germans
+to raise the siege of Paris. The army once commanded by Steinmetz was now
+reconstituted, and despatched under General Manteuffel towards Amiens;
+Prince Frederick Charles moved with the remainder of his troops towards the
+Loire. Aware that his approach could not long be delayed, Gambetta insisted
+that Aurelle de Paladines should begin the march on Paris. The general
+attacked Tann at Coulmiers on the 9th of November, defeated him, and
+re-occupied Orleans, the first real success that the French had gained in
+the war. There was great alarm at the German headquarters at Versailles;
+the possibility of a failure of the siege was discussed; and forty thousand
+troops were sent southwards in haste to the support of the Bavarian
+general. Aurelle, however, did not move upon the capital: his troops were
+still unfit for the enterprise; and he remained stationary on the north of
+Orleans, in order to improve his organisation, to await reinforcements, and
+to meet the attack of Frederick Charles in a strong position. In the third
+week of November the leading divisions of the army of Metz approached, and
+took post between Orleans and Paris. Gambetta now insisted that the effort
+should be made to relieve the capital. Aurelle resisted, but was forced to
+obey. The garrison of Paris had already made several unsuccessful attacks
+upon the lines of their besiegers, the most vigorous being that of Le
+Bourget on the 30th of October, in which bayonets were crossed. It was
+arranged that in the last days of November General Trochu should endeavour
+to break out on the southern side, and that simultaneously the army of the
+Loire should fall upon the enemy in front of it and endeavour to force its
+way to the capital. On the 28th the attack upon the Germans on the north of
+Orleans began. For several days the struggle was renewed by one division
+after another of the armies of Aurelle and Prince Frederick Charles.
+Victory remained at last with the Germans; the centre of the French
+position was carried; the right and left wings of the army were severed
+from one another and forced to retreat, the one up the Loire, the other
+towards the west. Orleans on the 5th of December passed back into the hands
+of the Germans. The sortie from Paris, which began with a successful attack
+by General Ducrot upon Champigny beyond the Marne, ended after some days of
+combat in the recovery by the Germans of the positions which they had lost,
+and in the retreat of Ducrot into Paris. In the same week Manteuffel,
+moving against the relieving army of the north, encountered it near Amiens,
+defeated it after a hard struggle, and gained possession of Amiens itself.
+
+[Rouen occupied, Dec. 6.]
+
+[Bapaume, Jan. 3.]
+
+[St. Quentin, Jan 19.]
+
+After the fall of Amiens, Manteuffel moved upon Rouen. This city fell into
+his hands without resistance; the conquerors pressed on westwards, and at
+Dieppe troops which had come from the confines of Russia gazed for the
+first time upon the sea. But the Republican armies, unlike those which the
+Germans had first encountered, were not to be crushed at a single blow.
+Under the energetic command of Faidherbe the army of the North advanced
+again upon Amiens. Goeben, who was left to defend the line of the Somme,
+went out to meet him, defeated him on the 23rd of December, and drove him
+back to Arras. But again, after a week's interval, Faidherbe pushed
+forward. On the 3rd of January he fell upon Goeben's weak division at
+Bapaume, and handled it so severely that the Germans would on the following
+day have abandoned their position, if the French had not themselves been
+the first to retire. Faidherbe, however, had only fallen back to receive
+reinforcements. After some days' rest he once more sought to gain the road
+to Paris, advancing this time by the eastward line through St. Quentin. In
+front of this town Goeben attacked him. The last battle of the army of the
+North was fought on the 19th of January. The French general endeavoured to
+disguise his defeat, but the German commander had won all that he desired.
+Faidherbe's army was compelled to retreat northwards in disorder; its part
+in the war was at an end.
+
+[The Armies of the Loire and of the East.]
+
+[Le Mans, Jan. 12.]
+
+[Bourbaki.]
+
+[Montbeliard, Jan. 15-17.]
+
+[The Eastern army crosses the Swiss Frontier, Feb. 1.]
+
+During the last three weeks of December there was a pause in the operations
+of the Germans on the Loire. It was expected that Bourbaki and the east
+wing of The Armies of the French army would soon re-appear at Orleans and
+endeavour to combine with Chanzy's troops. Gambetta, however, had formed
+another plan. He considered that Chanzy, with the assistance of divisions
+formed in Brittany, would be strong enough to encounter Prince Frederick
+Charles, and he determined to throw the army of Bourbaki, strengthened by
+reinforcements from the south, upon Germany itself. The design was a daring
+one, and had the two French armies been capable of performing the work
+which Gambetta required of them, an inroad into Baden, or even the
+re-conquest of Alsace, would most seriously have affected the position of
+the Germans before Paris. But Gambetta miscalculated the power of young,
+untrained troops, imperfectly armed, badly fed, against a veteran enemy. In
+a series of hard-fought struggles the army of the Loire under General
+Chanzy was driven back at the beginning of January from Vendome to Le Mans.
+On the 12th, Chanzy took post before this city and fought his last battle.
+While he was making a vigorous resistance in the centre of the line, the
+Breton regiments stationed on his right gave way; the Germans pressed round
+him, and gained possession of the town. Chanzy retreated towards Laval,
+leaving thousands of prisoners in the hands of the enemy, and saving only
+the debris of an army. Bourbaki in the meantime, with a numerous but
+miserably equipped force, had almost reached Belfort. The report of his
+eastward movement was not at first believed at the German headquarters
+before Paris, and the troops of General Werder, which had been engaged
+about Dijon with a body of auxiliaries commanded by Garibaldi, were left to
+bear the brunt of the attack without support. When the real state of
+affairs became known Manteuffel was sent eastwards in hot haste towards the
+threatened point. Werder had evacuated Dijon and fallen back upon Vesoul;
+part of his army was still occupied in the siege of Belfort. As Bourbaki
+approached he fell back with the greater part of his troops in order to
+cover the besieging force, leaving one of his lieutenants to make a flank
+attack upon Bourbaki at Villersexel. This attack, one of the fiercest in
+the war, delayed the French for two days, and gave Werder time to occupy
+the strong positions that he had chosen about Montbeliard. Here, on the
+15th of January, began a struggle which lasted for three days. The French,
+starving and perishing with cold, though far superior in number to their
+enemy, were led with little effect against the German entrenchments. On the
+18th Bourbaki began his retreat. Werder was unable to follow him;
+Manteuffel with a weak force was still at some distance, and for a moment
+it seemed possible that Bourbaki, by a rapid movement westwards, might
+crush this isolated foe. Gambetta ordered Bourbaki to make the attempt: the
+commander refused to court further disaster with troops who were not fit to
+face an enemy, and retreated towards Pontarlier in the hope of making his
+way to Lyons. But Manteuffel now descended in front of him; divisions of
+Werder's army pressed down from the north; the retreat was cut off; and the
+unfortunate French general, whom a telegram from Gambetta removed from his
+command, attempted to take his own life. On the 1st of February, the wreck
+of his army, still numbering eighty-five thousand men, but reduced to the
+extremity of weakness and misery, sought refuge beyond the Swiss frontier.
+
+[Capitulation of Paris and Armistice, Jan. 28.]
+
+The war was now over. Two days after Bourbaki's repulse at Montbeliard the
+last unsuccessful sortie was made from Paris. There now remained provisions
+only for another fortnight; above forty thousand of the inhabitants had
+succumbed to the privations of the siege; all hope of assistance from the
+relieving armies before actual famine should begin disappeared. On the 23rd
+of January Favre sought the German Chancellor at Versailles in order to
+discuss the conditions of a general armistice and of the capitulation of
+Paris. The negotiations lasted for several days; on the 28th an armistice
+was signed with the declared object that elections might at once be freely
+held for a National Assembly, which should decide whether the war should be
+continued, or on what conditions peace should be made. The conditions of
+the armistice were that the forts of Paris and all their material of war
+should be handed over to the German army; that the artillery of the
+enceinte should be dismounted; and that the regular troops in Paris should,
+as prisoners of war, surrender their arms. The National Guard were
+permitted to retain their weapons and their artillery. Immediately upon the
+fulfilment of the first two conditions all facilities were to be given for
+the entry of supplies of food into Paris. [545]
+
+[National Assembly at Bordeaux, Feb. 12.]
+
+[Preliminaries of Peace, Feb. 26.]
+
+The articles of the armistice were duly executed, and on the 30th of
+January the Prussian flag waved over the forts of the French capital.
+Orders were sent into the provinces by the Government that elections should
+at once be held. It had at one time been feared by Count Bismarck that
+Gambetta would acknowledge no armistice that might be made by his
+colleagues at Paris. But this apprehension was not realised, for, while
+protesting against a measure adopted without consultation with himself and
+his companions at Bordeaux, Gambetta did not actually reject the armistice.
+He called upon the nation, however, to use the interval for the collection
+of new forces; and in the hope of gaining from the election an Assembly in
+favour of a continuation of the war, he published a decree incapacitating
+for election all persons who had been connected with the Government of
+Napoleon III. Against this decree Bismarck at once protested, and at his
+instance it was cancelled by the Government of Paris. Gambetta thereupon
+resigned. The elections were held on the 8th of February, and on the 12th
+the National Assembly was opened at Bordeaux. The Government of Defence now
+laid down its powers. Thiers--who had been the author of those
+fortifications which had kept the Germans at bay for four months after the
+overthrow of the Imperial armies; who, in the midst of the delirium of
+July, 1870, had done all that man could do to dissuade the Imperial
+Government and its Parliament from war; who, in spite of his seventy years,
+had, after the fall of Napoleon, hurried to London, to St. Petersburg, to
+Florence, to Vienna, in the hope of winning some support for France,--was
+the man called by common assent to the helm of State. He appointed a
+Ministry, called upon the Assembly to postpone all discussions as to the
+future Government of France, and himself proceeded to Versailles in order
+to negotiate conditions of peace. For several days the old man struggled
+with Count Bismarck on point after point in the Prussian demands. Bismarck
+required the cession of Alsace and Eastern Lorraine, the payment of six
+milliards of francs, and the occupation of part of Paris by the German army
+until the conditions of peace should be ratified by the Assembly. Thiers
+strove hard to save Metz, but on this point the German staff was
+inexorable; he succeeded at last in reducing the indemnity to five
+milliards, and was given the option between retaining Belfort and sparing
+Paris the entry of the German troops. On the last point his patriotism
+decided without a moment's hesitation. He bade the Germans enter Paris, and
+saved Belfort for France. On the 26th of February preliminaries of peace
+were signed. Thirty thousand German soldiers marched into the Champs
+Elysees on the 1st of March; but on that same day the treaty was ratified
+by the Assembly at Bordeaux, and after forty-eight hours Paris was freed
+from the sight of its conquerors. The Articles of Peace provided for the
+gradual evacuation of France by the German army as the instalments of the
+indemnity, which were allowed to extend over a period of three years,
+should be paid. There remained for settlement only certain matters of
+detail, chiefly connected with finance; these, however, proved the object
+of long and bitter controversy, and it was not until the 10th of May that
+the definitive Treaty of Peace was signed at Frankfort.
+
+[German Unity.]
+
+France had made war in order to undo the work of partial union effected by
+Prussia in 1866: it achieved the opposite result, and Germany emerged from
+the war with the Empire established. Immediately after the victory of Woerth
+the Crown Prince had seen that the time had come for abolishing the line of
+division which severed Southern Germany from the Federation of the North.
+His own conception of the best form of national union was a German Empire
+with its chief at Berlin. That Count Bismarck was without plans for uniting
+North and South Germany it is impossible to believe; but the Minister and
+the Crown Prince had always been at enmity; and when, after the battle of
+Sedan, they spoke together of the future, it seemed to the Prince as if
+Bismarck had scarcely thought of the federation of the Empire or of the
+re-establishment of the Imperial dignity, and as if he was inclined to it
+only under certain reserves. It was, however, part of Bismarck's system to
+exclude the Crown Prince as far as possible from political affairs, under
+the strange pretext that his relationship to Queen Victoria would be abused
+by the French proclivities of the English Court; and it is possible that
+had the Chancellor after the battle of Sedan chosen to admit the Prince to
+his confidence instead of resenting his interference, the difference
+between their views as to the future of Germany would have been seen to be
+one rather of forms and means than of intention. But whatever the share of
+these two dissimilar spirits in the initiation of the last steps towards
+German union, the work, as ultimately achieved, was both in form and in
+substance that which the Crown Prince had conceived. In the course of
+September negotiations were opened with each of the Southern States for its
+entry into the Northern Confederation. Bavaria alone raised serious
+difficulties, and demanded terms to which the Prussian Government could not
+consent. Bismarck refrained from exercising pressure at Munich, but invited
+the several Governments to send representatives to Versailles for the
+purpose of arriving at a settlement. For a moment the Court of Munich drew
+the sovereign of Wuertemberg to its side, and orders were sent to the envoys
+of Wuertemberg at Versailles to act with the Bavarians in refusing to sign
+the treaty projected by Bismarck. The Wuertemberg Ministers hereupon
+tendered their resignation; Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt signed the treaty,
+and the two dissentient kings saw themselves on the point of being excluded
+from United Germany. They withdrew their opposition, and at the end of
+November the treaties uniting all the Southern States with the existing
+Confederation were executed, Bavaria retaining larger separate rights than
+were accorded to any other member of the Union.
+
+[Proclamation of the Empire, Jan. 18.]
+
+In the acts which thus gave to Germany political cohesion there was nothing
+that altered the title of its chief. Bismarck, however, had in the meantime
+informed the recalcitrant sovereigns that if they did not themselves offer
+the Imperial dignity to King William, the North German Parliament would do
+so. At the end of November a letter was accordingly sent by the King of
+Bavaria to all his fellow-sovereigns, proposing that the King of Prussia,
+as President of the newly-formed Federation, should assume the title of
+German Emperor. Shortly afterwards the same request was made by the same
+sovereign to King William himself, in a letter dictated by Bismarck. A
+deputation from the North German Reichstag, headed by its President, Dr.
+Simson, who, as President of the Frankfort National Assembly, had in 1849
+offered the Imperial Crown to King Frederick William, expressed the
+concurrence of the nation in the act of the Princes. It was expected that
+before the end of the year the new political arrangements would have been
+sanctioned by the Parliaments of all the States concerned, and the 1st of
+January had been fixed for the assumption of the Imperial title. So
+vigorous, however, was the opposition made in the Bavarian Chamber, that
+the ceremony was postponed till the 18th. Even then the final approving
+vote had not been taken at Munich; but a second adjournment would have been
+fatal to the dignity of the occasion; and on the 18th of January, in the
+midst of the Princes of Germany and the representatives of its army
+assembled in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, King William assumed the
+title of German Emperor. The first Parliament of the Empire was opened at
+Berlin two months later.
+
+[The Commune of Paris.]
+
+[Troops withdrawn to Versailles, March 18.]
+
+[The Commune.]
+
+The misfortunes of France did not end with the fall of its capital and the
+loss of its border provinces; the terrible drama of 1870 closed with civil
+war. It is part of the normal order of French history that when an
+established Government is overthrown, and another is set in its place, this
+second Government is in its turn attacked by insurrection in Paris, and an
+effort is made to establish the rule of the democracy of the capital
+itself, or of those who for the moment pass for its leaders. It was so in
+1793, in 1831, in 1848, and it was so again in 1870. Favre, Trochu, and the
+other members of the Government of Defence had assumed power on the
+downfall of Napoleon III. because they considered themselves the
+individuals best able to serve the State. There were hundreds of other
+persons in Paris who had exactly the same opinion of themselves; and when,
+with the progress of the siege, the Government of Defence lost its
+popularity and credit, it was natural that ambitious and impatient men of a
+lower political rank should consider it time to try whether Paris could not
+make a better defence under their own auspices. Attempts were made before
+the end of October to overthrow the Government. They were repeated at
+intervals, but without success. The agitation, however, continued within
+the ranks of the National Guard, which, unlike the National Guard in the
+time of Louis Philippe, now included the mass of the working class, and was
+the most dangerous enemy, instead of the support, of Government. The
+capitulation brought things to a crisis. Favre had declared that it would
+be impossible to disarm the National Guard without a battle in the streets;
+at his instance Bismarck allowed the National Guard to retain their
+weapons, and the fears of the Government itself thus prepared the way for
+successful insurrection. When the Germans were about to occupy western
+Paris, the National Guard drew off its artillery to Montmartre and there
+erected entrenchments. During the next fortnight, while the Germans were
+withdrawing from the western forts in accordance with the conditions of
+peace, the Government and the National Guard stood facing one another in
+inaction; on the 18th of March General Lecomte was ordered to seize the
+artillery parked at Montmartre. His troops, surrounded and solicited by the
+National Guard, abandoned their commander. Lecomte was seized, and, with
+General Clement Thomas, was put to death. A revolutionary Central Committee
+took possession of the Hotel de Ville; the troops still remaining faithful
+to the Government were withdrawn to Versailles, where Thiers had assembled
+the Chamber. Not only Paris itself, but the western forts with the
+exception of Mont Valerien, fell into the hands of the insurgents. On the
+26th of March elections were held for the Commune. The majority of peaceful
+citizens abstained from voting. A council was elected, which by the side of
+certain harmless and well-meaning men contained a troop of revolutionists
+by profession; and after the failure of all attempts at conciliation,
+hostilities began between Paris and Versailles.
+
+[Second Siege--April 2, May 21.]
+
+There were in the ranks of those who fought for the Commune some who fought
+in the sincere belief that their cause was that of municipal freedom; there
+were others who believed, and with good reason, that the existence of the
+Republic was threatened by a reactionary Assembly at Versailles; but the
+movement was on the whole the work of fanatics who sought to subvert every
+authority but their own; and the unfortunate mob who followed them, in so
+far as they fought for anything beyond the daily pay which had been their
+only means of sustenance since the siege began, fought for they knew not
+what. As the conflict was prolonged, it took on both sides a character of
+atrocious violence and cruelty. The murder of Generals Lecomte and Thomas
+at the outset was avenged by the execution of some of the first prisoners
+taken by the troops of Versailles. Then hostages were seized by the
+Commune. The slaughter in cold blood of three hundred National Guards
+surprised at Clamart by the besiegers gave to the Parisians the example of
+massacre. When, after a siege of six weeks, in which Paris suffered far
+more severely than it had suffered from the cannonade of the Germans, the
+troops of Versailles at length made their way into the capital, humanity,
+civilisation, seemed to have vanished in the orgies of devils. The
+defenders, as they fell back, murdered their hostages, and left behind them
+palaces, museums, the entire public inheritance of the nation in its
+capital, in flames. The conquerors during several days shot down all whom
+they took fighting, and in many cases put to death whole bands of prisoners
+without distinction. The temper of the army was such that the Government,
+even if it had desired, could probably not have mitigated the terrors of
+this vengeance. But there was little sign anywhere of an inclination to
+mercy. Courts-martial and executions continued long after the heat of
+combat was over. A year passed, and the tribunals were still busy with
+their work. Above ten thousand persons were sentenced to transportation or
+imprisonment before public justice was satisfied.
+
+[Entry of Italian Troops into Rome, Sept. 20, 1870.]
+
+[The Papacy.]
+
+The material losses which France sustained at the hands of the invader and
+in civil war were soon repaired; but from the battle of Woerth down to the
+overthrow of the Commune France had been effaced as a European Power, and
+its effacement was turned to good account by two nations who were not its
+enemies. Russia, with the sanction of Europe, threw off the trammels which
+had been imposed upon it in the Black Sea by the Treaty of 1856. Italy
+gained possession of Rome. Soon after the declaration of war the troops of
+France, after an occupation of twenty-one years broken only by an interval
+of some months in 1867, were withdrawn from the Papal territory. Whatever
+may have been the understanding with Victor Emmanuel on which Napoleon
+recalled his troops from Civita Vecchia, the battle of Sedan set Italy
+free; and on the 20th of September the National Army, after overcoming a
+brief show of resistance, entered Rome. The unity of Italy was at last
+completed; Florence ceased to be the national capital. A body of laws
+passed by the Italian Parliament, and known as the Guarantees, assured to
+the Pope the honours and immunities of a sovereign, the possession of the
+Vatican and the Lateran palaces, and a princely income; in the appointment
+of Bishops and generally in the government of the Church a fulness of
+authority was freely left to him such as he possessed in no other European
+land. But Pius would accept no compromise for the loss of his temporal
+power. He spurned the reconciliation with the Italian people, which had now
+for the first time since 1849 become possible. He declared Rome to be in
+the possession of brigands; and, with a fine affectation of disdain for
+Victor Emmanuel and the Italian Government, he invented, and sustained down
+to the end of his life, before a world too busy to pay much heed to his
+performance, the reproachful part of the Prisoner of the Vatican.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+France after 1871--Alliance of the Three Emperors--Revolt of
+Herzegovina--The Andrassy Note--Murder of the Consuls at Salonika--The
+Berlin Memorandum--Rejected by England--Abdul Aziz deposed--Massacres in
+Bulgaria--Servia and Montenegro declare War--Opinion in England--
+Disraeli--Meeting of Emperors at Reichstadt--Servian Campaign--Declaration
+of the Czar--Conference at Constantinople--Its Failure--The London
+Protocol--Russia declares War--Advance on the Balkans--Osman at
+Plevna--Second Attack on Plevna--The Shipka Pass--Roumania--Third attack
+on Plevna--Todleben--Fall of Plevna--Passage of the Balkans--Armistice--
+England--The Fleet passes the Dardanelles--Treaty of San Stefano--England
+and Russia--Secret Agreement--Convention with Turkey--Congress of
+Berlin--Treaty of Berlin--Bulgaria.
+
+
+[France after 1871.]
+
+The storm of 1870 was followed by some years of European calm. France,
+recovering with wonderful rapidity from the wounds inflicted by the war,
+paid with ease the instalments of its debt to Germany, and saw its soil
+liberated from the foreigner before the period fixed by the Treaty of
+Frankfort. The efforts of a reactionary Assembly were kept in check by M.
+Thiers; the Republic, as the form of government which divided Frenchmen the
+least, was preferred by him to the monarchical restoration which might have
+won France allies at some of the European Courts. For two years Thiers
+baffled or controlled the royalist majority at Versailles which sought to
+place the Comte de Chambord or the chief of the House of Orleans on the
+throne, and thus saved his country from the greatest of all perils, the
+renewal of civil war. In 1873 he fell before a combination of his
+opponents, and McMahon succeeded to the Presidency, only to find that the
+royalist cause was made hopeless by the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to
+adopt the Tricolour flag, and that France, after several years of trial,
+definitely preferred the Republic. Meanwhile, Prince Bismarck had known how
+to frustrate all plans for raising a coalition against victorious Germany
+among the Powers which had been injured by its successes, or whose
+interests were threatened by its greatness. He saw that a Bourbon or a
+Napoleon on the throne of France would find far more sympathy and
+confidence at Vienna and St. Petersburg than the shifting chief of a
+Republic, and ordered Count Arnim, the German Ambassador at Paris, who
+wished to promote a Napoleonic restoration, to desist from all attempts to
+weaken the Republican Government. At St. Petersburg, where after the
+misfortunes of 1815 France had found its best friends, the German statesman
+had as yet little to fear. Bismarck had supported Russia in undoing the
+Treaty of Paris; in announcing the conclusion of peace with France, the
+German Emperor had assured the Czar in the most solemn language that his
+services in preventing the war of 1870 from becoming general should never
+be forgotten; and, whatever might be the feeling of his subjects, Alexander
+II. continued to believe that Russia could find no steadier friend than the
+Government of Berlin.
+
+[Alliance of the three Emperors.]
+
+With Austria Prince Bismarck had a more difficult part to play. He could
+hope for no real understanding so long as Beust remained at the head of
+affairs. But the events of 1870, utterly frustrating Beust's plans for a
+coalition against Prussia, and definitely closing for Austria all hope of
+recovering its position within Germany, had shaken the Minister's position.
+Bismarck was able to offer to the Emperor Francis Joseph the sincere and
+cordial friendship of the powerful German Empire, on the condition that
+Austria should frankly accept the work of 1866 and 1870. He had dissuaded
+his master after the victory of Koeniggraetz from annexing any Austrian
+territory; he had imposed no condition of peace that left behind it a
+lasting exasperation; and he now reaped the reward of his foresight.
+Francis Joseph accepted the friendship offered him from Berlin, and
+dismissed Count Beust from office, calling to his place the Hungarian
+Minister Andrassy, who, by conviction as well as profession, welcomed the
+establishment of a German Empire, and the definite abandonment by Austria
+of its interference in German affairs. In the summer of 1872 the three
+Emperors, accompanied by their Ministers, met in Berlin. No formal alliance
+was made, but a relation was established of sufficient intimacy to insure
+Prince Bismarck against any efforts that might be made by France to gain an
+ally. For five years this so-called League of the three Emperors continued
+in more or less effective existence, and condemned France to isolation. In
+the apprehension of the French people, Germany, gorged with the five
+milliards but still lean and ravenous, sought only for some new occasion
+for war. This was not the case. The German nation had entered unwillingly
+into the war of 1870; that its ruler, when once his great aim had been
+achieved, sought peace not only in word but in deed the history of
+subsequent years has proved. The alarms which at intervals were raised at
+Paris and elsewhere had little real foundation; and when next the peace of
+Europe was broken, it was not by a renewal of the struggle on the Vosges,
+but by a conflict in the East, which, terrible as it was in the sufferings
+and the destruction of life which it involved, was yet no senseless duel
+between two jealous nations, but one of the most fruitful in results of all
+modern wars, rescuing whole provinces from Ottoman dominion, and leaving
+behind it in place of a chaos of outworn barbarism at least the elements
+for a future of national independence among the Balkan population.
+
+[Revolt of Herzegovina, Aug., 1875.]
+
+[Andrassy Note, Jan. 31, 1876.]
+
+In the summer of 1875 Herzegovina rose against its Turkish masters, and in
+Bosnia conflicts broke out between Christians and Mohammedans. The
+insurrection was vigorously, though privately, supported by Servia and
+Montenegro, and for some months baffled all the efforts made by the Porte
+for its suppression. Many thousands of the Christians, flying from a
+devastated land and a merciless enemy, sought refuge beyond the Austrian
+frontier, and became a burden upon the Austrian Government. The agitation
+among the Slavic neighbours and kinsmen of the insurgents threatened the
+peace of Austria itself, where Slav and Magyar were almost as ready to fall
+upon one another as Christian and Turk. Andrassy entered into
+communications with the Governments of St. Petersburg and Berlin as to the
+adoption of a common line of policy by the three Empires towards the Porte;
+and a scheme of reforms, intended to effect the pacification of the
+insurgent provinces, was drawn up by the three Ministers in concert with
+one another. This project, which was known as the Andrassy Note, and which
+received the approval of England and France, demanded from the Porte the
+establishment of full and entire religious liberty, the abolition of the
+farming of taxes, the application of the revenue produced by direct
+taxation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the needs of those provinces
+themselves, the institution of a Commission composed equally of Christians
+and Mohammedans to control the execution of these reforms and of those
+promised by the Porte, and finally the improvement of the agrarian
+condition of the population by the sale to them of waste lands belonging to
+the State. The Note demanding these reforms was presented in Constantinople
+on the 31st of January, 1876. The Porte, which had already been lavish of
+promises to the insurgents, raised certain objections in detail, but
+ultimately declared itself willing to grant in substance the concessions
+which were specified by the Powers. [546]
+
+[Murder of the Consuls at Salonika, May 6.]
+
+Armed with this assurance, the representatives of Austria now endeavoured
+to persuade the insurgents to lay down their arms and the refugees to
+return to their homes. But the answer was made that promises enough had
+already been given by the Sultan, and that the question was, not what more
+was to be written on a piece of paper, but how the execution of these
+promises was to be enforced. Without some guarantee from the Great Powers
+of Europe the refugees refused to place themselves again at the mercy of
+the Turk, and the leaders in Herzegovina refused to disband their troops.
+The conflict broke out afresh with greater energy; the intervention of the
+Powers, far from having produced peace, roused the fanatical passions of
+the Mohammedans both against the Christian rayahs and against the foreigner
+to whom they had appealed. A wave of religious, of patriotic agitation, of
+political disquiet, of barbaric fury, passed over the Turkish Empire. On
+the 6th of May the Prussian and the French Consuls at Salonika were
+attacked and murdered by the mob. In Smyrna and Constantinople there were
+threatening movements against the European inhabitants; in Bulgaria, the
+Circassian settlers and the hordes of irregular troops whom the Government
+had recently sent into that province waited only for the first sign of an
+expected insurrection to fall upon their prey and deluge the land with
+blood.
+
+[The Berlin Memorandum, May 13.]
+
+As soon as it became evident that peace was not to be produced by Count
+Andrassy's Note, the Ministers of the three Empires determined to meet one
+another with the view of arranging further diplomatic steps to be taken in
+common. Berlin, which the Czar was about to visit, was chosen as the
+meeting-place; the date of the meeting was fixed for the second week in
+May. It was in the interval between the despatch of Prince Bismarck's
+invitation and the arrival of the Czar, with Prince Gortschakoff and Count
+Andrassy, that intelligence came of the murder of the Prussian and French
+Consuls at Salonika. This event gave a deeper seriousness to the
+deliberations now held. The Ministers declared that if the representatives
+of two foreign Powers could be thus murdered in broad daylight in a
+peaceful town under the eyes of the powerless authorities, the Christians
+of the insurgent provinces might well decline to entrust themselves to an
+exasperated enemy. An effective guarantee for the execution of the promises
+made by the Porte had become absolutely necessary. The conclusions of the
+Ministers were embodied in a Memorandum, which declared that an armistice
+of two months must be imposed on the combatants; that the mixed Commission
+mentioned in the Andrassy Note must be at once called into being, with a
+Christian native of Herzegovina at its head; and that the reforms promised
+by the Porte must be carried out under the superintendence of the
+representatives of the European Powers. If before the end of the armistice
+the Porte should not have given its assent to these terms, the Imperial
+Courts declared that they must support these diplomatic efforts by measures
+of a more effective character. [547]
+
+[England alone rejects the Berlin Memorandum.]
+
+On the same day that this Memorandum was signed, Prince Bismarck invited
+the British, the French, and Italian Ambassadors to meet the Russian and
+the Austrian Chancellors at his residence. They did so. The Memorandum was
+read, and an urgent request was made that Great Britain France, and Italy
+would combine with the Imperial Courts in support of the Berlin Memorandum
+as they had in support of the Andrassy Note. As Prince Gortschakoff and
+Andrassy were staying in Berlin only for two days longer, it was hoped that
+answers might be received by telegraph within forty-eight hours. Within
+that time answers arrived from the French and Italian Governments accepting
+the Berlin Memorandum; the reply from London did not arrive till five days
+later; it announced the refusal of the Government to join in the course
+proposed. Pending further negotiations on this subject, French, German,
+Austrian, Italian, and Russian ships of war were sent to Salonika to
+enforce satisfaction for the murder of the Consuls. The Cabinet of London,
+declining to associate itself with the concert of the Powers, and stating
+that Great Britain, while intending nothing in the nature of a menace,
+could not permit territorial changes to be made in the East without its own
+consent, despatched the fleet to Besika Bay.
+
+[Abdul Aziz deposed, May 29.]
+
+[Massacres in Bulgaria.]
+
+[Servia and Montenegro declare war, July 2.]
+
+Up to this time little attention had been paid in England to the revolt of
+the Christian subjects of the Porte or its effect on European politics.
+Now, however, a series of events began which excited the interest and even
+the passion of the English people in an extraordinary degree. The ferment
+in Constantinople was deepening. On the 29th of May the Sultan Abdul Aziz
+was deposed by Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni, the former the chief of the
+party of reform, the latter the representative of the older Turkish
+military and patriotic spirit which Abdul Aziz had incensed by his
+subserviency to Russia. A few days later the deposed Sultan was murdered.
+Hussein Avni and another rival of Midhat were assassinated by a desperado
+as they sat at the council; Murad V., who had been raised to the throne,
+proved imbecile; and Midhat, the destined regenerator of the Ottoman Empire
+as many outside Turkey believed, grasped all but the highest power in the
+State. Towards the end of June reports reached western Europe of the
+repression of an insurrection in Bulgaria with measures of atrocious
+violence. Servia and Montenegro, long active in support of their kinsmen
+who were in arms, declared war. The reports from Bulgaria, at first vague,
+took more definite form; and at length the correspondents of German as well
+as English newspapers, making their way to the district south of the
+Balkans, found in villages still strewed with skeletons and human remains
+the terrible evidence of what had passed. The British Ministry, relying
+upon the statements of Sir H. Elliot, Ambassador at Constantinople, at
+first denied the seriousness of the massacres: they directed, however, that
+investigations should be made on the spot by a member of the Embassy; and
+Mr. Baring, Secretary of Legation, was sent to Bulgaria with this duty.
+Baring's report confirmed the accounts which his chief had refused to
+believe, and placed the number of the victims, rightly or wrongly, at not
+less than twelve thousand. [548]
+
+[Opinion in England.]
+
+The Bulgarian massacres acted on Europe in 1876 as the massacre of Chios
+had acted on Europe in 1822. In England especially they excited the deepest
+horror, and completely changed the tone of public opinion towards the Turk.
+Hitherto the public mind had scarcely been conscious of the questions that
+were at issue in the East. Herzegovina, Bosnia, Bulgaria, were not familiar
+names like Greece; the English people hardly knew where these countries
+were, or that they were not inhabited by Turks. The Crimean War had left
+behind it the tradition of friendship with the Sultan; it needed some
+lightning-flash, some shock penetrating all ranks of society, to dispel
+once and for all the conventional idea of Turkey as a community resembling
+a European State, and to bring home to the English people the true
+condition of the Christian races of the Balkan under their Ottoman masters.
+But this the Bulgarian massacres effectively did; and from this time the
+great mass of the English people, who had sympathised so strongly with the
+Italians and the Hungarians in their struggle for national independence,
+were not disposed to allow the influence of Great Britain to be used for
+the perpetuation of Turkish ascendency over the Slavic races. There is
+little doubt that if in the autumn of 1876 the nation had had the
+opportunity of expressing its views by a Parliamentary election, it would
+have insisted on the adoption of active measures in concert with the Powers
+which were prepared to force reform upon the Porte. But the Parliament of
+1876 was but two years old; the majority which supported the Government was
+still unbroken; and at the head of the Cabinet there was a man gifted with
+extraordinary tenacity of purpose, with great powers of command over
+others, and with a clear, cold, untroubled apprehension of the line of
+conduct which he intended to pursue. It was one of the strangest features
+of this epoch that a Minister who in a long career had never yet exercised
+the slightest influence upon foreign affairs, and who was not himself
+English by birth, should have impressed in such an extreme degree the stamp
+of his own individuality upon the conduct of our foreign policy; that he
+should have forced England to the very front in the crisis through which
+Europe was passing; and that, for good or for evil, he should have reversed
+the tendency which since the Italian war of 1859 had seemed ever to be
+drawing England further and further away from Continental affairs.
+
+[Disraeli.]
+
+Disraeli's conception of Parliamentary politics was an ironical one. It had
+pleased the British nation that the leadership of one of its great
+political parties should be won by a man of genius only on the condition of
+accommodating himself to certain singular fancies of his contemporaries;
+and for twenty years, from the time of his attacks upon Sir Robert Peel for
+the abolition of the corn-laws down to the time when he educated his party
+into the democratic Reform Bill of 1867, Disraeli with an excellent grace
+suited himself to the somewhat strange parts which he was required to play.
+But after 1874, when he was placed in office at the head of a powerful
+majority in both Houses of Parliament and of a submissive Cabinet, the
+antics ended; the epoch of statesmanship, and of statesmanship based on the
+leader's own individual thought not on the commonplace of public creeds,
+began. At a time when Cavour was rice-growing and Bismarck unknown outside
+his own county, Disraeli had given to the world in Tancred his visions of
+Eastern Empire. Mysterious chieftains planned the regeneration of Asia by a
+new crusade of Arab and Syrian votaries of the one living faith, and
+lightly touched on the transfer of Queen Victoria's Court from London to
+Delhi. Nothing indeed is perfect; and Disraeli's eye was favoured with such
+extraordinary perceptions of the remote that it proved a little uncertain
+in its view of matters not quite without importance nearer home. He thought
+the attempt to establish Italian independence a misdemeanour; he listened
+to Bismarck's ideas on the future of Germany, and described them as the
+vapourings of a German baron. For a quarter of a century Disraeli had
+dazzled and amused the House of Commons without, as it seemed, drawing
+inspiration from any one great cause or discerning any one of the political
+goals towards which the nations of Europe were tending. At length, however,
+the time came for the realisation of his own imperial policy; and before
+the Eastern question had risen conspicuously above the horizon in Europe,
+Disraeli, as Prime Minister of England, had begun to act in Asia and
+Africa. He sent the Prince of Wales to hold Durbars and to hunt tigers
+amongst the Hindoos; he proclaimed the Queen Empress of India; he purchased
+the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. Thus far it had been uncertain
+whether there was much in the Minister's policy beyond what was theatrical
+and picturesque; but when a great part of the nation began to ask for
+intervention on behalf of the Eastern Christians against the Turks, they
+found out that Disraeli's purpose was solid enough. Animated by a deep
+distrust and fear of Russia, he returned to what had been the policy of
+Tory Governments in the days before Canning, the identification of British
+interests with the maintenance of Ottoman power. If a generation of
+sentimentalists were willing to sacrifice the grandeur of an Empire to
+their sympathies with an oppressed people, it was not Disraeli who would be
+their instrument. When the massacre of Batak was mentioned in the House of
+Commons, he dwelt on the honourable qualities of the Circassians; when
+instances of torture were alleged, he remarked that an oriental people
+generally terminated its connection with culprits in a more expeditious
+manner. [549] There were indeed Englishmen enough who loved their country
+as well as Disraeli, and who had proved their love by sacrifices which
+Disraeli had not had occasion to make, who thought it humiliating that the
+greatness of England should be purchased by the servitude and oppression of
+other races, and that the security of their Empire should be deemed to rest
+on so miserable a thing as Turkish rule. These were considerations to which
+Disraeli did not attach much importance. He believed the one thing needful
+to be the curbing of Russia; and, unlike Canning, who held that Russia
+would best be kept in check by England's own armed co-operation with it in
+establishing the independence of Greece, he declined from the first to
+entertain any project of imposing reform on the Sultan by force, doubting
+only to what extent it would be possible for him to support the Sultan in
+resistance to other Powers. According to his own later statement he would
+himself, had he been left unfettered, have definitely informed the Czar
+that if he should make war upon the Porte England would act as its ally.
+Public opinion in England, however, rendered this course impossible. The
+knife of Circassian and Bashi-Bazouk had severed the bond with Great
+Britain which had saved Turkey in 1854. Disraeli--henceforward Earl of
+Beaconsfield--could only utter grim anathemas against Servia for presuming
+to draw the sword upon its rightful lord and master, and chide those
+impatient English who, like the greater man whose name is associated with
+Beaconsfield, considered that the world need not be too critical as to the
+means of getting rid of such an evil as Ottoman rule. [550]
+
+[Meeting and Treaty of Reichstadt, July 8.]
+
+[The Servian Campaign, July-Oct.]
+
+[Russian enforces an armistice, Oct. 30.]
+
+The rejection by England of the Berlin Memorandum and the proclamation of
+war by Servia and Montenegro were followed by the closer union of the
+three Imperial Courts. The Czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph, with
+their Ministers, met at Reichstadt in Bohemia on the 8th of July.
+According to official statements the result of the meeting was that the
+two sovereigns determined upon non-intervention for the present, and
+proposed only to renew the attempt to unite all the Christian Powers in a
+common policy when some definite occasion should arise. Rumours, however,
+which proved to be correct, went abroad that something of the nature of
+an eventual partition of European Turkey had been the object of
+negotiation. A Treaty had in fact been signed providing that if Russia
+should liberate Bulgaria by arms, Austria should enter into possession of
+Bosnia and Herzegovina. The neutrality of Austria had virtually been
+purchased at this price, and Russia had thus secured freedom of action in
+the event of the necessary reforms not being forced upon Turkey by the
+concert of Europe. Sooner perhaps than Prince Gortschakoff had expected,
+the religious enthusiasm of the Russian people and their sympathy for
+their kinsmen and fellow-believers beyond the Danube forced the Czar into
+vigorous action. In spite of the assistance of several thousands of
+Russian volunteers and of the leadership of the Russian General
+Tchernaieff, the Servians were defeated in their struggle with the Turks.
+The mediation of England was in vain tendered to the Porte on the only
+terms on which even at London peace was seen to be possible, the
+maintenance of the existing rights of Servia and the establishment of
+provincial autonomy in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. After a brief
+suspension of hostilities in September war was renewed. The Servians were
+driven from their positions; Alexinatz was captured, the road to Belgrade
+lay open, and the doom of Bulgaria seemed likely to descend upon the
+conquered Principality. The Turks offered indeed a five months' armistice,
+which would have saved them the risks of a winter campaign and enabled
+them to crush their enemy with accumulated forces in the following
+spring. This, by the advice of Russia, the Servians refused to accept. On
+the 30th of October a Russian ultimatum was handed in at Constantinople
+by the Ambassador Ignatieff, requiring within forty-eight hours the grant
+to Servia of an armistice for two months and the cessation of hostilities.
+The Porte submitted; and wherever Slav and Ottoman stood facing one
+another in arms, in Herzegovina and Bosnia as well as Servia and
+Montenegro, there was a pause in the struggle.
+
+[Declaration of the Czar, Nov. 2.]
+
+[England proposes a Conference.]
+
+The imminence of a war between Russia and Turkey in the last days of
+October and the close connection between Russia and the Servian cause
+justified the anxiety of the British Government. This anxiety the Czar
+sought to dispel by a frank declaration of his own views. On the 2nd of
+November he entered into conversation with the British Ambassador, Lord A.
+Loftus, and assured him on his word of honour that he had no intention of
+acquiring Constantinople; that if it should be necessary for him to occupy
+part of Bulgaria his army would remain there only until peace was restored
+and the security of the Christian population established; and, generally,
+that he desired nothing more earnestly than a complete accord between
+England and Russia in the maintenance of European peace and the improvement
+of the condition of the Christian population in Turkey. He stated, however,
+with perfect clearness that if the Porte should continue to refuse the
+reforms demanded by Europe, and the Powers should put up with its continued
+refusal, Russia would act alone. Disclaiming in words of great earnestness
+all desire for territorial aggrandisement, he protested against the
+suspicion with which his policy was regarded in England, and desired that
+his words might be made public in England as a message of peace. [551] Lord
+Derby, then Foreign Secretary, immediately expressed the satisfaction with
+which the Government had received these assurances; and on the following
+day an invitation was sent from London to all the European Powers proposing
+a Conference at Constantinople, on the basis of a common recognition of the
+integrity of the Ottoman Empire, accompanied by a disavowal on the part of
+each of the Powers of all aims at aggrandisement or separate advantage. In
+proposing this Conference the Government acted in conformity with the
+expressed desire of the Czar. But there were two voices within the Cabinet.
+Lord Beaconsfield, had it been in his power, would have informed Russia
+categorically that England would support the Sultan if attacked. This the
+country and the Cabinet forbade: but the Premier had his own opportunities
+of utterance, and at the Guildhall Banquet on the 9th of November, six days
+after the Foreign Secretary had acknowledged the Czar's message of
+friendship, and before this message had been made known to the English
+people, Lord Beaconsfield uttered words which, if they were not idle
+bluster, could have been intended only as a menace to the Czar or as an
+appeal to the war-party at home:--"Though the policy of England is peace,
+there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If England enters
+into conflict in a righteous cause, her resources are inexhaustible. She is
+not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself
+whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a
+campaign which she will not terminate till right is done."
+
+[Project of Ottoman Constitution.]
+
+The proposal made by the Earl of Derby for a Conference at Constantinople
+was accepted by all the Powers, and accepted on the bases specified. Lord
+Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, was appointed to represent
+Great Britain in conjunction with Sir H. Elliot, its Ambassador. The
+Minister made his journey to Constantinople by way of the European
+capitals, and learnt at Berlin that the good understanding between the
+German Emperor and the Czar extended to Eastern affairs. Whether the
+British Government had as yet gained any trustworthy information on the
+Treaty of Reichstadt is doubtful; but so far as the public eye could judge,
+there was now, in spite of the tone assumed by Lord Beaconsfield, a fairer
+prospect of the solution of the Eastern question by the establishment of
+some form of autonomy in the Christian provinces than there had been at any
+previous time. The Porte itself recognised the serious intention of the
+Powers, and, in order to forestall the work of the Conference, prepared a
+scheme of constitutional reform that far surpassed the wildest claims of
+Herzegovinian or of Serb. Nothing less than a complete system of
+Parliamentary Government, with the very latest ingenuities from France and
+Belgium, was to be granted to the entire Ottoman Empire. That Midhat Pasha,
+who was the author of this scheme, may have had some serious end in view is
+not impossible; but with the mass of Palace-functionaries at Constantinople
+it was simply a device for embarrassing the West with its own inventions;
+and the action of men in power, both great and small, continued after the
+constitution had come into nominal existence to be exactly what it had been
+before. The very terms of the constitution must have been unintelligible to
+all but those who had been employed at foreign courts. The Government might
+as well have announced its intention of clothing the Balkans with the flora
+of the deep sea.
+
+[Demands settled at the Preliminary Conference, Dec. 11-21.]
+
+In the second week of December the representatives of the six Great Powers
+assembled at Constantinople. In order that the demands of Europe should be
+presented to the Porte with unanimity, they determined to hold a series of
+preliminary meetings with one another before the formal opening of the
+Conference and before communicating with the Turks. At these meetings,
+after Ignatieff had withdrawn his proposal for a Russian occupation of
+Bulgaria, complete accord was attained. It was resolved to demand the
+cession of certain small districts by the Porte to Servia and Montenegro;
+the grant of administrative autonomy to Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria;
+the appointment in each of these provinces of Christian governors, whose
+terms of office should be for five years, and whose nomination should be
+subject to the approval of the Powers; the confinement of Turkish troops to
+the fortresses; the removal of the bands of Circassians to Asia; and
+finally the execution of these reforms under the superintendence of an
+International Commission, which should have at its disposal a corps of six
+thousand gendarmes to be enlisted in Switzerland or Belgium. By these
+arrangements, while the Sultan retained his sovereignty and the integrity
+of the Ottoman Empire remained unimpaired, it was conceived that the
+Christian population would be effectively secured against Turkish violence
+and caprice.
+
+[The Turks refuse the demands of the Conference, Jan. 20, 1877.]
+
+All differences between the representatives of the European Powers having
+been removed, the formal Conference was opened on the 23rd of December
+under the presidency of the Turkish Foreign Minister, Savfet Pasha. The
+proceedings had not gone far when they were interrupted by the roar of
+cannon. Savfet explained that the new Ottoman constitution was being
+promulgated, and that the salvo which the members of the Conference heard
+announced the birth of an era of universal happiness and prosperity in the
+Sultan's dominions. It soon appeared that in the presence of this great
+panacea there was no place for the reforming efforts of the Christian
+Powers. Savfet declared from the first that, whatever concessions might be
+made on other points, the Sultan's Government would never consent to the
+establishment of a Foreign Commission to superintend the execution of its
+reforms, nor to the joint action of the Powers in the appointment of the
+governors of its provinces. It was in vain argued that without such
+foreign control Europe possessed no guarantee that the promises and the
+good intentions of the Porte, however gratifying these might be, would be
+carried into effect. Savfet replied that by the Treaty of 1856 the Powers
+had declared the Ottoman Empire to stand on exactly the same footing as
+any other great State in Europe, and had expressly debarred themselves
+from interfering, under whatever circumstances, with its internal
+administration. The position of the Turkish representative at the
+Conference was in fact the only logical one. In the Treaty of Paris the
+Powers had elaborately pledged themselves to an absurdity; and this
+Treaty the Turk was never weary of throwing in their faces. But the
+situation was not one for lawyers and for the interpretation of
+documents. The Conference, after hearing the arguments and the
+counter-projects of the Turkish Ministers, after reconsidering its own
+demands and modifying these in many important points in deference to
+Ottoman wishes, adhered to the demand for a Foreign Commission and for a
+European control over the appointment of governors. Midhat, who was now
+Grand Vizier, summoned the Great Council of the Empire, and presented to
+it the demands of the Conference. These demands the Great Council
+unanimously rejected. Lord Salisbury had already warned the Sultan what
+would be the results of continued obstinacy; and after receiving Midhat's
+final reply the ambassadors of all the Powers, together with the envoys
+who had been specially appointed for the Conference, quitted
+Constantinople.
+
+[The London Protocol, Mar. 31.]
+
+[The Porte rejects the Protocol.]
+
+[Russia declares war, April 24.]
+
+Russia, since the beginning of November, had been actively preparing for
+war. The Czar had left the world in no doubt as to his own intentions in
+case of the failure of the European Concert; it only remained for him to
+ascertain whether, after the settlement of a definite scheme of reform by
+the Conference and the rejection of this scheme by the Porte, the Powers
+would or would not take steps to enforce their conclusion. England
+suggested that the Sultan should be allowed a year to carry out his good
+intentions: Gortschakoff inquired whether England would pledge itself to
+action if, at the end of the year, reform was not effected; but no such
+pledge was forthcoming. With the object either of discovering some
+arrangement in which the Powers would combine, or of delaying the outbreak
+of war until the Russian preparations were more advanced and the season
+more favourable, Ignatieff was sent round to all the European Courts. He
+visited England, and subsequently drew up, with the assistance of Count
+Schouvaloff, Russian Ambassador at London, a document which gained the
+approval of the British as well as the Continental Governments. This
+document, known as the London Protocol, was signed on the 31st of March.
+After a reference to the promises of reform made by the Porte, it stated
+that the Powers intended to watch carefully by their representatives over
+the manner in which these promises were carried into effect; that if their
+hopes should be once more disappointed they should regard the condition of
+affairs as incompatible with the interests of Europe; and that in such case
+they would decide in common upon the means best fitted to secure the
+well-being of the Christian population and the interests of general peace.
+Declarations relative to the disarmament of Russia, which it was now the
+principal object of the British Government to effect, were added. There was
+indeed so little of a substantial engagement in this Protocol that it would
+have been surprising had Russia disarmed without obtaining some further
+guarantee for the execution of reform. But weak as the Protocol was, it was
+rejected by the Porte. Once more the appeal was made to the Treaty of
+Paris, once more the Sultan protested against the encroachment of the
+Powers on his own inviolable rights. Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet even now
+denied that the last word had been spoken, and professed to entertain some
+hope in the effect of subsequent diplomatic steps; but the rest of Europe
+asked and expected no further forbearance on the part of Russia. The army
+of operations already lay on the Pruth: the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of
+the Czar, was appointed to its command; and on the 24th of April the
+Russian Government issued its declaration of war.
+
+[Passage of the Danube, June 27.]
+
+[Advance on the Balkans, July.]
+
+[Gourko south of the Balkans, July 15.]
+
+Between the Russian frontier and the Danube lay the Principality of
+Roumania. A convention signed before the outbreak of hostilities gave to
+the Russian army a free passage through this territory, and Roumania
+subsequently entered the war as Russia's ally. It was not, however, until
+the fourth week of June that the invaders were able to cross the Danube.
+Seven army-corps were assembled in Roumania; of these one crossed the Lower
+Danube into the Dobrudscha, two were retained in Roumania as a reserve, and
+four crossed the river in the neighbourhood of Sistowa, in order to enter
+upon the Bulgarian campaign. It was the desire of the Russians to throw
+forward the central part of their army by the line of the river Jantra upon
+the Balkans; with their left to move against Rustchuk and the Turkish
+armies in the eastern fortresses of Bulgaria; with their right to capture
+Nicopolis, and guard the central column against any flank attack from the
+west. But both in Europe and in Asia the Russians had underrated the power
+of their adversary, and entered upon the war with insufficient forces.
+Advantages won by their generals on the Armenian frontier while the
+European army was still marching through Roumania were lost in the course
+of the next few weeks. Bayazid and other places that fell into the hands of
+the Russians at the first onset were recovered by the Turks under Mukhtar
+Pasha; and within a few days after the opening of the European campaign the
+Russian divisions in Asia were everywhere retreating upon their own
+frontier. The Bulgarian campaign was marked by the same rapid successes of
+the invader at the outset, to be followed, owing to the same insufficiency
+of force, by similar disasters. Encountering no effective opposition on the
+Danube, the Russians pushed forward rapidly towards the Balkans by the line
+of the Jantra. The Turkish army lay scattered in the Bulgarian fortresses,
+from Widdin in the extreme west to Shumla at the foot of the Eastern
+Balkans. It was considered by the Russian commanders that two army-corps
+would be required to operate against the Turks in Eastern Bulgaria, while
+one corps would be enough to cover the central line of invasion from the
+west. There remained, excluding the two corps in reserve in Roumania and
+the corps holding the Dobrudscha, but one corps for the march on the
+Balkans and Adrianople. The command of the vanguard of this body was given
+to General Gourko, who pressed on into the Balkans, seized the Shipka Pass,
+and descended into Southern Bulgaria (July 15). The Turks were driven from
+Kesanlik and Eski Sagra, and Gourko's cavalry, a few hundreds in number,
+advanced to within two days' march of Adrianople.
+
+[Osman occupies Plevna, July 19.]
+
+[First engagement at Plevna, July 20.]
+
+[Second battle at Plevna, July 30.]
+
+[The Shipka Pass, Aug. 20-23.]
+
+The headquarters of the whole Russian army were now at Tirnova, the ancient
+Bulgarian capital, about half-way between the Danube and the Balkans. Two
+army-corps, commanded by the Czarewitch, moved eastwards against Rustchuk
+and the so-called Turkish army of the Danube, which was gathering behind
+the lines of the Kara Lom; another division, under General Krudener, turned
+westward and captured Nicopolis with its garrison. Lovatz and other points
+lying westward of the Jantra were occupied by weak detachments; but so
+badly were the reconnaissances of the Russians performed in this direction
+that they were unaware of the approach of a Turkish army from Widdin,
+thirty-five thousand strong, till this was close on their flank. Before the
+Russians could prevent him, Osman Pasha, with the vanguard of this army,
+had occupied the town and heights of Plevna, between Nicopolis and Lovatz.
+On the 20th of July, still unaware of their enemy's strength, the Russians
+attacked him at Plevna: they were defeated with considerable loss, and
+after a few days one of Osman's divisions, pushing forward upon the
+invader's central line, drove them out of Lovatz. The Grand Duke now sent
+reinforcements to Krudener, and ordered him to take Plevna at all costs.
+Krudener's strength was raised to thirty-five thousand; but in the meantime
+new Turkish regiments had joined Osman, and his troops, now numbering about
+fifty thousand, had been working day and night entrenching themselves in
+the heights round Plevna which the Russians had to attack. The assault was
+made on the 30th of July; it was beaten back with terrible slaughter, the
+Russians leaving a fifth of their number on the field. Had Osman taken up
+the offensive and the Turkish commander on the Lom pressed vigorously upon
+the invader's line, it would probably have gone ill with the Russian army
+in Bulgaria. Gourko was at once compelled to abandon the country south of
+the Balkans. His troops, falling back upon the Shipka Pass, were there
+attacked from the south by far superior forces under Suleiman Pasha. The
+Ottoman commander, prodigal of the lives of his men and trusting to mere
+blindfold violence, hurled his army day after day against the Russian
+positions (Aug. 20-23). There was a moment when all seemed lost, and the
+Russian soldiers sent to their Czar the last message of devotion from men
+who were about to die at their post. But in the extremity of peril there
+arrived a reinforcement, weak, but sufficient to turn the scale against the
+ill-commanded Turks. Suleiman's army withdrew to the village of Shipka at
+the southern end of the pass. The pass itself, with the entrance from
+northern Bulgaria, remained in the hands of the Russians.
+
+[Roumania.]
+
+[Third battle of Plevna, Sept 11-12.]
+
+After the second battle of Plevna it became clear that the Russians could
+not carry on the campaign with their existing forces. Two army-corps were
+called up which were guarding the coast of the Black Sea; several others
+were mobilised in the interior of Russia, and began their journey towards
+the Danube. So urgent, however, was the immediate need, that the Czar was
+compelled to ask help from Roumania. This help was given. Roumanian troops,
+excellent in quality, filled up the gap caused by Krudener's defeats, and
+the whole army before Plevna was placed under the command of the Roumanian
+Prince Charles. At the beginning of September the Russians were again ready
+for action. Lovatz was wrested from the Turks, and the division which had
+captured it moved on to Plevna to take part in a great combined attack.
+This attack was made on the 11th of September under the eyes of the Czar.
+On the north the Russians and Roumanians together, after a desperate
+struggle, stormed the Grivitza redoubt. On the south Skobeleff carried the
+first Turkish position, but could make no impression on their second line
+of defence. Twelve thousand men fell on the Russian side before the day was
+over, and the main defences of the Turks were still unbroken. On the morrow
+the Turks took up the offensive. Skobeleff, exposed to the attack of a far
+superior foe, prayed in vain for reinforcements. His men, standing in the
+positions that they had won from the Turks, repelled one onslaught after
+another, but were ultimately overwhelmed and driven from the field. At the
+close of the second day's battle the Russians were everywhere beaten back
+within their own lines, except at the Grivitza redoubt, which was itself
+but an outwork of the Turkish defences, and faced by more formidable works
+within. The assailants had sustained a loss approaching that of the Germans
+at Gravelotte with an army one-third of the Germans' strength. Osman was
+stronger than at the beginning of the campaign; with what sacrifices Russia
+would have to purchase its ultimate victory no man could calculate.
+
+[Todleben besieges Plevna.]
+
+[Fall of Plevna, Dec. 10.]
+
+The three defeats at Plevna cast a sinister light upon the Russian military
+administration and the quality of its chiefs. The soldiers had fought
+heroically; divisional generals like Skobeleff had done all that man could
+do in such positions; the faults were those of the headquarters and the
+officers by whom the Imperial Family were surrounded. After the third
+catastrophe, public opinion called for the removal of the authors of these
+disasters and the employment of abler men. Todleben, the defender of
+Sebastopol, who for some unknown reason had been left without a command,
+was now summoned to Bulgaria, and virtually placed at the head of the army
+before Plevna. He saw that the stronghold of Osman could only be reduced by
+a regular siege, and prepared to draw his lines right round it. For a time
+Osman kept open his communications with the south-west, and heavy trains of
+ammunition and supplies made their way into Plevna from this direction; but
+the investment was at length completed, and the army of Plevna cut off from
+the world. In the meantime new regiments were steadily pouring into
+Bulgaria from the interior of Russia. East of the Jantra, after many
+alternations of fortune, the Turks were finally driven back behind the
+river Lom. The last efforts of Suleiman failed to wrest the Shipka Pass
+from its defenders. From the narrow line which the invaders had with such
+difficulty held during three anxious months their forces, accumulating day
+by day, spread out south and west up to the slopes of the Balkans, ready to
+burst over the mountain-barrier and sweep the enemy back to the walls of
+Constantinople when once Plevna should have fallen and the army which
+besieged it should be added to the invader's strength. At length, in the
+second week of December, Osman's supply of food was exhausted. Victor in
+three battles, he refused to surrender without one more struggle. On the
+10th of December, after distributing among his men what there remained of
+provisions, he made a desperate effort to break out towards the west. His
+columns dashed in vain against the besieger's lines; behind him his enemies
+pressed forward into the positions which he had abandoned; a ring of fire
+like that of Sedan surrounded the Turkish army; and after thousands had
+fallen in a hopeless conflict, the general and the troops who for five
+months had held in check the collected forces of the Russian Empire
+surrendered to their conqueror.
+
+[Crossing of the Balkans, Dec. 25-Jan. 8.]
+
+[Capitulation of Shipka, Jan. 9.]
+
+[Russians enter Adrianople, Jan. 20, 1878.]
+
+If in the first stages of the war there was little that did credit to
+Russia's military capacity, the energy that marked its close made amends
+for what had gone before. Winter was descending in extreme severity: the
+Balkans were a mass of snow and ice; but no obstacle could now bar the
+invader's march. Gourko, in command of an army that had gathered to the
+south-west of Plevna, made his way through the mountains above Etropol in
+the last days of December, and, driving the Turks from Sophia, pressed on
+towards Philippopolis and Adrianople. Farther east two columns crossed the
+Balkans by bye-paths right and left of the Shipka Pass, and then,
+converging on Shipka itself, fell upon the rear of the Turkish army which
+still blocked the southern outlet. Simultaneously a third corps marched
+down the pass from the north and assailed the Turks in front. After a
+fierce struggle the entire Turkish army, thirty-five thousand strong, laid
+down its arms. There now remained only one considerable force between the
+invaders and Constantinople. This body, which was commanded by Suleiman,
+held the road which runs along the valley of the Maritza, at a point
+somewhat to the east of Philippopolis. Against it Gourko advanced from the
+west, while the victors of Shipka, descending due south through Kesanlik,
+barred the line of retreat towards Adrianople. The last encounter of the
+war took place on the 17th of January. Suleiman's army, routed and
+demoralised, succeeded in making its escape to the AEgean coast. Pursuit was
+unnecessary, for the war was now practically over. On the 20th of January
+the Russians made their entry into Adrianople; in the next few days their
+advanced guard touched the Sea of Marmora at Rodosto.
+
+[Armistice, Jan. 31.]
+
+Immediately after the fall of Plevna the Porte had applied to the European
+Powers for their mediation. Disasters in Asia had already warned it not to
+delay submission too long; for in the middle of October Mukhtar Pasha had
+been driven from his positions, and a month later Kars had been taken by
+storm. The Russians had subsequently penetrated into Armenia and had
+captured the outworks of Erzeroum. Each day that now passed brought the
+Ottoman Empire nearer to destruction. Servia again declared war; the
+Montenegrins made themselves masters of the coast-towns and of
+border-territory north and south; Greece seemed likely to enter into the
+struggle. Baffled in his attempt to gain the common mediation of the
+Powers, the Sultan appealed to the Queen of England personally for her good
+offices in bringing the conflict to a close. In reply to a telegram from
+London, the Czar declared himself willing to treat for peace as soon as
+direct communications should be addressed to his representatives by the
+Porte. On the 14th of January commissioners were sent to the headquarters
+of the Grand Duke Nicholas at Kesanlik to treat for an armistice and for
+preliminaries of peace. The Russians, now in the full tide of victory, were
+in no hurry to agree with their adversary. Nicholas bade the Turkish envoys
+accompany him to Adrianople, and it was not until the 31st of January that
+the armistice was granted and the preliminaries of peace signed.
+
+[England.]
+
+[Vote of Credit, Jan. 28-Feb. 8.]
+
+[Fleet passes the Dardanelles, Feb. 6.]
+
+While the Turkish envoys were on their journey to the Russian headquarters,
+the session of Parliament opened at London. The Ministry had declared at
+the outbreak of the war that Great Britain would remain neutral unless its
+own interests should be imperilled, and it had defined these interests with
+due clearness both in its communications with the Russian Ambassador and in
+its statements in Parliament. It was laid down that Her Majesty's
+Government could not permit the blockade of the Suez Canal, or the
+extension of military operations to Egypt; that it could not witness with
+indifference the passing of Constantinople into other hands than those of
+its present possessors; and that it would entertain serious objections to
+any material alterations in the rules made under European sanction for the
+navigation of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. [552] In reply to Lord Derby's
+note which formulated these conditions of neutrality Prince Gortschakoff
+had repeated the Czar's assurance that the acquisition of Constantinople
+was excluded from his views, and had promised to undertake no military
+operation in Egypt; he had, however, let it be understood that, as an
+incident of warfare, the reduction of Constantinople might be necessary
+like that of any other capital. In the Queen's speech at the opening of
+Parliament, Ministers stated that the conditions on which the neutrality of
+England was founded had not hitherto been infringed by either belligerent,
+but that, should hostilities be prolonged, some unexpected occurrence might
+render it necessary to adopt measures of precaution, measures which could
+not be adequately prepared without an appeal to the liberality of
+Parliament. From language subsequently used by Lord Beaconsfield's
+colleagues, it would appear that the Cabinet had some apprehension that the
+Russian army, escaping from the Czar's control, might seize and attempt
+permanently to hold Constantinople. On the 23rd of January orders were sent
+to Admiral Hornby, commander of the fleet at Besika Bay, to pass the
+Dardanelles, and proceed to Constantinople. Lord Derby, who saw no
+necessity for measures of a warlike character until the result of the
+negotiations at Adrianople should become known, now resigned office; but on
+the reversal of the order to Admiral Hornby he rejoined the Cabinet. On the
+28th of January, after the bases of peace had been communicated by Count
+Schouvaloff to the British Government but before they had been actually
+signed, the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved for a vote of L6,000,000 for
+increasing the armaments of the country. This vote was at first vigorously
+opposed on the ground that none of the stated conditions of England's
+neutrality had been infringed, and that in the conditions of peace between
+Russia and Turkey there was nothing that justified a departure from the
+policy which England had hitherto pursued. In the course of the debates,
+however, a telegram arrived from Mr. Layard, Elliot's successor at
+Constantinople, stating that notwithstanding the armistice the Russians
+were pushing on towards the capital; that the Turks had been compelled to
+evacuate Silivria on the Sea of Marmora; that the Russian general was about
+to occupy Tchataldja, an outpost of the last line of defence not thirty
+miles from Constantinople; and that the Porte was in great alarm, and
+unable to understand the Russian proceedings. The utmost excitement was
+caused at Westminster by this telegram. The fleet was at once ordered to
+Constantinople. Mr. Forster, who had led the opposition to the vote of
+credit, sought to withdraw his amendment; and although on the following
+day, with the arrival of the articles of the armistice, it appeared that
+the Russians were simply moving up to the accepted line of demarcation, and
+that the Porte could hardly have been ignorant of this when Layard's
+telegram was despatched, the alarm raised in London did not subside, and
+the vote of credit was carried by a majority of above two hundred. [553]
+
+[Imminence of war with England.]
+
+When a victorious army is, without the intervention of some external Power,
+checked in its work of conquest by the negotiation of an armistice, it is
+invariably made a condition that positions shall be handed over to it which
+it does not at the moment occupy, but which it might reasonably expect to
+have conquered within a certain date, had hostilities not been suspended.
+The armistice granted to Austria by Napoleon after the battle of Marengo
+involved the evacuation of the whole of Upper Italy; the armistice which
+Bismarck offered to the French Government of Defence at the beginning of
+the siege of Paris would have involved the surrender of Strasburg and of
+Toul. In demanding that the line of demarcation should be carried almost up
+to the walls of Constantinople the Russians were asking for no more than
+would certainly have been within their hands had hostilities been prolonged
+for a few weeks, or even days. Deeply as the conditions of the armistice
+agitated the English people, it was not in these conditions, but in the
+conditions of the peace which was to follow, that the true cause of
+contention between England and Russia, if cause there was, had to be found.
+Nevertheless, the approach of the Russians to Gallipoli and the lines of
+Tchataldja, followed, as it was, by the despatch of the British fleet to
+Constantinople, brought Russia and Great Britain within a hair's breadth of
+war. It was in vain that Lord Derby described the fleet as sent only for
+the protection of the lives and property of British subjects. Gortschakoff,
+who was superior in amenities of this kind, replied that the Russian
+Government had exactly the same end in view, with the distinction that its
+protection would be extended to all Christians. Should the British fleet
+appear at the Bosphorus, Russian troops would, in the fulfilment of a
+common duty of humanity, enter Constantinople. Yielding to this threat,
+Lord Beaconsfield bade the fleet halt at a convenient point in the Sea of
+Marmora. On both sides preparations were made for immediate action. The
+guns on our ships stood charged for battle; the Russians strewed the
+shallows with torpedoes. Had a Russian soldier appeared on the heights of
+Gallipoli, had an Englishman landed on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus,
+war would at once have broken out. But after some weeks of extreme danger
+the perils of mere contiguity passed away, and the decision between peace
+and war was transferred from the accidents of tent and quarter deck to the
+deliberations of statesmen assembled in Congress.
+
+[Treaty of San Stefano, Mar. 3.]
+
+The bases of Peace which were made the condition of the armistice granted
+at Adrianople formed with little alteration the substance of the Treaty
+signed by Russia and Turkey at San Stefano, a village on the Sea of
+Marmora, on the 3rd of March. By this Treaty the Porte recognised the
+independence of Servia, Montenegro, and Roumania, and made considerable
+cessions of territory to the two former States. Bulgaria was constituted an
+autonomous tributary Principality, with a Christian Government and a
+national militia. Its frontier, which was made so extensive as to include
+the greater part of European Turkey, was defined as beginning near Midia on
+the Black Sea, not sixty miles from the Bosphorus; passing thence westwards
+just to the north of Adrianople; descending to the AEgean Sea, and following
+the coast as far as the Thracian Chersonese; then passing inland westwards,
+so as barely to exclude Salonika; running on to the border of Albania
+within fifty miles of the Adriatic, and from this point following the
+Albanian border up to the new Servian frontier. The Prince of Bulgaria was
+to be freely elected by the population, and confirmed by the Porte with the
+assent of the Powers; a system of administration was to be drawn up by an
+Assembly of Bulgarian notables; and the introduction of the new system into
+Bulgaria with the superintendence of its working was to be entrusted for
+two years to a Russian Commissioner. Until the native militia was
+organised, Russian troops, not exceeding fifty thousand in number, were to
+occupy the country; this occupation, however, was to be limited to a term
+approximating to two years. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the proposals laid
+before the Porte at the first sitting of the Conference of 1876 were to be
+immediately introduced, subject to such modifications as might be agreed
+upon between Turkey, Russia, and Austria. The Porte undertook to apply
+scrupulously in Crete the Organic Law which had been drawn up in 1868,
+taking into account the previously expressed wishes of the native
+population. An analogous law, adapted to local requirements, was, after
+being communicated to the Czar, to be introduced into Epirus, Thessaly, and
+the other parts of Turkey in Europe for which a special constitution was
+not provided by the Treaty. Commissions, in which the native population was
+to be largely represented, were in each province to be entrusted with the
+task of elaborating the details of the new organisation. In Armenia the
+Sultan undertook to carry into effect without further delay the
+improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements, and to guarantee
+the security of the Armenians from Kurds and Circassians. As an indemnity
+for the losses and expenses of the war the Porte admitted itself to be
+indebted to Russia in the sum of fourteen hundred million roubles; but in
+accordance with the wishes of the Sultan, and in consideration of the
+financial embarrassments of Turkey, the Czar consented to accept in
+substitution for the greater part of this sum the cession of the Dobrudscha
+in Europe, and of the districts of Ardahan, Kars, Batoum, and Bayazid in
+Asia. As to the balance of three hundred million roubles left due to
+Russia, the mode of payment or guarantee was to be settled by an
+understanding between the two Governments. The Dobrudscha was to be given
+by the Czar to Roumania in exchange for Bessarabia, which this State was to
+transfer to Russia. The complete evacuation of Turkey in Europe was to take
+place within three months, that of Turkey in Asia within six months, from
+the conclusion of peace. [554]
+
+[Congress proposed.]
+
+[Opposite purposes of Russia and England.]
+
+It had from the first been admitted by the Russian Government that
+questions affecting the interests of Europe at large could not be settled
+by a Treaty between Russia and Turkey alone, but must form the subject of
+European agreement. Early in February the Emperor of Austria had proposed
+that a European Conference should assemble at his own capital. It was
+subsequently agreed that Berlin, instead of Vienna, should be the place of
+meeting, and instead of a Conference a Congress should be held, that is, an
+international assembly of the most solemn form, in which each of the Powers
+is represented not merely by an ambassador or an envoy, but by its leading
+Ministers. But the question at once arose whether there existed in the mind
+of the Russian Government a distinction between parts of the Treaty of San
+Stefano bearing on the interests of Europe generally and parts which
+affected no States but Russia and Turkey; and whether, in this case, Russia
+was willing that Europe should be the judge of the distinction, or, on the
+contrary, claimed for itself the right of withholding portions of the
+Treaty from the cognisance of the European Court. In accepting the
+principle of a Congress, Lord Derby on behalf of Great Britain made it a
+condition that every article of the Treaty without exception should be laid
+before the Congress, not necessarily as requiring the concurrence of the
+Powers, but in order that the Powers themselves might in each case decide
+whether their concurrence was necessary or not. To this demand Prince
+Gortschakoff offered the most strenuous resistance, claiming for Russia the
+liberty of accepting, or not accepting, the discussion of any question that
+might be raised. It would clearly have been in the power of the Russian
+Government, had this condition been granted, to exclude from the
+consideration of Europe precisely those matters which in the opinion of
+other States were most essentially of European import. Phrases of
+conciliation were suggested; but no ingenuity of language could shade over
+the difference of purpose which separated the rival Powers. Every day the
+chances of the meeting of the Congress seemed to be diminishing, the
+approach of war between Russia and Great Britain more unmistakable. Lord
+Beaconsfield called out the Reserves and summoned troops from India; even
+the project of seizing a port in Asia Minor in case the Sultan should fall
+under Russian influence was discussed in the Cabinet. Unable to reconcile
+himself to these vigorous measures, Lord Derby, who had long been at
+variance with the Premier, now finally withdrew from the Cabinet (March
+28). He was succeeded in his office by the Marquis of Salisbury, whose
+comparison of his relative and predecessor to Titus Oates revived the
+interest of the diplomatic world in a now forgotten period of English
+history.
+
+[Circular of April 1.]
+
+The new Foreign Secretary had not been many days in office when a Circular,
+despatched to all the Foreign Courts, summed up the objections of Great
+Britain to the Treaty of San Stefano. It was pointed out that a strong
+Slavic State would be created under the control of Russia, possessing
+important harbours upon the shores of the Black Sea and the Archipelago,
+and giving to Russia a preponderating influence over political and
+commercial relations on both those seas; that a large Greek population
+would be merged in a dominant Slavic majority; that by the extension of
+Bulgaria to the Archipelago the Albanian and Greek provinces left to the
+Sultan would be severed from Constantinople; that the annexation of
+Bessarabia and of Batoum would make the will of the Russian Government
+dominant over all the vicinity of the Black Sea; that the acquisition of
+the strongholds of Armenia would place the population of that province
+under the immediate influence of the Power that held these strongholds,
+while through the cession of Bayazid the European trade from Trebizond to
+Persia would become liable to be arrested by the prohibitory barriers of
+the Russian commercial system. Finally, by the stipulation for an indemnity
+which it was beyond the power of Turkey to discharge, and by the reference
+of the mode of payment or guarantee to a later settlement, Russia had
+placed it in its power either to extort yet larger cessions of territory,
+or to force Turkey into engagements subordinating its policy in all things
+to that of St. Petersburg.
+
+[Count Schouvaloff.]
+
+[Secret agreement, May 30th.]
+
+[Convention with Turkey, June 4.]
+
+[Cyprus.]
+
+It was the object of Lord Salisbury to show that the effects of the Treaty
+of San Stefano, taken in a mass, threatened the peace and the interests of
+Europe, and therefore, whatever might be advanced for or against individual
+stipulations of the Treaty, that the Treaty as a whole, and not clauses
+selected by one Power, must be submitted to the Congress if the examination
+was not to prove illusory. This was a just line of argument. Nevertheless
+it was natural to suppose that some parts of the Treaty must be more
+distasteful than others to Great Britain; and Count Schouvaloff, who was
+sincerely desirous of peace, applied himself to the task of discovering
+with what concessions Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet would be satisfied. He
+found that if Russia would consent to modifications of the Treaty in
+Congress excluding Bulgaria from the Aegean Sea, reducing its area on the
+south and west, dividing it into two provinces, and restoring the Balkans
+to the Sultan as a military frontier, giving back Bayazid to the Turks, and
+granting to other Powers besides Russia a voice in the organisation of
+Epirus, Thessaly, and the other Christian provinces of the Porte, England
+might be induced to accept without essential change the other provisions of
+San Stefano. On the 7th of May Count Schouvaloff quitted London for St.
+Petersburg, in order to lay before the Czar the results of his
+communications with the Cabinet, and to acquaint him with the state of
+public opinion in England. On his journey hung the issues of peace or war.
+Backed by the counsels of the German Emperor, Schouvaloff succeeded in his
+mission. The Czar determined not to risk the great results already secured
+by insisting on the points contested, and Schouvaloff returned to London
+authorised to conclude a pact with the British Government on the general
+basis which had been laid down. On the 30th of May a secret agreement, in
+which the above were the principal points, was signed, and the meeting of
+the Congress for the examination of the entire Treaty of San Stefano was
+now assured. But it was not without the deepest anxiety and regret that
+Lord Beaconsfield consented to the annexation of Batoum and the Armenian
+fortresses. He obtained indeed an assurance in the secret agreement with
+Schouvaloff that the Russian frontier should be no more extended on the
+side of Turkey in Asia; but his policy did not stop short here. By a
+Convention made with the Sultan on the 4th of June, Great Britain engaged,
+in the event of any further aggression by Russia upon the Asiatic
+territories of the Sultan, to defend these territories by force of arms.
+The Sultan in return promised to introduce the necessary reforms, to be
+agreed upon by the two Powers, for the protection of the Christian and
+other subjects of the Porte in these territories, and further assigned the
+Island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England. It was
+stipulated by a humorous after-clause that if Russia should restore to
+Turkey its Armenian conquests, Cyprus would be evacuated by England, and
+the Convention itself should be at an end. [555]
+
+[Congress of Berlin, June 13-July 13.]
+
+[Treaty of Berlin, July 13.]
+
+The Congress of Berlin, at which the Premier himself and Lord Salisbury
+represented Great Britain, opened on the 13th of June. Though the
+compromise between England and Russia had been settled in general terms,
+the arrangement of details opened such a series of difficulties that the
+Congress seemed more than once on the point of breaking up. It was mainly
+due to the perseverance and wisdom of Prince Bismarck, who transferred the
+discussion of the most crucial points from the Congress to private meetings
+of his guests, and who himself acted as conciliator when Gortschakoff
+folded up his maps or Lord Beaconsfield ordered a special train, that the
+work was at length achieved. The Treaty of Berlin, signed on the 13th of
+July, confined Bulgaria, as an autonomous Principality, to the country
+north of the Balkans, and diminished the authority which, pending the
+establishment of its definitive system of government, would by the Treaty
+of San Stefano have belonged to a Russian commissioner. The portion of
+Bulgaria south of the Balkans, but extending no farther west than the
+valley of the Maritza, and no farther south than Mount Rhodope, was formed
+into a Province of East Roumelia, to remain subject to the direct political
+and military authority of the Sultan, under conditions of administrative
+autonomy. The Sultan was declared to possess the right of erecting
+fortifications both on the coast and on the land-frontier of this province,
+and of maintaining troops there. Alike in Bulgaria and in Eastern Roumelia
+the period of occupation by Russian troops was limited to nine months.
+Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austria, to be occupied and
+administered by that Power. The cessions of territory made to Servia and
+Montenegro in the Treaty of San Stefano were modified with the object of
+interposing a broader strip between these two States; Bayazid was omitted
+from the ceded districts in Asia, and the Czar declared it his intention to
+erect Batoum into a free port, essentially commercial. At the instance of
+France the provisions relating to the Greek Provinces of Turkey were
+superseded by a vote in favour of the cession of part of these Provinces to
+the Hellenic Kingdom. The Sultan was recommended to cede Thessaly and part
+of Epirus to Greece, the Powers reserving to themselves the right of
+offering their mediation to facilitate the negotiations. In other respects
+the provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano were confirmed without
+substantial change.
+
+[Comparison of the two Treaties.]
+
+Lord Beaconsfield returned to London, bringing, as he said, peace with
+honour. It was claimed, in the despatch to our Ambassadors which
+accompanied the publication of the Treaty of Berlin, that in this Treaty
+the cardinal objections raised by the British Government to the Treaty of
+San Stefano had found an entire remedy. "Bulgaria," wrote Lord Salisbury,
+"is now confined to the river-barrier of the Danube, and consequently has
+not only ceased to possess any harbour on the Archipelago, but is removed
+by more than a hundred miles from the neighbourhood of that sea. On the
+Euxine the important port of Bourgas has been restored to the Government of
+Turkey; and Bulgaria retains less than half the sea-board originally
+assigned to it, and possesses no other port except the roadstead of Varna,
+which can hardly be used for any but commercial purposes. The replacement
+under Turkish rule of Bourgas and the southern half of the sea-board on the
+Euxine, and the strictly commercial character assigned to Batoum, have
+largely obviated the menace to the liberty of the Black Sea. The political
+outposts of Russian power have been pushed back to the region beyond the
+Balkans; the Sultan's dominions have been provided with a defensible
+frontier." It was in short the contention of the English Government that
+while Russia, in the pretended emancipation of a great part of European
+Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano, had but acquired a new dependency,
+England, by insisting on the division of Bulgaria, had baffled this plan
+and restored to Turkey an effective military dominion over all the country
+south of the Balkans. That Lord Beaconsfield did well in severing Macedonia
+from the Slavic State of Bulgaria there is little reason to doubt; that,
+having so severed it, he did ill in leaving it without a European guarantee
+for good government, every successive year made more plain; the wisdom of
+his treatment of Bulgaria itself must, in the light of subsequent events,
+remain matter for controversy. It may fairly be said that in dealing with
+Bulgaria English statesmen were, on the whole, dealing with the unknown.
+Nevertheless, had guidance been accepted from the history of the other
+Balkan States, analogies were not altogether wanting or altogether remote.
+During the present century three Christian States had been formed out of
+what had been Ottoman territory: Servia, Greece, and Roumania. Not one of
+these had become a Russian Province, or had failed to develop and maintain
+a distinct national existence. In Servia an attempt had been made to retain
+for the Porte the right of keeping troops in garrison. This attempt had
+proved a mistake. So long as the right was exercised it had simply been a
+source of danger and disquiet, and it had finally been abandoned by the
+Porte itself. In the case of Greece, Russia, with a view to its own
+interests, had originally proposed that the country should be divided into
+four autonomous provinces tributary to the Sultan: against this the Greeks
+had protested, and Canning had successfully supported their protest. Even
+the appointment of an ex-Minister of St. Petersburg, Capodistrias, as first
+President of Greece in 1827 had failed to bring the liberated country under
+Russian influence; and in the course of the half-century which had since
+elapsed it had become one of the commonplaces of politics, accepted by
+every school in every country of Western Europe, that the Powers had
+committed a great error in 1833 in not extending to far larger dimensions
+the Greek Kingdom which they then established. In the case of Roumania, the
+British Government had, out of fear of Russia, insisted in 1856 that the
+provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia should remain separate: the result was
+that the inhabitants in defiance of England effected their union, and that
+after a few years had passed there was not a single politician in England
+who regarded their union otherwise than with satisfaction. If history
+taught anything in the solution of the Eastern question, it taught that the
+effort to reserve for the Sultan a military existence in countries which
+had passed from under his general control was futile, and that the best
+barrier against Russian influence was to be found not in the division but
+in the strengthening and consolidation of the States rescued from Ottoman
+dominions.
+
+It was of course open to English statesmen in 1878 to believe that all that
+had hitherto passed in the Balkan Peninsula had no bearing upon the
+problems of the hour, and that, whatever might have been the case with
+Greece, Servia, and Roumania, Bulgaria stood on a completely different
+footing, and called for the application of principles not based on the
+experience of the past but on the divinations of superior minds. Should the
+history of succeeding years bear out this view, should the Balkans become a
+true military frontier for Turkey, should Northern Bulgaria sink to the
+condition of a Russian dependency, and Eastern Roumelia, in severance from
+its enslaved kin, abandon itself to a thriving ease behind the garrisons of
+the reforming Ottoman, Lord Beaconsfield will have deserved the fame of a
+statesman whose intuitions, undimmed by the mists of experience, penetrated
+the secret of the future, and shaped, because they discerned, the destiny
+of nations. It will be the task of later historians to measure the exact
+period after the Congress of Berlin at which the process indicated by Lord
+Beaconsfield came into visible operation; it is the misfortune of those
+whose view is limited by a single decade to have to record that in every
+particular, with the single exception of the severance of Macedonia from
+the Slavonic Principality, Lord Beaconsfield's ideas, purposes and
+anticipations, in so far as they related to Eastern Europe, have hitherto
+been contradicted by events. What happened in Greece, Servia, and Roumania
+has happened in Bulgaria. Experience, thrown to the winds by English
+Ministers in 1878, has justified those who listened to its voice. There
+exists no such thing as a Turkish fortress on the Balkans; Bourgas no more
+belongs to the Sultan than Athens or Belgrade; no Turkish soldier has been
+able to set foot within the territory whose very name, Eastern Roumelia,
+was to stamp it as Turkish dominion. National independence, a living force
+in Greece, in Servia, in Roumania, has proved its power in Bulgaria too.
+The efforts of Russia to establish its influence over a people liberated by
+its arms have been repelled with unexpected firmness. Like the divided
+members of Roumania, the divided members of Bulgaria have effected their
+union. In this union, in the growing material and moral force of the
+Bulgarian State, Western Europe sees a power wholly favourable to its own
+hopes for the future of the East, wholly adverse to the extension of
+Russian rule: and it has been reserved for Lord Beaconsfield's colleague at
+the Congress of Berlin, regardless of the fact that Bulgaria north of the
+Balkans, not the southern Province, created that vigorous military and
+political organisation which was the precursor of national union, to
+explain that in dividing Bulgaria into two portions the English Ministers
+of 1878 intended to promote its ultimate unity, and that in subjecting the
+southern half to the Sultan's rule they laid the foundation for its
+ultimate independence.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[1] Chapters I. to XI. of this Edition.
+
+[2] Chapters XII. to XVIII. of this Edition.
+
+[3] Page 362 of this Edition.
+
+[4] Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege, p. 90, Vivenot,
+Quellen zur Geschichte der Kaiserpolitik Oesterreichs, i. 185, 208.
+
+[5] Von Sybel, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit, i. 289.
+
+[6] Vivenot, Quellen, i. 372. Buchez et Roux, xiii. 340, xiv. 24.
+
+[7] Haeusser, Deutsche Geschichte, i. 88. Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, i. 78.
+
+[8] Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 46.
+
+[9] Pertz, Leben Stein, ii. 402. Paget, Travels in Hungary, i. 131.
+
+[10] Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn, p. 256. Vivenot, Quellen, i. 133, 165. The
+acquisition of Bavaria was declared by the Austrian Cabinet to be the
+_summum bonum_ of the monarchy.
+
+[11] Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert, iv. 1144.
+
+[12] Carlyle, Friedrich, vi. 667.
+
+[13] Haeusser, i. 197. Hardenberg (Ranke), i. 139. Von Sybel, i. 272.
+
+[14] "The connection with the House of Austria and the present undertaking
+continue to be very unpopular. It is openly said that one half of the
+treasure was uselessly spent at Reichenbach, and that the other half will
+be spent on the present occasion, and that the sovereign will be reduced to
+his former level of Margrave of Brandenburg." Eden, from Berlin; June 19,
+1792. Records: Prussia, vol. 151. "He (Moellendorf) reprobated the alliance
+with Austria, condemning the present interference in the affairs of France
+as ruinous, and censuring as undignified and contrary to the most important
+interests of this country the leaving Russia sole arbitress of the fate of
+Poland. He, however, said, what every Prussian without any exception of
+party will say, that this country can never acquiesce in the establishment
+of a good government in Poland, since in a short time it would rise to a
+very decided superiority," _Id._, July 17. Mr. Cobden's theory that
+the partition of Poland was effected in the interest of good government
+must have caused some surprise at Berlin.
+
+[15] The condition of Mecklenburg is thus described in a letter written by
+Stein during a journey in 1802:--"I found the aspect of the country as
+cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pasture
+or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire labouring class under
+the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built
+farmhouses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the
+whole country, an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my
+spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his
+peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den
+of some wild beast, who devastates even thing about him, and surrounds
+himself with the silence of the grave." Pertz, Leben Stein, i. 192. For a
+more cheerful description of Muenster, see _id._, i. 241.
+
+[16] Perthes, Staatsleben, p. 116. Rigby, Letters from France, p. 215.
+
+[17] Buchez et Roux, xvi. 279. One of the originals of this declaration,
+handed to the British ambassador, is in the London Records: Prussia, vol.
+151.
+
+[18] The accounts of the emigrants sent to England by Lord Elgin, envoy at
+Brussels, and Sir J. Murray, our military attache with Brunswick's army (in
+Records: Flanders, vol. 221) are instructive: "The conduct of the army
+under the Princes of France is universally reprobated. Their appearance in
+dress, in attendants, in preparations, is ridiculous. As an instance,
+however trivial, it may be mentioned that on one of the waggons was written
+_Toilette de Monsieur_. The spirit of vengeance, however, which they
+discover on every occasion is far more serious. Wherever they have passed,
+they have exercised acts of cruelty, in banishing and severely punishing
+those persons who, though probably culpable, had yet been left untouched by
+the Prussian commanders. To such an extent has this been carried that the
+commander at Verdun would not suffer any Frenchman (emigrant) to pass a
+night in the town without a special permission." Sept. 21. After the
+failure of the campaign, Elgin writes of the emigrants: "They every-where
+added to the cruelties for some of which several hussars had been executed:
+carried to its extent the vengeance threatened in the Duke of Brunswick's
+Declaration, in burning whole villages where a shot was fired on them: and
+on the other hand by their self-sufficiency, want of subordination and
+personal disrespect, have drawn upon themselves the contempt of the
+combined armies." Oct. 6. So late as 1796, the exile Louis XVIII. declared
+his intention to restore the "property and rights" (i.e. tithes, feudal
+dues, etc.) of the nobles and clergy, and to punish the men who had
+"committed offences." See Letter to Pichegru, May 4, 1796, in Manuscrit
+Inedit de Louis XVIII., p. 464.
+
+[19] Wordsworth, Prelude, book ix.
+
+[20] The correspondence is in Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn, p. 371. Such was
+the famine in the Prussian camp that Dumouriez sent the King of Prussia
+twelve loaves, twelve pounds of coffee, and twelve pounds of sugar. The
+official account of the campaign is in the _Berlinische Zeitung_ of
+Oct. 11, 1792.
+
+[21] Forster, Werke, vi. 386.
+
+[22] "The very night the news of the late Emperor's (Leopold's) death
+arrived here (Brussels), inflammatory advertisements and invitations to arm
+were distributed." One culprit "belonged to the Choir of St. Gudule: he
+chose the middle of the day, and in the presence of many people posted up a
+paper in the church, exhorting to a general insurrection. The remainder of
+this strange production was the description of a vision he pretended to
+have seen, representing the soul of the late emperor on its way to join
+that of Joseph, already suffering in the other world." Col. Gardiner, March
+20, 1792. Records: Flanders, vol. 220.
+
+[23] Elgin, from Brussels, Nov. 6. "A brisk cannonade has been heard this
+whole forenoon in the direction of Mons. It is at this moment somewhat
+diminished, though not at an end" Nov. 7. "Several messengers have arrived
+from camp in the course of the night, but all the Ministers (I have seen
+them all) deny having received one word of detail.... Couriers have been
+sent this night in every direction to call in all the detachments on the
+frontiers.... The Government is making every arrangement for quitting
+Brussels: their papers are already prepared, their carriages ready." ...
+Then a PS. "A cannonade is distinctly heard again.... All the emigrants
+now here are removing with the utmost haste." Nov. 9th. "The confusion
+throughout the country is extreme. The roads are covered with emigrants,
+and persons of these provinces flying from the French armies," Records:
+Flanders, vol. 222.
+
+[24] In Nov. 1792, Grenville ordered the English envoys at Vienna and
+Berlin to discover, if possible, the real designs of aggrandisement held by
+those Courts. Mr. Straton, at Vienna, got wind of the agreement against
+Poland. "I requested Count Philip Cobenzl" (the Austrian Minister) "that he
+would have the goodness to open himself confidentially to me on the precise
+object which the two allied Courts might have in contemplation. This,
+however, the Count was by no means disposed to do; on the contrary, he went
+round the compass of evasion in order to avoid a direct answer. But
+determined as I was to push the Austrian Minister, I heaped question on
+question, until I forced him to say, blushing, and with evident signs of
+embarrassment, 'Count Stadion' (Ambassador at London) 'will be able to
+satisfy the curiosity of the British Minister, to whatever point it may be
+directed.'" Jan. 20, 1793. Records: Austria, vol. 32. Stadion accordingly
+informed Lord Grenville of the Polish and Bavarian plans. Grenville
+expressed his concern and regret at the aggression on Poland, and gave
+reasons against the Bavarian exchange. To our envoy with the King of
+Prussia Grenville wrote: "It may possibly be the intention of the Courts to
+adopt a plan of indemnifying themselves for the expense of the war by fresh
+acquisitions in Poland, and carrying into execution a new partition of that
+country. You will not fail to explain in the most distinct and pointed
+manner his Majesty's entire disapprobation of such a plan, and his
+determination on no account to concur in any measures which may tend to the
+completion of a design so unjust in itself." Jan. 4, 1793. Records: Army in
+Germany, vol. 437. At Vienna Cobenzl declared, Feb. 9, that Austria could
+not now "even manifest a wish to oppose the projects of Prussia in Poland,
+as in that case his Prussian Majesty would probably withdraw his assistance
+from the French war; nay, perhaps even enter into an alliance with that
+nation and invade Bohemia." Records: Austria, vol. 32.
+
+[25] Auckland, ii. 464. Papers presented to Parliament, 1793. Mr. Oscar
+Browning, in _Fortnightly Review_, Feb., 1883.
+
+[26] Von Sybel, ii. 259. Thugut, Vertrauliche Briefe, i. 17. Letters from
+Brussels, 23rd March in Records: Flanders, vol. 222. "The Huzars are in
+motion all round, so that we hope to have them here to-morrow. Most of the
+French troops who arrived last, and which are mostly peasants armed with
+pikes, are returning home, besides a great number of their volunteers."
+24th March. "At this moment we hear the cannon. The French have just had it
+cry'd in the town that all the tailors who are making coats for the army
+must bring them made or unmade, and be paid directly.... They beat the
+drums to drown the report of the cannon.... You have not a conception of
+the confusion in the town.... This moment passed four Austrians with their
+heads cut to pieces, and one with his eye poked out. The French are
+retiring by the Porte d'Anderlecht." Ostend, April 4th. "This day, before
+two of the clock, twenty-five Austrian huzars enter'd the town while the
+inhabitants were employed burning the tree of liberty."
+
+[27] Mortimer-Ternaux, vii. 412.
+
+[28] Berriat-St.-Prix, La Justice Revolutionnaire, introd.
+
+[29] "The King of Prussia has been educated in the persuasion that the
+execution of that exchange involves the ruin of his family, and he is the
+more sore about it that by the qualified consent which he has given to its
+taking place he has precluded himself from opposing it by arms.
+Accordingly, every idle story which arrives from Munich which tends to
+revive this apprehension makes an impression which I am unable, at the
+first moment, to efface." Lord Yarmouth, from the Prussian camp, Aug. 12,
+1793, Records: Army in Germany, 437. "Marquis Lucchesini, the effectual
+director, is desirous of avoiding every expense and every exertion of the
+troops; of leaving the whole burden of the war on Austria and the other
+combined Powers; and of seeing difficulties multiply in the arrangements
+which the Court of Vienna may wish to form I do not perceive any object
+beyond this; no desire of diminishing the power of France; no system or
+feeling for crushing the opinions, the doctrines, of that country." Elgin,
+May 17. Records: Flanders, vol. 223.
+
+[30] Auckland, iii. 24. Thugut, Vertrauliche Briefe, i. 13. Grenville to
+Eden, Sept. 7th, 1793, Records: Austria, vol. 34: a most important
+historical document, setting out the principles of alliance between England
+and Austria. Austria, if it will abandon the Bavarian exchange, may claim
+annexations on the border of the Netherlands, in Alsace and Lorraine, and
+in the intermediate parts of the frontier of France. England's indemnity
+"must be looked for in the foreign settlements and colonies of France....
+His Majesty has an interest in seeing the House of Austria strengthen
+itself by acquisitions on the French frontier. The Emperor must see with
+pleasure the relative increase of the naval and commercial resources of
+this country beyond those of France." In the face of this paper, it cannot
+be maintained that the war of 1793 was, after the first few months, purely
+defensive on England's part; though no doubt Pitt's notion of an indemnity
+was fair and modest in comparison with the schemes and acts of his enemy.
+
+[31] The first mention of Bonaparte's name in any British document
+occurs in an account of the army of Toulon sent to London in Dec. 1793
+by a spy. "Les capitaines d'artillerie, eleve dans cet etat, connoissent
+leur service et ont tous du talens. Ils preferoient l'employer pour une
+meilleure cause.... Le sixterne, nomme Bonaparte, tres republicain, a
+ete tue sous les murs de Toulon." Records: France, vol. 599. Austria
+undertook to send 5,000 troops from Lombardy to defend Toulon, but broke
+its engagement. "You will wait on M. Thugut (the Austrian Minister) and
+claim in the most peremptory terms the performance of this engagement.
+It would be very offensive to his Majesty that a request made so
+repeatedly on his part should be neglected; but it is infinitely more so
+to see that, when this country is straining every nerve for the common
+cause, a body of troops for the want of which Toulon may possibly at
+this moment be lost, have remained inactive at Milan. You will admit of
+no further excuses." Grenville to Eden, Nov. 24, 1793. Thugut's written
+answer was, "The Emperor gave the order of march at a moment when the
+town of Toulon had no garrison. Its preservation then seemed matter of
+pressing necessity, but now all inquietude on this score has happily
+disappeared. The troops of different nations already assembled at Toulon
+put the place out of all danger." Records: Austria, vol. 35.
+
+[32] Haeusser, i. 482. "La Prusse," wrote Thugut at this time, "parviendra
+au moyen de son alliance a nous faire plus de mal qu'elle ne nous a fait
+par les guerres les plus sanglantes." Briefe, i. 12, 15. Thugut even
+proposed that England should encourage the Poles to resist. Eden, April
+15; Records: Austria, vol. 33.
+
+[33] The English Government found that Thugut was from the first
+indifferent to their own aim, the restoration of the Bourbons, or
+establishment of some orderly government in France. In so far as he
+concerned himself with the internal affairs of France, he hoped rather for
+continued dissension, as facilitating the annexation of French territory by
+Austria. "Qu'on profite de ce conflit des partis en France pour tacher de
+se rendre maitre des forteresses, afin de faire la loi au parti qui aura
+prevalu, et l'obliger d'acheter la paix et la protection de l'empereur, en
+lui cedant telle partie de ses conquetes que S.M. jugera de sa covenance."
+Briefe, i. 13.
+
+[34] The despatches of Lord Yarmouth from the Prussian and Austrian
+headquarters, from July 17 to Nov. 22, 1793, give a lively picture both of
+the military operations and of the political intrigues of this period. They
+are accompanied by the MS. journal of the Austrian army from Sept. 15 to
+Dec. 14, each copy apparently with Wurmser's autograph, and by the original
+letter of the Prussian Minister, Lucchesini, to Lord Yarmouth, announcing
+the withdrawal of Prussia from the war, "M. de Lucchesini read it to me
+very hastily, and seemed almost ashamed of a part of its contents."
+Records: Army in Germany, vols. 437, 438, 439.
+
+[35] Hardenberg (Ranke), i. 181, Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, i. 10.
+
+[36] Elgin reports after this engagement, May 1st, 1794--"The French army
+appears to continue much what it has hitherto been, vigorous and
+persevering where (as in villages and woods) the local advantages are of a
+nature to supply the defects of military science; weak and helpless beyond
+belief where cavalry can act, and manoeuvres are possible.... The magazines
+of the army are stored, and the provisions regularly given out to the
+troops, and good in quality. Indeed, it is singular to observe in all the
+villages where we have been forward forage, etc., in plenty, and all the
+country cultivated as usual. The inhabitants, however, have retired with
+the French army; and to that degree that the tract we have lately taken
+possession of is absolutely deserted.... The execution of Danton has
+produced no greater effect in the army than other executions, and we have
+found many papers on those who fell in the late actions treating it with
+ridicule, and as a source of joy." Records: Flanders, 226. "I am in hopes
+to hear from you on the subject of the French prisoners, as to where I am
+to apply for the money I advance for their subsistence. They are a great
+number of them almost naked, some entirely so. It is absolutely shocking to
+humanity to see them. I would purchase some coarse clothing for those that
+are in the worst state, but know not how far I should be authorised. They
+are mostly old men and boys." Consul Harward, at Ostend, March 4th,
+_id_.
+
+[37] These events are the subject of controversy. See Hueffer, Oestreich und
+Preussen, p. 62 Von Sybel, iii. 138. Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 38. The old
+belief, defended by Von Sybel, was that Thugut himself had determined upon
+the evacuation of Belgium, and treacherously deprived Coburg of forces for
+its defence. But, apart from other evidence, the tone of exasperation that
+runs through Thugut's private letters is irreconcilable with this theory.
+Lord Elgin, whose reports are used by Von Sybel, no doubt believed that
+Thugut was playing false; but he was a bad judge, being in the hands of
+Thugut's opponents, especially General Mack, whom he glorifies in the most
+absurd way. The other English envoy in Belgium, Lord Yarmouth, reported in
+favour of Thugut's good faith in this matter, and against military
+intriguers. Records: Army in Germany, vol. 440. A letter of Prince
+Waldeck's in Thugut, i. 387, and a conversation between Mack and Sir Morton
+Eden, on Feb. 3rd, 1797, reported by the latter in Records: Austria, vol.
+48, appear to fix the responsibility for the evacuation of Belgium on these
+two generals, Waldeck and Mack, and on the Emperor's confidential military
+adviser, Rollin.
+
+[38] "Should the French come they will find this town perfectly empty.
+Except my own, I do not think there are three houses in Ostend with a bed
+in them. So general a panic I never witnessed." June 30th.--"To remain here
+alone would be a wanton sacrifice. God knows 'tis an awful stroke to me to
+leave a place just as I began to be comfortably settled." Consul Harward:
+Records: Army in Germany, vol. 440. "All the English are arrested in
+Ostend; the men are confined in the Capuchin convent, and the women in the
+Convent des Soeurs Blancs. All the Flamands from the age of 17 to 32 are
+forced to go for soldiers. At Bruges the French issued an order for 800 men
+to present themselves. Thirty only came, in consequence of which they rang
+a bell on the Grand Place, and the inhabitants thinking that it was some
+ordinance, quitted their houses to hear it, when they were surrounded by
+the French soldiers, and upwards of 1,000 men secured, gentle and simple,
+who were all immediately set to work on the canals." Mr. W. Poppleton,
+Flushing, Sept. 4. Records: Flanders, vol. 227.
+
+[39] Malmesbury, ii. 125. Von Sybel, iii. 168. Grenville made Coburg's
+dismissal a _sine qua non_ of the continuance of English co-operation.
+Instructions to Lord Spencer, July 19, 1794. Records: Austria, 36. But for
+the Austrian complaints against the English, see Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 50.
+
+[40] Schlosser, xv. 203: borne out by the Narrative of an Officer, printed
+in Annual Register, 1795, p. 143.
+
+[41] Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, iii. 59, 512. Martens, Recueil des Traites,
+vi. 45, 52. Hardenberg, i. 287. Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 32. "Le Roi de
+Prusse," wrote the Empress Catherine, "est une mechante bete et un grand
+cochon." Prussia made no attempt to deliver the unhappy son of Louis XVI.
+from his captivity.
+
+[42] The British Government had formed the most sanguine estimate of the
+strength of the Royalist movement in France. "I cannot let your servant
+return without troubling you with these few lines to conjure you to use
+every possible effort to give life and vigour to the Austrian Government at
+this critical moment. Strongly as I have spoken in my despatch of the
+present state of France, I have said much less than my information, drawn
+from various quarters, and applying to almost every part of France, would
+fairly warrant. We can never hope that the circumstances, as far as they
+regard the state of France, can be more favourable than they now are. For
+God's sake enforce these points with all the earnestness which I am sure
+you will feel upon them." Grenville to Eden, April 17, 1795; Records:
+Austria, vol. 41. After the failure of the expedition, the British
+Government made the grave charge against Thugut that while he was
+officially sending Clerfayt pressing orders to advance, he secretly told
+him to do nothing. "It is in vain to reason with the Austrian Ministers on
+the folly and ill faith of a system which they have been under the
+necessity of concealing from you, and which they will probably endeavour to
+disguise" Grenville to Eden, Oct., 1795; _id_., vol. 43. This charge,
+repeated by historians, is disproved by Thugut's private letters. Briefe,
+i. 221, _seq_. No one more bitterly resented Clerfayt's inaction.
+
+[43] The documents relating to the expedition to Quiberon, with several
+letters of D'Artois, Charette, and the Vendean leaders, are in Records:
+France, vol. 600.
+
+[44] Von Sybel, iii. 537. Buchez et Roux, xxxvi. 485.
+
+[45] For the police interpretation of the _Zauberfloete_, see Springer,
+Geschichte Oesterreichs, vol. i. p. 49.
+
+[46] Zobi, Storia Civile della Toscana, i. 284.
+
+[47] Galanti, Descrizione delle Sicilie, 1786, i. 279. He adds, "The
+Samnites and the Lucanians could not have shown so horrible a spectacle,
+because they had no feudal laws." Galanti's book gives perhaps the best
+idea of the immense task faced by monarchy in the eighteenth century in
+its struggle against what he justly calls "gli orrori del governo
+feudale." Nothing but a study of these details of actual life described by
+eye-witnesses can convey an adequate impression of the completeness and the
+misery of the feudal order in the more backward countries of Europe till
+far down in the eighteenth century. There is a good anonymous account of
+Sicily in 1810 in Castlereagh, 8, 317.
+
+[48] Correspondance de Napoleon, i. 260. Botta, lib. vi. Despatches of Col.
+Graham, British attache with the Austrian army, in Records: Italian States,
+vol. 57. These most interesting letters, which begin on May 19, show the
+discord and suspicion prevalent from the first in the Austrian army.
+"Beaulieu has not met with cordial co-operation from his own generals,
+still less from the Piedmontese. He accuses them of having chosen to be
+beat in order to bring about a peace promised in January last." "Beaulieu
+was more violent than ever against his generals who have occasioned the
+failure of his plans. He said nine of them were cowards. I believe some of
+them are ill-affected to the cause." June 15.--"Many of the officers
+comfort themselves with thinking that defeat must force peace, and others
+express themselves in terms of despair." July 25,--Beaulieu told Graham
+that if Bonaparte had pushed on after the battle of Lodi, he might have
+gone straight into Mantua. The preparations for defence were made later.
+
+[49] Thugut, Briefe i. 107. A correspondence on this subject was carried on
+in cypher between Thugut and Ludwig Cobenzl, Austrian Ambassador at St.
+Petersburg in 1793-4. During Thugut's absence in Belgium, June, 1794,
+Cobenzl sent a duplicate despatch, not in cypher, to Vienna. Old Prince
+Kaunitz, the ex-minister, heard that a courier had arrived from St
+Petersburg, and demanded the despatch at the Foreign Office "like a
+dictator." It was given to him. "Ainsi," says Thugut, "adieu au secret qui
+depuis un an a ete conserve avec tant de soins!"
+
+[50] Wurmser's reports are in Vivenot, Clerfayt, p. 477. Graham's daily
+despatches from the Austrian head-quarters give a vivid picture of these
+operations, and of the sudden change from exultation to despair. Aug.
+1.--"I have the honour to inform your lordship that the siege of Mantua is
+raised, the French having retreated last night with the utmost
+precipitation." Aug. 2.--"The Austrians are in possession of all the French
+mortars and cannon, amounting to about 140, with 190,000 shells and bombs;
+the loss of the Imperial army is inconsiderable." Aug. 5.--"The rout of
+this day has sadly changed the state of affairs. There are no accounts of
+General Quosdanovich." Aug. 9.--"Our loss in men and cannon was much
+greater than was imagined. I had no idea of the possibility of the extent
+of such misfortunes as have overwhelmed us" Aug. 17.--"It is scarcely
+possible to describe the state of disorder and discouragement that prevails
+in the army. Were I free from apprehension, about the fate of my letter"
+(he had lost his baggage and his cypher in it), "I should despair of
+finding language adequate to convey a just idea of the discontent of the
+officers with General Wurmser. From generals to subalterns the universal
+language is 'qu'il faut faire la paix, car nous ne savons pas faire la
+guerre.'" Aug. 18.--"Not only the commander-in-chief, but the greatest
+number of the generals are objects of contempt and ridicule." Aug. 27.--"I
+do not exaggerate when I say that I have met with instances of down-right
+dotage." "It was in general orders that wine should be distributed to the
+men previous to the attack of the 29th. There was some difficulty in
+getting it up to Monte Baldo. General Bayolitzy observed that 'it did not
+signify, for the men might get the value in money afterwards.' The men
+marched at six in the evening without it, to attack at daybreak, and
+received four kreutzers afterwards. This is a fact I can attest. In action
+I saw officers sent on urgent messages going at a foot's pace: they say
+that their horses are half starved, and that they cannot afford to kill
+them."
+
+[51] Grundsaetze (Archduke Charles), ii. 202. Bulletins in Wiener Zeitung,
+June-Oct., 1796.
+
+[52] Martens, vi. 59.
+
+[53] This seems to me to be the probable truth about Austria's policy in
+1796, of which opposite views will be found in Haeusser, vol. ii. ch. 1-3,
+and in Hueffer, Oestreich und Preussen, p. 142. Thugut professed in 1793 to
+have given up the project of the Bavarian exchange in deference to England.
+He admitted, however, soon afterwards, that he had again been pressing the
+King of Prussia to consent to it, but said that this was a ruse, intended
+to make Prussia consent to Austria's annexing a large piece of France
+instead. Eden, Sept., 1793; Records: Austria, vol. 34. The incident shows
+the difficulty of getting at the truth in diplomacy.
+
+[54] Yet the Government had had warning of this in a series of striking
+reports sent by one of Lord Elgin's spies during the Reign of Terror.
+"Jamais la France ne fut cultivee comme elle l'est. Il n'y a pas un arpent
+qui ne soit ensemence, sauf dans les lieux ou operent les armees
+belligerantes. Cette culture universelle a ete forcee par les Directrices la
+ou on ne la faisait pas volontairement." June 8, 1794; Records: Flanders,
+vol. 226. Elgin had established a line of spies from Paris to the Belgian
+frontier. Every one of these persons was arrested by the Revolutionary
+authorities. Elgin then fell in with the writer of the above, whose name is
+concealed, and placed him on the Swiss frontier. He was evidently a person
+thoroughly familiar with both civil and military administration. He appears
+to have talked to every Frenchman who entered Switzerland; and his reports
+contain far the best information that readied England during the Reign of
+Terror, contradicting the Royalists, who said that the war was only kept up
+by terrorism. He warned the English Government that the French nation in a
+mass was on the side of the Revolution, and declared that the downfall of
+Robespierre and the terrorists would make no difference in the prosecution
+of the war. The Government seems to have paid no attention to his reports,
+if indeed they were ever read.
+
+[55] Correspondance de Napoleon, ii. 28. Thugut, about this time, formed
+the plan of annexing Bologna and Ferrara to Austria, and said that if this
+result could be achieved, the French attack upon the Papal States would be
+no bad matter. See the instructions to Allvintzy, in Vivenot, Clerfayt, p.
+511, which also contain the first Austrian orders to imprison Italian
+innovators, the beginning of Austria's later Italian policy.
+
+[56] Wurmser had orders to break out southwards into the Papal States.
+"These orders he (Thugut) knew had reached the Marshal, but they were also
+known to the enemy, as a cadet of Strasoldo's regiment, who was carrying
+the duplicate, had been taken prisoner, and having been seen to swallow a
+ball of wax, in which the order was wrapped up, he was immediately put to
+death and the paper taken out of his stomach." Eden, Jan., 1797; Records:
+Austria, vol. 48. Colonel Graham, who had been shut up in Mantua since
+Sept. 10, escaped on Dec 17, and restored communication between Wurmser and
+Allvintzy. He was present at the battle of Rivoli, which is described in
+his despatches.
+
+[57] "We expect every hour to hear of the entry of the Neapolitan troops
+and the declaration of a religious war. Every preparation has been made for
+such an event." Graves to Lord Grenville, Oct. 1, 1796; Records; Rome, vol.
+56.
+
+[58] "The clamours for peace have become loud and importunate. His Imperial
+Majesty is constantly assailed by all his Ministers, M. de Thugut alone
+excepted, and by all who approach his person. Attempts are even made to
+alarm him with a dread of insurrection. In the midst of these calamities M.
+de Thugut retains his firmness of mind, and continues to struggle against
+the united voice of the nobility and the numerous and trying adversities
+that press upon him." Eden, April 1. "The confusion at the army exceeds the
+bounds of belief. Had Bonaparte continued his progress hither (Vienna), no
+doubt is entertained that he might have entered the place without
+opposition. That, instead of risking this enterprise, he should have
+stopped and given the Austrians six days to recover from their alarm and to
+prepare for defence, is a circumstance which it is impossible to account
+for." April 12. "He" (Mack) "said that when this place was threatened by
+the enemy, Her Imperial Majesty broke in upon the Emperor while in
+conference with his Minister, and, throwing herself and her children at his
+feet, determined His Majesty to open the negotiation which terminated in
+the shameful desertion of his ally." Aug. 16; Records: Austria, vols. 49,
+50. Thugut subsequently told Lord Minto that if he could have laid his hand
+upon L500,000 in cash to stop the run on the Bank of Vienna, the war would
+have been continued, in which case he believed he would have surrounded
+Bonaparte's army.
+
+[59] The cession of the Rhenish Provinces was not, as usually stated,
+contained in the Preliminaries. Corr. de Napoleon, 2, 497; Hueffer, p. 259,
+where the details of the subsequent negotiations will be found.
+
+[60] Gohier, Memoires i. Carnot, Reponse a Bailleul. Correspondance de
+Napoleon, ii. 188. Miot de Melito, ch. vi.
+
+[61] Martens, Traites, vi. 420; Thugut, Briefe, ii. 64. These letters
+breathe a fire and passion rare among German statesmen of that day, and
+show the fine side of Thugut's character. The well-known story of the
+destruction of Cobenzl's vase by Bonaparte at the last sitting, with the
+words, "Thus will I dash the Austrian Monarchy to pieces," is mythical.
+Cobenzl's own account of the scene is as follows;--"Bonaparte, excited by
+not having slept for two nights, emptied glass after glass of punch. When I
+explained with the greatest composure, Bonaparte started up in a violent
+rage, and poured out a flood of abuse, at the same time scratching his name
+illegibly at the foot of the statement which he had handed in as protocol.
+Then without waiting for our signatures, he put on his hat in the
+conference-room itself, and left us. Until he was in the street he
+continued to vociferate in a manner that could only be ascribed to
+intoxication, though Clarke and the rest of his suite, who were waiting in
+the hall, did their best to restrain him." "He behaved as if he had escaped
+from a lunatic asylum. His own people are all agreed about this." Hueffer,
+Oestreich und Preussen, p. 453.
+
+[62] Haeusser, Deutsche Geschichte, ii. 147. Vivenot, Rastadter Congress, p.
+17. Von Lang, Memoiren, i. 33. It is alleged that the official who drew up
+this document had not been made acquainted with the secret clauses.
+
+[63] "Tout annonce qu'il sera de toute impossibilite de finir avec ces
+gueux de Francais autrement que par moyens de fermete." Thugut, ii. 105.
+For the negotiation at Seltz, see Historische Zeitschrift, xxiii. 27.
+
+[64] Botta, lib. xiii. Letters of Mr. J. Denham and others in Records:
+Sicily, vol. 44.
+
+[65] Nelson Despatches, iii. 48.
+
+[66] Bernhardi, Geschichte Russlands, ii. 2, 382.
+
+[67] "Quel bonheur, quelle gloire, quelle consolation pour cette grande et
+illustre nation! Que je vous suis obligee, reconnaissante! J'ai pleure et
+embrasse mes enfans, mon mari. Si jamais on fait un portrait du brave
+Nelson je le veux avoir dans ma chambre. Hip, Hip, Hip, Ma chere Miladi je
+suis folle de joye." Queen of Naples to Lady Hamilton, Sept. 4, 1798;
+Records: Sicily, vol. 44. The news of the overwhelming victory of the Nile
+seems literally to have driven people out of their senses at Naples. "Lady
+Hamilton fell apparently dead, and is not yet (Sept 25) perfectly recovered
+from her severe bruises." Nelson Despatches, 3, 130. On Nelson's arrival,
+"up flew her ladyship, and exclaiming, 'O God, is it possible?' she fell
+into my arms more dead than alive." It has been urged in extenuation of
+Nelson's subsequent cruelties that the contagion of this frenzy, following
+the effects of a severe wound in the head, had deprived his mind of its
+balance. "My head is ready to split, and I am always so sick." Aug. 10. "It
+required all the kindness of my friends to set me up." Sept. 25.
+
+[68] Sir W. Hamilton's despatch, Nov. 28, in Records: Sicily, vol. 44,
+where there are originals of most of the Neapolitan proclamations, etc., of
+this time. Mack had been a famous character since the campaign of 1793.
+Elgin's letters to Lord Grenville from the Netherlands, private as well as
+public, are full of extravagant praise of him. In July, 1796, Graham writes
+from the Italian army: "In the opinion of all here, the greatest general in
+Europe is the Quartermaster Mack, who was in England in 1793. Would to God
+he was marching, and here now." Mack, on the other hand, did not grudge
+flattery to the English:--"Je perdrais partout espoir et patience si je
+n'avais pas vu pour mon bonheur et ma consolation l'adorable Triumvirat"
+(Pitt, Grenville, Dundas) "qui surveille a Londres nos affaires. Soyez, mon
+cher ami, l'organe de ma profonde veneration envers ces Ministres
+incomparables." Mack to Elgin, 23. Feb., 1794. The British Government was
+constantly pressing Thugut to make Mack commander-in chief. Thugut, who had
+formed a shrewd notion of Mack's real quality, gained much obloquy by his
+steady refusal.
+
+[69] Signed by Mack. Colletta, p. 176. Mack's own account of the campaign
+is in Vivenot, Rastadter Congress, p. 83.
+
+[70] Nelson, iii. 210: Hamilton's despatch, Dec. 28, 1798, in Records;
+Sicily, vol. 44. "It was impossible to prevent a suspicion getting abroad
+of the intention of the Royal Family to make their escape. However, the
+secret was so well kept that we contrived to get their Majesties' treasure
+in jewels and money, to a very considerable extent, on board of H.M. ship
+the _Vanguard_ the 20th of December, and Lord Nelson went on the next
+night by a secret passage into the Palace, and brought off in his boats
+their Sicilian Majesties and all the Royal Family. It was not discovered at
+Naples, until very late at night, that the Royal Family had escaped.... On
+the morning of Christmas Day, some hours before we got into Palermo, Prince
+Albert, one of their Majesties' sons, six years of age, was, either from
+fright or fatigue, taken with violent convulsions, and died in the arms of
+Lady Hamilton, the Queen, the Princesses, and women attendants being in
+such confusion as to be incapable of affording any assistance."
+
+[71] See Helfert, Der Rastatter Gesandtenmord, and Sybel's article thereon,
+in Hist. Zeitschrift, vol. 32.
+
+[72] Danilevsky-Miliutin, ii. 214. Despatch of Lord W. Bentinck from the
+allied head-quarters at Piacenza, June 23, in Records: Italian States, vol.
+58. Bentinck arrived a few days before this battle; his despatches cover
+the whole North-Italian campaign from this time.
+
+[73] Nelson Despatches, iii. 447; Sir W. Hamilton's Despatch of July 14, in
+Records: Sicily, vol. 45. Helfert, Koenigin Karolina, p. 38. Details of the
+proscription in Colletta, v. 6. According to Hamilton, some of the
+Republicans in the forts had actually gone to their homes before Nelson
+pronounced the capitulation void. "When we anchored in the Bay, the 24th of
+June, the capitulation of the castles had in some measure taken place.
+Fourteen large polacks had taken on board out of the castles the most
+conspicuous and criminal of the Neapolitan rebels that had chosen to go to
+Toulon; the others had already been permitted to return to their homes." If
+this is so, Nelson's pretext that the capitulation had not been executed
+was a mere afterthought. Helfert is mistaken in calling the letter or
+proclamation of July 8th repudiating the treaty, a forgery. It is perfectly
+genuine. It was published by Nelson in the King's name, and is enclosed in
+Hamilton's despatch. Hamilton's exultations about himself and his wife, and
+their share in these events, are sorry reading. "In short, Lord Nelson and
+I, with Emma, have carried affairs to this happy crisis. Emma is really the
+Queen's bosom friend.... You may imagine, when we three agree, what real
+business is done.... At least I shall end my diplomatical career
+gloriously, as you will see by what the King of Naples writes from this
+ship to his Minister in London, owing the recovery of his kingdom to the
+King's fleet, and Lord Nelson and me." (Aug. 4, _id_.) Hamilton states the
+number of persons in prison at Naples on Sept. 12 to be above eight
+thousand.
+
+[74] Castlereagh, iv.; Records: Austria, 56. Lord Minto had just succeeded
+Sir Morton Eden as ambassador. The English Government was willing to grant
+the House of Hapsburg almost anything for the sake "of strengthening that
+barrier which the military means and resources of Vienna can alone oppose
+against the future enterprises of France." Grenville to Minto, May 13,
+1800. Though they felt some regard for the rights of the King of Piedmont,
+Pitt and Grenville were just as ready to hand over the Republic of Genoa to
+the Hapsburgs as Bonaparte had been to hand over Venice; in fact, they
+looked forward to the destruction of the Genoese State with avowed
+pleasure, because it easily fell under the influence of France. Their
+principal anxiety was that if Austria "should retain Venice and Genoa and
+possibly acquire Leghorn," it should grant England an advantageous
+commercial treaty. Grenville to Minto, Feb. 8, 1800; Castlereagh, v. 3-11.
+
+[75] Lord Mulgrave to Grenville, Sept. 12, 1799; Records: Army of
+Switzerland, vol. 80. "Suvaroff opened himself to me in the most unreserved
+manner. He began by stating that he had been called at a very advanced
+period of life from his retirement, where his ample fortune and honours
+placed him beyond the allurement of any motives of interest. Attachment to
+his sovereign and zeal for his God inspired him with the hope and the
+expectation of conquests. He now found himself under very different
+circumstances. He found himself surrounded by the parasites or spies of
+Thugut, men at his devotion, creatures of his power: an army bigoted to a
+defensive system, afraid even to pursue their successes when that system
+had permitted them to obtain any; he had to encounter the further check of
+a Government at Vienna averse to enterprise, etc."
+
+[76] Miliutin, 2, 20, 3, 186; Minto, Aug. 10, 1799; Records: Austria, vol.
+56. "I had no sooner mentioned this topic (Piedmont) than I perceived I had
+touched a very delicate point. M. de Thugut's manner changed instantly from
+that of coolness and civility to a great show of warmth attended with some
+sharpness. He became immediately loud and animated, and expressed chagrin
+at the invitation sent to the King of Sardinia.... He considers the
+conquest of Piedmont as one made by Austria of an enemy's country. He
+denies that the King of Sardinia can be considered as an ally or as a
+friend, or even as a neuter; and, besides imputing a thousand instances of
+ill-faith to that Court, relies on the actual alliance made by it with the
+French Republic by which the King of Sardinia had appropriated to himself
+part of the Emperor's dominions in Lombardy, an offence which, I perceive,
+will not be easily forgotten.... I mention these circumstances to show the
+degree of passion which the Court of Vienna mixes with this discussion."
+Minto answered Thugut's invective with the odd remark "that perhaps in the
+present extraordinary period the most rational object of this war was to
+restore the integrity of the moral principle both in civil and political
+life, and that this principle of justice should take the lead in his mind
+of those considerations of temporary convenience which in ordinary times
+might not have escaped his notice." Thugut then said "that the Emperor of
+Russia had desisted from his measure of the King of Sardinia's immediate
+recall, leaving the time of that return to the Emperor." On the margin of
+the despatch, against this sentence, is written in pencil, in Lord
+Grenville's handwriting, "I am persuaded this is not true."
+
+[77] Miliutin, 3, 117. And so almost verbatim in a conversation described
+in Eden's despatch, Aug. 31 Records: Austria, vol. 55. "M. de Thugut's
+answer was evidently dictated by a suspicion rankling in his mind that the
+Netherlands might be made a means of aggrandisement for Prussia. His
+jealousy and aversion to that Power are at this moment more inveterate than
+I have before seen them. It is probable that he may have some idea of
+establishing there the Great Duke of Tuscany."
+
+[78] Thugut's territorial policy did actually make him propose to abolish
+the Papacy not only as a temporal Power, but as a religious institution.
+"Baron Thugut argued strongly on the possibility of doing without a Pope,
+and of each sovereign taking on himself the function of head of the
+National Church, as in England. I said that as a Protestant, I could not be
+supposed to think the authority of the Bishop of Rome necessary; but that
+in the present state of religious opinion, and considering the only
+alternative in those matters, viz. the subsistence of the Roman Catholic
+faith or the extinction of Christianity itself, I preferred, though a
+Protestant, the Pope to the Goddess of Reason. However, the mind of Baron
+Thugut is not open to any reasoning of a general nature when it is put in
+competition with conquest or acquisition of territory." Minto to Grenville,
+Oct. 22, 1799; Records: Austria, vol. 57. The suspicions of Austria current
+at the Neapolitan Court are curiously shown in the Nelson Correspondence.
+Nelson writes to Minto (Aug. 20) at Vienna: "For the sake of the civilised
+world, let us work together, and as the best act of our lives manage to
+hang Thugut ... As you are with Thugut, your penetrating mind will discover
+the villain in all his actions.... That Thugut is caballing.... Pray keep
+an eye upon the rascal, and you will soon find what I say is true. Let us
+hang these three miscreants, and all will go smooth." Suvaroff was not more
+complimentary. "How can that desk-worm, that night-owl, direct an army from
+his dusky nest, even if he had the sword of Scanderbeg?" (Sept. 3.)
+
+[79] Miliutin, iii. 37; Bentinck, Aug. 16, from the battle-field; Records:
+Italian States, vol. 58. His letter ends "I must apologise to your Lordship
+for the appearance of this despatch" (it is on thin Italian paper and
+almost illegible): "we" (_i.e._, Suvaroff's staff) "have had the misfortune
+to have had our baggage plundered by the Cossacks."
+
+[80] Every capable soldier saw the ruinous mischief of the Archduke's
+withdrawal. "Not only are all prospects of our making any progress in
+Switzerland at an end, but the chance of maintaining the position now
+occupied is extremely precarious. The jealousy and mistrust that exists
+between the Austrians and Russians is inconceivable. I shall not pretend to
+offer an opinion on what might be the most advantageous arrangement for the
+army of Switzerland, but it is certain that none can be so bad as that
+which at present exists." Colonel Crauford, English military envoy, Sept.
+5, 1799; Records: Army of Switzerland, vol. 79. The subsequent Operations
+of Korsakoff are described in despatches of Colonel Ramsay and Lord
+Mulgrave, _id_. vol. 80, 81, Conversations with the Archduke Charles
+in those of Mr. Wickham, _id_. vol. 77.
+
+[81] The despatches of Colonel Clinton, English attache with Suvaroff, are
+in singular contrast to the highly-coloured accounts of this retreat common
+in histories. Of the most critical part he only says: "On the 6th the army
+passed the Panix mountain, which the snow that had fallen during the last
+week had rendered dangerous, and several horses and mules were lost on the
+march." He expresses the poorest opinion of Suvaroff and his officers: "The
+Marshal is entirely worn out and incapable of any exertion: he will not
+suffer the subject of the indiscipline of his army to be mentioned to him.
+He is popular with his army because he puts no check whatever in its
+licentiousness. His honesty is now his only remaining good quality."
+Records: Army of Switzerland, vol. 80. The elaborate plan for Suvaroff's
+and Korsakoff's combined movements, made as if Switzerland had been an open
+country and Massena's army a flock of sheep, was constructed by the
+Austrian colonel Weyrother, the same person who subsequently planned the
+battle of Austerlitz. On learning the plan from Suvaroff, Lord Mulgrave,
+who was no great genius, wrote to London demonstrating its certain failure,
+and predicting almost exactly the events that took place.
+
+[82] Miot de Melito, ch. ix. Lucien Bonaparte, Revolution de Brumaire, p.
+31.
+
+[83] Law of Feb. 17, 1800 (28 Pluvioese, viii.).
+
+[84] M. Thiers, Feb. 21, 1872.
+
+[85] Parl. Hist, xxxiv. 1198. Thugut, Briefe ii. 445.
+
+[86] Memorial du Depot de la Guerre, 1826, iv. 268. Bentinck's despatch,
+June 16; Records: Italian States, vol. 59.
+
+[87] Thugut, Briefe ii. 227, 281, 393; Minto's despatch, Sept. 24, 1800;
+Records: Austria, vol. 60. "The Emperor was in the act of receiving a
+considerable subsidy for a vigorous prosecution of the war at the very
+moment when he was clandestinely and in person making the most abject
+submission to the common enemy. Baron Thugut was all yesterday under the
+greatest uneasiness concerning the event which he had reason to apprehend,
+but which was not yet certain. He still retained, however, a slight hope,
+from the apparent impossibility of anyone's committing such an act of
+infamy and folly. I never saw him or any other man so affected as he was
+when he communicated this transaction to me to-day. I said that these
+fortresses being demanded as pledges of sincerity, the Emperor should have
+given on the same principle the arms and ammunition of the army. Baron
+Thugut added that after giving up the soldiers' muskets, the clothes would
+be required off their backs, and that if the Emperor took pains to acquaint
+the world that he would not defend his crown, there would not be wanting
+those who would take it from his head, and perhaps his head with it. He
+became so strongly affected that, in laying hold of my hand to express the
+strong concern he felt at the notion of having committed me and abused the
+confidence I had reposed in his counsels, he burst into tears and literally
+wept. I mention these details because they confirm the assurance that every
+part of these feeble measures has either been adopted against his opinion
+or executed surreptitiously and contrary to the directions he had given."
+After the final collapse of Austria, Minto writes of Thugut: "He never for
+a moment lost his presence of mind or his courage, nor ever bent to weak
+and unbecoming counsels. And perhaps this can be said of him alone in this
+whole empire." Jan. 3, 1801, _id._
+
+[88] Martens, vii. 296.
+
+[89] Koch und Schoell, Histoire des Traites, vi. 6. Nelson Despatches, iv.
+299.
+
+[90] De Clercq, Traites de la France i. 484.
+
+[91] Parl. Hist., Nov. 3, 1801.
+
+[92] Gagern, Mein Antheil, i. 119. He protests that he never carried the
+dog. The waltz was introduced about this time at Paris by Frenchmen
+returning from Germany, which gave occasion to the _mot_ that the
+French had annexed even the national dance of the Germans.
+
+[93] Perthes, Politische Zustaende, i. 311.
+
+[94] Koch und Schoell, vi. 247. Beer, Zehn Jahre Oesterreichischer Politik,
+p. 35 Haeusser, ii. 398.
+
+[95] Perthes, Politische Zustaende, ii. 402, _seq_.
+
+[96] Friedrich, Geschichte des Vatikanischen Konzils, i. 27, 174.
+
+[97] Pertz, Leben Stein, i. 257. Seeley's Stein, i. 125.
+
+[98] The first hand account of the formation of the Code Napoleon, with
+the Proces Verbal of the Council of State and the principal reports,
+speeches, etc., made in the Tribunate and the Legislative Bodies, is to
+be found in the work of Baron Locre, "La Legislation de la France,"
+published at Paris in 1827. Locre was Secretary of the Council of State
+under the Consulate and the Empire, and possessed a quantity of records
+which had not been published before 1827. The Proces Verbal, though
+perhaps not always faithful, contains the only record of Napoleon's own
+share in the discussions of the Council of State.
+
+[99] The statement, so often repeated, that the Convention prohibited
+Christian worship, or "abolished Christianity," in France, is a fiction.
+Throughout the Reign of Terror the Convention maintained the State Church
+as established by the Constituent Assembly in 1791. Though the salaries of
+the clergy fell into arrear, the Convention rejected a proposal to cease
+paying them. The non-juring priests were condemned by the Convention to
+transportation, and were liable to be put to death if they returned to
+France. But where churches were profaned, or constitutional priests
+molested, it was the work of local bodies or of individual Conventionalists
+on mission, not of the law. The Commune of Paris shut up most, but not all,
+of the churches in Paris. Other local bodies did the same. After the Reign
+of Terror ended, the Convention adopted the proposal which it had rejected
+before, and abolished the State salary of the clergy (Sept. 20th, 1794).
+This merely placed all sects on a level. But local fanatics were still busy
+against religion; and the Convention accordingly had to pass a law (Feb.
+23, 1795), forbidding all interference with Christian services. This law
+required that worship should not be held in a distinctive building (_i.e._
+church), nor in the open air. Very soon afterwards the Convention (May 23)
+permitted the churches to be used for worship. The laws against non-juring
+priests were not now enforced, and a number of churches in Paris were
+actually given up to non-juring priests. The Directory was inclined to
+renew the persecution of this class in 1796, but the Assemblies would not
+permit it; and in July, 1797, the Council of Five Hundred passed a motion
+totally abolishing the legal penalties of non-jurors. This was immediately
+followed by the coup d'etat of Fructidor.
+
+[100] Gregoire, Memoires, ii. 87. Annales de la Religion, x. 441;
+Pressense, L'Eglise et la Revolution, p. 359.
+
+[101] Papers presented to Parliament, 1802-3, p. 95.
+
+[102] "The King and his Ministers are in the greatest distress and
+embarrassment. The latter do not hesitate to avow it, and the King has for
+the last week shown such evident symptoms of dejection that the least
+observant could not but remark it. He has expressed himself most feelingly
+upon the unfortunate predicament in which he finds himself. He would
+welcome the hand that should assist him and the voice that should give him
+courage to extricate himself."--F. Jackson's despatch from Berlin, May 16,
+1803; Records; Prussia, vol. 189.
+
+[103] Haeusser ii. 472. There are interesting accounts of Lombard and the
+other leading persons of Berlin in F. Jackson's despatches of this date.
+The charge of gross personal immorality made against Lombard is brought
+against almost every German public man of the time in the writings of
+opponents. History and politics are, however, a bad tribunal of private
+character.
+
+[104] Fournier, Gentz und Cobenzl, p. 79. Beer, Zehn Jahre, p. 49. The
+despatches of Sir J. Warren of this date from St. Petersburg (Records:
+Russia, vol. 175) are full of plans for meeting an expected invasion of the
+Morea and the possible liberation of the Greeks by Bonaparte. They give the
+impression that Eastern affairs were really the dominant interest with
+Alexander in his breach with France.
+
+[105] Miot de Melito, i. 16. Savary, ii. 32.
+
+[106] A protest handed in at Vienna by Louis XVIII. against Napoleon's
+title was burnt in the presence of the French ambassador. The Austrian
+title was assumed on August 10, but the publication was delayed a day on
+account of the sad memories of August 10, 1792. Fournier, p. 102. Beer, p.
+60.
+
+[107] Papers presented to Parliament, 28th January, 1806, and 5th May,
+1815.
+
+[108] Hardenberg, ii. 50: corrected in the articles on Hardenberg and
+Haugwitz in the Deutsche Allgemeine Biographie.
+
+[109] Hardenberg, v. 167. Hardenberg was meanwhile representing himself to
+the British and Russian envoys as the partisan of the Allies. "He declared
+that he saw it was become impossible for this country to remain neutral,
+and that he should unequivocally make known his sentiments to that effect
+to the King. He added that if the decision depended upon himself, Russia
+need entertain no apprehension as to the part he should take."--Jackson,
+Sept. 3, 1805; Records: Prussia, vol. 194.
+
+[110] Gentz, Schriften, iii. 60, Beer, 132, 141. Fournier, 104. Springer,
+i. 64.
+
+[111] Rustow, Krieg von 1805, p. 55.
+
+[112] Nelson Despatches, vi. 457.
+
+[113] "The reports from General Mack are of the most satisfactory nature,
+and the apprehensions which were at one time entertained from the immense
+force which Bonaparte is bringing into Germany gradually decrease."--Sir A.
+Paget's Despatch from Vienna, Sept, 18; Records: Austria, vol. 75.
+
+[114] Rustow, p. 154. Schoenhals, Krieg von 1805, p. 33. Paget's despatch,
+Oct. 25; Records: Austria, vol. 75. "The jealousy and misunderstanding
+among the generals had reached such a pitch that no communication took
+place between Ferdinand and Mack but in writing. Mack openly attributed his
+calamities to the ill-will and opposition of the Archduke and the rest of
+the generals. The Archduke accuses Mack of ignorance, of madness, of
+cowardice, and of treachery. The consternation which prevails here (Vienna)
+is at the highest pitch. The pains which are taken to keep the public in
+the dark naturally increase the alarm. Not a single newspaper has been
+delivered for several days past except the wretched _Vienna. Gazette_.
+The Emperor is living at a miserable country-house, in order, as people
+say, that he may effect his escape. Every bark on the Danube has been put
+in requisition by the Government. The greatest apprehensions prevail on
+account of the Russians, of whose excesses loud complaints are made. Their
+arrival here is as much dreaded as that of the French. Cobenzl and
+Collenbach are in such a state of mind as to render them totally unfit for
+all business." Cobenzl was nevertheless still able to keep up his jocular
+style in asking the ambassador for the English subsidies:--"Vous etes
+malade, je le suis aussi un peu, mais ce qui est encore plus malade que
+nous deux ce sont nos finances; ainsi pour l'amour de Dieu depechez vous de
+nous donner vos deux cent mille livres sterlings. Je vous embrasse de tout
+mon coeur,"--Cobenzl to Paget, enclosed in _id_.
+
+[115] Hardenberg, ii. 268. Jackson, Oct. 7. Records: Prussia, vol. 195.
+"The intelligence was received yesterday at Potsdam, while M. de Hardenberg
+was with the King of Prussia. His Prussian Majesty was very violently
+affected by it, and in the first moment of anger ordered M. de Hardenberg
+to return to Berlin and immediately to dismiss the French ambassador. After
+a little reflection, however, he said that that measure should be
+postponed."
+
+[116] Rapp, Memoires, p. 58. Beer, p. 188.
+
+[117] "The scarcity of provisions had been very great indeed. Much
+discouragement had arisen in consequence, and a considerable degree of
+insubordination, which, though less easy to produce in a Russian army than
+in any other, is, when it does make its appearance, most prejudicial, was
+beginning to manifest itself in various ways. The bread waggons were
+pillaged on their way to the camp, and it became very difficult to repress
+the excesses of the troops."--Report of General Ramsay, Dec. 10; Records:
+Austria, vol. 78.
+
+[118] Hardenberg, ii. 345, Haugwitz had just become joint Foreign Minister
+with Hardenberg.
+
+[119] Haugwitz' justification of himself, with Hardenberg's comments upon
+it, is to be seen in Hardenberg, v. 220. But see also, for Hardenberg's own
+bad faith, _id._ i. 551.
+
+[120] Lord Harrowby's despatch from Berlin, Dec. 7; Records: Prussia, vol.
+196. The news of Austerlitz reached Berlin on the night of Dec. 7. Next day
+Lord Harrowby called on Hardenberg. "He told me that in a council of war
+held since the arrival of the first accounts of the disaster, it had been
+decided to order a part of the Prussian army to march into Bohemia. These
+events, he said, need not interrupt our negotiations." Then, on the 12th
+came the news of the armistice: Harrowby saw Hardenberg that evening. "I
+was struck with something like irritation in his manner, with a sort of
+reference to the orders of the King, and with an expression which dropped
+from him that circumstances might possibly arise in which Prussia could
+look only to her own defence and security. I attributed this in a great
+degree to the agitation of the moment, and I should have pushed the
+question to a point if the entrance of Count Metternich and M. d'Alopeus
+had not interrupted me.... Baron Hardenberg assured us that the military
+movements of the Prussian army were proceeding without a moment's loss of
+time." On the 25th Haugwitz arrived with his treaty. Hardenberg then
+feigned illness. "Baron Hardenberg was too ill to see me, or, as far as I
+could learn, any other person; and it has been impossible for me to
+discover what intelligence is brought by Count Haugwitz."
+
+[121] Lefebvre, Histoire des Cabinets, ii. 217.
+
+[122] Martens, viii. 388; viii. 479. Beer, p. 232.
+
+[123] Correspondence de Napoleon, xii. 253.
+
+[Transcriber's Note: A corner had been torn from the page in our print
+copy. A [***] sometimes indicates several missing words.]
+
+[124] The story of Pitt's "Austerlitz look" preceding his death is so
+impressive and so well known that I cannot resist giving the real facts
+about the reception of the news of Austerlitz in England. There were four
+Englishmen who were expected to witness the battle, Sir A. Paget,
+ambassador at Vienna, Lord L. Gower, ambassador with the Czar, Lord
+Harrington and General Ramsay, military envoys. Of these, Lord Harrington
+had left England too late to reach the armies; Sir A. Paget sat [***]
+despatches at Olmuetz without hearing the firing, and on going out alter the
+[***] astonished to fall in with the retreating army; Gower was too far in
+[***] General Ramsay unfortunately went off on that very day to get some
+[***] no Englishman witnessed the awful destruction that took [***] that
+reached England, quite misrepresented [***] decisive one. Pitt actually
+thought at first [***] to his policy, and likely to encourage [***] as
+December 20th the following [***] "Even supposing the advantage of [***]
+must have been obtained with a loss which cannot have left his force in a
+condition to contend with the army of Prussia and at the same time to make
+head against the Allies. If on the other hand it should appear that the
+advantage has been with the Allies, there is every reason to hope that
+Prussia will come forward with vigour to decide the contest." Records:
+Prussia, vol. 196. It was the surrender of Ulm which really gave Pitt the
+shock attributed to Austerlitz. The despatch then written--evidently from
+Pitt's dictation--exhorting the Emperor to do his duty, is the most
+impassioned and soul-stirring thing in the whole political correspondence
+of the time.
+
+[125] Hardenberg, ii. 463. Hardenberg, who, in spite of his weak and
+ambiguous conduct up to the end of 1805, felt bitterly the disgraceful
+position in which Prussia had placed itself, now withdrew from office. "I
+received this morning a message from Baron Hardenberg requesting me to call
+on him. He said that he could no longer remain in office consistently with
+his honour, and that he waited only for the return of Count Haugwitz to
+give up to him the management of his department. 'You know,' he said, 'my
+principles, and the efforts that I have made in favour of the good cause;
+judge then of the pain that I must experience when I am condemned to be
+accessory to this measure. You know, probably, that I was an advocate for
+the acquisition of Hanover, but I wished it upon terms honourable to both
+parties. I thought it a necessary bulwark to cover the Prussian dominions,
+and I thought that the House of Hanover might have been indemnified
+elsewhere. But now,' he added, 'j'abhorre les moyens infames par lesquels
+nous faisons cette acquisition. Nous pourrions rester les amis de Bonaparte
+sans etre ses esclaves.' He apologised for this language, and said I must
+not consider it as coming from a Prussian Minister, but from a man who
+unbosomed himself to his friend.... I have only omitted the distressing
+picture of M. de Hardenberg's agitation during this conversation. He
+bewailed the fate of Prussia, and complained of the hardships he had
+undergone for the last three months, and of the want of firmness and
+resolution in his Prussian Majesty. He several times expressed the hope
+that his Majesty's Government and that of Russia would make some allowances
+for the situation of this country. They had the means, he said, to do it an
+infinity of mischief. The British navy might destroy the Prussian commerce,
+and a Russian army might conquer some of her eastern provinces; but
+Bonaparte would be the only gainer, as thereby Prussia would be thrown
+completely into his arms."--F. Jackson's despatch from Berlin, March 27,
+1806; Records: Prussia, vol. 197.
+
+[126] On the British envoy demanding his passports, Haugwitz entered into a
+long defence of his conduct, alleging grounds of necessity. Mr. Jackson
+said that there could be no accommodation with England till the note
+excluding British vessels was reversed. "M. de Haugwitz immediately
+rejoined, 'I was much surprised when I found that that note had been
+delivered to you.' 'How,' I said, 'can _you_ be surprised who was the
+author of the measures that give rise to it?' The only answer I received
+was, 'Ah! ne dites pas cela.' He observed that it would be worth
+considering whether our refusal to acquiesce in the present state of things
+might not bring about one still more disastrous. I smiled, and asked if I
+was to understand that a Prussian army would take a part in the threatened
+invasion of England. He replied that he did not now mean to insinuate any
+such thing, but that it might be impossible to answer for
+events."--Jackson's Despatch, April 25. _id._
+
+[127] Papers presented to Parliament, 1806, p. 63.
+
+[128] "An order has been issued to the officers of the garrison of Berlin
+to abstain, under severe penalties, from speaking of the state of public
+affairs. This order was given in consequence of the very general and loud
+expressions of dissatisfaction which issued from all classes of people, but
+particularly from the military, at the recent conduct of the Government;
+for it has been in contemplation to publish an edict prohibiting the public
+at large from discussing questions of state policy. The experience of a
+very few days must convince the authors of this measure of the reverse of
+their expectation, the satires and sarcasms upon their conduct having
+become more universal than before."--Jackson's Despatch, March 22,
+_id_. "On Thursday night the windows of Count Haugwitz' house were
+completely demolished by some unknown person. As carbine bullets were
+chiefly made use of for the purpose, it is suspected to have been done by
+some of the garrison. The same thing had happened some nights before, but
+the Count took no notice of it. Now a party of the police patrol the
+street"--_Id_., April 27.
+
+[129] Pertz, i. 331. Seeley, i. 271.
+
+[130] Hopfner, Der Krieg von 1806, i. 48.
+
+[131] A list of all Prussian officers in 1806 of and above the rank of
+major is given in Henckel von Donnersmarck, Erinnerungen, with their years
+of service. The average of a colonel's service is 42 years; of a major's,
+35.
+
+[132] Mueffling, Aus Meinem Leben, p. 15. Hopfner, i. 157. Correspondence de
+Napoleon, xiii. 150.
+
+[133] Hopfner, ii. 390. Hardenberg, iii. 230.
+
+[134] "Count Stein, the only man of real talents in the administration, has
+resigned or was dismissed. He is a considerable man, of great energy,
+character, and superiority of mind, who possessed the public esteem in a
+high degree, and, I have no doubt, deserved it.... During the negotiation
+for an armistice, the expenses of Bonaparte's table and household at Berlin
+were defrayed by the King of Prussia. Since that period one of the
+Ministers called upon Stein, who was the chief of the finances, to pay
+300,000 crowns on the same account. Stein refused with strong expressions
+of indignation. The King spoke to him: he remonstrated with his Majesty in
+the most forcible terms, descanted on the wretched humiliation of such mean
+conduct, and said that he never could pay money on such an account unless
+he had the order in writing from his Majesty. This order was given a few
+days after the conversation."--Hutchinson's Despatch, Jan. 1, 1807;
+Records: Prussia, vol. 200.
+
+[135] Corr. Nap. xiii. 555.
+
+[136] "It is still doubtful who commands, and whether Kamensky has or has
+not given up the command. I wrote to him on the first moment of my arrival,
+but have received no answer from him. On the 23rd, the day of the first
+attack, he took off his coat and waistcoat, put all his stars and ribbons
+over his shirt, and ran about the streets of Pultusk encouraging the
+soldiers, over whom he is said to have great influence."--Lord Hutchinson's
+Despatch, Jan. 1, 1807; Records: Prussia, vol. 200.
+
+[137] Hutchinson's letter, in Adair, Mission to Vienna, p. 373.
+
+[138] For the Whig foreign policy, see Adair, p. 11-13. Its principle was
+to relinquish the attempt to raise coalitions of half-hearted Governments
+against France by means of British subsidies, but to give help to States
+which of their own free will entered into war with Napoleon.
+
+[139] The battle of Friedland is described in Lord Hutchinson's despatch
+(Records: Prussia, vol. 200--in which volume are also Colonel Sonntag's
+reports, containing curious details about the Russians, and some personal
+matter about Napoleon in a letter from an inhabitant of Eylau; also
+Gneisenau's appeal to Mr. Canning from Colberg).
+
+[140] Bignon, vi. 342.
+
+[141] Papers presented to Parliament, 1808, p. 106. The intelligence
+reached Canning on the 21st of July. Canning's despatch to Brook Taylor,
+July 22; Records: Denmark, vol. 196. It has never been known who sent the
+information, but it must have been some one very near the Czar, for it
+purported to give the very words used by Napoleon in his interview with
+Alexander on the raft. It is clear, from Canning's despatch of July 22,
+that this conversation and nothing else had up till then been reported. The
+informant was probably one of the authors of the English alliance of 1805.
+
+[142] Napoleon to Talleyrand, July 31, 1807. He instructs Talleyrand to
+enter into certain negotiations with the Danish Minister, which would be
+meaningless if the Crown Prince had already promised to hand over the
+fleet. The original English documents, in Records: Denmark, vols. 196, 197,
+really show that Canning never considered that he had any proof of the
+intentions of Denmark, and that he justified his action only by the
+inability of Denmark to resist Napoleon's demands.
+
+[143] Cevallos, p. 73.
+
+[144] Pertz, ii. 23. Seeley, i. 430.
+
+[145] Cevallos, p. 13. Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, i. 131.
+
+[146] Escoiquiz, Expose, p. 57, 107.
+
+[147] Miot de Melito, ii. ch. 7. Murat was made King of Naples.
+
+[148] Baumgarten, i. 242.
+
+[149] Wellington Despatches, iii. 135.
+
+[150] Haeusser, iii. 133. Seeley, i. 480.
+
+[151] For the striking part played at Erfurt by Talleyrand in opposition to
+Napoleon see Metternich's paper of December 4, in Beer, p. 516. It seems
+that Napoleon wished to involve the Czar in active measures against
+Austria, but was thwarted by Talleyrand.
+
+[152] Baumgarten i. 311.
+
+[153] Napier, ii. 17.
+
+[154] Metternich, ii. 147.
+
+[155] Gentz, Tagebuecher, i. 60.
+
+[156] Steffens, vi. 153. Memoires du Roi Jerome, iii. 340.
+
+[157] Beer, p. 370. Haeusser, iii. 278.
+
+[158] Correspondance de Napoleon, xviii. 459, 472. Gentz, Tagebuecher, i.
+120, Pelet, Memoires sur la Guerre de 1809, i. 223.
+
+[159] "Je n'ai jamais vu d'affaire aussi sanglante et aussi meurtriere."
+Report of the French General, Memoires de Jerome, iv. 109.
+
+[160] See Arndt's Poem on Schill. Gedichte, i. 328 (ed. 1837).
+
+[161] Wellington Despatches, iv. 533. Sup. Desp. vi. 319, Napier, ii. 357.
+
+[162] Correspondance de Napoleon: Decision, Mai 23, 1806. Parliamentary
+Papers, 1810, p. 123, 697.
+
+[163] Beer, p. 445, Gentz, Tagebuecher, i. 82, 118.
+
+[164] Correspondance de Napoleon, xix. 15, 265.
+
+[165] Corresp. de Napoleon, xxiii. 62, Decret, 9 Dec., 1811.
+
+[166] Memoires de Jerome, v. 185.
+
+[167] Wellington Supplementary Despatches, vi. 41. Napier, iii. 250.
+
+[168] Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, i. 405.
+
+[169] Hardenberg (Ranke), iv. 268. Haeusser, iii. 535. Seeley, ii. 447.
+
+[170] Martens, Nouveau Recueil, i. 417. A copy, or the original, of this
+Treaty was captured by the Russians with other of Napoleon's papers during
+the retreat from Moscow, and a draft of it sent to London, which remains in
+the Records.
+
+[171] Metternich, i. 122.
+
+[172] Memoires de Jerome, v. 247.
+
+[173] Bogdanowitsch, i. 72; Chambray, i. 186. Sir R. Wilson, Invasion of
+Russia, p. 15.
+
+[174] Droysen, Leben des Grafen York. I. 394.
+
+[175] Pertz, iii. 211, _seq_. Seeley, iii. 21.
+
+[176] Oncken, Oesterreich und Preussen, i. 28.
+
+[177] Martens, N.R., III. 234. British and Foreign State Papers
+(Hertslet), i. 49.
+
+[178] For Breslau in February, see Steffens, 7. 69.
+
+[179] For the difference between the old and the new officers, see
+Correspondance de Napoleon, 27 Avril, 1813.
+
+[180] Henckel von Donnersmarck, p. 187. The battles of Luetzen, Bautzen, and
+Leipzig are described in the despatches of Lord Cathcart, who witnessed
+them in company with the Czar and King Frederick William. Records: Russia,
+207, 209.
+
+[181] The account given in the following pages of Napoleon's motives and
+action during the armistice is based upon the following letters printed in
+the twenty-fifth volume of the Correspondence:--To Eugene, June 2, July 1,
+July 17, Aug. 4; to Maret, July 8; to Daru, July 17; to Berthier, July 23;
+to Davoust, July 24, Aug. 5; to Ney, Aug. 4, Aug. 12. The statement of
+Napoleon's error as to the strength of the Austrian force is confirmed by
+Metternich, i. 150.
+
+[182] Oncken, i. 80.
+
+[183] Napoleon to Eugene, 1st July, 1813.
+
+[184] Metternich, i. 163.
+
+[185] Haeusser, iv. 59. One of the originals is contained in Lord Cathcart's
+despatch from Kalisch, March 28th, 1813. Records: Russia, Vol. 206.
+
+[186] Memoires de Jerome, vi. 223.
+
+[187] "Your lordship has only to recollect the four days' continued
+fighting at Leipzig, followed by fourteen days' forced marches in the worst
+weather, in order to understand the reasons that made some repose
+absolutely necessary. The total loss of the Austrians alone, since the 10th
+of August, at the time of our arrival at Frankfort, was 80,000 men. We were
+entirely unprovided with heavy artillery, the nearest battery train not
+having advanced further than the frontiers of Bohemia." It was thought for
+a moment that the gates of Strasburg and Huningen might be opened by
+bribery, and the Austrian Government authorised the expenditure of a
+million florins for this purpose; in that case the march into Switzerland
+would have been abandoned. The bribing plan, however, broke down.--Lord
+Aberdeen's despatches, Nov. 24, Dec. 25, 1813. Records; Austria, 107.
+
+[188] Castlereagh's despatch from Langres, Jan. 29, 1814. Records:
+Continent, Vol. II.: "As far as I have hitherto felt myself called on to
+give an opinion, I have stated that the British Government did not decline
+treating with Bonaparte." "The Czar said he observed my view of the
+question was different from what he believed prevailed in England"
+(_id._ Feb. 16). See Southey's fine Ode on the Negotiations of 1814.
+
+[189] British and Foreign State Papers, I. 131.
+
+[190] Beranger, Biographie, ed. duod., p. 354.
+
+[191] British and Foreign State Papers, I. 151.
+
+[192] Lord W. Bentinck, who was with Murat, warned him against the probable
+consequences of his duplicity. Bentinck had, however, to be careful in his
+language, as the following shows. Murat having sent him a sword of honour,
+he wrote to the English Government, May 1, 1814: "It is a severe violence
+to my feelings to incur any degree of obligation to an individual whom I so
+entirely despise. But I feel it my duty not to betray any appearance of a
+spirit of animosity." To Murat he wrote on the same day: "The sword of a
+great captain is the most flattering present which a soldier can receive.
+It is with the highest gratitude that I accept the gift, Sire, which you
+have done me the honour to send."--Records: Sicily, Vol. 98.
+
+[193] Treaties of Teplitz, Sept. 9, 1813. In Bianchi, Storia Documentata
+della Diplomazia Europea, i. 334, there is a long protest addressed by
+Metternich to Castlereagh on May 26, 1814, referring with great minuteness
+to a number of clauses in a secret Treaty signed by all the Powers at
+Prague on July 27, 1813, and ratified at London on August 23, giving
+Austria the disposal of all Italy. This protest, which has been accepted as
+genuine in Reuchlin's Geschichte Italiens and elsewhere, is, with the
+alleged secret Treaty, a forgery. My grounds for this statement are as
+follows:--(1) There was no British envoy at Prague in July, 1813. (2) The
+private as well as the official letters of Castlereagh to Lord Cathcart of
+Sept. 13 and 18, and the instructions sent to Lord Aberdeen during August
+and September, prove that no joint Treaty existed up to that date, to which
+both England and Austria were parties. Records: Russia, 207, 209 A.
+Austria, 105. (3) Lord Aberdeen's reports of his negotiations with
+Metternich after this date conclusively prove that almost all Italian
+questions, including even the Austrian frontier, were treated as matters to
+be decided by the Allies in common. While Austria's right to a
+preponderance in upper Italy is admitted, the affairs of Rome and Naples
+are always treated as within the range of English policy.
+
+[194] The originals of the Genoese and Milanese petitions for independence
+are in Records: Sicily, Vol. 98. "The Genoese universally desire the
+restoration of their ancient Republic. They dread above all other
+arrangements their annexation to Piedmont, to the inhabitants of which
+there have always existed a peculiar aversion."--Bentick's Despatch, April
+27, 1814, _id._
+
+[195] Castlereagh, x. 18.
+
+[196] As Arndt, Schriften, ii. 311, Fuenf oder sechs Wunder Gottes.
+
+[197] Bernhardi, Geschichte Russlands, iii. 26.
+
+[198] Parl. Debates, xxvii. 634, 834.
+
+[199] Wellington, Sup. Des., x. 468; Castlereagh, x. 145. Records, Sicily,
+vol. 97. The future King Louis Philippe was sent by his father-in-law,
+Ferdinand, to England, to intrigue against Murat among the Sovereigns and
+Ministers then visiting England. His own curious account of his
+proceedings, with the secret sign for the Prince Regent, given him by Louis
+XVIII., who was afraid to write anything, is in _id._, vol. 99.
+
+[200] Wippermann, Kurhessen, pp. 9-13. In Hanover torture was restored, and
+occasionally practised till the end of 1818: also the punishment of death
+by breaking on the wheel. See Hodgskin, Travels, ii. 51, 69.
+
+[201] Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, ii. 30, Wellington, D., xii. 27; S.
+D., ix. 17.
+
+[202] Wellington, S.D., ix. 328.
+
+[203] Compare his cringing letter to Pichegru in Manuscrit de Louis XVIII.,
+p. 463, with his answer in 1797 to the Venetian Senate, in Thiers.
+
+[204] _Moniteur_, 5 Juin. British and Foreign State Papers, 1812-14,
+ii. 960.
+
+[205] The payment of L13 per annum in direct taxes. No one could be elected
+who did not pay L40 per annum in direct taxes,--so large a sum, that the
+Charta provided for the case of there not being fifty persons in a
+department eligible.
+
+[206] Fourteen out of Napoleon's twenty marshals and three-fifths of his
+Senators were called to the Chamber of Peers. The names of the excluded
+Senators will be found in Vaulabelle, ii. 100; but the reader must not take
+Vaulabelle's history for more than a collection of party-legends.
+
+[207] Ordonnance, in _Moniteur_, 26 Mai.
+
+[208] This poor creature owed his life, as he owes a shabby immortality, to
+the beautiful and courageous Grace Dalrymple Elliot. Journal of Mrs. G.D.
+Elliot, p. 79.
+
+[209] Carnot, Memoire adresse au Roi, p. 20.
+
+[210] Wellington Despatches, xii. 248. On the ground of his ready-money
+dealings, it has been supposed that Wellington understood the French
+people. On the contrary, he often showed great want of insight, both in his
+acts and in his opinions, when the finer, and therefore more statesmanlike,
+sympathies were in question. Thus, in the delicate position of ambassador
+of a victorious Power and counsellor of a restored dynasty, he bitterly
+offended the French country-population by behaving like a _grand seigneur_
+before 1789, and hunting with a pack of hounds over their young corn. The
+matter was so serious that the Government of Louis XVIII. had to insist on
+Wellington stopping his hunts. (Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 141.) This
+want of insight into popular feeling, necessarily resulted in some
+portentous blunders: _e.g.,_ all that Wellington could make of
+Napoleon's return from Elba was the following:--"He has acted upon false or
+no information, and the King will destroy him without difficulty and in a
+short time." Despatches, xii. 268.
+
+[211] A good English account of Vienna during the Congress will be found in
+"Travels in Hungary," by Dr. R. Bright, the eminent physician. His visit to
+Napoleon's son, then a child five years old, is described in a passage of
+singular beauty and pathos.
+
+[212] British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 554, _seq_.
+Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 13. Kluber, ix. 167. Seeley's Stein, iii.
+248. Gentz, Depeches Inedites, i. 107. Records: Continent, vol. 7, Oct. 2.
+
+[213] Bernhardi, i. 2; ii. 2, 661.
+
+[214] Wellington, S.D., ix. 335.
+
+[215] Wellington, S.D., ix. 340. Records: Continent, vol. 7, Oct. 9, 14.
+
+[216] Talleyrand, p. 74. Records, _id.,_ Oct. 24, 25.
+
+[217] Wellington, S.D., ix. 331. Talleyrand, pp. 59, 82, 85, 109. Klueber,
+vii. 21.
+
+[218] British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 814. Klueber, vii. 61.
+
+[219] Talleyrand, p. 281.
+
+[220] B. and F. State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 1001.
+
+[221] Castlereagh did not contradict them. Records: Cont., vol. 10, Jan. 8.
+
+[222] British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, p. 642. Seeley's Stein,
+iii. 303. Talleyrand, Preface, p. 18.
+
+[223] Chiefly, but not altogether, because Napoleon's war with England had
+ruined the trade of the ports. See the report of Marshal Brune, in Daudet,
+La Terreur Blanche, p. 173, and the striking picture of Marseilles in
+Thiers, xviii. 340, drawn from his own early recollections. Bordeaux was
+Royalist for the same reason.
+
+[224] Berriat-St. Prix, Napoleon a Grenoble, p. 10.
+
+[225] Beranger, Biographie, p. 373, ed. duod.
+
+[226] See their contemptible addresses, as well as those of the army, in
+the _Moniteur_, from the 10th to the 19th of March to Louis XVIII.,
+from the 27th onwards to Napoleon.
+
+[227] _i.e._, Because he had abused his liberty. On Ney's trial two
+courtiers alleged that Ney said he "would bring back Napoleon in an iron
+cage." Ney contradicted, them. Proces de Ney, ii. 105, 113.
+
+[228] British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 443.
+
+[229] Correspondance de Napoleon, xxviii. 171, 267, etc.
+
+[230] British and Foreign State Papers, 1814-15, ii. 275. Castlereagh, ix.
+512, Wellington, S.D., ix. 244. Records: Continent, vol. 12, Feb. 26.
+
+[231] Correspondance de Napoleon, xxviii. 111, 127. The order forbidding
+him to come to Paris is wrongly dated April 19; probably for May 29. The
+English documents relating to Ferdinand's return to Naples, with the
+originals of many proclamations, etc., are in Records: Sicily, vols. 103,
+104. They are interesting chiefly as showing the deep impression made on
+England by Ferdinand's cruelties in 1799.
+
+[232] Benjamin Constant, Memoire sur les Cent Jours.
+
+[233] Lafayette, Memoires, v. 414.
+
+[234] Miot de Melito, iii. 434.
+
+[235] Napoleon to Ney; Correspondance, xxviii. 334.
+
+[236] "I have got an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very
+inexperienced staff." (Despatches, xii. 358.) So, even after his victory,
+he writes:--"I really believe that, with the exception of my old Spanish
+infantry, I have got not only the worst troops but the worst-equipped army,
+with the worst staff that was ever brought together." (Despatches, xii.
+509.)
+
+[237] Therefore he kept his forces more westwards, and further from
+Bluecher, than if he had known Napoleon's actual plan. But the severance of
+the English from the sea required to be guarded against as much as a defeat
+of Bluecher. The Duke never ceased to regard it as an open question whether
+Napoleon ought not to have thrown his whole force between Brussels and the
+sea. (_Vide_ Memoir written in 1842 Wellington, S.D., ix. 530.)
+
+[238] Metternich, i., p. 155.
+
+[239] Wellington Despatches, xii. 649.
+
+[240] Wellington, S.D., xi. 24, 32. Maps of projected frontiers, Records:
+Cont., vol 23.
+
+[241] Despatches, xii. 596. Seeley's Stein, iii. 332.
+
+[242] B. and F State Papers, 1815-16, iii. 201. The second article is the
+most characteristic:--"Les trois Princes ... confessant que la nation
+Chretienne dont eux et leurs peuples font partie n'a reellement d'autre
+Souverain que celui a qui seul appartient en propriete la puissance ...
+c'est-a-dire Dieu notre Divin Sauveur Jesus Christ, le Verbe du Tres Haut,
+la parole de vie: leurs Majestes recommandent ... a leurs peuples ... de se
+fortifier chaque jour davantage dans les principes et l'exercice des
+devoirs que le Divin Sauveur a enseignes aux hommes."
+
+[243] Wellington, S.D., xi. 175. The account which Castlereagh gives of
+the Czar's longing for universal peace appears to refute the theory that
+Alexander had some idea of an attack upon Turkey in thus uniting
+Christendom. According to Castlereagh, Metternich also thought that "it was
+quite clear that the Czar's mind was affected," but for the singular reason
+that "peace and goodwill engrossed all his thoughts, and that he had found
+him of late friendly and reasonable on all points" (_Id_.) There was,
+however, a strong popular impression at this time that Alexander was on the
+point of invading Turkey. (Gentz, D.I., i. 197.)
+
+[244] B. and F. State Papers, 1815-16, iii. 273. Records; Continent, vol.
+30.
+
+[245] Klueber, ii. 598.
+
+[246] Klueber, vi. 12. It covers, with its appendices, 205 pages.
+
+[247] In the first draft of the secret clauses of the Treaty of June 14,
+1800, between England and Austria (see p. 150), Austria was to have had
+Genoa. But the fear arising that Russia would not permit Austria's
+extension to the Mediterranean, an alteration was made, whereby Austria was
+promised half of Piedmont, Genoa to go to the King of Sardinia in
+compensation.
+
+[248] Pertz, Leben Steins, iv 524.
+
+[249] Talleyrand, p. 277.
+
+[250] B. and F. State Papers, 1815-16, p. 928.
+
+[251] Bernhardi, iii. 2, 10, 666.
+
+[252] "We are now inundated with Russian agents of various descriptions,
+some public and some secret, but all holding the same language, all
+preaching 'Constitution and liberal principles,' and all endeavouring to
+direct the eyes of the independents towards the North.... A copy of the
+instructions sent to the Russian Minister here has fallen into the hands of
+the Austrians." A'Court (Ambassador at Naples) to Castlereagh, Dec. 7,
+1815, Records: Sicily, 104.
+
+[253] A profound reason has been ascribed to Metternich's conservatism by
+some of his English apologists in high place, namely the fear that if ideas
+of nationality should spring up, the non-German components of the Austrian
+monarchy, viz., Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, etc., would break off and become
+independent States. But there is not a word in Metternich's writings which
+shows that this apprehension had at this time entered his mind. To
+generalise his Italian policy of 1815 into a great prophetic statesmanship,
+is to interpret the ideas of one age by the history of the next.
+
+[254] In Moravia. For the system of espionage, see the book called "Carte
+segrete della polizia Austriaca," consisting of police-reports which fell
+into the hands of the Italians at Milan in 1848.
+
+[255] Bianchi, Storia Documentata, i. 208. The substance of this secret
+clause was communicated to A'Court, the English Ambassador at Naples. "I
+had no hesitation in saying that anything which contributed to the good
+understanding now prevailing between Austria and Naples, could not but
+prove extremely satisfactory to the British Government." A'Court to
+Castlereagh, July 18, 1815. Records: Sicily, vol. 104.
+
+[256] Letters in Reuchlin, Geschichte Italiens, i. 71. The Holy Alliance
+was turned to better account by the Sardinian statesmen than by the
+Neapolitans. "Apres s'etre allie," wrote the Sardinian Ambassador at St.
+Petersburg, "en Jesus-Christ notre Sauveur parole de vie, pourquoi et a
+quel propos s'allier en Metternich?"
+
+[257] See the passages from Grenville's letters quoted in pp. 125, 126 of
+this work.
+
+[258] Castlereagh, x. 18. "The danger is that the transition" (to liberty)
+"may be too sudden to ripen into anything likely to make the world better
+or happier.... I am sure it is better to retard than accelerate the
+operation of this most hazardous principle which is abroad."
+
+[259] B. and F. State Papers, 1816-17, p. 553. Metternich, iii. 80.
+Castlereagh had at first desired that the Constitution should be modified
+under the influence of the English Ambassador. Instructions to A'Court,
+March 14, 1814, marked "Most Secret"; Records: Sicily, vol. 99. A'Court
+himself detested the Constitution. "I conceive the Sicilian people to be
+totally and radically unfit to be entrusted with political power." July 23,
+1814, id.
+
+[260] Castlereagh, x. 25.
+
+[261] "If his Majesty announces his determination to give effect to the
+main principles of a constitutional regime, it is possible that he may
+extinguish the existing arrangement with impunity, and re-establish one
+more consistent with the efficiency of the executive power, and which may
+restore the great landed proprietors and the clergy to a due share of
+authority." Castlereagh, id.
+
+[262] Daudet, La Terreur Blanche, p. 186. The loss of the troops was a
+hundred. The stories of wholesale massacres at Marseilles and other places
+are fictions.
+
+[263] See the Address, in _Journal des Debats_, 15 Octobre: "Nous
+oserons solliciter humblement la retribution necessaire," etc. For the
+general history of the Session, see Duvergier de Hauranne, iii. 257;
+Viel-Castal, iv. 139; Castlereagh's severe judgment of Artois. Records:
+Cont., 28, Sept. 21.
+
+[264] _Journal des Debats_, 29 October.
+
+[265] Wellington, S.D., xi. 95. This self-confident folly is repeated in
+many of Lord Liverpool's letters.
+
+[266] Proces du Marechal Ney, i. 212.
+
+[267] Ney was not, however, a mere fighting general. The Military Studies
+published in English in 1833 from his manuscripts prove this. They abound
+in acute remarks, and his estimate of the quality of the German soldier, at
+a time when the Germans were habitually beaten and despised, is very
+striking. He urges that when French infantry fight in three ranks, the
+charge should be made after the two front ranks have fired, without waiting
+for the third to fire. "The German soldier, formed by the severest
+discipline, is cooler than any other. He would in the end obtain the
+advantage in this kind of firing if it lasted long." (P. 100.) Ney's
+parents appear to have been Wuertemberg people who had settled in Alsace.
+The name was really Neu (New).
+
+[268] See the extracts from La Bourdonnaye's printed speech in _Journal
+des Debits_, 19 Novembre: "Pour arreter leurs trames criminelles, il faut
+des fers, des bourreaux, des supplices. La mort, la mort seule peut
+effrayer leurs complices et mettre fin a leurs complots," etc. The journals
+abound with similar speeches.
+
+[269] General Mouton-Duvernet. Several were sentenced to death in their
+absence; some were acquitted on the singular plea that they had become
+subjects of the Empire of Elba, and so could not be guilty of treason to
+the King of France.
+
+[270] The sentence was commuted by the King to twelve years' imprisonment.
+General Chartran was actually shot. It is stated, though it appears not to
+be clear, that his prosecution began at the same late date. Duvergier de
+Hauranne, iii. 335.
+
+[271] The highest number admitted by the Government to have been imprisoned
+at any one time under the Law of Public Security was 319, in addition to
+750 banished from their homes or placed under surveillance. No one has
+collected statistics of the imprisonments by legal sentence. The old story
+that there were 70,000 persons in prison is undoubtedly an absurd
+exaggeration; but the numbers given by the Government, even if true at any
+one moment, afford no clue to the whole number of imprisonments, for as
+fast as one person gets out of prison in France in a time of political
+excitement, another is put in. The writer speaks from personal experience,
+having been imprisoned in 1871. Any one who has seen how these affairs are
+conducted will know how ridiculous it would be to suppose that the central
+government has information of every case.
+
+[272] See, _e.g._, the Petition aux Deux Chambres, 1816, at the
+beginning of P.L. Courier's works.
+
+[273] _Journal des Debats_, 19 Decembre, 1815.
+
+[274] Wellington, S.D., xi 309.
+
+[275] Despatch in Duvergier de Hauranne, iii. 441.
+
+[276] Pertz, Leben Steins, iv. 428.
+
+[277] Schmalz, Berichtigung, etc., p. 14.
+
+[278] Pertz, Leben Steins, v. 23.
+
+[279] A curious account of the festival remains, written by Kieser, one of
+the Professors who took part in it (Kieser, Das Wartburgfest, 1818). It is
+so silly that it is hard to believe it to have been written by a grown-up
+man. He says of the procession to the Wartburg, "There have indeed been
+processions that surpassed this in outward glory and show; but in inner
+significant value it cannot yield to any." But making allowance for the
+author's personal weakness of head, his book is a singular and instructive
+picture of the mental condition of "Young Germany" and its teachers at that
+time--a subject that caused such extravagant anxiety to Governments, and so
+seriously affected the course of political history. It requires some effort
+to get behind the ridiculous side of the students' Teutonism; but there
+were elements of reality there. Persons familiar with Wales will be struck
+by the resemblance, both in language and spirit, between the scenes of 1818
+and the religious meetings or the Eisleddfodau of the Welsh, a resemblance
+not accidental, but resulting from similarity of conditions, viz., a real
+susceptibility to religious, patriotic, and literary ideas among a people
+unacquainted with public or practical life on a large scale. But the
+vigorous political action of the Welsh in 1880, when the landed interest
+throughout the Principality lost seats which it had held for centuries,
+surprised only those who had seen nothing but extravagance in the chapel
+and the field-meeting. Welsh ardour, hitherto in great part undirected,
+then had a practical effect because English organisation afforded it a
+model: German ardour in 1817 proved sterile because it had no such example
+at hand.
+
+[280] See the speech in Bernhardi, iii. 669.
+
+[281] Gentz, D.I., ii. 87, iii. 72.
+
+[282] Castlereagh, xii. 55, 62.
+
+[283] Wellington, S.D., xii. 835.
+
+[284] B. and F. State Papers, 1818-19, vi. 14.
+
+[285] Gentz, D.I., i. 400. Gentz, the confidant and adviser of Metternich,
+was secretary to the Conference at Aix-la-Chapelle. His account of it in
+this despatch is of the greatest value, bringing out in a way in which no
+official documents do the conservative and repressive tone of the
+Conference. The prevalent fear had been that Alexander would break with his
+old Allies and make a separate league with France and Spain. See also
+Castlereagh, xii. 47.
+
+[286] "I could write you a long letter about the honour which the Prussians
+pay to everything Austrian, our whole position, our measures, our language.
+Metternich has fairly enchanted them." Gentz, Nachlasse [Osten], i. 52.
+
+[287] Metternich, iii. 171.
+
+[288] See his remarks in Metternich, iii. 269; an oasis of sense in this
+desert of Commonplace.
+
+[289] Stourdza, Denkschrift, etc., p. 31. The French original is not in the
+British Museum.
+
+[290] The extracts from Sand's diaries, published in a little book in 1821
+(Tagebuecher, etc.), form a very interesting religious study. The last,
+written on Dec. 31, 1818, is as follows:--"I meet the last day of this year
+in an earnest festal spirit, knowing well that the Christmas which I have
+celebrated will be my last. If our strivings are to result in anything, if
+the cause of mankind is to succeed in our Fatherland, if all is not to be
+forgotten, all our enthusiasm spent in vain, the evildoer, the traitor, the
+corrupter of youth must die. Until I have executed this, I have no peace;
+and what can comfort me until I know that I have with upright will set my
+life at stake? O God, I pray only for the right clearness and courage of
+soul, that in that last supreme hour I may not be false to myself" (p.
+174). The reference to the Greeks is in a letter in the English memoir, p.
+40.
+
+[291] The papers of the poet Arndt were seized. Among them was a copy of
+certain short notes made by the King of Prussia, about 1808, on the
+uselessness of a _levee en masse_. One of these notes was as
+follows:--"As soon as a single clergyman is shot" (_i.e._ by the
+French) "the thing would come to an end." These words were published in the
+Prussian official paper as an indication that Arndt, worse than Sand,
+advocated murdering clergymen! Welcker, Urkunden, p. 89.
+
+[292] Metternich, iii. 217, 258.
+
+[293] Metternich, iii. 268.
+
+[294] The minutes of the Conference are in Welcker, Urkunden, p. 104,
+_seq_. See also Weech, Correspondenzen.
+
+[295] Protokolle der Bundesversammlung, 8, 266. Nauwerck, Thaetigkeit, etc.,
+2, 287.
+
+[296] AEgidi, Der Schluss-Acte, ii. 362, 446.
+
+[297] Article 57. The intention being that no assembly in any German State
+might claim sovereign power as representing the people. If, for instance,
+the Bavarian Lower House had asserted that it represented the sovereignty
+of the people, and that the King was simply the first magistrate in the
+State, this would have been an offence against Federal law, and have
+entitled the Diet--_i.e._ Metternich--to armed interference. The
+German State-papers of this time teem with the constitutional distinction
+between a Representative Assembly (_i.e._ assembly representing
+popular sovereignty) and an Assembly of Estates (_i.e._, of particular
+orders with limited, definite rights, such as the granting of a tax). In
+technical language, the question at issue was the true interpretation of
+the phrase _Landstaendische Verfassungen_, used in the 13th article of
+the original Act of Federation.
+
+[298] See, in Welcker, Urkunden, p. 356, the celebrated paper called
+"Memorandum of a Prussian Statesman, 1822," which at the same time
+recommends a systematic underhand rivalry with Austria, in preparation for
+an ultimate breach. Few State-papers exhibit more candid and cynical
+cunning.
+
+[299] Ilse, Politische Verfolgungen, p. 31.
+
+[300] The comparison is the Germans' own, not mine. "'How savoury a thin
+roast veal is!' said one Hamburg beggar to another. 'Where did you eat it?'
+said his friend, admiringly. 'I never ate it at all, but I smelt it as I
+passed a great man's house while the dog was being fed.'" (Ilse, p. 57.)
+
+[301] The Commission at Mainz went on working until 1827. It seems to have
+begun to discover real revolutionary societies about 1824. There is a long
+list of persons remanded for trial in their several States, in Ilse, p.
+595, with the verdicts and the sentences passed upon them, which vary from
+a few months' to nineteen years' imprisonment.
+
+[302] Metternich, iii. 168; and see Wellington, S.D., xii. 878.
+
+[303] Gregoire, Memoires, i. 411. Had the Constitutional Church of France
+succeeded, Gregoire would have left a great name in religious history.
+Napoleon, by one of the most fatal acts of despotism, extinguished a
+society likely, from its democratic basis and its association with a great
+movement of reform, to become the most liberal and enlightened of all
+Churches, and left France to be long divided between Ultramontane dogma and
+a coarse kind of secularism. The life of Gregoire ought to be written in
+English. From the enormous number of improvements for which he laboured,
+his biography would give a characteristic picture of the finer side of the
+generation of 1789.
+
+[304] The late Count of Chambord, or Henry V., son of the Duke of Barry,
+was born some months after his father's death.
+
+[305] Castlereagh, xii. 162, 259. "The monster Radicalism still lives,"
+Castlereagh sorrowfully admits to Metternich.
+
+[306] Metternich, iii. 369. "A man must be like me, born and brought up
+amid the storm of politics, to know what is the precise meaning of a shout
+of triumph like those which now burst from Burdett and Co. He may have read
+of it, but I have seen it with my eyes. I was living at the time of the
+Federation of 1789. I was fifteen, and already a man."
+
+[307] Baumgarten, Geschichte Spaniens, ii. 175.
+
+[308] See the note of Fernan Nunez, in Wellington, S. D, xii 582. "Les
+efforts unanimes de ces memes Puissances ont detruit le systeme
+devastateur, d'ou naquit la rebellion Americaine; mais il leur restait
+encore a le detruire dans l'Amerique Espagnole."
+
+[309] Wellington, S.D., xii. 807.
+
+[310] Jullian, Precis Historique, p. 78.
+
+[311] Historia de la vida de Fernando VII., ii. 158.
+
+[312] Carrascosa, Memoires, p. 25; Colletta, ii. 155.
+
+[313] Carrascosa p. 44.
+
+[314] Gentz. D.I., ii. 108, 122. It was rather too much even for the
+Austrians. "La conduite de ce malheureux souverain n'a ete, des le
+commencement des troubles, qu'un tissu de faiblesse et de duplicite," etc.
+"Voila l'allie que le ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons a
+retablir les interets!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries
+and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a
+saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles
+III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer,
+whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque
+comic element runs through his life, and through every picture drawn by
+persons in actual intercourse with him. The following, from one of
+Bentinck's despatches of 1814 (when Ferdinand had just heard that Austria
+had promised to keep Murat in Naples), is very characteristic: "I found his
+Majesty very much afflicted and very much roused. He expressed his
+determination never to renounce the rights which God had given him.... He
+said he might be poor, but he would die honest, and his children should not
+have to reproach him for having given up their rights. He was the son of
+the honest Charles III. ... he was his unworthy offspring, but he would
+never disgrace his family.... On my going away he took me by the hand, and
+said he hoped I should esteem him as he did me, and begged me to take a
+Pheasant pye to a gentleman who had been his constant shooting companion."
+Records, Sicily, vol. 97. Ferdinand was the last sovereign who habitually
+kept a professional fool, or jester, in attendance upon him.
+
+[315] British and Foreign State Papers, vii. 361, 995.
+
+[316] Except in Sicily, where, however, the course of events had not the
+same publicity as on the mainland.
+
+[317] Verbatim from the Russian Note of April 18. B. and F. State Papers,
+vii. 943.
+
+[318] Parliamentary Debates, N.S., viii. 1136.
+
+[319] Gentz, D.I., ii. 70. "M. le Prince Metternich s'est rendu chez
+l'Empereur pour le mettre au fait de ces tristes circonstances. Depuis que
+je le connais, je ne l'ai jamais vu aussi frappe d'aucun evenement qu'il
+l'etait hier avant son depart."
+
+[320] Castlereagh, xii. 311.
+
+[321] Gentz, D.I., ii. 76. Metternich, iii. 395. "Our fire-engines were
+not full in July, otherwise we should have set to work immediately."
+
+[322] Gentz, ii. 85. Gentz was secretary at the Congress of Troppau, as he
+had been at Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle. His letters exhibit the Austrian
+and absolutist view of all European politics with striking clearness. He
+speaks of the change in Richelieu's action as disagreeable but not fatal.
+"Ces pruderies politiques sont sans doute lacheuses.... La Russie,
+l'Autriche, et la Prusse, heureusement libres encore dans leurs mouvements,
+et assez puissantes pour soutenir ce qu'elles arretent, pourraient adopter
+sans le concours de l'Angleterre et de la France un systeme tel que les
+besoins du moment le demandent." The description of the three despotisms as
+"happily free in their movements" is very characteristic of the time.
+
+[323] This is the system conveniently but incorrectly named Holy Alliance,
+from its supposed origination in he unmeaning Treaty of Holy Alliance in
+1815. The reader will have seen that it took five years of reaction to
+create a definitive agreement among the monarchs to intervene against
+popular changes in other States, and that the principles of any operative
+league planned by Alexander in 1815 would have been largely different from
+those which he actually accepted in 1820. The Alexander who designed the
+Holy Alliance was the Alexander who had forced Louis XVIII. to grant the
+Charta.
+
+[324] Castlereagh, xii. 330.
+
+[325] Metternich, iii. 394. B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1160. Gentz, D.
+I., ii. 112. The best narrative of the Congress of Troppau is in Duvergier
+de Hauranne, vi. 93. The Life of Canning by his secretary, Stapleton,
+though it is a work of some authority on this period, is full of
+misstatements about Castlereagh. Stapleton says that Castlereagh took no
+notice of the Troppau circular of December 8 until it had been for more
+than a month in his possession, and suggests that he would never have
+protested at all but for the unexpected disclosure of the circular in a
+German newspaper. As a matter of fact, the first English protest against
+the Troppau doctrine, expressed in a memorandum, "tres long, tres positif,
+assez dur meme, et assez tranchant dans son langage," was handed in to the
+Congress on December 16 or 19, along with a very unwelcome note to
+Metternich. There is some gossip of another of Canning's secretaries in
+Greville's Memoirs, i. 105, to the effect that Castlereagh's private
+despatches to Troppau differed in tone from his official ones, which were
+only written "to throw dust in the eyes of Parliament." It is sufficient to
+read the Austrian documents of the time, teeming as they do with vexation
+and disappointment at England's action, to see that this is a fiction.
+
+[326] Had Ferdinand's first proposals been accepted by the Neapolitan
+Parliament, France and England, it was thought, might have insisted on a
+compromise at Laibach. "Les Gouvernements de France et d'Angleterre
+auraient fortement insiste sur l'introduction d'un regime constitutionnel
+et representatif, regime que la Cour de Vienne croit absolument
+incompatible avec la position des Etats de l'Italie, et avec la surete de
+ses propres Etats." Gentz, D.I., ii. 110.
+
+[327] Gentz, Nachlasse (P. Osten), i. 67. Lest the reader should take a
+prejudice against Capodistrias for his cunning, I ought to mention here
+that he was a man of austere disinterestedness in private life, and one of
+the few statesmen of the time who did not try to make money by politics.
+His ambition, which was very great, rose above all the meaner objects which
+tempt most men. The contrast between his personal goodness and his
+unscrupulousness in diplomacy will become more clear later on.
+
+[328] Colletta, ii. 230. Bianchi, Diplomazia, ii. 47.
+
+[329] Gualterio, Ultimi Rivolgimenti, iii. 46. Silvio Pellico, Le mie
+prigioni, ch. 57.
+
+[330] B. and F. State Papers, viii. 1203.
+
+[331] Baumgarten, ii. 325.
+
+[332] Wellington Despatches, N.S., i. 284.
+
+[333] Talleyrand et Louis XVIII., p. 333.
+
+[334] Wellington, i. 343.
+
+[335] Duvergier de Hauranne, vii. 140.
+
+[336] Canning denied that it was offered, but the despatches in Wellington
+prove it. These papers, supplemented by the narrative of Duvergier de
+Hauranne, drawn from the French documents which he specifies, are the
+authority for the history of the Congress. Canning's celebrated speech of
+April, 1823, is an effective _ex parte_ composition rather than a
+historical summary. The reader who goes to the originals will be struck by
+the immense superiority of Wellington's statements over those of all the
+Continental statesmen at Verona, in point, in force, and in good sense, as
+well as in truthfulness. The Duke, nowhere appears to greater advantage.
+
+[337] Report of Angouleme, Duvergier d'Hauranne, vii. "La ou sont nos
+troupes, nous maintenons la paix avec beaucoup de peine; mais la ou nous
+ne sommes pas, on massacre, on brule, on pille, on vole. Les corps
+Espagnols, se disant royalistes, ne cherchent qu'a voler et a piller."
+
+[338] Decretos del Rey Fernando, vii. 35, 50, 75. This process, which was
+afterwards extended even to common soldiers, was called Purificacion.
+Committees were appointed to which all persons coming under the law had to
+send in detailed evidence of correct conduct in and since 1820, signed by
+some well-known royalists. But the committees also accepted any letters of
+denunciation that might be sent to them, and were bound by law to keep them
+secret, so that in practice the Purificacion became a vast system of
+anonymous persecution.
+
+[339] Historia de la vida de Fernando VII., 1842, iii. 152.
+
+[340] Decretos del Rey Fernando, vii. 45.
+
+[341] Decretos, vii. 154. The preamble to this law is perhaps the most
+astonishing of all Ferdinand's devout utterances. "My soul is confounded
+with the horrible spectacle of the sacrilegious crimes which impiety has
+dared to commit against the Supreme Maker of the universe. The ministers of
+Christ have been persecuted and sacrificed; the venerable successor of St.
+Peter has been outraged; the temples of the Lord have been profaned and
+destroyed; the Holy Gospel depreciated; in fine, the inestimable legacy
+which Jesus Christ gave in his last supper to secure our eternal felicity,
+the Sacred Host, has been trodden under foot. My soul shudders, and will
+not be able to return to tranquillity until, in union with my children, my
+faithful subjects, I offer to God holocausts of piety," etc. But for some
+specimens of Ferdinand's command of the vernacular, of a very different
+character, see Wellington, N.S., ii. 37.
+
+[342] Revolution d'Espagne, examen critique (Paris, 1836), p. 151, from the
+lists in the Gaceta de Madrid. The Gaceta for these years is wanting from
+the copy in the British Museum, and in the large collection in that library
+of historical and periodical literature relating to Spain I can find no
+first hand authorities for the judicial murders of these years. Nothing
+relating to the subject was permitted to be printed in Spain for many years
+afterwards The work cited in this note, though bearing a French title, and
+published at Paris in 1836, was in fact a Spanish book written in 1824. The
+critical inquiry which has substantiated many of the worst traditions of
+the French Reign of Terror from local records still remains to be
+undertaken for this period of Spanish history.
+
+[343] See e.g., Stapleton, Canning and his Times p. 378. Wellington often
+suggested the use of less peremptory language. Despatches, i. 134,
+188[***], Metternich wrote as follows on hearing at Vienna of Castlereagh's
+death: "Castlereagh was the only man in his country who had gained any
+experience in foreign affairs. He had learned to understand me. He was
+devoted to me in heart and spirit, not only from personal inclination, but
+from conviction. I awaited him here as my second self." iii. 391.
+Metternich, however, was apt to exaggerate his influence over the English
+Minister. It was a great surprise to him that Castlereagh, after gaining
+decisive majorities in the House of Commons on domestic questions in 1820,
+in no wise changed the foreign policy expressed in the protest against the
+Declaration of Troppau.
+
+[344] Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, ii. 18.
+
+[345] Wellington, i. 188.
+
+[346] Parl Hist., 12th Dec., 1826.
+
+[347] Stapleton, Life of Canning, i. 134. Martineau, p. 144.
+
+[348] Gentz, Nachlasse (Osten), ii. 165.
+
+[349] About the year 1830 the theory was started by Fallmerayer, a Tyrolese
+writer, that the modern Greeks were the descendants of Slavonic invaders,
+with scarcely a drop of Greek blood in their veins. Fallmerayer was
+believed by some good scholars to have proved that the old Greek race had
+utterly perished. More recent inquiries have discredited both Fallmerayer
+and his authorities, and tend to establish the conclusion that, except in
+certain limited districts, the Greeks left were always numerous enough to
+absorb the foreign incomers. (Hopf, Griechenland; in Etsch and Gruber's
+Encyklopaedie, vol. 85, p. 100.) The Albanian population of Greece in 1820
+is reckoned at about one-sixth.
+
+[350] Maurer, Das Griechische Volk, i. 64.
+
+[351] The Greek songs illustrate the conversion of the Armatole into the
+Klepht in the age preceding the Greek revolution. Thus, in the fine ballad
+called "The Tomb of Demos," which Goethe has translated, the dying man
+says--
+
+[Transcriber's Note: The following has been transliterated from the Greek]
+
+  Kai pherte ton pneumatikon na m' exomologaisae
+  na tun eipo ta krimata osa cho kamomena
+  trianta chroni armatolos, c'eicosi echo klephtaes.
+
+"Bring the priest that he may shrive me; that I may tell him the sins that
+I have committed, thirty years an Armatole and twenty years a Klepht."
+--Fauriel, Chants Populaires, i. 56.
+
+[352] Finlay, Greece under Ottoman Domination, p. 284.
+
+[353] Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien, i. 123.
+
+[354] Literally, _Interpreter_; the old theory of the Turks being that
+in their dealings with foreign nations they had only to receive petitions,
+which required to be translated into Turkish.
+
+[355] Zallonos, [Transliterated Greek] Pragmateia peri ton phanarioton,
+p. 71. Kagalnitchau, La Walachie, i. 371.
+
+[356] A French translation of the Autobiography of Koraes, along with his
+portrait, will be found in the Lettres Inedites de Coray, Paris, 1877. The
+vehicle of expression usually chosen by Koraes for addressing his
+countrymen was the Preface (written in modern Greek) to the edition of an
+ancient author. The second half of the Preface to the Politics of
+Aristotle, 1822, is a good specimen of his political spirit and manner. It
+was separately edited by the Swiss scholar, Orelh, with a translation, for
+the benefit of the German Philhellenes. Among the principal linguistic
+prefaces are those to Heliodorus 1804, and the Prodromos, or introduction,
+to the series of editions called Bibliotheca Graeca, begun in 1805, and
+published at the expense of the brothers Zosimas of Odessa Most of the
+editions published by Koraes bear on their title page a statement of the
+patriotic purpose of the work, and indicate the persons who bore the
+expense. The edition of the Ethics, published immediately after the
+massacre of Chios, bears the affecting words 'At the expense of those who
+have so cruelly suffered in Chios.' The costly form of these editions, some
+of which contain fine engravings, seems somewhat inappropriate for works
+intended for national instruction. Koraes, however, was not in a hurry. He
+thought, at least towards the close of his life, that the Greeks ought to
+have gone through thirty years more of commercial and intellectual
+development before they drew the sword. They would in that case, he
+believed, have crushed Turkey by themselves and have prevented the Greek
+kingdom from becoming the sport of European diplomacy. Much miscellaneous
+information on Greek affairs before 1820 (rather from the Phanariot point
+of view) will be found, combined with literary history in the Cours de
+Litterature Grecque of Rhizos Neroulos, 1827. The more recent treatise of R
+Rhankabes on the same subject (also in French, Paris, 1877) exhibits what
+appears to be characteristic of the modern Greeks, the inability to
+distinguish between mere passable performances and really great work.
+
+[357] Zinkeisen, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, v. 959.
+
+[358] Koraes, Memoire sur l'etat actual de la civilization de la Grece:
+republished in the Lettres Inedites, p. 464. This memoir, read by Koraes to
+a learned society in Paris, in January, 1803, is one of the most luminous
+and interesting historical sketches ever penned.
+
+[359] [Greek text: Didaskalia Patrikae], by, or professing to be by,
+Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and printed "at the expense of the Holy
+Sepulchre," p. 13. This curious work, in which the Patriarch at last breaks
+out into doggrel, has found its way to the British Museum. It was answered
+by Koraes. For the effect of Rhegas' songs on the people, see Fauriel, ii.
+18. Mr. Finlay seems to be mistaken in calling Anthimos' book an answer to
+the tract of Eugenios Bulgaris on religious toleration. That was written
+about thirty years before.
+
+[360] Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, ch, v. 36, 37.
+
+[361] Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Geschichte Griechenlands, i. 145, from the
+papers of Hypsilanti's brother. Otherwise in Prokesch-Osten, Abfall der
+Griechen, i. 13.
+
+[362] Cordon, Greek Revolution, i. 96.
+
+[363] B. and F, State Papers, viii. 1203.
+
+[364] Finlay, i. 187; Gordon, i. 203; K. Mendelssohn, Geschichte
+Griechenlands, i. 191; Prokesch-Osten, Abfall der Griechen, i. 20.
+
+[365] Metternich, iii. 622, 717; Prokewh-Ostett, i. 231, 303. B. and F.
+State Papers, viii. 1247.
+
+[366] Records, Continent, iii.
+
+[367] Castlereagh, viii. 16; Metternich, iii. 504.
+
+[368] Kolokotrones, [Transliterated Greek] Aiaegaesis Symbanton, p. 82;
+Tricoupis, [Transliterated Greek] Historia, i. 61, 92.
+
+[369] Gordon, i. 388; Finlay, i. 330; Mendelssohn, i. 269.
+
+[370] Gordon ii. 138. The news of this catastrophe reached Metternich at
+Ischl on July 30th. "Prince Metternich was taking an excursion, in which,
+unfortunately I could not accompany him. I at once sent Francis after him
+with this important letter, which he received at a spot where the name of
+the Capitan Pasha had probably never been heard before. The prince soon
+came back to me; and (_pianissimo_ in order that the friends of Greece
+might not hear it) we congratulate one another on the event, which may very
+well prove _le commencement de la fin_ for the Greek insurrection."
+(Gentz.)
+
+[371] Prokesch-Osten, i. 253, iv. 63. B. and F. State Papers, xii. 902.
+Stapleton, Canning, p. 496 Metternich, 127. Wellington, N.S. ii. 372-396.
+
+[372] Korff, Accession of Nicholas, p. 253; Herzen, Russische Verschwoerung,
+p. 106; Mendelssohn, i. 396. Schnitzler, Histoire Intime, i. 195.
+
+[373] B. and F. State Papers, xiv. 630; Metternich, iv. 161, 212, 320, 372;
+Willington, N.S., ii. 85, 148, 244; Gentz, D.I., iii. 315.
+
+[374] B. and F. State Papers, xiv. 632; xvii. 20; Wellington, N.S., iv. 57.
+
+[375] Parl. Deb., May 11, 1877. Nothing can be more misleading than to say
+that Canning never contemplated the possibility of armed action because a
+clause in the Treaty of 1827 made the formal stipulation that the
+contracting Powers would not "take part in the hostilities between the
+contending parties." How, except by armed force, could the Allies "prevent,
+in so far as might be in their power, all collision between the contending
+parties," which, in the very same clause, they undertook to do? And what
+was the meaning of the stipulation that they should "transmit instructions
+to their Admirals conformable to these provisions"? Wellington himself,
+_before_ the battle of Navarino, condemned the Treaty of London on the
+very ground that it "specified means of compulsion which were neither more
+nor less than measures of war;" and he protested against the statement that
+the treaty arose directly out of the Protocol of St. Petersburg, which was
+his own work. Wellington, N.S., iv. 137, 221.
+
+[376] Bourchier's Codrington, ii. 6[***]. Admiralty Despatches, Nov. 10,
+1807, Parl. Deb., Feb. 14, 1828.
+
+[377] Rosen, Geschichte der Tuerkei, i. 57.
+
+[378] Moltke, Russisch-Turkische Feldzug, p. 226. Rosen, i. 67.
+
+[379] Viel-Castel, xx. 16. Russia was to have had the Danubian Provinces;
+Austria was to have had Bosnia and Servia; Prussia was to have had Saxony
+and Holland; the King of Holland was to have reigned at Constantinople.
+
+[380] Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, ii. 813. Rosen, i. 108.
+
+[381] Wellington, N. S, iv. 297.
+
+[382] Mendelssohn, Graf Capodistrias, p. 64.
+
+[383] B. and F. State Papers, xvii. p. 132. Prokesch-Osten, v. 136.
+
+[384] Stockmar, i. 80; Mendelssohn; Capodistrias, p. 272. B. and F. State
+Papers, xvii. 453.
+
+[385] Viel-Castel, xix. 574. Duvergier de Hauranne, x. 85.
+
+[386] Proces des ex-Ministres, i. 189.
+
+[387] Lafayette, vi. 383. Marmont, viii. 238. Dupin, Revolution de Juillet,
+p. 7. Odilon Barrot, i. 105. Sarrans, Lafayette, i. 217. Berard, Revolution
+de 1830, p. 60. Hillebrand, Die Juli-Revolution, p. 87.
+
+[388] Juste, Revolution Belge, i. 85. Congres National, i. 134.
+
+[389] Wellington, N.S. vii. 309. B. and F. State Papers, xviii. 761.
+Metternich, v. 44. Hillebrand, Geschichte Frankreichs, i. 171. Stockmar, i.
+143. Bulwers Palmerston, ii. 5. Hertslet, Map of Europe, iii. 81.
+
+[390] Smitt, Geschichte des Polnischen Aufstandes, i. 112. Spazier,
+Geschichte des Aufstandes, i. 177. Leiewel, Histoire de Pologne, i. 300.
+
+[391] Leroy-Beaulieu, Milutine, p. 199; L'Empire des Tsars, i. 380.
+Leiewel, Considerations, p. 317.
+
+[392] Bianchi, Ducati Estensi, i. 54. La Farina, v. 241. Farini, i. 34.
+
+[393] Bianchi, Diplomazia, iii. 48. Metternich, iv. 121. Hillebrand,
+Geschichte Frankreichs, i. 206. Haussonville, i. 32. B. and F. State
+Papers, xix. 1429. Guizot, Memoires, ii. 290.
+
+[394] Ilse, Untersuchungen, p. 262. Metternich, v. 347. Biedermann,
+Dreissig Jahre, i. 6.
+
+[395] Mazzini, Scritti, iii. 310. Simoni, Conspirations Mazziniennes, p.
+53. Metternich, v. 526. B. and F. State Papers, xxiv. 979.
+
+[396] B. and F. State Papers, xviii. 196. Palmerston, i. 300.
+
+[397] "La Reine Isabelle est la Revolution incarnee dans sa forme la plus
+dangereuse; Don Carlos represente le principe Monarchique aux prises avec
+la Revolution pure." Metternich, v. 615. B. and F. State Papers, xviii.
+1365; xxii. 1394. Baumgarten, iii. 65.
+
+[398] Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 941. Miraflores, Memorias, i. 39.
+Guizot, iv. 86. Palmerston ii. 180.
+
+[399] Essai historique sur les Provinces Basques, p. 58. W. Humboldt, Werke
+iii. 213.
+
+[400] Henningsen, Campaign with Zumalacarregui, i. 93. Burgos, Anales, ii.
+110. Baumgarten, iii. 257.
+
+[401] Rosen, i. 158. Prokesch von Osten, Kleine Schriften, vii. 56. Mehmed
+Ali, p. 17. Hillebrand, i. 514 Metternich, v. 481. B. and F. State Papers,
+xx. 1176; xxii. 140.
+
+[402] Palmerston understood little about the real condition of the Ottoman
+Empire, and thought that with ten years of peace it might again become a
+respectable Power. "All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire
+and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure and
+unadulterated nonsense." Bulwer's Palmerston, ii. 299.
+
+[403] Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 1008. Rosen, ii. 3. Guizot, v. 188.
+Prokesch-Osten, Mehmed Ali, p. 89. Palmerston, ii. 356. Hillebrand, ii.
+357. Greville Memoirs, 2nd part, vol. i. 297.
+
+[404] "Sie sollen ihn nicht haben
+       Den freien Deutschen Rhein."
+
+By Becker; answered by De Musset's "Nous avons eu votre Rhin Allemand." The
+words of the much finer song "Die Wacht am Rhein" were also written at this
+time--by Schneckenburger, a Wuertemberg man; but the music by which they are
+known was not composed till 1854.
+
+[405] Farini, i. 153. Azeglio, Corresp. Politique, p. 24; Casi di Romagna,
+p. 47.
+
+[406] Down to 1827 not only was all land inherited by nobles free from
+taxation, but any taxable land purchased by a noble thereupon became
+tax-free. The attempt of the Government to abolish this latter injustice
+evoked a storm of anger in the Diet of 1825, and still more in the country
+assemblies, some of the latter even resolving that such law, if passed, fey
+the Diet, would be null and void.
+
+[407] Horvath, Fuenfundzwanzig Jahre, i. 408. Springer, i. 466. Gerando,
+Esprit Public, 173. Kossuth, Gessammelte Werke, i. 29. Beschwerden und
+Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn, 39.
+
+[408] Das Polen-Attentat, 1846, p. 203. Verhaeltnisse in Galizien, p. 57.
+Briefe eines Polnischen Edelmannes, p. 31. Metternich, vii. 196. Cracow,
+which had been made an independent Republic by the Congress of Vienna, was
+now annexed by Austria with the consent of Russia and Prussia, and against
+the protests of England and France.
+
+[409] Reden des Koenigs Friedrich Wilhelm IV., p. 17. Ranke's F. W, IV. in
+Allg. Deutsche Biog. Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre, i. 186.
+
+[410] Guizot, viii. 101, Palmerston, iii. 194. Parl. Papers, 1847. Martin's
+Prince Consort, i. 341.
+
+[411] Metternich, vii. 538, 603; Vitzthum, Berlin und Wien, 1845-62, p. 78;
+Kossuth Werke (1850), ii. 78; Pillersdorff, Rueckblicke, p. 22; Reschauer,
+Das Jahr 1848, i. 191; Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, ii. 185; Iranyi
+et Chassin, Revolution de Hongrie, i. 128.
+
+[412] Metternich, viii. 181. The animation of his remarks on all sorts of
+points in English life is wonderful. After a halt at Brussels and at his
+Johannisburg estate Metternich returned to Vienna in 1852, and, though not
+restored to office, resumed his great position in society. He lived through
+the Crimean War, on which he wrote numerous memoranda, for whose use it
+does not appear. Even on the outbreak of war with France in 1859 he was
+still busy with his pen. He survived long enough to hear of the battle of
+Magenta, but was spared the sorrow of witnessing the creation of the
+Kingdom of Italy. He died on the 11th of June, 1859, in his eighty-seventh
+year. Metternich was not the only statesman present at the Congress of
+Vienna who lived to see the second Napoleonic Empire. Nesselrode, the
+Russian Chancellor, lived till 1862; Czartoryski, who was Foreign Minister
+of Russia at the time of the battle of Austerlitz, till 1861.
+
+[413] Adlerstein, Archiv des Ungarischen Ministeriums, i. 27; Iranyi et
+Chassin, i. 184; Springer, ii. 219.
+
+[414] Casati Nuove Rivelazioni, ii. 72. Schoenhals, Campagnes d'ltalie de
+1848 et 1849 p. 72. Cattaneo, Insurrezione di Milano, p. 29. Parl. Pap.
+1849, lvii. (2) 210, 333. Senneidawind, Feldzug in 1848, i. 30.
+
+[415] Manin, Documents laisses, i. 106. Perlbach, Manin, p. 14. Contarini,
+Memoriale Veneto, p. 10. Rovani, Manin, p. 25. Parliamentary Papers, 1849,
+lvii. (a) 267.
+
+[416] Bianchi, Diplomazia Europea, v. 183. Farini, Stato Romano, ii. 16.
+Parl. Papers, 1849, lvii. 285, 297, 319. Pasolini, Memorie, p. 91.
+
+[417] Die Berliner Maerz-Revolution, p. 55. Ausfuehrliche Beschreibung, p. 3.
+Amtliche Berichte, p. 16. Stahr, Preussische Revolution, i. 91. S. Stern,
+Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes, p. 58. Stern was an eye-witness at Berlin,
+though not generally a good authority.
+
+[418] "Preussen geht fortan in Deutschland auf." Reden Friedrich Wilhelms,
+p. 9. In conversation with Bassermann Frederick William at a later time
+described his ride through Berlin as "a comedy which he had been made to
+play." The bombast at any rate was all his own.
+
+[419] Droysen und Samwer, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 220. Bunsen, Memoir on
+Schleswig-Holstein, p. 25. Schleswig-Holstein, Uebersichtliche Darstellung,
+p 51. On the other side, Noten zur Beleuchtung, p. 12.
+
+[420] Verhandlungen der National-versammlung, i. 25. Biedermann Dreissig
+Jahre, i. 278. Radowitz, Werke, ii. 36.
+
+[421] Actes du Gouvernement Provisoire, p. 12. Louis Blanc, Revelations
+Historiques, i. 135. Gamier Pages, Revolution de 1848, vi 108, viii 148.
+Emile Thomas, Histoire des Ateliers Nationaux, p. 93.
+
+[422] Barret, Memoires, ii. 103. Caussidiere, Memoires, p. 117. Gamier
+Pages, x. 419. Normanby, Year of Revolution, i. 389. Granier de Cassagnac,
+Chute de Louis Philippe, i. 359. De la Gorce, Seconde Republique, i. 273.
+Falloux, Memoires, i. 328.
+
+[423] Oeuvres de Napoleon III., iii. 13, 24. Granier de Cassagnac, ii. 16.
+Jerrold, Napoleon III., ii. 393.
+
+[424] Vitzthum, Wien, p. 108. Springer, ii. 293. Pillersdorff, Rueckblicke,
+p. 68; Nachlass, p. 118. Reschauer, ii. 176. Dunder, October Revolution, p.
+5. Ficquelmont, Aufklaerungen, p. 65.
+
+[425] Schoenhals, p. 117. Farini, ii. 9. Parl. Pap., 1849, lvii. 352.
+
+[426] Ficquelmont p. 6. Pillersdorfif, Nachlass, 93. Helfert, iv. 142.
+Schfoenhais, p. 177. Parliamentary Papers, _id_. 332, 472, 597. Contarini,
+p. 67. Azeglio, Operazioni del Durando, p. 6. Manin, Documents, i. 289.
+Bianchi, Diplomazia, v. 257. Pasolini, p. 100.
+
+[427] Parliamentary Papers, 1849 lviii p. 128. Venice refused to
+acknowledge the armistice, and detached itself from Sardinia, restoring
+Manin to power.
+
+[428] Slavonia itself was attached to Croatia; Dalmatia also was claimed as
+a member of this triple Kingdom under the Hungarian Crown in virtue of
+ancient rights, though since its annexation in 1797 it had been governed
+directly from Vienna, and in 1848 was represented in the Reichstag of
+Vienna, not in that of Pesth.
+
+[429] The real meaning of the Charters is, however, contested. Springer,
+ii. 281. Adlerstein, Archiv, i. 166. Helfert, ii. 255. Iranyi et Chassin,
+i. 236. Die Serbische Wolwodschaftsfrage, p. 7.
+
+[430] But see Kossuth, Schriften (1880, ii. 215), for a conversation
+between Jellacic and Batthyany, said to have been narrated to Kossuth by
+the latter. If authentic, this certainly proves Jellacic to have used the
+Slavic agitation from the first solely for Austrian ends. See also
+Vitzthuin, p. 207.
+
+[431] Adlerstein, Archiv, i. 146. 156. Klapka, Erinnerungen, p. 30. Iranyi
+et Chassin, i. 344. Serbische Bewegung, p. 106.
+
+[432] Iranyi et Chassin, ii. 56. Codex der neuen Gesetze (Pesth), i. 7.
+
+[433] Adlerstein, ii. 296. Helfert, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 79, ii.
+192. Dunder, p. 77. Springer, ii. 520. Vitzthum, p. 143. Kossuth, Schriften
+(1881), ii. 284. Reschauer, ii. 563. Pillersdorff, Nachlass, p. 163. Iranyi
+et Chassin, ii. 98.
+
+[434] Codex der neuen Gesetze, i. 37. Helfert, iv. (3) 321.
+
+[435] Revolutionskrieg in Siebenburgen i. 30. Helfert, ii. 207. Bratiano et
+Iranyi, Lettres Hongro-Roumaines, Adlerstein, ii. 105.
+
+[436] Klapka, Erinnerungen, p. 56. Helfert, iv. 199; Goergei, Leben und
+Wirken, i. 145. Adlerstein, iii. 576, 648.
+
+[437] Helfert, iv. (2) 326. Klapka, War in Hungary, i. 23. Iranyi et
+Chassin, ii. 534. Goergei, ii. 54.
+
+[438] Klapka, War, ii. 106. Erinnerungen, 58. Goergei, ii. 378. Kossuth,
+Schriften (1880), ii. 291. Codex der neuen Gesetze, i. 75, 105.
+
+[439] Farini, ii. 404. Parl. Pap., 1849. lvii. 607; lviii. (2) 117.
+Bianchi, Diplomazia, vi. 67. Gennarelli, Sventure, p. 29. Pasolini, p. 139.
+
+[440] Schoenhals, p. 332. Parl. Pap., 1849, lviii. (2) 216. Bianchi,
+Politica Austriaca, p. 134. Lamarmora, Un Episodie, p. 175. Portafogli ci
+Ramorino, p. 41. Ramorino was condemned to death, and executed.
+
+[441] Garibaldi, Epistolario, i. 33. Del Vecchio, L'assedio di Roma, p. 30.
+Vaillant, Siege de Rome, p. 12. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vi. 213. Guerzoni,
+Garibaldi, i. 266. Granier de Cassagnac, ii. 59. Lesseps, Memoire, p. 61.
+Barrot, iii 191, Discours de Napoleon 3rd, p. 38.
+
+[442] Manin, Documents, ii. 340. Perlbach, Manin, p. 37. Gennarelli,
+Governo Pontificio, i. 32. Contarini, p. 224.
+
+[443] Verhandlungen der National Versammlung. i. 576 Radowitz, Werke, iii.
+369. Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 205. Biedermann, Dreissig Jahre,
+i. 295.
+
+[444] Verhandlungen der National Versammlung, ii. 1877, 2185. Herzog Ernst
+II., Ausmeinem Leben, i. 313. Biedermann, i. 306. Beseier, Erlebtes, p. 68.
+Waitz, Friede mit Daenemark. Radowitz, iii. 406.
+
+[445] Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, p. 184. Wagener, Erlebtes, p. 28.
+Stahr, Preussische Revolution, i. 453.
+
+[446] _Seine Bundespflichten:_ an ambiguous expression that might mean
+either its duties as an ally or its duties as a member of the German
+Federation. The obscurity was probably intentional.
+
+[447] Verhandlungen der National Versammlung, vi. 4225. Haym, Deutsche
+National Versammlung, ii. 112. Radowitz, iii. 459. Helfert, iv. 62.
+
+[448] Verhandlungen, viii. 6093. Beseler, p. 82. Helfert, iv. (3) 390,
+Haym, ii. 317, Radowitz, v. 477.
+
+[449] Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms, pp. 233, 269. Beseler, 87.
+Biedermann, i. 389. Wagener, Politik Friedrich Wilhelm IV., p. 56. Ernst
+II., i. 329.
+
+[450] Verhandlungen, etc., ix. 6695, 6886. Haym, in. 185. Barnberger,
+Erlebnisse, p. 6.
+
+[451] Verhandlungen zu Erfurt, i. 114; ii. 143. Biedermann, i. 469.
+Radowitz, ii. 138.
+
+[452] Der Fuersten Kongress, p. 13. Reden Friedrich Wilhelms, iv pp. 55, 69.
+Konferenz der Verbundeten, 1850, pp. 26, 53. Beust, Erinnerungen, i. 115,
+Ernst II., i. 525. Duncker, Vier Monate, p. 41.
+
+[453] Ernst II., i. 377. Hertslet, Map of Europe, ii. 1106, 1129, 1151.
+Parl. Papers, 1864, lxiii., p. 29; 1804, lxv., pp. 30, 187.
+
+[454] Maupas, Memoires, i. 176. Oeuvres de Napoleon III., iii. 271. Barrot,
+iv. 21. Granier de Cassagnac, Chute de Louis Philippe, ii. 128; Recit
+complet, p. 1. Jerrold, Napoleon III., iii. 203. Tocqueville, Corresp. ii.
+176.
+
+[455] Stockman, 396. Eastern Papers (_i.e._, Parliamentary Papers,
+1854, vol. 71), part 6. Malmesbury, Memoirs of an ex-Minister, i. 402; the
+last probably inaccurate. Diplomatic Study of the Crimean War, i. 11. This
+work is a Russian official publication, and, though loose and
+untrustworthy, is valuable as showing the Russian official view.
+
+[456] Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 142. Lane Poole, Stratford de Redcliffe, ii.
+191.
+
+[457] Eastern Papers, i. 55. Diplomatic Study, i. 121.
+
+[458] Eastern Papers, v. 2, 19.
+
+[459] Eastern Papers, i. 102. Admitted in Diplomatic Study, i. 163.
+
+[460] He writes thus, April 5, 1851:--"The great game of improvement is
+altogether up for the present. It is impossible for me to conceal that the
+main object of my stay here is almost hopeless." Even Palmerston, in the
+rare moments when he allowed his judgment to master his prepossessions on
+this subject, expressed the same view. He wrote on November 24, 1850,
+warning Reschid Pasha "the Turkish Empire is doomed to fall by the timidity
+and irresolution of its Sovereign and of its Ministers; and it is evident
+we shall ere long have to consider what other arrangements may be set up in
+its place." Stratford left Constantinople on leave in June, 1852, but
+resigned his Embassy altogether in January, 1853. (Lane Poole, Life of
+Stratford de Redcliffe, ii. 112, 215.)
+
+[461] Eastern Papers, i. 253, 339. Lane Poole, Stratford, ii. 248.
+
+[462] Palmerston had accepted the office of Home Secretary, but naturally
+exercised great influence in foreign affairs. The Foreign Secretary was
+Lord Clarendon.
+
+[463] Eastern Papers, i. 210, ii. 116. Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 23.
+
+[464] Eastern Papers, ii. 23.
+
+[465] Eastern Papers, ii. 86, 91, 103.
+
+[466] Eastern Papers, ii. 203, 227, 299.
+
+[467] Treaty of April 20, 1854, and Additional Article, Eastern Papers, ix.
+61. The Treaty between Austria and Prussia was one of general defensive
+alliance, covering also the case of Austria incurring attack through an
+advance into the Principalities. In the event of Russia annexing the
+Principalities or sending its troops beyond the Balkans the alliance was to
+be offensive.
+
+[468] Briefwechsel F. Wilhelms mit Bunsen, p. 310. Martin's Prince Consort,
+iii. 39. On November 20, after the Turks had begun war, the King of Prussia
+wrote thus to Bunsen (the italics, capitals, and exclamations are his own):
+"All direct help which England _in unchristian folly!!!!!!_ gives TO
+ISLAM AGAINST CHRISTIANS! will have (besides God's avenging judgment [hear!
+hear!]) no other effect than to bring what is now Turkish territory at a
+somewhat later period under Russian dominion" (Briefwechsel, p. 317). The
+reader may think that the insanity to which Frederick William succumbed was
+already mastering him; but the above is no rare specimen of his epistolary
+style.
+
+[469] The Treaty of alliance between France and England, to which Prussia
+was asked to accede, contained, however, a clause pledging the contracting
+parties "under no circumstance to seek to obtain from the war any advantage
+to themselves."
+
+[470] Eastern Papers, viii. I.
+
+[471] Eastern Papers, xi. 3. Ashley's Palmerston, ii. 60. For the
+navigation of the mouths of the Danube, see Diplomatic Study, ii. 39.
+Russia, which had been in possession of the mouths of the Danube since the
+Treaty of Adrianople, and had undertaken to keep the mouths clear, had
+allowed the passage to become blocked and had otherwise prevented traffic
+descending, in order to keep the Black Sea trade in its own hands.
+
+[472] See, however, Burgoyne's Letter to the _Times_, August 4, 1868,
+in Kinglake, iv. 465. Rousset, Guerre de Crimee, i. 280.
+
+[473] Statements of Raglan, Lucan, Cardigan; Kinglake, v. 108, 402.
+
+[474] On the death of Nicholas, the King of Prussia addressed the following
+lecture to the unfortunate Bunsen:--"You little thought that, at the very
+moment when you were writing to me, one of the noblest of men, one of the
+grandest forms in history, one of the truest hearts, and at the same time
+one of the greatest rulers of this narrow world, was called from faith to
+sight. I thank God on my knees that He deemed me worthy to be, in the best
+sense of the word, his [Nicholas'] friend, and to remain true to him. You,
+dear Bunsen, thought differently of him, and you will now painfully confess
+this before your conscience, most painfully of all the truth (which all
+your letters in these late bad times have unfortunately shown me but too
+plainly), that _you hated him_. You hated him, not as a man, but as
+the representative of a principle, that of violence. If ever, redeemed like
+him through simple faith in Christ's blood, you see him in eternal peace,
+then remember what I now write to you: '_You will beg his pardon_.
+Even here, my dear friend, may the blessing of repentance be granted to
+you."--Briefwechsel, p. 325. Frederick William seems to have forgotten to
+send the same pious wishes to the Poles in Siberia.
+
+[475] Parliamentary Papers, 1854-5, vol. 55, p. 1, Dec. 2, 1854. Ashley's
+Palmerston, ii. 84.
+
+[476] Eastern Papers, Part 13, 1.
+
+[477] Kinglake, vii. 21. Rousset, ii. 35, 148.
+
+[478] Diplomatic Study, ii. 361. Martin, Prince Consort, iii. 394.
+
+[479] Prussia was admitted when the first Articles had been settled, and it
+became necessary to revise the Treaty of July, 1841, of which Prussia had
+been one of the signatories.
+
+[480] "In the course of the deliberation, whenever our [Russian]
+plenipotentiaries found themselves in the presence of insurmountable
+difficulties, they appealed to the personal intervention of this sovereign
+[Napoleon], and had only to congratulate themselves on the
+result."--Diplomatic Study, ii. 377.
+
+[481] Three pages of promises. Eastern Papers, xvii. One was kept
+faithfully. "To accomplish these objects, means shall be sought to profit
+by the science, the art, _and the funds_ of Europe." One of the
+drollest of the prophecies of that time is the congratulatory address of
+the Missionaries to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, _id_. 1882.--"The
+Imperial Hatti-sheriff has convinced us that our fond expectations are
+likely to be realised. The light will shine upon those who have long sat in
+darkness; and blest by social prosperity and religious freedom, the
+millions of Turkey will, we trust, be seen ere long sitting peacefully
+under their own vine and fig-tree." So they were, and with poor Lord
+Stratford's fortune, among others, in their pockets.
+
+[482] All verbatim from the Treaty. Parl. Papers, 1856, vol 61, p. 1.
+
+[483] Martin, Prince Consort, iii. 452. Poole, Stratford, ii. 356.
+
+[484] Berti, Cavour avanti 1848, p. 110. La Rive, Cavour, p. 58. Cavour,
+Lettere (ed. Chuala), introd. p. 73.
+
+[485] Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), ii. introd. p. 187. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, i.
+412. Manin, the Ex-President of Venice, now in exile, declared from this
+time for the House of Savoy. Garibaldi did the same.
+
+[486] Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), ii. introd. pp. 289, 324; iii. introd. p.
+i. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vii. 1, Mazade, Cavour, p. 187, Massari, La
+Marmora, p. 204.
+
+[487] "In mezzo alle piu angosciose crisi politiche, esclamava nelle
+solitudine delle sue stanze; 'Perisca il mio nome, perisca la mia fama,
+purche l'Italia sia,'" Artom (Cavour's secretary), Cavour in Parlameuto:
+introd. p. 46.
+
+[488] La Farina Epistolaria, ii. 56, 81, 137, 426. The interview with
+Garibaldi; Cavour, Letiere, id. introd. p. 297. Garibaldi, Epistolario, i.
+55.
+
+[489] Cavour, Lettere (Chiala), iii. introd. p. 32. Bianchi, Diplomazia,
+viii. II. The statement of Napoleon III. to Lord Cowley, in Martin Prince
+Consort, v. 31, that there was no Treaty, is untrue.
+
+[490] Bianchi, Politique de Cavour, p. 328, where is Cavour's indignant
+letter to Napoleon. The last paragraph of this seems to convey a veiled
+threat to publish the secret negotiations.
+
+[491] Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. p. 115; iii. 29. Bianchi, Politique de
+Cavour, p. 333. Bianchi, Diplomazia, vii. 61. Massari, Cavour, p. 314.
+Parliamentary Papers, 1859, xxxii. 204, 262. Merimee, Lettres a Panizzi, i.
+21. Martin, Prince Consort, iv. 427.
+
+[492] La Farina, Epistolaria, ii. 172. Parliamentary Papers, 1859, xxxiii.
+391, 470.
+
+[493] Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 212, iii. 107. Bianchi, Politique de
+Cavour, p. 319. Bianchi, Diplomazia, viii. 145, 198. Massari, Vittorio
+Emanuele, ii. 32. Kossuth, Memories p. 394. Parl. Pap. 1859, xxxii. 63,
+1860, lxviii. 7. La Farina Epist, ii. 190. Ollivier, L'Eglise et l'Etat,
+ii. 452.
+
+[494] Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel, i. 268.
+
+[495] Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 301. Bianchi, viii. 180. Garibaldi,
+Epist., i. 79. Guerzoni, i. 491. Reuchlin, iv. 410.
+
+[496] Cavour, Lettere, iv. introd. 20. Bianchi, Politique, p. 354. Bianchi,
+Diplomazia, viii. 256. Parliamentary Papers, 1860, lxvii. 203; lxviii. 53.
+
+[497] Cavour in Parlamento, p. 536.
+
+[498] Garibaldi, Epist., i. 97. Persano, Diario, i. 14. Le Farina, Epist.,
+ii. 324. Guerzoni, ii. 23. Parliamentary Papers, 1860, lxviii. 2. Mundy,
+H.M.S. _Hannibal_ at Palermo, p. 133.
+
+[499] Cavour, Lettere, iii. introd. 269. La Farina, Epist., ii. 336.
+Bianchi, Politique, p. 366. Persano, Diario, i. 50, 72, 96.
+
+[500] Bianchi, Politique, p. 377. Persano, ii. p. 1-102. Persano sent his
+Diary in MS. to Azeglio, and asked his advice on publishing it. Azeglio
+referred to Cavour's saying, "If we did for ourselves what we are doing for
+Italy, we should be sad blackguards," and begged Persano to let his secrets
+be secrets, saying that since the partition of Poland no confession of such
+"colossal blackguardism" had been published by any public man.
+
+[501] Bianchi, Politique, p. 383. Persano, iii. 61. Bianchi, Diplomazia,
+viii. 337, Garibaldi, Epist., i. 127.
+
+[502] "Le Roi repondit tout court: 'C'est impossible.'" Cavour to his
+ambassador at London, Nov. 16, in Bianchi, Politique, p. 386. La Farina,
+Epist., ii. 438. Persano, iv. 44, Guerzoni, ii. 212.
+
+[503] Cavour in Parlamento, p. 630. Azeglio, Correspondance Politique, p.
+180. La Rive, p. 313. Berti, Cavour avanti 1848, p. 302.
+
+[504] "Le comte le reconnu, lui serra la main et dit: 'Frate, frate, libera
+chiesa in libero stato' Ce furent ses dernieres paroles." Account of the
+death of Cavour by his niece, Countess Alfieri, in La Rive, Cavour, p. 319.
+
+[505] Berichte uber der Militair etat, p. 669. Schulthess, Europaischer
+Geschichts Kalender, 1862, p. 122.
+
+[506] Poschinger, Preussen im Bundestag ii. 69, 97; iv. 178. Hahn,
+Bismarck, i. 608.
+
+[507] Hahn, Fuerst Bismarck, i. 66. This work is a collection of documents,
+speeches, and letters not only by Bismarck himself but on all the principal
+matters in which Bismarck was concerned. It is perhaps, from the German
+point of view, the most important repertory of authorities for the period
+1862-1885.
+
+[508] Sammlung der Staatsacten Oesterreichs (1861), pp. 2, 33. Drei Jahre
+Verfassungstreit, p. 107.
+
+[509] Sammlung der Staatsacten, p. 89. Der Ungarische Reichstag 1861, pp.
+3, 194, 238. Arnold Forster, Life of Deak, p. 141.
+
+[510] Celestin, Russland, p. 3. Leroy-Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, i. 400.
+Homme d'Etat Russe, p. 73. Wallace, Russia, p. 485.
+
+[511] Raczynski, Memoires sur la Pologne, p. 14. B. and F. State Papers,
+1862-63, p. 769.
+
+[512] Leroy-Beaulieu, Homme d'Etat Russe, p. 259.
+
+[513] Hahn, i. 112. Verhandl des Preuss, Abgeord. ueber Polen, p. 45.
+
+[514] Parliamentary Papers, 1864, vol. lxiv. pp. 28, 263. Hahn, Bismarck,
+i. 165.
+
+[515] From Rechberg's despatch of Feb 28, 1863 (in Hahn, i. 84), apparently
+quoting actual words uttered by Bismarck. Bismarck's account of the
+conversation (id. 80) tones it down to a demand that Austria should not
+encroach on Prussia's recognised joint-leadership in Germany.
+
+[516] B. and F. State Papers, 1863-4, p. 173. Beust, Erinnerungen, i. 136.
+
+[517] Bismarck's note of July 29th, 1870, in Hahn, i. 506, describing
+Napoleon's Belgian project, which dated from the time when he was himself
+ambassador at Paris in 1862, gives this as the explanation of Napoleon's
+policy in 1864. The Commercial Treaty with Prussia and friendly personal
+relations with Bismarck also influenced Napoleon's views. See Bismarck's
+speech of Feb. 21st, 1879, on this subject, in Hahn, iii. 599.
+
+[518] Hahn, Bismarck, i. 271, 318. Oesterreichs Kaempfe in 1866, i. 8.
+
+[519] B. and F. State Papers, 1864-65, p. 460.
+
+[520] La Marmora, Un po piu di luce, pp. 109, 146, Jacini, Due Anni, p.
+154. Hahn, i. 377. In the first draft of the Treaty Italy was required to
+declare war not only on Austria but on all German Governments which should
+join it. King William, who had still some compunction in calling in Italian
+arms against the Fatherland, struck out these words.
+
+[521] La Marmora, Un po piu di luce, p. 204. Hahn, i. 402.
+
+[522] Hahn, Bismarck, i. 425. Hahn, Zwei Jahre, p. 60. Oesterreichs Kaempfe,
+i. 30.
+
+[523] Discours de Napoleon III., p. 456. On May 11th, Nigra, Italian
+ambassador at Paris, reported that Napoleon's ideas on the objects to be
+attained by a Congress were as follows:--Venetia to Italy, Silesia to
+Austria; the Danish Duchies and other territory in North Germany to
+Prussia; the establishment of several small States on the Rhine under
+French protection; the dispossessed German princes to be compensated in
+Roumania. La Marmora, p. 228. Napoleon III. was pursuing in a somewhat
+altered form the old German policy of the Republic and the Empire--namely,
+the balancing of Austria and Prussia against one another, and the
+establishment of a French protectorate over the group of secondary States.
+
+[524] Oesterreichs Kaempfe, ii. 341. Prussian Staff, Campaign of 1866
+(Hozier), p. 167.
+
+[525] Hahn, i. 476. Benedetti, Ma Mission en Prusse, p. 186. Reuchlin, v.
+457. Massari, La Marmora, p. 350.
+
+[526] Hahn, i. 501, 505.
+
+[527] Benedetti, p. 191. Hahn, i. 508; ii. 328, 635. See also La Marmora's
+Un po piu di luce, p. 242, and his Segreti di Stato, p. 274. Govone's
+despatches strongly confirm the view that Bismarck was more than a mere
+passive listener to French schemes for the acquisition of Belgium. That he
+originated the plan is not probable; that he encouraged it seems to me
+quite certain, unless various French and Italian documents unconnected with
+one another are forgeries from beginning to end. On the outbreak of the war
+of 1870 Bismarck published the text of the draft-treaty discussed in 1866
+providing for an offensive and defensive alliance between France and
+Prussia, and the seizure of Belgium by France. The draft was in Benedetti's
+handwriting, and written on paper of the French Embassy. Benedetti stated
+in answer that he had made the draft at Bismarck's dictation. This might
+seem very unlikely were it not known that the draft of the Treaty between
+Prussia and Italy in 1866 was actually so written down by Barral, the
+Italian Ambassador, at Bismarck's dictation.
+
+[528] Regelung der Verhaeltnisse, p. 4. Ausgleich mit Ungarn, p. 9.
+
+[529] Hungary retained a Ministry of National Defence for its Reserve
+Forces, and a Finance Ministry for its own separate finance. Thus the
+Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the only one of the three common Ministries
+which covered the entire range of a department.
+
+[530] They had indeed been discovered by French agents in Germany. Rothan,
+L'Affaire du Luxembourg, p. 74.
+
+[531] Hahn, i. 658. Rothan, Luxembourg, p. 246. Correspondenzen des K.K.
+Minist. des Auessern, 1868, p. 24. Parl. Pap., 1867, vol. lxxiv., p. 427.
+
+[532] Sorel, Histoire Diplomatique, i. 38. But see the controversy between
+Beust and Gramont in _Le Temps_, Jan. 11-16, 1873.
+
+[533] Rothan, La France en 1867, ii. 316. Reuchlin, v. 547. Two historical
+expressions belong to Mentana: the "Never," of M. Rouher, and "The
+Chassepots have done wonders," of General Failly.
+
+[534] Sorel, i. 40. Hahn, i. 720. Immediately after Mentana, on Nov. 17,
+1867, Mazzini wrote to Bismarck and to the Prussian ambassador at Florence,
+Count Usedom, stating that Napoleon had resolved to make war on Prussia and
+had proposed an alliance to Victor Emmanuel, who had accepted it for the
+price of Rome. Mazzini offered to employ revolutionary means to frustrate
+this plan, and asked for money and arms. Bismarck showed caution, but did
+not altogether disregard the communication. Politica Segreta Italiana, p.
+339.
+
+[535] Benedetti, Ma Mission, p. 319, July 7. Gramont, La France et la
+Prusse, p. 61.
+
+[536] Sorel, Histoire Diplomatique, i. 197.
+
+[537] Hahn, ii. 69. Sorel, i. 236.
+
+[538] Prince Napoleon, in Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 1878; Gramont, in
+Revue de France, April 17, 1878. (Signed Andreas Memor.) Ollivier, L'Eglise
+et l'Etat, ii. 473. Sorel, i. 245.
+
+[539] Der Deutsch Franzoesische Krieg, 1870-71 (Prussian General Staff), i.
+72.
+
+[540] Bazaine, L'Armee du Rhin, p. 74.
+
+[541] Papiers Secrets du Second Empire (1875), pp. 33, 240.
+
+[542] Diary of the Emperor Frederick, Sept. 3.
+
+[543] Favre's circular alleged that the King of Prussia had declared that
+he made war not on France but on the Imperial Dynasty. King William had
+never stated anything of the kind. His proclamation on entering France, to
+which Favre appears to have referred, merely said that the war was to he
+waged against the French army, and not against the inhabitants, who, so
+long as they kept quiet, would not be molested.
+
+[544] Deutsch-Franzoesiche Krieg, vol. III., p. 104. Bazaine, p. 166. Proces
+de Bazaine, vol. ii., p. 219. Regnier, p. 20. Hahn, ii., 171.
+
+[545] Hahn, ii. 216. Valfrey, Diplomatie du Gouvernement de la Defense
+Nationale, ii. 51. Hertsier, Map of Europe, iii. 1912, 1954.
+
+[546] Parl. Pap. 1876, vol. lxxxiv., pp. 74, 96.
+
+[547] Parl. Pap. 1876, vol. lxxxiv., p. 183.
+
+[548] Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. xc., p. 143.
+
+[549] Parl. Deb. July 10, 1876, verbatim.
+
+[550] See Burke's speech on the Russian armament, March 29, 1791, and the
+passage on "the barbarous anarchic despotism" of Turkey in his Reflections
+on the French Revolution, p. 150, Clar. edit. Burke lived and died in
+Beaconsfield, and his grave is there. There seems, however, to be no
+evidence for the story that he was about to receive a peerage with the
+title of Beaconsfield, when the death of his son broke all his hopes.
+
+[551] Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. xc., p. 642; 1878, vol. lxxxi., p. 679.
+
+[552] Parl. Pap. 1877, vol. lxxxix., p. 135.
+
+[553] Parl. Pap. 1878, vol. lxxxi., pp. 661, 725. Parl. Deb., vol.
+ccxxxvii.
+
+[554] The Treaty, with Maps, is in Parl. Pap. 1878, vol. lxxxiii. p. 239.
+
+[555] Parl. Pap. 1878, vl. lxxxii., p. 3. _Globe_, May 31, 1878. Hahn,
+iii. 116.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: (1) Footnotes have been numbered and collected at the
+end of the work. (2) Sidenotes have been placed in brackets prior to the
+paragraph in which they occur. (3) In a few places (all in the footnotes)
+the text in our print copy was illegible and has been marked with a [***].
+(4) The spelling in the print copy was not always consistent. Irregular
+words in the original (e.g., "ascendent," "Christain," and "Wuertemburg")
+have been retained whenever possible.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's History of Modern Europe 1972-1878, by C. A. Fyffe
+
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