READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE FROM 1792 TO 1878

CHAPTER XII.

THE RESTORATION

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. Since that time seventy 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 organized 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 up-rising 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, 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 resettlement 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.

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 settlement 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 aggrandizement 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 recognized. 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). 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. 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.

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 Restoration in 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.

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 recrossed 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 recognized 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”.

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.

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.

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 barbarized 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.

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, 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 centralized 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 Constitution promulgated by King Louis XVIII on the 4th of June, 1814, and known as the Charta, 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 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. 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.

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. 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 almanacs, 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, resumed his place at the head of the officers of the Palace.

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 Church lands, 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. 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: 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.

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 Wurttemberg, 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 10,000 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. 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.

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.

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.

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. Like many other designs or 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; 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.

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. 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; 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.

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. 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.

Talleyrand’s object was attained. He had isolated Russia and Prussia, and had drawn to his own side not 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, 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”

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; 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 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.

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.

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 Danzig and Thorn on the Vistula, with the district lying between Thorn and the border of Silesia. 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.

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 Napoleon leaves 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.

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, 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.

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 Prefect 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. 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 recognized 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”.

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; 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, 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. Mac-Donald, 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.

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, 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 ­organization, and no military spirit. The regular troops who were sent out against Napoleon mounted the tricolour 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.

France was won: Europe remained behind. On the 13th of March the Ministers of all the Great congress of 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.

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 Blucher, 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 dispatches 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 organized 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 organization 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. 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.

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. 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.

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 ascendancy 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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 Blucher 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.

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 plan of 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 Blucher, 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. Blucher 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.

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, guarded the country west of the Charleroi road as far as Oudenarde on the Scheldt.

Blucher’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. In the course of the 14th, the Prussian out-posts 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 Blucher 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 Blucher, whose troops were already drawn up and awaiting the attack of the French.

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 Blucher. 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 Blucher 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 battle-field 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 Blucher 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.

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 army­corps 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.

Blucher, 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 Blucher 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 Blucher 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. Blucher, 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 Blucher 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 corn-fields, 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.

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 cannon­shot 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 reform 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. Blucher, 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 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 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.

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.

Fouche had entered into a private negotiation with Wellington while the English were on the outskirts of Paris, and while the authorized 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. 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. 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.

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, 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 40,000,000; 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.

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. 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 humor, 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”. 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.

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 the Four Powers, 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.

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 organization 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, 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.

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 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 criticized 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: 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.

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 Alsace and 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, 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.

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 Wilberforce'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 wide-spread. 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. 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. 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 civilization 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.

THE PROGRESS OF REACTION. EUROPE AFTER 1815.