READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE FROM 1792 TO 1878

CHAPTER XX.

AUSTRIA AND ITALY

The plain of Northern Italy has ever been an arena on which the contest between interests greater than those of Italy itself has been brought to an issue, and it may perhaps be truly said that in the struggle between established Governments and Revolution throughout Central Europe in 1848 the real turning point, if it can anywhere be fixed, lay rather in the fortunes of a campaign in Lombardy than in any single combination of events at Vienna or Berlin. The very existence of the Austrian Monarchy depended on the victory of Radetzky's forces over the national movement at the head of which Piedmont had now placed itself. If Italian independence should be established upon the ruin of the Austrian arms, and the influence and example of the victorious Italian people be thrown into the scale against the Imperial Government in its struggle with the separatist forces that convulsed every part of the Austrian dominions, it was scarcely possible that any stroke of fortune or policy could save the Empire of the Hapsburgs from dissolution. But on the prostration or recovery of Austria, as represented by its central power at Vienna, the future of Germany in great part depended. Whatever compromise might be effected between popular and monarchical forces in the other German States if left free from Austria's interference, the whole influence of a resurgent Austrian power could not but be directed against the principles of popular sovereignty and national union. The Parliament of Frankfort might then in vain affect to fulfil its mandate without reckoning with the Court of Vienna. All this was indeed obscured in the tempests that for a while shut out the political horizon. The Liberals of Northern Germany had little sympathy with the Italian cause in the decisive days of 1848. Their inclinations went rather with the combatant who, though bent on maintaining an oppressive dominion, was nevertheless a member of the German race and paid homage for the moment to Constitutional rights. Yet, as later events were to prove, the fetters which crushed liberty beyond the Alps could fit as closely on to German limbs; and in the warfare of Upper Italy for its own freedom the battle of German Liberalism was in no small measure fought and lost.

Metternich once banished from Vienna, the first popular demand was for a Constitution. His successors in office, with a certain characteristic pedantry, devoted their studies to the Belgian Constitution of 1831; and after some weeks a Constitution was published by edict for the non-Hungarian part of the Empire, including a Parliament of two Chambers, the Lower to be chosen by indirect election, the Upper consisting of nominees of the Crown and representatives of the great landowners. The provisions of this Constitution in favour of the Crown and the Aristocracy, as well as the arbitrary mode of its promulgation, displeased the Viennese. Agitation recommenced in the city; unpopular officials were roughly handled the Press grew ever more violent and more scurrilous. One strange result of the tutelage in which Austrian society had been held was that the students of the University became, and for some time continued to be, the most important political body of the capital. Their principal rivals in influence were the National Guard drawn from citizens of the middle class, the workmen as yet remaining in the background. Neither in the Hall of the University nor at the taverns where the civic militia discussed the events of the hour did the office-drawn Constitution find favour. On the 13th of May it was determined, with the view of exercising stronger pressure upon the Government, that the existing committees of the National Guard and of the students should be superseded by one central committee representing both bodies. The elections to this committee had been held, and its sittings had begun, when the commander of the National Guard declared such proceedings to be inconsistent with military discipline, and ordered the dissolution of the committee. Riots followed, during which the students and the mob made their way into the Emperor's palace and demanded from his Ministers not only the re­establishment of the central committee but the abolition of the Upper Chamber in the projected Constitution, and the removal of the checks imposed on popular sovereignty by a limited franchise and the system of indirect elections. On point after point the Ministry gave way; and, in spite of the resistance and reproaches of the Imperial household, they obtained the Emperor's signature to a document promising that for the future all the important military posts in the city should be held by the National Guard jointly with the regular troops, that the latter should never be called out except on the requisition of the National Guard, and that the projected Constitution should remain without force until it should have been submitted for confirmation to a single Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage.

The weakness of the Emperor's intelligence rendered him a mere puppet in the hands of those who for the moment exercised control over his actions. During the riot of the 15th of May he obeyed his Ministers; a few hours afterwards he fell under the sway of the Court party, and consented to fly from Vienna. On the 18th the Viennese learnt to their astonishment that Ferdinand was far on the road to the Tyrol. Soon afterwards a manifesto was published, stating that the violence and anarchy of the capital had compelled the Emperor to transfer his residence to Innsbruck; that he remained true, however, to the promises made in March and to their legitimate consequences; and that proof must be given of the return of the Viennese to their old sentiments of loyalty before he could again appear among them. A certain revulsion of feeling in the Emperor's favour now became manifest in the capital, and emboldened the Ministers to take the first step necessary towards obtaining his return, namely the dissolution of the Students' Legion. They could count with some confidence on the support of the wealthier part of the middle class, who were now becoming wearied of the students' extravagances and alarmed at the interruption of business caused by the Revolution; moreover, the ordinary termination of the academic year was near at hand. The order was accordingly given for the dissolution of the Legion and the closing of the University. But the students met the order with the stoutest resistance. The workmen poured in from the suburbs to join in their defence. Barricades were erected, and the insurrection of March seemed on the point of being renewed. Once more the Government gave way, and not only revoked its order, but declared itself incapable of preserving tranquillity in the capital unless it should receive the assistance of the leaders of the people. With the full concurrence of the Ministers, a Committee of Public Safety was formed, representing at once the students, the middle class, and the workmen; and it entered upon its duties with an authority exceeding, within the limits of the capital, that of the shadowy functionaries of State.

In the meantime the antagonism between the Czechs and the Germans in Bohemia was daily becoming more bitter. The influence of the party of compromise, which had been dominant in the early days of March, had disappeared before the ill-timed attempt of the German national leaders at Frankfort to include Bohemia within the territory sending representatives to the German national Parliament. By consenting to this incorporation the Czech population would have definitely renounced its newly asserted claim to nationality. If the growth of democratic spirit at Vienna was accompanied by a more intense German national feeling in the capital, the popular movements at Vienna and at Prague must necessarily pass into a relation of conflict with one another. On the flight of the Emperor becoming known at Prague, Count Thun, the governor, who was also the chief of the moderate Bohemian party, invited Ferdinand to make Prague the seat of his Government. This invitation, which would have directly connected the Crown with Czech national interests, was not accepted. The rasher politicians, chiefly students and workmen, continued to hold their meetings and to patrol the streets; and a Congress of Slavs from all parts of the Empire, which was opened on the 2nd of June, excited national passions still further. So threatening grew the attitude of the students and workmen that Count Windischgratz, commander of the troops at Prague, prepared to act with artillery. On the 12th of June, the day on which the Congress of Slavs broke up, fighting began. Windischgratz, whose wife was killed by a bullet, appears to have acted with calmness, and to have sought to arrive at some peaceful settlement. He withdrew his troops, and desisted from a bombardment that he had begun, on the understanding that the barricades which had been erected should be removed. This condition was not fulfilled. New acts of violence occurred in the city, and on the 17th Windischgratz reopened fire. On the following day Prague surrendered, and Windischgratz re-entered the city as Dictator. The autonomy of Bohemia was at an end. The army had for the first time acted with effect against a popular rising; the first blow had been struck on behalf of the central power against the revolution which till now had seemed about to dissolve the Austrian State into its fragments.

At this point the dominant interest in Austrian affairs passes from the capital and the northern provinces to Radetzky's army and the Italians with whom it stood face to face. Once convinced of the necessity of a retreat from Milan, the Austrian commander had moved with sufficient rapidity to save Verona and Mantua from passing into the hands of the insurgents. He was thus enabled to place his army in one of the best defensive positions in Europe, the Quadrilateral flanked by the rivers Mincio and Adige, and protected by the fortresses of Verona, Mantua, Peschiera, and Legnano. With his front on the Mincio he awaited at once the attack of the Piedmontese and the arrival of reinforcements from the north-east. On the 8th of April the first attack was made, and after a sharp engagement at Goito the passage of the Mincio was effected by the Sardinian army. Siege was now laid to Peschiera; and while a Tuscan contingent watched Mantua, the bulk of Charles Albert's forces operated farther northward with the view of cutting off Verona from the roads to the Tyrol. This result was for a moment achieved, but the troops at the King's disposal were far too weak for the task of reducing the fortresses; and in an attempt that was made on the 6th of May to drive the Austrians out of their positions in front of Verona, Charles Albert was defeated at Santa Lucia and compelled to fall back towards the Mincio.

A pause in the war ensued, filled by political events of evil omen for Italy. Of all the princes who had permitted their troops to march northwards to the assistance of the Lombards, not one was acting in full sincerity. The first to show himself in his true colours was the Pope. On the 29th of April an Allocution was addressed to the Cardinals, in which Pius disavowed all participation in the war against Austria, and declared that his own troops should do no more than defend the integrity of the Roman States. Though at the moment an outburst of popular indignation in Rome forced a still more liberal Ministry into power, and Durando, the Papal general, continued his advance into Venetia, the Pope's renunciation of his supposed national leadership produced the effect which its author desired, encouraging every open and every secret enemy of the Italian cause, and perplexing those who had believed themselves to be engaged in a sacred as well as a patriotic war. In Naples things hurried far more rapidly to a catastrophe. Elections had been held to the Chamber of Deputies, which was to be opened on the 15th of May, and most of the members returned were men who, while devoted to the Italian national cause were neither Republicans nor enemies of the Bourbon dynasty, but anxious to co-operate with their King in the work of Constitutional reform. Politicians of another character, however, commanded the streets of Naples. Rumours were spread that the Court was on the point of restoring despotic government and abandoning the Italian cause. Disorder and agitation increased from day to day; and after the Deputies had arrived in the city and begun a series of informal meetings preparatory to the opening of the Parliament, an ill-advised act of Ferdinand gave to the party of disorder, who were weakly represented in the Assembly, occasion for an insurrection. After promulgating the Constitution on February both, Ferdinand had agreed that it should be submitted to the two Chambers for revision. He notified, however, to the Representatives on the eve of the opening of Parliament that they would be required to take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution. They urged that such an oath would deprive them of their right of revision. The King, after some hours, consented to a change in the formula of the oath; but his demand had already thrown the city into tumult. Barricades were erected, the Deputies in vain endeavouring to calm the rioters and to prevent a conflict with the troops. While negotiations were still in progress shots were fired. The troops now threw themselves upon the people; there was a struggle, short in duration, but sanguinary and merciless; the barricades were captured, some hundreds of the insurgents slain, and Ferdinand was once more absolute master of Naples. The Assembly was dissolved on the day after that on which it should have met. Orders were at once sent by the King to General Pepe, commander of the troops that were on the march to Lombardy, to return with his army to Naples. Though Pepe continued true to the national cause, and endeavoured to lead his army forward from Bologna in defiance of the King's instructions, his troops now melted away; and when he crossed the Po and placed himself under the standard of Charles Albert in Venetia there remained with him scarcely fifteen hundred men.

It thus became clear before the end of May that the Lombards would receive no considerable help from the Southern States in their struggle for freedom, and that the promised league of the Governments in the national cause was but a dream from which there was a bitter awakening. Nor in Northern Italy itself was there the unity in aim and action without which success was impossible. The Republican party accused the King and the Provisional Government at Milan of an unwillingness to arm the people; Charles Albert on his part regarded every Republican as an enemy. On entering Lombardy the King had stated that no question as to the political organisation of the future should be raised until the war was ended; nevertheless, before a fortress had been captured, he had allowed Modena and Parma to declare themselves incorporated with the Piedmontese monarchy; and, in spite of Mazzini's protest, their example was followed by Lombardy and some Venetian districts. In the recriminations that passed between the Republicans and the Monarchists it was even suggested that Austria had friends of its own in certain classes of the population. This was not the view taken by the Viennese Government, which from the first appears to have considered its cause in Lombardy as virtually lost. The mediation of Great Britain was invoked by Metternich's successors, and a willingness expressed to grant to the Italian provinces complete autonomy under the Emperor's sceptre. Palmerston, in reply to the supplications of a Court which had hitherto cursed his influence, urged that Lombardy and the greater part of Venetia should be ceded to the King of Piedmont. The Austrian Government would have given up Lombardy to their enemy; they hesitated to increase his power to the extent demanded by Palmerston, the more so as the French Ministry was known to be jealous of the aggrandizement of Sardinia, and to desire the establishment of weak Republics like those formed in 1796. Withdrawing from its negotiations at London, the Emperor's Cabinet now entered into direct communication with the Provisional Government at Milan, and, without making any reference to Piedmont or Venice, offered complete independence to Lombardy. As the union of this province with Piedmont had already been voted by its inhabitants, the offer was at once rejected. Moreover, even if the Italians had shown a disposition to compromise their cause and abandon Venice, Radetzky would not have broken off the combat while any possibility remained of winning over the Emperor from the side of the peace-party. In reply to instructions directing him to offer an armistice to the enemy, he sent Prince Felix Schwarzenberg to Innsbruck to implore the Emperor to trust to the valour of his soldiers and to continue the combat. Already there were signs that the victory would ultimately be with Austria. Reinforcements had cut their way through the insurgent territory and reached Verona; and although a movement by which Radetzky threatened to sever Charles Albert's communications was frustrated by a second engagement at Goito, and Peschiera passed into the besiegers' hands, this was the last success won by the Italians. Throwing himself suddenly eastwards, Radetzky appeared before Vicenza, and compelled this city, with the entire Papal army, commanded by General Durando, to capitulate. The fall of Vicenza was followed June. July. by that of the other cities on the Venetian mainland till Venice alone on the east of the Adige defied the Austrian arms. As the invader pressed onward, an Assembly which Manin had convoked at Venice decided on union with Piedmont. Manin himself had been the most zealous opponent of what he considered the sacrifice of Venetian independence. He gave way nevertheless at the last, and made no attempt to fetter the decision of the Assembly; but when this decision had been given he handed over the conduct of affairs to others, and retired for a while into private life, declining to serve under a king.

Charles Albert now renewed his attempt to wrest the central fortresses from the Austrians. Leaving half his army at Peschiera and farther north, he proceeded with the other half to blockade Mantua. Radetzky took advantage of the unskilful generalship of his opponent, and threw himself upon the weakly guarded centre of the long Sardinian line. The King perceived his error, and sought to unite with his the northern detachments, now separated from him by the Mincio. His efforts were baffled, and on the 25th of July, after a brave resistance, his troops were defeated at Custozza. The retreat across the Mincio was conducted in fair order, but disasters sustained by the northern division, which should have held the enemy in check, destroyed all hope, and the retreat then became a flight. Radetzky followed in close pursuit. Charles Albert entered Milan, but declared himself unable to defend the city. A storm of indignation broke out against the unhappy King amongst the Milanese, whom he was declared to have betrayed. The palace where he had taken up his quarters was besieged by the mob; his life was threatened; and he escaped with difficulty on the night of August 5th under the protection of General La Marmora and a few faithful Guards. A capitulation was signed, and as the Piedmontese army evacuated the city Radetzky's troops entered it in triumph. Not less than sixty thousand of the inhabitants, according to Italian statements, abandoned their homes and sought refuge in Switzerland or Piedmont rather than submit to the conqueror's rule. Radetzky could now have followed his retreating enemy without difficulty to Turin, and have crushed Piedmont itself under foot; but the fear of France and Great Britain checked his career of victory, and hostilities were brought to a close by an armistice at Vigevano on August 9th.

The effects of Radetzky’s triumph were felt in every province of the Empire. The first open expression given to the changed state of affairs was the return of the Imperial Court from its refuge at Innsbruck to Vienna. The election promised in May had been held, and an Assembly representing all the non-Hungarian parts of the Monarchy, with the exception of the Italian provinces, had been opened by the Archduke John, as representative of the Emperor, on the 22nd of July. Ministers and Deputies united in demanding the return of the Emperor to the capital. With Radetzky and Windischgratz within call, the Emperor could now with some confidence face his students and his Parliament. But of far greater importance than the return of the Court to Vienna was the attitude which it now assumed towards the Diet and the national Government of Hungary. The concessions made in April, inevitable as they were, had in fact raised Hungary to the position of an independent State. When such matters as the employment of Hungarian troops against Italy or the distribution of the burden of taxation came into question, the Emperor had to treat with the Hungarian Ministry almost as if it represented a foreign and a rival Power. For some months this humiliation had to be borne, and the appearance of fidelity to the new Constitutional law maintained. But a deep, resentful hatred against the Magyar cause penetrated the circles in which the old military and official absolutism of Austria yet survived; and behind the men and the policy still representing with some degree of sincerity the new order of things, there gathered the passions and the intrigues of a reaction that waited only for the outbreak of civil war within Hungary itself, and the restoration of confidence to the Austrian army, to draw the sword against its foe. Already, while Italy was still unsubdued, and the Emperor was scarcely safe in his palace at Vienna, the popular forces that might be employed against the Government at Pesth came into view.

In one of the stormy sessions of the Hungarian Diet at the time when the attempt was first made to impose the Magyar language upon Croatia the Illyrian leader, Gai, had thus addressed the Assembly: “You Magyars are an island in the ocean of Slavism. Take heed that its waves do not rise and overwhelm you”. The agitation of the spring of 1848 first revealed in its full extent the peril thus foreshadowed. Croatia had for above a year been in almost open mutiny, but the spirit of revolt now spread through the whole of the Serb population of Southern Hungary, from the eastern limits of Slavonia, across the plain known as the Banat beyond the junction of the Theiss and the Danube, up to the borders of Transylvania. The Serbs had been welcomed into these provinces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the sovereigns of Austria as a bulwark against the Turks. Charters had been given to them, which were still preserved, promising them a distinct political administration under their own elected Voivode, and ecclesiastical independence under their own Patriarch of the Greek Church. These provincial rights had fared much as others in the Austrian Empire. The Patriarch and the Voivode had disappeared, and the Banat had been completely merged in Hungary. Enough, however, of Serb nationality remained to kindle at the summons of 1848, and to resent with a sudden fierceness the determination of the Magyar rulers at Pesth that the Magyar language, as the language of State, should thenceforward bind together all the races of Hungary in the enjoyment of a common national life. The Serbs had demanded from Kossuth and his colleagues the restoration of the local and ecclesiastical autonomy of which the Hapsburgs had deprived them, and the recognition of their own national language and customs. They found, or believed, that instead of a German they were now to have a Magyar lord, and one more near, more energetic, more aggressive. Their reply to Kossuth's defence of Magyar ascendency was the summoning of a Congress of Serbs at Carlowitz on the Lower Danube. Here it was declared that the Serbs of Austria formed a free and independent nation under the Austrian sceptre and the common Hungarian Crown. A Voivode was elected and the limits of his province were defined. A National Committee was charged with the duty of organizing a Government and of entering into intimate connection with the neighbouring Slavic Kingdom of Croatia.

At Agram, the Croatian capital, all established authority had sunk in the catastrophe of March, and a National Committee had assumed power. It happened that the office of Governor, or Ban, of Croatia was then vacant. The Committee sent a deputation to Vienna requesting that the colonel of the first Croatian regiment, Jellacic, might be appointed. Without waiting for the arrival of the deputation, the Court, by a patent dated the 23rd of March, nominated Jellacic to the vacant post. The date of this appointment, and the assumption of office by Jellacic on the 14th of April, the very day before the Hungarian Ministry entered upon its powers, have been considered proof that a secret understanding existed from the first between Jellacic and the Court. No further evidence of this secret relation has, however, been made public, and the belief long current among all friends of the Magyar cause that Croatia was deliberately instigated to revolt against the Hungarian Government by persons around the Emperor seems to rest on no solid foundation. The Croats would have been unlike all other communities in the Austrian Empire if they had not risen under the national impulse of 1848. They had been murmuring against Magyar ascendency for years past, and the fire long smouldering now probably burst into flame here as elsewhere without the touch of an incendiary hand. With regard to Jellacic’s sudden appointment it is possible that the Court, powerless to check the Croatian movement, may have desired to escape the appearance of compulsion by spontaneously conferring office on the popular soldier, who was at least more likely to regard the Emperor's interests than the lawyers and demagogues around him. Whether Jellacic was at this time genuinely concerned for Croatian autonomy, or whether from the first, while he apparently acted with the Croatian nationalists his deepest sympathies were with the Austrian army, and his sole design was that of serving the Imperial Crown with or without its own avowed concurrence, it is impossible to say. That, like most of his countrymen, he cordially hated the Magyars, is beyond doubt. The general impression left by his character hardly accords with the Magyar conception of him as the profound and far-sighted conspirator- he would seem, on the contrary, to have been a man easily yielding to the impulses of the moment, and capable of playing contradictory parts with little sense of his own inconsistency.

Installed in office, Jellacic cast to the winds all consideration due to the Emperor's personal engagements towards Hungary, and forthwith permitted the Magyar officials to be driven out of the country. On the 2nd of May he issued an order forbidding all Croatian authorities to correspond with the Government at Pesth. Batthyany, the Hungarian Premier, at once hurried to Vienna, and obtained from the Emperor a letter commanding Jellacic to submit to the Hungarian Ministry. As the Ban paid no attention to this mandate, General Hrabowsky, commander of the troops in the southern provinces, received orders from Pesth to annul all that Jellacic had done, to suspend him from his office, and to bring him to trial for high treason. Nothing daunted, Jellacic on his own authority convoked the Diet of Croatia for the 5th of June; the populace of Agram, on hearing of Hrabowsky’s mission, burnt the Palatine in effigy. This was a direct outrage on the Imperial family, and Batthyany turned it to account. The Emperor had just been driven from Vienna by the riot of the 15th of May. Batthyany sought him at Innsbruck, and by assuring him of the support of his loyal Hungarians against both the Italians and the Viennese obtained his signature on June 10th to a rescript vehemently condemning the Ban's action and suspending him from office. Jellacic had already been summoned to appear at Innsbruck. He set out, taking with him a deputation of Croats and Serbs, and leaving behind him a popular Assembly sitting at Agram, in which, besides the representatives of Croatia, there were seventy Deputies from the Serb provinces. On the very day on which the Ban reached Innsbruck, the Imperial order condemning him and suspending him from his functions was published by Batthyany at Pesth. Nor was the situation made easier by the almost simultaneous announcement that civil war had broken out on the Lower Danube, and that General Hrabowsky, on attempting to occupy Carlowitz, had been attacked and compelled to retreat by the Serbs under their national leader Stratimirovic.

It is said that the Emperor Ferdinand, during deliberations in council on which the fate of the Austrian Empire depended, was accustomed to occupy himself with counting the number of carriages that passed from right and left respectively under the windows. In the struggle between Croatia and Hungary he appears to have avoided even the formal exercise of authority, preferring to commit the decision between the contending parties to the Archduke John, as mediator or judge. John was too deeply immersed in other business to give much attention to the matter. What really passed between Jellacic and the Imperial family at Innsbruck is unknown. The official request of the Ban was for the withdrawal or suppression of the rescript signed by the Emperor on June 10th. Prince Esterhazy, who represented the Hungarian Government at Innsbruck, was ready to make this concession; but before the document could be revoked, it had been made public by Batthyany. With the object of proving his fidelity to the Court, Jellacic now published an address to the Croatian regiments serving in Lombardy, entreating them not to be diverted from their duty to the Emperor in the field by any report of danger to their rights and their nationality nearer home. So great was Jellacic’s influence with his countrymen that an appeal from him of opposite tenor would probably have caused the Croatian regiments to quit Radetzky in a mass, and so have brought the war in Italy to an ignominious end. His action won for him a great popularity in the higher ranks of the Austrian army, and probably gained for him, even if he did not possess it before, the secret confidence of the Court. That some understanding now existed is almost certain, for, in spite of the unrepealed declaration of June 10th, and the postponement of the Archduke's judgment, Jellacic was permitted to return to Croatia and to resume his government. The Diet at Agram occupied itself with far-reaching schemes for a confederation of the southern Slavs; but its discussions were of no practical effect, and after some weeks it was extinguished under the form of an adjournment. From this time Jellacic held dictatorial power. It was unnecessary for him in his relations with Hungary any longer to keep up the fiction of a mere defence of Croatian rights; he appeared openly as the champion of Austrian unity. In negotiations which he held with Batthyany at Vienna during the last days of July, he demanded the restoration of single Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs for the whole Austrian Empire. The demand was indignantly refused, and the chieftains of the two rival races quitted Vienna to prepare for war.

The Hungarian National Parliament, elected under the new Constitution, had been opened at Pesth on July 5th. Great efforts had been made, in view of the difficulties with Croatia and of the suspected intrigues between the Ban and the Court party, to induce the Emperor Ferdinand to appear at Pesth in person. He excused himself from this on the ground of illness, but sent a letter to the Parliament condemning not only in his own name but in that of every member of the Imperial family the resistance offered to the Hungarian Government in the southern provinces. If words bore any meaning, the Emperor stood pledged to a loyal co-operation with the Hungarian Ministers in defence of the unity and the constitution of the Hungarian Kingdom as established by the laws of April. Yet at this very time the Minister of War at Vienna was encouraging Austrian officers to join the Serb insurgents. Kossuth, who conducted most of the business of the Hungarian Government in the Lower Chamber at Pesth, made no secret of his hostility to the central powers. While his colleagues sought to avoid a breach with the other half of the Monarchy, it seemed to be Kossuth's object rather to provoke it. In calling for a levy of two hundred thousand men to crash the Slavic rebellion, he openly denounced the Viennese Ministry and the Court as its promoters. In leading the debate upon the Italian War, he endeavoured without the knowledge of his colleagues to make the cession of the territory west of the Adige a condition of Hungary's participation in the struggle. As Minister of Finance, he spared neither word nor act to demonstrate his contempt for the financial interests of Austria. Whether a gentler policy on the part of the most powerful statesman in Hungary might have averted the impending conflict it is vain to ask; but in the uncompromising enmity of Kossuth the Austrian Court found its own excuse for acts in which shamelessness seemed almost to rise into political virtue. No sooner had Radetzky's victories and the fall of Milan brought the Emperor back to Vienna than the new policy came into effect. The veto of the sovereign was placed upon the laws passed by the Diet at Pesth for the defence of the Kingdom. The Hungarian Government was required to reinstate Jellacic in his dignities, to enter into negotiations at Vienna with him and the Austrian Ministry, and finally to desist from all military preparations against the rebellious provinces. In answer to these demands the Diet sent a hundred of its members to Vienna to claim from the Emperor the fulfilment of his plighted word. The miserable man received them on the 9th of September with protestations of his sincerity; but even before the deputation had passed the palace-gates, there appeared in the official gazette a letter under the Emperor's own hand replacing Jellacic in office and acquitting him of every charge that had been brought against him. It was for this formal recognition alone that Jellacic had been waiting. On the 11th of September he crossed the Drave with his army, and began his march against the Hungarian capital.

The Ministry now in office at Vienna was composed in part of men who had been known as reformers in the early days of 1848; but the old order was represented by Count Wessenberg, who had been Metternich's assistant at the Congress of Vienna, and by Latour, the War Minister, a soldier of high birth whose career dated back to the campaign of Austerlitz. Whatever contempt might be felt by one section of the Cabinet for the other, its members were able to unite against the independence of Hungary as they had united against the independence of Italy. They handed in to the Emperor a memorial in which the very concessions to which they owed their own existence as a Constitutional Ministry were made a ground for declaring the laws establishing Hungarian autonomy null and void. In a tissue of transparent sophistries they argued that the Emperor's promise of a Constitution to all his dominions on the 15th of March disabled him from assenting, without the advice of his Viennese Ministry, to the resolutions subsequently passed by the Hungarian Diet, although the union between Hungary and the other Hereditary States had from the first rested solely on the person of the monarch, and no German official had ever pretended to exercise authority over Hungarians otherwise than by order of the sovereign as Hungarian King. The publication of this Cabinet memorial, which appeared in the journals at Pesth on the 15th of September, gave plain warning to the Hungarians that, if they were not to be attacked by Jellacic and the Austrian army simultaneously, they must make some compromise with the Government at Vienna. Batthyany was inclined to concession, and after resigning office in consequence of the Emperor's desertion he had already re-assumed his post with colleagues disposed to accept his own pacific policy. Kossuth spoke openly of war with Austria and of a dictatorship. As Jellacic advanced towards Pesth, the Palatine took command of the Hungarian army and marched southwards. On reaching Lake Baloton, on whose southern shore the Croats were encamped, he requested a personal conference with Jellacic, and sailed to the appointed place of meeting. But he waited in vain for the Ban; and rightly interpreting this rejection of his overtures, he fled from the army and laid down his office. The Emperor now sent General Lamberg from Vienna with orders to assume the supreme command alike over the Magyar and the Croatian forces, and to prevent an encounter. On the success of Lamberg's mission hung the last chance of reconciliation between Hungary and Austria. Batthyany, still clinging to the hope of peace, set out for the camp in order to meet the envoy on his arrival. Lamberg, desirous of obtaining the necessary credentials from the Hungarian Government, made his way to Pesth. There he found Kossuth and a Committee of Six installed in power. Under their influence the Diet passed a resolution forbidding Lamberg to assume command of the Hungarian troops, and declaring him a traitor if he should attempt to do so. The report spread through Pesth that Lamberg had come to seize the citadel and bombard the town; and before he could reach a place of safety he was attacked and murdered by a raging mob. It was in vain that Batthyany, who now laid down his office, besought the Government at Vienna to take no rash step of vengeance. The pretext for annihilating Hungarian independence had been given, and the mask was cast aside. A manifesto published by the Emperor on the 3rd of October declared the Hungarian Parliament dissolved, and its acts null and void. Martial law was proclaimed, and Jellacic appointed commander of all the forces and representative of the sovereign. In the course of the next few days it was expected that he would enter Pesth as conqueror.

In the meantime, however confidently the Government might reckon on Jellacic's victory, the passions of revolution were again breaking loose in Vienna itself. Increasing misery among the poor, financial panics, the reviving efforts of professional agitators, had renewed the disturbances of the spring in forms which alarmed the middle classes almost as much as the holders of power. The conflict of the Government with Hungary brought affairs to a crisis. After discovering the uselessness of negotiations with the Emperor, the Hungarian Parliament had sent some of its ablest members to request an audience from the Assembly sitting at Vienna, in order that the representatives of the western half of the Empire might, even at the last moment, have the opportunity of pronouncing a judgment upon the action of the Court. The most numerous group in the Assembly was formed by the Czech deputies from Bohemia. As Slavs, the Bohemian deputies had sympathised with the Croats and Serbs in their struggle against Magyar ascendency, and in their eyes Jellacic was still the champion of a national cause. Blinded by their sympathies of race to the danger involved to all nationalities alike by the restoration of absolutism, the Czech majority, in spite of a singularly impressive warning given by a leader of the German Liberals, refused a hearing to the Hungarian representatives. The Magyars, repelled by the Assembly, sought and found allies in the democracy of Vienna itself. The popular clubs rang with acclamations for the cause of Hungarian freedom and with invectives against the Czech instruments of tyranny. In the midst of this deepening agitation tidings arrived at Vienna that Jellacic had been repulsed in his march on Pesth and forced to retire within the Austrian frontier. It became necessary for the Viennese Government to throw its own forces into the struggle, and an order was given by Latour to the regiments in the capital to set out for the scene of warfare. This order had, however, been anticipated by the democratic leaders, and a portion of the troops had been won over to the popular side. Latour's commands were resisted; and upon an attempt being made to enforce the departure of the troops, the regiments fired on one another (October 6th). The battalions of the National Guard which rallied to the support of the Government were overpowered by those belonging to the working men's districts. The insurrection was victorious; the Ministers submitted once more to the masters of the streets, and the orders given to the troops were withdrawn. But the fiercer part of the mob was not satisfied with a political victory. There were criminals and madmen among its leaders who, after the offices of Government had been stormed and Latour had been captured, determined upon his death. It was in vain that some of the keenest political opponents of the Minister sought at the peril of their own lives to protect him from his murderers. He was dragged into the court in front of the War Office, and there slain with ferocious and yet deliberate barbarity.

The Emperor, while the city was still in tumult, had in his usual fashion promised that the popular demands should be satisfied; but as soon as he was unobserved he fled from Vienna, and in his flight he was followed by the Czech deputies and many German Conservatives, who declared that their lives were no longer safe in the capital. Most of the Ministers gathered round the Emperor at Olmutz in Moravia; the Assembly, however, continued to hold its sittings in Vienna, and the Finance Minister, apparently under instructions from the Court, remained at his post, and treated the Assembly as still possessed of legal powers. But for all practical purposes the western half of the Austrian Empire had now ceased to have any Government whatever; and the real state of affairs was bluntly exposed in a manifesto published by Count Windischgratz at Prague on the 11th of October, in which, without professing to have received any commission from the Emperor, he announced his intention of marching on Vienna in order to protect the sovereign and maintain the unity of the Empire. In due course the Emperor ratified the action of his energetic soldier; Windischgratz was appointed to the supreme command over all the troops of the Empire with the exception of Radetzky's army, and his march against Vienna was begun.

To the Hungarian Parliament, exasperated by the decree ordering its own dissolution and the war openly levied against the country by the Court in alliance with Jellacic, the revolt of the capital seemed to bring a sudden deliverance from all danger. The Viennese had saved Hungary, and the Diet was willing, if summoned by the Assembly at Vienna, to send its troops to the defence of the capital. But the urgency of the need was not understood on either side till too late. The Viennese Assembly, treating itself as a legitimate and constitutional power threatened by a group of soldiers who had usurped the monarch's authority, hesitated to compromise its legal character by calling in a Hungarian army. The Magyar generals on the other hand were so anxious not to pass beyond the strict defence of their own kingdom, that, in the absence of communication from a Viennese authority, they twice withdrew from Austrian soil after following Jellacic in pursuit beyond the frontier. It was not until Windischgratz had encamped within sight of Vienna, and had detained as a rebel the envoy sent to him by the Hungarian Government, that Kossuth's will prevailed over the scruples of weaker men, and the Hungarian army marched against the besiegers. In the meantime Windischgratz had begun his attack on the suburbs, which were weakly defended by the National Guard and by companies of students and volunteers, the nominal commander being one Messenhauser, formerly an officer in the regular army, who was assisted by a soldier of far greater merit than himself, the Polish general Bem. Among those who fought were two members of the German Parliament of Frankfort, Robert Blum and Frobel, who had been sent to mediate between the Emperor and his subjects, but had remained at Vienna as combatants. The besiegers had captured the outskirts of the city, and negotiations for surrender were in progress, when, on the 30th of October, Messenhauser from the top of the cathedral tower saw beyond the line of the besiegers on the south-east the smoke of battle, and announced that the Hungarian army was approaching. An engagement had in fact begun on the plain of Schwechat between the Hungarians and Jellacic, reinforced by divisions of Windischgratz’s troops. In a moment of wild excitement the defenders of the capital threw themselves once more upon their foe, disregarding the offer of surrender that had been already made. But the tide of battle at Schwechat turned against the Hungarians. They were compelled to retreat, and Windischgratz, reopening his cannonade upon the rebels who were also violators of their truce, became in a few hours master of Vienna. He made his entry on the 31st of October, and treated Vienna as a conquered city. The troops had behaved with ferocity during the combat in the suburbs, and slaughtered scores of unarmed persons. No Oriental tyrant ever addressed his fallen foes with greater insolence and contempt for human right than Windischgratz in the proclamations which, on assuming government, he addressed to the Viennese; yet, whatever might be the number of persons arrested and imprisoned, the number now put to death was not great. The victims were indeed carefully selected; the most prominent being Robert Blum, in whom, as a leader of the German Liberals and a Deputy of the German Parliament inviolable by law, the Austrian Government struck ostentatiously at the Parliament itself and at German democracy at large.

In the subjugation of Vienna the army had again proved itself the real political power in Austria; but the time had not yet arrived when absolute government could be openly restored. The Bohemian deputies, fatally as they had injured the cause of constitutional rule by their secession from Vienna, were still in earnest in the cause of provincial autonomy, and would vehemently have repelled the charge of an alliance with despotism. Even the mutilated Parliament of Vienna had been recognised by the Court as in lawful session until the 22nd of October, when an order was issued proroguing the Parliament and bidding it re-assemble a month later at Kremsier, in Moravia. There were indications in the weeks succeeding the fall of Vienna of a conflict between the reactionary and the more liberal influences surrounding the Emperor, and of an impending coup d'etat: but counsels of prudence prevailed for the moment; the Assembly was permitted to meet at Kremsier, and professions of constitutional principle were still made with every show of sincerity. A new Ministry, however, came into office, with Prince Felix Schwarzenberg at its head. Schwarzenberg belonged to one of the greatest Austrian families. He had been ambassador at Naples when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and had quitted the city with words of menace when insult was offered to the Austrian flag. Exchanging diplomacy for war, he served under Radetzky, and was soon recognised as the statesman in whom the army, as a political power, found its own peculiar representative. His career had hitherto been illustrated chiefly by scandals of private life so flagrant that England and other countries where he had held diplomatic posts had insisted on his removal; but the cynical and reckless audacity of the man rose in his new calling as Minister of Austria to something of political greatness. Few statesmen have been more daring than Schwarzenberg; few have pushed to more excessive lengths the advantages to be derived from the moral or the material weakness of an adversary. His rule was the debauch of forces respited in their extremity for one last and worst exertion. Like the Roman Sulla, he gave to a condemned and perishing cause the passing semblance of restored vigour, and died before the next great wave of change swept his creations away.

Schwarzenberg's first act was the deposition of his sovereign. The imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand had long suggested his abdication or dethronement, and the time for decisive action had now arrived. He gladly withdrew into private life: the crown, declined by his brother and heir, was passed on to his nephew, Francis Joseph, a youth of eighteen. This prince had at least not made in person, not uttered with his own lips, not signed with his own hand, those solemn engagements with the Hungarian nation which Austria was now about to annihilate with fire and sword. He had not moved in friendly intercourse with men who were henceforth doomed to the scaffold. He came to the throne as little implicated in the acts of his predecessor as any nominal chief of a State could be; as fitting an instrument in the hands of Court and army as any reactionary faction could desire. Helpless and well-meaning, Francis Joseph, while his troops poured into Hungary, played for a while in Austria the part of a loyal observer of his Parliament; then, when the moment had come for its destruction, he obeyed his soldier-minister as Ferdinand had in earlier days obeyed the students, and signed the decree for its dissolution (March 4, 1849). The Assembly, during its sittings at Vienna, had accomplished one important task: it had freed the peasantry from the burdens attaching to their land and converted them into independent proprietors. This part of its work survived it, and remained almost the sole gain that Austria derived from the struggle of 1848. After the removal to Kremsier, a Committee of the Assembly had been engaged with the formation of a Constitution for Austria, and the draft was now completed. In the course of debate something had been gained by the representatives of the German and the Slavic races in the way of respect for one another's interests and prejudices; some political knowledge had been acquired; some approach made to an adjustment between the claims of the central power and of provincial autonomy. If the Constitution sketched at Kremsier had come into being, it would at least have given to Western Austria and to Galicia, which belonged to this half of the Empire, a system of government based on popular desires and worthy, on the part of the Crown, of a fair trial. But, apart from its own defects from the monarchical point of view, this Constitution rested on the division of the Empire into two independent parts; it assumed the separation of Hungary from the other Hereditary States; and of a separate Hungarian Kingdom the Minister now in power would hear no longer. That Hungary had for centuries possessed and maintained its rights; that, with the single exception of the English, no nation in Europe had equalled the Magyars in the stubborn and unwearied defence of Constitutional law; that, in an age when national spirit was far less hotly inflamed, the Emperor Joseph had well-nigh lost his throne and wrecked his Empire in the attempt to subject this resolute race to a centralized administration, was nothing to Schwarzenberg and the soldiers who were now trampling upon revolution. Hungary was declared to have forfeited by rebellion alike its ancient rights and the contracts of 1848. The dissolution of the Parliament of Kremsier was followed by the publication of an edict affecting to bestow a uniform and centralized Constitution upon the entire Austrian Empire. All existing public rights were thereby extinguished; and, inasmuch as the new Constitution, in so far as it provided for a representative system, never came into existence, but remained in abeyance until it was formally abrogated in 1851, the real effect of the Unitary Edict of March, 1849, which professed to close the period of revolution by granting the same rights to all, was to establish absolute government and the rule of the sword throughout the Emperor's dominions. Provincial institutions giving to some of the German and Slavic districts a shadowy control of their own local affairs only marked the distinction between the favoured and the dreaded parts of the Empire. Ten years passed before freedom again came within sight of the Austrian peoples.

The Hungarian Diet, on learning of the transfer of the crown from Ferdinand to Francis Joseph, had refused to acknowledge this act as valid, on the ground that it had taken place without the consent of the Legislature, and that Francis Joseph had not been crowned King of Hungary. Ferdinand was treated as still the reigning sovereign, and the war now became, according to the Hungarian view, more than ever a war in defence of established right, inasmuch as the assailants of Hungary were not only violators of a settled constitution but agents of a usurping prince. The whole nation was summoned to arms; and in order that there might be no faltering at headquarters, the command over the forces on the Danube was given by Kossuth to Gorgei, a young officer of whom little was yet known to the world but that he had executed Count Eugene Zichy, a powerful noble, for holding communications with Jellacic. It was the design of the Austrian Government to attack Hungary at once by the line of the Danube and from the frontier of Galicia on the north-east. The Serbs were to be led forward from their border-provinces against the capital; and another race, which centuries of oppression had filled with bitter hatred of the Magyars, was to be thrown into the struggle. The mass of the population of Transylvania belonged to the Roumanian stock. The Magyars, here known by the name of Szeklers, and a community of Germans, descended from immigrants who settled in Transylvania about the twelfth century, formed a small but a privileged minority, in whose presence the Roumanian peasantry, poor, savage, and absolutely without political rights, felt themselves before 1848 scarcely removed from serfdom. In the Diet of Transylvania the Magyars held command, and in spite of the resistance of the Germans, they had succeeded in carrying an Act, in May, 1848, uniting the country with Hungary. This Act had been ratified by the Emperor Ferdinand, but it was followed by a widespread insurrection of the Roumanian peasantry, who were already asserting their claims as a separate nation and demanding equality with their oppressors. The rising of the Roumanians had indeed more of the character of an agrarian revolt than of a movement for national independence. It was marked by atrocious cruelty; and although the Hapsburg standard was raised, the Austrian commandant, General Puchner, hesitated long before lending the insurgents his countenance. At length, in October, he declared against the Hungarian Government. The union of the regular troops with the peasantry overpowered for a time all resistance. The towns fell under Austrian sway, and although the Szeklers were not yet disarmed, Transylvania seemed to be lost to Hungary. General Puchner received orders to lead his troops, with the newly formed Roumanian militia, westward into the Banat, in order to co­operate in the attack which was to overwhelm the Hungarians from every quarter of the kingdom.

On the 15th of December, Windischgratz, in command of the main Austrian army, crossed the river Leitha, the border between German and Magyar territory. Gorgei, who was opposed to him, had from the first declared that Pesth must be abandoned and a war of defence carried on in Central Hungary. Kossuth, however, had scorned this counsel, and announced that he would defend Pesth to the last. The backwardness of the Hungarian preparations and the disorder of the new levies justified the young general, who from this time assumed the attitude of contempt and hostility towards the Committee of Defence. Kossuth had in fact been strangely served by fortune in his choice of Gorgei. He had raised him to command on account of one irretrievable act of severity against an Austrian partisan, and without any proof of his military capacity. In the untried soldier he had found a general of unusual skill; in the supposed devotee to Magyar patriotism he had found a military politician as self-willed and as insubordinate as any who have ever distracted the councils of a falling State. Dissensions and misunderstandings aggravated the weakness of the Hungarians in the field. Position after position was lost, and it soon became evident that the Parliament and Government could remain no longer at Pesth. They withdrew to Debreczin beyond the Theiss, and on the 5th of January, 1849, Windischgratz made his entry into the capital.

The Austrians now supposed the war to be at an end. It was in fact but beginning. The fortress of Comorn, on the upper Danube, remained in the hands of the Magyars; and by conducting his retreat northwards into a mountainous country where the Austrians could not follow him Gorgei gained the power either of operating against Windischgratz’s communications or of combining with the army of General Klapka, who was charged with the defence of Hungary against an enemy advancing from Galicia. While Windischgratz remained inactive at Pesth, Klapka met and defeated an Austrian division under General Schlick which had crossed the Carpathians and was moving southwards towards Debreczin. Gorgei now threw himself eastwards upon the line of retreat of the beaten enemy, and Schlick's army only escaped capture by abandoning its communications and seeking refuge with Windischgratz at Pesth. A concentration of the Magyar forces was effected on the Theiss, and the command over the entire army was given by Kossuth to Dembinski, a Pole who had gained distinction in the wars of Napoleon and in the campaign of 1831. Gorgei, acting as the representative of the officers who had been in the service before the Revolution, had published an address declaring that the army would fight for no cause but that of the Constitution as established by Ferdinand, the legitimate King, and that it would accept no commands but those of the Ministers whom Ferdinand had appointed. Interpreting this manifesto as a direct act of defiance, and as a warning that the army might under Gorgei's command make terms on its own authority with the Austrian Government, Kossuth resorted to the dangerous experiment of superseding the national commanders by a Pole who was connected with the revolutionary party throughout Europe. The act was disastrous in its moral effects upon the army; and, as a general, Dembinski entirely failed to justify his reputation. After permitting Schlick's corps to escape him he moved forwards from the Theiss against Pesth. He was met by the Austrians and defeated at Kapolna (February 26). Both armies retired to their earlier positions, and, after a declaration from the Magyar generals that they would no longer obey his orders, Dembinski was removed from his command, though he remained in Hungary to interfere once more with evil effect before the end of the war.

The struggle between Austria and Hungary had reached this stage when the Constitution merging all provincial rights in one centralised system was published by Schwarzenberg. The Croats, the Serbs, the Roumanians, who had so credulously flocked to the Emperor's banner under the belief that they were fighting for their own independence, at length discovered their delusion. Their enthusiasm sank; the bolder among them even attempted to detach their countrymen from the Austrian cause; but it was too late to undo what had already been done. Jellacic, now undistinguishable from any other Austrian general, mocked the politicians of Agram who still babbled of Croatian autonomy: Stratimirovic, the national leader of the Serbs, sank before his rival the Patriarch of Carlowitz, a Churchman who preferred ecclesiastical immunities granted by the Emperor of Austria to independence won on the field of battle by his countrymen. Had a wiser or more generous statesmanship controlled the Hungarian Government in the first months of its activity, a union between the Magyars and the subordinate races against Viennese centralisation might perhaps even now have been effected. But distrust and animosity had risen too high for the mediators between Slav and Magyar to attain any real success, nor was any distinct promise of self-government even now to be drawn from the offers of concession which were held out at Debreczin. An interval of dazzling triumph seemed indeed to justify the Hungarian Government in holding fast to its sovereign claims. In the hands of able leaders no task seemed too hard for Magyar troops to accomplish. Bem, arriving in Transylvania without a soldier, created a new army, and by a series of extraordinary marches and surprises not only overthrew the Austrian and Roumanian troops opposed to him, but expelled a corps of Russians whom General Puchner in his extremity had invited to garrison Hermannstadt. Gorgei, resuming in the first week of April the movement in which Dembinski had failed, inflicted upon the Austrians a series of defeats that drove them back to the walls of Pesth; while Klapka, advancing on Comorn, effected the relief of this fortress, and planted in the rear of the Austrians a force which threatened to cut them off from Vienna. It was in vain that the Austrian Government removed Windischgratz from his command. His successor found that a force superior to his own was gathering round him on every side. He saw that Hungary was lost; and leaving a garrison in the fortress of Buda, he led off his army in haste from the capital, and only paused in his retreat when he had reached the Austrian frontier.

The Magyars, rallying from their first defeats, had brilliantly achieved the liberation of their land. The Court of Vienna, attempting in right of superior force to overthrow an established constitution, had proved itself the inferior power; and in mingled exaltation and resentment it was natural that the party and the leaders who had been foremost in the national struggle of Hungary should deem a renewed union with Austria impossible, and submission to the Hapsburg crown an indignity. On the 19th of April, after the defeat of Windischgratz but before the evacuation of Pesth, the Diet declared that the House of Hapsburg had forfeited its throne, and proclaimed Hungary an independent State. No statement was made as to the future form of government, but everything indicated that Hungary, if successful in maintaining its independence, would become a Republic, with Kossuth, who was now appointed Governor, for its chief. Even in the revolutionary severance of ancient ties homage was paid to the legal and constitutional bent of the Hungarian mind. Nothing was said in the Declaration of April 19th of the rights of man; there was no Parisian commonplace on the sovereignty of the people. The necessity of Hungarian independence was deduced from the offences which the Austrian House had committed against the written and unwritten law of the land, offences continued through centuries and crowned by the invasion under Windischgratz, by the destruction of the Hungarian Constitution in the edict of March 9th, and by the introduction of the Russians into Transylvania. Though coloured and exaggerated by Magyar patriotism, the charges made against the Hapsburg dynasty were on the whole in accordance with historical fact; and if the affairs of States were to be guided by no other considerations than those relating to the performance of contracts, Hungary had certainly established its right to be quit of partnership with Austria and of its Austrian sovereign. But the judgment of history has condemned Kossuth's declaration of Hungarian independence in the midst of the struggle of 1849 as a great political error. It served no useful purpose; it deepened the antagonism already existing between the Government and a large part of the army; and while it added to the sources of internal discord, it gave colour to the intervention of Russia as against a revolutionary cause. Apart from its disastrous effect upon the immediate course of events, it was based upon a narrow and inadequate view both of the needs and of the possibilities of the future. Even in the interests of the Magyar nation itself as a European power, it may well be doubted whether in severance from Austria such influence and such weight could possibly have been won by a race numerically weak and surrounded by hostile nationalities, as the ability and the political energy of the Magyars have since won for them in the direction of the accumulated forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It has generally been considered a fatal error on the part of the Hungarian commanders that, after expelling the Austrian army, they did not at once march upon Vienna, but returned to lay siege to the fortress of Buda, which resisted long enough to enable the Austrian Government to reorganize and to multiply its forces. But the intervention of Russia would probably have been fatal to Hungarian independence, even if Vienna had been captured and a democratic government established there for a while in opposition to the Court at Olmutz. The plan of a Russian intervention, though this intervention was now explained by the community of interest between Polish and Hungarian rebels, was no new thing. Soon after the outbreak of the March Revolution the Czar had desired to send his troops both into Prussia and into Austria as the restorers of monarchical authority. His help was declined on behalf of the King of Prussia; in Austria the project had been discussed at successive moments of danger, and after the overthrow of the Imperial troops in Transylvania by Bem the proffered aid was accepted. The Russians who then occupied Hermannstadt did not, however, enter the country as combatants; their task was to garrison certain positions still held by the Austrians, and so to set free the Emperor's troops for service in the field. On the declaration of Hungarian independence, it became necessary for Francis Joseph to accept his protector's help without qualification or disguise. An army of eighty thousand Russians marched across Galicia to assist the Austrians in grappling with an enemy before whom, when single-handed, they had succumbed. Other Russian divisions, while Austria massed its troops on the Upper Danube, entered Transylvania from the south and east, and the Magyars in the summer of 1849 found themselves compelled to defend their country against forces three times more numerous than their own.

When it became known that the Czar had determined to throw all his strength into the scale, Kossuth saw that no ordinary operations of war could possibly avert defeat, and called upon his countrymen to destroy their homes and property at the approach of the enemy, and to leave to the invader a flaming and devastated solitude. But the area of warfare was too vast for the execution of this design, even if the nation had been prepared for so desperate a course. The defence of Hungary was left to its armies, and Gorgei became the leading figure in the calamitous epoch that followed. While the Government prepared to retire to Szegedin, far in the south-east, Gorgei took post on the Upper Danube, to meet the powerful force which the Emperor of Austria had placed under the orders of General Haynau, a soldier whose mingled energy and ferocity in Italy had marked him out as a fitting scourge for the Hungarians, and had won for him supreme civil as well as military powers. Gorgei naturally believed that the first object of the Austrian commander would be to effect a junction with the Russians, who, under Paskiewitsch, the conqueror of Kars in 1829, were now crossing the Carpathians; and he therefore directed all his efforts against the left of the Austrian line. While he was unsuccessfully attacking the enemy on the river Waag north of Comorn, Haynau with the mass of his forces advanced on the right bank of the Danube, and captured Raab (June 28th). Gorgei threw himself southwards, but his efforts to stop Haynau were in vain, and the Austrians occupied Pesth (July 11th). The Russians meanwhile were advancing southwards by an independent line of march. Their vanguard reached the Danube and the Upper Theiss, and Gorgei seemed to be enveloped by the enemy. The Hungarian Government adjured him to hasten towards Szegedin and Arad, where Kossuth was concentrating all the other divisions for a final struggle; but Gorgei held on to his position about Comorn until his retreat could only be effected by means of a vast detour northwards, and before he could reach Arad all was lost. Dembinski was again in command. Charged with the defence of the passage of the Theiss about Szegedin, he failed to prevent the Austrians from crossing the river, and on the 5th of August was defeated at Czoreg with heavy loss. Kossuth now gave the command to Bern, who had hurried from Transylvania, where overpowering forces had at length wrested victory from his grasp. Bern fought the last battle of the campaign at Temesvar. He was overthrown and driven eastwards, but succeeded in leading a remnant of his army across the Moldavian frontier and so escaped capture. Gorgei, who was now close to Arad, had some strange fancy that it would dishonour his army to seek refuge on neutral soil. He turned northwards so as to encounter Russian and not Austrian regiments, and without striking a blow, without stipulating even for the lives of the civilians in his camp, he led his army within the Russian lines at Vilagos, and surrendered unconditionally to the generals of the Czar. His own life was spared; no mercy was shown to those who were handed over as his fellow-prisoners by the Russian to the Austrian Government, or who were seized by Haynau as his troops advanced. Tribunals more resembling those of the French Reign of Terror than the Courts of a civilised Government sent the noblest patriots and soldiers of Hungary to the scaffold. To the deep disgrace of the Austrian Crown, Count Batthyany, the Minister of Ferdinand, was included among those whose lives were sacrificed. The vengeance of the conqueror seemed the more frenzied and the more insatiable because it had only been rendered possible by foreign aid. Crushed under an iron rule, exhausted by war, the prey of a Government which knew only how to employ its subject­races as gaolers over one another, Hungary passed for some years into silence and almost into despair. Every vestige of its old constitutional rights was extinguished. Its territory was curtailed by the separation of Transylvania and Croatia; its administration was handed over to Germans from Vienna. A conscription, enforced not for the ends of military service but as the surest means of breaking the national spirit, enrolled its youth in Austrian regiments, and banished them to the extremities of the empire. No darker period was known in the history of Hungary since the wars of the seventeenth century than that which followed the catastrophe of 1849.

The gloom which followed Austrian victory was now descending not on Hungary alone but on Italy also. The armistice made between Radetzky and the King of Piedmont at Vigevano in August, 1848, lasted for seven months, during which the British and French Governments endeavoured, but in vain, to arrange terms of peace between the combatants. With military tyranny in its most brutal form crushing down Lombardy, it was impossible that Charles Albert should renounce the work of deliverance to which he had pledged himself. Austria, on the other hand, had now sufficiently recovered its strength to repudiate the concessions which it had offered at an earlier time, and Schwarzenberg on assuming power announced that the Emperor would maintain Lombardy at every cost. The prospects of Sardinia as regarded help from the rest of the Peninsula were far worse than when it took up arms in the spring of 1848. Projects of a general Italian federation, of a military union between the central States and Piedmont, of an Italian Constituent Assembly, had succeeded one another and left no result. Naples had fallen back into absolutism; Rome and Tuscany, from which aid might still have been expected, were distracted by internal contentions, and hastening as it seemed towards anarchy. After the defeat of Charles Albert at Custozza, Pius IX., who was still uneasily playing his part as a constitutional sovereign, had called to office Pellegrino Rossi, an Italian patriot of an earlier time, who had since been ambassador of Louis Philippe at Rome, and by his connection with the Orleanist Monarchy had incurred the hatred of the Republican party throughout Italy. Rossi, as a vigorous and independent reformer, was as much detested in clerical and reactionary circles as he was by the demagogues and their followers. This, however, profited him nothing; and on the 15th of November, as he was proceeding to the opening of the Chambers, he was assassinated by an unknown hand. Terrified by this crime, and by an attack upon his own palace by which it was followed, Pius fled to Gaeta and placed himself under the protection of the King of Naples. A Constituent Assembly was summoned and a Republic proclaimed at Rome, between which and the Sardinian Government there was so little community of feeling that Charles Albert would, if the Pope had accepted his protection, have sent his troops to restore him to a position of security. In Tuscany affairs were in a similar condition. The Grand Duke had for some months been regarded as a sincere, though reserved, friend of the Italian cause, and he had even spoken of surrendering his crown if this should be for the good of the Italian nation. When, however, the Pope had fled to Gaeta, and the project was openly avowed of uniting Tuscany with the Roman States in a Republic, the Grand Duke, moved more by the fulminations of Pius against his despoilers than by care for his own crown, fled in his turn, leaving the Republicans masters of Florence. A miserable exhibition of vanity, riot, and braggadocio was given to the world by the politicians of the Tuscan State. Alike in Florence and in Rome all sense of the true needs of the moment, of the absolute uselessness of internal changes of Government if Austria was to maintain its dominion, seemed to have vanished from men's minds. Republican phantoms distracted the heart and the understanding; no soldier, no military administrator arose till too late by the side of the rhetoricians and mob-leaders who filled the stage; and when, on the 19th of March, the armistice was brought to a close in Upper Italy, Piedmont took the field alone.

The campaign which now began lasted but for five days. While Charles Albert scattered his forces from Lago Maggiore to Stradella on the south of the Po, hoping to move by the northern road upon Milan, Radetzky concentrated his troops near Pavia, where he intended to cross the Ticino. In an evil moment Charles Albert had given the command of his army to Chrzanowski, a Pole, and had entrusted its southern division, composed chiefly of Lombard volunteers, to another Pole, Ramorino, who had been engaged in Mazzini's incursion into Savoy in 1833. Ramorino had then, rightly or wrongly, incurred the charge of treachery. His relations with Chrzanowski were of the worst character, and the habit of military obedience was as much wanting to him as the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign from whom he had now accepted a command. The wilfulness of this adventurer made the Piedmontese army an easy prey. Ramorino was posted on the south of the Po, near its junction with the Ticino, but received orders on the commencement of hostilities to move northwards and defend the passage of the Ticino at Pavia, breaking up the bridges behind him. Instead of obeying this order he kept his division lingering about Stradella. Radetzky, approaching the Ticino at Pavia, found the passage unguarded. He crossed the river with the mass of his army, and, cutting off Ramorino's division, threw himself upon the flank of the scattered Piedmontese. Charles Albert, whose headquarters were at Novara, hurried southwards. Before he could concentrate his troops, he was attacked at Mortara by the Austrians and driven back. The line of retreat upon Turin and Alessandria was already lost; an attempt was made to hold Novara against the advancing Austrians. The battle which was fought in front of this town on the 23rd of March ended with the utter overthrow of the Sardinian army. So complete was the demoralization of the troops that the cavalry were compelled to attack bodies of half-maddened infantry in the streets of Novara in order to save the town from pillage.

Charles Albert had throughout the battle of the 23rd appeared to seek death. The reproaches levelled against him for the abandonment of Milan in the previous year, the charges of treachery which awoke to new life the miserable record of his waverings in 1821, had sunk into the very depths of his being. Weak and irresolute in his earlier political career, harsh and illiberal towards the pioneers of Italian freedom during a great part of his reign, Charles had thrown his whole heart and soul into the final struggle of his country against Austria. This struggle lost, life had nothing more for him. The personal hatred borne towards him by the rulers of Austria caused him to believe that easier terms of peace might be granted to Piedmont if another sovereign were on its throne, and his resolution, in case of defeat, was fixed and settled. When night fell after the battle of Novara he called together his generals, and in their presence abdicated his crown. Bidding an eternal farewell to his son Victor Emmanuel, who knelt weeping before him, he quitted the army accompanied by but one attendant, and passed unrecognized through the enemy’s guards. He left his queen, his capital, unvisited as he journeyed into exile. The brief residue of his life was spent in solitude near Oporto. Six months after the battle of Novara he was carried to the grave.

It may be truly said of Charles Albert that nothing in his reign became him like the ending of it. Hopeless as the conflict of 1849 might well appear, it proved that there was one sovereign in Italy who was willing to stake his throne, his life, the whole sum of his personal interests, for the national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara, have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The faults of the Government of Turin during Charles Albert's years of peace had ceased to have any bearing on Italian affairs; the sharpest tongues no longer repeated, the most credulous ear no longer harboured the slanders of 1848; the man who, beaten and outnumbered, had for hours sat immovable in front of the Austrian cannon at Novara had, in the depth of his misfortune, given to his son not the crown of Piedmont only but the crown of Italy. Honour, patriotism, had made the young Victor Emmanuel the hope of the Sardinian army; the same honour and patriotism carried him safely past the lures which Austria set for the inheritor of a ruined kingdom, and gave in the first hours of his reign an earnest of the policy which was to end in Italian union. It was necessary for him to visit Radetzky in his camp in order to arrange the preliminaries of peace. There, amid flatteries offered to him at his father's expense, it was notified to him that if he would annul the Constitution that his father had made, he might reckon not only on an easy quittance with the conqueror, but on the friendship and support of Austria. This demand, though strenuously pressed in later negotiations, Victor Emmanuel unconditionally refused. He had to endure for a while the presence of Austrian troops in his kingdom, and to furnish an indemnity which fell heavily on so small a State; but the liberties of his people remained intact, and the pledge given by his father inviolate. Amid the ruin of all hopes and the bankruptcy of all other royal reputations throughout Italy, there proved to be one man, one government, in which the Italian people could trust. This compensation at least was given in the disasters of 1849, that the traitors to the cause of Italy and of freedom could not again deceive, nor the dream of a federation of princes again obscure the necessity of a single national government. In the fidelity of Victor Emmanuel to the Piedmontese Constitution lay the pledge that when Italy’s next opportunity should arrive, the chief would be there who would meet the nation’s need.

The battle of Novara had not long been fought when the Grand Duke of Tuscany was restored to his throne under an Austrian garrison, and his late democratic Minister, Guerazzi, who had endeavoured by submission to the Court-party to avert an Austrian occupation, was sent into imprisonment. At Rome a far bolder spirit was shown. Mazzini had arrived in the first week of March, and, though his exhortation to the Roman Assembly to forget the offences of Charles Albert and to unite against the Austrians in Lombardy came too late, he was able, as one of a Triumvirate with dictatorial powers, to throw much of his own ardour into the Roman populace in defence of their own city and State. The enemy against whom Rome had to be defended proved indeed to be other than that against whom preparations were being made. The victories of Austria had aroused the apprehension of the French Government; and though the fall of Piedmont and Lombardy could not now be undone, it was determined by Louis Napoleon and his Ministers to anticipate Austria's restoration of the Papal power by the despatch of French troops to Rome. All the traditions of French national policy pointed indeed to such an intervention. Austria had already invaded the Roman States from the north, and the political conditions which in 1832 had led so pacific a minister as Casimir Perier to occupy Ancona were now present in much greater force. Louis Napoleon could not, without abandoning a recognised interest and surrendering something of the due influence of France, have permitted Austrian generals to conduct the Pope back to his capital and to assume the government of Central Italy. If the first impulses of the Revolution of 1848 had still been active in France, its intervention would probably have taken the form of a direct alliance with the Roman Republic; but public opinion had travelled far in the opposite direction since the Four Days of June; and the new President, if he had not forgotten his own youthful relations with the Carbonari, was now a suitor for the solid favours of French conservative and religious sentiment. His Ministers had not recognised the Roman Republic. They were friends, no doubt, to liberty; but when it was certain that the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Neapolitans, were determined to restore the Pope, it might be assumed that the continuance of the Roman Republic was an impossibility. France, as a Catholic and at the same time a Liberal Power, might well, under these circumstances, address itself to the task of reconciling Roman liberty with the inevitable return of the Holy Father to his temporal throne. Events were moving too fast for diplomacy; troops must be at once despatched, or the next French envoy would find Radetzky on the Tiber. The misgivings of the Republican part of the Assembly at Paris were stilled by French assurances of the generous intentions of the Government towards the Roman populations, and of its anxiety to shelter them from Austrian domination, President, Ministers, and generals resolutely shut their eyes to the possibility that a French occupation of Rome might be resisted by force by the Romans themselves; and on the 22nd of April an armament of about ten thousand men set sail for Civita Vecchia under the command of General Oudinot, a son of the Marshal of that name.

Before landing on the Italian coast, the French general sent envoys to the authorities at Civita Vecchia, stating that his troops came as friends, and demanding that they should be admitted into the town. The Municipal Council determined not to offer resistance, and the French thus gained a footing on Italian soil and a basis for their operations. Messages came from French diplomatists in Rome encouraging the general to advance without delay. The mass of the population, it was said, would welcome his appearance; the democratic faction, if reckless, was too small to offer any serious resistance, and would disappear as soon as the French should enter the city. On this point, however, Oudinot was speedily undeceived. In reply to a military envoy who was sent to assure the Triumvirs of the benevolent designs of the French, Mazzini bluntly answered that no reconciliation with the Pope was possible; and on the 26th of April the Roman Assembly called upon the Executive to repel force by force. Oudinot now proclaimed a state of siege at Civita Vecchia, seized the citadel, and disarmed the garrison. On the 28th he began his march on Rome. As he approached, energetic preparations were made for resistance. Garibaldi, who had fought at the head of a free corps against the Austrians in Upper Italy in 1848, had now brought some hundreds of his followers to Rome. A regiment of Lombard volunteers, under their young leader Manara, had escaped after the catastrophe of Novara, and had come to fight for liberty in its last stronghold on Italian soil. Heroes, exiles, desperadoes from all parts of the Peninsula, met in the streets of Rome, and imparted to its people a vigour and resolution of which the world had long deemed them incapable. Even the remnant of the Pontifical Guard took part in the work of defence. Oudinot, advancing with his little corps of seven thousand men, found himself, without heavy artillery, in front of a city still sheltered by its ancient fortifications, and in the presence of a body of combatants more resolute than his own troops and twice as numerous. He attacked on the 30th, was checked at every point, and compelled to retreat towards Civita Vecchia, leaving two hundred and fifty prisoners in the hands of the enemy.

Insignificant as was this misfortune of the French arms, it occasioned no small stir in Paris and in the Assembly. The Government, which had declared that the armament was intended only to protect Rome against Austria, was vehemently reproached for its duplicity, and a vote was passed demanding that the expedition should not be permanently diverted from the end assigned to it. Had the Assembly not been on the verge of dissolution it would probably have forced upon the Government a real change of policy. A general election, however, was but a few days distant, and until the result of this election should be known the Ministry determined to temporise. M. Lesseps, since famous as the creator of the Suez Canal, was sent to Rome with instructions to negotiate for some peaceable settlement. More honest than his employers, Lesseps sought with heart and soul to fulfil his task. While he laboured in city and camp, the French elections for which the President and Ministers were waiting took place, resulting in the return of a Conservative and reactionary majority. The new Assembly met on the 28th of May. In the course of the next few days Lesseps accepted terms proposed by the Roman Government, which would have precluded the French from entering Rome. Oudinot, who had been in open conflict with the envoy throughout his mission, refused his sanction to the treaty, and the altercations between the general and the diplomatist were still at their height when despatches arrived from Paris announcing that the powers given to Lesseps were at an end, and ordering Oudinot to recommence hostilities. The pretence of further negotiation would have been out of place with the new Parliament. On the 4th of June the French general, now strongly reinforced, occupied the positions necessary for a regular siege of Rome.

Against the forces now brought into action it was impossible that the Roman Republic could long defend itself. One hope remained, and that was in a revolution within France itself. The recent elections had united on the one side all Conservative interests, on the other the Socialists and all the more extreme factions of the Republican party. It was determined that a trial of strength should first be made within the Assembly itself upon the Roman question, and that, if the majority there should stand firm, an appeal should be made to insurrection. Accordingly on the 11th of June, after the renewal of hostilities had been announced in Paris, Ledru Rollin demanded the impeachment of the Ministry. His motion was rejected, and the signal was given for an outbreak not only in the capital but in Lyons and other cities. But the Government were on their guard, and it was in vain that the resources of revolution were once more brought into play. General Changarnier suppressed without bloodshed a tumult in Paris on June 13th; and though fighting took place at Lyons, the insurrection proved feeble in comparison with the movements of the previous year. Louis Napoleon and his Ministry remained unshaken, and the siege of Rome was accordingly pressed to its conclusion. Oudinot, who at the beginning of the month had carried the positions held by the Roman troops outside the walls, opened fire with heavy artillery on the 14th. The defence was gallantly sustained by Garibaldi and his companions until the end of the month, when the breaches made in the walls were stormed by the enemy, and further resistance became impossible. The French made their entry into Rome on the 3rd of July, Garibaldi leading his troops northwards in order to prolong the struggle with the Austrians who were now in possession of Bologna, and, if possible, to reach Venice, which was still uncaptured. Driven to the eastern coast and surrounded by the enemy, he was forced to put to sea. He landed again, but only to be hunted over mountain and forest. His wife died by his side. Rescued by the devotion of Italian patriots, he made his escape to Piedmont and thence to America, to reappear in all the fame of his heroic deeds and sufferings at the next great crisis in the history of his country.

It had been an easy task for a French army to conquer Rome; it was not so easy for the French Government to escape from the embarrassments of its victory. Liberalism was still the official creed of the Republic, and the protection of the Roman population from a reaction under Austrian auspices had been one of the alleged objects of the Italian expedition. No stipulation had, however, been made with the Pope during the siege as to the future institutions of Rome; and when, on the 14th of July, the restorations of Papal authority was formally announced by Oudinot, Pius and his Minister Antonelli still remained unfettered by any binding engagement. Nor did the Pontiff show the least inclination to place himself in the power of his protectors. He remained at Gaeta, sending a Commission of three Cardinals to assume the government of Rome. The first acts of the Cardinals dispelled any illusion that the French might have formed as to the docility of the Holy See. In the presence of a French Republican army they restored the Inquisition, and appointed a Board to bring to trial all officials compromised in the events that had taken place since the murder of Rossi in November, 1848. So great was the impression made on public opinion by the action of the Cardinals that Louis Napoleon considered it well to enter the lists in person on behalf of Roman liberty; and in a letter to Colonel Ney, a son of the Marshal, he denounced in language of great violence the efforts that were being made by a party antagonistic to France to base the Pope's return upon proscription and tyranny. Strong in the support of Austria and the other Catholic Powers, the Papal Government at Gaeta received this menace with indifference, and even made the discourtesy of the President a ground for withholding concessions. Of the re­establishment of the Constitution granted by Pius in 1848 there was now no question; all that the French Ministry could hope was to save some fragments in the general shipwreck of representative government, and to avert the vengeance that seemed likely to fall upon the defeated party. A Pontifical edict, known as the Motu Proprio, ultimately bestowed upon the municipalities certain local powers, and gave to a Council, nominated by the Pope from among the persons chosen by the municipalities, the right of consultation on matters of finance. More than this Pius refused to grant, and when he returned to Rome it was as an absolute sovereign. In its efforts on behalf of the large body of persons threatened with prosecution the French Government was more successful. The so-called amnesty which was published by Antonelli with the Motu Proprio seemed indeed to have for its object the classification of victims rather than the announcement of pardon; but under pressure from the French the excepted persons were gradually diminished in number, and all were finally allowed to escape other penalties by going into exile. To those who were so driven from their homes Piedmont offered a refuge.

Thus the pall of priestly absolutism and misrule fell once more over the Roman States, and the deeper the hostility of the educated classes to the restored power the more active became the system of repression. For liberty of person there was no security whatever, and, though the offences of 1848 were now professedly amnestied, the prisons were soon thronged with persons arrested on indefinite charges and detained for an unlimited time without trial. Nor was Rome more unfortunate in its condition than Italy generally. The restoration of Austrian authority in the north was completed by the fall of Venice. For months after the subjugation of the mainland, Venice, where the Republic had again been proclaimed and Manin had been recalled to power, had withstood all the efforts of the Emperor's forces. Its hopes had been raised by the victories of the Hungarians, which for a moment seemed almost to undo the catastrophe of Novara. But with the extinction of all possibility of Hungarian aid the inevitable end came in view. Cholera and famine worked with the enemy; and a fortnight after Gorgei had laid down his arms at Vilagos the long and honourable resistance of Venice ended with the entry of the Austrians (August 25th). In the south, Ferdinand of Naples was again ruling as despot throughout the full extent of his dominions. Palermo, which had struck the first blow for freedom in 1848, had soon afterwards become the seat of a Sicilian Parliament, which deposed the Bourbon dynasty and offered the throne of Sicily to the younger brother of Victor Emmanuel. To this Ferdinand replied by a fleet to Messina, which bombarded that city for five days and laid a great part of it in ashes. His violence caused the British and French fleets to interpose, and hostilities were suspended until the spring of 1849, the Western Powers ineffectually seeking to frame some compromise acceptable at once to the Sicilians and to the Bourbon dynasty. After the triumph of Radetzky at Novara and the rejection by the Sicilian Parliament of the offer of a separate constitution and administration for the island, Ferdinand refused to remain any longer inactive. His fleet and army moved southwards from Messina, and a victory won at the foot of Mount Etna over the Sicilian forces, followed by the capture of Catania, brought the struggle to a close. The Assembly at Palermo dispersed, and the Neapolitan troops made their entry into the capital without resistance on the 15th of May. It was in vain that Great Britain now urged Ferdinand to grant to Sicily the liberties which he had hitherto professed himself willing to bestow. Autocrat he was, and autocrat he intended to remain. On the mainland the iniquities practised by his agents seem to have been even worse than in Sicily, where at least some attempt was made to use the powers of the State for the purposes of material improvement. For those who had incurred the enmity of Ferdinand's Government there was no law and no mercy. Ten years of violence and oppression, denounced by the voice of freer lands, had still to be borne by the subjects of this obstinate tyrant ere the reckoning-day arrived, and the deeply rooted jealousy between Sicily and Naples, which had wrought so much ill to the cause of Italian freedom, was appeased by the fall of the Bourbon throne.

We have thus far traced the stages of conflict between the old monarchical order and the forces of revolution in the Austrian empire and in that Mediterranean land whose destiny was so closely interwoven with that of Austria. We have now to pass back into Germany, and to resume the history of the German revolution at the point where the national movement seemed to concentrate itself in visible form, the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. That an Assembly representing the entire German people, elected in unbounded enthusiasm and comprising within it nearly every man of political or intellectual eminence who sympathised with the national cause, should be able to impose its will upon the tottering Governments of the individual German States, was not an unnatural belief in the circumstances of the moment. No second Chamber represented the interests of the ruling Houses, nor had they within the Assembly itself the organs for the expression of their own real or unreal claims. With all the freedom of a debating club or of a sovereign authority like the French Convention, the Parliament of Frankfort entered upon its work of moulding Germany afresh, limited only by its own discretion as to what it should make matter of consultation with any other power. There were thirty-six Governments in Germany, and to negotiate with each of these on the future Constitution might well seem a harder task than to enforce a Constitution on all alike. In the creation of a provisional executive authority there was something of the same difficulty. Each of the larger States might, if consulted, resist the selection of a provisional chief from one of its rivals; and though the risk of bold action was not denied, the Assembly, on the instance of its President, Von Gagern, a former Minister of Hesse-Darmstadt, resolved to appoint an Administrator of the Empire by a direct vote of its own. The Archduke John of Austria, long known as an enemy of Metternich's system of repression and as a patron of the idea of German union, was chosen Administrator, and he accepted the office. Prussia and the other States acquiesced in the nomination, though the choice of a Hapsburg prince was unpopular with the Prussian nation and army, and did not improve the relations between the Frankfort Assembly and the Court of Berlin. Schmerling, an Austrian, was placed at the head of the Archduke's Ministry.

In the preparation of a Constitution for Germany the Assembly could draw little help from the work of legislators in other countries. Belgium, whose institutions were at once recent and successful, was not a Federal State; the founders of the American Union had not had to reckon with four kings and to include in their federal territory part of the dominions of an emperor. Instead of grappling at once with the formidable difficulties of political organisation, the Committee charged with the drafting of a Constitution determined first to lay down the principles of civil right which were to be the basis of the German commonwealth. There was something of the scientific spirit of the Germans in thus working out the substructure of public law on which all other institutions were to rest; moreover, the remembrance of the Decrees of Carlsbad and of the other exceptional legislation from which Germany had so heavily suffered excited a strong demand for the most solemn guarantees against arbitrary departure from settled law in the future. Thus, regardless of the absence of any material power by which its conclusions were to be enforced, the Assembly, in the intervals between its stormy debates on the politics of the hour, traced with philosophic thoroughness the consequences of the principles of personal liberty and of equality before the law, and fashioned the order of a modern society in which privileges of class, diversity of jurisdictions, and the trammels of feudalism on industrial life were alike swept away. Four months had passed, and the discussion of the so-called Primary Rights was still unfinished, when the Assembly was warned by an outbreak of popular violence in Frankfort itself of the necessity of hastening towards a constitutional settlement.

The progress of the insurrection in Schleswig-Holstein against Danish sovereignty had been watched with the greatest interest throughout Germany; and in the struggle of these provinces for their independence the rights and the honour of the German nation at large were held to be deeply involved. As the representative of the Federal authority, King Frederick William of Prussia had sent his troops into Holstein, and they arrived there in time to prevent the Danish army from following up its first successes and crushing the insurgent forces. Taking up the offensive, General Wrangel at the head of the Prussian troops succeeded in driving the Danes out of Schleswig, and at the beginning of May he crossed the border between Schleswig and Jutland and occupied the Danish fortress of Fredericia. His advance into purely Danish territory occasioned the diplomatic intervention of Russia and Great Britain; and, to the deep disappointment of the German nation and its Parliament, the King of Prussia ordered his general to retire into Schleswig. The Danes were in the meantime blockading the harbours and capturing the merchant-vessels of the Germans, as neither Prussia nor the Federal Government possessed a fleet of war. For some weeks hostilities were irresolutely continued in Schleswig, while negotiations were pursued in foreign capitals and various forms of compromise urged by foreign Powers. At length, on the 26th of August, an armistice of seven months was agreed upon at Malmo in Sweden by the representatives of Denmark and Prussia, the Court of Copenhagen refusing to recognise the German central Government at Frankfort or to admit its envoy to the conferences. The terms of this armistice, when announced in Germany, excited the greatest indignation, inasmuch as they declared all the acts of the Provisional Government of Schleswig-Holstein null and void, removed all German troops from the Duchies, and handed over their government during the duration of the armistice to a Commission of which half the members were to be appointed by the King of Denmark. Scornfully as Denmark had treated the Assembly of Frankfort, the terms of the armistice nevertheless required its sanction. The question was referred to a committee, which, under the influence of the historian Dahlmann, himself formerly an official in Holstein, pronounced for the rejection of the treaty. The Assembly, in a scene of great excitement, resolved that the execution of the measures attendant on the armistice should be suspended. The Ministry in consequence resigned, and Dahlmann was called upon to replace it by one under his own leadership. He proved unable to do so. Schmerling resumed office, and demanded that the Assembly should reverse its vote. Though in severance from Prussia the Central Government had no real means of carrying on a war with Denmark, the most passionate opposition was made to this demand. The armistice was, however, ultimately ratified by a small majority. Defeated in the Assembly, the leaders of the extreme Democratic faction allied themselves with the populace of Frankfort, which was ready for acts of violence. Tumultuous meetings were held; the deputies who had voted for the armistice were declared traitors to Germany. Barricades were erected, and although the appearance of Prussian troops prevented an assault from being made on the Assembly, its members were attacked in the streets, and two of them murdered by the mob (Sept. 17th). A Republican insurrection was once more attempted in Baden, but it was quelled without difficulty.

The intervention of foreign Courts on behalf of Denmark had given ostensible ground to the Prussian Government for not pursuing the war with greater resolution; but though the fear of Russia undoubtedly checked King Frederick William, this was not the sole, nor perhaps the most powerful influence that worked upon him. The cause of Schleswig-Hulstein was, in spite of its legal basis, in the main a popular and a revolutionary one, and between the King of Prussia and the revolution there was an intense and a constantly deepening antagonism. Since the meeting of the National Assembly at Berlin on the 22nd of May the capital had been the scene of an almost unbroken course of disorder. The Assembly, which was far inferior in ability and character to that of Frankfort, soon showed itself unable to resist the influence of the populace. On the 8th of June a resolution was moved that the combatants in the insurrection of March deserved well of their country. Had this motion been carried the King would have dissolved the Assembly: it was outvoted, but the mob punished this concession to the feelings of the monarch by outrages upon the members of the majority. A Civic Guard was enrolled from citizens of the middle class, but it proved unable to maintain order, and wholly failed to acquire the political importance which was gained by the National Guard of Paris after the revolution of 1830. Exasperated by their exclusion from service in the Guard, the mob on the 14th of June stormed an arsenal and destroyed the trophies of arms which they found there. Though violence reigned in the streets the Assembly rejected a proposal for declaring the inviolability of its members, and placed itself under the protection of the citizens of Berlin. King Frederick William had withdrawn to Potsdam, where the leaders of reaction gathered round him. He detested his Constitutional Ministers, who, between a petulant king and a suspicious Parliament, were unable to effect any useful work and soon found themselves compelled to relinquish their office. In Berlin the violence of the working classes, the interruption of business, the example of civil war in Paris, inclined men of quiet disposition to a return to settled government at any price. Measures brought forward by the new Ministry for the abolition of the patrimonial jurisdictions, the hunting-rights and other feudal privileges of the greater landowners, occasioned the organisation of a league for the defence of property, which soon became the focus of powerful conservative interests. Above all, the claims of the Archduke John, as Administrator of the Empire, to the homage of the army, and the hostile attitude assumed towards the army by the Prussian Parliament itself, exasperated the military class and encouraged the king to venture on open resistance. A tumult having taken place at Schweidnitz in Silesia, in which several persons were shot by the soldiery, the Assembly, pending an investigation into the circumstances, demanded that the Minister of War should publish an order requiring the officers of the army to work with the citizens for the realisation of Constitutional Government; and it called upon all officers not loyally inclined to a Constitutional system to resign their commissions as a matter of honour. Denying the right of the Chamber to act as a military executive, the Minister of War refused to publish the order required. The vote was repeated, and in the midst of threatening demonstrations in the streets the Ministry resigned (Sept. 7th).

It had been the distinguishing feature of the Prussian revolution that the army had never for a moment wavered in its fidelity to the throne. The success of the insurrection of March 18th had been due to the paucity of troops and the errors of those in command, not to any military disaffection such as had paralyzed authority in Paris and in the Mediterranean States. Each affront offered to the army by the democratic majority in the Assembly supplied the King with new weapons; each slight passed upon the royal authority deepened the indignation of the officers. The armistice of Malmo brought back to the neighbourhood of the capital a general who was longing to crush the party of disorder, and regiments on whom he could rely; but though there was now no military reason for delay, it was not until the capture of Vienna by Windischgratz had dealt a fatal blow at democracy in Germany that Frederick William determined to have done with his own mutinous Parliament and the mobs by which it was controlled. During September and October the riots and tumults in the streets of Berlin continued. The Assembly, which had rejected the draft of a Constitution submitted to it by the Cabinet, debated the clauses of one drawn up by a Committee of its own members, abolished nobility, orders and titles, and struck out from the style of the sovereign the words that described him as King by the Grace of God. When intelligence arrived in Berlin that the attack of Windischgratz upon Vienna had actually begun, popular passion redoubled. The Assembly was besieged by an angry crowd, and a resolution in favour of the intervention of Prussia was brought forward within the House. This was rejected, and it was determined instead to invoke the mediation of the Central Government at Frankfort between the Emperor and his subjects. But the decision of the Assembly on this and every other point was now matter of indifference. Events outstripped its deliberations, and with the fall of Vienna its own course was run. On the 2nd of November the King dismissed his Ministers and called to office the Count of Brandenburg, a natural son of Frederick William II, a soldier in high command, and one of the most outspoken representatives of the monarchical spirit of the army. The meaning of the appointment was at once understood. A deputation from the Assembly conveyed its protest to the King at Potsdam. The King turned his back upon them without giving an answer, and on the 9th of November an order was issued proroguing the Assembly, and bidding it to meet on the 27th at Brandenburg, not at Berlin.

The order of prorogation, as soon as signed by the King was brought into the Assembly by the Ministers, who demanded that it should be obeyed immediately and without discussion. The President allowing a debate to commence, the Ministers and seventy-eight Conservative deputies left the Hall. The remaining deputies, two hundred and eighty in number, then passed a resolution declaring that they would not meet at Brandenburg; that the King had no power to remove, to prorogue, or to dissolve the Assembly without its own consent; and that the Ministers were unfit to hold office. This challenge was answered by a proclamation of the Ministers declaring the further meeting of the deputies illegal, and calling upon the Civic Guard not to recognise them as a Parliament. On the following day General Wrangel and his troops entered Berlin and surrounded the Assembly Hall. In reply to the protests of the President, Wrangel answered that the Parliament had been prorogued and must disappear. The members peaceably left the Hall, but reassembled at another spot that they had selected in anticipation of expulsion; and for some days they were pursued by the military from one place of meeting to another. On the 15th of November they passed a resolution declaring the expenditure of state funds and the raising of taxes by the Government to be illegal so long as the Assembly should not be permitted to continue its deliberations. The Ministry on its part showed that it was determined not to brook resistance. The Civic Guard was dissolved and ordered to surrender its arms. It did so without striking a blow, and vanished from the scene, a memorable illustration of the political nullity of the middle class in Berlin as compared with that of Paris. The state of siege was proclaimed, the freedom of the Press and the right of public meeting were suspended. On the 27th of November a portion of the Assembly appeared, according to the King's order, at Brandenburg, but the numbers present were not sufficient for the transaction of business. The presence of the majority, however, was not required, for the King had determined to give no further legal opportunities to the men who had defied him. Treating the vote of November 15th as an act of rebellion on the part of those concerned in it, the King dissolved the Assembly (December 5th), and conferred upon Prussia a Constitution drawn up by his own advisers, with the promise that this Constitution should be subject to revision by the future representative body. Though the dissolution of the Assembly occasioned tumults in Breslau and Cologne it was not actively resented by the nation at large. The violence of the fallen body during its last weeks of existence had exposed it to general discredit; its vote of the 15th of November had been formally condemned by the Parliament of Frankfort; and the liberal character of the new Constitution, which agreed in the main with the draft-Constitution produced by the Committee of the Assembly, disposed moderate men to the belief that in the conflict between the King and the popular representatives the fault had not been on the side of the sovereign.

In the meantime the Parliament of Frankfort, warned against longer delay by the disturbances of September 17th, had addressed itself in earnest to the settlement of the Federal Constitution of Germany. Above a host of minor difficulties two great problems confronted it at the outset. The first was the relation of the Austrian Empire, with its partly German and partly foreign territory, to the German national State; the other was the nature of the headship to be established. As it was clear that the Austrian Government could not apply the public law of Germany to its Slavic and Hungarian provinces, it was enacted in the second article of the Frankfort Constitution that where a German and a non-German territory had the same sovereign, the relation between these countries must be one of purely personal union under the sovereign, no part of Germany being incorporated into a single State with any non­German land. At the time when this article was drafted the disintegration of Austria seemed more probable than the re-establishment of its unity; no sooner, however, had Prince Schwarzenberg been brought into power by the subjugation of Vienna, than he made it plain that the government of Austria was to be centralized as it had never been before. In the first public declaration of his policy he announced that Austria would maintain its unity and permit no exterior influence to modify its internal organisation; that the settlement of the relations between Austria and Germany could only be effected after each had gained some new and abiding political form; and that in the meantime Austria would continue to fulfil its duties as a confederate. The interpretation put upon this statement at Frankfort was that Austria, in the interest of its own unity, preferred not to enter the German body, but looked forward to the establishment of some intimate alliance with it at a future time. As the Court of Vienna had evidently determined not to apply to itself the second article of the Constitution, and an antagonism between German and Austrian policy came within view, Schmerling, as an Austrian subject, was induced to resign his office, and was succeeded in it by Gagern, hitherto President of the Assembly (Dec. 16th).

In announcing the policy of the new Ministry, Gagern assumed the exclusion of Austria from the German Federation. Claiming for the Assembly, as the representative of the German nation, sovereign power in drawing up the Constitution, he denied that the Constitution could be made an object of negotiation with Austria. As Austria refused to fulfil the conditions of the second article, it must remain outside the Federation; the Ministry desired, however, to frame some close and special connection between Austria and Germany, and asked for authority to negotiate with the Court of Vienna for this purpose. Gagern's declaration of the exclusion of Austria occasioned a vehement and natural outburst of feeling among the Austrian deputies, and was met by their almost unanimous protest. Some days later there arrived a note from Schwarzenberg which struck at the root of all that had been done and all that was claimed by the Assembly. Repudiating the interpretation that had been placed upon his words, Schwarzenberg declared that the affairs of Germany could only be settled by an understanding between the Assembly and the Courts, and by an arrangement with Austria, which was the recognised chief of the Governments and intended to remain so in the new Federation. The question of the inclusion or exclusion of Austria now threw into the shade all the earlier differences between parties in the Assembly. A new dividing-line was drawn. On the one side appeared a group composed of the Austrian representatives, of Ultramontanes who feared a Protestant ascendency if Austria should be excluded, and of deputies from some of the smaller States who had begun to dread Prussian domination. On the other side was the great body of representatives who set before all the cause of German national union, who saw that this union would never be effected in any real form if it was made to depend upon negotiations with the Austrian Court, and who held, with the Minister, that to create a true German national State without the Austrian provinces was better than to accept a phantom of complete union in which the German people should be nothing and the Cabinet of Vienna everything. Though coalitions and intrigues of parties obscured the political prospect from day to day, the principles of Gagern were affirmed by a majority of the Assembly, and authority to negotiate some new form of connection with Austria, as a power outside the Federation, was granted to the Ministry.

The second great difficulty of the Assembly was the settlement of the Federal headship. Some were for a hereditary Emperor, some for a President or Board, some for a monarchy alternating between the Houses of Prussia and Austria, some for a sovereign elected for life or for a fixed period. The first decision arrived at was that the head should be one of the reigning princes of Germany, and that he should bear the title of Emperor. Against the hereditary principle there was a strong and, at first, a successful opposition. Reserving for future discussion other questions relating to the imperial office, the Assembly passed the Constitution through the first reading on February 3rd, 1849. It was now communicated to all the German Governments, with the request that they would offer their opinions upon it. The four minor kingdoms-Saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and Wurtemberg with one consent declared against any Federation in which Austria should not be included; the Cabinet of Vienna protested against the subordination of the Emperor of Austria to a central power vested in any other German prince, and proposed that the entire Austrian Empire, with its foreign as well as its German elements, should enter the Federation. This note was enough to prove that Austria was in direct conflict with the scheme of national union which the Assembly had accepted; but the full peril of the situation was not perceived till on the 9th of March Schwarzenberg published the Constitution of Olmutz, which extinguished all separate rights throughout the Austrian Empire, and confounded in one mass, as subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, Hungarians, Germans, Slavs and Italians. The import of the Austrian demand now stood out clear and undisguised. Austria claimed to range itself with a foreign population of thirty millions within the German Federation; in other words, to reduce the German national union to a partnership with all the nationalities of Central Europe, to throw the weight of an overwhelming influence against any system of free representative government, and to expose Germany to war where no interests but those of the Pole or the Magyar might be at stake. So deep was the impression made at Frankfort by the fall of the Kremsier Parliament and the publication of Schwarzenberg's unitary edict, that one of the most eminent of the politicians who had hitherto opposed the exclusion of Austria-the Baden deputy Welcker-declared that further persistence in this course would be treason to Germany. Ranging himself with the Ministry, he proposed that the entire German Constitution, completed by a hereditary chieftainship, should be passed at a single vote on the second reading, and that the dignity of Emperor should be at once offered to the King of Prussia. Though the Assembly declined to pass the Constitution by a single vote, it agreed to vote upon clause by clause without discussion. The hereditary principle was affirmed by the narrow majority of four in a House of above five hundred. The second reading of the Constitution was completed on the 27th of March, and on the following day the election of the sovereign took place. Two hundred and ninety votes were given for the King of Prussia. Two hundred and forty-eight members, hostile to the hereditary principle or to the prince selected, abstained from voting.

Frederick William had from early years cherished the hope of seeing some closer union of Germany established under Prussian influence. But he dwelt in a world where there was more of picturesque mirage than of real insight. He was almost superstitiously loyal to the House of Austria; and he failed to perceive, what was palpable to men of far inferior endowments to his own, that by setting Prussia at the head of the constitutional movement of the epoch he might at any time from the commencement of his reign have rallied all Germany round it. Thus the revolution of 1848 burst upon him, and he was not the man to act or to lead in time of revolution. Even in 1848, had he given promptly and with dignity what, after blood had been shed in his streets, he had to give with humiliation, he would probably have been acclaimed Emperor on the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort, and have been accepted by the universal voice of Germany. But the odium cast upon him by the struggle of March 18th was so great that in the election of a temporary Administrator of the Empire in June no single member at Frankfort gave him a vote. Time was needed to repair his credit, and while time passed Austria rose from its ruins. In the spring of 1849 Frederick William could not have assumed the office of Emperor of Germany without risk of a war with Austria, even had he been willing to accept this office on the nomination of the Frankfort Parliament. But to accept the Imperial Crown from a popular Assembly was repugnant to his deepest convictions. Clear as the Frankfort Parliament had been, as a whole, from the taint of Republicanism or of revolutionary violence, it had nevertheless had its birth in revolution: the crown which it offered would, in the King's expression, have been picked up from blood and mire. Had the princes of Germany by any arrangement with the Assembly tendered the crown to Frederick William the case would have been different; a new Divine right would have emanated from the old, and conditions fixed by negotiation between the princes and the popular Assembly might have been endured. That Frederick William still aspired to German leadership in one form or another no one doubted; his disposition to seek or to reject an accommodation with the Frankfort Parliament varied with the influences which surrounded him. The Ministry led by the Count of Brandenburg, though anti-popular in its domestic measures, was desirous of arriving at some understanding with Gagern and the friends of German union. Shortly before the first reading of the Constitution at Frankfort, a note had been drafted in the Berlin Cabinet admitting under certain provisions the exclusion of Austria from the Federation, and proposing, not that the Assembly should admit the right of each Government to accept or reject the Constitution, but that it should meet in a fair spirit such recommendations as all the Governments together should by a joint act submit to it. This note, which would have rendered an agreement between the Prussian Court and the Assembly possible, Frederick William at first refused to sign. He was induced to do so (Jan. 23rd) by his confidant Bunsen, who himself was authorised to proceed to Frankfort. During Bunsen's absence despatches arrived at Berlin from Schwarzenberg, who, in his usual resolute way, proposed to dissolve the Frankfort Assembly, and to divide Germany between Austria, Prussia, and the four secondary kingdoms. Bunsen on his return found his work undone; the King recoiled under Austrian pressure from the position which he had taken up, and sent a note to Frankfort on the 16th of February, which described Austria as a necessary part of Germany and claimed for each separate Government the right to accept or reject the Constitution as it might think fit. Thus the acceptance of the headship by Frederick William under any conditions compatible with the claims of the Assembly was known to be doubtful when, on the 28th of March, the majority resolved to offer him the Imperial Crown. The disposition of the Ministry at Berlin was indeed still favourable to an accommodation; and when, on the 2nd of April, the members of the Assembly who were charged to lay its offer before Frederick William arrived at Berlin, they were received with such cordiality by Brandenburg that it was believed the King's consent had been won.

The reply of the King to the deputation on the following day rudely dispelled these hopes. He declared that before he could accept the Crown not only must he be summoned to it by the Princes of Germany, but the consent of all the Governments must be given to the Constitution. In other words, he required that the Assembly should surrender its claims to legislative supremacy, and abandon all those parts of the Federal Constitution of which any of the existing Governments disapproved. As it was certain that Austria and the four minor kingdoms would never agree to any Federal union worthy of the name, and that the Assembly could not now, without renouncing its past, admit that the right of framing the Constitution lay outside itself, the answer of the King was understood to amount to a refusal. The deputation left Berlin in the sorrowful conviction that their mission had failed; and a note which was soon afterwards received at Frankfort from the King showed that this belief was correct.

The answer of King Frederick William proved indeed much more than that he had refused the Crown of Germany; it proved that he would not accept the Constitution which the Assembly had enacted. The full import of this determination, and the serious nature of the crisis now impending over Germany, were at once understood. Though twenty-eight Governments successively accepted the Constitution, these were without exception petty States, and their united forces would scarcely have been a match for one of its more powerful enemies. On the 5th of April the Austrian Cabinet declared the Assembly to have been guilty of illegality in publishing the Constitution, and called upon all Austrian deputies to quit Frankfort. The Prussian Lower Chamber, elected under the King's recent edict, having protested against the state of siege in Berlin, and having passed a resolution in favour of the Frankfort Constitution, was forthwith dissolved. Within the Frankfort Parliament the resistance of Governments excited a patriotic resentment and caused for the moment a union of parties. Resolutions were passed declaring that the Assembly would adhere to the Constitution. A Committee was charged with the ascertainment of measures to be adopted for enforcing its recognition; and a note was addressed to all the hostile Governments demanding that they should abstain from proroguing or dissolving the representative bodies within their dominions with the view of suppressing the free utterance of opinions in favour of the Constitution.

On the ground of this last demand the Prussian official Press now began to denounce the Assembly of Frankfort as a revolutionary body. The situation of affairs daily became worse. It was in vain that the Assembly appealed to the Governments, the legislative Chambers, the local bodies, the whole people, to bring the Constitution into effect. The moral force on which it had determined to rely proved powerless, and in despair of conquering the Governments by public opinion the more violent members of the democratic party determined to appeal to insurrection. On the 4th of May a popular rising began at Dresden, where the King, under the influence of Prussia, had dismissed those of his Ministers who urged him to accept the Constitution, and had dissolved his Parliament. The outbreak drove the King from his capital; but only five days had passed when a Prussian army-corps entered the city and crushed the rebellion. In this interval, short as it was, there had been indications that the real leaders of the insurrection were fighting not for the Frankfort Constitution but for a Republic, and that in the event of their victory a revolutionary Government, connected with French and Polish schemes of subversion, would come into power. In Baden this was made still clearer. There the Government of the Grand Duke had actually accepted the Frankfort Constitution, and had ordered elections to be held for the Federal legislative body by which the Assembly was to be succeeded. Insurrection nevertheless broke out. The Republic was openly proclaimed; the troops joined the insurgents; and a Provisional Government allied itself with a similar body that had sprung into being with the help of French and Polish refugees in the neighbouring Palatinate. Conscious that these insurrections must utterly ruin its own cause, the Frankfort Assembly on the suggestion of Gagern called upon the Archduke John to suppress them by force of arms, and at the same time to protect the free expression of opinion on behalf of the Constitution where threatened by Governments. John, who had long clung to his office only to further the ends of Austria, refused to do so, and Gagern in consequence resigned. With his fall ended the real political existence of the Assembly. In reply to a resolution which it passed on the 10th of May, calling upon John to employ all the forces of Germany in defence of the Constitution, the Archduke placed a mock-Ministry in office. The Prussian Government, declaring the vote of the 10th of May to be a summons to civil war, ordered all Prussian deputies to withdraw from the Assembly, and a few days later its example was imitated by Saxony and Hanover. On the 20th of May sixty-five of the best known of the members, including Arndt and Dahlmann, placed on record their belief that in the actual situation the relinquishment of the task of the Assembly was the least of evils, and declared their work at Frankfort ended. Other groups followed them till there remained only the party of the extreme Left, which had hitherto been a weak minority, and which in no sense represented the real opinions of Germany. This Rump-Parliament, troubling itself little with John and his Ministers, determined to withdraw from Frankfort, where it dreaded the appearance of Prussian troops, into Wurtemberg, where it might expect some support from the revolutionary Governments of Baden and the Palatinate. On the 6th of June a hundred and five deputies assembled at Stuttgart. There they proceeded to appoint a governing Committee for all Germany, calling upon the King of Wurtemberg to supply them with seven thousand soldiers, and sending out emissaries to stir up the neighbouring population. But the world disregarded them. The Government at Stuttgart, after an interval of patience, bade them begone; and on the 18th of June their hall was closed against them and they were dispersed by troops, no one raising a hand on their behalf. The overthrow of the insurgents who had taken up arms in Baden and the Palatinate was not so easy a matter. A campaign of six weeks was necessary, in which the army of Prussia, led by the Prince of Prussia, sustained some reverses, before the Republican levies were crushed, and with the fall of Rastadt the insurrection was brought to a close.

The end of the German Parliament, on which the nation had set such high hopes and to which it had sent so much of what was noblest in itself, contrasted lamentably with the splendour of its opening. Whether a better result would have been attained if, instead of claiming supreme authority in the construction of Federal union, the Assembly had from the first sought the co-operation of the Governments, must remain matter of conjecture. Austria would under all circumstances have been the great hindrance in the way; and after the failure of the efforts made at Frankfort to establish the general union of Germany, Austria was able completely to frustrate the attempts which were now made at Berlin to establish partial union upon a different basis. In notifying to the Assembly his refusal of the Imperial Crown, King Frederick William had stated that he was resolved to place himself at the head of a Federation to be formed by States voluntarily uniting with him under terms to be subsequently arranged; and in a circular note addressed to the German Governments he invited such as were disposed to take counsel with Prussia to unite in Conference at Berlin. The opening of the Conference was fixed for the 17th of May. Two days before this the King issued a proclamation to the Prussian people announcing that in spite of the failure of the Assembly of Frankfort a German union was still to be formed. When the Conference opened at Berlin, no envoys appeared but those of Austria, Saxony, Hanover, and Bavaria. The Austrian representative withdrew at the end of the first sitting, the Bavarian rather later, leaving Prussia to lay such foundations as it could for German unity with the temporising support of Saxony and Hanover. A confederation was formed, known as the League of the Three Kingdoms. An undertaking was given that a Federal Parliament should be summoned, and that a Constitution should be made jointly by this Parliament and the Governments (May 26th). On the 11th of June the draft of a Federal Constitution was published. As the King of Prussia was apparently acting in good faith, and the draft-Constitution in spite of some defects seemed to afford a fair basis for union, the question now arose among the leaders of the German national movement whether the twenty-eight States which had accepted the ill-fated Constitution of Frankfort ought or ought not to enter the new Prussian League. A meeting of a hundred and fifty ex-members of the Frankfort Parliament was held at Gotha; and although great indignation was expressed by the more democratic faction, it was determined that the scheme now put forward by Prussia deserved a fair trial. The whole of the twenty-eight minor States consequently entered the League, which thus embraced all Germany with the exception of Austria, Bavaria and Wurtemberg. But the Courts of Saxony and Hanover had from the first been acting with duplicity. The military influence of Prussia, and the fear which they still felt of their own subjects, had prevented them from offering open resistance to the renewed work of Federation; but they had throughout been in communication with Austria, and were only waiting for the moment when the complete restoration of Austria's military strength should enable them to display their true colours. During the spring of 1849, while the Conferences at Berlin were being held, Austria was still occupied with Hungary and Venice. The final overthrow of these enemies enabled it to cast its entire weight upon Germany. The result was seen in the action of Hanover and Saxony, which now formally seceded from the Federation. Prussia thus remained at the end of 1849 with no support but that of the twenty-eight minor States. Against it, in open or in tacit antagonism to the establishment of German unity in any effective form, the four secondary Kingdoms stood ranged by the side of Austria.

It was not until the 20th of March, 1850, that the Federal Parliament, which had been promised ten months before on the incorporation of the new League, assembled at Erfurt. In the meantime reaction had gone far in many a German State. In Prussia, after the dissolution of the Lower Chamber on April 27th, 1849, the King had abrogated the electoral provisions of the Constitution so recently granted by himself, and had substituted for them a system based on the representation of classes. Treating this act as a breach of faith, the Democratic party had abstained from voting at the elections, with the result that in the Berlin Parliament of 1850 Conservatives, Reactionists, and officials formed the great majority. The revision of the Prussian Constitution, promised at first as a concession to Liberalism, was conducted in the opposite sense. The King demanded the strengthening of monarchical power; the Feudalists, going far beyond him, attacked the municipal and social reforms of the last two years, and sought to lead Prussia back to the system of its medieval estates. It was in the midst of this victory of reaction in Prussia that the Federal Parliament at Erfurt began its sittings. Though the moderate Liberals, led by Gagern and other tried politicians of Frankfurt, held the majority in both Houses, a strong Absolutist party from Prussia confronted them, and it soon became clear that the Prussian Government was ready to play into the hands of this party. The draft of the Federal Constitution, which had been made at Berlin, was presented, according to the undertaking of May 28th, 1849, to the Erfurt Assembly. Aware of the gathering strength of the reaction and of the danger of delay, the Liberal majority declared itself ready to pass the draft into law without a single alteration. The reactionary minority demanded that a revision should take place; and, to the scandal of all who understood the methods or the spirit of Parliamentary rule, the Prussian Ministers united with the party which demanded alterations in the project which they themselves had brought forward. A compromise was ultimately effected; but the action of the Court of Prussia and the conduct of its Ministers throughout the Erfurt debates struck with deep despondency those who had believed that Frederick William might still effect the work in which the Assembly of Frankfort had failed. The trust in the King's sincerity or consistence of purpose sank low. The sympathy of the national Liberal party throughout Germany was to a great extent alienated from Prussia; while, if any expectation existed at Berlin that the adoption of a reactionary policy would disarm the hostility of the Austrian Government to the new League, this hope was wholly vain and baseless.

Austria had from the first protested against the attempt of the King of Prussia to establish any new form of union in Germany, and had declared that it would recognise none of the conclusions of the Federal Parliament of Erfurt. According to the theory now advanced by the Cabinet of Vienna the ancient Federal Constitution of Germany was still in force. All that had happened since March, 1848, was so much wanton and futile mischief-making. The disturbance of order had at length come to an end, and with the exit of the rioters the legitimate powers re-entered into their rights. Accordingly, there could be no question of the establishment of new Leagues. The old relation of all the German States to one another under the ascendency of Austria remained in full strength; the Diet of Frankfort, which had merely suspended its functions and by no means suffered extinction, was still the legitimate central authority. That some modifications might be necessary in the ancient Constitution was the most that Austria was willing to admit. This, however, was an affair not for the German people but for its rulers, and Austria accordingly invited all the Governments to a Congress at Frankfort where the changes necessary might be discussed. In reply to this summons, Prussia strenuously denied that the old Federal Constitution was still in existence. The princes of the numerous petty States which were included in the new Union assembled at Berlin round Frederick William, and resolved that they would not attend the Conference at Frankfort except under reservations and conditions which Austria would not admit. Arguments and counter­arguments were exchanged; but the controversy between an old and a new Germany was one to be decided by force of will or force of arms, not by political logic. The struggle was to be one between Prussia and Austria, and the Austrian Cabinet had well gauged the temper of its opponent. A direct summons to submission would have roused all the King's pride, and have been answered by war. Before demanding from Frederick William the dissolution of the Union which he had founded, Schwarzenberg determined to fix upon a quarrel in which the King should be perplexed or alarmed at the results of his own policy. The dominant conviction in the mind of Frederick William was that of the sanctity of monarchical rule. If the League of Berlin could be committed to some enterprise hostile to monarchical power, and could be charged with an alliance with rebellion, Frederick William would probably falter in his resolutions, and a resort to arms, for which, however, Austria was well prepared, would become unnecessary.

Among the States whose Governments had been forced by public opinion to join the new Federation was the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel. The Elector was, like his predecessors, a thorough despot at heart, and chafed under the restrictions which a constitutional system imposed upon his rule. Acting under Austrian instigation, he dismissed his Ministers in the spring of 1850, and placed in office one Hassenpflug, a type of the worst and most violent class of petty tyrants produced by the officialism of the minor German States. Hassenpflug immediately quarrelled with the Estates at Cassel, and twice dissolved them, after which he proceeded to levy taxes by force. The law-courts declared his acts illegal; the officers of the army, when called on for assistance, began to resign. The conflict between the Minister and the Hessian population was in full progress when, at the beginning of September, Austria with its vassal Governments proclaimed the re-establishment of the Diet of Frankfort. Though Prussia and most of the twenty-eight States confederate with it treated this announcement as null and void, the Diet, constituted by the envoys of Austria, the four minor Kingdoms, and a few seceders from the Prussian Union, commenced its sittings. To the Diet the Elector of Hesse forthwith appealed for help against his subjects, and the decision was given that the refusal of the Hessian Estates to grant the taxes was an offence justifying the intervention of the central power. Fortified by this judgment, Hassenpflug now ordered that every person offering resistance to the Government should be tried by court-martial. He was baffled by the resignation of the entire body of officers in the Hessian army; and as this completed the discomfiture of the Elector, the armed intervention of Austria, as identified with the Diet of Frankfort, now became a certainty. But to the protection of the people of Hesse in their constitutional rights Prussia, as chief of the League which Hesse had joined, stood morally pledged. It remained for the King to decide between armed resistance to Austria or the humiliation of a total abandonment of Prussia's claim to leadership in any German union. Conflicting influences swayed the King in one direction and another. The friends of Austria and of absolutism declared that the employment of the Prussian army on behalf of the Hessians would make the King an accomplice of revolution: the bolder and more patriotic spirits protested against the abdication of Prussia's just claims and the evasion of its responsibilities towards Germany. For a moment the party of action, led by the Prince of Prussia, gained the ascendant. General Radowitz, the projector of the Union, was called to the Foreign Ministry, and Prussian troops entered Hesse. Austria now ostentatiously prepared for war. Frederick William, terrified by the danger confronting him, yet unwilling to yield all, sought the mediation of the Czar of Russia. Nicholas came to Warsaw, where the Emperor of Austria and Prince Charles, brother of the King of Prussia, attended by the Ministers of their States, met him. The closest family ties united the Courts of St. Petersburg and Berlin but the Russian sovereign was still the patron of Austria as he had been in the Hungarian campaign. He resented the action of Prussia in Schleswig-Holstein, and was offended that King Frederick William had not presented himself at Warsaw in person. He declared in favour of all Austria's demands, and treated Count Brandenburg with such indignity that the Count, a high-spirited patriot, never recovered from its effect. He returned to Berlin only to give in his report and die. Manteuffel, Minister of the Interior, assured the King that the Prussian army was so weak in numbers and so defective in organisation that, if it took the field against Austria and its allies, it would meet with certain ruin. Bavarian troops, representing the Diet of Frankfort, now entered Hesse at Austria's bidding, and stood face to face with the Prussians. The moment had come when the decision must be made between peace and war. At a Council held at Berlin on November and the peace-party carried the King with them. Radowitz gave up office; Manteuffel, the Minister of repression within and of submission without, was set at the head of the Government. The meaning of his appointment was well understood, and with each new proof of the weakness of the King the tone of the Court of Austria became more imperious. On the 9th of November Schwarzenberg categorically demanded the dissolution of the Prussian Union, the recognition of the Federal Diet, and the evacuation of Hesse by the Prussian troops. The first point was at once conceded, and in hollow, equivocating language Manteuffel made the fact known to the members of the Confederacy. The other conditions not being so speedily fulfilled, Schwarzenberg set Austrian regiments in motion, and demanded the withdrawal of the Prussian troops from Hesse within twenty-four hours. Manteuffel begged the Austrian Minister for an interview, and, without waiting for an answer, set out for Olmutz. His instructions bade him to press for certain concessions; none of these did he obtain, and he made the necessary submission without them. On the 29th of November a convention was signed at Olmutz, in which Prussia recognised the German Federal Constitution of 1815 as still existing, undertook to withdraw all its troops from Hesse with the exception of a single battalion, and consented to the settlement of affairs both in Hesse and in Schleswig-Holstein by the Federal Diet. One point alone in the scheme of the Austrian statesman was wanting among the fruits of his victory at Olmutz and of the negotiations at Dresden by which this was followed. Schwarzenberg had intended that the entire Austrian Empire should enter the German Federation; and if he had had to reckon with no opponents but the beaten and humbled Prussia, he would have effected his design. But the prospect of a central European Power, with a population of seventy millions, controlled as this would virtually be by the Cabinet of Vienna, alarmed other nations. England declared that such a combination would undo the balance of power in Europe and menace the independence of Germany; France protested in more threatening terms; and the project fell to the ground, to be remembered only as the boldest imagination of a statesman for whom fortune, veiling the Nemesis in store, seemed to set no limit to its favours.

The cause of Schleswig-Holstein, so intimately bound up with the efforts of the Germans towards national union, sank with the failure of these efforts; and in the final humiliation of Prussia it received what might well seem its death-blow. The armistice of Malmo, which was sanctioned by the Assembly of Frankfort in the autumn of 1848, lasted until March 26th, 1849. War was then recommenced by Prussia, and the lines of Duppel were stormed by its troops, while the volunteer forces of Schleswig-Holstein unsuccessfully laid siege to Fredericia. Hostilities had continued for three months, when a second armistice, to last for a year, and Preliminaries of Peace, were agreed upon. At the conclusion of this armistice, in July, 1850, Prussia, in the name of Germany, made peace with Denmark. The inhabitants of the Duchies in consequence continued the war for themselves, and though defeated with great loss at Idstedt on the 24th of July, they remained unconquered at the end of the year. This was the situation of affairs when Prussia, by the Treaty of Olmutz, agreed that the restored Federal Diet should take upon itself the restoration of order in Schleswig-Holstein, and that the troops of Prussia should unite with those of Austria to enforce its decrees. To the Cabinet of Vienna, the foe in equal measure of German national union and of every democratic cause, the Schleswig-Holsteiners were simply rebels in insurrection against their Sovereign. They were required by the Diet, under Austrian dictation, to lay down their arms; and commissioners from Austria and Prussia entered the Duchies to compel them to do so. Against Denmark, Austria, and Prussia together, it was impossible for Schleswig-Holstein to prolong its resistance. The army was dissolved, and the Duchies were handed over to the King of Denmark, to return to the legal status which was defined in the Treaties of Peace. This was the nominal condition of the transfer; but the Danish Government treated Schleswig as part of its national territory, and in the northern part of the Duchy the process of substituting Danish for German nationality was actively pursued. The policy of foreign Courts, little interested in the wish of the inhabitants, had from the beginning of the struggle of the Duchies against Denmark favoured the maintenance and consolidation of the Danish Kingdom. The claims of the Duke of Augustenburg, as next heir to the Duchies in the male line, were not considered worth the risk of a new war; and by a protocol signed at London on the 2nd of August, 1850, the Powers, with the exception of Prussia, declared themselves in favour of a single rule of succession in all parts of the Danish State. By a Treaty of the 8th of May, 1852, to which Prussia gave its assent, the pretensions of all other claimants to the disputed succession were set aside, and Prince Christian, of the House of Glucksburg, was declared heir to the throne, the rights of the German Federation as established by the Treaties of 1815 being reserved. In spite of this reservation of Federal rights, and of the stipulations in favour of Schleswig and Holstein made in the earlier agreements, the Duchies appeared to be now practically united with the Danish State. Prussia, for a moment their champion, had joined with Austria in coercing their army, in dissolving their Government, in annulling the legislation by which the Parliament of Frankfort had made them participators in public rights thenceforward to be the inheritance of all Germans. A page in the national history was obliterated; Prussia had turned its back on its own professions; there remained but one relic from the time when the whole German people seemed so ardent for the emancipation of its brethren beyond the frontier. The national fleet, created by the Assembly of Frankfort for the prosecution of the struggle with Denmark, still lay at the mouth of the Elbe. But the same power which had determined that Germany was not to be a nation had also determined that it could have no national maritime interests. After all that had passed, authority had little call to be nice about appearances; and the national fleet was sold by auction, in accordance with a decree of the restored Diet of Frankfort, in the summer of 1852.

It was with deep disappointment and humiliation that the Liberals of Germany, and all in whom the hatred of democratic change had not overpowered the love of country, witnessed the issue of the movement of 1848. In so far as that movement was one directed towards national union it had totally failed, and the state of things that had existed before 1848 was restored without change. As a movement of constitutional and social reform, it had not been so entirely vain; nor in this respect can it be said that Germany after the year 1848 returned altogether to what it was before it. Many of the leading figures of the earlier time re-appeared indeed with more or less of lustre upon the stage. Metternich though excluded from office by younger men, beamed upon Vienna with the serenity of a prophet who had lived to see most of his enemies shot and of a martyr who had returned to one of the most enviable Salons in Europe. No dynasty lost its throne, no class of the population had been struck down with proscription as were the clergy and the nobles of France fifty years before. Yet the traveller familiar with Germany before the revolution found that much of the old had now vanished, much of a new world come into being. It was not sought by the re-established Governments to undo at one stroke the whole of the political, the social, the agrarian legislation of the preceding time, as in some other periods of reaction. The nearest approach that was made to this was in a decree of the Diet annulling the Declaration of Rights drawn up by the Frankfort Assembly, and requiring the Governments to bring into conformity with the Federal Constitution all laws and institutions made since the beginning of 1848. Parliamentary government was thereby enfeebled, but not necessarily extinguished. Governments narrowed the franchise, curtailed the functions of representative assemblies, filled these with their creatures, coerced voters at elections; but, except in Austria, there was no open abandonment of constitutional forms. In some States, as in Saxony under the reactionary rule of Count Beust, the system of national representation established in 1848 was abolished and the earlier Estates were revived; in Prussia the two Houses of Parliament continued in existence, but in such dependence upon the royal authority, and under such strong pressure of an aristocratic and official reaction, that, after struggling for some years in the Lower House, the Liberal leaders at length withdrew in despair. The character which Government now assumed in Prussia was indeed far more typical of the condition of Germany at large than was the bold and uncompromising despotism of Prince Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmutz of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an oppression which was everywhere felt and yet was hard to define. Its best elements were those which suffered the most: its highest intellectual and political aims were those which most excited the suspicion of the Government. Its King had lost whatever was stimulating or elevated in his illusions. From him no second alliance with Liberalism, no further effort on behalf of German unity, was to be expected: the hope for Germany and for Prussia, if hope there was, lay in a future reign.

The powerlessness of Prussia was the measure of Austrian influence and prestige. The contrast presented by Austria in 1848 and Austria in 1851 was indeed one that might well arrest political observers. Its recovery had no doubt been effected partly by foreign aid, and in the struggle with the Magyars a dangerous obligation had been incurred towards Russia; but scarred and riven as the fabric was within, it was complete and imposing without. Not one of the enemies who in 1848 had risen against the Court of Vienna now remained standing. In Italy, Austria had won back what had appeared to be hopelessly lost; in Germany it had more than vindicated its old claims. It had thrown its rival to the ground, and the full measure of its ambition was perhaps even yet not satisfied. "First to humiliate Prussia, then to destroy it," was the expression in which Schwarzenberg summed up his German policy. Whether, with his undoubted firmness and daring, the Minister possessed the intellectual qualities and the experience necessary for the successful administration of an Empire built up, as Austria now was, on violence and on the suppression of every national force, was doubted even by his admirers. The proof, however, was not granted to him, for a sudden death carried him off in his fourth year of power (April 5th, 1852). Weaker men succeeded to his task. The epoch of military and diplomatic triumph was now ending, the gloomier side of the reaction stood out unrelieved by any new succession of victories. Financial disorder grew worse and worse. Clericalism claimed its bond from the monarchy which it had helped to restore. In the struggle of the nationalities of Austria against the central authority the Bishops had on the whole thrown their influence on to the side of the Crown. The restored despotism owed too much to their help and depended too much on their continued goodwill to be able to refuse their demands. Thus the new centralised administration, reproducing in general the uniformity of government attempted by the Emperor Joseph II, contrasted with this in its subservience to clerical power. Ecclesiastical laws and jurisdictions were allowed to encroach on the laws and jurisdiction of the State; education was made over to the priesthood; within the Church itself the bishops were allowed to rule uncontrolled. The very Minister who had taken office under Schwarzenberg as the representative of the modern spirit, to which the Government still professed to render homage, became the instrument of an act of submission to the Papacy which marked the lowest point to which Austrian policy fell. Alexander Bach, a prominent Liberal in Vienna at the beginning of 1848, had accepted office at the price of his independence, and surrendered himself to the aristocratic and clerical influences that dominated the Court. Consistent only in his efforts to simplify the forms of government, to promote the ascendency of German over all other elements in the State, to maintain the improvement in the peasant's condition effected by the Parliament of Kremsier, Bach, as Minister of the Interior, made war in all other respects on his own earlier principles. In the former representative of the Liberalism of the professional classes in Vienna absolutism had now its most efficient instrument; and the Concordat negotiated by Bach with the Papacy in 1855 marked the definite submission of Austria to the ecclesiastical pretensions which in these years of political languor and discouragement gained increasing recognition throughout Central Europe. Ultramontanism had sought allies in many political camps since the revolution of 1848. It had dallied in some countries with Republicanism; but its truer instincts divined in the victory of absolutist systems its own surest gain. Accommodations between the Papacy and several of the German Governments were made in the years succeeding 1849; and from the centralised despotism of the Emperor Francis Joseph the Church won concessions which since the time of Maria Theresa it had in vain sought from any ruler of the Austrian State.

The European drama which began in 1848 had more of unity and more of concentration in its opening than in its close. In Italy it ends with the fall of Venice; in Germany the interest lingers till the days of Olmutz; in France there is no decisive break in the action until the Coup d'etat which, at the end of the year 1851, made Louis Napoleon in all but name Emperor of France. The six million votes which had raised Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the Republic might well have filled with alarm all who hoped for a future of constitutional rule; yet the warning conveyed by the election seems to have been understood by but few. As the representative of order and authority, as the declared enemy of Socialism, Louis Napoleon was on the same side as the Parliamentary majority; he had even been supported in his candidature by Parliamentary leaders such as M. Thiers. His victory was welcomed as a victory over Socialism and the Red Republic; he had received some patronage from the official party of order, and it was expected that, as nominal chief of the State, he would act as the instrument of this party. He was an adventurer, but an adventurer with so little that was imposing about him, that it scarcely occurred to men of influence in Paris to credit him with the capacity for mischief. His mean look and spiritless address, the absurdities of his past, the insignificance of his political friends, caused him to be regarded during his first months of public life with derision rather than with fear. The French, said M. Thiers long afterwards, made two mistakes about Louis Napoleon: the first when they took him for a fool, the second when they took him for a man of genius. It was not until the appearance of the letter to Colonel Ney, in which the President ostentatiously separated himself from his Ministers and emphasised his personal will in the direction of the foreign policy of France, that suspicions of danger to the Republic from his ambition arose. From this time, in the narrow circle of the Ministers whom official duty brought into direct contact with the President, a constant sense of insecurity and dread of some new surprise on his part prevailed, though the accord which had been broken by the letter to Colonel Ney was for a while outwardly re-established, and the forms of Parliamentary government remained unimpaired.

The first year of Louis Napoleon's term of office was drawing to a close when a message from him was delivered to the Assembly which seemed to announce an immediate attack upon the Constitution. The Ministry in office was composed of men of high Parliamentary position; it enjoyed the entire confidence of a great majority in the Assembly, and had enforced with at least sufficient energy the measures of public security which the President and the country seemed agreed in demanding. Suddenly, on the 31st of October, the President announced to the Assembly by a message carried by one of his aides-de-camp that the Ministry were dismissed. The reason assigned for their dismissal was the want of unity within the Cabinet itself; but the language used by the President announced much more than a ministerial change. "France, in the midst of confusion, seeks for the hand, the will of him whom it elected on the 10th of December. The victory won on that day was the victory of a system, for the name of Napoleon is in itself a programme. It signifies order, authority, religion, national prosperity within; national dignity without. It is this policy, inaugurated by my election, that I desire to carry to triumph with the support of the Assembly and of the people." In order to save the Republic from anarchy, to maintain the prestige of France among other nations, the President declared that he needed men of action rather than of words; yet when the list of the new Ministers appeared, it contained scarcely a single name of weight. Louis Napoleon had called to office persons whose very obscurity had marked them as his own instruments, and guaranteed to him the ascendency which he had not hitherto possessed within the Cabinet. Satisfied with having given this proof of his power, he resumed the appearance of respect, if not of cordiality, towards the Assembly. He had learnt to beware of precipitate action; above two years of office were still before him; and he had now done enough to make it clear to all who were disposed to seek their fortunes in a new political cause that their services on his behalf would be welcomed, and any excess of zeal more than pardoned. From this time there grew up a party which had for its watchword the exaltation of Louis Napoleon and the derision of the methods of Parliamentary government. Journalists, unsuccessful politicians, adventurers of every description, were enlisted in the ranks of this obscure but active band. For their acts and their utterances no one was responsible but themselves. They were disavowed without compunction when their hardihood went too far; but their ventures brought them no peril, and the generosity of the President was not wanting to those who insisted on serving him in spite of himself.

France was still trembling with the shock of the Four Days of June; and measures of repression formed the common ground upon which Louis Napoleon and the Assembly met without fear of conflict. Certain elections which were held in the spring of 1850, and which gave a striking victory in Paris and elsewhere to Socialist or Ultra-Democratic candidates, revived the alarms of the owners of property, and inspired the fear that with universal suffrage the Legislature itself might ultimately fall into the hands of the Red Republicans. The principle of universal suffrage had been proclaimed almost by accident in the midst of the revolution of 1848. It had been embodied in the Constitution of that year because it was found already in existence. No party had seriously considered the conditions under which it was to be exercised, or had weighed the political qualifications of the mass to whom it was so lightly thrown. When election after election returned to the Chamber men whose principles were held to menace society itself, the cry arose that France must be saved from the hands of the vile multitude; and the President called upon a Committee of the Assembly to frame the necessary measures of electoral reform. Within a week the work of the Committee was completed, and the law which it had drafted was brought before the Assembly. It was proposed that, instead of a residence of six months, a continuous residence of three years in the same commune should be required of every voter, and that the fulfilment of this condition should be proved, not by ordinary evidence, but by one of certain specified acts, such as the payment of personal taxes. With modifications of little importance the Bill was passed by the Assembly. Whether its real effect was foreseen even by those who desired the greatest possible limitation of the franchise is doubtful; it is certain that many who supported it believed, in their ignorance of the practical working of electoral laws, that they were excluding from the franchise only the vagabond and worthless class which has no real place within the body politic. When the electoral lists drawn up in pursuance of the measure appeared, they astounded all parties alike. Three out of the ten millions of voters in France were disfranchised. Not only the inhabitants of whole quarters in the great cities but the poorer classes among the peasantry throughout France had disappeared from the electoral body. The Assembly had at one blow converted into enemies the entire mass of the population that lived by the wages of bodily labour. It had committed an act of political suicide, and had given to a man so little troubled with scruples of honour as Louis Napoleon the fatal opportunity of appealing to France as the champion of national sovereignty and the vindicator of universal suffrage against an Assembly which had mutilated it in the interests of class.

The duration of the Presidency was fixed by the Constitution of 1848 at four years, and it was enacted that the President should not be re-eligible to his dignity. By the operation of certain laws imperfectly adjusted to one another, the tenure of office by Louis Napoleon expired on the 8th of May, 1852, while the date for the dissolution of the Assembly fell within a few weeks of this day. France was therefore threatened with the dangers attending the almost simultaneous extinction of all authority. The perils of 1852 loomed only too visibly before the country, and Louis Napoleon addressed willing hearers when, in the summer of 1850, he began to hint at the necessity of a prolongation of his own power. The Parliamentary recess was employed by the President in two journeys through the Departments; the first through those of the south-east, where Socialism was most active, and where his appearance served at once to prove his own confidence and to invigorate the friends of authority; the second through Normandy, where the prevailing feeling was strongly in favour of firm government, and utterances could safely be made by the President which would have brought him into some risk at Paris. In suggesting that France required his own continued presence at the head of the State Louis Napoleon was not necessarily suggesting a violation of the law. It was provided by the Statutes of 1848 that the Assembly by a vote of three-fourths might order a revision of the Constitution; and in favour of this revision petitions were already being drawn up throughout the country. Were the clause forbidding the re-election of the President removed from the Constitution, Louis Napoleon might fairly believe that an immense majority of the French people would re-invest him with power. He would probably have been content with a legal re-election had this been rendered possible; but the Assembly showed little sign of a desire to smooth his way, and it therefore became necessary for him to seek the means of realising his aims in violation of the law. He had persuaded himself that his mission, his destiny, was to rule France; in other words, he had made up his mind to run such risks and to sanction such crimes as might be necessary to win him sovereign power. With the loftier impulses of ambition, motives of a meaner kind stimulated him to acts of energy. Never wealthy, the father of a family though unmarried, he had exhausted his means, and would have returned to private life a destitute man, if not laden with debt. When his own resolution flagged, there were those about him too deeply interested in his fortunes to allow him to draw back.

It was by means of the army that Louis Napoleon intended in the last resort to make himself master of France, and the army had therefore to be won over to his personal cause. The generals who had gained distinction either in the Algerian wars or in the suppression of insurrection in France were without exception Orleanists or Republicans. Not a single officer of eminence was as yet included in the Bonapartist band. The President himself had never seen service except in a Swiss camp of exercise; beyond his name he possessed nothing that could possibly touch the imagination of a soldier. The heroic element not being discoverable in his person or his career, it remained to work by more material methods. Louis Napoleon had learnt many things in England, and had perhaps observed in the English elections of that period how much may be effected by the simple means of money-bribes and strong drink. The saviour of society was not ashamed to order the garrison of Paris double rations of brandy and to distribute innumerable doles of half a franc or less. Military banquets were given, in which the sergeant and the corporal sat side by side with the higher officers. Promotion was skilfully offered or withheld. As the generals of the highest position were hostile to Bonaparte, it was the easier to tempt their subordinates with the prospect of their places. In the acclamations which greeted the President at the reviews held at Paris in the autumn of 1850, in the behaviour both of officers and men in certain regiments, it was seen how successful had been the emissaries of Bonapartism. The Committee which represented the absent Chamber in vain called the Minister of War to account for these irregularities. It was in vain that Changarnier, who, as commander both of the National Guard of Paris and of the first military division, seemed to hold the arbitrament between President and Assembly in his hands, openly declared at the beginning of 1851 in favour of the Constitution. He was dismissed from his post; and although a vote of censure which followed this dismissal led to the resignation of the Ministry, the Assembly was unable to reinstate Changarnier in his command, and helplessly witnessed the authority which he had held pass into hostile or untrustworthy hands.

There now remained only one possible means of averting the attack upon the Constitution which was so clearly threatened, and that was by subjecting the Constitution itself to revision in order that Louis Napoleon might legally seek re-election at the end of his Presidency. An overwhelming current of public opinion pressed indeed in the direction of such a change. However gross and undisguised the initiative of the local functionaries in preparing the petitions which showered upon the Assembly, the national character of the demand could not be doubted. There was no other candidate whose name carried with it any genuine popularity or prestige, or around whom even the Parliamentary sections at enmity with the President could rally. The Assembly was divided not very unevenly between Legitimists, Orleanists, and Republicans. Had indeed the two monarchical groups been able to act in accord, they might have had some hope of re-establishing the throne; and an attempt had already been made to effect a union, on the understanding that the childless Comte de Chambord should recognise the grandson of Louis Philippe as his heir, the House of Orleans renouncing its claims during the lifetime of the chief of the elder line. These plans had been frustrated by the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to sanction any appeal to the popular vote, and the restoration of the monarchy was therefore hopeless for the present. It remained for the Assembly to decide whether it would facilitate Louis Napoleon's re-election as President by a revision of the Constitution or brave the risk of his violent usurpation of power. The position was a sad and even humiliating one for those who, while they could not disguise their real feeling towards the Prince, yet knew themselves unable to count on the support of the nation if they should resist him. The Legitimists, more sanguine in temper, kept in view an ultimate restoration of the monarchy, and lent themselves gladly to any policy which might weaken the constitutional safeguards of the Republic. The Republican minority alone determined to resist any proposal for revision, and to stake everything upon the maintenance of the constitution in its existing form. Weak as the Republicans were as compared with the other groups in the Assembly when united against them, they were yet strong enough to prevent the Ministry from securing that majority of three-fourths without which the revision of the Constitution could not be undertaken. Four hundred and fifty votes were given in favour of revision, two hundred and seventy against it (July 19th). The proposal therefore fell to the ground, and Louis Napoleon, who could already charge the Assembly with having by its majority destroyed universal suffrage, could now charge it with having by its minority forbidden the nation to choose its own head. Nothing more was needed by him. He had only to decide upon the time and the circumstances of the coup d'etat which was to rid him of his adversaries and to make him master of France.

Louis Napoleon had few intimate confidants; the chief among these were his half­brother Morny, one of the illegitimate offspring of Queen Hortense, a man of fashion and speculator in the stocks; Fialin or Persigny, a person of humble origin who had proved himself a devoted follower of the Prince through good and evil; and Fleury, an officer at this time on a mission in Algiers. These were not men out of whom Louis Napoleon could form an administration, but they were useful to him in discovering and winning over soldiers and officials of sufficient standing to give to the execution of the conspiracy something of the appearance of an act of Government. A general was needed at the War Office who would go all lengths in illegality. Such a man had already been found in St. Arnaud, commander of a brigade in Algiers, a brilliant soldier who had redeemed a disreputable past by years of hard service, and who was known to be ready to treat his French fellow-citizens exactly as he would treat the Arabs. As St. Arnaud's name was not yet familiar in Paris, a campaign was arranged in the summer of 1851 for the purpose of winning him distinction. At the cost of some hundreds of lives St. Arnaud was pushed into sufficient fame; and after receiving congratulations proportioned to his exploits from the President's own hand, he was summoned to Paris, in order at the right moment to be made Minister of War. A troop of younger officers, many of whom gained a lamentable celebrity as the generals of 1870, were gradually brought over from Algiers and placed round the Minister in the capital. The command of the army of Paris was given to General Magnan, who, though he preferred not to share in the deliberations on the coup d’état, had promised his cooperation when the moment should arrive. The support, or at least the acquiescence, of the army seemed thus to be assured. The National Guard, which, under Changarnier, would probably have rallied in defence of the Assembly, had been placed under an officer pledged to keep it in inaction. For the management of the police Louis Napoleon had fixed upon M. Maupas, Prefet of the Haute Garonne. This person, to whose shamelessness we owe the most authentic information that exists on the coup d’état, had, while in an inferior station, made it his business to ingratiate himself with the President by sending to him personally police reports which ought to have been sent to the Ministers. The objects and the character of M. Maupas were soon enough understood by Louis Napoleon. He promoted him to high office; sheltered him from the censure of his superiors; and, when the coup d'etat was drawing nigh, called him to Paris, in the full and well-grounded confidence that, whatever the most perfidious ingenuity could contrive in turning the guardians of the law against the law itself, that M. Maupas, as Prefet of Police, might be relied upon to accomplish.

Preparations for the coup d’état had been so far advanced in September that a majority of the conspirators had then urged Louis Napoleon to strike the blow without delay, while the members of the Assembly were still dispersed over France in the vacation. St. Arnaud, however, refused his assent, declaring that the deputies, if left free, would assemble at a distance from Paris, summon to them the generals loyal to the Constitution, and commence a civil war. He urged that, in order to avoid greater subsequent risks, it would be necessary to seize all the leading representatives and generals from whom resistance might be expected, and to hold them under durance until the crisis should be over. This simultaneous arrest of all the foremost public men in France could only be effected at a time when the Assembly was sitting. St. Arnaud therefore demanded that the coup d'etat should be postponed till the winter. Another reason made for delay. Little as the populace of Paris loved the reactionary Assembly, Louis Napoleon was not altogether assured that it would quietly witness his own usurpation of power. In waiting until the Chamber should again be in session, he saw the opportunity of exhibiting his cause as that of the masses themselves, and of justifying his action as the sole means of enforcing popular rights against a legislature obstinately bent on denying them. Louis Napoleon's own Ministers had overthrown universal suffrage. This might indeed be matter for comment on the part of the censorious, but it was not a circumstance to stand in the way of the execution of a great design. Accordingly Louis Napoleon determined to demand from the Assembly at the opening of the winter session the repeal of the electoral law of May 31st, and to make its refusal, on which he could confidently reckon, the occasion of its destruction.

The conspirators were up to this time conspirators and nothing more. A Ministry still subsisted which was not initiated in the President's designs nor altogether at his command. On his requiring that the repeal of the law of May 31st should be proposed to the Assembly, the Cabinet resigned. The way to the highest functions of State was thus finally opened for the agents of the coup d’état. St. Arnaud was placed at the War Office, Maupas at the Prefecture of Police. The colleagues assigned to them were too insignificant to exercise any control over their actions. At the reopening of the Assembly on the 4th of November an energetic message from the President was read. On the one hand he denounced a vast and perilous combination of all the most dangerous elements of society which threatened to overwhelm France in the following year; on the other hand he demanded, with certain undefined safeguards, the re­establishment of universal suffrage. The middle classes were scared with the prospect of a Socialist revolution; the Assembly was divided against itself, and the democracy of Paris flattered by the homage paid to the popular vote. With very little delay a measure repealing the Law of May 31st was introduced into the Assembly. It was supported by the Republicans and by many members of the other groups; but the majority of the Assembly, while anxious to devise some compromise, refused to condemn its own work in the unqualified form on which the President insisted. The Bill was thrown out by seven votes. Forthwith the rumour of an impending coup d’état spread through Paris. The Questors, or members charged with the safeguarding of the Assembly, moved the resolutions necessary to enable them to secure sufficient military aid. Even now prompt action might perhaps have saved the Chamber. But the Republican deputies, incensed by their defeat on the question of universal suffrage, plunged headlong into the snare set for them by the President, and combined with his open or secret partisans to reject the proposition of the Questors. Changarnier had blindly vouched for the fidelity of the army; one Republican deputy, more imaginative than his colleagues, bade the Assembly confide in their invisible sentinel, the people. Thus the majority of the Chamber, with the clearest warning of danger, insisted on giving the aggressor every possible advantage. If the imbecility of opponents is the best augury of success in a bold enterprise, the President had indeed little reason to anticipate failure.

The execution of the coup d’état was fixed for the early morning of December 2nd. On the previous evening Louis Napoleon held a public reception at the Elysée, his quiet self-possessed manner indicating nothing of the struggle at hand. Before the guests dispersed the President withdrew to his study. There the last council of the conspirators was held, and they parted, each to the execution of the work assigned to him. The central element in the plan was the arrest of Cavaignac, of Changarnier and three other generals who were members of the Assembly, of eleven civilian deputies including M. Thiers, and of sixty-two other politicians of influence. Maupas summoned to the Prefecture of Police in the dead of night a sufficient number of his trusted agents, received each of them on his arrival in a separate room, and charged each with the arrest of one of the victims. The arrests were accomplished before dawn, and the leading soldiers and citizens of France met one another in the prison of Mazas. The Palais Bourbon, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was occupied by troops. The national printing establishment was seized by gendarmes, and the proclamations of Louis Napoleon, distributed sentence by sentence to different compositors, were set in type before the workmen knew upon what they were engaged. When day broke the Parisians found the soldiers in the streets, and the walls placarded with manifestoes of Louis Napoleon. The first of these was a decree which announced in the name of the French people that the National Assembly and the Council of State were dissolved, that universal suffrage was restored, and that the nation was convoked in its electoral colleges from the 14th to the 21st of December. The second was a proclamation to the people, in which Louis Napoleon denounced at once the monarchical conspirators within the Assembly and the anarchists who sought to overthrow all government. His duty called upon him to save the Republic by an appeal to the nation. He proposed the establishment of a decennial executive authority, with a Senate, a Council of State, a Legislative Body, and other institutions borrowed from the Consulate of 1799. If the nation refused him a majority of its votes he would summon a new Assembly and resign his powers; if the nation believed in the cause of which his name was the symbol, in France regenerated by the Revolution and organised by the Emperor, it would prove this by ratifying his authority. A third proclamation was addressed to the army. In 1830 and in 1848 the army had been treated as the conquered, but its voice was now to be heard. Common glories and sorrows united the soldiers of France with Napoleon's heir, and the future would unite them in common devotion to the repose and greatness of their country.

The full meaning of these manifestoes was not at first understood by the groups who read them. The Assembly was so unpopular that the announcement of its dissolution, with the restoration of universal suffrage, pleased rather than alarmed the democratic quarters of Paris. It was not until some hours had passed that the arrests became generally known, and that the first symptoms of resistance appeared. Groups of deputies assembled at the houses of the Parliamentary leaders; a body of fifty even succeeded in entering the Palais Bourbon and in commencing a debate: they were, however, soon dispersed by soldiers. Later in the day above two hundred members assembled at the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement. There they passed resolutions declaring the President removed from his office, and appointing a commander of the troops at Paris. The first officers who were sent to clear the Mairie flinched in the execution of their work, and withdrew for further orders. The Magistrates of the High Court, whose duty it was to order the impeachment of the President in case of the violation of his oath to the Constitution, assembled, and commenced the necessary proceedings; but before they could sign a warrant, soldiers forced their way into the hall and drove the judges from the Bench. In due course General Forey appeared with a strong body of troops at the Mairie, where the two hundred deputies were assembled. Refusing to disperse, they were one and all arrested, and conducted as prisoners between files of troops to the Barracks of the Quai d'Orsay. The National Guard, whose drums had been removed by their commander in view of any spontaneous movement to arms, remained invisible. Louis Napoleon rode out amidst the acclamations of the soldiery; and when the day closed it seemed as if Paris had resolved to accept the change of Government and the overthrow of the Constitution without a struggle.

There were, however, a few resolute men at work in the workmen's quarters; and in the wealthier part of the city the outrage upon the National Representation gradually roused a spirit of resistance. On the morning of December 3rd the Deputy Baudin met with his death in attempting to defend a barricade which had been erected in the Faubourg St. Antoine. The artisans of eastern Paris showed, however, little inclination to take up arms on behalf of those who had crushed them in the Four Days of June; the agitation was strongest within the Boulevards, and spread westwards towards the stateliest district of Paris. The barricades erected on the south of the Boulevards were so numerous, the crowds so formidable, that towards the close of the day the troops were withdrawn, and it was determined that after a night of quiet they should make a general attack and end the struggle at one blow. At midday on December 4th divisions of the army converged from all directions upon the insurgent quarter. The barricades were captured or levelled by artillery, and with a loss on the part of the troops of twenty-eight killed, and a hundred and eighty wounded resistance was overcome. But the soldiers had been taught to regard the inhabitants of Paris as their enemies, and they bettered the instructions given them. Maddened by drink or panic, they commenced indiscriminate firing in the Boulevards after the conflict was over, and slaughtered all who either in the street or at the windows of the houses came within range of their bullets. According to official admissions, the lives of sixteen civilians paid for every soldier slain; independent estimates place far higher the number of the victims of this massacre. Two thousand arrests followed, and every Frenchman who appeared dangerous to Louis Napoleon's myrmidons, from Thiers and Victor Hugo down to the anarchist orators of the wineshops, was either transported, exiled, or lodged in prison. Thus was the Republic preserved and society saved.

France in general received the news of the coup d’état with indifference: where it excited popular movements these movements were of such a character that Louis Napoleon drew from them the utmost profit. A certain fierce, blind Socialism had spread among the poorest of the rural classes in the centre and south of France. In these departments there were isolated risings, accompanied by acts of such murderous outrage and folly that a general terror seized the surrounding districts. In the course of a few days the predatory bands were dispersed, and an unsparing chastisement inflicted on all who were concerned in their misdeeds; but the reports sent to Paris were too serviceable to Louis Napoleon to be left in obscurity; and these brutish village-outbreaks, which collapsed at the first appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a vast Socialist revolution from which the coup d’état, and that alone, had saved France. Terrified by the reappearance of the Red Spectre, the French nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the plebiscite was, whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis Napoleon's authority and committed to him the necessary powers for establishing a Constitution on the basis laid down in his proclamation of December 2nd. Seven million votes answered this question in the affirmative, less than one-tenth of that number in the negative. The result was made known on the last day of the year 1851. On the first day of the new year Louis Napoleon attended a service of thanksgiving at Notre Dame, took possession of the Tuileries, and restored the eagle as the military emblem of France. He was now in all but name an absolute sovereign. The Church, the army, the ever-servile body of the civil administration, waited impatiently for the revival of the Imperial title. Nor was the saviour of society the man to shrink from further responsibilities. Before the year closed the people was once more called upon to express its will. Seven millions of votes pronounced for hereditary power; and on the anniversary of the coup d’état Napoleon III was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.