READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE FROM 1792 TO 1878

CHAPTER XXIII

GERMAN ASCENDANCY WON BY PRUSSIA

Shortly before the events which broke the power of Austria in Italy, the German people believed themselves to have entered on a new political era. King Frederick William IV, who, since 1848, had disappointed every hope that had been fixed on Prussia and on himself, was compelled by mental disorder to withdraw from public affairs in the autumn of 1858. His brother, Prince William of Prussia, who had for a year acted as the King’s representative, now assumed the Regency. In the days when King Frederick William still retained some vestiges of his reputation the Prince of Prussia had been unpopular, as the supposed head of the reactionary party; but the events of the last few years had exhibited him in a better aspect. Though strong in his belief both in the Divine right of kings in general, and in the necessity of a powerful monarchical rule in Prussia, he was disposed to tolerate, and even to treat with a certain respect, the humble elements of constitutional government which he found in existence. There was more manliness in his nature than in that of his brother, more belief in the worth of his own people. The espionage, the servility, the overdone professions of sanctity in Manteuffel's regime displeased him, but most of all he despised its pusillanimity in the conduct of foreign affairs. His heart indeed was Prussian, not German, and the destiny which created him the first Emperor of united Germany was not of his own making nor of his own seeking; but he felt that Prussia ought to hold a far greater station both in Germany and in Europe than it had held during his brother's reign, and that the elevation of the State to the position which it ought to occupy was the task that lay before himself. During the twelve months preceding the Regency the retirement of the King had not been treated as more than temporary, and the Prince of Prussia, though constantly at variance with Manteuffel's Cabinet, had therefore not considered himself at liberty to remove his brother's advisers. His first act on the assumption of the constitutional office of Regent was to dismiss the hated Ministry. Prince Antony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was called to office, and posts in the Government were given to men well known as moderate Liberals. Though the Regent stated in clear terms that he had no intention of forming a Liberal party-administration, his action satisfied public opinion. The troubles and the failures of 1849 had inclined men to be content with far less than had been asked years before. The leaders of the more advanced sections among the Liberals preferred for the most part to remain outside Parliamentary life rather than to cause embarrassment to the new Government; and the elections of 1859 sent to Berlin a body of representatives fully disposed to work with the Regent and his Ministers in the policy of guarded progress which they had laid down.

This change of spirit in the Prussian Government, followed by the events that established Italian independence, told powerfully upon public opinion throughout Germany. Hopes that had been crushed in 1849 now revived. With the collapse of military despotism in the Austrian Empire the clouds of reaction seemed everywhere to be passing away; it was possible once more to think of German national union and of common liberties in which all Germans should share. As in 1808 the rising of the Spaniards against Napoleon had inspired Blucher and his countrymen with the design of a truly national effort against their foreign oppressor, so in 1859 the work of Cavour challenged the Germans to prove that their national patriotism and their political aptitude were not inferior to those of the Italian people. Men who had been prominent in the National Assembly at Frankfort again met one another and spoke to the nation. In the Parliaments of several of the minor States resolutions were brought forward in favour of the creation of a central German authority. Protests were made against the infringement of constitutional rights that had been common during the last ten years; patriotic meetings and demonstrations were held; and a National Society, in imitation of that which had prepared the way for union with Piedmont in Central and Southern Italy, was formally established. There was indeed no such preponderating opinion in favour of Prussian leadership as had existed in 1848. The southern States had displayed a strong sympathy with Austria in its war with Napoleon III, and had regarded the neutrality of Prussia during the Italian campaign as a desertion of the German cause. Here there were few who looked with friendly eye upon Berlin. It was in the minor states of the north, and especially in Hesse-Cassel, where the struggle between the Elector and his subjects was once more breaking out, that the strongest hopes were directed towards the new Prussian ruler, and the measures of his government were the most anxiously watched.

The Prince Regent was a soldier by profession and habit. He was born in 1797, and had been present at the battle of Arcis-sur-Aube, the last fought by Napoleon against the Allies in 1814. During forty years he had served on every commission that had been occupied with Prussian military affairs; no man better understood the military organisation of his country, no man more clearly recognised its capacities and its faults. The defective condition of the Prussian army had been the principal, though not the sole, cause of the miserable submission to Austria at Olmutz in 1850, and of the abandonment of all claims to German leadership on the part of the Court of Berlin. The Prince would himself have risked all chances of disaster rather than inflict upon Prussia the humiliation with which King Frederick William then purchased peace; but Manteuffel had convinced his sovereign that the army could not engage in a campaign against Austria without ruin. Military impotence was the only possible justification for the policy then adopted, and the Prince determined that Prussia should not under his own rule have the same excuse for any political shortcomings. The work of reorganization was indeed begun during the reign of Frederick William IV., through the enforcement of the three-years' service to which the conscript was liable by law, but which had fallen during the long period of peace to two-years' service. The number of troops with the colours was thus largely increased, but no addition had been made to the yearly levy, and no improvement attempted in the organisation of the Landwehr. When in 1859 the order for mobilization was given in consequence of the Italian war, it was discovered that the Landwehr battalions were almost useless. The members of this force were mostly married men approaching middle life, who had been too long engaged in other pursuits to resume their military duties with readiness, and whose call to the field left their families without means of support and chargeable upon the public purse. Too much, in the judgment of the reformers of the Prussian army, was required from men past youth, not enough from youth itself. The plan of the Prince Regent was therefore to enforce in the first instance with far more stringency the law imposing the universal obligation to military service; and, while thus raising the annual levy from 40,000 to 60,000 men, to extend the period of service in the Reserve, into which the young soldier passed on the completion of his three years with the colours, from two to four years. Asserting with greater rigour its claim to seven years in the early life of the citizen, the State would gain, without including the Landwehr, an effective army of four hundred thousand men, and would practically be able to dispense with the service of those who were approaching middle life, except in cases of great urgency. In the execution of this reform the Government could on its own authority enforce the increased levy and the full three years' service in the standing army; for the prolongation of service in the Reserve, and for the greater expenditure entailed by the new system, the consent of Parliament was necessary.

The general principles on which the proposed reorganization was based were accepted by public opinion and by both Chambers of Parliament; it was, however, held by the Liberal leaders that the increase of expenditure might, without impairing the efficiency of the army, be avoided by returning to the system of two-years service with the colours, which during so long a period had been thought sufficient for the training of the soldier. The Regent, however, was convinced that the discipline and the instruction of three years were indispensable to the Prussian conscript, and he refused to accept the compromise suggested. The mobilisation of 1859 had given him an opportunity for forming additional battalions; and although the Landwehr were soon dismissed to their homes the new formation was retained, and the place of the retiring militiamen was filled by conscripts of the year. The Lower Chamber, in voting the sum required in 1860 for the increased numbers of the army, treated this arrangement as temporary, and limited the grant to one year; in spite of this the Regent, who on the death of his brother in January, 1861, became King of Prussia, formed the additional battalions into new regiments, and gave to these new regiments their names and colours. The year 1861 passed without bringing the questions at issue between the Government and the Chamber of Deputies to a settlement. Public feeling, disappointed in the reserved and hesitating policy which was still followed by the Court in German affairs, stimulated too by the rapid consolidation of the Italian monarchy, which the Prussian Government on its part had as yet declined to recognize, was becoming impatient and resentful. It seemed as if the Court of Berlin still shrank from committing itself to the national cause. The general confidence reposed in the new ruler at his accession was passing away; and when in the summer of 1861 the dissolution of Parliament took place, the elections resulted in the return not only of a Progressist majority, but of a majority little inclined to submit to measures of compromise, or to shrink from the assertion of its full constitutional rights.

The new Parliament assembled at the beginning of 1862. Under the impulse of public opinion, the Government was now beginning to adopt a more vigorous policy in German affairs, and to re-assert Prussia's claims to an independent leadership in defiance of the restored Diet of Frankfort. But the conflict with the Lower Chamber was not to be averted by revived energy abroad. The Army Bill, which was passed at once by the Upper House, was referred to a hostile Committee on reaching the Chamber of Deputies, and a resolution was carried insisting on the right of the representatives of the people to a far more effective control over the Budget than they had hitherto exercised. The result of this vote was the dissolution of Parliament by the King, and the resignation of the Ministry, with the exception of General Roon, Minister of War, and two of the most conservative among his colleagues. Prince Hohenlohe, President of the Upper House, became chief of the Government. There was now an open and undisguised conflict between the Crown and the upholders of Parliamentary rights. "King or Parliament" was the expression in which the newly-appointed Ministers themselves summed up the struggle. The utmost pressure was exerted by the Government in the course of the elections which followed, but in vain. The Progressist Party returned in overwhelming strength to the new Parliament; the voice of the country seemed unmistakably to condemn the policy to which the King and his advisers were committed. After a long and sterile discussion in the Budget Committee, the debate on the Army Bill began in the Lower House on the 11th of September. Its principal clauses were rejected by an almost unanimous vote. An attempt made by General Roon to satisfy his opponents by a partial and conditional admission of the principle of two-years' service resulted only in increased exasperation on both sides. Hohenlohe resigned, and the King now placed in power, at the head of a Ministry of conflict, the most resolute and unflinching of all his friends, the most contemptuous scorner of Parliamentary majorities, Herr von Bismarck.

The new Minister was, like Cavour, a country gentleman, and, like Cavour, he owed his real entry into public life to the revolutionary movement of 1848. He had indeed held some obscure official posts before that epoch, but it was as a member of the United Diet which assembled at Berlin in April, 1848, that he first attracted the attention of King or people. He was one of two Deputies who refused to join in the vote of thanks to Frederick William IV. for the Constitution which he had promised to Prussia. Bismarck, then thirty-three years old, was a Royalist of Royalists, the type, as it seemed, of the rough and masterful Junker, or Squire, of the older parts of Prussia, to whom all reforms from those of Stein downwards were hateful, all ideas but those of the barrack and the kennel alien. Others in the spring of 1848 lamented the concessions made by the Crown to the people; Bismarck had the courage to say so. When reaction came there were naturally many, and among them King Frederick William, who were interested in the man who in the heyday of constitutional enthusiasm had treated the whole movement as so much midsummer madness, and had remained faithful to monarchical authority as the one thing needful for the Prussian State. Bismarck continued to take a prominent part in the Parliaments of Berlin and Erfurt; it was not, however, till 1851 that he passed into the inner official circle. He was then sent as the representative of Prussia to the restored Diet of Frankfort. As an absolutist and a conservative, brought up in the traditions of the Holy Alliance, Bismarck had in earlier days looked up to Austria as the mainstay of monarchical order and the historic barrier against the flood of democratic and wind-driven sentiment which threatened to deluge Germany. He had even approved the surrender made at Olmutz in 1850, as a matter of necessity; but the belief now grew strong in his mind, and was confirmed by all he saw at Frankfort, that Austria under Schwarzenberg's rule was no longer the Power which had been content to share the German leadership with Prussia in the period before 1848, but a Power which meant to rule in Germany uncontrolled. In contact with the representatives of that outworn system which Austria had resuscitated at Frankfort, and with the instruments of the dominant State itself, Bismarck soon learnt to detest the paltriness of the one and the insolence of the other. He declared the so-called Federal system to be a mere device for employing the secondary German States for the aggrandizement of Austria and the humiliation of Prussia. The Court of Vienna, and with it the Diet of Frankfort, became in his eyes the enemy of Prussian greatness and independence. During the Crimean war he was the vigorous opponent of an alliance with the Western Powers, not only from distrust of France, and from regard towards Russia as on the whole the most constant and the most natural ally of his own country, but from the conviction that Prussia ought to assert a national policy wholly independent of that of the Court of Vienna. That the Emperor of Austria was approaching more or less nearly to union with France and England was, in Bismarck's view, a good reason why Prussia should stand fast in its relations of friendship with St. Petersburg. The policy of neutrality, which King Frederick William and Manteuffel adopted more out of disinclination to strenuous action than from any clear political view, was advocated by Bismarck for reasons which, if they made Europe nothing and Prussia everything, were at least inspired by a keen and accurate perception of Prussia's own interests in its present and future relations with its neighbours. When the reign of Frederick William ended, Bismarck, who stood high in the confidence of the new Regent, was sent as ambassador to St. Petersburg. He subsequently represented Prussia for a short time at the Court of Napoleon III., and was recalled by the King from Paris in the autumn of 1862 in order to be placed at the head of the Government. Far better versed in diplomacy than in ordinary administration, he assumed, together with the Presidency of the Cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

There were now at the head of the Prussian State three men eminently suited to work with one another, and to carry out, in their own rough and military fashion, the policy which was to unite Germany under the House of Hohenzollern. The King, Bismarck, and Roon were thoroughly at one in their aim, the enforcement of Prussia's ascendency by means of the army. The designs of the Minister, which expanded with success and which involved a certain daring in the choice of means, were at each new development so ably veiled or disclosed, so dexterously presented to the sovereign, as to overcome his hesitation on striking into many an unaccustomed path. Roon and his workmen, who, in the face of a hostile Parliament and a hostile Press, had to supply to Bismarck what a foreign alliance and enthusiastic national sentiment had supplied to Cavour, forged for Prussia a weapon of such temper that, against the enemies on whom it was employed, no extraordinary genius was necessary to render its thrust fatal. It was no doubt difficult for the Prime Minister, without alarming his sovereign and without risk of an immediate breach with Austria, to make his ulterior aims so clear as to carry the Parliament with him in the policy of military reorganization. Words frank even to brutality were uttered by him, but they sounded more like menace and bluster than the explanation of a well-considered plan. "Prussia must keep its forces together," he said in one of his first Parliamentary appearances, "its boundaries are not those of a sound State. The great questions of the time are to be decided not by speeches and votes of majorities but by blood and iron." After the experience of 1848 and 1850, a not too despondent political observer might well have formed the conclusion that nothing less than the military overthrow of Austria could give to Germany any tolerable system of national government, or even secure to Prussia its legitimate field of action. This was the keystone of Bismarck's belief, but he failed to make his purpose and his motives intelligible to the representatives of the Prussian people. He was taken for a mere bully and absolutist of the old type. His personal characteristics, his arrogance, his sarcasm, his habit of banter, exasperated and inflamed. Roon was no better suited to the atmosphere of a popular assembly. Each encounter of the Ministers with the Chamber embittered the struggle and made reconciliation more difficult. The Parliamentary system of Prussia seemed threatened in its very existence when, after the rejection by the Chamber of Deputies of the clause in the Budget providing for the cost of the army ­reorganization, this clause was restored by the Upper House, and the Budget of the Government passed in its original form. By the terms of the Constitution the right of the Upper House in matters of taxation was limited to the approval or rejection of the Budget sent up to it from the Chamber of Representatives. It possessed no power of amendment. Bismarck, however, had formed the theory that in the event of a disagreement between the two Houses a situation arose for which the Constitution had not provided, and in which therefore the Crown was still possessed of its old absolute authority. No compromise, no negotiation between the two Houses, was, in his view, to be desired. He was resolved to govern and to levy taxes without a Budget, and had obtained the King’s permission to close the session immediately the Upper House had given its vote. But before the order for prorogation could be brought down the President of the Lower Chamber had assembled his colleagues, and the unanimous vote of those present declared the action of the Upper House null and void. In the agitation attending this trial of strength between the Crown, the Ministry and the Upper House on one side and the Representative Chamber on the other the session of 1862 closed.

The Deputies, returning to their constituencies, carried with them the spirit of combat, and received the most demonstrative proofs of popular sympathy and support. Representations of great earnestness were made to the King, but they failed to shake in the slightest degree his confidence in his Minister, or to bend his fixed resolution to carry out his military reforms to the end. The claim of Parliament to interfere with matters of military organisation in Prussia touched him in his most sensitive point. He declared that the aim of his adversaries was nothing less than the establishment of a Parliamentary instead of a royal army. In perfect sincerity he believed that the convulsions of 1848 were on the point of breaking out afresh. “You mourn the conflict between the Crown and the national representatives,” he said to the spokesman of an important society; “do I not mourn it? I sleep no single night.” The anxiety, the despondency of the sovereign were shared by the friends of Prussia throughout Germany; its enemies saw with wonder that Bismarck in his struggle with the educated Liberalism of the middle classes did not shrink from dalliance with the Socialist leaders and their organs. When Parliament reassembled at the beginning of 1863 the conflict was resumed with even greater heat. The Lower Chamber carried an address to the King, which, while dwelling on the loyalty of the Prussian people to their chief, charged the Ministers with violating the Constitution, and demanded their dismissal. The King refused to receive the deputation which was to present the address, and in the written communication in which he replied to it he sharply reproved the Assembly for their errors and presumption. It was in vain that the Army Bill was again introduced. The House, while allowing the ordinary military expenditure for the year, struck out the costs of the reorganisation, and declared Ministers personally answerable for the sums expended. Each appearance of the leading members of the Cabinet now became the signal for contumely and altercation. The decencies of debate ceased to be observed on either side. When the President attempted to set some limit to the violence of Bismarck and Roon, and, on resistance to his authority, terminated the sitting, the Ministers declared that they would no longer appear in a Chamber where freedom of speech was denied to them. Affairs came to a deadlock. The Chamber again appealed to the King, and insisted that reconciliation between the Crown and the nation was impossible so long as the present Ministers remained in office. The King, now thoroughly indignant, charged the Assembly with attempting to win for itself supreme power, expressed his gratitude to his Ministers for their resistance to this usurpation, and declared himself too confident in the loyalty of the Prussian people to be intimidated by threats. His reply was followed by the prorogation of the Assembly (May 26th). A dissolution would have been worse than useless, for in the actual state of public opinion the Opposition would probably have triumphed throughout the country. It only remained for Bismarck to hold his ground, and, having silenced the Parliament for a while, to silence the Press also by the exercise of autocratic power. The Constitution authorized the King, in the absence of the Chambers, to publish enactments on matters of urgency having the force of laws. No sooner had the session been closed than an edict was issued empowering the Government, without resort to courts of law, to suppress any newspaper after two warnings. An outburst of public indignation branded this return to the principles of pure despotism in Prussia; but neither King nor Minister was to be diverted by threats or by expostulations from his course. The Press was effectively silenced. So profound, however, was the distrust now everywhere felt as to the future of Prussia, and so deep the resentment against the Minister in all circles where Liberal influences penetrated, that the Crown Prince himself, after in vain protesting against a policy of violence which endangered his own prospective interests in the Crown, publicly expressed his disapproval of the action of Government. For this offence he was never forgiven.

The course which affairs were taking at Berlin excited the more bitter regret and disappointment among all friends of Prussia as at this very time it seemed that constitutional government was being successfully established in the western part of the Austrian Empire. The centralized military despotism with which Austria emerged from the convulsions of 1848 had been allowed ten years of undisputed sway; at the end of this time it had brought things to such a pass that, after a campaign in which there had been but one great battle, and while still in possession of a vast army and an unbroken chain of fortresses, Austria stood powerless to move hand or foot. It was not the defeat of Solferino or the cession of Lombardy that exhibited the prostration of Austria's power, but the fact that while the conditions of the Peace of Zurich were swept away, and Italy was united under Victor Emmanuel in defiance of the engagements made by Napoleon III. at Villafranca, the Austrian Emperor was compelled to look on with folded arms. To have drawn the sword again, to have fired a shot in defence of the Pope's temporal power or on behalf of the vassal princes of Tuscany and Modena, would have been to risk the existence of the Austrian monarchy. The State was all but bankrupt; rebellion might at any moment break out in Hungary, which had already sent thousands of soldiers to the Italian camp. Peace at whatever price was necessary abroad, and at home the system of centralized despotism could no longer exist, come what might in its place. It was natural that the Emperor should but imperfectly understand at the first the extent of the concessions which it was necessary for him to make. He determined that the Provincial Councils which Schwarzenberg had promised in 1850 should be called into existence, and that a Council of the Empire (Reichsrath), drawn in part from these, should assemble at Vienna, to advise, though not to control, the Government in matters of finance. So urgent, however, were the needs of the exchequer, that the Emperor proceeded at once to the creation of the Central Council, and nominated its first members himself. (March, 1860.)

That the Hungarian members nominated by the Emperor would decline to appear at Vienna unless some further guarantee was given for the restoration of Hungarian liberty was well known. The Emperor accordingly promised to restore the ancient county-organisation, which had filled so great a space in Hungarian history before 1848, and to take steps for assembling the Hungarian Diet. This, with the repeal of an edict injurious to the Protestants, opened the way for reconciliation, and the nominated Hungarians took their place in the Council, though under protest that the existing arrangement could only be accepted as preparatory to the full restitution of the rights of their country. The Council continued in session during the summer of 1860. Its duties were financial; but the establishment of financial equilibrium in Austria was inseparable from the establishment of political stability and public confidence; and the Council, in its last sittings, entered on the widest constitutional problems. The non-German members were in the majority; and while all parties alike condemned the fallen absolutism, the rival declarations of policy submitted to the Council marked the opposition which was henceforward to exist between the German Liberals of Austria and the various Nationalist or Federalist groups. The Magyars, uniting with those who had been their bitterest enemies, declared that the ancient independence in legislation and administration of the several countries subject to the House of Hapsburg must be restored, each country retaining its own historical character. The German minority contended that the Emperor should bestow upon his subjects such institutions as, while based on the right of self­government should secure the unity of the Empire and the force of its central authority. All parties were for a constitutional system and for local liberties in one form or another; but while the Magyars and their supporters sought for nothing less than national independence, the Germans would at the most have granted a uniform system of provincial self-government in strict subordination to a central representative body drawn from the whole Empire and legislating for the whole Empire. The decision of the Emperor was necessarily a compromise. By a Diploma published on the 20th of October he promised to restore to Hungary its old Constitution, and to grant wide legislative rights to the other States of the Monarchy, establishing for the transaction of affairs common to the whole Empire an Imperial Council, and reserving for the non-Hungarian members of this Council a qualified right of legislation for all the Empire except Hungary.

The Magyars had conquered their King; and all the impetuous patriotism that had been crushed down since the ruin of 1849 now again burst into flame. The County Assemblies met, and elected as their officers men who had been condemned to death in 1849 and who were living in exile; they swept away the existing law-courts, refused the taxes, and proclaimed the legislation of 1848 again in force. Francis Joseph seemed anxious to avert a conflict, and to prove both in Hungary and in the other parts of the Empire the sincerity of his promises of reform, on which the nature of the provincial Constitutions which were published immediately after the Diploma of October had thrown some doubt. At the instance of his Hungarian advisers he dismissed the chief of his Cabinet, and called to office Schmerling, who, in 1848, had been Prime Minister of the German National Government at Frankfort. Schmerling at once promised important changes in the provincial systems drawn up by his predecessor, but in his dealings with Hungary he proved far less tractable than the Magyars had expected. If the Hungarians had recovered their own constitutional forms, they still stood threatened with the supremacy of a Central Council in all that related to themselves in common with the rest of the Empire, and against this they rebelled. But from the establishment of this Council of the Empire neither the Emperor nor Schmerling would recede. An edict of February 26th, 1861, while it made good the changes promised by Schmerling in the several provincial systems, confirmed the general provisions of the Diploma of October, and declared that the Emperor would maintain the Constitution of his dominions as now established against an attack.

In the following April the Provincial Diets met throughout the Austrian Empire, and the Diet of the Hungarian Kingdom assembled at Pesth. The first duty of each of these bodies was to elect representatives to the Council of the Empire which was to meet at Vienna. Neither Hungary nor Croatia, however, would elect such representatives, each claiming complete legislative independence, and declining to recognize any such external authority as it was now proposed to create. The Emperor warned the Hungarian Diet against the consequences of its action; but the national spirit of the Magyars was thoroughly roused, and the County Assemblies vied with one another in the violence of their addresses to the Sovereign. The Diet, reviving the Constitutional difficulties connected with the abdication of Ferdinand, declared that it would only negotiate for the coronation of Francis Joseph after the establishment of a Hungarian Ministry and the restoration of Croatia and Transylvania to the Hungarian Kingdom. Accepting Schmerling's contention that the ancient constitutional rights of Hungary had been extinguished by rebellion, the Emperor insisted on the establishment of a Council for the whole Empire, and refused to recede from the declarations which he had made in the edict of February. The Diet hereupon protested, in a long and vigorous address to the King, against the validity of all laws made without its own concurrence, and declared that Francis Joseph had rendered an agreement between the King and the nation impossible. A dissolution followed. The County Assemblies took up the national struggle. They in their turn were suppressed; their officers were dismissed, and military rule was established throughout the land, though with explicit declarations on the part of the King that it was to last only till the legally existing Constitution could be brought into peaceful working.

Meanwhile the Central Representative Body, now by enlargement of its functions and increase in the number of its members made into a Parliament of the Empire, assembled at Vienna. Its real character was necessarily altered by the absence of representatives from Hungary; and for some time the Government seemed disposed to limit its competence to the affairs of the Cis-Leithan provinces; but after satisfying himself that no accord with Hungary was possible, the Emperor announced this fact to the Assembly, and bade it perform its part as the organ of the Empire at large, without regard to the abstention of those who did not choose to exercise their rights. The Budget for the entire Empire was accordingly submitted to the Assembly, and for the first time the expenditure of the Austrian State was laid open to public examination and criticism. The first session of this Parliament lasted, with adjournments, from May, 1861, to December, 1862. In legislation it effected little, but its relations as a whole with the Government remained excellent, and its long-continued activity, unbroken by popular disturbances, did much to raise the fallen credit of the Austrian State and to win for it the regard of Germany. On the close of the session the Provincial Diets assembled, and throughout the spring of 1863 the rivalry of the Austrian nationalities gave abundant animation to many a local capital. In the next summer the Reichsrath reassembled at Vienna.

Though Hungary remained in a condition not far removed from rebellion, the Parliamentary system of Austria was gaining in strength, and indeed, as it seemed, at the expense of Hungary itself; for the Roumanian and German population of Transylvania, rejoicing in the opportunity of detaching themselves from the Magyars, now sent deputies to Vienna. While at Berlin each week that passed sharpened the antagonism between the nation and its Government, and made the Minister's name more odious, Austria seemed to have successfully broken with the traditions of its past, and to be fast earning for itself an honourable place among States of the constitutional type.

One of the reproaches brought against Bismarck by the Progressist majority in the Parliament of Berlin was that he had isolated Prussia both in Germany and in Europe. That he had roused against the Government of his country the public opinion of Germany was true: that he had alienated Prussia from all Europe was not the case; on the contrary, he had established a closer relation between the Courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg than had existed at any time since the commencement of the Regency, and had secured for Prussia a degree of confidence and goodwill on the part of the Czar which, in the memorable years that were to follow, served it scarcely less effectively than an armed alliance. Russia, since the Crimean War, had seemed to be entering upon an epoch of boundless change. The calamities with which the reign of Nicholas had closed had excited in that narrow circle of Russian society where thought had any existence a vehement revulsion against the sterile and unchanging system of repression, the grinding servitude of the last thirty years. From the Emperor downwards all educated men believed not only that the system of government, but that the whole order of Russian social life, must be recast. The ferment of ideas which marks an age of revolution was in full course; but in what forms the new order was to be moulded, through what processes Russia was to be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the class of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II, humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organizing faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pass out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey or a single interview he should succumb to the persuasions of some rival politician. In no country in Europe was there such incoherence, such self-contradiction, such absence of unity of plan and purpose in government as in Russia, where all nominally depended upon a single will. Pressed and tormented by all the rival influences that beat upon the centre of a great empire, Alexander seems at times to have played off against one another as colleagues in the same branch of Government the representatives of the most opposite schools of action, and, after assenting to the plans of one group of advisers, to have committed the execution of these plans, by way of counterpoise, to those who had most opposed them. But, like other weak men, he dreaded nothing so much as the reproach of weakness or inconstancy; and in the cloud of half-formed or abandoned purposes there were some few to which he resolutely adhered. The chief of these, the great achievement of his reign, was the liberation of the serfs.

It was probably owing to the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 that the serfs had not been freed by Nicholas. That sovereign had long understood the necessity for the change, and in 1847 he had actually appointed a Commission to report on the best means of effecting it.

The convulsions of 1848, followed by the Hungarian and the Crimean Wars, threw the project into the background during the remainder of Nicholas's reign; but if the belief of the Russian people is well founded, the last injunction of the dying Czar to his successor was to emancipate the serfs throughout his empire. Alexander was little capable of grappling with so tremendous a problem himself; in the year 1859, however, he directed a Commission to make a complete inquiry into the subject, and to present a scheme of emancipation. The labours of the Commission extended over two years; its discussions were agitated, at times violent. That serfage must sooner or later be abolished all knew; the points on which the Commission was divided were the bestowal of land on the peasants and the regulation of the village community. European history afforded abundant precedents in emancipation, and under an infinite variety of detail three types of the process of enfranchisement were clearly distinguishable from one another. Maria Theresa, in liberating the serf, had required him to continue to render a fixed amount of labour to his lord, and had given him on this condition fixity of tenure in the land he occupied; the Prussian reformers had made a division of the land between the peasant and the lord, and extinguished all labour-dues; Napoleon, in enfranchising the serfs in the Duchy of Warsaw, had simply turned them into free men, leaving the terms of their occupation of land to be settled by arrangement or free contract with their former lords. This example had been followed in the Baltic Provinces of Russia itself by Alexander I. Of the three modes of emancipation, that based on free contract had produced the worst results for the peasant; and though many of the Russian landowners and their representatives in the Commission protested against a division of the land between themselves and their serfs as an act of agrarian revolution and spoliation, there were men in high office, and some few among the proprietors, who resolutely and successfully fought for the principle of independent ownership by the peasants. The leading spirit in this great work appears to have been Nicholas Milutine, Adjunct of the Minister of the Interior, Lanskoi. Milutine, who had drawn up the Municipal Charta of St. Petersburg, was distrusted by the Czar as a restless and uncompromising reformer. It was uncertain from day to day whether the views of the Ministry of the Interior or those of the territorial aristocracy would prevail; ultimately, however, under instructions from the Palace, the Commission accepted not only the principle of the division of the land, but the system of communal self-government by the peasants themselves. The determination of the amount of land to be held by the peasants of a commune and of the fixed rent to be paid to the lord was left in the first instance to private agreement; but where such agreement was not reached, the State, through arbiters elected at local assemblies of the nobles, decided the matter itself. The rent once fixed, the State enabled the commune to redeem it by advancing a capital sum to be recouped by a quit-rent to the State extending over forty-nine years. The Ukase of the Czar converting twenty-five millions of serfs into free proprietors, the greatest act of legislation of modern times, was signed on the 3rd of March, 1861, and within the next few weeks was read in every church of the Russian Empire. It was a strange comment on the system of government in Russia that in the very month in which the edict was published both Lanskoi and Milutine, who had been its principal authors, were removed from their posts. The Czar feared to leave them in power to superintend the actual execution of the law which they had inspired. In supporting them up to the final stage of its enactment Alexander had struggled against misgivings of his own, and against influences of vast strength alike at the Court, within the Government, and in the Provinces. With the completion of the Edict of Emancipation his power of resistance was exhausted, and its execution was committed by him to those who had been its opponents. That some of the evils which have mingled with the good in Russian enfranchisement might have been less had the Czar resolutely stood by the authors of reform and allowed them to complete their work in accordance with their own designs and convictions, is scarcely open to doubt.

It had been the belief of educated men in Russia that the emancipation of the serf would be but the first of a series of great organic changes, bringing their country more nearly to the political and social level of its European neighbours. This belief was not fulfilled. Work of importance was done in the reconstruction of the judicial system of Russia, but in the other reforms expected little was accomplished. An insurrection which broke out in Poland at the beginning of 1863 diverted the energies of the Government from all other objects; and in the overpowering outburst of Russian patriotism and national feeling which it excited, domestic reforms, no less than the ideals of Western civilization, lost their interest. The establishment of Italian independence, coinciding in time with the general unsettlement and expectation of change which marked the first years of Alexander's reign, had stirred once more the ill-fated hopes of the Polish national leaders. From the beginning of the year 1861 Warsaw was the scene of repeated tumults. The Czar was inclined, within certain limits, to a policy of conciliation. The separate Legislature and separate army which Poland had possessed from 1815 to 1830 he was determined not to restore; but he was willing to give Poland a large degree of administrative autonomy, to confide the principal offices in its Government to natives, and generally to relax something of that close union with Russia which had been enforced by Nicholas since the rebellion of 1831. But the concessions of the Czar, accompanied as they were by acts of repression and severity, were far from satisfying the demands of Polish patriotism. It was in vain that Alexander in the summer of 1862 sent his brother Constantine as Viceroy to Warsaw, established a Polish Council of State, placed a Pole, Wielopolski, at the head of the Administration, superseded all the Russian governors of Polish provinces by natives, and gave to the municipalities and the districts the right of electing local councils; these concessions seemed nothing, and were in fact nothing, in comparison with the national independence which the Polish leaders claimed. The situation grew worse and worse. An attempt made upon the life of the Grand Duke Constantine during his entry into Warsaw was but one among a series of similar acts which discredited the Polish cause and strengthened those who at St. Petersburg had from the first condemned the Czar's attempts at conciliation. At length the Russian Government took the step which precipitated revolt. A levy of one in every two hundred of the population throughout the Empire had been ordered in the autumn of 1862. Instructions were sent from St. Petersburg to the effect that in raising this levy in Poland the country population were to be spared, and that all persons who were known to be connected with the disorders in the towns were to be seized as soldiers. This terrible sentence against an entire political class was carried out, so far as it lay within the power of the authorities, on the night of January 14th, 1863. But before the imperial press-gang surrounded the houses of its victims a rumour of the intended blow had gone abroad. In the preceding hours, and during the night of the 14th, thousands fled from Warsaw and the other Polish towns into the forests. There they formed themselves into armed bands, and in the course of the next few days a guerilla warfare broke out wherever Russian troops were found in insufficient strength or off their guard.

The classes in which the national spirit of Poland lived were the so-called noblesse, numbering hundreds of thousands, the town populations, and the priesthood. The peasants, crushed and degraded, though not nominally in servitude, were indifferent to the national cause. On the neutrality, if not on the support, of the peasants the Russian Government could fairly reckon; within the towns it found itself at once confronted by an invisible national Government whose decrees were printed and promulgated by unknown hands, and whose sentences of death were mercilessly executed against those whom it condemned as enemies or traitors to the national cause. So extraordinary was the secrecy which covered the action of this National Executive, that Milutine, who was subsequently sent by the Czar to examine into the affairs of Poland, formed the conclusion that it had possessed accomplices within the Imperial Government at St. Petersburg itself. The Polish cause retained indeed some friends in Russia even after the outbreak of the insurrection; it was not until the insurrection passed the frontier of the kingdom and was carried by the nobles into Lithuania and Podolia that the entire Russian nation took up the struggle with passionate and vindictive ardour as one for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and where the mass of population, if not actually Russian, was almost indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with the Czar's dominions, and with the exception of their Polish landowners they were now in fact thoroughly Russian. When therefore the nobles of these provinces declared that Poland must be reconstituted with the limits of 1772, and subsequently took up arms in concert with the insurrectionary Government at Warsaw, the Russian people, from the Czar to the peasant, felt the struggle to be nothing less than one for the dismemberment or the preservation of their own country, and the doom of Polish nationality, at least for some generations, was sealed. The diplomatic intervention of the Western Powers on behalf of the constitutional rights of Poland under the Treaty of Vienna, which was to some extent supported by Austria, only prolonged a hopeless struggle, and gave unbounded popularity to Prince Gortschakoff, by whom, after a show of courteous attention during the earlier and still perilous stage of the insurrection, the interference of the Powers was resolutely and unconditionally repelled. By the spring of 1864 the insurgents were crushed or exterminated. General Muravieff, the Governor of Lithuania, fulfilled his task against the mutinous nobles of this province with unshrinking severity, sparing neither life nor fortune so long as an enemy of Russia remained to be overthrown. It was at Wilna, the Lithuanian capital, not at Warsaw, that the terrors of Russian repression were the greatest. Muravieff’s executions may have been less numerous than is commonly supposed; but in the form of pecuniary requisitions and fines he undoubtedly aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of a great part of the class most implicated in the rebellion.

In Poland itself the Czar, after some hesitation, determined once and for all to establish a friend to Russia in every homestead of the kingdom by making the peasant owner of the land on which he laboured. The insurrectionary Government at the outbreak of the rebellion had attempted to win over the peasantry by promising enactments to this effect, but no one had responded to their appeal. In the autumn of 1863 the Czar recalled Milutine from his enforced travels and directed him to proceed to Warsaw, in order to study the affairs of Poland on the spot, and to report on the measures necessary to be taken for its future government and organisation. Milutine obtained the assistance of some of the men who had laboured most earnestly with him in the enfranchisement of the Russian serfs; and in the course of a few weeks he returned to St. Petersburg, carrying with him the draft of measures which were to change the face of Poland. He recommended on the one hand that every political institution separating Poland from the rest of the Empire should be swept away, and the last traces of Polish independence utterly obliterated; on the other hand, that the peasants, as the only class on which Russia could hope to count in the future, should be made absolute and independent owners of the land they occupied. Prince Gortschakoff, who had still some regard for the opinion of Western Europe, and possibly some sympathy for the Polish aristocracy, resisted this daring policy; but the Czar accepted Milutine's counsel, and gave him a free hand in the execution of his agrarian scheme. The division of the land between the nobles and the peasants was accordingly carried out by Milutine’s own officers under conditions very different from those adopted in Russia. The whole strength of the Government was thrown on to the side of the peasant and against the noble. Though the population was denser in Poland than in Russia, the peasant received on an average four times as much land; the compensation made to the lords (which was paid in bonds which immediately fell to half their nominal value) was raised not by quit-rents on the peasants' lands alone, as in Russia, but by a general land-tax falling equally on the land left to the lords, who had thus to pay a great part of their own compensation: above all, the questions in dispute were settled, not as in Russia by arbiters elected at local assemblies of the nobles, but by officers of the Crown. Moreover, the division of landed property was not made once and for all, as in Russia, but the woods and pastures remaining to the lords continued subject to undefined common-rights of the peasants. These common-rights were deliberately left unsettled in order that a source of contention might always be present between the greater and the lesser proprietors, and that the latter might continue to look to the Russian Government as the protector or extender of their interests. “We hold Poland,” said a Russian statesman, “by its rights of common.”

Milutine, who, with all the fiery ardour of his national and levelling policy, seems to have been a gentle and somewhat querulous invalid, and who was shortly afterwards struck down by paralysis, to remain a helpless spectator of the European changes of the next six years, had no share in that warfare against the language, the religion, and the national culture of Poland with which Russia has pursued its victory since 1863. The public life of Poland he was determined to Russianise; its private and social life he would probably have left unmolested, relying on the goodwill of the great mass of peasants who owed their proprietorship to the action of the Czar. There were, however, politicians at Moscow and St. Petersburg who believed that the deep-lying instinct of nationality would for the first time be called into real life among these peasants by their very elevation from misery to independence, and that where Russia had hitherto had three hundred thousand enemies Milutine was preparing for it six millions. It was the dread of this possibility in the future, the apprehension that material interests might not permanently vanquish the subtler forces which pass from generation to generation, latent, if still unconscious, where nationality itself is not lost, that made the Russian Government follow up the political destruction of the Polish noblesse by measures directed against Polish nationality itself, even at the risk of alienating the class who for the present were effectively won over to the Czar's cause. By the side of its life-giving and beneficent agrarian policy Russia has pursued the odious system of debarring Poland from all means of culture and improvement associated with the use of its own language, and has aimed at eventually turning the Poles into Russians by the systematic impoverishment and extinction of all that is essentially Polish in thought, in sentiment, and in expression. The work may prove to be one not beyond its power; and no common perversity on the part of its Government would be necessary to turn against Russia the millions who in Poland owe all they have of prosperity and independence to the Czar: but should the excess of Russian propagandism, or the hostility of Church to Church, at some distant date engender a new struggle for Polish independence, this struggle will be one governed by other conditions than those of 1831 or 1863, and Russia will, for the first time, have to conquer on the Vistula not a class nor a city, but a nation.

It was a matter of no small importance to Bismarck and to Prussia that in the years 1863 and 1864 the Court of St. Petersburg found itself confronted with affairs of such seriousness in Poland. From the opportunity which was then presented to him of obliging an important neighbour, and of profiting by that neighbour’s conjoined embarrassment and goodwill, Bismarck drew full advantage. He had always regarded the Poles as a mere nuisance in Europe, and heartily despised the Germans for the sympathy which they had shown towards Poland in 1848. When the insurrection of 1863 broke out, Bismarck set the policy of his own country in emphatic contrast with that of Austria and the Western Powers, and even entered into an arrangement with Russia for an eventual military combination in case the insurgents should pass from one side to the other of the frontier. Throughout the struggle with the Poles, and throughout the diplomatic conflict with the Western Powers, the Czar had felt secure in the loyalty of the stubborn Minister at Berlin; and when, at the close of the Polish revolt, the events occurred which opened to Prussia the road to political fortune, Bismarck received his reward in the liberty of action given him by the Russian Government. The difficulties connected with Schleswig-Holstein, which, after a short interval of tranquillity following the settlement of 1852, had again begun to trouble Europe, were forced to the very front of Continental affairs by the death of Frederick VII., King of Denmark, in November, 1863. Prussia had now at its head a statesman resolved to pursue to their extreme limit the chances which this complication offered to his own country; and, more fortunate than his predecessors of 1848, Bismarck had not to dread the interference of the Czar of Russia as the patron and protector of the interests of the Danish court.

By the Treaty of London, signed on May 8th, 1852, all the great Powers, including Prussia, had recognised the principle of the integrity of the Danish Monarchy, and had pronounced Prince Christian of Glucksburg to be heir-presumptive to the whole dominions of the reigning King. The rights of the German Federation in Holstein were nevertheless declared to remain unprejudiced; and in a Convention made with Austria and Prussia before they joined in this Treaty, King Frederick VII had undertaken to conform to certain rules in his treatment of Schleswig as well as of Holstein. The Duke of Augustenburg, claimant to the succession in Schleswig-Holstein through the male line, had renounced his pretensions in consideration of an indemnity paid to him by the King of Denmark. This surrender, however, had not received the consent of his son and of the other members of the House of Augustenburg, nor had the German Federation, as such, been a party to the Treaty of London. Relying on the declaration of the Great Powers in favour of the integrity of the Danish Kingdom, Frederick VII. had resumed his attempts to assimilate Schleswig, and in some degree Holstein, to the rest of the Monarchy; and although the Provincial Estates were allowed to remain in existence, a national Constitution was established in October, 1855, for the entire Danish State. Bitter complaints were made of the system of repression and encroachment with which the Government of Copenhagen was attempting to extinguish German nationality in the border provinces; at length, in November, 1858, under threat of armed intervention by the German Federation, Frederick consented to exclude Holstein from the operation of the new Constitution. But this did not produce peace, for the inhabitants of Schleswig, severed from the sister-province and now excited by the Italian war, raised all the more vigorous a protest against their own incorporation with Denmark; while in Holstein itself the Government incurred the charge of unconstitutional action in fixing the Budget without the consent of the Estates. The German Federal Diet again threatened to resort to force, and Denmark prepared for war. Prussia took up the cause of Schleswig in 1861; and even the British Government, which had hitherto shown far more interest in the integrity of Denmark than in the rights of the German provinces, now recommended that the Constitution of 1855 should be abolished, and that a separate legislation and administration should be granted to Schleswig as well as to Holstein. The Danes, however, were bent on preserving Schleswig as an integral part of the State, and the Government of King Frederick, while willing to recognize Holstein as outside Danish territory proper, insisted that Schleswig should be included within the unitary Constitution, and that Holstein should contribute a fixed share to the national expenditure. A manifesto to this effect, published by King Frederick on the 30th of March, 1863, was the immediate ground of the conflict now about to break out between Germany and Denmark. The Diet of Frankfort announced that if this proclamation were not revoked it should proceed to Federal execution, that is, armed intervention, against the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein. Still counting upon foreign aid or upon the impotence of the Diet, the Danish Government refused to change its policy, and on the 29th of September laid before the Parliament at Copenhagen the law incorporating Schleswig with the rest of the Monarchy under the new Constitution. Negotiations were thus brought to a close, and on the 1st of October the Diet decreed the long-threatened Federal execution.

Affairs had reached this stage, and the execution had not yet been put in force, when, on the 15th of November, King Frederick VII. died. For a moment it appeared possible that his successor, Prince Christian of Glucksburg, might avert the conflict with Germany by withdrawing from the position which his predecessor had taken up. But the Danish people and Ministry were little inclined to give way; the Constitution had passed through Parliament two days before King Frederick's death, and on the 18th of November it received the assent of the new monarch. German national feeling was now as strongly excited on the question of Schleswig-Holstein as it had been in 1848. The general cry was that the union of these provinces with Denmark must be treated as at an end, and their legitimate ruler, Frederick of Augustenburg, son of the Duke who had renounced his rights, be placed on the throne. The Diet of Frankfort, however, decided to recognize neither of the two rival sovereigns in Holstein until its own intervention should have taken place. Orders were given that a Saxon and a Hanoverian corps should enter the country; and although Prussia and Austria had made a secret agreement that the settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question was to be conducted by themselves independently of the Diet, the tide of popular enthusiasm ran so high that for the moment the two leading Powers considered it safer not to obstruct the Federal authority, and the Saxon and Hanoverian troops accordingly entered Holstein as mandatories of the Diet at the end of 1863. The Danish Government, offering no resistance, withdrew its troops across the river Eider into Schleswig.

From this time the history of Germany is the history of the profound and audacious statecraft and of the overmastering will of Bismarck; the nation, except through its valour on the battle-field, ceases to influence the shaping of its own fortunes. What the German people desired in 1864 was that Schleswig-Holstein should be attached, under a ruler of its own, to the German Federation as it then existed; what Bismarck intended was that Schleswig- Holstein, itself incorporated more or less directly with Prussia, should be made the means of the destruction of the existing Federal system and of the expulsion of Austria from Germany. That another petty State, bound to Prussia by no closer tie than its other neighbors, should be added to the troop among whom Austria found its vassals and its instruments, would have been in Bismarck's eyes no gain but actual detriment to Germany. The German people desired one course of action; Bismarck had determined on something totally different; and with matchless resolution and skill he bore down all opposition of people and of Courts, and forced a reluctant nation to the goal which he had himself chosen for it. The first point of conflict was the apparent recognition by Bismarck of the rights of King Christian IX. as lawful sovereign in the Duchies as well as in the rest of the Danish State. By the Treaty of London Prussia had indeed pledged itself to this recognition; but the German Federation had been no party to the Treaty, and under the pressure of a vehement national agitation Bavaria and the minor States one after another recognised Frederick of Augustenburg as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck was accused alike by the Prussian Parliament and by the popular voice of Germany at large of betraying German interests to Denmark, of abusing Prussia's position as a Great Power, of inciting the nation to civil war. In vain he declared that, while surrendering no iota of German rights, the Government of Berlin must recognize those treaty-obligations with which its own legal title to a voice in the affairs of Schleswig was intimately bound up, and that the King of Prussia, not a multitude of irresponsible and ill-informed citizens, must be the judge of the measures by which German interests were to be effectually protected. His words made no single convert either in the Prussian Parliament or in the Federal Diet. At Frankfort the proposal made by the two leading Powers that King Christian should be required to annul the November Constitution, and that in case of his refusal Schleswig also should be occupied, was rejected, as involving an acknowledgment of the title of Christian as reigning sovereign. At Berlin the Lower Chamber refused the supplies which Bismarck demanded for operations in the Duchies, and formally resolved to resist his policy by every means at its command. But the resistance of Parliament and of Diet were alike in vain. By a masterpiece of diplomacy Bismarck had secured the support and co-operation of Austria in his own immediate Danish policy, though but a few months before he had incurred the bitter hatred of the Court of Vienna by frustrating its plans for a reorganization of Germany by a Congress of princes at Frankfort, and had frankly declared to the Austrian ambassador at Berlin that if Austria did not transfer its political centre to Pesth and leave to Prussia free scope in Germany, it would find Prussia on the side of its enemies in the next war in which it might be engaged. But the democratic and impassioned character of the agitation in the minor States in favour of the Schleswig- Holsteiners and their Augustenburg pretender had enabled Bismarck to represent this movement to the Austrian Government as a revolutionary one, and by a dexterous appeal to the memories of 1848 to awe the Emperor's advisers into direct concert with the Court of Berlin, as the representative of monarchical order, in dealing with a problem otherwise too likely to be solved by revolutionary methods and revolutionary forces. Count Rechberg, the Foreign Minister at Vienna, was lured into a policy which, after drawing upon Austria a full share of the odium of Bismarck's Danish plans, after forfeiting for it the goodwill of the minor States with which it might have kept Prussia in check, and exposing it to the risk of a European war, was to confer upon its rival the whole profit of the joint enterprise, and to furnish a pretext for the struggle by which Austria was to be expelled alike from Germany and from what remained to it of Italy. But of the nature of the toils into which he was now taking the first fatal and irrevocable step Count Rechberg appears to have had no suspicion. A seeming cordiality united the Austrian and Prussian Governments in the policy of defiance to the will of all the rest of Germany and to the demands of their own subjects. It was to no purpose that the Federal Diet vetoed the proposed summons to King Christian and the proposed occupation of Schleswig. Austria and Prussia delivered an ultimatum at Copenhagen demanding the repeal of the November Constitution; and on its rejection their troops entered Schleswig, not as the mandatories of the German Federation, but as the instruments of two independent and allied Powers. (Feb. 1, 1864.)

Against the overwhelming forces by which they were thus attacked the Danes could only make a brave but ineffectual resistance. Their first line of defence was the Danewerke, a fortification extending east and west towards the sea from the town of Schleswig. Prince Frederick Charles, who commanded the Prussian right, was repulsed in an attack upon the easternmost part of this work at Missunde; the Austrians, however, carried some positions in the centre which commanded the defenders' lines, and the Danes fell back upon the fortified post of Duppel, covering the narrow channel which separates the island of Alsen from the mainland. Here for some weeks they held the Prussians in check, while the Austrians, continuing the march northwards, entered Jutland. At length, on the 18th of April, after several hours of heavy bombardment, the lines of Duppel were taken by storm and the defenders driven across the channel into Alsen. Unable to pursue the enemy across this narrow strip of sea, the Prussians joined their allies in Jutland, and occupied the whole of the Danish mainland as far as the Lum Fiord. The war, however, was not to be terminated without an attempt on the part of the neutral Powers to arrive at a settlement by diplomacy. A Conference was opened at London on the 20th of April, and after three weeks of negotiation the belligerents were induced to accept an armistice. As the troops of the German Federation, though unconcerned in the military operations of the two Great Powers, were in possession of Holstein, the Federal Government was invited to take part in the Conference. It was represented by Count Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, a politician who was soon to rise to much greater eminence; but in consequence of the diplomatic union of Prussia and Austria the views entertained by the Governments of the secondary German States had now no real bearing on the course of events, and Count Beust's earliest appearance on the great European stage was without result, except in its influence on his own career.

The first proposition laid before the Conference was that submitted by Bernstorff, the Prussian envoy, to the effect that Schleswig-Holstein should receive complete independence, the question whether King Christian or some other prince should be sovereign of the new State being reserved for future settlement. To this the Danish envoys replied that even on the condition of personal union with Denmark through the Crown they could not assent to the grant of complete independence to the Duchies. Raising their demand in consequence of this refusal, and declaring that the war had made an end of the obligations subsisting under the London Treaty of 1852, the two German Powers then demanded that Schleswig-Holstein should be completely separated from Denmark and formed into a single State under Frederick of Augustenburg, who in the eyes of Germany possessed the best claim to the succession. Lord Russell, while denying that the acts or defaults of Denmark could liberate Austria and Prussia from their engagements made with other Powers in the Treaty of London, admitted that no satisfactory result was likely to arise from the continued union of the Duchies with Denmark, and suggested that King Christian should make an absolute cession of Holstein and of the southern part of Schleswig, retaining the remainder in full sovereignty. The frontier-line he proposed to draw at the River Schlei. To this principle of partition both Denmark and the German Powers assented, but it proved impossible to reach an agreement on the frontier-line. Bernstorff, who had at first required nearly all Schleswig, abated his demands, and would have accepted a line drawn westward from Flensburg, so leaving to Denmark at least half the province, including the important position of Duppel. The terms thus offered to Denmark were not unfavourable. Holstein it did not expect, and could scarcely desire, to retain; and the territory which would have been taken from it in Schleswig under this arrangement included few districts that were not really German. But the Government of Copenhagen, misled by the support given to it at the Conference by England and Russia-a support which was one of words only-refused to cede anything north of the town of Schleswig. Even when in the last resort Lord Russell proposed that the frontier-line should be settled by arbitration the Danish Government held fast to its refusal, and for the sake of a few miles of territory plunged once more into a struggle which, if it was not to kindle a European war of vast dimensions, could end only in the ruin of the Danes. The expected help failed them. Attacked and overthrown in the island of Alsen, the German flag carried to the northern extremity of their mainland, they were compelled to make peace on their enemies' terms. Hostilities were brought to a close by the signature of Preliminaries on the 1st of August; and by the Treaty of Vienna, concluded on the 30th of October, 1864, King Christian ceded his rights in the whole of Schleswig-Holstein to the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, and undertook to recognize whatever dispositions they might make of those provinces.

The British Government throughout this conflict had played a sorry part, at one moment threatening the Germans, at another using language towards the Danes which might well be taken to indicate an intention of lending them armed support. To some extent the errors of the Cabinet were due to the relation which existed between Great Britain and Napoleon III. It had up to this time been considered both at London and at Paris that the Allies of the Crimea had still certain common interests in Europe; and in the unsuccessful intervention at St. Petersburg on behalf of Poland in 1863 the British and French Governments had at first gone hand in hand. But behind every step openly taken by Napoleon III there was some half-formed design for promoting the interests of his dynasty or extending the frontiers of France; and if England had consented to support the diplomatic concert at St. Petersburg by measures of force, it would have found itself engaged in a war in which other ends than those relating to Poland would have been the foremost. Towards the close of the year 1863 Napoleon had proposed that a European Congress should assemble, in order to regulate not only the affairs of Poland but all those European questions which remained unsettled. This proposal had been abruptly declined by the English Government; and when in the course of the Danish war Lord Palmerston showed an inclination to take up arms if France would do the same, Napoleon was probably not sorry to have the opportunity of repaying England for its rejection of his own overtures in the previous year. He had moreover hopes of obtaining from Prussia an extension of the French frontier either in Belgium or towards the Rhine. In reply to overtures from London, Napoleon stated that the cause of Schleswig-Holstein to some extent represented the principle of nationality, to which France was friendly, and that of all wars in which France could engage a war with Germany would be the least desirable. England accordingly, if it took up arms for the Danes, would have been compelled to enter the war alone; and although at a later time, when the war was over and the victors were about to divide the spoil, the British and French fleets ostentatiously combined in manoeuvres at Cherbourg, this show of union deceived no one, least of all the resolute and well-informed director of affairs at Berlin. To force, and force alone, would Bismarck have yielded. Palmerston, now sinking into old age, permitted Lord Russell to parody his own fierce language of twenty years back; but all the world, except the Danes, knew that the fangs and the claws were drawn, and that British foreign policy had become for the time a thing of snarls and grimaces.

Bismarck had not at first determined actually to annex Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia. He would have been content to leave it under the nominal sovereignty of Frederick of Augustenburg if that prince would have placed the entire military and naval resources of Schleswig-Holstein under the control of the Government of Berlin, and have accepted on behalf of his Duchies conditions which Bismarck considered indispensable to German union under Prussian leadership. In the harbour of Kiel it was not difficult to recognise the natural headquarters of a future German fleet; the narrow strip of land projecting between the two seas naturally suggested the formation of a canal connecting the Baltic with the German Ocean, and such a work could only belong to Germany at large or to its leading Power. Moreover, as a frontier district, Schleswig-Holstein was peculiarly exposed to foreign attack; certain strategical positions necessary for its defence must therefore be handed over to its protector. That Prussia should have united its forces with Austria in order to win for the Schleswig-Holsteiners the power of governing themselves as they pleased, must have seemed to Bismarck a supposition in the highest degree preposterous. He had taken up the cause of the Duchies not in the interest of the inhabitants but in the interest of Germany; and by Germany he understood Germany centred at Berlin and ruled by the House of Hohenzollern. If therefore the Augustenburg prince was not prepared to accept his throne on these terms, there was no room for him, and the provinces must be incorporated with Prussia itself. That Austria would not without compensation permit the Duchies thus to fall directly or indirectly under Prussian sway was of course well known to Bismarck; but so far was this from causing him any hesitation in his policy, that from the first he had discerned in the Schleswig-Holstein question a favourable pretext for the war which was to drive Austria out of Germany.

Peace with Denmark was scarcely concluded when, at the bidding of Prussia, reluctantly supported by Austria, the Saxon and Hanoverian troops which had entered Holstein as the mandatories of the Federal Diet were compelled to leave the country. A Provisional Government was established under the direction of an Austrian and a Prussian Commissioner. Bismarck had met the Prince of Augustenburg at Berlin some months before, and had formed an unfavourable opinion of the policy likely to be adopted by him towards Prussia. All Germany, however, was in favour of the Prince's claims, and at the Conference of London these claims had been supported by the Prussian envoy himself. In order to give some appearance of formal legality to his own action, Bismarck had to obtain from the Crown-jurists of Prussia a decision that King Christian IX had, contrary to the general opinion of Germany, been the lawful inheritor of Schleswig-Holstein, and that the Prince of Augustenburg had therefore no rights whatever in the Duchies. As the claims of Christian had been transferred by the Treaty of Vienna to the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia jointly, it rested with them to decide who should be Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and under what conditions. Bismarck announced at Vienna on the 22nd of February, 1865, the terms on which he was willing that Schleswig- Holstein should be conferred by the two sovereigns upon Frederick of Augustenburg. He required, in addition to community of finance, postal system, and railways, that Prussian law, including the obligation to military service, should be introduced into the Duchies; that their regiments should take the oath of fidelity to the King of Prussia, and that their principal military positions should be held by Prussian troops. These conditions would have made Schleswig- Holstein in all but name a part of the Prussian State: they were rejected both by the Court of Vienna and by Prince Frederick himself, and the population of Schleswig-Holstein almost unanimously declared against them. Both Austria and the Federal Diet now supported the Schleswig-Holsteiners in what appeared to be a struggle on behalf of their independence against Prussian domination; and when the Prussian Commissioner in Schleswig-Holstein expelled the most prominent of the adherents of Augustenburg, his Austrian colleague published a protest declaring the act to be one of lawless violence. It seemed that the outbreak of war between the two rival Powers could not long be delayed; but Bismarck had on this occasion moved too rapidly for his master, and considerations relating to the other European Powers made it advisable to postpone the rupture for some months. An agreement was patched up at Gastein by which, pending an ultimate settlement, the government of the two provinces was divided between their masters, Austria taking the administration of Holstein, Prussia that of Schleswig, while the little district of Lauenburg on the south was made over to King William in full sovereignty. An actual conflict between the representatives of the two rival governments at their joint headquarters in Schleswig-Holstein was thus averted; peace was made possible at least for some months longer; and the interval was granted to Bismarck which was still required for the education of his Sovereign in the policy of blood and iron, and for the completion of his own arrangements with the enemies of Austria outside Germany.

The natural ally of Prussia was Italy; but without the sanction of Napoleon III. it would have been difficult to engage Italy in a new war. Bismarck had therefore to gain at least the passive concurrence of the French Emperor in the union of Italy and Prussia against Austria. He visited Napoleon at Biarritz in September, 1865, and returned with the object of his journey achieved. The negotiation of Biarritz, if truthfully recorded, would probably give the key to much of the European history of the next five years. As at Plombières, the French Emperor acted without his Ministers, and what he asked he asked without a witness. That Bismarck actually promised to Napoleon III either Belgium or any part of the Rhenish Provinces in case of the aggrandizement of Prussia has been denied by him, and is not in itself probable. But there are understandings which prove to be understandings on one side only; politeness may be misinterpreted; and the world would have found Count Bismarck unendurable if at every friendly meeting he had been guilty of the frankness with which he informed the Austrian Government that its centre of action must be transferred from Vienna to Pesth. That Napoleon was now scheming for an extension of France on the north-east is certain; that Bismarck treated such rectification of the frontier as a matter for arrangement is hardly to be doubted; and if without a distinct and written agreement Napoleon was content to base his action on the belief that Bismarck would not withhold from him his reward, this only proved how great was the disparity between the aims which the French ruler allowed himself to cherish and his mastery of the arts by which alone such aims were to be realized. Napoleon desired to see Italy placed in possession of Venice; he probably believed at this time that Austria would be no unequal match for Prussia and Italy together, and that the natural result of a well-balanced struggle would be not only The completion of Italian union but the purchase of French neutrality or mediation by the cession of German territory west of the Rhine. It was no part of the duty of Count Bismarck to chill Napoleon's fancies or to teach him political wisdom. The Prussian statesman may have left Biarritz with the conviction that an attack on Germany would sooner or later follow the disappointment of those hopes which he had flattered and intended to mock; but for the present he had removed one dangerous obstacle from his path, and the way lay free before him to an Italian alliance if Italy itself should choose to combine with him in war.

Since the death of Cavour the Italian Government had made no real progress towards the attainment of the national aims, the acquisition of Rome and Venice. Garibaldi, impatient of delay, had in 1862 landed again in Sicily and summoned his followers to march with him upon Rome. But the enterprise was resolutely condemned by Victor Emmanuel, and when Garibaldi crossed to the mainland he found the King's troops in front of him at Aspromonte. There was an exchange of shots, and Garibaldi fell wounded. He was treated with something of the distinction shown to a royal prisoner, and when his wound was healed he was released from captivity. His enterprise, however, and the indiscreet comments on it made by Rattazzi, who was now in power, strengthened the friends of the Papacy at the Tuileries, and resulted in the fall of the Italian Minister. His successor, Minghetti, deemed it necessary to arrive at some temporary understanding with Napoleon on the Roman question. The presence of French troops at Rome offended national feeling, and made any attempt at conciliation between the Papal Court and the Italian Government hopeless. In order to procure the removal of this foreign garrison Minghetti was willing to enter into engagements which seemed almost to imply the renunciation of the claim on Rome. By a Convention made in September, 1864, the Italian Government undertook not to attack the territory of the Pope, and to oppose by force every attack made upon it from without. Napoleon on his part engaged to withdraw his troops gradually from Rome as the Pope should organise his own army, and to complete the evacuation within two years. It was, however, stipulated in an Article which was intended to be kept secret, that the capital of Italy should be changed, the meaning of this stipulation being that Florence should receive the dignity which by the common consent of Italy ought to have been transferred from Turin to Rome and to Rome alone. The publication of this Article, which was followed by riots in Turin, caused the immediate fall of Minghetti’s Cabinet. He was succeeded in office by General La Marmora, under whom the negotiations with Prussia were begun which, after long uncertainty, resulted in the alliance of 1866 and in the final expulsion of Austria from Italy.

Bismarck from the beginning of his Ministry appears to have looked forward to the combination of Italy and Prussia against the common enemy; but his plans ripened slowly. In the spring of 1865, when affairs seemed to be reaching a crisis in Schleswig-Holstein, the first serious overtures were made by the Prussian ambassador at Florence. La Marmora answered that any definite proposition would receive the careful attention of the Italian Government, but that Italy would not permit itself to be made a mere instrument in Prussia's hands for the intimidation of Austria. Such caution was both natural and necessary on the part of the Italian Minister; and his reserve seemed to be more than justified when, a few months later, the Treaty of Gastein restored Austria and Prussia to relations of friendship. La Marmora might now well consider himself released from all obligations towards the Court of Berlin: and, entering on a new line of policy, he sent an envoy to Vienna to ascertain if the Emperor would amicably cede Venetia to Italy in return for the payment of a very large sum of money and the assumption by Italy of part of the Austrian national debt. Had this transaction been effected, it would probably have changed the course of European history; the Emperor, however, declined to bargain away any part of his dominions, and so threw Italy once more into the camp of his great enemy. In the meantime the disputes about Schleswig-Holstein broke out afresh. Bismarck renewed his efforts at Florence in the spring of 1866, with the result that General Govone was sent to Berlin in order to discuss with the Prussian Minister the political and military conditions of an alliance. But instead of proposing immediate action, Bismarck stated to Govone that the question of Schleswig-Holstein was insufficient to justify a great war in the eyes of Europe, and that a better cause must be put forward, namely, the reform of the Federal system of Germany. Once more the subtle Italians believed that Bismarck's anxiety for a war with Austria was feigned, and that he sought their friendship only as a means of extorting from the Court of Vienna its consent to Prussia's annexation of the Danish Duchies. There was an apparent effort on the part of the Prussian statesman to avoid entering into any engagement which involved immediate action; the truth being that Bismarck was still in conflict with the pacific influences which surrounded the King, and uncertain from day to day whether his master would really follow him in the policy of war. He sought therefore to make the joint resort to arms dependent on some future act, such as the summoning of a German Parliament, from which the King of Prussia could not recede if once he should go so far. But the Italians, apparently not penetrating the real secret of Bismarck's hesitation, would be satisfied with no such indeterminate engagement; they pressed for action within a limited time; and in the end, after Austria had taken steps which went far to overcome the last scruples of King William, Bismarck consented to fix three months as the limit beyond which the obligation of Italy to accompany Prussia into war should not extend. On the 8th of April a Treaty of offensive and defensive alliance was signed. It was agreed that if the King of Prussia should within three months take up arms for the reform of the Federal system of Germany, Italy would immediately after the outbreak of hostilities declare war upon Austria. Both Powers were to engage in the war with their whole force, and peace was not to be made but by common consent, such consent not to be withheld after Austria should have agreed to cede Venetia to Italy and territory with an equal population to Prussia.

Eight months had now passed since the signature of the Convention of Gastein. The experiment of an understanding with Austria, which King William had deemed necessary, had been made, and it had failed; or rather, as Bismarck expressed himself in a candid moment, it had succeeded, inasmuch as it had cured the King of his scruples and raised him to the proper point of indignation against the Austrian Court. The agents in effecting this happy result had been the Prince of Augustenburg, the population of Holstein, and the Liberal party throughout Germany at large. In Schleswig, which the Convention of Gastein had handed over to Prussia, General Manteuffel, a son of the Minister of 1850, had summarily put a stop to every expression of public opinion, and had threatened to imprison the Prince if he came within his reach; in Holstein the Austrian Government had permitted, if it had not encouraged, the inhabitants to agitate in favour of the Pretender, and had allowed a mass-meeting to be held at Altona on the 23rd of January, where cheers were raised for Augustenburg, and the summoning of the Estates of Schleswig-Holstein was demanded. This was enough to enable Bismarck to denounce the conduct of Austria as an alliance with revolution. He demanded explanations from the Government of Vienna, and the Emperor declined to render an account of his actions. Warlike preparations now began, and on the 16th of March the Austrian Government announced that it should refer the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein to the Federal Diet. This was a clear departure from the terms of the Convention of Gastein, and from the agreement made between Austria and Prussia before entering into the Danish war in 1864 that the Schleswig-Holstein question should be settled by the two Powers independently of the German Federation. King William was deeply moved by such a breach of good faith; tears filled his eyes when he spoke of the conduct of the Austrian Emperor; and though pacific influences were still active around him he now began to fall in more cordially with the warlike policy of his Minister. The question at issue between Prussia and Austria expanded from the mere disposal of the Duchies to the reconstitution of the Federal system of Germany. In a note laid before the Governments of all the Minor States Bismarck declared that the time had come when Germany must receive a new and more effective organisation, and inquired how far Prussia could count on the support of allies if it should be attacked by Austria or forced into war. It was immediately after this re-opening of the whole problem of Federal reform in Germany that the draft of the Treaty with Italy was brought to its final shape by Bismarck and the Italian envoy, and sent to the Ministry at Florence for its approval.

Bismarck had now to make the best use of the three months' delay that was granted to him. On the day after the acceptance of the Treaty by the Italian Government, the Prussian representative at the Diet of Frankfort handed in a proposal for the summoning of a German Parliament, to be elected by universal suffrage. Coming from the Minister who had made Parliamentary government a mockery in Prussia, this proposal was scarcely considered as serious. Bavaria, as the chief of the secondary States, had already expressed its willingness to enter upon the discussion of Federal reform, but it asked that the two leading Powers should in the meantime undertake not to attack one another. Austria at once acceded to this request, and so forced Bismarck into giving a similar assurance. Promises of disarmament were then exchanged; but as Austria declined to stay the collection of its forces in Venetia against Italy, Bismarck was able to charge his adversary with insincerity in the negotiation, and preparations for war were resumed on both sides. Other difficulties, however, now came into view. The Treaty between Prussia and Italy had been made known to the Court of Vienna by Napoleon, whose advice La Marmora had sought before its conclusion, and the Austrian Emperor had thus become aware of his danger. He now determined to sacrifice Venetia if Italy's neutrality could be so secured. On the 5th of May the Italian ambassador at Paris, Count Nigra, was informed by Napoleon that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to him on behalf of Victor Emmanuel if France and Italy would not prevent Austria from indemnifying itself at Prussia's expense in Silesia. Without a war, at the price of mere inaction, Italy was offered all that it could gain by a struggle which was likely to be a desperate one, and which might end in disaster. La Marmora was in sore perplexity. Though he had formed a juster estimate of the capacity of the Prussian army than any other statesman or soldier in Europe, he was thoroughly suspicious of the intentions of the Prussian Government; and in sanctioning the alliance of the previous month he had done so half expecting that Bismarck would through the prestige of this alliance gain for Prussia its own objects without entering into war, and then leave Italy to reckon with Austria as best it might. He would gladly have abandoned the alliance and have accepted Austria's offer if Italy could have done this without disgrace. But the sense of honour was sufficiently strong to carry him past this temptation. He declined the offer made through Paris, and continued the armaments of Italy, though still with a secret hope that European diplomacy might find the means of realizing the purpose of his country without war.

The neutral Powers were now, with various objects, bestirring themselves in favour of a European Congress. Napoleon believed the time to be come when the Treaties of 1815 might be finally obliterated by the joint act of Europe. He was himself ready to join Prussia with three hundred thousand men if the King would transfer the Rhenish Provinces to France. Demands, direct and indirect, were made on Count Bismarck on behalf of the Tuileries for cessions of territory of greater or less extent. These demands were neither granted nor refused. Bismarck procrastinated; he spoke of the obstinacy of the King his master; he inquired whether parts of Belgium or Switzerland would not better assimilate with France than a German province; he put off the Emperor's representatives by the assurance that he could more conveniently arrange these matters with the Emperor when he should himself visit Paris. On the 28th of May invitations to a Congress were issued by France, England, and Russia jointly, the objects of the Congress being defined as the settlement of the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein, of the differences between Austria and Italy, and of the reform of the Federal Constitution of Germany, in so far as these affected Europe at large. The invitation was accepted by Prussia and by Italy; it was accepted by Austria only under the condition that no arrangement should be discussed which should give an increase of territory or power to one of the States invited to the Congress. This subtly-worded condition would not indeed have excluded the equal aggrandizement of all. It would not have rendered the cession of Venetia to Italy or the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia impossible; but it would either have involved the surrender of the former Papal territory by Italy in order that Victor Emmanuel's dominions should receive no increase, or, in the alternative, it would have entitled Austria to claim Silesia as its own equivalent for the augmentation of the Italian Kingdom. Such reservations would have rendered any efforts of the Powers to preserve peace useless, and they were accepted as tantamount to a refusal on the part of Austria to attend the Congress. Simultaneously with its answer to the neutral Powers, Austria called upon the Federal Diet to take the affairs of Schleswig-Holstein into its own hands, and convoked the Holstein Estates. Bismarck thereupon declared the Convention of Gastein to be at an end, and ordered General Manteuffel to lead his troops into Holstein. The Austrian commander, protesting that he yielded only to superior force, withdrew through Altona into Hanover. Austria at once demanded and obtained from the Diet of Frankfort the mobilization of the whole of the Federal armies. The representative of Prussia, declaring that this act of the Diet had made an end of the existing Federal union, handed in the plan of his Government for the reorganization of Germany, and quitted Frankfort. Diplomatic relations between Austria and Prussia were broken off on the 12th of June, and on the 15th Count Bismarck demanded of the sovereigns of Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse-Cassel, that they should on that very day put a stop to their military preparations and accept the Prussian scheme of Federal reform. Negative answers being given, Prussian troops immediately marched into these territories, and war began. Weimar, Mecklenburg, and other petty States in the north took part with Prussia: all the rest of Germany joined Austria.

The goal of Bismarck's desire, the end which he had steadily set before himself since entering upon his Ministry, was attained; and, if his calculations as to the strength of the Prussian army were not at fault, Austria was at length to be expelled from the German Federation by force of arms. But the process by which Bismarck had worked up to this result had ranged against him the almost unanimous opinion of Germany outside the military circles of Prussia itself. His final demand for the summoning of a German Parliament was taken as mere comedy. The guiding star of his policy had hitherto been the dynastic interest of the House of Hohenzollern; and now, when the Germans were to be plunged into war with one another, it seemed as if the real object of the struggle was no more than the annexation of the Danish Duchies and some other coveted territory to the Prussian Kingdom. The voice of protest and condemnation rose loud from every organ of public opinion. Even in Prussia itself the instances were few where any spontaneous support was tendered to the Government. The Parliament of Berlin, struggling up to the end against the all-powerful Minister, had seen its members prosecuted for speeches made within its own walls, and had at last been prorogued in order that its insubordination might not hamper the Crown in the moment of danger. But the mere disappearance of Parliament could not conceal the intensity of ill-will which the Minister and his policy had excited. The author of a fratricidal war of Germans against Germans was in the eyes of many the greatest of all criminals; and on the 7th of May an attempt was made by a young fanatic to take Bismarck's life in the streets of Berlin. The Minister owed the preservation of his life to the feebleness of his assailant's weapon and to his own vigorous arm. But the imminence of the danger affected King William far more than Bismarck himself. It spoke to his simple mind of supernatural protection and aid; it stilled his doubts; and confirmed him in the belief that Prussia was in this crisis the instrument for working out the Almighty's will.

A few days before the outbreak of hostilities the Emperor Napoleon gave publicity to his own view of the European situation. He attributed the coming war to three causes: to the faulty geographical limits of the Prussian State, to the desire for a better Federal system in Germany, and to the necessity felt by the Italian nation for securing its independence. These needs would, he conceived, be met by a territorial rearrangement in the north of Germany consolidating and augmenting the Prussian Kingdom; by the creation of a more effective Federal union between the secondary German States; and finally, by the incorporation of Venetia with Italy, Austria's position in Germany remaining unimpaired. Only in the event of the map of Europe being altered to the exclusive advantage of one Great Power would France require an extension of frontier. Its interests lay in the preservation of the equilibrium of Europe, and in the maintenance of the Italian Kingdom. These had already been secured by arrangements which would not require France to draw the sword; a watchful but unselfish neutrality was the policy which its Government had determined to pursue. Napoleon had in fact lost all control over events, and all chance of gaining the Rhenish Provinces, from the time when he permitted Italy to enter into the Prussian alliance without any stipulation that France should at its option be admitted as a third member of the coalition. He could not ally himself with Austria against his own creation, the Italian Kingdom; on the other hand, he had no means of extorting cessions from Prussia when once Prussia was sure of an ally who could bring two hundred thousand men into the field. His diplomacy had been successful in so far as it had assured Venetia to Italy whether Prussia should be victorious or overthrown, but as regarded France it had landed him in absolute powerlessness. He was unable to act on one side; he was not wanted on the other. Neutrality had become a matter not of choice but of necessity; and until the course of military events should have produced some new situation in Europe, France might well be watchful, but it could scarcely gain much credit for its disinterested part.

Assured against an attack from the side of the Rhine, Bismarck was able to throw the mass of the Prussian forces southwards against Austria, leaving in the north only the modest contingent which was necessary to overcome the resistance of Hanover and Hesse-Cassel. Through the precipitancy of a Prussian general, who struck without waiting for his colleagues, the Hanoverians gained a victory at Langensalza on the 27th of June; but other Prussian regiments arrived on the field a few hours later, and the Hanoverian army was forced to capitulate on the next day. The King made his escape to Austria; the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, less fortunate, was made a prisoner of war. Northern Germany was thus speedily reduced to submission, and any danger of a diversion in favour of Austria in this quarter disappeared. In Saxony no attempt was made to bar the way to the advancing Prussians. Dresden was occupied without resistance, but the Saxon army marched southwards in good time, and joined the Austrians in Bohemia. The Prussian forces, about two hundred and fifty thousand strong, now gathered on the Saxon and Silesian frontier, covering the line from Pirna to Landshut. They were composed of three armies: the first, or central, army under Prince Frederick Charles, a nephew of the King; the second, or Silesian, army under the Crown Prince; the westernmost, known as the army of the Elbe, under General Herwarth von Bittenfeld. Against these were ranged about an equal number of Austrians, led by Benedek, a general who had gained great distinction in the Hungarian and the Italian campaigns. It had at first been thought probable that Benedek, whose forces lay about Olmutz, would invade Southern Silesia, and the Prussian line had therefore been extended far to the east. Soon, however, it appeared that the Austrians were unable to take up the offensive, and Benedek moved westwards into Bohemia. The Prussian line was now shortened, and orders were given to the three armies to cross the Bohemian frontier and converge in the direction of the town of Gitschin. General Moltke, the chief of the staff, directed their operations from Berlin by telegraph. The combined advance of the three armies was executed with extraordinary precision; and in a series of hard-fought combats extending from the 26th to the 29th of June the Austrians were driven back upon their centre, and effective communication was established between the three invading bodies. On the 30th the King of Prussia, with General Moltke and Count Bismarck, left Berlin; on the 2nd of July they were at headquarters at Gitschin. It had been Benedek's design to leave a small force to hold the Silesian army in check, and to throw the mass of his army westwards upon Prince Frederick Charles and overwhelm him before he could receive help from his colleagues. This design had been baffled by the energy of the Crown Prince's attack, and by the superiority of the Prussians in generalship, in the discipline of their troops, and in the weapon they carried; for though the Austrians had witnessed in the Danish campaign the effects of the Prussian breech-loading rifle, they had not thought it necessary to adopt a similar arm. Benedek, though no great battle had yet been fought, saw that the campaign was lost, and wrote to the Emperor on the 1st of July recommending him to make peace, for otherwise a catastrophe was inevitable. He then concentrated his army on high ground a few miles west of Koniggratz, and prepared for a defensive battle on the grandest scale. In spite of the losses of the past week he could still bring about two hundred thousand men into action. The three Prussian armies were now near enough to one another to combine in their attack, and on the night of July 2nd the King sent orders to the three commanders to move against Benedek before daybreak. Prince Frederick Charles, advancing through the village of Sadowa, was the first in the field. For hours his divisions sustained an unequal struggle against the assembled strength of the Austrians. Midday passed; the defenders now pressed down upon their assailants; and preparations for a retreat had been begun, when the long-expected message arrived that the Crown Prince was close at hand. The onslaught of the army of Silesia on Benedek's right, which was accompanied by the arrival of Herwarth at the other end of the field of battle, at once decided the day. It was with difficulty that the Austrian commander prevented the enemy from seizing the positions which would have cut off his retreat. He retired eastwards across the Elbe with a loss of eighteen thousand killed and wounded and twenty-four thousand prisoners. His army was ruined; and ten days after the Prussians had crossed the frontier the war was practically at an end.

The disaster of Koniggratz was too great to be neutralized by the success of the Austrian forces in Italy. La Marmora, who had given up his place at the head of the Government in order to take command of the army, crossed the Mincio at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, but was defeated by inferior numbers on the fatal ground of Custozza, and compelled to fall back on the Oglio. This gleam of success, which was followed by a naval victory at Lissa off the Istrian coast, made it easier for the Austrian Emperor to face the sacrifices that were now inevitable. Immediately after the battle of Koniggratz he invoked the mediation of Napoleon III., and ceded Venetia to him on behalf of Italy. Napoleon at once tendered his good offices to the belligerents, and proposed an armistice. His mediation was accepted in principle by the King or Prussia, who expressed his willingness also to grant an armistice as soon as preliminaries of peace were recognised by the Austrian Court. In the meantime, while negotiations passed between all four Governments, the Prussians pushed forward until their outposts came within sight of Vienna. If in pursuance of General Moltke's plan the Italian generals had thrown a corps north-eastwards from the head of the Adriatic, and so struck at the very heart of the Austrian monarchy, it is possible that the victors of Koniggratz might have imposed their own terms without regard to Napoleon's mediation, and, while adding the Italian Tyrol to Victor Emmanuel's dominions, have completed the union of Germany under the House of Hohenzollern at one stroke. But with Hungary still intact, and the Italian army paralyzed by the dissensions of its commanders, prudence bade the great statesman of Berlin content himself with the advantages which he could reap without prolongation of the war, and without the risk of throwing Napoleon into the enemy's camp. He had at first required, as conditions of peace, that Prussia should be left free to annex Saxony, Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and other North German territory; that Austria should wholly withdraw from German affairs; and that all Germany, less the Austrian Provinces, should be united in a Federation under Prussian leadership. To gain the assent of Napoleon to these terms, Bismarck hinted that France might by accord with Prussia annex Belgium. Napoleon, however, refused to agree to the extension of Prussia's ascendency over all Germany, and presented a counter-project which was in its turn rejected by Bismarck. It was finally settled that Prussia should not be prevented from annexing Hanover, Nassau, and Hesse-Cassel, as conquered territory that lay between its own Rhenish Provinces and the rest of the kingdom; that Austria should completely withdraw from German affairs; that Germany north of the Main, together with Saxony, should be included in a Federation under Prussian leadership; and that for the States south of the Main there should be reserved the right of entering into some kind of national bond with the Northern League. Austria escaped without loss of any of its non-­Italian territory; it also succeeded in preserving the existence of Saxony, which, as in 1815, the Prussian Government had been most anxious to annex. Napoleon, in confining the Prussian Federation to the north of the Main, and in securing by a formal stipulation in the Treaty the independence of the Southern States, imagined himself to have broken Germany into halves, and to have laid the foundation of a South German League which should look to France as its protector. On the other hand, Bismarck by his annexation of Hanover and neighbouring districts had added a population of four millions to the Prussian Kingdom, and given it a continuous territory; he had forced Austria out of the German system; he had gained its sanction to the Federal union of all Germany north of the Main, and had at least kept the way open for the later extension of this union to the Southern States. Preliminaries of peace embodying these conditions and recognizing Prussia's sovereignty in Schleswig-Holstein were signed at Nicolsburg on the 26th of July, and formed the basis of the definitive Treaty of Peace which was concluded at Prague on the 23rd of August. An illusory clause, added at the instance of Napoleon, provided that if the population of the northern districts of Schleswig should by a free vote express the wish to be united with Denmark, these districts should be ceded to the Danish Kingdom.

Bavaria and the south-western allies of Austria, though their military action was of an ineffective character, continued in arms for some weeks after the battle of Koniggratz and the suspension of hostilities arranged at Nicolsburg did not come into operation on their behalf till the 2nd of August. Before that date their forces were dispersed and their power of resistance broken by the Prussian generals Falckenstein and Manteuffel in a series of unimportant engagements and intricate manoeuvres. The City of Frankfort, against which Bismarck seems to have borne some personal hatred, was treated for a while by the conquerors with extraordinary and most impolitic harshness; in other respects the action of the Prussian Government towards these conquered States was not such as to render future union and friendship difficult. All the South German Governments, with the single exception of Baden, appealed to the Emperor Napoleon for assistance in the negotiations which they had opened at Berlin. But at the very moment when this request was made and granted Napoleon was himself demanding from Bismarck the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate and of the Hessian districts west of the Rhine. Bismarck had only to acquaint the King of Bavaria and the South German Ministers with the designs of their French protector in order to reconcile them to his own chastening, but not unfriendly, hand. The grandeur of a united Fatherland flashed upon minds hitherto impenetrable by any national ideal when it became known that Napoleon was bargaining for Oppenheim and Kaiserslautern. Not only were the insignificant questions as to the war-indemnities to be paid to Prussia and the frontier villages to be exchanged promptly settled, but by a series of secret Treaties all the South German States entered into an offensive and defensive alliance with the Prussian King, and engaged in case of war to place their entire forces at his disposal and under his command. The diplomacy of Napoleon III. had in the end effected for Bismarck almost more than his earlier intervention had frustrated, for it had made the South German Courts the allies of Prussia not through conquest or mere compulsion but out of regard for their own interests. It was said by the opponents of the Imperial Government in France, and scarcely with exaggeration, that every error which it was possible to commit had, in the course of the year 1866, been committed by Napoleon III. One crime, one act of madness, remained open to the Emperor's critics, to lash him and France into a conflict with the Power whose union he had not been able to prevent.

Prior to the battle of Koniggratz, it would seem that all the suggestions of the French Emperor relating to the acquisition of Belgium were made to the Prussian Government through secret agents, and that they were actually unknown, or known by mere hearsay, to Benedetti, the French Ambassador at Berlin. According to Prince Bismarck, these overtures had begun as early as 1862, when he was himself Ambassador at Paris, and were then made verbally and in private notes to himself; they were the secret of Napoleon's neutrality during the Danish war; and were renewed through relatives and confidential agents of the Emperor when the struggle with Austria was seen to be approaching. The ignorance in which Count Benedetti was kept of his master's private diplomacy may to some extent explain the extraordinary contradictions between the accounts given by this Minister and by Prince Bismarck of the negotiations that passed between them in the period following the campaign of 1866, after Benedetti had himself been charged to present the demands of the French Government. In June, while the Ambassador was still, as it would seem, in ignorance of what was passing behind his back, he had informed the French Ministry that Bismarck, anxious for the preservation of French neutrality, had hinted at the compensations that might be made to France if Prussia should meet with great success in the coming war. According to the report of the Ambassador, made at the time, Count Bismarck stated that he would rather withdraw from public life than cede the Rhenish Provinces with Cologne and Bonn, but that he believed it would be possible to gain the King's ultimate consent to the cession of the Prussian district of Treves on the Upper Moselle, which district, together with Luxemburg or parts of Belgium and Switzerland, would give France an adequate improvement of its frontier. The Ambassador added in his report, by way of comment, that Count Bismarck was the only man in the kingdom who was disposed to make any cession of Prussian territory whatever, and that a unanimous and violent revulsion against France would be excited by the slightest indication of any intention on the part of the French Government to extend its frontiers towards the Rhine. He concluded his report with the statement that, after hearing Count Bismarck's suggestions, he had brought the discussion to a summary close, not wishing to leave the Prussian Minister under the impression that any scheme involving the seizure of Belgian or Swiss territory had the slightest chance of being seriously considered at Paris. (June 4-8.)

Benedetti probably wrote these last words in full sincerity. Seven weeks later, after the settlement of the Preliminaries at Nicolsburg, he was ordered to demand the cession of the Bavarian Palatinate, of the portion of Hesse-Darmstadt west of the Rhine, including Mainz, and of the strip of Prussian territory on the Saar which had been left to France in 1814 but taken from it in 1815. According to the statement of Prince Bismarck, which would seem to be exaggerated, this demand was made by Benedetti as an ultimatum and with direct threats of war, which were answered by Bismarck in language of equal violence. In any case the demand was unconditionally refused, and Benedetti travelled to Paris in order to describe what had passed at the Prussian headquarters. His report made such an impression on the Emperor that the demand for cessions on the Rhine was at once abandoned, and the Foreign Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, who had been disposed to enforce this by arms, was compelled to quit office. Benedetti returned to Berlin, and now there took place that negotiation relating to Belgium on which not only the narratives of the persons immediately concerned, but the documents written at the time, leave so much that is strange and unexplained. According to Benedetti, Count Bismarck was keenly anxious to extend the German Federation to the South of the Main, and desired with this object an intimate union with at least one Great Power. He sought in the first instance the support of France, and offered in return to facilitate the seizure of Belgium. The negotiation, according to Benedetti, failed because the Emperor Napoleon required that the fortresses in Southern Germany should be held by the troops of the respective States to which they belonged, while at the same time General Manteuffel, who had been sent from Berlin on a special mission to St. Petersburg, succeeded in effecting so intimate a union with Russia that alliance with France became unnecessary. According to the counter-statement of Prince Bismarck, the plan now proposed originated entirely with the French Ambassador, and was merely a repetition of proposals which had been made by Napoleon during the preceding four years, and which were subsequently renewed at intervals by secret agents almost down to the outbreak of the war of 1870. Prince Bismarck has stated that he dallied with these proposals only because a direct refusal might at any moment have caused the outbreak of war between France and Prussia, a catastrophe which up to the end he sought to avert. In any case the negotiation with Benedetti led to no conclusion, and was broken off by the departure of both statesmen from Berlin in the beginning of autumn.

The war of 1866 had been brought to an end with extraordinary rapidity; its results were solid and imposing. Venice, perplexed no longer by its Republican traditions or by doubts of the patriotism of the House of Savoy, prepared to welcome King Victor Emmanuel; Bismarck, returning from the battle-field of Koniggratz, found his earlier unpopularity forgotten in the flood of national enthusiasm which his achievements and those of the army had evoked. A new epoch had begun; the antagonisms of the past were out of date; nobler work now stood before the Prussian people and its rulers than the perpetuation of a barren struggle between Crown and Parliament. By none was the severance from the past more openly expressed than by Bismarck himself; by none was it more bitterly felt than by the old Conservative party in Prussia, who had hitherto regarded the Minister as their own representative. In drawing up the Constitution of the North German Federation, Bismarck remained true to the principle which he had laid down at Frankfort before the war, that the German people must be represented by a Parliament elected directly by the people themselves. In the incorporation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel and the Danish Duchies with Prussia, he saw that it would be impossible to win the new populations to a loyal union with Prussia if the King's Government continued to recognize no friends but the landed aristocracy and the army. He frankly declared that the action of the Cabinet in raising taxes without the consent of Parliament had been illegal, and asked for an Act of Indemnity. The Parliament of Berlin understood and welcomed the message of reconciliation. It heartily forgave the past, and on its own initiative added the name of Bismarck to those for whose services to the State the King asked a recompense. The Progressist party, which had constituted the majority in the last Parliament, gave place to a new combination known as the National Liberal party, which, while adhering to the Progressist creed in domestic affairs, gave its allegiance to the Foreign and the German policy of the Minister. Within this party many able men who in Hanover and the other annexed territories had been the leaders of opposition to their own Governments now found a larger scope and a greater political career. More than one of the colleagues of Bismarck who had been appointed to their offices in the years of conflict were allowed to pass into retirement, and their places were filled by men in sympathy with the National Liberals. With the expansion of Prussia and the establishment of its leadership in a German Federal union, the ruler of Prussia seemed himself to expand from the instrument of a military monarchy to the representative of a great nation.

To Austria the battle of Koniggratz brought a settlement of the conflict between the Crown and Hungary. The Constitution of February, 1861, hopefully as it had worked during its first years, had in the end fallen before the steady refusal of the Magyars to recognise the authority of a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. Within the Reichsrath itself the example of Hungary told as a disintegrating force; the Poles, the Czechs seceded from the Assembly; the Minister, Schmerling, lost his authority, and was forced to resign in the summer of 1865. Soon afterwards an edict of the Emperor suspended the Constitution. Count Belcredi, who took office in Schmerling's place, attempted to arrive at an understanding with the Magyar leaders. The Hungarian Diet was convoked, and was opened by the King in person before the end of the year. Francis Joseph announced his abandonment of the principle that Hungary had forfeited its ancient rights by rebellion, and asked in return that the Diet should not insist upon regarding the laws of 1848 as still in force. Whatever might be the formal validity of those laws, it was, he urged, impossible that they should be brought into operation unaltered. For the common affairs of the two halves of the Monarchy there must be some common authority. It rested with the Diet to arrive at the necessary understanding with the Sovereign on this point, and to place on a satisfactory footing the relations of Hungary to Transylvania and Croatia. As soon as an accord should have been reached on these subjects, Francis Joseph stated that he would complete his reconciliation with the Magyars by being crowned King of Hungary.

In the Assembly to which these words were addressed the majority was composed of men of moderate opinions, under the leadership of Francis Deak. Deak had drawn up the programme of the Hungarian Liberals in the election of 1847. He had at that time appeared to be marked out by his rare political capacity and the simple manliness of his character for a great, if not the greatest, part in the work that then lay before his country. But the violence of revolutionary methods was alien to his temperament. After serving in Batthyany's Ministry, he withdrew from public life on the outbreak of war with Austria, and remained in retirement during the dictatorship of Kossuth and the struggle of 1849. As a loyal friend to the Hapsburg dynasty, and a clear-sighted judge of the possibilities of the time, he stood apart while Kossuth dethroned the Sovereign and proclaimed Hungarian independence. Of the patriotism and the disinterestedness of Deak there was never the shadow of a doubt; a distinct political faithsevered him from the leaders whose enterprise ended in the catastrophe which he had foreseen, and preserved for Hungary one statesman who could, without renouncing his own past and without inflicting humiliation on the Sovereign, stand as the mediator between Hungary and Austria when the time for reconciliation should arrive. Deak was little disposed to abate anything of what he considered the just demands of his country. It was under his leadership that the Diet had in 1861 refused to accept the Constitution which established a single Parliament for the whole Monarchy. The legislative independence of Hungary he was determined at all costs to preserve intact; rather than surrender this he had been willing in 1861 to see negotiations broken off and military rule restored. But when Francis Joseph, wearied of the sixteen years' struggle, appealed once more to Hungary for union and friendship, there was no man more earnestly desirous to reconcile the Sovereign with the nation, and to smooth down the opposition to the King's proposals which arose within the Diet itself, than Deak.

Under his influence a committee was appointed to frame the necessary basis of negotiation. On the 25th of June, 1866, the Committee gave in its report. It declared against any Parliamentary union with the Cis-Leithan half of the Monarchy, but consented to the establishment of common Ministries for War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, and recommended that the Budget necessary for these joint Ministries should be settled by Delegations from the Hungarian Diet and from the western Reichsrath. The Delegations, it was proposed, should meet separately, and communicate their views to one another by writing. Only when agreement should not have been thus attained were the Delegations to unite in a single body, in which case the decision was to rest with an absolute majority of votes.

The debates of the Diet on the proposals of King Francis Joseph had been long and anxious; it was not until the moment when the war with Prussia was breaking out that the Committee presented its report. The Diet was now prorogued, but immediately after the battle of Koniggratz the Hungarian leaders were called to Vienna, and negotiations were pushed forward on the lines laid down by the Committee. It was a matter of no small moment to the Court of Vienna that while bodies of Hungarian exiles had been preparing to attack the Empire both from the side of Silesia and of Venice, Deak and his friends had loyally abstained from any communication with the foreign enemies of the House of Hapsburg. That Hungary would now gain almost complete independence was certain; the question was not so much whether there should be an independent Parliament and Ministry at Pesth as whether there should not be a similarly independent Parliament and Ministry in each of the territories of the Crown, the Austrian Sovereign becoming the head of a Federation instead of the chief of a single or a dual State. Count Belcredi, the Minister at Vienna, was disposed towards such a Federal system; he was, however, now confronted within the Cabinet by a rival who represented a different policy. After making peace with Prussia, the Emperor called to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Count Beust, who had hitherto been at the head of the Saxon Government, and who had been the representative of the German Federation at the London Conference of 1864. Beust, while ready to grant the Hungarians their independence, advocated the retention of the existing Reichsrath and of a single Ministry for all the Cis-Leithan parts of the Monarchy. His plan, which pointed to the maintenance of German ascendency in the western provinces, and which deeply offended the Czechs and the Slavic populations, was accepted by the Emperor: Belcredi withdrew from office, and Beust was charged, as President of the Cabinet, with the completion of the settlement with Hungary (Feb. 7, 1867). Deak had hitherto left the chief ostensible part in the negotiations to Count Andrassy, one of the younger patriots of 1848, who had been condemned to be hanged, and had lived a refugee during the next ten years. He now came to Vienna himself, and in the course of a few days removed the last remaining difficulties. The King gratefully charged him with the formation of the Hungarian Ministry under the restored Constitution, but Deak declined alike all office, honours, and rewards, and Andrassy, who had actually been hanged in effigy, was placed at the head of the Government. The Diet, which had reassembled shortly before the end of 1866, greeted the national Ministry with enthusiasm. Alterations in the laws of 1848 proposed in accordance with the agreement made at Vienna, and establishing the three common Ministries with the system of Delegations for common affairs, were carried by large majorities. The abdication of Ferdinand, which throughout the struggle of 1849 Hungary had declined to recognise, was now acknowledged as valid, and on the 8th of June, 1867, Francis Joseph was crowned King of Hungary amid the acclamations of Pesth. The gift of money which is made to each Hungarian monarch on his coronation Francis Joseph by a happy impulse distributed among the families of those who had fallen in fighting against him in 1849. A universal amnesty was proclaimed, no condition being imposed on the return of the exiles but that they should acknowledge the existing Constitution. Kossuth alone refused to return to his country so long as a Hapsburg should be its King, and proudly clung to ideas which were already those of the past.

The victory of the Magyars was indeed but too complete. Not only were Beust and the representatives of the western half of the Monarchy so overmatched by the Hungarian negotiators that in the distribution of the financial burdens of the Empire Hungary escaped with far too small a share, but in the more important problem of the relation of the Slavic and Roumanian populations of the Hungarian Kingdom to the dominant race no adequate steps were taken for the protection of these subject nationalities. That Croatia and Transylvania should be reunited with Hungary if the Emperor and the Magyars were ever to be reconciled was inevitable; and in the case of Croatia certain conditions were no doubt imposed, and certain local rights guaranteed. But on the whole the non-Magyar peoples in Hungary were handed over to the discretion of the ruling race. The demand of Bismarck that the centre of gravity of the Austrian States should be transferred from Vienna to Pesth had indeed been brought to pass. While in the western half of the Monarchy the central authority, still represented by a single Parliament, seemed in the succeeding years to be altogether losing its cohesive power, and the political life of Austria became a series of distracting complications, in Hungary the Magyar Government resolutely set itself to the task of moulding into one the nationalities over which it ruled. Uniting the characteristic faults with the great qualities of a race marked out by Nature and ancient habit for domination over more numerous but less aggressive neighbours, the Magyars have steadily sought to the best of their power to obliterate the distinctions which make Hungary in reality not one but several nations. They have held the Slavic and the Roumanian population within their borders with an iron grasp, but they have not gained their affection. The memory of the Russian intervention in 1849 and of the part then played by Serbs, by Croats and Roumanians in crushing Magyar independence has blinded the victors to the just claims of these races both within and without the Hungarian kingdom, and attached their sympathy to the hateful and outworn empire of the Turk. But the individuality of peoples is not to be blotted out in a day; nor, with all its striking advance in wealth, in civilisation, and in military power, has the Magyar State been able to free itself from the insecurity arising from the presence of independent communities on its immediate frontiers belonging to the same race as those whose language and nationality it seeks to repress.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WAR BETWEEN FRANCE AND GERMANY