LAST WEEK.
THE HOLY ALLIANCE.
Can it be true that we are really back in those times when the Emperors of Russia and Austria, and the King of Prussia, were represented in old engravings as embracing each other, and vowing eternal fidelity to the sublime principle that the nations of the earth were created for the use of kings? Even so far back as the year 1815, either the free air of England or the prudence of Lord Castlereagh had sufficient force to prevent the Prince Regent from joining such an alliance as this. On the continent of Europe, Prince Metternich and Madame Krüdener, and the Prussian diplomatists, and the statesmen of the Restoration in Paris were allowed to have things their own way, and for fifteen long years the heavings of the great earthquake were checked. The constitutions promised to the German nations were withheld, and in their place the Diet at Frankfort—that last expression of German pedantry and ever-meddling tyranny—was established as an actual institution. The Russian Emperor carried out in practice his dream of universal freedom by rivetting the last links of the chains on the unfortunate Poles. Francis of Austria, acting no doubt under the advice of Metternich, deprived the estates of his various provinces of the last remains of self-government, and constituted himself the sole and irresponsible inquisitor and regulator of his empire. Recent events in Hungary, and in Lombardy more particularly, are the best illustrations of the value of this system of blind and elaborate tyranny. France was thrown back into the hands of the religious congregations, and that statesman best pleased his royal master who contrived to defraud the French nation of some portion of the liberty which had been promised to them upon the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and the restoration of the old traditional dynasty. Old Marshal Soult might have been seen in those days walking in a religious procession, with a huge wax taper in his hand, and all but intoning those set forms of French adjuration, which are more in harmony with the energy of camps than with the solemnities of the church. Louis XVIII. was wheeled about from his chamber to his carriage in a chair of marvellous construction, and quoted scraps of Horace, now at his brother, and now at his people. The most French thing in France, in those times, was the immortal song of Béranger, who contrived that his countrymen should forget the edge, and remember only the glitter of the imperial sword. After all, expedition for expedition—one of Napoleon’s little promenades militaires to Berlin or Vienna, was at least more flattering to the French love of glory than the wretched saunter from the Bidassoa to Cadiz. Battle for battle, Austerlitz or Jena, was well worth the day of the Trocadero. However, thus it was that kings and princes went on in those Lethæan times, which passed away, in all appearance, so calmly between the last struggle at Waterloo, and the three days of Barricades, when the old Epicurean philosopher of Hartwell had passed away, and a king equally despotic at heart, but a far less shrewd observer of the times blundered in his stead.
But these fifteen years of pause and hesitation were intelligible after those other twenty-five years of fire and sword. The nations of Europe were weary of revolutions, and camp-life, and captured cities, and the misery, and the splendour of an epoch when war was looked upon as the predominant affair of human life. In no country did this feeling so strongly prevail as in France. In the year 1814, when Napoleon had concluded his last campaign but one at Fontainebleau, the exhaustion of the country was so great, that on Sunday evenings when the villagers of France collected under their trees for their usual sports, the young maidens were obliged to dance together for want of partners. The youths who should have courted them in country fashion, and have led them to the altar, were sleeping their last sleep under the snows of Russia, or their bones were bleaching under the strong sun of Spain. France was fairly wearied out with the effort of a quarter of a century, and before all things had to recover a male population strong enough to re-assert the prerogative of the French name. Throughout Germany the hatred against France had been so intense, and the joy at having driven the invader back to his own side of the Rhine so great, that the nations were willing enough to trust to the promises of their princes, and to bide their time. Our fathers in England had enough to do in those evil days. Our statesmen were but too well inclined to take a lesson from the great continental professors of the art of tyranny. Lords Eldon and Sidmouth were not very fervent partisans of the development of liberal ideas. The harvests were bad. Strange theories about making bread dear that poverty-stricken men might have plenty of it were afloat. There was a general and eager craving for a reform of our political institutions. There was antagonism between bigoted Attorneys-General and reckless pamphleteers, and a general astonishment at the magnitude of our public burdens. In those days men had not formed a just estimate of what the British people could accomplish, so their ingenuity and their industry were not obstructed by unwise laws. However, there was enough to be done at home without looking about for fresh causes of offence. The Holy Alliance might be sneered at and jeered at, but no Englishman of sound mind dreamt of raising fresh subsidies, and enlisting more soldiers to combat a principle which might very fairly be left to work out its own destruction. We had intervened in the affairs of the continent to our hearts’ content. Of Metternich and Eldon, and the ideas they represented, there is an end.
From 1830 to 1848 the march of political affairs was different. Europe was taught practically that there might be revolution without anarchy. It had been the policy of the old statesmen who had reestablished order in Europe, in other words, who had worked out its liberation from the military despotism of France, to establish it as a recognised axiom, that any resistance to constituted authority was but the commencement of fresh troubles upon the model of 1790. When the intelligence reached London, now a little more than thirty years ago, that fresh barricades had been erected in Paris, and that the people had obtained a vic-