THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
tion of engravings. But there was little left of that revolutionary scheming and plotting to which the exiled had formerly given themselves, inspired by the delusive hope that a new uprising for free government would soon again take place on the European continent. Louis Napoleon sat firmly on the imperial throne of France, and the prestige he had gained by the Crimean War had brought him the most flattering recognition by other European sovereigns and made him appear like the arbiter of the destinies of the continent. In Germany, the stupid and rude reaction against the liberal current of 1848 went its course. In Austria, the return to absolutistic rule seemed almost complete. In Italy, Mazzini's revolutionary attempt, the prospects of which he had pictured to me in such glowing colors three years before, had resulted in disastrous failure. No part of the European horizon seemed to be illumined by a ray of hope to cheer the exiles still living in London. There was indeed an international committee of revolutionary leaders, to give direction to whatever revolutionary possibility might turn up. Whether they could see any such possibilities among the hard actualities of the time, it is difficult to say. But, as a matter of experience, nothing can be more active and fatuous than the imagination, and nothing more eager, boundless, and pathetic than the credulity of the exile. To those whose eyes were open to the real situation, the international committee looked like a gathering of specters moving about in a graveyard.
Whether Mazzini was at the time in London, I do not know. If he was, he held himself in that mysterious seclusion characteristic of him—a seclusion in which he met only his most confidential political agents and those English families whose members, completely under his wonderful fascination, were devoted to him to the point of almost limitless self-sacrifice.
But Kossuth was in London, and I promptly went to pay
[ 50 ]
