[Cavour's policy with regard to Rome and Venice.]

[The Free Church in the Free State.]

Thus in the spring of 1861, within two years from the outbreak of war with Austria, Italy with the exception of Rome and Venice was united under Victor Emmanuel. Of all the European Powers, Great Britain alone watched the creation of the new Italian Kingdom with complete sympathy and approval. Austria, though it had made peace at Zuerich, declined to renew diplomatic intercourse with Sardinia, and protested against the assumption by Victor Emmanuel of the title of King of Italy. Russia, the ancient patron of the Neapolitan Bourbons, declared that geographical conditions alone prevented its intervention against their despoilers. Prussia, though under a new sovereign, had not yet completely severed the ties which bound it to Austria. Nevertheless, in spite of wide political ill-will, and of the passionate hostility of the clerical party throughout Europe, there was little probability that the work of the Italian people would be overthrown by external force. The problem which faced Victor Emmanuel's Government was not so much the frustration of reactionary designs from without as the determination of the true line of policy to be followed in regard to Rome and Venice. There were few who, like Azeglio, held that Rome might be permanently left outside the Italian Kingdom; there were none who held this of Venice. Garibaldi might be mad enough to hope for victory in a campaign against Austria and against France at the head of such a troop as he himself could muster; Cavour would have deserved ill of his country if he had for one moment countenanced the belief that the force which had overthrown the Neapolitan Bourbons could with success, or with impunity to Italy, measure itself against the defenders of Venetia or of Rome. Yet the mind of Cavour was not one which could rest in mere passive expectancy as to the future, or in mere condemnation of the unwise schemes of others. His intelligence, so luminous, so penetrating, that in its utterances we seem at times to be listening to the very spirit of the age, ranged over wide fields of moral and of spiritual interests in its forecast of the future of Italy, and spent its last force in one of those prophetic delineations whose breadth and power the world can feel, though a later time alone can judge of their correspondence with the destined course of history. Venice was less to Europe than Rome; its transfer to Italy would, Cavour believed, be effected either by arms or negotiations so soon as the German race should find a really national Government, and refuse the service which had hitherto been exacted from it for the maintenance of Austrian interests. It was to Prussia, as the representative of nationality in Germany, that Cavour looked as the natural ally of Italy in the vindication of that part of the national inheritance which still lay under the dominion of the Hapsburg. Rome, unlike Venice, was not only defended by foreign arms, it was the seat of a Power whose empire over the mind of man was not the sport of military or political vicissitudes. Circumstances might cause France to relax its grasp on Rome, but it was not to such an accident that Cavour looked for the incorporation of Rome with Italy. He conceived that the time would arrive when the Catholic world would recognise that the Church would best fulfil its task in complete separation from temporal power. Rome would then assume its natural position as the centre of the Italian State; the Church would be the noblest friend, not the misjudging enemy, of the Italian national monarchy. Cavour's own religious beliefs were perhaps less simple than he chose to represent them. Occupying himself, however, with institutions, not with dogmas, he regarded the Church in profound earnestness as a humanising and elevating power. He valued its independence so highly that even on the suppression of the Piedmontese monasteries he had refused to give to the State the administration of the revenue arising from the sale of their lands, and had formed this into a fund belonging to the Church itself, in order that the clergy might not become salaried officers of the State. Human freedom was the principle in which he trusted; and looking upon the Church as the greatest association formed by men, he believed that here too the rule of freedom, of the absence of State-regulation, would in the end best serve man's highest interests. With the passing away of the Pope's temporal power, Cavour imagined that the constitution of the Church itself would become more democratic, more responsive to the movement of the modern world. His own effort in ecclesiastical reform had been to improve the condition and to promote the independence of the lower clergy. He had hoped that each step in their moral and material progress would make them more national at heart; and though this hope had been but partially fulfilled, Cavour had never ceased to cherish the ideal of a national Church which, while recognising its Head in Rome, should cordially and without reserve accept the friendship of the Italian State. [503]

[Death of Cavour, June 6, 1861.]

[Free Church in Free State.]

It was in the exposition of these principles, in the enforcement of the common moral interest of Italian nationality and the Catholic Church, that Cavour gave his last counsels to the Italian Parliament. He was not himself to lead the nation farther towards the Promised Land. The immense exertions which he had maintained during the last three years, the indignation and anxiety caused to him by Garibaldi's attacks, produced an illness which Cavour's own careless habits of life and the unskilfulness of his doctors rendered fatal. With dying lips he repeated to those about him the words in which he had summed up his policy in the Italian Parliament: "A free Church in a free State." [504] Other Catholic lands had adjusted by Concordats with the Papacy the conflicting claims of temporal and spiritual authority in such matters as the appointment of bishops, the regulation of schools, the family-rights of persons married without ecclesiastical form. Cavour appears to have thought that in Italy, where the whole nation was in a sense Catholic, the Church might as safely and as easily be left to manage its own affairs as in the United States, where the Catholic community is only one among many religious societies. His optimism, his sanguine and large-hearted tolerance, was never more strikingly shown than in this fidelity to the principle of liberty, even in the case of those who for the time declined all reconciliation with the Italian State. Whether Cavour's ideal was an impracticable fancy a later age will decide. The ascendency within the Church of Rome would seem as yet to have rested with the elements most opposed to the spirit of the time, most obstinately bent on setting faith and reason in irreconcilable enmity. In place of that democratic movement within the hierarchy and the priesthood which Cavour anticipated, absolutism has won a new crown in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Catholic dogma has remained impervious to the solvents which during the last thirty years have operated with perceptible success on the theology of Protestant lands. Each conquest made in the world of thought and knowledge is still noted as the next appropriate object of denunciation by the Vatican. Nevertheless the cautious spirit will be slow to conclude that hopes like those of Cavour were wholly vain. A single generation may see but little of the seed-time, nothing of the harvests that are yet to enrich mankind. And even if all wider interests be left out of view, enough remains to justify Cavour's policy of respect for the independence of the Church in the fact that Italy during the thirty years succeeding the establishment of its union has remained free from civil war. Cavour was wont to refer to the Constitution which the French National Assembly imposed upon the clergy in 1790 as the type of erroneous legislation. Had his own policy and that of his successors not been animated by a wiser spirit; had the Government of Italy, after overthrowing the Pope's temporal sovereignty, sought enemies among the rural priesthood and their congregations, the provinces added to the Italian Kingdom by Garibaldi would hardly have been maintained by the House of Savoy without a second and severer struggle. Between the ideal Italy which filled the thoughts not only of Mazzini but of some of the best English minds of that time—the land of immemorial greatness, touched once more by the divine hand and advancing from strength to strength as the intellectual and moral pioneer among nations—between this ideal and the somewhat hard and commonplace realities of the Italy of to-day there is indeed little enough resemblance. Poverty, the pressure of inordinate taxation, the physical and moral habits inherited from centuries of evil government,—all these have darkened in no common measure the conditions from which Italian national life has to be built up. If in spite of overwhelming difficulties each crisis has hitherto been surmounted; if, with all that is faulty and infirm, the omens for the future of Italy are still favourable, one source of its good fortune has been the impress given to its ecclesiastical policy by the great statesman to whom above all other men it owes the accomplishment of its union, and who, while claiming for Italy the whole of its national inheritance, yet determined to inflict no needless wound upon the conscience of Rome.



CHAPTER XXIII.

Germany after 1858—The Regency in Prussia—Army re-organisation—King William I.—Conflict between the Crown and the Parliament—Bismarck—The struggle continued—Austria from 1859—The October Diploma—Resistance of Hungary—The Reichsrath—Russia under Alexander II.—Liberation of the Serfs—Poland—The Insurrection of 1863—Agrarian measures in Poland—Schleswig-Holstein—Death of Frederick VII.—Plans of Bismarck—Campaign in Schleswig—Conference of London—Treaty of Vienna—England and Napoleon III.—Prussia and Austria—Convention of Gastein—Italy—Alliance of Prussia with Italy—Proposals for a Congress fail—War between Austria and Prussia—Napoleon III.—Koeniggraetz— Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon—Treaty of Prague—South Germany—Projects for compensation to France—Austria and Hungary—Deak—Establishment of the Dual System in Austria-Hungary.

[Germany from 1858.]

[The Regency in Prussia, Oct. 1858.]

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 ail 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.

[Revival of idea of German union.]

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 Bluecher 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 Regent of Prussia and the army.]

[Scheme of reorganisation.]

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 Olmuetz 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 reorganisation 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 mobilisation 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 Prussian Parliament and the army, 1859-1861.]

[Accession of King William, Jan., 1861.]

The general principles on which the proposed reorganisation 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 recognise, 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.

[First Parliament of 1862.]

[Dissolution, May, 1862.]

[Second Parliament of 1862.]

[Bismarck becomes Minister, Sept., 1862.]

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. [505]

[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 Olmuetz 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 aggrandisement 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. [506] 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.

[Bismarck and the Lower Chamber, 1862.]

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 reorganisation. 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-reorganisation, 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. [507]

[King William.]

[The conflict continued, 1863.]

[Measures against the Press.]

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 authorised 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.

[Austria from 1859.]

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 centralised 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 Zuerich 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 centralised 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.)

[Hungary.]

[Centralists and Federalists in the Council.]

[The Diploma of Oct 20, 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 self-government 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. [508]

[Hungary resists the establishment of a Central Council.]

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.

[Conflict of Hungary with the Crown, 1861.]

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 recognise 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. [509]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

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 organising 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.

[Liberation of the Serfs. March, 1861.]

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. [510]

[Poland, 1861, 1862.]

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 civilisation, 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. [511]

[Poland and Russia.]

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.

[Agrarian measures in Poland.]

[Agrarian measures in Poland, 1864.]

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." [512]

[Russia and Polish nationality.]

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.

[Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1863.]

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. [513] 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.

[Schleswig-Holstein, 1852-1863.]

[The Patent of March 30, 1863.]

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 Gluecksburg 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 recognise 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. [514]

[Death of Frederick VII., November, 1863.]

[Federal execution in Holstein. December, 1863.]

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 Gluecksburg, 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 recognise 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.

[Plans of Bismarck.]

[Union of Austria and Prussia.]

[Austrian and Prussian troops enter Schleswig. Feb., 1864.]

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 neighbours, 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 recognise 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 reorganisation 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. [515] 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.)

[Campaign in Schleswig. Feb.-April, 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 Dueppel, 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 Dueppel 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 Luem 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. [516]

[Conference of London. April, 1864.]

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 Dueppel. 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 recognise whatever dispositions they might make of those provinces.

[Great Britain and Napoleon III.]

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. [517] 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.

[Intentions of Bismarck as to Schleswig-Holstein.]

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.

[Relations of Prussia and Austria, Dec., 1854-Aug., 1865.]

[Convention of Gastein, Aug. 14, 1865.]

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. [518]

[Bismarck at Biarritz, Sept., 1865.]

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 Plombieres, 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 aggrandisement 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 realised. 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.

[Italy, 1862-65.]

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. [519]