progress, it was not so with Europe generally. In England they were years
of almost unparalleled suffering and discontent; in Italy the rule of
Austria grew more and more anti-national; in Prussia, though a vigorous
local and financial administration hastened the recovery of the
impoverished land, the hopes of liberty declined beneath the reviving
energy of the nobles and the resistance of the friends of absolutism. When
Stein had summoned the Prussian people to take up arms for their
Fatherland, he had believed that neither Frederick William nor Alexander
would allow Prussia to remain without free institutions after the battle
was won. The keener spirits in the War of Liberation had scarcely
distinguished between the cause of national independence and that of
internal liberty. They returned from the battle-fields of Saxony and France,
knowing that the Prussian nation had unsparingly offered up life and wealth
at the call of patriotism, and believing that a patriot-king would rejoice
to crown his triumph by inaugurating German freedom. For a while the hope
seemed near fulfilment. On the 22nd of May, 1815, Frederick William
published an ordinance, declaring that a Representation of the People
should be established. [276] For this end the King stated that the existing
Provincial Estates should be re-organised, and new ones founded where none
existed, and that out of the Provincial Estates the Assembly of
Representatives of the country should be chosen. It was added that a
commission would be appointed, to organise under Hardenberg's presidency
the system of representation, and to draw up a written Constitution. The
right of discussing all legislative measures affecting person or property
was promised to the Assembly. Though foreign affairs seemed to be directly
excluded from parliamentary debate, and the language of the Edict suggested
that the representative body would only have a consultative voice, without
the power either of originating or of rejecting laws, these reservations
only showed the caution natural on the part of a Government divesting
itself for the first time of absolute power. Guarded as it was, the scheme
laid down by the King would hardly have displeased the men who had done the
most to make constitutional rule in Prussia possible.
[Resistance of feudal and autocratic parties.]
But the promise of Frederick William was destined to remain unfulfilled. It
was no good omen for Prussia that Stein, who had rendered such glorious
services to his country and to all Europe, was suffered to retire from
public life. The old court-party at Berlin, politicians who had been forced
to make way for more popular men, landowners who had never pardoned the
liberation of the serf, all the interests of absolutism and class-privilege
which had disappeared for a moment in the great struggle for national
existence, gradually re-asserted their influence over the King, and
undermined the authority of Hardenberg, himself sinking into old age amid
circumstances of private life that left to old age little of its honour. To
decide even in principle upon the basis to be given to the new Prussian
Constitution would have taxed all the foresight and all the constructive
skill of the most experienced statesman; for by the side of the ancient
dominion of the Hohenzollerns there were now the Rhenish and the Saxon
Provinces, alien in spirit and of doubtful loyalty, in addition to Polish
territory and smaller German districts acquired at intervals between 1792
and 1815. Hardenberg was right in endeavouring to link the Constitution
with something that had come down from the past; but the decision that the
General Assembly should be formed out of the Provincial Estates was
probably an injudicious one; for these Estates, in their present form, were
mainly corporations of nobles, and the spirit which animated them was at
once the spirit of class-privilege and of an intensely strong localism.
Hardenberg had not only occasioned an unnecessary delay by basing the
representative system upon a reform of the Provincial Estates, but had
exposed himself to sharp attacks from these very bodies, to whom nothing
was more odious than the absorption of their own dignity by a General
Assembly. It became evident that the process of forming a Constitution
would be a tedious one; and in the meantime the opponents of the popular
movement opened their attack upon the men and the ideas whose influence in
the war of Liberation appeared to have made so great a break between the
German present and the past.
[Schmalz's pamphlet, 1815.]
The first public utterance of the reaction was a pamphlet issued in July,
1815, by Schmalz, a jurist of some eminence, and brother-in-law of
Scharnhorst, the re-organiser of the army. Schmalz, contradicting a
statement which attributed to him a highly honourable part in the patriotic
movement of 1808, attacked the Tugendbund, and other political associations
dating from that epoch, in language of extreme violence. In the stiff and
peremptory manner of the old Prussian bureaucracy, he denied that popular
enthusiasm had anything whatever to do with the victory of 1813, [277]
attributing the recovery of the nation firstly to its submission to the
French alliance in 1812, and secondly to the quiet sense of duty with
which, when the time came, it took up arms in obedience to the King. Then,
passing on to the present aims of the political societies, he accused them
of intending to overthrow all established governments, and to force unity
upon Germany by means of revolution, murder, and pillage. Stein was not
mentioned by name, but the warning was given to men of eminence who
encouraged Jacobinical societies, that in such combinations the giants end
by serving the dwarfs. Schmalz's pamphlet, which was written with a
strength and terseness of style very unusual in Germany, made a deep
impression, and excited great indignation in Liberal circles. It was
answered, among other writers, by Niebuhr; and the controversy thickened
until King Frederick William, in the interest of public tranquillity,
ordered that no more should be said on either side. It was in accordance
with Prussian feeling that the King should thus interfere to stop the
quarrels of his subjects. There would have been nothing unseemly in an act
of impartial repression. But the King made it impossible to regard his act
as of this character. Without consulting Hardenberg, he conferred a
decoration upon the author of the controversy. Far-sighted men saw the true
bearing of the act. They warned Hardenberg that, if he passed over this
slight, he would soon have to pass over others more serious, and urged him
to insist upon the removal of the counsellors on whose advice the King had
acted. [278] But the Minister disliked painful measures. He probably
believed that no influence could ever supplant his own with the King, and
looked too lightly upon the growth of a body of opponents, who, whether in
open or in concealed hostility to himself, were bent upon hindering the
fulfilment of the constitutional reforms which he had at heart.
[The promised Constitutions delayed in Germany.]
In the Edict of the 22nd of May, 1815, the King had ordered that the work
of framing a Constitution should be begun in the following September.
Delays, however, arose; and when the commission was at length appointed,
its leading members were directed to travel over the country in order to
collect opinions upon the form of representation required. Two years passed
before even this preliminary operation began. In the meantime very little
progress had been made towards the establishment of constitutional
government in Germany at large. One prince alone, the Grand Duke of Weimar,
already eminent in Europe from his connection with Goethe and Schiller,
loyally accepted the idea of a free State, and brought representative
institutions into actual working. In Hesse, the Elector summoned the
Estates, only to dismiss them with contumely when they resisted his
extortions. In most of the minor States contests or negotiations took place
between the Sovereigns and the ancient Orders, which led to little or no
result. The Federal Diet, which ought to have applied itself to the
determination of certain principles of public right common to all Germany,
remained inactive. Though hope had not yet fallen, a sense of discontent
arose, especially among the literary class which had shown such enthusiasm
in the War of Liberation. It was characteristic of Germany that the demand
for free government came not from a group of soldiers, as in Spain, not
from merchants and men of business, as in England, but from professors and
students, and from journalists, who were but professors in another form.
The middle class generally were indifferent: the higher nobility, and the
knights who had lost their semi-independence in 1803, sought for the
restoration of privileges which were really incompatible with any
State-government whatever. The advocacy of constitutional rule and of
German unity was left, in default of Prussian initiative, to the ardent
spirits of the Universities and the Press, who naturally exhibited in the
treatment of political problems more fluency than knowledge, and more zeal
than discretion. Jena, in the dominion of the Duke of Weimar, became, on
account of the freedom of printing which existed there, the centre of the
new Liberal journalism. Its University took the lead in the Teutonising
movement which had been inaugurated by Fichte twelve years before in the
days of Germany's humiliation, and which had now received so vigorous an
impulse from the victory won over the foreigner.
[The Wartburg Festival, Oct., 1817.]
On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, with deputations from
all the Protestant Universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to
celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of
Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been
decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves, and
assembled within the venerable hall of Luther's Wartburg Castle; sang,
prayed, preached, and were preached to; dined; drank to German liberty, the
jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the Grand Duke
of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternised with the Landsturm
in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church
without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with
gymnastics, which were now the recognised symbol of German vigour, and
lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the
official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash
words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of
the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames,
in imitation of Luther's dealing with the Pope's Bull, a quantity of what
they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz's
pamphlet. They also burnt a soldier's strait-jacket, a pigtail, and a
corporal's cane, emblems of the military brutalism of past times which were
now being revived in Westphalia. [279] Insignificant as the whole affair
was, it excited a singular alarm not only in Germany but at foreign Courts.
Richelieu wrote from Paris to inquire whether revolution was breaking out.
The King of Prussia sent Hardenberg to Weimar to make investigations on the
spot. Metternich, who saw conspiracy and revolution everywhere and in
everything, congratulated himself that his less sagacious neighbours were
at length awakening to their danger. The first result of the Wartburg
scandal was that the Duke of Weimar had to curtail the liberties of his
subjects. Its further effects became only too evident as time went on. It
left behind it throughout Germany the impression that there were forces of
disorder at work in the Press and in the Universities which must be crushed
at all cost by the firm hand of Government; and it deepened the anxiety
with which King Frederick William was already regarding the promises of
liberty which he had made to the Prussian people two years before.
[Alexander in 1818.]
Twelve months passed between the Wartburg festival and the beginning of the
Conferences at Aix-la-Chapelle. In the interval a more important person
than the King of Prussia went over to the side of reaction. Up to the
summer of 1818, the Czar appeared to have abated nothing of his zeal for
constitutional government. In the spring of that year, he summoned the
Polish Diet; addressed them in a speech so enthusiastic as to alarm not
only the Court of Vienna but all his own counsellors; and stated in the
clearest possible language his intention of extending the benefits of a
representative system to the whole Russian Empire. [280] At the close of
the brief session he thanked the Polish Deputies for their boldness in
throwing out a measure proposed by himself. Alexander's popular rhetoric at
Warsaw might perhaps be not incompatible with a settled purpose to permit
no encroachment on authority either there or elsewhere; but the change in
his tone was so great when he appeared at Aix-la-Chapelle a few months
afterwards, that some strange and sudden cause has been thought necessary
to explain it. It is said that during the Czar's residence at Moscow, in
June, 1818, the revelation was made to him of the existence of a mass of
secret societies in the army, whose aim was the overthrow of his own
Government. Alexander's father had died by the hands of murderers: his own
temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a
discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to
the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with
earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to
a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator
to the despot. But the evidence of what passed in his mind is wanting.
Hearsay, conjecture, gossip, abound; [281] the one man who could have told
all has left no word. This only is certain, that from the close of the year
1818, the future, hitherto bright with dreams of peaceful progress, became
in Alexander's view a battle-field between the forces of order and anarchy.
The task imposed by Providence on himself and other kings was no longer to
spread knowledge and liberty among mankind, but to defend existing
authority, and even authority that was oppressive and un-Christian, against
the madness that was known as popular right.
[Conferences of Aix-la-Chapelle, Oct., 1818.]
[France evacuated.]
[Proposed Quintuple Alliance.]
[Canning.]
At the end of September, 1818, the Sovereigns or Ministers of the Great
Powers assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Conferences began. The first
question to be decided was whether the Allied Army might safely be
withdrawn from France; the second, in what form the concert of Europe
should hereafter be maintained. On the first question there was no
disagreement: the evacuation of France was resolved upon and promptly
executed. The second question was a more difficult one. Richelieu, on
behalf of King Louis XVIII., represented that France now stood on the same
footing as any other European Power, and proposed that the Quadruple
Alliance of 1815 should be converted into a genuine European federation by
adding France to it as a fifth member. The plan had been communicated to
the English Government, and would probably have received its assent but for
the strong opposition raised by Canning within the Cabinet. Canning took a
gloomy but a true view of the proposed concert of the Powers. He foresaw
that it would really amount to a combination of governments against
liberty. Therefore, while recognising the existing engagements of this
country, he urged that England ought to join in no combination except that
to which it had already pledged itself, namely, the combination made with
the definite object of resisting French disturbance. To combine with three
Powers to prevent Napoleon or the Jacobins from again becoming masters of
France was a reasonable act of policy: to combine with all the Great Powers
of Europe against nothing in particular was to place the country on the
side of governments against peoples, and to involve England in any
enterprise of repression which the Courts might think fit to undertake.
Canning's warning opened the eyes of his colleagues to the view which was
likely to be taken of such a general alliance by Parliament and by public
opinion. Lord Castlereagh was forbidden to make this country a party to any
abstract union of Governments. In memorable words the Prime Minister
described the true grounds for the decision: "We must recollect in the
whole of this business, and ought to make our Allies feel, that the general
and European discussion of these questions will be in the British
Parliament." [282] Fear of the rising voice of the nation, no longer forced
by military necessities to sanction every measure of its rulers, compelled
Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh to take account of scruples which were not
their own. On the same grounds, while the Ministry agreed that Continental
difficulties which might hereafter arise ought to be settled by a friendly
discussion among the Great Powers, it declined to elevate this occasional
deliberation into a system, and to assent to the periodical meeting of a
Congress. Peace might or might not be promoted by the frequent gatherings
of Sovereigns and statesmen; but a council so formed, if permanent in its
nature, would necessarily extinguish the independence of every minor State,
and hand over the government of all Europe to the Great Courts, if only
they could agree with one another.
[Declarations and Secret Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.]
It was the refusal of England to enter into a general league that
determined the form in which the results of the Conference of 1818 were
embodied. In the first place the Quadruple Alliance against French
revolution was renewed, and with such seriousness that the military centres
were fixed, at which, in case of any outbreak, the troops of each of the
Great Powers should assemble. [283] This Treaty, however, was kept secret,
in order not to add to the difficulties of Richelieu. The published
documents breathed another spirit. [284] Without announcing an actual
alliance with King Louis XVIII., the Courts, including England, declared
that through the restoration of legitimate and constitutional monarchy
France had regained its place in the councils of Europe, and that it would
hereafter co-operate in maintaining the general peace. For this end
meetings of the sovereigns or their ministers might be necessary; such
meetings would, however, be arranged by the ordinary modes of negotiation,
nor would the affairs of any minor State be discussed by the Great Powers,
except at the direct invitation of that State, whose representatives would
then be admitted to the sittings. In these guarded words the intention of
forming a permanent and organised Court of Control over Europe was
disclaimed. A manifesto, addressed to the world at large, declared that the
sovereigns of the five great States had no other object in their union than
the maintenance of peace on the basis of existing treaties. They had formed
no new political combinations; their rule was the observance of
international law; their object the prosperity and moral welfare of their
subjects.
[Repressive tone of the Conference.]
[Metternich and Austrian principles henceforth dominant.]
The earnestness with which the statesmen of 1818, while accepting the
conditions laid down by England, persevered in the project of a joint
regulation of European affairs may suggest the question whether the plan
which they had at heart would not in truth have operated to the benefit of
mankind. The answer is, that the value of any International Council depends
firstly on the intelligence which it is likely to possess, and secondly on
the degree in which it is really representative. Experience proved that the
Congresses which followed 1818 possessed but a limited intelligence, and
that they represented nothing at all but authority. The meeting at
Aix-la-Chapelle was itself the turning-point in the constitutional history
of Europe. Though no open declaration was made against constitutional
forms, every Sovereign and every minister who attended the Conference left
it with the resolution to draw the reins of government tighter. A note of
alarm had been sounded. Conspiracies in Belgium, an attempt on the life of
Wellington, rumours of a plot to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, combined
with the outcry against the German Universities and the whispered tales
from Moscow in filling the minds of statesmen with apprehensions. The
change which had taken place in Alexander himself was of the most serious
moment. Up to this time Metternich, the leader of European Conservatism,
had felt that in the Czar there were sympathies with Liberalism and
enlightenment which made the future of Europe doubtful. [285] To check the
dissolution of existing power, to suppress all tendency to change, was the
habitual object of Austria, and the Czar was the one person who had seemed
likely to prevent the principles of Austria from becoming the law of
Europe. Elsewhere Metternich had little to fear in the way of opposition.
Hardenberg, broken in health and ill-supported by his King, had ceased to
be a power. Yielding to the apprehensions of Frederick William, perhaps
with the hope of dispelling them at some future time, he took his place
among the alarmists of the day, and suffered the German policy of Prussia,
to which so great a future lay open a few years before, to become the mere
reflex of Austrian inaction and repression. [286] England, so long as it
was represented on the Continent by Castlereagh and Wellington, scarcely
counted for anything on the side of liberty. The sudden change in Alexander
removed the one check that stood in Austria's way; and from this time
Metternich exercised an authority in Europe such as few statesmen have ever
possessed. His influence, overborne by that of the Czar during 1814 and
1815, struck root at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, maintained itself
unimpaired during five eventful years, and sank only when the death of Lord
Castlereagh allowed the real voice of England once more to be heard, and
Canning, too late to forbid the work of repression in Italy and in Spain,
inaugurated, after an interval of forced neutrality, that worthier concert
which established the independence of Greece.
[Metternich's advice to Prussia, 1818.]
If it is the mark of a clever statesman to know where to press and where to
give way, Metternich certainly proved himself one in 1818. Before the end
of the Conference he delivered to Hardenberg and to the King of Prussia two
papers containing a complete set of recommendations for the management of
Prussian affairs. The contents of these documents were singular enough: it
is still more singular that they form the history of what actually took
place in Prussia during the succeeding years. Starting with the assumption
that the party of revolution had found its lever in the promise of King
Frederick William to create a Representative System, Metternich
demonstrated in polite language to the very men who had made this promise,
that any central Representation would inevitably overthrow the Prussian
State; pointed out that the King's dominions consisted of seven Provinces;
and recommended Frederick William to fulfil his promise only by giving to
each Province a Diet for the discussion of its own local concerns. Having
thus warned the King against creating a National Parliament, like that
which had thrown France into revolution in 1789, Metternich exhibited the
specific dangers of the moment and the means of overcoming them. These
dangers were Universities, Gymnastic establishments, and the Press. "The
revolutionists," he said, "despairing of effecting their aim themselves,
have formed the settled plan of educating the next generation for
revolution. The Gymnastic establishment is a preparatory school for
University disorders. The University seizes the youth as he leaves boyhood,
and gives him a revolutionary training. This mischief is common to all
Germany, and must be checked by joint action of the Governments. Gymnasia,
on the contrary, were invented at Berlin, and spring from Berlin. For
these, palliative measures are no longer sufficient. It has become a duty
of State for the King of Prussia to destroy the evil. The whole institution
in every shape must be closed and uprooted." With regard to the abuse of
the Press, Metternich contented himself with saying that a difference ought
to be made between substantial books and mere pamphlets or journals; and
that the regulation of the Press throughout Germany at large could only be
effected by an agreement between Austria and Prussia. [287]
[Stourdza's pamphlet.]
With a million men under arms, the Sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon
trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their
rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon
schoolboys' shoulders. The Emperor Francis, whose imagination had failed to
rise to the glories of the Holy Alliance, alone seems to have had some
suspicion of the absurdity of the present alarms. [288] The Czar
distinguished himself by his zeal against the lecturers who were turning
the world upside down. As if Metternich had not frightened the Congress
enough already, the Czar distributed at Aix-la-Chapelle a pamphlet
published by one Stourdza, a Moldavian, which described Germany as on the
brink of revolution, and enumerated half a score of mortal disorders which
racked that unfortunate country. The chief of all was the vicious system of
the Universities, which instead of duly developing the vessel of the
Christian State from the cradle of Moses, [289] brought up young men to be
despisers of law and instruments of a licentious Press. The ingenious
Moldavian, whose expressions in some places bear a singular resemblance to
those of Alexander, while in others they are actually identical with
reflections of Metternich's not then published, went on to enlighten the
German Governments as to the best means of rescuing their subjects from
their perilous condition. Certain fiscal and administrative changes were
briefly suggested, but the main reform urged was exactly that propounded by
Metternich, the enforcement of a better discipline and of a more
rigidly-prescribed course of study at the Universities, along with the
supervision of all journals and periodical literature.
[The murder of Kotzebue, March 23, 1819.]
Stourdza's pamphlet, in which loose reasoning was accompanied by the
coarsest invective, would have gained little attention if it had depended
on its own merits or on the reputation of its author: it became a different
matter when it was known to represent the views of the Czar. A vehement but
natural outcry arose at the Universities against this interference of the
foreigner with German domestic affairs. National independence, it seemed,
had been won in the deadly struggle against France only in order that
internal liberty, the promised fruit of this independence, should be
sacrificed at the bidding of Russia. The Czar himself was out of reach: the
vengeance of outraged patriotism fell upon an insignificant person who had
the misfortune to be regarded as his principal agent. A dramatic author
then famous, now forgotten, August Kotzebue, held the office of Russian
agent in Central Germany, and conducted a newspaper whose object was to
throw ridicule on the national movement of the day, and especially on those
associations of students where German enthusiasm reached its climax. Many
circumstances embittered popular feeling against this man, and caused him
to be regarded less as a legitimate enemy than as a traitor and an
apostate. Kotzebue had himself been a student at Jena, and at one time had
turned liberal sentiments to practical account in his plays. Literary
jealousies and wounded vanity had subsequently alienated him from his
country, and made him the willing and acrid hireling of a foreign Court.
The reports which, as Russian agent, he sent to St. Petersburg were
doubtless as offensive as the attacks on the Universities which he
published in his journal; but it was an extravagant compliment to the man
to imagine that he was the real author of the Czar's desertion from
Liberalism to reaction. This, however, was the common belief, and it cost
Kotzebue dear. A student from Erlangen, Carl Sand, who had accompanied the
standard at the Wartburg festival, formed the silent resolve of sacrificing
his own life in order to punish the enemy of his country. Sand was a man of
pure and devout, though ill-balanced character. His earlier life marked him
as one whose whole being was absorbed by what he considered a divine call.
He thought of the Greeks who, even in their fallen estate, had so often
died to free their country from Turkish oppression, and formed the
deplorable conclusion that by murdering a decayed dramatist he could strike
some great blow against the powers of evil. [290] He sought the unfortunate
Kotzebue in the midst of his family, stabbed him to the heart, and then
turned his weapon against himself. Recovering from his wounds, he was
condemned to death, and perished, after a year's interval, on the scaffold,
calling God to witness that he died for Germany to be free.
[Action of Metternich.]
The effects of Sand's act were very great, and their real nature was at
once recognised. Hardenberg, the moment that he heard of Kotzebue's death,
exclaimed that a Prussian Constitution had now become impossible.
Metternich, who had thought the Czar mad because he desired to found a
peaceful alliance of Sovereigns on religious principles, was not likely to
make allowance for a kind of piety that sent young rebels over the country
on missions of murder. The Austrian statesman was in Rome when the news of
Kotzebue's assassination reached him. He saw that the time had come for
united action throughout Germany, and, without making any public utterance,
drew up a scheme of repressive measures, and sent out proposals for a
gathering of the Ministers of all the principal German Courts. In the
summer he travelled slowly northwards, met the King of Prussia at Teplitz,
in Bohemia, and shortly afterwards opened the intended Conference of
Ministers in the neighbouring town of Carlsbad. A number of innocent
persons had already, at his instigation, been arrested in Prussia and other
States, under circumstances deeply discreditable to Government. Private
papers were seized, and garbled extracts from them published in official
prints as proof of guilt. [291] "By the help of God," Metternich wrote, "I
hope to defeat the German Revolution, just as I vanquished the conqueror of
the world. The revolutionists thought me far away, because I was five
hundred leagues off. They deceived themselves; I have been in the midst of
them, and now I am striking my blows." [292] Metternich's plan was to
enforce throughout Germany, by means of legislation in the Federal Diet,
the principle which he had already privately commended to the King of
Prussia. There were two distinct objects of policy before him: the first,
to prevent the formation in any German State of an assembly representing
the whole community, like the English House of Commons or the French
Chamber of Deputies; the second, to establish a general system of
censorship over the Press and over the Universities, and to create a
central authority, vested, as the representative of the Diet, with
inquisitorial powers.
[The South-Western States become constitutional as Prussia relapses.]
[Bavarian Constitution, May 26, 1818.]
The first of these objects, the prevention of general assemblies, had been
rendered more difficult by recent acts of the Governments of Bavaria and
Baden. A singular change had taken place in the relation between Prussia
and the Minor States which had formerly constituted the Federation of the
Rhine. When, at the Congress of Vienna, Prussian statesmen had endeavoured
to limit the arbitrary rule of petty sovereigns by charging the Diet with
the protection of constitutional right over all Germany, the Kings of
Bavaria and Würtemberg had stoutly refused to part with sovereign power. To
submit to a law of liberty, as it then seemed, was to lose their own
separate existence, and to reduce themselves to dependence upon the
Jacobins of Berlin. This apprehension governed the policy of the Minor
Courts from 1813 to 1815. But since that time events had taken an
unexpected turn. Prussia, which once threatened to excite popular movement
over all Germany in its own interest, had now accepted Metternich's
guidance, and made its representative in the Diet the mouthpiece of
Austrian interest and policy. It was no longer from Berlin but from Vienna
that the separate existence of the Minor States was threatened. The two
great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker
neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name
of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns
seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but
in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to
Metternich's direction, the Governments of the South-Western States
familiarised themselves with the idea of a popular representation; and at
the very time when the conservative programme was being drawn up for the
Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the King of Bavaria published a Constitution.
Baden followed after a short interval, and in each of these States,
although the Legislature was divided into two Chambers, the representation
established was not merely provincial, according to Metternich's plan, or
wholly on the principle of separate Estates or Orders, as before the
Revolution, but to some extent on the type of England and France, where the
Lower Chamber, in theory, represented the public at large. This was enough
to make Metternich condemn the new Constitutions as radically bad and
revolutionary. [293] He was, however, conscious of the difficulty of making
a direct attack upon them. This task he reserved for a later time. His
policy at present was to obtain a declaration from the Diet which should
prevent any other Government within the League from following in the same
path; while, by means of Press-laws, supervision of the Universities, and a
central commission of inquiry, he expected to make the position of
rebellious professors and agitators so desperate that the forces of
disorder, themselves not deeply rooted in German nature, would presently
disappear.
[Conference of Carlsbad, Aug., 1819.]
The Conference of Ministers at Carlsbad, which in the memory of the German
people is justly associated with the suppression of their liberty for an
entire generation, began and ended in the month of August, 1819. Though
attended by the representatives of eight German Governments, it did little
more than register the conclusions which Metternich had already formed.
[294] The zeal with which the envoy of Prussia supported every repressive
measure made it useless for the Ministers of the Minor Courts to offer an
open opposition. Nothing more was required than that the Diet should
formally sanction the propositions thus privately accepted by all the
leading Ministers. On the 20th of September this sanction was given. The
Diet, which had sat for three years without framing a single useful law,
ratified all Metternich's oppressive enactments in as many hours. It was
ordered that in every State within the Federation the Government should
take measures for preventing the publication of any journal or pamphlet
except after licence given, and each Government was declared responsible to
the Federation at large for any objectionable writing published within its
own territory. The Sovereigns were required to appoint civil commissioners
at the Universities, whose duty it should be to enforce public order and to
give a salutary direction to the teaching of the professors. They were also
required to dismiss all professors who should overstep the bounds of their
duty, and such dismissed persons were prohibited from being employed in any
other State. It was enacted that within fifteen days of the passing of the
decree an extraordinary Commission should assemble at Mainz to investigate
the origin and extent of the secret revolutionary societies which
threatened the safety of the Federation. The Commission was empowered to
examine and, if necessary, to arrest any subject of any German State. All
law-courts and other authorities were required to furnish it with
information and with documents, and to undertake all inquiries which the
Commission might order. The Commission, however, was not a law-court
itself: its duty was to report to the Diet, which would then create such
judicial machinery as might be necessary. [295]
[Supplementary Act of Vienna, June, 1820.]
These measures were of an exceptional, and purported to be of a temporary,
character. There were, however, other articles which Metternich intended to
raise to the rank of organic laws, and to incorporate with the Act of 1815,
which formed the basis of the German Federation. The conferences of
Ministers were accordingly resumed after a short interval, but at Vienna
instead of at Carlsbad. They lasted for several months, a stronger
opposition being now made by the Minor States than before. A second body of
federal law was at length drawn up, and accepted by the Diet on the 8th of
June, 1820. [296] The most important of its provisions was that which
related to the Constitutions admissible within the German League. It was
declared that in every State, with the exception of the four free cities,
supreme power resided in the Sovereign and in him alone, and that no
Constitution might do more than bind the Sovereign to co-operate with the
Estates in certain definite acts of government. [297]
In cases where a Government either appealed for help against rebellious
subjects, or was notoriously unable to exert authority, the Diet charged
itself with the duty of maintaining public order.
[The reaction in Prussia.]
From this time whatever liberty existed in Germany was to be found in the
Minor States, in Bavaria and Baden, and in Würtemberg, which received a
Constitution a few days before the enrolment of the decrees of Carlsbad. In
Prussia the reaction carried everything before it. Humboldt, the best and
most liberal of the Ministers, resigned, protesting in vain against the
ignominious part which the King had determined to play. He was followed by
those of his colleagues whose principles were dearer to them than their
places. Hardenberg remained in office, a dying man, isolated, neglected,
thwarted; clinging to some last hope of redeeming his promises to the
Prussian people, yet jealous of all who could have given him true aid;
dishonouring by tenacity of place a career associated with so much of his
country's glory, and ennobled in earlier days by so much fortitude in time
of evil. There gathered around the King a body of men who could see in the
great patriotic efforts and reforms of the last decade nothing but an
encroachment of demagogues on the rights of power. They were willing that
Prussia should receive its orders from Metternich and serve a foreign Court
in the work of repression, rather than that it should take its place at the
head of all Germany on the condition of becoming a free and constitutional
State. [298] The stigma of disloyalty was attached to all who had kindled
popular enthusiasm in 1808 and 1812. To have served the nation was to have
sinned against the Government. Stein was protected by his great name from
attack, but not from calumny. His friend Arndt, whose songs and addresses
had so powerfully moved the heart of Germany during the War of Liberation,
was subjected to repeated legal process, and, although unconvicted of any
offence, was suspended from the exercise of his professorship for twenty
years. Other persons, whose fault at the most was to have worked for German
unity, were brought before special tribunals, and after long trial either
refused a public acquittal or sentenced to actual imprisonment. Free
teaching, free discussion, ceased. The barrier of authority closed every
avenue of political thought. Everywhere the agent of the State prescribed
an orthodox opinion, and took note of those who raised a dissentient voice.
[The Commission at Mainz.]
The pretext made at Carlsbad for this crusade against liberty, which was
more energetically carried out in Prussia than elsewhere, was the existence
of a conspiracy or agitation for the overthrow of Governments and of the
present constitution of the German League. It was stated that proofs
existed of the intention to establish by force a Republic one and
indivisible, like that of France in 1793. But the very Commission which was
instituted by the Carlsbad Ministers to investigate the origin and nature
of this conspiracy disproved its existence. The Commission assembled at
Mainz, examined several hundred persons and many thousand documents, and
after two years' labour delivered a report to the Diet. The report went
back to the time of Fichte's lectures and the formation of the Tugendbund
in 1808, traced the progress of all the students' associations and other
patriotic societies from that time to 1820; and, while exhibiting in the
worst possible light the aims and conduct of the advocates of German unity,
acknowledged that scarcely a single proof had been discovered of
treasonable practice, and that the loyalty of the mass of the people was
itself a sufficient guarantee against the impulses of the evil-minded.
[299] Such was the impression of triviality and imposture produced at the
Diet by this report, that the representatives of several States proposed
that the Commission should forthwith be dissolved as useless and
unnecessary. This, however, could not be tolerated by Metternich and his
new disciples. The Commission was allowed to continue in existence, and
with it the regime of silence and repression. The measures which had been
accepted at Carlsbad as temporary and provisional became more and more a
part of the habitual system of government. Prosecutions succeeded one
another; letters were opened; spies attended the lectures of professors and
the meetings of students; the newspapers were everywhere prohibited from
discussing German affairs. In a country where there were so many printers
and so many readers journalism could not altogether expire. It was still
permissible to give the news and to offer an opinion about foreign lands:
and for years to come the Germans, like beggars regaling themselves with
the scents from rich men's kitchens, [300] followed every stage of the
political struggles that were agitating France, England, and Spain, while
they were not allowed to express a desire or to formulate a grievance of
their own.
[Prussian Provincial Estates, June, 1823.]
[Redeeming features of Prussian absolutism.]
In the year 1822 Hardenberg died. All hope of a fulfilment of the promises
made in Prussia in 1815 had already become extinct. Not many months after
the Minister's death, King Frederick William established the Provincial
Estates which had been recommended to him by Metternich, and announced that
the creation of a central representative system would be postponed until
such time as the King should think fit to introduce it. This meant that the
project was finally abandoned; and Prussia in consequence remained without
a Parliament until the Revolution of 1848 was at the door. The Provincial
Estates, with which the King affected to temper absolute rule, met only
once in three years. Their function was to express an opinion upon local
matters when consulted by the Government: their enemies said that they were
aristocratic and did harm, their partizans could not pretend that they did
much good. In the bitterness of spirit with which, at a later time, the
friends of liberty denounced the betrayal of the cause of freedom by the
Prussian Court, a darker colour has perhaps been introduced into the
history of this period than really belongs to it. The wrongs sustained by
the Prussian nation have been compared to those inflicted by the despotism
of Spain. But, however contemptible the timidity of King Frederick William,
however odious the ingratitude shown to the truest friends of King and
people, the Government of 1819 is not correctly represented in such a
parallel. To identify the thousand varieties of wrong under the common name
of oppression, is to mistake words for things, and to miss the
characteristic features which distinguish nations from one another. The
greatest evils which a Government can inflict upon its subjects are
probably religious persecution, wasteful taxation, and the denial of
justice in the daily affairs of life. None of these were present in Prussia
during the darkest days of reaction. The hand of oppression fell heavily on
some of the best and some of the most enlightened men; it violated
interests so precious as those of free criticism and free discussion of
public affairs; but the great mass of the action of Government was never on
the side of evil. The ordinary course of justice was still pure, the
administration conscientious and thrifty. The system of popular education,
which for the first time placed Prussia in advance of Saxony and other
German States, dates from these years of warfare against liberty. A
reactionary despotism built the schools and framed the laws whose
reproduction in free England half a century later is justly regarded as the
chief of all the liberal measures of our day. So strong, so lasting, was
that vital tradition which made monarchy in Prussia an instrument for the
execution of great public ends.
[A new Liberalism grows up in Germany after 1820.]
[Interest in France.]
But the old harmony between rulers and subjects in Germany perished in
the system of coercion which Metternich established in 1819. Patient as
the Germans were, loyal as they had proved themselves to Frederick William
and to worse princes through good and evil, the galling disappointment of
noble hopes, the silencing of the Press, the dissolution of societies,--
calumnies, expulsions, prosecutions,--embittered many an honest mind
against authority. The Commission of Mainz did not find conspirators, but
it made them. As years went by, and all the means of legitimately working
for the improvement of German public life were one after another
extinguished, men of ardent character thought of more violent methods.
Secret societies, such as Metternich had imagined, came into actual being.
[301] And among those who neither sank into apathy and despair nor enrolled
themselves against existing power, a new body of ideas supplanted the old
loyal belief in the regeneration of Germany by its princes. The
Parliamentary struggles of France, the revolutionary movements in Italy and
in Spain which began at this epoch, drew the imagination away from that
pictured restoration of a free Teutonic past which had proved so barren of
result, and set in its place the idea of a modern universal or European
Liberalism. The hatred against France, especially among the younger men,
disappeared. A distinction was made between the tyrant Napoleon and the
people who were now giving to the rest of the Continent the example of a
free and animated public life, and illuminating the age with a political
literature so systematic and so ingenious that it seemed almost like a
political philosophy. The debates in the French Assembly, the writings of
French publicists, became the school of the Germans. Paris regained in
foreign eyes something of the interest that it had possessed in 1789. Each
victory or defeat of the French popular cause awoke the joy or the sorrow
of German Liberals, to whom all was blank at home: and when at length the
throne of the Bourbons fell, the signal for deliverance seemed to have
sounded in many a city beyond the Rhine.
[France after 1818.]
[Richelieu resigns, Dec., 1818. Decazes keeps power.]
We have seen that in Central Europe the balance between liberty and
reaction, wavering in 1815, definitely fell to the side of reaction at the
Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. It remains to trace the course of events which
in France itself suspended the peaceful progress of the nation, and threw
power for some years into the hands of a faction which belonged to the
past. The measures carried by Decazes in 1817, which gave so much
satisfaction to the French, were by no means viewed with the same approval
either at London or at Vienna. The two principal of these were the
Electoral Law, and a plan of military reorganisation which brought back
great numbers of Napoleon's old officers and soldiers to the army.
Richelieu, though responsible as the head of the Ministry, felt very grave
fears as to the results of this legislation. He had already become anxious
and distressed when the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle met; and the events
which took place in France during his absence, as well as the
communications which passed between himself and the foreign Ministers,
convinced him that a change of internal policy was necessary. The busy mind
of Metternich had already been scheming against French Liberalism. Alarmed
at the energy shown by Decazes, the Austrian statesman had formed the
design of reconciling Artois and the Ultra-Royalists to the King's
Government; and he now urged Richelieu, if his old opponents could be
brought to reason, to place himself at the head of a coalition of all the
conservative elements in the State. [302] While the Congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle was sitting, the partial elections for the year 1818, the
second under the new Electoral Law, took place. Among the deputies returned
there were some who passed for determined enemies of the Bourbon
restoration, especially Lafayette, whose name was so closely associated
with the humiliations of the Court in 1789. Richelieu received the news
with dismay, and on his return to Paris took steps which ended in the
dismissal of Decazes, and the offer of a seat in the Cabinet to Villèle,
the Ultra-Royalist leader. But the attempted combination failed. Richelieu
accordingly withdrew from office; and a new Ministry was formed, of which
Decazes, who had proved himself more powerful than his assailants, was the
real though not the nominal chief.
[Election of Grégoire, Sept., 1819.]
The victory of the young and popular statesman was seen with extreme
displeasure by all the foreign Courts, nor was his success an enduring one.
For awhile the current of Liberal opinion in France and the favour of King
Louis XVIII. enabled Decazes to hold his own against the combinations of
his opponents and the ill-will of all the most powerful men in Europe. An
attack made on the Electoral Law by the Upper House was defeated by the
creation of sixty new Peers, among whom there were several who had been
expelled in 1815. But the forces of Liberalism soon passed beyond the
Minister's own control, and his steady dependence upon Louis XVIII. now
raised against him as resolute an opposition among the enemies of the House
of Bourbon as among the Ultra-Royalists. In the elections of 1819 the
candidates of the Ministry were beaten by men of more pronounced opinions.
Among the new members there was one whose victory caused great astonishment
and alarm. The ex-bishop Grégoire, one of the authors of the destruction of
the old French Church in 1790, and mover of the resolution which
established the Republic in 1792, was brought forward from his retirement
and elected Deputy by the town of Grenoble. To understand the panic caused
by this election we must recall, not the events of the Revolution, but the
legends of them which were current in 1819. The history of Grégoire by no
means justifies the outcry which was raised against him; his real actions,
however, formed the smallest part of the things that were alleged or
believed by his enemies. It was said he had applauded the execution of King
Louis XVI., when he had in fact protested against it: [303] his courageous
adherence to the character of a Christian priest throughout the worst days
of the Convention, his labours in organising the Constitutional Church when
the choice lay between that and national atheism, were nothing, or worse
than nothing, in the eyes of men who felt themselves to be the despoiled
heirs of that rich and aristocratic landed society, called the Feudal
Church, which Grégoire had been so active in breaking up. Unluckily for
himself, Grégoire, though humane in action, had not abstained from the
rhodomontades against kings in general which were the fashion in 1793.
Louis XVIII., forgetting that he had himself lately made the regicide
Fouché a Minister, interpreted Grégoire's election by the people of
Grenoble, to which the Ultra-Royalists had cunningly contributed, as a
threat against the Bourbon family. He showed the displeasure usual with him
when any slight was offered to his personal dignity, and drew nearer to his
brother Artois and the Ultra-Royalists, whom he had hitherto shunned as his
favourite Minister's worst enemies. Decazes, true to his character as the
King's friend, now confessed that he had gone too far in the legislation of
1817, and that the Electoral Law, under which such a monster as Grégoire
could gain a seat, required to be altered. A project of law was sketched,
designed to restore the preponderance in the constituencies to the landed
aristocracy. Grégoire's election was itself invalidated; and the Ministers
who refused to follow Decazes in his new policy of compromise were
dismissed from their posts.
[Murder of the Duke of Berry, Feb. 13, 1820.]
[Reaction sets in.]
[Fall of Decazes. Richelieu Minister, Feb., 1820.]
A few months more passed, and an event occurred which might have driven a
stronger Government than that of Louis XVIII. into excesses of reaction.
The heirs to the Crown next in succession to the Count of Artois were his
two sons, the Dukes of Angoulême and Berry. Angoulême was childless; the
Duke of Berry was the sole hope of the elder Bourbon line, which, if he
should die without a son, would, as a reigning house, become extinct, the
Crown of France not descending to a female. [304] The circumstance which
made Berry's life so dear to Royalists made his destruction the
all-absorbing purpose of an obscure fanatic, who abhorred the Bourbon
family as the lasting symbol of the foreigner's victory over France.
Louvel, a working man, had followed Napoleon to exile in Elba. After
returning to his country he had dogged the footsteps of the Bourbon princes
for years together, waiting for the chance of murder. On the night of the
13th of February, 1820, he seized the Duke of Berry as he was leaving the
Opera House, and plunged a knife into his breast. The Duke lingered for
some hours, and expired early the next morning in the presence of King
Louis XVIII., the Princes, and all the Ministers. Terrible as the act was,
it was the act of a single resolute mind: no human being had known of
Louvel's intention. But it was impossible that political passion should
await the quiet investigation of a law-court. No murder ever produced a
stronger outburst of indignation among the governing classes, or was more
skilfully turned to the advantage of party. The Liberals felt that their
cause was lost. While fanatical Ultra-Royalists, abandoning themselves to a
credulity worthy of the Reign of Terror, accused Decazes himself of
complicity with the assassin, their leaders fixed upon the policy which was
to be imposed on the King. It was in vain that Decazes brought forward his
reactionary Electoral Law, and proposed to invest the officers of State
with arbitrary powers of arrest and to re-establish the censorship of the
Press. The Count of Artois insisted upon the dismissal of the Minister, as
the only consolation which could be given to him for the murder of his son
The King yielded; and, as an Ultra-Royalist administration was not yet
possible, Richelieu unwillingly returned to office, assured by Artois that
his friends had no other desire than to support his own firm and temperate
rule.
[Progress of the reaction in France.]
[Ultra-Royalist Ministry, Dec., 1821.]
[The Congregation.]
Returning to power under such circumstances, Richelieu became, in spite of
himself, the Minister of reaction. The Press was fettered, the legal
safeguards of personal liberty were suspended, the electoral system was
transformed by a measure which gave a double vote to men of large property.
So violent were the passions which this retrograde march of Government
excited, that for a moment Paris seemed to be on the verge of revolution.
Tumultuous scenes occurred in the streets; but the troops, on whom
everything depended, obeyed the orders given to them, and the danger passed
away. The first elections under the new system reduced the Liberal party to
impotence, and brought back to the Chamber a number of men who had sat in
the reactionary Parliament of 1816. Villèle and other Ultra-Royalists were
invited to join Richelieu's Cabinet. For awhile it seemed as if the
passions of Church and aristocracy might submit to the curb of a practical
statesmanship, friendly, if not devoted, to their own interests. But
restraint was soon cast aside. The Count of Artois saw the road to power
open, and broke his promise of supporting the Minister who had taken office
at his request. Censured and thwarted in the Chamber of Deputies, Richelieu
confessed that he had undertaken a hopeless task, and bade farewell to
public life. King Louis, now nearing the grave, could struggle no longer
against the brother who was waiting to ascend his throne. The next Ministry
was nominated not by the King but by Artois. Around Villèle, the real head
of the Cabinet, there was placed a body of men who represented not the new
France, or even that small portion of it which was called to exercise the
active rights of citizenship, but the social principles of a past age, and
that Catholic or Ultramontane revival which was now freshening the surface
but not stirring the depths of the great mass of French religious
indifference. A religious society known as the Congregation, which had
struck its first roots under the storm of Republican persecution, and grown
up during the Empire, a solitary yet unobserved rallying-place for Catholic
opponents of Napoleon's despotism, now expanded into a great organism of
government. The highest in blood and in office sought membership in it: its
patronage raised ambitious men to the stations they desired, its hostility
made itself felt against the small as well as against the great. The spirit
which now gained the ascendancy in French government was clerical even more
than it was aristocratic. It was monarchical too, but rather from dislike
to the secularist tone of Liberalism and from trust in the orthodoxy of the
Count of Artois than from any fixed belief in absolutist principles. There
might be good reason to oppose King Louis XVIII.; but what priest, what
noble, could doubt the divine right of a prince who was ready to compensate
the impoverished emigrants out of the public funds, and to commit the whole
system of public education to the hands of the clergy?
[Bourbon rule before and after 1821.]
In the middle class of France, which from this time began to feel itself in
opposition to the Bourbon Government, there had been no moral change
corresponding to that which made so great a difference between the
governing authority of 1819 and that of 1822. Public opinion, though
strongly affected, was not converted into something permanently unlike
itself by the murder of the Duke of Berry. The courtiers, the devotees, the
great ladies, who had laid a bold hand upon power, had not the nation on
their side, although for a while the nation bore their sway submissively.
But the fate of the Bourbon monarchy was in fact decided when Artois and
his confidants became its representatives. France might have forgotten that
the Bourbons owed their throne to foreign victories; it could not be
governed in perpetuity by what was called the _Parti Prêtre_. Twenty
years taken from the burden of age borne by Louis XVIII., twenty years of
power given to Decazes, might have prolonged the rule of the restored
family perhaps for some generations. If military pride found small
satisfaction in the contrast between the Napoleonic age and that which
immediately succeeded it, there were enough parents who valued the blood of
their children, there were enough speakers and writers who valued the
liberty of discussion, enough capitalists who valued quiet times, for the
new order to be recognised as no unhopeful one. France has indeed seldom
had a better government than it possessed between 1816 and 1820, nor could
an equal period be readily named during which the French nation, as a
whole, enjoyed greater happiness.
[General causes of the victory of reaction in Europe.]
Political reaction had reached its full tide in Europe generally about five
years after the end of the great war. The phenomena were by no means the
same in all countries, nor were the accidents of personal influence without
a large share in the determination of events: yet, underlying all
differences, we may trace the operation of certain great causes which were
not limited by the boundaries of individual States. The classes in which
any fixed belief in constitutional government existed were nowhere very
large; outside the circle of state officials there was scarcely any one who
had had experience in the conduct of public affairs. In some countries, as
in Russia and Prussia, the conception of progress towards self-government
had belonged in the first instance to the holders of power: it had
exercised the imagination of a Czar, or appealed to the understanding of a
Prussian Minister, eager, in the extremity of ruin, to develop every
element of worth and manliness existing within his nation. The cooling of a
warm fancy, the disappearance of external dangers, the very agitation which
arose when the idea of liberty passed from the rulers to their subjects,
sufficed to check the course of reform. And by the side of the Kings and
Ministers who for a moment had attached themselves to constitutional
theories there stood the old privileged orders, or what remained of them,
the true party of reaction, eager to fan the first misgivings and alarms of
Sovereigns, and to arrest a development more prejudicial to their own power
and importance than to the dignity and security of the Crown. Further,
there existed throughout Europe the fatal and ineradicable tradition of the
convulsions of the first Revolution, and of the horrors of 1793. No votary
of absolutism, no halting and disquieted friend of freedom, could ever be
at a loss for images of woe in presaging the results of popular
sovereignty; and the action of one or two infatuated assassins owed its
wide influence on Europe chiefly to the ancient name and memory of
Jacobinism.
There was also in the very fact that Europe had been restored to peace by
the united efforts of all the governments something adverse to the success
of a constitutional or a Liberal party in any State. Constitutional systems
had indeed been much praised at the Congress of Vienna; but the group of
men who actually controlled Europe in 1815, and who during the five
succeeding years continued in correspondence and in close personal
intercourse with one another, had, with one exception, passed their lives
in the atmosphere of absolute government, and learnt to regard the conduct
of all great affairs as the business of a small number of very eminent
individuals. Castlereagh, the one Minister of a constitutional State,
belonged to a party which, to a degree almost unequalled in Europe,
identified political duty with the principle of hostility to change. It is
indeed in the correspondence of the English Minister himself, and in
relation to subjects of purely domestic government in England, that the
community of thought which now existed between all the leading statesmen of
Europe finds its most singular exhibition. Both Metternich and Hardenberg
took as much interest in the suppression of Lancashire Radicalism, and in
the measures of coercion which the British Government thought it necessary
to pass in the year 1819, as in the chastisement of rebellious pamphleteers
upon the Rhine, and in the dissolution of the students' clubs at Jena. It
was indeed no very great matter for the English people, who were now close
upon an era of reform, that Castlereagh received the congratulations of
Vienna and Berlin for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and the right of
public meeting, [305] or that Metternich believed that no one but himself
knew the real import of the shouts with which the London mob greeted Sir
Francis Burdett. [306] Neither the impending reform of the English Criminal
Law nor the emancipation of Irish Catholics resulted from the enlightenment
of foreign Courts, or could be hindered by their indifference. But on the
Continent of Europe the progress towards constitutional freedom was indeed
likely to be a slow and a chequered one when the Ministers of absolutism
formed so close and intimate a band, when the nations contained within them
such small bodies of men in any degree versed in public affairs, and when
the institutions on which it was proposed to base the liberty of the future
were so destitute of that strength which springs from connection with the
past.