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.--Königgrätz--
Custozza-Mediation of Napoleon--Treaty of Prague--South Germany--Projects
for compensation to France--Austria and Hungary--Deák--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 régime displeased him, but most of
all he despised its pusillanimity in the conduct of foreign affairs. His
heart indeed was Prussian, not German, and the destiny which created him
the first Emperor of united Germany was not of his own making nor of his
own seeking; but he felt that Prussia ought to hold a far greater station
both in Germany and in Europe than it had held during his brother's reign,
and that the elevation of the State to the position which it ought to
occupy was the task that lay before himself. During the twelve months
preceding the Regency the retirement of the King had not been treated as
more than temporary, and the Prince of Prussia, though constantly at
variance with Manteuffel's Cabinet, had therefore not considered himself at
liberty to remove his brother's advisers. His first act on the assumption
of the constitutional office of Regent was to dismiss the hated Ministry.
Prince Antony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was called to office, and posts
in the Government were given to men well known as moderate Liberals. Though
the Regent stated in clear terms that he had no intention of forming a
Liberal party-administration, his action satisfied public opinion. The
troubles and the failures of 1849 had inclined men to be content with far
less than had been asked years before. The leaders of the more advanced
sections among the Liberals preferred for the most part to remain outside
Parliamentary life rather than to cause embarrassment to the new
Government; and the elections of 1859 sent to Berlin a body of
representatives fully disposed to work with the Regent and his Ministers in
the policy of guarded progress which they had laid down.
[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 Blücher 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 Olmütz 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 Olmütz 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 Zürich 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 Glücksburg 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
Glücksburg, 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.]