Republic was ominous of a disposition among the people to
bring back a Napoleonic regime, with all the falsities that it
might imply. He so construed the vote which elected him, and
does not seem to have been mistaken. Having surrounded himself
with unprincipled adventurers, and employed three years of his
presidency in preparations for the attempt, he executed a coup
d' état on the 2d of December, dispersing the National
Assembly, arresting influential republicans, and submitting to
popular vote a new constitution which prolonged his presidency
to ten years. This was but the first step. A year later he
secured a "plébiscite" which made him hereditary Emperor of
the French. The new Empire--the Second Empire in France--was
more vulgar, more false, more fraudulent, more swarmingly a
nest of self-seeking and dishonest adventurers, than the First
had been, and with nothing of the saving genius that was in
the First. It rotted for eighteen years, and then it fell,
France with it.
The Crimean War.
A certain respectability was lent to this second Napoleonic
Empire by the alliance of England with it in 1854, against
Russia. The Czar, Nicholas, had determined to defy resistance
in Europe to his designs against the Turks. He first
endeavored to persuade England to join him in dividing the
possessions of "the sick man," as he described the Ottoman,
and, that proposal being declined, he opened on his own
account a quarrel with the Porte. France and England joined
forces in assisting the Turks, and the little kingdom of
Sardinia, from motives of far-seeing policy, came into the
alliance. The principal campaign of the war was fought in the
Crimea, and its notable incident was the long siege of
Sebastopol, which the Russians defended until September, 1855.
An armistice was concluded the following January, and the
terms of peace were settled at a general conference of powers
in Paris the next March. The results of the war were a check
to Russia, but an improvement of the condition of the Sultan's
Christian subjects. Moldavia and Wallachia were soon
afterwards united under the name of Roumania, paying tribute
to the Porte, but otherwise independent.
Liberation and Unification of Italy.
The part taken by Sardinia in the Crimean War gave that
kingdom a standing in European politics which had never been
recognized before. It was a measure of sagacious policy due to
the able statesman, Count Cavour, who had become the trusted
minister of Victor Emmanuel, the Sardinian king. The king and
his minister were agreed in one aim--the unification of Italy
under the headship of the House of Savoy. By her participation
in the war with Russia, Sardinia won a position which enabled
her to claim and secure admission to the Congress of Paris,
among the greater powers. At that conference, Count Cavour
found an opportunity to direct attention to the deplorable
state of affairs in Italy, under the Austrian rule and
influence. No action by the Congress was taken; but the
Italian question was raised in importance at once by the
discussion of it, and Italy was rallied to the side of
Sardinia as the necessary head of any practicable movement
toward liberation. More than that: France was moved to
sympathy with the Italian cause, and Louis Napoleon was led to
believe that his throne would be strengthened by espousing it.
He encouraged Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, therefore, in an
attitude toward Austria which resulted in war (1859), and when
the Sardinians were attacked he went to their assistance with
a powerful force. At Magenta and Solferino the Austrians were
decisively beaten, and the French emperor then abruptly closed
the war, making a treaty which ceded Lombardy alone to
Sardinia, leaving Venetia still under the oppressor, and the
remainder of Italy unchanged in its state. For payment of the
service he had rendered, Louis Napoleon exacted Savoy and
Nice, and Victor Emmanuel was compelled to part with the
original seat of his House.
There was bitter disappointment among the Italian patriots
over the meagerness of the fruit yielded by the splendid
victories of Magenta and Solferino. Despite the treaty of
Villafranca, they were determined to have more, and they did.
Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna demanded annexation to
Sardinia, and, after a plébiscite, they were received (March,
1860) into the kingdom and represented in its parliament. In
the Two Sicilies there was an intense longing for deliverance
from the brutalities of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Victor
Emmanuel could not venture an attack upon the rotten kingdom,
for fear of resentments in France and elsewhere. But the
adventurous soldier, Garibaldi, now took on himself the task
of completing the liberation of Italy. With an army of
volunteers, he first swept the Neapolitans out of Sicily, and
then took Naples itself, within the space of four months,
between May and September, 1860. The whole dominion was
annexed to what now became the Kingdom of Italy, and which
embraced the entire peninsula except Rome, garrisoned for the
Pope by French troops, and Venetia, still held in the clutches
of Austria. In 1862, Garibaldi raised volunteers for an attack
on Rome; but the unwise movement was suppressed by Victor
Emmanuel. Two years later, the King of Italy brought about an
agreement with the French emperor to withdraw his garrison
from Rome, and, after that had been done, the annexation of
Rome to the Italian kingdom was a mere question of time. It
came about in 1870, after the fall of Louis Napoleon, and
Victor Emmanuel transferred his capital to the Eternal City.
The Pope's domain was then limited to the precincts of the
Vatican.
The Austro-Prussian War.
The unification of Italy was the first of a remarkable series
of nationalizing movements which have been the most
significant feature of the history of the last half of the
nineteenth century. The next of these movements to begin was
in Germany--the much divided country of one peculiarly
homogeneous and identical race. Influences tending toward
unification had been acting on the Germans since Prussia rose
to superiority in the north. By the middle of the century, the
educated, military Prussia that was founded after 1806 had
become a power capable of great things in capable hands; and
the capable hands received it. In 1861, William I. succeeded
his brother as king; in 1862, Otto von Bismarck became his
prime minister. It was a remarkable combination of qualities
and talents, and remarkable results came from it.
{1101}
In 1864, Prussia and Austria acted together in taking
Schleswig and Holstein, as German states, from Denmark. The
next year they quarreled over the administration of the
duchies. In 1866, they fought, and Austria was entirely
vanquished in a "seven weeks war." The superiority of Prussia,
organized by her great military administrator and soldier,
Moltke, was overpowering. Her rival was left completely at her
mercy. But Bismarck and his king were wisely magnanimous. They
refrained from inflicting on the Austrians a humiliation that
would rankle and keep enmities alive. They foresaw the need of
future friendship between the two powers of central Europe, as
against Russia on the one side and France on the other, and
they shaped their policy to secure it. It sufficed them to
have put Austria out of the German circle, forever; to have
ended the false relation in which the Hapsburgs--rulers of an
essentially Slavonic and Magyar dominion--had stood towards
Germany so long.
Prussia now dominated the surrounding German states so
commandingly that the mode and the time of their unification
may be said to have been within her own control. Hanover,
Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Schleswig-Holstein, and Frankfort were
incorporated in the Prussian kingdom at once. Saxony and the
other states of the north were enveloped in a North German
Confederation, with the King of Prussia for its hereditary
president and commander of its forces. The states of southern
Germany were left unfederated for the time being, but bound
themselves by treaty to put their armies at the disposal of
Prussia. Thus Germany as a whole was already made practically
one power, under the control of King William and his great
minister.
Final Expulsion of Austria from Italy.
The same war which unified Germany carried forward the
nationalization of Italy another step. Victor Emmanuel had
shrewdly entered into an alliance with Prussia before the war
began, and attacked Austria in Venetia simultaneously with the
German attack on the Bohemian side. The Italians were beaten
at Custozza, and their navy was defeated in the Adriatic; but
the victorious Prussians exacted Venetia for them in the
settlement of peace, and Austria had no more footing in the
peninsula.
Austria-Hungary.
It is greatly to the credit of Austria, long blinded and
stupefied by the narcotic of absolutism, that the lessons of
the war of 1866 sank deep into her mind and produced a very
genuine enlightenment. The whole policy of the court of Vienna
was changed, and with it the constitution of the Empire. The
statesmen of Hungary were called into consultation with the
statesmen of Austria, and the outcome of their discussions was
an agreement which swept away the old Austria, holding Hungary
in subjection, and created in its place a new power--a federal
Austria-Hungary--equalized in its two principal parts, and
united under the same sovereign with distinct constitutions.
The Franco-German War.
The surprising triumph of Prussia in the Seven Weeks War stung
Louis Napoleon with a jealousy which he could not conceal. He
was incapable of perceiving what it signified,--of perfection
in the organization of the Prussian kingdom and of power in
its resources. He was under illusions as to the strength of
his own Empire. It had been honeycombed by the rascalities
that attended and surrounded him, and he did not know it. He
imagined France to be capable of putting a check on Prussian
aggrandizement; and he began very early after Sadowa to pursue
King William with demands which were tolerably certain to end
in war. When the war came, in July, 1870, it was by his own
declaration; yet Prussia was prepared for it and France was
not. In six weeks time from the declaration of war,--in one
month from the first action,--Napoleon himself was a prisoner
of war in the hands of the Germans, surrendered at Sedan, with
the whole army which he personally commanded; the Empire was in
collapse, and a provisional government had taken the direction
of affairs. On the 20th of September Paris was invested; on
the 28th of October Baznine, with an army of 150,000 men,
capitulated at Metz. A hopeless attempt to rally the nation to
fresh efforts of defence in the interior, on the Loire, was
valiantly made under the lead of Gambetta; but it was too
late. When the year closed, besieged Paris was at the verge of
starvation and all attempts to relieve the city had failed. On
the 28th of January, 1871, an armistice was sought and
obtained; on the 30th, Paris was surrendered and the Germans
entered it. The treaty of peace negotiated subsequently ceded
Alsace to Germany, with a fifth of Lorraine, and bound France
to pay a war indemnity of five milliards of francs.
The Paris Commune.
In February, 1871, the provisional "Government of National
Defense" gave way to a National Assembly, duly elected under
the provisions of the armistice, and an executive was
instituted at Bordeaux, under the presidency of M. Thiers.
Early in March, the German forces were withdrawn from Paris,
and control of the city was immediately seized by that
dangerous element--Jacobinical, or Red Republican, or
Communistic, as it may be variously described--which always
shows itself with promptitude and power in the French capital,
at disorderly times. The Commune was proclaimed, and the
national government was defied. From the 2d of April until the
28th of May Paris was again under siege, this time by forces
of the French government, fighting to overcome the
revolutionists within. The proceedings of the latter were more
wantonly destructive than those of the Terrorists of the
Revolution, and scarcely less sanguinary. The Commune was
suppressed in the end with great severity.
The Third French Republic.
M. Thiers held the presidency of the Third Republic in France
until 1873, when he resigned and was succeeded by Marshal
MacMahon. In 1875 the constitution which has since remained,
with some amendments, in force, was framed and adopted. In
1878 Marshal MacMahon gave place to M. Jules Grévy, and the
latter to M. Sadi Carnot in 1887. Republican government seems
to be firmly and permanently established in France at last.
The country is in a prosperous state, and nothing but its
passionate desire to recover Alsace and to avenge Sedan
appears threatening to its future.
{1102}
The new German Empire.
While the army of the Germans was still besieging Paris, and
King William and Prince Bismarck were at Versailles, in
January, 1871, the last act which completed the unification
and nationalization of Germany was performed. This was the
assumption of the title of Emperor by King William, in
response to the prayer of the princes of Germany and of the
North German Parliament. On the 16th of the following April, a
constitution for the German Empire was proclaimed.
The long and extraordinary reign of the Emperor William I. was
ended by his death in 1888. His son, Frederick III., was dying
at the time of an incurable disease, and survived his father
only three months. The son of Frederick III., William II.,
signalized the beginning of his reign by dismissing, after a
few months, the great minister, Count Bismarck, on whom his
strong grandfather had leaned, and who had wrought such
marvels of statesmanship and diplomacy for the German race.
What may lie at the end of the reign which had this
self-sufficient beginning is not to be foretold.
The Russo-Turkish War.
Since the Franco-German War of 1870-1871, the peace of Europe
has been broken but once by hostilities within the European
boundary. In 1875 a rising against the unendurable misrule of
the Turks began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was imitated
the next year in Bulgaria. Servia and Montenegro declared war
against Turkey and were overcome. Russia then espoused the
cause of the struggling Slavs, and opened, in 1877, a most
formidable new attempt to crush the Ottoman power, and to
accomplish her coveted extension to the Mediterranean. From
May until the following January the storm of war raged
fiercely along the Balkans. The Turks fought stubbornly, but
they were beaten back, and nothing but a dangerous opposition
of feeling among the other powers in Europe stayed the hand of
the Czar from being laid upon Constantinople. The powers
required a settlement of the peace between Russia and Turkey
to be made by a general Congress, and it was held at Berlin in
June, 1878. Bulgaria was divided by the Congress into two
states, one tributary to the Turk, but freely governed, the
other subject to Turkey, but under a Christian governor. This
arrangement was set aside seven years later by a bloodless
revolution, which formed one Bulgaria in nominal relations of
dependence upon the Porte. This was the third important
nationalizing movement within a quarter of a century, and it
is likely to go farther in southeastern Europe, until it
settles, perhaps, "the Eastern question," so far as the
European side of it is concerned.
Bosnia and Herzegovina were given to Austria by the Congress
of Berlin; the independence of Roumania, Servia, and
Montenegro was made more complete; the island of Cyprus was
turned over to Great Britain for administration.
Spain in the last half Century.
A few words will tell sufficiently the story of Spain since
the successor of Joseph Bonaparte quitted the scene. Ferdinand
VII. died in 1833, and his infant daughter was proclaimed
queen, as Isabella II., with her mother, Christina, regent.
Isabella's title was disputed by Don Carlos, the late king's
brother, and a civil war between Carlists and Christinos went
on for years. When Isabella came of age she proved to be a
dissolute woman, with strong proclivities toward arbitrary
government. A liberal party, and even a republican party, had
been steadily gaining ground in Spain, and the queen placed
herself in conflict with it. In 1868 a revolution drove her
into France. The revolutionists offered the crown to a prince
distantly related to the royal family of Prussia. It was this
incident that gave Louis Napoleon a pretext for quarreling
with the King of Prussia in 1870 and declaring war. Declined
by the Hohenzollern prince, the Spanish crown was then offered
to Amadeo, son of the King of Italy, who accepted it, but
resigned it again in 1873, after a reign of two years, in
disgust with the factions which troubled him. Castelar, the
distinguished republican orator, then formed a republican
government which held the reins for a few months, but could
not establish order in the troubled land. The monarchy was
restored in December, 1874, by the coronation of Alfonso XII.,
son of the exiled Isabella. Since that time Spain has
preserved a tolerably peaceful and contented state.
England and Ireland.
In recent years, the part which Great Britain has taken in
Continental affairs has been slight; and, indeed, there has
been little in those affairs to bring about important
international relations. In domestic politics, a single series
of questions, concerning Ireland and the connection of Ireland
with the British part of the United Kingdom, has mastered the
field, overriding all others and compelling the statesmen of
the day to take them in hand. The sudden imperiousness of
these questions affords a peculiar manifestation of the
political conscience in nations which the nineteenth century
has wakened and set astir. Through all the prior centuries of
their subjection, the treatment of the Irish people by the
English was as cruel and as heedless of justice and right as
the treatment of Poles by Russians or of Greeks by Turks. They
were trebly oppressed: as conquered subjects of an alien race,
as religious enemies, as possible rivals in production and
trade. They were deprived of political and civil rights; they
were denied the ministrations of their priests; the better
employments and more honorable professions were closed to
them; the industries which promised prosperity to their
country were suppressed. A small minority of Protestant
colonists became the recognized nation, so far as a
nationality in Ireland was recognized at all. When Ireland was
said to have a Parliament, it was the Parliament of the
minority alone. No Catholic sat in it; no Catholic was
represented in it. When Irishmen were permitted to bear arms,
they were Protestant Irishmen only who formed the privileged
militia. Seven-tenths of the inhabitants of the island were
politically as non-existent as actual serfdom could have made
them. For the most part they were peasants and their state as
such scarcely above the condition of serfs. They owned no
land; their leases were insecure; the laws protected them in
the least possible degree; their landlords were mostly of the
hostile creed and race. No country in Europe showed conditions
better calculated to distress and degrade a people.
{1103}
This was the state of things in Ireland until nearly the end
of the eighteenth century. In 1782 legislative independence
was conceded; but the independent legislature was still the
Parliament in which Protestants sat alone. In 1793 Catholics
were admitted to the franchise; but seats in Parliament were
still denied to them and they must elect Protestants to
represent them. In 1800 the Act of Union, creating the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, extinguished the
Parliament at Dublin and provided for the introduction of
Irish peers and members to represent Irish constituencies in
the greater Parliament at London; but still no Catholic could
take a seat in either House. Not until 1829, after eighteen
years of the fierce agitation which Daniel O'Connell stirred
up, were Catholic disabilities entirely removed and the people
of that faith placed on an equal footing with Protestants in
political and civil rights. O'Connell's agitation was not for
Catholic emancipation alone, but for the repeal of the Act of
Union and the restoration of legislative independence and
national distinctness to Ireland. That desire has been hot in
the Irish heart from the day the Union was accomplished. After
O'Connell's death, there was quiet on the subject for a time.
The fearful famine of 1845-7 deadened all political feeling.
Then there was a recurrence of the passionate animosity to
British rule which had kindled unfortunate rebellions in 1798
and 1803. It produced the Fenian conspiracies, which ran their
course from about 1858 to 1867. But soon after that time Irish
nationalism resumed a more politic temper, and doubled the
energy of its efforts by confining them to peaceful and lawful
ways. The Home Rule movement, which began in 1873, was aimed
at the organization of a compact and well-guided Irish party
in Parliament, to press the demand for legislative
independence and to act with united weight on lines of Irish
policy carefully laid down. This Home Rule party soon acquired
a powerful leader in Mr. Charles Parnell, and was successful
in carrying questions of reform in Ireland to the forefront of
English politics.
Under the influence of its great leader, Mr. Gladstone, the
Liberal party had already, before the Home Rule party came
into the field, begun to adopt measures for the redress of
Irish wrongs. In 1869, the Irish branch of the Church of
England, calling itself the Church of Ireland, was
disestablished. The membership of that church was reckoned to
be one-tenth of the population; but it had been supported by
the taxation of the whole. The Catholics, the Presbyterians
and other dissenters were now released from this unjust
burden. In 1870, a Land Bill--the first of several, which
restrict the power of Irish landlords to oppress their
tenants, and which protect the latter, while opening
opportunities of land-ownership to them--was passed. The land
question became for a time more prominent than the Home Rule
question, and the party of Mr. Parnell was practically
absorbed in an Irish National Land League, formed to force
landlords to a reduction of rents. The methods of coercion
adopted brought the League into collision with the Liberal
Government, notwithstanding the general sympathy of the latter
with Irish complaints. For a time the Irish Nationalists went
into alliance with the English Conservatives; but in 1886 Mr.
Gladstone became convinced, and convinced the majority of his
party, that just and harmonious relations between Ireland and
Great Britain could never be established without the
concession of Home Rule to the former. A bill which he
introduced to that end was defeated in the House of Commons
and Mr. Gladstone resigned. In 1892 he was returned to power,
and in September of the following year he carried in the House
of Commons a bill for the transferring of Irish legislation to
a distinct Parliament at Dublin. It was defeated, however, in
the House of Lords, and the question now rests in an unsettled
state. Mr. Gladstone's retirement from the premiership and
from the leadership of his party, which occurred in March,
1894, may affect the prospects of the measure; but the English
Liberals are committed to its principle, and it appears to be
certain that the Irish question will attain some solution
within no very long time.
Conclusion.
The beginning of the year 1894, when this is written, finds
Europe at peace, as it has been for a number of years. But the
peace is not of friendship, nor of honorable confidence, nor
of good will. The greater nations are lying on their arms, so
to speak, watching one another with strained eyes and with
jealous hearts. France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, are
marshaling armies in the season of peace that, not many years
ago, would have seemed monstrous for war. Exactions of
military service and taxation for military expenditure are
pressed upon their people to the point of last endurance. The
preparation for battle is so vast in its scale, so unceasing,
so increasing, so far in the lead over all other efforts among
men, that it seems like a new affirmation of belief that war
is the natural order of the world.