Part 104

These outbreaks of the revolutionary spirit were alarming to the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance and excited them to a vigorous activity. They convened a Congress, first at Troppau, in October, 1820, afterwards at Laybach, and finally at Verona, to plan concerted action for the suppressing of the popular movements of the time. As the result of these conferences, the congenial duty of restoring absolutism in the Two Sicilies, and of helping the King of Sardinia against his subjects, was imposed upon Austria and willingly performed; while the Bourbon court of France was solicited to put an end to the bad example of constitutional government in Spain. Both commissions were executed with fidelity and zeal. Italy was flung down and fettered again; French troops occupied Spain from 1823 until 1827. England, alone, protested against this flagrant policing of Europe by the Holy Alliance. Canning, its spirited minister, "called in the New World," as he described his policy, "to redress the balance of the old," by recognizing the independence of the Spanish colonies in America, which, Cuba excepted, were now separated forever from the crown of Spain. Brazil in like manner was cut loose from the Portuguese crown, and assumed the constitution of an empire, under Dom Pedro, the eldest son of John VI.

Greek War of Independence.

These stifled revolutions in western Europe failed to discourage a more obstinate insurrection which began in the East, among the Christian subjects of the Turks, in 1821. The Ottoman government had been growing weaker and more vicious for many years. The corrupted and turbulent Janissaries were the masters of the empire, and a sultan who attempted, as Selim III. (1789-1807) had done, to introduce reforms, was put to death. Russia, under Alexander I., had been continuing to gain ground at the expense of the Turks, and assuming more and more of a patronage of the Christian subjects of the Porte. There seems to be little doubt that the rising begun in 1821, which had its start in Moldavia, and its first leader in a Greek, Ypsilanti, who had been an officer in the Russian service, received encouragement from the Czar. But Alexander turned his back on it when the Greeks sprang to arms and seriously appealed to Europe for help in a war of national independence. The Congress of Verona condemned the Greek rising, in common with that of Spain. Again, England alone showed sympathy, but did nothing as a government, and left the struggling Greeks to such help as they might win from individual friends. Lord Byron, with others, went to Greece, carrying money and arms; and, generally, these volunteers lost much of their ardor in the Greek cause when they came into close contact with its native supporters. But the Greeks, however lacking in high qualities, made an obstinate fight, and held their ground against the Turks, until the feeling of sympathy with them had grown too strong in England and in France for the governments of those countries to be heedless of it. Moreover, in Russia, Alexander I. had been succeeded (1825) by the aggressive Nicholas, who had not patience to wait for the slow crumbling of the Ottoman power, but was determined to break it as summarily as he could. He joined France and England, therefore, in an alliance and in a naval demonstration against the Turks (1827), which had its result in the battle of Navarino. The allies of Nicholas went no farther; but he pursued the undertaking, in a war which lasted until the autumn of 1829. Turkey at the end of it conceded the independence of Greece, and practically that of Wallachia and Moldavia. In 1830, a conference at London established the Greek kingdom, and in 1833 a Bavarian prince, Otho I., was settled on the throne.

Revolutions of 1830.

Before this result was reached, revolution in western Europe, arrested in 1821-23, had broken out afresh. Bourbonism had become unendurable to France. Charles X., who succeeded his brother Louis XVIII; in 1824, showed not only a more arbitrary temper, but a disposition more deferential to the Church than his predecessor. He was fond of the Jesuits, whom his subjects very commonly distrusted and disliked. He attempted to put shackles on the press, and when elections to the chamber of deputies went repeatedly against the government, he undertook practically to alter the suffrage by ordinances of his own. A revolution seemed then to be the only remedy that was open to the nation, and it was adopted in July, 1830, the veteran Lafayette taking the lead. Charles X. was driven to abdication, and left France for England. The crown was transferred to Louis Philippe, of the Orleans branch of the Bourbon family,--son of the Philip Égalité who joined the Jacobins in the Revolution.

The July Revolution in France proved a signal for more outbreaks in other parts of Europe than had followed the Spanish rising of ten years before.

Belgium broke away from the union with Holland, which had never satisfied its people, and, after some struggle, won recognized independence, as a new kingdom, with Leopold of Saxe Coburg raised to the throne.

Russian Poland, bearing the name of a constitutional kingdom since 1815, but having the Czar for its king and the Czar's brother for viceroy, found no lighter oppression than before, and made a hopeless, brave attempt to escape from its bonds. The revolt was put down with unmerciful severity, and thousands of the hapless patriots went to exile in Siberia.

In Germany, there were numerous demonstrations in the smaller states, which succeeded more or less in extorting constitutional concessions; but there was no revolutionary movement on a larger scale.

Italy remained quiet in both the north and the south, where disturbances had arisen before; but commotions occurred in the Papal states, and in Modena and Parma, which required the arms of Austria to suppress.

In England, the agitations of the continent hastened forward a revolution which went far beyond all other popular movements of the time in the lasting importance of its effects, and which exhibited in their first great triumph the peaceful forces of the Platform and the Press.

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England under the last two Georges.

But we have given little attention to affairs in Great Britain during the past half century or more, and need to glance backward.

Under the third of the Georges, there was distinctly a check given to the political progress which England had been making since the Revolution of 1688. The wilfulness of the king fairly broke down, for a considerable period, the system of responsible cabinet government which had been taking shape and root under the two earlier Hanoverians, and ministers became again, for a time, mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The rupture with the American colonies, and the unsuccessful war which ended in their independence, brought in another influence, adverse, for the time being, to popular claims in government. For it was not King George, alone, nor Lord North, nor any small Tory faction, that prosecuted and upheld the attempt to make the colonists in America submissive to "taxation without representation." The English nation at large approved the war; English national sentiment was hostile to the Americans in their independent attitude, and the Whigs--the liberals then in English politics--were a discredited and weakened party for many years because of their leaning to the American side of the questions in dispute. Following close upon the American war, came the French Revolution, which frightened into Toryism great numbers of people who did not by nature belong there. In England, as everywhere else, the reaction lasted long, and government was more arbitrary and repressive than it could possibly have continued to be under different circumstances.

Meantime extraordinary social changes had taken place, which tended to mark more strongly the petrifying of things in the political world. The great age of mechanical invention had been fully opened. Machines had begun to do the work of human hands in every industry, and steam had begun to move the machines. The organization of labor, too, had assumed a new phase. The factory system had arisen; and with it had appeared a new growth of cities and towns. Production was accelerated; wealth was accumulating more rapidly, and the distribution of wealth was following different lines. The English middle class was rising fast as a money-power and was gathering the increased energies of the kingdom into its hands.

Parliamentary Reform in England.

But while the tendency of social changes had been to increase vastly the importance of this powerful middle class, the political conditions had actually diminished its weight in public affairs. In Parliament, it had no adequate representation. The old boroughs, which sent members to the House of Commons as they had sent them for generations before, no longer contained a respectable fraction of the "commons of England," supposed to be represented in the House, and those who voted in the boroughs were not at all the better class of the new England of the nineteenth century. Great numbers of the boroughs were mere private estates, and the few votes polled in them were cast by tenants who elected their landlords' nominees. On the other hand, the large cities and the numerous towns of recent growth had either no representation in Parliament, or they had equal representation with the "rotten boroughs" which cast two or three or half-a-dozen votes.

That the commons of England, with all the gain of substantial strength they had been making in the last half of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, endured this travesty of popular representation so long as until 1832, is proof of the potency of the conservatism which the French Revolution induced. The subject of parliamentary reform had been now and then discussed since Chatham's time; but Toryism had always been able to thrust it aside and bring the discussion to naught. At last there came the day when the question would no longer be put down. The agitations of 1830, combined with a very serious depression of industry and trade, produced a state of feeling which could not be defied. King and Parliament yielded to the public demand, and the First Reform Bill was passed. It widened the suffrage and amended very considerably the inequities of the parliamentary representation; but both reforms have been carried much farther since, by two later bills.

Repeal of the English Corn Laws.

The reform of Parliament soon brought a broader spirit into legislation. Its finest fruits began to ripen about 1838, when an agitation for the repeal of the foolish and wicked English "corn-laws" was opened by Cobden and Bright. In the day of the "rotten boroughs," when the landlords controlled Parliament, they imagined that they had "protected" the farming interest, and secured higher rents to themselves, by laying heavy duties on the importation of foreign bread-stuffs. A famous "sliding scale" of such duties had been invented, which raised the duties when prices in the home market dropped, and lowered them proportionately when home prices rose. Thus the consumers were always deprived, as much as possible, of any cheapening of their bread which bountiful Nature might offer, and paid a heavy tax to increase the gains of the owners and cultivators of land.

Now that other "interests" besides the agricultural had a voice in Parliament, and had become very strong, they began to cry out against this iniquity, and demand that the "corn laws" be done away with. The famous "anti-corn-law league," organized mainly by the exertions of Richard Cobden, conducted an agitation of the question which brought about the repeal of the laws in 1846.

But the effect of the agitation did not end there. So thorough and prolonged a discussion of the matter had enlightened the English people upon the whole question between "protection" and free trade. The manufacturers and mechanics, who had led the movement against protective duties on food-stuffs, were brought to see that they were handicapped more than protected by duties on imports in their own departments of production. So Cobden and his party continued their attacks on the theory of "protection" until every vestige of it was cleared from the English statute books.

The Revolutions of 1848.

Another year of revolutions throughout Europe came in 1848, and the starting point of excitement was not, this time, at Paris, but, strangely enough, in the Vatican, at Rome. Pius IX. had been elected to the papal chair in 1846, and had immediately rejoiced the hearts and raised the hopes of the patriots in misgoverned Italy by his liberal measures of reform and his promising words. The attitude of the Pope gave encouragement to popular demonstrations in various Italian states during the later part of 1847; and in January 1848 a formidable rising occurred in Sicily, followed in February by another in Naples. King Ferdinand II. was compelled to change his ministers and to concede a constitution, which he did not long respect.

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Lombardy was slow this time in being kindled; but when the flame of revolution burst out it was very fierce. The Austrians were driven first from Milan (March, 1848), and then from city after city, until they seemed to be abandoning their Italian possessions altogether. Venice asserted its republican independence under the presidency of Daniel Manin. Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, thought the time favorable for recovering Lombardy to himself, and declared war against Austria. The expulsion of the Austrians became the demand of the entire peninsula, and even the Pope, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the King of Naples were forced to join the patriotic movement in appearance, though not with sincerity. But the King of Sardinia brought ruin on the whole undertaking, by sustaining a fatal defeat in battle at Custozza, in July, 1848.

France had been for some time well prepared for revolt, and was quick to be moved by the first whisper of it from Italy. The short-lived popularity of Louis Philippe was a thing of the past. There was widespread discontent with many things, and especially with the limited suffrage. The French people had the desire and the need of something like that grand measure of electoral reform which England secured so peacefully in 1832; but they could not reach it in the peaceful way. The aptitude and the habit of handling and directing the great forces of public opinion effectively in such a situation were alike wanting among them. There was a mixture, moreover, of social theories and dreams in their political undertaking, which heated the movement and made it more certainly explosive. The Parisian mob took arms and built barricades on the 23d of February. The next day Louis Philippe signed an abdication, and a week later he was an exile in England. For the remainder of the year France was strangely ruled: first by a self-constituted provisional government, Lamartine at its head, which opened national workshops, and attempted to give employment and pay to 125,000 enrolled citizens in need; afterwards by a Constituent National Assembly, and an Executive Commission, which found the national workshops a devouring monster, difficult to control and hard to destroy. Paris got rid of the shops in June, at the cost of a battle which lasted four days, and in which more than 8,000 people were wounded or slain. In November a republican constitution, framed by the Assembly, was adopted, and on the 10th of December Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Louis Bonaparte, once King of Holland, and of Hortense Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine, was elected President of the Republic by an enormous popular vote.

The revolutionary shock of 1848 was felt in Germany soon after the fall of the monarchy in France. In March there was rioting in Berlin and a collision with the troops, which alarmed the king so seriously that he yielded promises to almost every demand. Similar risings in other capitals had about the same success. At Vienna, the outbreak was more violent and drove both Metternich and the Emperor from the city. In the first flush of these popular triumphs there came about a most hopeful-looking election of a Germanic National Assembly, representative of all Germany, and gathered at Frankfort, on the invitation of the Diet, for a revision of the constitution of the Confederation. But the Assembly contained more learned scholars than practical statesmen, and its constitutional work was wasted labor. A Constituent Assembly elected in Prussia accomplished no more, and was dispersed in the end without resistance; but the king granted a constitution of his own framing. The revolutionary movement in Germany left its effects, in a general loosening of the bonds of harsh government, a general broadening of political ideas, a final breaking of the Metternich influence, even in Austria; but it passed over the existing institutions of the much-divided country with a very light touch.

In Hungary the revolution, stimulated by the eloquence of Kossuth, was carried to the pitch of serious war. The Hungarians had resolved to be an independent nation, and in the struggle which ensued they approached very near the attainment of their desire; but Russia came to the help of the Hapsburgs, and the armies of the two despotisms combined were more than the Hungarians could resist. Their revolt was abandoned in August, 1849, and Kossuth, with other leaders, escaped through Turkish territory to other lands.

The suppression of the Hungarian revolt was followed by a complete restoration of the despotism and domination of the Austrians in Italy. Charles Albert, of Sardinia, had taken courage from the struggle in Hungary and had renewed hostilities in March, 1849. But, again, he was crushingly defeated, at Novara, and resigned, in despair, the crown to his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Venice, which had resisted a long siege with heroic constancy, capitulated in August of the same year. The whole of Lombardy and Venetia was bowed once more under the merciless tyranny of the Austrians, and savage revenges were taken upon the patriots who failed to escape. Rome, whence the Pope--no longer a patron of liberal politics--had fled, and where a republic had been once more set up, with Garibaldi and Mazzini in its constituent assembly, was besieged and taken, and the republic overturned, by troops sent from republican France. The Neapolitan king restored his atrocious absolutism without help, by measures of the greatest brutality.

A civil war in Switzerland, which occurred simultaneously with the political collisions in surrounding countries, is hardly to be classed with them. It was rather a religious conflict, between the Roman Catholics and their opponents. The Catholic cantons, united in a League, called the Sonderbund, were defeated in the war; the Jesuits were expelled from Switzerland in consequence, and, in September, 1848, a new constitution for the confederacy was adopted.

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The Second Empire in France.

The election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency of the French 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.