J. Holland Rose

“ The causes of awakening have been infinitely various, and have never wholly died away; but it is the special glory of the Nineteenth Century that races which had hitherto lain helpless and well-nigh dead, rose to manhood as if by magic, and shed their blood like water in the effort to secure a free and unfettered existence both for the individual and the nation. It is a true saying of the German historian, Gervinus, "The history of this age will no longer be only a relation of the lives of great men and of princes, but a biography of nations." ”

“ Once away from Berlin, Frederick William found himself launched on a resistless stream of national enthusiasm. At heart he was no less a patriot than the most ardent of the university students; but he knew far better than they the awful risks of war with the French Empire. His little kingdom of 4,700,000 souls, with but half-a-dozen strongholds it could call its own, a realm ravaged by Napoleon's troops alike in war and peace until commerce and credit were but a dim memory—such a land could ill afford to defy an empire ten times as populous and more than ten times as powerful. ”

“ Thrice did the fickle goddess cast Napoleon to the ground in the first two years of his new life, only that his wondrous gifts and sublime self-confidence might tower aloft the more conspicuously, bewildering alike the malcontents of Paris, the generals of the old Empire, the peoples of the Levant, and the statesmen of Britain. Of all these triumphs assuredly the last was not the least. The Peace of Amiens left France the arbitress of Europe, and, by restoring to her all her lost colonies, it promised to place her in the van of the oceanic and colonizing peoples. ”

“ Lowering clouds and pitiless rain robbed the scene of all brilliance, but wreathed it with a certain sombre majesty. On the one side was the fair city, the centre of German art and culture, hastily girdled with redoubts and intrenchments manned now by some 120,000 defenders. Fears and murmurings had vanished as soon as the Emperor appeared; and though in many homes men still longed for the triumph of the allies, yet loyalty to their King and awe of Napoleon held the great mass of the citizens true to his alliance. As for the French soldiery, their enthusiasm was unbounded. ”

“ Finally, there came the crushing blow of the Treaty of Berlin. The Russian people had fought for an ideal: they longed to see the cross take the place of the crescent which for five centuries had flashed defiance to Christendom from the summit of St. Sofia at Constantinople. But Britain's ironclads, Austria's legions, and German diplomacy barred the way in the very hour of triumph; and Russia drew back. To the Slav enthusiasts of Moscow even the Treaty of San Stefano had seemed a dereliction of a sacred duty; that of Berlin seemed the most cowardly of betrayals. ”

“ Pitt, the stately, austere leader of the House of Commons, who, on entering its precincts, fixed his eyes straight on his seat, and tilted his nose loftily in air during his State progress thither, with not so much as a nod to his supporters367—yet here, on the lawn of Lauriston House, is all fun and laughter, sharpening his wit against the edge of Wilberforce’s fancy, answering jest with jest, quotation with quotation, in a fresh mingling of jollity and culture. As yet all is joyous in the lives of the friends. ”

“ It is easy for us now to descant on the virtues of moderation. But how many men would have held on an even course when the guillotine worked its fell work in France, when the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame, and when Jacobinism seemed about to sweep over the Continent? Here, as at so many points, France proved to be the worst foe to ordered liberty. Robespierre and Hébert were the men who assured the doom of Muir and Palmer. A trivial incident will suffice to illustrate the alarm of Englishmen at the assembly of a British Convention. ”

“ Thenceforth France was able to work out her future under the shelter of institutions which unquestionably possess one supreme merit, that of durability. But while the chief civic and material gains of the Revolution were thus perpetuated, the very spirit and life of that great movement were benumbed by the personality and action of Napoleon. The burning enthusiasm for the Rights of Man was quenched, the passion for civic equality survived only as the gibbering ghost of what it had been in 1790, and the consolidation of revolutionary France was effected by a process nearly akin to petrifaction. ”

“ In truth, all the racial hatreds, aspirations, and ambitions that had so long been pent up in the south-east of Europe now seemed on the point of bursting forth and overwhelming civilisation in a common ruin. Just as the earth's volcanic forces now and again threaten to tear their way through the crust, so now the immemorial feuds of Moslems and Christians, of Greeks, Servians, Bulgars, Wallachs, and Turks, promised to desolate the slopes of the Balkans, of Rhodope and the Pindus, and to spread the lava tide of war over the half of the Continent. ”

“ The decease of a great man is always affecting: but the death of the hero who had soared to the zenith of military glory and civic achievement seems to touch the very nadir of calamity. Outliving his mighty Empire, girt around by a thousand miles of imprisoning ocean, guarded by his most steadfast enemies, his son a captive at the Court of the Hapsburgs, and his Empress openly faithless, he sinks from sight like some battered derelict. And Nature is more pitiless than man. ”

“ A cheery solid Admiral, a shadowy Captain Ross who can navigate but does not open his lips, a talkative creature of the secretary type, the soldierly Bingham, the graceful courtly Montholons, the young General who out-gascons the Gascons, the wire-drawn subtle Las Cases, the melancholy Grand Marshal and his spasmodic consort—all of them there to guard or cheer that pathetic central figure, the world's conqueror and world's exile. ”

“ In a word, Burke lacked the indefinable gift which Chatham, Fox, and Mirabeau so abundantly possessed—that of personality. His figure had not the forceful massiveness of that of Fox, and it wanted the dignity of the younger Pitt. Moreover his voice was harsh, and his action clumsy. His philosophic love of wedding facts to principles often led him to soar to heights where the question at issue appeared like a speck and votes a vulgar impertinence. Worst fault of all, his speeches were far too long. The fullness and richness which delights us to-day then had the effect of emptying the House. ”

“ But, even to the mass of mankind, the transformation scene ushered in by the nineteenth century was one of bewildering brilliance. Italy from the Alps to her heel controlled by the French; Austria compelled to forego all her Italian plans; Switzerland and Holland dominated by the First Consul's influence; Spain following submissively his imperious lead; England, despite all her naval triumphs, helpless on land; and France rapidly regaining more than all her old prestige and stability under the new institutions which form the most enduring tribute to the First Consul's glory. ”

“ Democracy, embattled for seven sad years by Napoleon against her sister, Nationality, little by little awakens to a consciousness of the mistake that has blighted his fortune and hers, and begins to ally herself with the ill-used champion of the Kings. Industry, starved by War, regains her strength and goes forth on a career of conquest more enduring than that of the great warrior. And the peoples that come to the front are not those of the Latin race, whom his wars have stunted, but those of the untamable Teutonic stock, the lords of the sea and the leaders of Central Europe. ”

“ When Berlier, one of the leading jurists of France, objected to the new order as leading France back to aristocracy, and contemptuously said that crosses and ribbons were the toys of monarchy, Bonaparte replied:
"Well: men are led by toys. I would not say that in a rostrum, but in a council of wise men and statesmen one ought to speak one's mind. I don't think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not at all changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling—honour. ”

“ No one who looked at the state of European politics in 1861, could have imagined that in less than ten years Prussia would have waged three wars and humbled the might of Austria and France. At that time she showed no signs of exceptional vigour: she had as yet produced no leaders so inspiring as Mazzini and Garibaldi, no statesman so able as Cavour. Her new king, William, far from arousing the feelings of growing enthusiasm that centred in Victor Emmanuel, was more and more distrusted and disliked by Liberals for the policy of militarism on which he had just embarked. ”

“ Hitherto the weather had been singularly mild and open, so much so that the superstitious peasants looked on it as a sign that God was favouring Napoleon. But, at last, on November the 6th, the first storm of winter fell on the straggling array, and completed its miseries. The icy blasts struck death to the hearts of the feeble; and the puny fighting of man against man was now merged in the awful struggle against the powers of the air. Drifts of snow blotted out the landscape; the wandering columns often lost the road and thousands forthwith ended their miseries. ”