Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 37)

Their state was probably at its worst in the later years of Louis XIV. That seems to be the conclusion which the deepest study has now reached, and the picture formerly drawn by historians, of a society continually sinking into lower miseries, is mostly put aside. The worst state, seemingly, was passed, or nearly so, when Louis XIV. died. It began to mend under his despicable successor, Louis XV. (1715-1774),— perhaps even during the regency of the profligate Orleans (1715-1723). Why it mended, no historian has clearly explained. The cause was not in better government; for the government grew worse. It did not come from any rise in character of the privileged classes; for the privileged classes abused their privileges with increasing selfishness. But general influences were at work in the world at large, stimulating activities of all kinds,—industry, trade, speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science, philosophy,—and whatever improvement occurred in the material condition and social state of the common people of France may find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its social system and the oppressions of government under which it bent.

But the difference between the France of Louis XIV. and the France of Louis XVI. was more in the people than in their state. If their misery was a little less, their patience was less, and by not a little. The stimulations of the age, which may have given more effectiveness to labor and more energy to trade, had likewise set thinking astir, on the same practical lines. Men whose minds in former centuries would have labored on riddles dialectical, metaphysical and theological, were now bent on the pressing problems of daily life. The mysteries of economic science began to challenge them. Every aspect of surrounding society thrust questions upon them, concerning its origin, its history, its inequalities, its laws and their principles, its government and the source of authority in it. The so-called "philosophers" of the age, Rousseau, Voltaire and the encyclopædists—were not the only questioners of the social world, nor did the questioning all come from what they taught. It was the intellectual epidemic of the time, carried into all countries, penetrating all classes, and nowhere with more diffusion than in France.

After the successful revolt of the English colonies in America, and the conspicuous blazoning of the doctrines of political equality and popular self-government in their declaration of independence and their republican constitution, the ferment of social free-thinking in France was naturally increased. The French had helped the colonists, fought side by side with them, watched their struggle with intense interest, and all the issues involved in the American revolution were discussed among them, with partiality to the republican side. Franklin, most republican representative of the young republic, came among them and captivated every class. He recommended to them the ideas for which he stood, perhaps more than we suspect.

Louis XVI. and his reign.

And thus, by many influences, the French people of all classes except the privileged nobility, and even in that class to some small extent, were made increasingly impatient of their misgovernment and of the wrongs and miseries going with it. Louis XVI., who came to the throne in 1774, was the best in character of the Bourbon kings. He had no noxious vices and no baleful ambitions. If he had found right conditions prevailing in his kingdom he would have made the best of them. But he had no capacity for reforming the evils that he inherited, and no strength of will to sustain those who had. He accepted an earnest reforming minister with more than willingness, and approved the wise measures of economy, of equitable taxation, and of emancipation for manufactures and trade, which Turgot proposed. But when protected interests, and the privileged order which fattened on existing abuses, raised a storm of opposition, he weakly gave way to it, and dismissed the man (1776) who might possibly have made the inevitable revolution a peaceful one. Another minister, the Genevan banker, Necker, who aimed at less reform, but demanded economy, suffered the same overthrow (1781). The waste, the profligate expenditure, the jobbery, the leeching of the treasury by high-born pensioners and sinecure office-holders, went on, scarcely checked, until the beginnings of actual bankruptcy had appeared.

The States-General.

Then a cry, not much heeded before, for the convocation of the States-general of the kingdom—the ancient great legislature of France, extinct since the year 1614—became loud and general. The king yielded (1788). The States-general was called to meet on the 1st of May, 1789, and the royal summons decreed that the deputies chosen to it from the third estate—the common people—should be equal in number to the deputies of the nobility and the clergy together. So the dumb lips of France as a nation were opened, its tongue unloosed, its common public opinion, and public feeling made articulate, for the first time in one hundred and seventy-five years. And the word that it spoke was the mandate of Revolution.

The States-general assembled at Versailles on the 5th of May, and a conflict between the third estate and the nobles occurred at once on the question between three assemblies and one. Should the three orders deliberate and vote together as one body, or sit and act separately and apart. The commons demanded the single assembly. The nobles and most of the clergy refused the union, in which their votes would be overpowered.

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The National Assembly.

After some weeks of dead-lock on this fundamental issue, the third estate brought it to a summary decision, by boldly asserting its own supremacy, as representative of the mass of the nation, and organizing itself in the character of the "National Assembly" of France. Under that name and character it was joined by a considerable part of the humbler clergy, and by some of the nobles,—additional to a few, like Mirabeau, who sat from the beginning with the third estate, as elected representatives of the people. The king made a weak attempt to annul this assumption of legislative sufficiency on the part of the third estate, and only hurried the exposure of his own powerlessness. Persuaded by his worst advisers to attempt a stronger demonstration of the royal authority, he filled Paris with troops, and inflamed the excitement, which had risen already to a passionate heat.

Outbreak of the Revolution.

Necker, who had been recalled to the ministry when the meeting of the States-general was decided upon, now received his second dismissal (July 11), and the news of it acted on Paris like a signal of insurrection. The city next day was in tumult. On the 14th the Bastile was attacked and taken. The king's government vanished utterly. His troops fraternized with the riotous people. Citizens of Paris organized themselves as a National Guard, on which every hope of order depended, and Lafayette took command. The frightened nobility began flight, first from Paris, and then from the provinces, as mob violence spread over the kingdom from the capital. In October there were rumors that the king had planned to follow the "émigrés" and take refuge in Metz. Then occurred the famous rising of the women; their procession to Versailles; the crowd of men which followed, accompanied but not controlled by Lafayette and his National Guards; the conveyance of the king and royal family to Paris, where they remained during the subsequent year, practically in captivity, and at the mercy of the Parisian mob.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly, negligent of the dangers of the moment, while actual anarchy prevailed, busied itself with debates on constitutional theory, with enactments for the abolition of titles and privileges, and with the creating of an inconvertible paper money, based on confiscated church lands, to supply the needs of the national treasury. Meantime, too, the members of the Assembly and their supporters outside of it were breaking into parties and factions, divided by their different purposes, principles and aims, and forming clubs,—centers of agitation and discussion,—clubs of the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Feuillants and the like,—where fear, distrust and jealousy were soon engendering ferocious conflicts among the revolutionists themselves. And outside of France, on the border where the fugitive nobles lurked, intrigue was always active, striving to enlist foreign help for King Louis against his subjects.

The First Constitution.

In April, 1791, Mirabeau, whose influence had been a powerful restraint upon the Revolution, died. In June, the king made an attempt to escape from his durance in Paris, but was captured at Varennes and brought back. Angry demands for his deposition were now made, and a tumultuous republican demonstration occurred, on the Champ de Mars, which Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, Bailly, dispersed, with bloodshed. But republicanism had not yet got its footing. In the constitution, which the Assembly completed at this time, the throne was left undisturbed. The king accepted the instrument, and a constitutional monarchy appeared to have quietly taken the place of the absolute monarchy of the past.

The Girondists.

It was an appearance not long delusive. The Constituent National Assembly being dissolved, gave way to a Legislative Assembly (October, 1791) elected under the new constitution. In the Legislative Assembly the republicans appeared with a strength which soon gave them control of it. They were divided into various groups; but the most eloquent and energetic of these, coming from Bordeaux and the department of the Gironde, fixed the name of Girondists upon the party to which they belonged. The king, as a constitutional sovereign, was forced presently to choose ministers from the ranks of the Girondists, and they controlled the government for several months in the spring of 1792. The earliest use they made of their control was to hurry the country into war with the German powers, which were accused of giving encouragement to the hostile plans of the émigrés on the border. It is now a well-determined fact that the Emperor Leopold was strongly opposed to war with France, and used all his influence for the preservation of peace. It was revolutionary France which opened the conflict, and it was the Girondists who led and shaped the policy of war.

Overthrow of the Monarchy.

In the first encounters of the war, the undisciplined French troops were beaten, and Paris was in panic. Measures were adopted which the king refused to sanction, and he dismissed his Girondist ministers. Lafayette, who was commanding one division of the army in the field, approved the king's course, and wrote an unwise letter to the Assembly, intimating that the army would not submit to a violation of the constitution. The republicans were enraged. Everything seemed proof to them of a treasonable connivance with the enemies of France, to bring about the subjugation of the country, and a forcible restoration of the old regime, absolutism, aristocratic privilege and all. On the 20th of June there was another rising of the Paris mob, unchecked by those who could, as yet, have controlled it. The rioters broke into the Tuileries and humiliated the king and queen with insults, but did no violence. Lafayette came to Paris and attempted to reorganize his old National Guard, for the defense of the constitution and the preservation of order, but failed. The extremists then resolved to throw down the toppling monarchy at once, by a sudden blow. In the early morning of August 10, they expelled the Council-General of the Municipality of Paris from the Hotel de Ville, and placed the government of the city under the control of a provisional Commune, with Danton at its head. {1091} At the same hour, the mob which these conspirators held in readiness, and which they directed, attacked the Tuileries and massacred the Swiss guard, while the king and the royal family escaped for refuge to the Chamber of the Legislative Assembly, near at hand. There, in the king's presence, on a formal demand made by the new self-constituted Municipality or Commune of Paris, the Assembly declared his suspension from executive functions, and invited the people to elect without delay a National Convention for the revising of the Constitution. Commissioners, hastily sent out to the provinces and the armies in the field, were received everywhere with submission to the change of government, except by Lafayette and his army, in and around Sedan. The Marquis placed them under arrest and took from his soldiers a new oath of fidelity to the constitution and the king. But he found himself unsupported, and, yielding to the sweep of events, he obeyed a dismissal by the new government from his command, and left France, to wait in exile for a time when he might serve his Country with a conscience more assured.

The Paris Commune.

Pending the meeting of the Convention, the Paris Commune, increased in number to two hundred and eighty-eight, and dominated by Danton and Robespierre, became the governing power in France. The Legislative Assembly was subservient to it; the kingless Ministry, which had Danton in association with the restored Girondists, was no less so. It was the fierce vigor of the Commune which caused the king and the royal family to be imprisoned in the Temple; which instituted a special tribunal for the summary trial of political prisoners; which searched Paris for "suspects," on the night of August 29-30, gathered three thousand men and women into the prisons and convents of the city, planned and ordered the "September Massacres" of the following week, and thus thinned the whole number of these "suspects" by a half.

Fall of the Girondists.

On the 22d of September the National Convention assembled. The Jacobins who controlled the Commune were found to have carried Paris overwhelmingly and all France largely with them, in the election of representatives. A furious, fanatical democracy, a bloodthirsty anarchism, was in the ascendant. The republican Girondists were now the conservative party in the Convention. They struggled to hold their ground, and very soon they were struggling for their lives. The Jacobin fury was tolerant of no opposition. What stood in its path, with no deadlier weapon than an argument or an appeal, must be, not merely overcome, but destroyed. The Girondists would have saved the king from the guillotine, but they dared not adopt his defense, and their own fate was sealed when they gave votes, under fear, which sent him in January to his death. Five months longer they contended irresolutely, as a failing faction, with their terrible adversaries, and then, in June, 1793, they were proscribed and their arrest decreed. Some escaped and raised futile insurrections in the provinces. Some stayed and faced the death which awaited them in the fast approaching "reign of terror."

"The Mountain" and "the Terror."

The fall of the Girondists left the Jacobin "Mountain" (so-called from the elevation of the seats on which its deputies sat in the Convention) unopposed. Their power was not only absolute in fact, but unquestioned, and they inevitably ran to riot in the exercise of it. The same madness overcame them in the mass which overcame Nero, Caligula, Caracalla, as individuals; for it is no more strange that the unnatural and awful feeling of unlimited dominion over one's fellows should turn the brain of a suddenly triumphant faction, than that it should madden a single shallow-minded man. The men of "the Mountain" were not only masters of France—except in La Vendée and the neighboring region south of the Loire, where an obstinate insurrection had broken out—but the armies which obeyed them had driven back the invading Germans, had occupied the Austrian Netherlands and taken possession of Savoy and Nice. Intoxicated by these successes, the Convention had proclaimed a crusade against all monarchical government, offering the help of France to every people which would rise against existing authorities, and declaring enmity to those who refused alliance with the Revolution. Holland was attacked and England forced to war. The spring of 1793 found a great European coalition formed against revolutionary France, and justified by the aggressions of the Jacobinical government.

For effective exercise of the power of the Jacobins, the Convention as a whole proved too large a body, even when it had been purged of Girondist opposition. Its authority was now gathered into the hands of the famous Committee of Public Safety, which became, in fact, the Revolutionary Government, controlling the national armies, and the whole administration of domestic and foreign affairs. Its reign was the Reign of Terror, and the fearful Revolutionary Tribunal, which began its bloody work with the guillotine in October, 1793, was the chief instrument of its power. Robespierre, Barère, St. Just, Couthon, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d' Herbois and Carnot—the latter devoted to the business of the war—were the controlling members of the Committee. Danton withdrew from it, refusing to serve.

In September, the policy of terrorism was avowedly adopted, and, in the language of the Paris Commune, "the Reign of Terror" became "the order of the day." The arraignment of "suspects" before the Revolutionary Tribunal began. On the 14th of October Marie Antoinette was put on trial; on the 16th she met her death. On the 31st the twenty-one imprisoned Girondist deputies were sent to the guillotine; followed on the 10th of November by the remarkable woman, Madame Roland, who was looked upon as the real leader of their party. From that time until the mid-summer following, the blood-madness raged; not in Paris alone, but throughout France, at Lyons, Marseilles, Toulon, Bordeaux, Nantes, and wherever a show of insurrection and resistance had challenged the ferocity of the Commissioners of the Revolutionary Government, who had been sent into the provinces with unlimited death-dealing powers.

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But when Jacobinism had destroyed all exterior opposition, it began very soon to break into factions within itself. There was a pitch in its excesses at which even Danton and Robespierre became conservatives, as against Hébert and the atheists of his faction. A brief struggle ensued, and the Hébertists, in March, 1794, passed under the knife of the guillotine. A month later Danton's enemies had rallied and he, with his followers, went down before their attack, and the sharp knife in the Place de la Revolution silenced his bold tongue. Robespierre remained dominant for a few weeks longer in the still reigning Committee of Public Safety; but his domination was already undermined by many fears, distrusts and jealousies among his colleagues and throughout his party. His downfall came suddenly on the 27th of July. On the morning of that day he was the dictator of the Convention and of its ruling committee; at night he was a headless corpse, and Paris was shouting with joy.

On the death of Robespierre the Reign of Terror came quickly to an end. The reaction was sudden and swift. The Committee of Public Safety was changed; of the old members only Carnot, indispensable organizer of war, remained. The Revolutionary Tribunal was remodeled. The Jacobin Club was broken up. The surviving Girondist deputies came back to the Convention. Prosecution of the Terrorists for their crimes began. A new struggle opened, between the lower elements in Parisian and French society, the sansculotte elements, which had controlled the Revolution thus far, and the middle class, the bourgeoisie, long cowed and suppressed, but now rallying to recover its share of power. Bourgeoisie triumphed in the contest. The Sansculottes made their last effort in a rising on the 1st Prairial (May 20, 1795) and were put down. A new constitution was framed which organized the government of the Republic under a legislature in two chambers,—a Council of Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients,—with an executive Directory of Five. But only one third of the legislature first assembled was to be freely elected by the people. The remaining two thirds were to be taken from the membership of the existing Convention. Paris rejected this last mentioned feature of the constitution, while France at large ratified it. The National Guard of Paris rose in insurrection on the 13th Vendémiare (October 5), and it was on this occasion that the young Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, got his foot on the first round of the ladder by which he climbed afterwards to so great a height. Put in command of the regular troops in Paris, which numbered only 5,000, against 30,000 of the National Guards, he crushed the latter in an action of an hour. That hour was the opening hour of his career.

The government of the Directory was instituted on the 27th of October following. Of its five members, Carnot and Barras were the only men of note, then or afterwards.

The war with the Coalition.

While France was cowering under "the Terror," its armies, under Jourdan, Hoche, and Pichegru, had withstood the great European combination with astonishing success. The allies were weakened by ill feeling between Prussia and Austria over the second partition of Poland, and generally by a want of concert and capable leadership in their action. On the other side, the democratic military system of the Republic, under Carnot's keen eyes, was continually bringing forward fresh soldierly talent to the front. The fall of the Jacobins made no change in that vital department of the administration, and the successes of the French were continued. In the summer of 1794 they carried the war into Germany, and expelled the allies from the Austrian Netherlands. Thence they invaded Holland, and before the end of January, 1795, they were masters of the country; the Stadtholder had fled to England, and a Batavian Republic had been organized. Spain had suffered losses in battle with them along the Pyrenees, and the King of Sardinia had yielded to them the passes of the Maritime Alps. In April the King of Prussia made peace with France. Before the close of the year 1795 the revolt in La Vendée was at an end; Spain had made peace; Pichegru had attempted a great betrayal of the armies on the Rhine, and had failed.

Napoleon in Italy.

This in brief was the situation at the opening of the year 1796, when the "little Corsican officer," who won the confidence of the new government of the Directory by saving its constitution on the 13th Vendemiare, planned the campaign of the year, and received the command of the army sent to Italy. He attacked the Sardinians in April, and a single month sufficed to break the courage of their king and force him to a treaty of peace. On the 10th of May he defeated the Austrians at Lodi; on the 15th he was in Milan. Lombardy was abandoned to him; all central Italy was at his mercy, and he began to act the sovereign conqueror in the peninsula, with a contempt for the government at Paris which he hardly concealed. Two ephemeral republics were created under his direction, the Cisalpine, in Lombardy, and the Cispadane, embracing Modena, Ferrara and Bologna. The Papacy was shorn of part of its territories.

Every attempt made by the Austrians to shake the hold which Bonaparte had fastened on the peninsula only fixed it more firmly. In the spring he began movements beyond the Alps, in concert with Hoche on the Rhine, which threatened Vienna itself and frightened Austria into proposals of peace. Preliminaries, signed in April, foreshadowed the hard terms of the treaty concluded at Campo Formio in the following October. Austria gave up her Netherland provinces to France, and part of her Italian territories to the Cisalpine Republic; but received, in partial compensation, the city of Venice and a portion of the dominions of the Venetian state; for, between the armistice and the treaty, Bonaparte had attacked and overthrown the venerable republic, and now divided it with his humbled enemy.

France under the Directory.

The masterful Corsican, who handled these great matters with the airs of a sovereign, may have known himself already to be the coming master of France. For the inevitable submission again of the many to one was growing plain to discerning eyes. The frightful school-teaching of the Revolution had not impressed practical lessons in politics on the mind of the untrained democracy, so much as suspicions, distrusts, and alarms. All the sobriety of temper, the confidence of feeling, the constraining habit of public order, without which the self-government of a people is impracticable, were yet to be acquired. French democracy was not more prepared for republican institutions in 1797 than it had been in 1789. {1093} There was no more temperance in its factions, no more balance between parties, no more of a steadying potency in public opinion. But it had been brought to a state of feeling that would prefer the sinking of all factions under some vigorous autocracy, rather than another appeal of their quarrels to the guillotine. And events were moving fast to a point at which that choice would require to be made. The summer of 1797 found the members of the Directory in hopeless conflict with one another and with the legislative councils. On the 4th of September a "coup d' état," to which Bonaparte contributed some help, purged both the Directory and the Councils of men obnoxious to the violent faction, and exiled them to Guiana. Perhaps the moment was favorable then for a soldier, with the great prestige that Bonaparte had won, to mount to the seat of power; but he did not so judge.

The Expedition to Egypt.

He planned, instead, an expedition to Egypt, directed against the British power in the East,—an expedition that failed in every object it could have, except the absence in which it kept him from increasing political disorders at home. He was able to maintain some appearance of success, by his subjugation of Egypt and His invasion of Syria; but of harm done to England, or of gain to France in the Mediterranean, there was none; since Nelson, at the battle of the Nile, destroyed the French fleet, and Turkey was added to the Anglo-Austrian coalition. The blunder of the expedition, as proved by its whole results, was not seen by the French people so plainly, however, as they saw the growing hopelessness of their own political state, and the alarming reverses which their armies in Italy and on the Rhine had sustained since Bonaparte went away.

French Aggressions.—The new Coalition.

Continued aggressions on the part of the French had provoked a new European coalition, formed in 1798. In Switzerland they had overthrown the ancient constitution of the confederacy, organizing a new Helvetic Republic on the Gallic model, but taking Geneva to themselves. In Italy they had set up a third republic, the Roman, removing the Pope forcibly from his sovereignty and from Rome. Every state within reach had then taken fresh alarm, and even Russia, undisturbed in the distance, was now enlisted against the troublesome democracy of France.

The unwise King of Naples, entering rashly into the war before his allies could support him, and hastening to restore the Pope, had been driven (December, 1798) from his kingdom, which underwent transformation into a fourth Italian republic, the Parthenopeian. But this only stimulated the efforts of the Coalition, and in the course of the following year the French were expelled from all Italy, saving Genoa alone, and the ephemeral republics they had set up were extinguished. On the Rhine they had lost ground; but they had held their own in Switzerland, after a fierce struggle with the Russian forces of Suwarrow.

Napoleon in power.

When news of these disasters, and of the ripeness of the situation at Paris for a new coup d' état, reached Bonaparte, in Egypt, he deserted his army there, leaving it, under Kléber, in a helpless situation, and made his way back to France. He landed at Fréjus on the 9th of October. Precisely a month later, by a combination with Sieyès, a veteran revolutionist and maker of constitutions, he accomplished the overthrow of the Directory. Before the year closed, a fresh constitution was in force, which vested substantially monarchical powers in an executive called the First Consul, and the chosen First Consul was Napoleon Bonaparte. Two associate Consuls, who sat with him, had no purpose but to conceal for a short time the real absoluteness of his rule.

From that time, for fifteen years, the history of France—it is almost possible to say the history of Europe—is the story of the career of the extraordinary Corsican adventurer who took possession of the French nation, with unparalleled audacity, and who used it, with all that pertained to it—lives, fortunes, talents, resources—in the most prodigious and the most ruthless undertakings of personal ambition that the modern world has ever seen. He was selfishness incarnate; and he was the incarnation of genius in all those modes of intellectual power which bear upon the mastery of momentary circumstances and the mastery of men. But of the higher genius that might have worthily employed such vast powers,—that might have enlightened and inspired a really great ambition in the man, to make himself an enduring builder of civilization in the world, he had no spark. The soul behind his genius was ignoble, the spirit was mean. And even on the intellectual side, his genius had its narrowness. His projects of selfishness were extraordinary, but never sagacious, never far-sighted, thoughtfully studied, wisely planned. There is no appearance in any part of his career of a pondered policy, guiding him to a well-determined end in what he did. The circumstances of any moment, whether on the battle-field or in the political arena, he could handle with a swift apprehension, a mastery and a power that may never have been surpassed. But much commoner men have apprehended and have commanded in a larger and more successful way the general sweep of circumstances in their lives. It is that fact which belittles Napoleon in the comparison often made between him and Cæsar. He was probably Cæsar's equal in war. But who can imagine Cæsar in Napoleon's place committing the blunders of blind arrogance which ruined the latter in Germany and Spain, or making his fatuous attempt to shut England, the great naval power, out of continental Europe?

His domestic administration was beneficial to France in many ways. He restored order, and maintained it, with a powerful hand. He suppressed faction effectually, and eradicated for the time all the political insanities of the Revolution. He exploited the resources of the country with admirable success; for his discernment in such matters was keen and his practical judgment was generally sound. But he consumed the nation faster than he gave it growth. His wars—the wars in which Europe was almost unceasingly kept by the aggression of his insolence and his greed—were the most murderous, the most devouring, that any warrior among the civilized races of mankind has ever been chargeable with. {1094} His blood-guiltiness in these wars is the one glaring fact which ought to be foremost in every thought of them. But it is not. There is a pitiable readiness in mankind to be dazzled and cheated by red battle-lights, when it looks into history for heroes; and few figures have been glorified more illusively in the world's eye than the marvelous warrior, the vulgar-minded adventurer, the prodigy of self-exalting genius, Napoleon Bonaparte.

In the first year of his Consulate, Bonaparte recovered Italy, by the extraordinary Marengo campaign, while Moreau won the victory of Hohenlinden, and the Treaty of Luneville was brought about. Austria obtained peace again by renewing the concessions of Campo Formio, and by taking part in a reconstruction of Germany, under Bonaparte's dictation, which secularized the ecclesiastical states, extinguished the freedom of most of the imperial cities, and aggrandized Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden and Saxony, as protégés and dependencies of France. England was left alone in the war, with much hostile feeling raised against her in Europe and America by the arrogant use she had made of her mastery of the sea. The neutral powers had all been embittered by her maritime pretensions, and Bonaparte now brought about the organization among them of a Northern League of armed neutrality. England broke it with a single blow, by Nelson's bombardment of Copenhagen. Napoleon, however, had conceived the plan of starving English industries and ruining British trade by a "continental system" of blockade against them, which involved the compulsory exclusion of British ships and British goods from all European countries. This impossible project committed him to a desperate struggle for the subjugation of Europe. It was the fundamental cause of his ruin.

The First Empire.

In 1802 the First Consul advanced his restoration of absolutism in France a second step, by securing the Consulate for life. A short interval of peace with England was arranged, but war broke out anew the following year, and the English for a time had no allies. The French occupied Hanover, and the Germans were quiescent. But in 1804, Bonaparte shocked Europe by the abduction and execution of the Bourbon prince, Duc d'Enghien, and began to challenge again the interference of the surrounding powers by a new series of aggressive measures. His ambition had thrown off all disguises; he had transformed the Republic of France into an Empire, so called, and himself, by title, into an Emperor, with an imposing crown. The Cisalpine or Italian Republic received soon afterwards the constitution of a kingdom, and he took the crown to himself as King of Italy. Genoa and surrounding territory (the Ligurian Republic) were annexed, at nearly the same time, to France; several duchies were declared to be dependencies, and an Italian principality was given to Napoleon's elder sister. The effect produced in Europe by such arbitrary and admonitory proceedings as these enabled Pitt, the younger, now at the head of the English government, to form an alliance (1805), first with Russia, afterwards with Austria, Sweden and Naples, and finally with Prussia, to break the yoke which the French Emperor had put upon Italy, Holland, Switzerland and Hanover, and to resist his further aggressions.

Austerlitz and Trafalgar.

The amazing energy and military genius of Napoleon never had more astonishing proof than in the swift campaign which broke this coalition at Ulm and Austerlitz. Austria was forced to another humiliating treaty, which surrendered Venice and Venetia to the conqueror's new Kingdom of Italy; gave up Tyrol to Bavaria; yielded other territory to Würtemberg, and raised both electors to the rank of kings, while making Baden a grand duchy, territorially enlarged. Prussia was dragged by force into alliance with France, and took Hanover as pay. But England triumphed at the same time on her own element, and Napoleon's dream of carrying his legions across the Channel, as Cæsar did, was forever dispelled by Nelson's dying victory at Trafalgar. That battle, which destroyed the combined navies of France and Spain, ended hope of contending successfully with the relentless Britons at sea.

End of the Holy Roman Empire.

France was never permitted to learn the seriousness of Trafalgar, and it put no check on the vaulting ambition in Napoleon which now began to o'erleap itself. He gave free rein to his arrogance in all directions. The King of Naples was expelled from his kingdom and the crown conferred on Joseph Bonaparte. Louis Bonaparte was made King of Holland. Southern Germany was suddenly reconstructed again. The little kingdoms of Napoleon's creation and the small states surrounding them were declared to be separated from the ancient Empire, and were formed into a Confederation of the Rhine, under the protection of France. Warned by this rude announcement of the precarious tenure of his imperial title as the head of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II. resigned it, and took to himself, instead, a title as meaningless as that which Napoleon had assumed,—the title of Emperor of Austria. The venerable fiction of the Holy Roman Empire disappeared from history on the 6th of August, 1806.

Subjugation of Prussia.

But while Austria had become submissive to the offensive measures of Napoleon, Prussia became now fired with unexpected, sudden wrath, and declared war in October, 1800. It was a rash explosion of national resentment, and the rashness was dearly paid for. At Jena and Auerstadt, Prussia sank under the feet of the merciless conqueror, as helplessly subjugated as a nation could be. Russia, attempting her rescue, was overcome at Eylau and Friedland; and both the vanquished powers came to terms with the victor at Tilsit (July, 1807). The King of Prussia gave up all his kingdom west of the Elbe, and all that it had acquired in the second and third partitions of Poland. A new German kingdom, of Westphalia, was constructed for Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome. A free state of Danzig, dependent on France, and a Grand Duchy of Warsaw, were created. The Russian Czar, bribed by some pieces of Polish Prussia, and by prospective acquisitions from Turkey and Sweden, became an ally of Napoleon and an accomplice in his plans for the subjection of Europe. He enlisted his empire in the "continental system" against England, and agreed to the enforcement of the decree which Napoleon issued from Berlin, declaring the British islands in a state of blockade, and prohibiting trade with them. The British government retorted by its "orders in council," which blockaded in the like paper-fashion all ports of France and of the allies and dependencies of France. And so England and Napoleon fought one another for years in the peaceful arena of commerce, to the exasperation of neutral nations and the destruction of the legitimate trade of the world.

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The crime against Spain.

And now, having prostrated Germany, and captivated the Czar, Napoleon turned toward another field, which had scarcely felt, as yet, his intrusive hand. Spain had been in servile alliance with France for ten years, while Portugal adhered steadily to her friendship with Great Britain, and now refused to be obedient to the Berlin Decree. Napoleon took prompt measures for the punishment of so bold a defiance. A delusive treaty with the Spanish court, for the partition of the small kingdom of the Braganzas, won permission for an army under Junot to enter Portugal, through Spain. No resistance to it was made. The royal family of Portugal quitted Lisbon, setting sail for Brazil, and Junot took possession of the kingdom. But this accomplished only half of Napoleon's design. He meant to have Spain, as well; and he found, in the miserable state of the country, his opportunity to work out an ingenious, unscrupulous scheme for its acquisition. His agents set on foot a revolutionary movement, in favor of the worthless crown prince, Ferdinand, against his equally worthless father, Charles IV., and pretexts were obtained for an interference by French troops. Charles was first coerced into an abdication; then Ferdinand was lured to an interview with Napoleon, at Bayonne, was made prisoner there, and compelled in his turn to relinquish the crown. A vacancy on the Spanish throne having been thus created, the Emperor gathered at Bayonne a small assembly of Spanish notables, who offered the seat to Joseph Bonaparte, already King of Naples. Joseph, obedient to his imperial brother's wish, resigned the Neapolitan crown to Murat, his sister's husband, accepted the crown of Spain, and was established at Madrid with a French army at his back.

This was one of the two most ruinous of the political blunders of Napoleon's life. He had cheated and insulted the whole Spanish nation, in a way too contemptuous to be endured even by a people long cast down. There was a revolt which did not spring from any momentary passion, but which had an obstinacy of deep feeling behind that made effective suppression of it impossible. French armies could beat Spanish armies, and disperse them, but they could not keep them dispersed; and they could not break up the organization of a rebellion which organized itself in every province, and which went on, when necessary, without any organization at all. England sent forces to the peninsula, under Wellington, for the support of the insurgent Spaniards and Portuguese; and thenceforward, to the end of his career, the most inextricable difficulties of Napoleon were those in which he had entangled himself on the southern side of the Pyrenees.

The chastening of Germany.

The other cardinal blunder in Napoleon's conduct, which proved more destructive to him than the crime in Spain, was his exasperating treatment of Germany. There was neither magnanimity on the moral side of him nor real wisdom on the intellectual side, to restrain him from using his victory with immoderate insolence. He put as much shame as he could invent into the humiliations of the German people. He had Prussia under his heel, and he ground the heel upon her neck with the whole weight of his power. The consequence was a pain and a passion which wrought changes like a miracle in the temper and character of the abused nation. There were springs of feeling opened and currents of national life set in motion that might never have been otherwise discovered. Enlightened men and strong men from all parts of Germany found themselves called to Prussia and to the front of its affairs, and their way made easy for them in labors of restoration and reform. Stein and Hardenburg remodeled the administration of the kingdom, uprooted the remains of serfdom in it, and gave new freedom to its energies. Scharnhorst organized the military system on which rose in time the greatest of military powers. Humboldt planned the school system which educated Prussia beyond all her neighbors, in the succeeding generations. Even the philosophers came out of their closets and took part, as Fichte did, in the stirring and uplifting of the spirit of their countrymen. So it was that the outrages of Napoleon in Germany revenged themselves, by summoning into existence an unsuspected energy that would be turned against him to destroy him in the end.

But the time of destruction was not yet come. He had a few years of triumph still before him,—of triumph everywhere except in Portugal and Spain. Austria, resisting him once more (1809), was once more crushed at Wagram, and to such submissiveness that it gave a daughter of the imperial house in marriage to the parvenu sovereign of France, next year, when he divorced his wife Josephine. He was at the summit of his renown that year, but already declining from the greatest height of his power. In 1811 there was little to change the situation.

The fall of Napoleon.

In 1812 the downfall of Napoleon was begun by his fatal expedition to Russia. The next year Prussia, half regenerated within the brief time since Jena and Tilsit, went into alliance with Russia, and the War of Liberation was begun. Austria soon joined the alliance; and at Leipzig (Oct. 18, 1813) the three nations shattered at last the yoke of oppression that had bound Europe so long. At the same time, the French armies in Spain were expelled, and Wellington entered France through the Pyrenees, to meet the allies who pursued Napoleon across the Rhine. Forced to abdicate and retire to the little island of Elba (the sovereignty of which was ceded to him), he remained there in quiet from May, 1814, until March, 1815, when he escaped and reappeared in France. Army and people welcomed him. The Bourbon monarchy, which had been restored by the allies, fell at his approach. The king, Louis XVIII., fled. Napoleon recovered his throne and occupied it for it few weeks. But the alliance which had expelled him from it refused to permit his recovery of power. The question was settled finally at Waterloo, on the 18th of June, when a British army under Wellington and a Prussian army under Blücher won a victory which left no hope to the beaten Emperor. He surrendered himself to the commander of a British vessel of war, and was sent to confinement for the remainder of his life on the remote island of St. Helena.

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The Congress of Vienna.

But Europe, delivered from one tyrannical master, was now given over to several of them, in a combination which oppressed it for a generation. The sovereigns who had united to dethrone Napoleon, with the two emperors, of Austria and Russia, at their head, and with the Austrian minister, Metternich, for their most trusted counselor, assumed first, in the Congress of Vienna, a general work of political rearrangement, to repair the Revolutionary and Napoleonic disturbances, and then, subsequently, an authoritative supervision of European politics which proved as meddlesome as Napoleon's had been. Their first act, as before stated, was to restore the Bourbon monarchy in France, indifferent to the wishes of the people. In Spain, Ferdinand had already taken the throne, when Joseph fled. In Italy, the King of Sardinia was restored and Genoa transferred to him; Lombardy and Venetia were given back to Austria; Tuscany, Modena and some minor duchies received Hapsburg princes; the Pope recovered his States, and the Bourbons returned to Naples and Sicily. In Germany, the Prussian kingdom was enlarged again by several absorptions, including part of Saxony, but some of its Polish territory was given to the Czar; Hanover became a kingdom; Austria resumed the provinces which Napoleon had conveyed to his Rhenish proteges; and, finally, a Germanic Confederation was formed, to take the place of the extinct Empire, and with no more efficiency in its constitution. In the Netherlands, a new kingdom was formed, to bear the Netherland name, and to embrace Holland and Belgium in union, with the House of Orange on the throne.

The Holy Alliance.

Between the Czar, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia, there was a personal agreement that went with these arrangements of the Congress of Vienna, and which was prolonged for a number of years. In the public understanding, this was associated, perhaps wrongly, with a written declaration, known as the Holy Alliance, in which the three sovereigns set forth their intention to regulate their foreign and domestic policy by the precepts of Christianity, and invited all princes to join their alliance for the maintenance of peace and the promotion of brotherly love. Whether identical as a fact with this Holy Alliance or secreted behind it, there was, and long continued to be, an undoubted league between these sovereigns and others, which had aims very different from the promotion of brotherly love. It was wholly reactionary, hostile to all political liberalism, and repressive of all movements in the interest of the people. Metternich was its skilful minister, and the deadly, soulless system of beaureaucratic absolutism which he organized in Austria was the model of government that it strove to introduce.

In Italy, the governments generally were reduced to the Austrian model, and the political state of the peninsula, for forty years, was scarcely better, if at all, than it had been under the Spanish rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Germany, as divided as ever, under a federal constitution which federated nothing else so much as the big and little courts and their reactionary ideas, was profoundly depressed in political spirit, while prospering materially and showing notable signs of intellectual life.

France was not slow in finding that the restored Bourbons and the restored émigrés had forgotten nothing and learned nothing, in the twenty-five years of their exile. They put all their strength into the turning back of the clock, trying to make it strike again the hours in which the Revolution and Napoleon had been so busy. It was futile work; but it sickened and angered the nation none the less. After all the stress and struggle it had gone through, there was a strong nation yet to resist the Bourbonism brought back to power. It recovered from the exhaustion of its wars with a marvellous quickness. The millions of peasant land-owners, who were the greatest creation of the Revolution, dug wealth from its soil with untiring free arms, and soon made it the most prosperous land in Europe. Through country and city, the ideas of the Revolution were in the brains of the common people, while its energies were in their brawn, and Bourbonism needed more wisdom than it ever possessed to reconcile them to its restoration.

Revolutions of 1820-1821.

It was not in France, however, but in Spain, that the first rising against the restored order of things occurred. Ferdinand VII., when released from his French imprisonment in 1814, was warmly received in Spain, and took the crown with quite general consent. He accepted the constitution under which the country had been governed since 1812, and made large lying promises of a liberal rule. But when seated on the throne, he suppressed the constitution, restored the Inquisition, revived the monasteries, called back the expelled Jesuits, and opened a deadly persecution of the liberals in Spanish politics. No effective resistance to him was organized until 1820, when a revolutionary movement took form which forced the king, in March, to reestablish the constitution and call different men to his council. Portugal, at the same time, adopted a similar constitution, and the exiled king, John VI., returning now from Brazil, accepted it.

The revolution in Spain set fire to the discontent that had smouldered in Italy. The latter broke forth, in the summer of 1820, at Naples, where the Bourbon king made no resistance to a sudden revolt of soldiers and citizens, but yielded the constitution they demanded at once. Sardinia followed, in the next spring, with a rising of the Piedmontese, requiring constitutional government. The king, Victor Emmanuel I., who was very old, resigned the crown to his brother, Charles Felix. The latter refused the demands of the constitutionalists and called upon Austria for help.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

And yet, the dread of war is greater in the civilized world than ever before. The interests and influences that work for peace are more powerful than at any former time. The wealth which war threatens, the commerce which it interrupts, the industry which it disturbs, the intelligence which it offends, the humanity which it shocks, the Christianity which it grieves, grow stronger to resist it, year by year. The statesman and the diplomatist are under checks of responsibility which a generation no older than Palmerston's never felt. The arbitrator and the tribunal of arbitration have become familiar within a quarter of a century. The spirit of the age opposes war with rising earnestness and increasing force; while the circumstance and fact of the time seem arranged for it as the chief business of mankind. It is a singular and a critical situation; the outcome from it is impenetrably hidden.

Within itself, too, each nation is troubled with hostilities that the world has not known before. Democracy in politics is bringing in, as was inevitable, democracy in the whole social system; and the period of adjustment to it, which we are passing through, could not fail to be a period of trial and of many dangers. The Anarchist, the Nihilist, the Socialist in his many variations—what are they going to do in the time that lies before us?

Europe, at the present stage of its history, is in the thick of many questions; and so we leave it.

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EURYMEDON, Battles of the (B. C. 466).

See ATHENS: B. C. 470-466.

EUSKALDUNAC.

See BASQUES.

EUTAW SPRINGS, Battle of(1781).

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1780-1781.

EUTHYNI, The.

See LOGISTÆ.

EUTYCHIAN HERESY.

See NESTORIAN AND MONOPHYSITE CONTROVERSY.

EUXINE, The.

Euxinus Pontus, or Pontus Euxinus, the Black Sea, as named by the Greeks.

EVACUATION DAY. The anniversary of the evacuation of New York by the British, Nov. 25, 1783.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1783 (NOVEMBER-DECEMBER).

EVANGELICAL UNION OF GERMANY, The.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1608-1618.

EVER VICTORIOUS ARMY, The.

See CHINA: A. D. 1850-1864.

EVESHAM, Battle of (1265).

The battle which finished the civil war in England known as the Barons' War. It was fought Aug. 3, 1265, and Earl Simon de Montfort, the soul of the popular cause, was slain, with most of his followers. Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., commanded the royal forces.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1216-1274.

EVICTIONS, Irish.

See IRELAND: A. D. 1886.

EXARCHS OF RAVENNA.

See ROME: A. D. 554-800.

EXARCHS OF THE DIOCESE.

See PRIMATES.

EXCHEQUER. EXCHEQUER ROLLS. EXCHEQUER TALLIES.

"The Exchequer of the Norman kings was the court in which the whole financial business of the country was transacted, and as the whole administration of justice, and even the military organisation, was dependent upon the fiscal officers, the whole framework of society may be said to have passed annually under its review. It derived its name from the chequered cloth which covered the table at which the accounts were taken, a name which suggested to the spectator the idea of a game at chess between the receiver and the payer, the treasurer and the sheriff. … The record of the business was preserved in three great rolls; one kept by the Treasurer, another by the Chancellor, and a third by an officer nominated by the king, who registered the matters of legal and special importance. The rolls of the Treasurer and Chancellor were duplicates; that of the former was called from its shape the great roll of the Pipe, and that of the latter the roll of the Chancery. These documents are mostly still in existence. The Pipe Rolls are complete from the second year of Henry II. and the Chancellor's Rolls nearly so. Of the preceding period only one roll, that of the thirty-first year of Henry I., is preserved, and this with Domesday book is the most valuable store of information which exists for the administrative history of the age. The financial reports were made to the barons by the sheriffs of the counties. At Easter and Michælmas each of these magistrates produced his own accounts and paid in to the Exchequer such an instalment or proffer as he could afford, retaining in hand sufficient money for current expenses. In token of receipt a tally was made; a long piece of wood in which a number of notches were cut, marking the pounds, shillings, and pence received; this stick was then split down the middle, each half contained exactly the same number of notches, and no alteration could of course be made without certain detection. … The fire which destroyed the old Houses of Parliament is said to have originated in the burning of the old Exchequer tallies."