Note 32 — THE FALL OF AUSTRIA.

Prussia, the most thoroughly anti-Gallican of all the parties to the Treaty of Vienna, completed the work of overthrowing the "detested" arrangements made by the framers of that treaty. The federal act creating the Germanic Confederation was incorporated in the work of the Congress of Vienna, and was guaranteed by eight European powers,—France, England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Prussia destroyed the Confederation without troubling herself about the wishes and opinions of the other seven parties to the arrangement of 1815. That all those parties to that arrangement were not always indifferent to their guaranty appears from the opposition made by Russia, France, and England to Prince Schwarzenburg's proposition, that Austria should be allowed to introduce all her non-Germanic territories into the Confederation, that is to say, that the Austrian Empire, which then included the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, should become a part of Germany, which it would soon have ruled, as well as overruled, while it would have extended its dominion over Italy. Had Schwarzenburg's project succeeded, the course of European events during the last sixteen years must have been entirely changed, or Austria would have been made too strong to be harmed by the French in Italy, or by the Prussians in Germany and Bohemia. Russia was specially adverse to that project; and the Treaty of Vienna was forcibly appealed to by her government in opposing it. The time had not then come for making waste-paper of the arrangements of 1815.