siasm. But Austria was deaf to the national aspirations, and alive only to her own separate interests; and this has been one of the principal causes of her unpopularity with the Germans. The most distinguished patriots of the day were in favour of the restoration; and it was only when they saw the futility of their hope, that they began to lend their countenance to other projects, if only such projects seemed calculated to save the German nation from utter destruction. All the smaller princes, except those whom Napoleon had raised to higher rank, were longing for the reestablishment of the old national unity, for which their ministers worked at the commencement of the Congress of Vienna. Even Prussia forgot for a moment her ambitious plans, and followed the counsels of her better genius,-for she has always had a divided mind, -while the princes and nobles of the empire, who had lost their position by its dissolution, petitioned Francis to resume the German crown. But they only received an evasive answer. Similar demands, said the Austrian sovereign, had been made to him from different quarters; they corresponded to his own wishes; but he had to ask himself whether he could make them coincide with the interests of his own dominions.

These words are a revelation of the state of affairs then existing. In the war-manifesto of 1809 the resignation of the emperor was treated as a temporary measure; and the only thing which prevented the realisation of a plan calculated to put an end to the interregnum was the Austrian empire which had been created in 1804. This first step led by fatal necessity to the second, when the emperor, in 1805, at the peace of Pressburg, bound himself not to object, either as the head or as one of the members of the German body politic, to the independent sovereignty assumed by others of its members. With equal necessity it led to the third step, when in 1806 the emperor of Austria abdicated the imperial throne of Germany. And finally, it prevented Austria from making use of the opportunities of restoring the German crown to her dynasty, and committed her, for good or evil, to the course which her internal, her German, and her European policy have actually taken. Hence there can be no change of system in Austria unaccompanied by a solution of her ambiguous relations to Germany. And the fact that this ambiguity still exists is the principal cause of the difficulties which continue to beset her.

But in adjusting our measurement of the guilt of this act, let us not forget to be just. In the gradual transformation and ultimate revolution of the political order, which have issued in the present condition of Europe, the action both of

Austria and Prussia has been controlled by a kind of necessity. In their essential character both were originally colonies. They grew out of conquests, acquisitions, and settlements of Germans, founded for the purpose of protecting the eastern frontiers of their empire from the inroads of barbarous tribes, or for the government of a subject population. Both powers were therefore military by the necessity of their origin; both naturally tended to an independent centralisation, and to an initiative activity which soon made them superior to their mother country in power as well as in political aims. The two colonial states were conscious of a vocation, which, though originally derived from, and still held under, the authority of the empire, appeared to both of them to be emphatically their own. Had they been situated beyond the ocean, they might have violently separated themselves or quietly seceded from the mother country; and Germany might have lost her colonial possessions as well as England and Spain. But the geographical contiguity of Austria and Prussia to Germany changed the nature of the process. Some of their original provinces formed a portion of the German empire; and they availed themselves of this relation for the purpose of extending their territory and increasing their power within the empire itself. The mother country ceased to possess her colonies, and her colonies began to possess her. One of them had grown to be the leading power of Germany. If they were to separate from her, they would be obliged to carry off with them some of the best portions of the national territory. This was the real lesson of the temporary Rhenish Confederacy in the beginning of the present century. It was composed of the remnants of the mother country collected together under French protection.

The national feeling of the Germans protested against so ignominious a close to a glorious history of a thousand years; and Austria had to bear her share of the blame. Austria was guilty of forsaking her old mother, the German empire, when she seemed to be dying. Then Prussia, with the criminal cupidity of a heartless heir, tried to hasten the death of her from whom she derived her life. Even yet, by her endeavours to prevent any reform of the German Confederacy, the temporary and imperfect form of German national existence, she is carrying out the same parricidal intentions. This is the great moral difference in the relative positions of the two great German powers to the German nation. A minor difference of the same kind is to be found in the working of that spirit of isolation which is common to both powers. The colonial state founded by Austria, partly through its original constitu

tion, partly through the milder sway which it exercised over the many remnants of the great migration of nations, had never ceased to be a mechanical compound of many different elements. Hence, as the mother country became weaker and her attraction less, the colonial state was necessarily compelled to concentrate its own powers, and to isolate its interests and its administrative functions. No such absolute necessity existed for Prussia, which, in aiming at the rank of an independent European power, was only following the temptations of vanity and ambition. The acts and declarations of Frederick II. alike prove him to have been the true incarnation of that evil spirit. As the principal cause of the annihilation of the imperial authority, Prussia doubled the pressure which was forcing Austria to take care of herself without thinking of the dying empire of Germany.

The new Austrian monarchy was strong in almost every respect,-in extent, in natural wealth, in numbers, and in the warlike character of its people. But it was weak morally, on account of the position which the Habsburg dynasty had once held at the head of the German empire. However imaginary the authority of the empire had been during the last period of its existence, it had mightily contributed to keep in order the rougher elements of the eastern half of the possessions of the Habsburgs. When it fell, the evil consequences presented themselves in three different shapes. First, there was the principle of nationality, which started like a spectre from the ruins of the ancient structure. Next, there was the inevitable unpopularity of Austria with the Germans. And thirdly, there was the preponderating popularity of Prussia, and the intrigues by which she sought to turn that popularity to her advantage. A brief explanation of these three points is

needed.

the

In 1806, when the old and time-worn Germanic empire disappeared, and the colonial state of Austria assumed an imperial character of its own, a movement took place among mixed population of the provinces united under the sceptre of the Habsburgs, analogous to those of the native tribes of Mexico and other Spanish-American colonies after their separation from the mother country. The prestige of the German emperor, the superior authority which the Habsburg monarch derived from the imperial crown, had been the instrument by which all these subject tribes and fragments of races and former nations had been kept in obedience and order. But as soon as that prestige was gone, a general agitation and stir began to be visible among them. When the nation seemed to be expiring, the nationalities started into life.

The Prince Albert de Broglie, in a paper on the "diplomatie du suffrage universel," speaks of the difference between nation and nationality. "On disait autrefois une nation; et ce mot avait un sens très-déterminé, puisque c'était l'appellation collective d'une réunion d'hommes soumis à un même régime politique. Nationalité veut dire apparemment quelque chose d'autre." Nationality, he might have added, in the modern revolutionary theory of international law, is the aspiration and pretension, based on the genealogy of races and tribes, to form a nation. When the great reality of the German nation was disappearing, it was no wonder that all the small pretensions called the nationalities should make their appearance.

Austria, cut off from the main root of her former life, was left a mass of heterogeneous elements, not one of which had sufficient predominance to give the new empire the necessary unity of character. It had become a political reality, but a reality altogether made up of antagonistic pretensions, which were kept together by little else than their mutual neutralisation. Even during the colonial period, the maintenance of this neutralising process had been the great secret of Austrian king-craft. Now it had become doubly necessary. The different nationalities were ever threatening to become the elements of the dissolution of the new monarchy; and the German element itself, which nature had intended to be the solid basis of the structure, was seduced by its very influence and power, by its superior worth and intelligence, and by its innate idealism, to overlook the practical considerations of political necessity, and to make itself the most dangerous element of the whole compound. When the German people rose against the French oppression, no national government existed in Germany. The German nation itself was, at that moment, a mere aspiration. But it was successful. The country

was delivered from the foreign yoke. The German nation triumphed while it existed only as a nationality. So far as the Germans were concerned, the victory was gained not by one government over another, but by one race over another. Hence the German mind almost lost sight of political forces, and, with its natural turn for theory, worked out the modern theory of nationality, which the enemies of Germany have since adopted and turned against her most important interests, and chiefly against Austria. German writers have complained that the principle of nationality received applications only to the damage, and never to the advantage, of Germany. They forget that Germans were among the inventors of the theory,

Le Correspondant, 25 jan. 1863.

and that natural justice requires the first finders of the folly to be also the first to feel its consequences. If the Germans, instead of adopting the principle of nationality,-which has been turned against them by Italians, Danes, Czechs, and Hungarians, but has not delivered the German population of Alsace from France, nor that of the Baltic provinces from Russia,had taken the political ground, and asserted their right to the reëstablishment of their empire, they would have succeeded long ago.

But by the course which they adopted they forced Austria, the most powerful of the German States, to set herself against all combinations aiming at national unity, because they were all grounded upon the principle of nationality, which is in itself destructive of the very existence of Austria. If it could ever have been practically applied to the provinces of that state, the monarchy would have been broken up into a greater number of states than the whole of Europe now contains. Austrian statesmen then had full reason for thinking the theory of nationality to be the most subversive principle of the age, and to look upon those who maintained it as political criminals.

Though the other German governments shared this view with the Austrian statesmen, Austria suffered from it more than they. All made themselves hateful to the people, but Austria most of all. The national feeling, roused from its long torpor by the great events of the Napoleonic wars, revolted against the political condition of Germany, after all the sacrifices which had been made to deliver her from the French yoke. It was disgusted to see dynasties which the annihilation of the imperial authority had rendered sovereign and independent battening, like worms in a carcass, upon the remains of the national body. For a short time, the confederacy of the new states promised to satisfy in some degree the demands for national unity and organisation. It was to be a substitute for the empire; and even still it is the empire in a rude and imperfect form. The great defects of the federal constitution were patent to every eye; but it was expected that they could be corrected by the efforts of patriots, and the mutual good-will of the princes and governments and their subjects. But when it was discovered, on one hand, that the princes, almost without exception, reckoned the interests of their dynasties and separate possessions above those of the nation, and only exhibited jealousy of the national movement, and, on the other, that the people in general felt a deadly hatred against those who obstructed the realisation of a better political condition of Germany as a whole,-then an open rupture ensued between the princes and the patriots