He declared that the aim of his adversaries was nothing less than the establishment of a Parliamentary instead of a royal army. In perfect sincerity he believed that the convulsions of 1848 were on the point of breaking out afresh. "You mourn the conflict between the Crown and the national representatives," he said to the spokesman of an important society; "do I not mourn it? I sleep no single night." The anxiety, the despondency of the sovereign were shared by the friends of Prussia throughout Germany; its enemies saw with wonder that Bismarck in his struggle with the educated Liberalism of the middle cla.s.ses did not shrink from dalliance with the Socialist leaders and their organs. When Parliament rea.s.sembled at the beginning of 1863 the conflict was resumed with even greater heat. The Lower Chamber carried an address to the King, which, while dwelling on the loyalty of the Prussian people to their chief, charged the Ministers with violating the Const.i.tution, and demanded their dismissal. The King refused to receive the deputation which was to present the address, and in the written communication in which he replied to it he sharply reproved the a.s.sembly for their errors and presumption. It was in vain that the Army Bill was again introduced. The House, while allowing the ordinary military expenditure for the year, struck out the costs of the reorganisation, and declared Ministers personally answerable for the sums expended. Each appearance of the leading members of the Cabinet now became the signal for contumely and altercation. The decencies of debate ceased to be observed on either side. When the President attempted to set some limit to the violence of Bismarck and Roon, and, on resistance to his authority, terminated the sitting, the Ministers declared that they would no longer appear in a Chamber where freedom of speech was denied to them. Affairs came to a deadlock. The Chamber again appealed to the King, and insisted that reconciliation between the Crown and the nation was impossible so long as the present Ministers remained in office. The King, now thoroughly indignant, charged the a.s.sembly with attempting to win for itself supreme power, expressed his grat.i.tude to his Ministers for their resistance to this usurpation, and declared himself too confident in the loyalty of the Prussian people to be intimidated by threats. His reply was followed by the prorogation of the a.s.sembly (May 26th). A dissolution would have been worse than useless, for in the actual state of public opinion the Opposition would probably have triumphed throughout the country. It only remained for Bismarck to hold his ground, and, having silenced the Parliament for a while, to silence the Press also by the exercise of autocratic power. The Const.i.tution authorised the King, in the absence of the Chambers, to publish enactments on matters of urgency having the force of laws. No sooner had the session been closed than an edict was issued empowering the Government, without resort to courts of law, to suppress any newspaper after two warnings. An outburst of public indignation branded this return to the principles of pure despotism in Prussia; but neither King nor Minister was to be diverted by threats or by expostulations from his course. The Press was effectively silenced. So profound, however, was the distrust now everywhere felt as to the future of Prussia, and so deep the resentment against the Minister in all circles where Liberal influences penetrated, that the Crown Prince himself, after in vain protesting against a policy of violence which endangered his own prospective interests in the Crown, publicly expressed his disapproval of the action of Government. For this offence he was never forgiven.

[Austria from 1859.]

The course which affairs were taking at Berlin excited the more bitter regret and disappointment among all friends of Prussia as at this very time it seemed that const.i.tutional government was being successfully established in the western part of the Austrian Empire. The centralised military despotism with which Austria emerged from the convulsions of 1848 had been allowed ten years of undisputed sway; at the end of this time it had brought things to such a pa.s.s that, after a campaign in which there had been but one great battle, and while still in possession of a vast army and an unbroken chain of fortresses, Austria stood powerless to move hand or foot. It was not the defeat of Solferino or the cession of Lombardy that exhibited the prostration of Austria's power, but the fact that while the conditions of the Peace of Zurich were swept away, and Italy was united under Victor Emmanuel in defiance of the engagements made by Napoleon III.

at Villafranca, the Austrian Emperor was compelled to look on with folded arms. To have drawn the sword again, to have fired a shot in defence of the Pope's temporal power or on behalf of the va.s.sal princes of Tuscany and Modena, would have been to risk the existence of the Austrian monarchy. The State was all but bankrupt; rebellion might at any moment break out in Hungary, which had already sent thousands of soldiers to the Italian camp.

Peace at whatever price was necessary abroad, and at home the system of centralised despotism could no longer exist, come what might in its place.

It was natural that the Emperor should but imperfectly understand at the first the extent of the concessions which it was necessary for him to make.

He determined that the Provincial Councils which Schwarzenberg had promised in 1850 should be called into existence, and that a Council of the Empire (Reichsrath), drawn in part from these, should a.s.semble at Vienna, to advise, though not to control, the Government in matters of finance. So urgent, however, were the needs of the exchequer, that the Emperor proceeded at once to the creation of the Central Council, and nominated its first members himself. (March, 1860.)

[Hungary.]

[Centralists and Federalists in the Council.]

[The Diploma of Oct 20, 1860.]

That the Hungarian members nominated by the Emperor would decline to appear at Vienna unless some further guarantee was given for the restoration of Hungarian liberty was well known. The Emperor accordingly promised to restore the ancient county-organisation, which had filled so great a s.p.a.ce in Hungarian history before 1848, and to take steps for a.s.sembling the Hungarian Diet. This, with the repeal of an edict injurious to the Protestants, opened the way for reconciliation, and the nominated Hungarians took their place in the Council, though under protest that the existing arrangement could only be accepted as preparatory to the full rest.i.tution of the rights of their country. The Council continued in session during the summer of 1860. Its duties were financial; but the establishment of financial equilibrium in Austria was inseparable from the establishment of political stability and public confidence; and the Council, in its last sittings, entered on the widest const.i.tutional problems. The non-German members were in the majority; and while all parties alike condemned the fallen absolutism, the rival declarations of policy submitted to the Council marked the opposition which was henceforward to exist between the German Liberals of Austria and the various Nationalist or Federalist groups. The Magyars, uniting with those who had been their bitterest enemies, declared that the ancient independence in legislation and administration of the several countries subject to the House of Hapsburg must be restored, each country retaining its own historical character. The German minority contended that the Emperor should bestow upon his subjects such inst.i.tutions as, while based on the right of self-government should secure the unity of the Empire and the force of its central authority. All parties were for a const.i.tutional system and for local liberties in one form or another; but while the Magyars and their supporters sought for nothing less than national independence, the Germans would at the most have granted a uniform system of provincial self-government in strict subordination to a central representative body drawn from the whole Empire and legislating for the whole Empire. The decision of the Emperor was necessarily a compromise. By a Diploma published on the 20th of October he promised to restore to Hungary its old Const.i.tution, and to grant wide legislative rights to the other States of the Monarchy, establishing for the transaction of affairs common to the whole Empire an Imperial Council, and reserving for the non-Hungarian members of this Council a qualified right of legislation for all the Empire except Hungary. [508]

[Hungary resists the establishment of a Central Council.]

The Magyars had conquered their King; and all the impetuous patriotism that had been crushed down since the ruin of 1849 now again burst into flame.

The County a.s.semblies met, and elected as their officers men who had been condemned to death in 1849 and who were living in exile; they swept away the existing law-courts, refused the taxes, and proclaimed the legislation of 1848 again in force. Francis Joseph seemed anxious to avert a conflict, and to prove both in Hungary and in the other parts of the Empire the sincerity of his promises of reform, on which the nature of the provincial Const.i.tutions which were published immediately after the Diploma of October had thrown some doubt. At the instance of his Hungarian advisers he dismissed the chief of his Cabinet, and called to office Schmerling, who, in 1848, had been Prime Minister of the German National Government at Frankfort. Schmerling at once promised important changes in the provincial systems drawn up by his predecessor, but in his dealings with Hungary he proved far less tractable than the Magyars had expected. If the Hungarians had recovered their own const.i.tutional forms, they still stood threatened with the supremacy of a Central Council in all that related to themselves in common with the rest of the Empire, and against this they rebelled. But from the establishment of this Council of the Empire neither the Emperor nor Schmerling would recede. An edict of February 26th, 1861, while it made good the changes promised by Schmerling in the several provincial systems, confirmed the general provisions of the Diploma of October, and declared that the Emperor would maintain the Const.i.tution of his dominions as now established against an attack.

[Conflict of Hungary with the Crown, 1861.]

In the following April the Provincial Diets met throughout the Austrian Empire, and the Diet of the Hungarian Kingdom a.s.sembled at Pesth. The first duty of each of these bodies was to elect representatives to the Council of the Empire which was to meet at Vienna. Neither Hungary nor Croatia, however, would elect such representatives, each claiming complete legislative independence, and declining to recognise any such external authority as it was now proposed to create. The Emperor warned the Hungarian Diet against the consequences of its action; but the national spirit of the Magyars was thoroughly roused, and the County a.s.semblies vied with one another in the violence of their addresses to the Sovereign. The Diet, reviving the Const.i.tutional difficulties connected with the abdication of Ferdinand, declared that it would only negotiate for the coronation of Francis Joseph after the establishment of a Hungarian Ministry and the restoration of Croatia and Transylvania to the Hungarian Kingdom. Accepting Schmerling's contention that the ancient const.i.tutional rights of Hungary had been extinguished by rebellion, the Emperor insisted on the establishment of a Council for the whole Empire, and refused to recede from the declarations which he had made in the edict of February.

The Diet hereupon protested, in a long and vigorous address to the King, against the validity of all laws made without its own concurrence, and declared that Francis Joseph had rendered an agreement between the King and the nation impossible. A dissolution followed. The County a.s.semblies took up the national struggle. They in their turn were suppressed; their officers were dismissed, and military rule was established throughout the land, though with explicit declarations on the part of the King that it was to last only till the legally existing Const.i.tution could be brought into peaceful working. [509]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

[The Reichsrath at Vienna, May, 1861-Dec., 1862.]

[Second session of the Reichsrath, 1863.]

Meanwhile the Central Representative Body, now by enlargement of its functions and increase in the number of its members made into a Parliament of the Empire, a.s.sembled at Vienna. Its real character was necessarily altered by the absence of representatives from Hungary; and for some time the Government seemed disposed to limit its competence to the affairs of the Cis-Leithan provinces; but after satisfying himself that no accord with Hungary was possible, the Emperor announced this fact to the a.s.sembly, and bade it perform its part as the organ of the Empire at large, without regard to the abstention of those who did not choose to exercise their rights. The Budget for the entire Empire was accordingly submitted to the a.s.sembly, and for the first time the expenditure of the Austrian State was laid open to public examination and criticism. The first session of this Parliament lasted, with adjournments, from May, 1861, to December, 1862. In legislation it effected little, but its relations as a whole with the Government remained excellent, and its long-continued activity, unbroken by popular disturbances, did much to raise the fallen credit of the Austrian State and to win for it the regard of Germany. On the close of the session the Provincial Diets a.s.sembled, and throughout the spring of 1863 the rivalry of the Austrian nationalities gave abundant animation to many a local capital. In the next summer the Reichsrath rea.s.sembled at Vienna.

Though Hungary remained in a condition not far removed from rebellion, the Parliamentary system of Austria was gaining in strength, and indeed, as it seemed, at the expense of Hungary itself; for the Roumanian and German population of Transylvania, rejoicing in the opportunity of detaching themselves from the Magyars, now sent deputies to Vienna. While at Berlin each week that pa.s.sed sharpened the antagonism between the nation and its Government, and made the Minister's name more odious, Austria seemed to have successfully broken with the traditions of its past, and to be fast earning for itself an honourable place among States of the const.i.tutional type.

One of the reproaches brought against Bismarck by the Progressist majority in the Parliament of Berlin was that he had isolated Prussia both in Germany and in Europe. That he had roused against the Government of his country the public opinion of Germany was true: that he had alienated Prussia from all Europe was not the case; on the contrary, he had established a closer relation between the Courts of Berlin and St.

Petersburg than had existed at any time since the commencement of the Regency, and had secured for Prussia a degree of confidence and goodwill on the part of the Czar which, in the memorable years that were to follow, served it scarcely less effectively than an armed alliance. Russia, since the Crimean War, had seemed to be entering upon an epoch of boundless change. The calamities with which the reign of Nicholas had closed had excited in that narrow circle of Russian society where thought had any existence a vehement revulsion against the sterile and unchanging system of repression, the grinding servitude of the last thirty years. From the Emperor downwards all educated men believed not only that the system of government, but that the whole order of Russian social life, must be recast. The ferment of ideas which marks an age of revolution was in full course; but in what forms the new order was to be moulded, through what processes Russia was to be brought into its new life, no one knew. Russia was wanting in capable statesmen; it was even more conspicuously wanting in the cla.s.s of serviceable and intelligent agents of Government of the second rank. Its monarch, Alexander II., humane and well-meaning, was irresolute and vacillating beyond the measure of ordinary men. He was not only devoid of all administrative and organising faculty himself, but so infirm of purpose that Ministers whose policy he had accepted feared to let him pa.s.s out of their sight, lest in the course of a single journey or a single interview he should succ.u.mb to the persuasions of some rival politician. In no country in Europe was there such incoherence, such self-contradiction, such absence of unity of plan and purpose in government as in Russia, where all nominally depended upon a single will. Pressed and tormented by all the rival influences that beat upon the centre of a great empire, Alexander seems at times to have played off against one another as colleagues in the same branch of Government the representatives of the most opposite schools of action, and, after a.s.senting to the plans of one group of advisers, to have committed the execution of these plans, by way of counterpoise, to those who had most opposed them. But, like other weak men, he dreaded nothing so much as the reproach of weakness or inconstancy; and in the cloud of half-formed or abandoned purposes there were some few to which he resolutely adhered. The chief of these, the great achievement of his reign, was the liberation of the serfs.

[Liberation of the Serfs. March, 1861.]

It was probably owing to the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 that the serfs had not been freed by Nicholas. That sovereign had long understood the necessity for the change, and in 1847 he had actually appointed a Commission to report on the best means of effecting it. The convulsions of 1848, followed by the Hungarian and the Crimean Wars, threw the project into the background during the remainder of Nicholas's reign; but if the belief of the Russian people is well founded, the last injunction of the dying Czar to his successor was to emanc.i.p.ate the serfs throughout his empire. Alexander was little capable of grappling with so tremendous a problem himself; in the year 1859, however, he directed a Commission to make a complete inquiry into the subject, and to present a scheme of emanc.i.p.ation. The labours of the Commission extended over two years; its discussions were agitated, at times violent. That serf.a.ge must sooner or later be abolished all knew; the points on which the Commission was divided were the bestowal of land on the peasants and the regulation of the village community. European history afforded abundant precedents in emanc.i.p.ation, and under an infinite variety of detail three types of the process of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt were clearly distinguishable from one another. Maria Theresa, in liberating the serf, had required him to continue to render a fixed amount of labour to his lord, and had given him on this condition fixity of tenure in the land he occupied; the Prussian reformers had made a division of the land between the peasant and the lord, and extinguished all labour-dues; Napoleon, in enfranchising the serfs in the Duchy of Warsaw, had simply turned them into free men, leaving the terms of their occupation of land to be settled by arrangement or free contract with their former lords. This example had been followed in the Baltic Provinces of Russia itself by Alexander I. Of the three modes of emanc.i.p.ation, that based on free contract had produced the worst results for the peasant; and though many of the Russian landowners and their representatives in the Commission protested against a division of the land between themselves and their serfs as an act of agrarian revolution and spoliation, there were men in high office, and some few among the proprietors, who resolutely and successfully fought for the principle of independent ownership by the peasants. The leading spirit in this great work appears to have been Nicholas Milutine, Adjunct of the Minister of the Interior, Lanskoi. Milutine, who had drawn up the Munic.i.p.al Charta of St. Petersburg, was distrusted by the Czar as a restless and uncompromising reformer. It was uncertain from day to day whether the views of the Ministry of the Interior or those of the territorial aristocracy would prevail; ultimately, however, under instructions from the Palace, the Commission accepted not only the principle of the division of the land, but the system of communal self-government by the peasants themselves. The determination of the amount of land to be held by the peasants of a commune and of the fixed rent to be paid to the lord was left in the first instance to private agreement; but where such agreement was not reached, the State, through arbiters elected at local a.s.semblies of the n.o.bles, decided the matter itself. The rent once fixed, the State enabled the commune to redeem it by advancing a capital sum to be recouped by a quit-rent to the State extending over forty-nine years. The Ukase of the Czar converting twenty-five millions of serfs into free proprietors, the greatest act of legislation of modern times, was signed on the 3rd of March, 1861, and within the next few weeks was read in every church of the Russian Empire. It was a strange comment on the system of government in Russia that in the very month in which the edict was published both Lanskoi and Milutine, who had been its princ.i.p.al authors, were removed from their posts. The Czar feared to leave them in power to superintend the actual execution of the law which they had inspired. In supporting them up to the final stage of its enactment Alexander had struggled against misgivings of his own, and against influences of vast strength alike at the Court, within the Government, and in the Provinces.

With the completion of the Edict of Emanc.i.p.ation his power of resistance was exhausted, and its execution was committed by him to those who had been its opponents. That some of the evils which have mingled with the good in Russian enfranchis.e.m.e.nt might have been less had the Czar resolutely stood by the authors of reform and allowed them to complete their work in accordance with their own designs and convictions, is scarcely open to doubt. [510]

[Poland, 1861, 1862.]

It had been the belief of educated men in Russia that the emanc.i.p.ation of the serf would be but the first of a series of great organic changes, bringing their country more nearly to the political and social level of its European neighbours. This belief was not fulfilled. Work of importance was done in the reconstruction of the judicial system of Russia, but in the other reforms expected little was accomplished. An insurrection which broke out in Poland at the beginning of 1863 diverted the energies of the Government from all other objects; and in the overpowering outburst of Russian patriotism and national feeling which it excited, domestic reforms, no less than the ideals of Western civilisation, lost their interest. The establishment of Italian independence, coinciding in time with the general unsettlement and expectation of change which marked the first years of Alexander's reign, had stirred once more the ill-fated hopes of the Polish national leaders. From the beginning of the year 1861 Warsaw was the scene of repeated tumults. The Czar was inclined, within certain limits, to a policy of conciliation. The separate Legislature and separate army which Poland had possessed from 1815 to 1830 he was determined not to restore; but he was willing to give Poland a large degree of administrative autonomy, to confide the princ.i.p.al offices in its Government to natives, and generally to relax something of that close union with Russia which had been enforced by Nicholas since the rebellion of 1831. But the concessions of the Czar, accompanied as they were by acts of repression and severity, were far from satisfying the demands of Polish patriotism. It was in vain that Alexander in the summer of 1862 sent his brother Constantine as Viceroy to Warsaw, established a Polish Council of State, placed a Pole, Wielopolski, at the head of the Administration, superseded all the Russian governors of Polish provinces by natives, and gave to the munic.i.p.alities and the districts the right of electing local councils; these concessions seemed nothing, and were in fact nothing, in comparison with the national independence which the Polish leaders claimed. The situation grew worse and worse. An attempt made upon the life of the Grand Duke Constantine during his entry into Warsaw was but one among a series of similar acts which discredited the Polish cause and strengthened those who at St. Petersburg had from the first condemned the Czar's attempts at conciliation. At length the Russian Government took the step which precipitated revolt. A levy of one in every two hundred of the population throughout the Empire had been ordered in the autumn of 1862. Instructions were sent from St. Petersburg to the effect that in raising this levy in Poland the country population were to be spared, and that all persons who were known to be connected with the disorders in the towns were to be seized as soldiers. This terrible sentence against an entire political cla.s.s was carried out, so far as it lay within the power of the authorities, on the night of January 14th, 1863. But before the imperial press-gang surrounded the houses of its victims a rumour of the intended blow had gone abroad. In the preceding hours, and during the night of the 14th, thousands fled from Warsaw and the other Polish towns into the forests. There they formed themselves into armed bands, and in the course of the next few days a guerilla warfare broke out wherever Russian troops were found in insufficient strength or off their guard. [511]

[Poland and Russia.]

The cla.s.ses in which the national spirit of Poland lived were the so-called n.o.blesse, numbering hundreds of thousands, the town populations, and the priesthood. The peasants, crushed and degraded, though not nominally in servitude, were indifferent to the national cause. On the neutrality, if not on the support, of the peasants the Russian Government could fairly reckon; within the towns it found itself at once confronted by an invisible national Government whose decrees were printed and promulgated by unknown hands, and whose sentences of death were mercilessly executed against those whom it condemned as enemies or traitors to the national cause. So extraordinary was the secrecy which covered the action of this National Executive, that Milutine, who was subsequently sent by the Czar to examine into the affairs of Poland, formed the conclusion that it had possessed accomplices within the Imperial Government at St. Petersburg itself. The Polish cause retained indeed some friends in Russia even after the outbreak of the insurrection; it was not until the insurrection pa.s.sed the frontier of the kingdom and was carried by the n.o.bles into Lithuania and Podolia that the entire Russian nation took up the struggle with pa.s.sionate and vindictive ardour as one for life or death. It was the fatal bane of Polish nationality that the days of its greatness had left it a claim upon vast territories where it had planted nothing but a territorial aristocracy, and where the ma.s.s of population, if not actually Russian, was almost indistinguishable from the Russians in race and language, and belonged like them to the Greek Church, which Catholic Poland had always persecuted. For ninety years Lithuania and the border provinces had been incorporated with the Czar's dominions, and with the exception of their Polish landowners they were now in fact thoroughly Russian. When therefore the n.o.bles of these provinces declared that Poland must be reconst.i.tuted with the limits of 1772, and subsequently took up arms in concert with the insurrectionary Government at Warsaw, the Russian people, from the Czar to the peasant, felt the struggle to be nothing less than one for the dismemberment or the preservation of their own country, and the doom of Polish nationality, at least for some generations, was sealed. The diplomatic intervention of the Western Powers on behalf of the const.i.tutional rights of Poland under the Treaty of Vienna, which was to some extent supported by Austria, only prolonged a hopeless struggle, and gave unbounded popularity to Prince Gortschakoff, by whom, after a show of courteous attention during the earlier and still perilous stage of the insurrection, the interference of the Powers was resolutely and unconditionally repelled. By the spring of 1864 the insurgents were crushed or exterminated. General Muravieff, the Governor of Lithuania, fulfilled his task against the mutinous n.o.bles of this province with unshrinking severity, sparing neither life nor fortune so long as an enemy of Russia remained to be overthrown. It was at Wilna, the Lithuanian capital, not at Warsaw, that the terrors of Russian repression were the greatest. Muravieff's executions may have been less numerous than is commonly supposed; but in the form of pecuniary requisitions and fines he undoubtedly aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of a great part of the cla.s.s most implicated in the rebellion.

[Agrarian measures in Poland.]

[Agrarian measures in Poland, 1864.]

In Poland itself the Czar, after some hesitation, determined once and for all to establish a friend to Russia in every homestead of the kingdom by making the peasant owner of the land on which he laboured. The insurrectionary Government at the outbreak of the rebellion had attempted to win over the peasantry by promising enactments to this effect, but no one had responded to their appeal. In the autumn of 1863 the Czar recalled Milutine from his enforced travels and directed him to proceed to Warsaw, in order to study the affairs of Poland on the spot, and to report on the measures necessary to be taken for its future government and organisation.

Milutine obtained the a.s.sistance of some of the men who had laboured most earnestly with him in the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Russian serfs; and in the course of a few weeks he returned to St. Petersburg, carrying with him the draft of measures which were to change the face of Poland. He recommended on the one hand that every political inst.i.tution separating Poland from the rest of the Empire should be swept away, and the last traces of Polish independence utterly obliterated; on the other hand, that the peasants, as the only cla.s.s on which Russia could hope to count in the future, should be made absolute and independent owners of the land they occupied. Prince Gortschakoff, who had still some regard for the opinion of Western Europe, and possibly some sympathy for the Polish aristocracy, resisted this daring policy; but the Czar accepted Milutine's counsel, and gave him a free hand in the execution of his agrarian scheme. The division of the land between the n.o.bles and the peasants was accordingly carried out by Milutine's own officers under conditions very different from those adopted in Russia. The whole strength of the Government was thrown on to the side of the peasant and against the n.o.ble. Though the population was denser in Poland than in Russia, the peasant received on an average four times as much land; the compensation made to the lords (which was paid in bonds which immediately fell to half their nominal value) was raised not by quit-rents on the peasants' lands alone, as in Russia, but by a general land-tax falling equally on the land left to the lords, who had thus to pay a great part of their own compensation: above all, the questions in dispute were settled, not as in Russia by arbiters elected at local a.s.semblies of the n.o.bles, but by officers of the Crown. Moreover, the division of landed property was not made once and for all, as in Russia, but the woods and pastures remaining to the lords continued subject to undefined common-rights of the peasants.

These common-rights were deliberately left unsettled in order that a source of contention might always be present between the greater and the lesser proprietors, and that the latter might continue to look to the Russian Government as the protector or extender of their interests. "We hold Poland," said a Russian statesman, "by its rights of common." [512]

[Russia and Polish nationality.]

Milutine, who, with all the fiery ardour of his national and levelling policy, seems to have been a gentle and somewhat querulous invalid, and who was shortly afterwards struck down by paralysis, to remain a helpless spectator of the European changes of the next six years, had no share in that warfare against the language, the religion, and the national culture of Poland with which Russia has pursued its victory since 1863. The public life of Poland he was determined to Russianise; its private and social life he would probably have left unmolested, relying on the goodwill of the great ma.s.s of peasants who owed their proprietorship to the action of the Czar. There were, however, politicians at Moscow and St. Petersburg who believed that the deep-lying instinct of nationality would for the first time be called into real life among these peasants by their very elevation from misery to independence, and that where Russia had hitherto had three hundred thousand enemies Milutine was preparing for it six millions. It was the dread of this possibility in the future, the apprehension that material interests might not permanently vanquish the subtler forces which pa.s.s from generation to generation, latent, if still unconscious, where nationality itself is not lost, that made the Russian Government follow up the political destruction of the Polish n.o.blesse by measures directed against Polish nationality itself, even at the risk of alienating the cla.s.s who for the present were effectively won over to the Czar's cause. By the side of its life-giving and beneficent agrarian policy Russia has pursued the odious system of debarring Poland from all means of culture and improvement a.s.sociated with the use of its own language, and has aimed at eventually turning the Poles into Russians by the systematic impoverishment and extinction of all that is essentially Polish in thought, in sentiment, and in expression. The work may prove to be one not beyond its power; and no common perversity on the part of its Government would be necessary to turn against Russia the millions who in Poland owe all they have of prosperity and independence to the Czar: but should the excess of Russian propagandism, or the hostility of Church to Church, at some distant date engender a new struggle for Polish independence, this struggle will be one governed by other conditions than those of 1831 or 1863, and Russia will, for the first time, have to conquer on the Vistula not a cla.s.s nor a city, but a nation.

[Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1863.]

It was a matter of no small importance to Bismarck and to Prussia that in the years 1863 and 1864 the Court of St. Petersburg found itself confronted with affairs of such seriousness in Poland. From the opportunity which was then presented to him of obliging an important neighbour, and of profiting by that neighbour's conjoined embarra.s.sment and goodwill, Bismarck drew full advantage. He had always regarded the Poles as a mere nuisance in Europe, and heartily despised the Germans for the sympathy which they had shown towards Poland in 1848. When the insurrection of 1863 broke out, Bismarck set the policy of his own country in emphatic contrast with that of Austria and the Western Powers, and even entered into an arrangement with Russia for an eventual military combination in case the insurgents should pa.s.s from one side to the other of the frontier. [513] Throughout the struggle with the Poles, and throughout the diplomatic conflict with the Western Powers, the Czar had felt secure in the loyalty of the stubborn Minister at Berlin; and when, at the close of the Polish revolt, the events occurred which opened to Prussia the road to political fortune, Bismarck received his reward in the liberty of action given him by the Russian Government. The difficulties connected with Schleswig-Holstein, which, after a short interval of tranquillity following the settlement of 1852, had again begun to trouble Europe, were forced to the very front of Continental affairs by the death of Frederick VII., King of Denmark, in November, 1863. Prussia had now at its head a statesman resolved to pursue to their extreme limit the chances which this complication offered to his own country; and, more fortunate than his predecessors of 1848, Bismarck had not to dread the interference of the Czar of Russia as the patron and protector of the interests of the Danish court.

[Schleswig-Holstein, 1852-1863.]

[The Patent of March 30, 1863.]

By the Treaty of London, signed on May 8th, 1852, all the great Powers, including Prussia, had recognised the principle of the integrity of the Danish Monarchy, and had p.r.o.nounced Prince Christian of Glucksburg to be heir-presumptive to the whole dominions of the reigning King. The rights of the German Federation in Holstein were nevertheless declared to remain unprejudiced; and in a Convention made with Austria and Prussia before they joined in this Treaty, King Frederick VII. had undertaken to conform to certain rules in his treatment of Schleswig as well as of Holstein. The Duke of Augustenburg, claimant to the succession in Schleswig-Holstein through the male line, had renounced his pretensions in consideration of an indemnity paid to him by the King of Denmark. This surrender, however, had not received the consent of his son and of the other members of the House of Augustenburg, nor had the German Federation, as such, been a party to the Treaty of London. Relying on the declaration of the Great Powers in favour of the integrity of the Danish Kingdom, Frederick VII. had resumed his attempts to a.s.similate Schleswig, and in some degree Holstein, to the rest of the Monarchy; and although the Provincial Estates were allowed to remain in existence, a national Const.i.tution was established in October, 1855, for the entire Danish State. Bitter complaints were made of the system of repression and encroachment with which the Government of Copenhagen was attempting to extinguish German nationality in the border provinces; at length, in November, 1858, under threat of armed intervention by the German Federation, Frederick consented to exclude Holstein from the operation of the new Const.i.tution. But this did not produce peace, for the inhabitants of Schleswig, severed from the sister-province and now excited by the Italian war, raised all the more vigorous a protest against their own incorporation with Denmark; while in Holstein itself the Government incurred the charge of unconst.i.tutional action in fixing the Budget without the consent of the Estates. The German Federal Diet again threatened to resort to force, and Denmark prepared for war. Prussia took up the cause of Schleswig in 1861; and even the British Government, which had hitherto shown far more interest in the integrity of Denmark than in the rights of the German provinces, now recommended that the Const.i.tution of 1855 should be abolished, and that a separate legislation and administration should be granted to Schleswig as well as to Holstein. The Danes, however, were bent on preserving Schleswig as an integral part of the State, and the Government of King Frederick, while willing to recognise Holstein as outside Danish territory proper, insisted that Schleswig should be included within the unitary Const.i.tution, and that Holstein should contribute a fixed share to the national expenditure. A manifesto to this effect, published by King Frederick on the 30th of March, 1863, was the immediate ground of the conflict now about to break out between Germany and Denmark.

The Diet of Frankfort announced that if this proclamation were not revoked it should proceed to Federal execution, that is, armed intervention, against the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein. Still counting upon foreign aid or upon the impotence of the Diet, the Danish Government refused to change its policy, and on the 29th of September laid before the Parliament at Copenhagen the law incorporating Schleswig with the rest of the Monarchy under the new Const.i.tution. Negotiations were thus brought to a close, and on the 1st of October the Diet decreed the long-threatened Federal execution. [514]

[Death of Frederick VII., November, 1863.]

[Federal execution in Holstein. December, 1863.]

Affairs had reached this stage, and the execution had not yet been put in force, when, on the 15th of November, King Frederick VII. died. For a moment it appeared possible that his successor, Prince Christian of Glucksburg, might avert the conflict with Germany by withdrawing from the position which his predecessor had taken up. But the Danish people and Ministry were little inclined to give way; the Const.i.tution had pa.s.sed through Parliament two days before King Frederick's death, and on the 18th of November it received the a.s.sent of the new monarch. German national feeling was now as strongly excited on the question of Schleswig-Holstein as it had been in 1848. The general cry was that the union of these provinces with Denmark must be treated as at an end, and their legitimate ruler, Frederick of Augustenburg, son of the Duke who had renounced his rights, be placed on the throne. The Diet of Frankfort, however, decided to recognise neither of the two rival sovereigns in Holstein until its own intervention should have taken place. Orders were given that a Saxon and a Hanoverian corps should enter the country; and although Prussia and Austria had made a secret agreement that the settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question was to be conducted by themselves independently of the Diet, the tide of popular enthusiasm ran so high that for the moment the two leading Powers considered it safer not to obstruct the Federal authority, and the Saxon and Hanoverian troops accordingly entered Holstein as mandatories of the Diet at the end of 1863. The Danish Government, offering no resistance, withdrew its troops across the river Eider into Schleswig.

[Plans of Bismarck.]

[Union of Austria and Prussia.]

[Austrian and Prussian troops enter Schleswig. Feb., 1864.]

From this time the history of Germany is the history of the profound and audacious statecraft and of the overmastering will of Bismarck; the nation, except through its valour on the battle-field, ceases to influence the shaping of its own fortunes. What the German people desired in 1864 was that Schleswig-Holstein should be attached, under a ruler of its own, to the German Federation as it then existed; what Bismarck intended was that Schleswig-Holstein, itself incorporated more or less directly with Prussia, should be made the means of the destruction of the existing Federal system and of the expulsion of Austria from Germany. That another petty State, bound to Prussia by no closer tie than its other neighbours, should be added to the troop among whom Austria found its va.s.sals and its instruments, would have been in Bismarck's eyes no gain but actual detriment to Germany. The German people desired one course of action; Bismarck had determined on something totally different; and with matchless resolution and skill he bore down all opposition of people and of Courts, and forced a reluctant nation to the goal which he had himself chosen for it. The first point of conflict was the apparent recognition by Bismarck of the rights of King Christian IX. as lawful sovereign in the Duchies as well as in the rest of the Danish State. By the Treaty of London Prussia had indeed pledged itself to this recognition; but the German Federation had been no party to the Treaty, and under the pressure of a vehement national agitation Bavaria and the minor States one after another recognised Frederick of Augustenburg as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Bismarck was accused alike by the Prussian Parliament and by the popular voice of Germany at large of betraying German interests to Denmark, of abusing Prussia's position as a Great Power, of inciting the nation to civil war.

In vain he declared that, while surrendering no iota of German rights, the Government of Berlin must recognise those treaty-obligations with which its own legal t.i.tle to a voice in the affairs of Schleswig was intimately bound up, and that the King of Prussia, not a mult.i.tude of irresponsible and ill-informed citizens, must be the judge of the measures by which German interests were to be effectually protected. His words made no single convert either in the Prussian Parliament or in the Federal Diet. At Frankfort the proposal made by the two leading Powers that King Christian should be required to annul the November Const.i.tution, and that in case of his refusal Schleswig also should be occupied, was rejected, as involving an acknowledgment of the t.i.tle of Christian as reigning sovereign. At Berlin the Lower Chamber refused the supplies which Bismarck demanded for operations in the Duchies, and formally resolved to resist his policy by every means at its command. But the resistance of Parliament and of Diet were alike in vain. By a masterpiece of diplomacy Bismarck had secured the support and co-operation of Austria in his own immediate Danish policy, though but a few months before he had incurred the bitter hatred of the Court of Vienna by frustrating its plans for a reorganisation of Germany by a Congress of princes at Frankfort, and had frankly declared to the Austrian amba.s.sador at Berlin that if Austria did not transfer its political centre to Pesth and leave to Prussia free scope in Germany, it would find Prussia on the side of its enemies in the next war in which it might be engaged. [515] But the democratic and impa.s.sioned character of the agitation in the minor States in favour of the Schleswig-Holsteiners and their Augustenburg pretender had enabled Bismarck to represent this movement to the Austrian Government as a revolutionary one, and by a dexterous appeal to the memories of 1848 to awe the Emperor's advisers into direct concert with the Court of Berlin, as the representative of monarchical order, in dealing with a problem otherwise too likely to be solved by revolutionary methods and revolutionary forces. Count Rechberg, the Foreign Minister at Vienna, was lured into a policy which, after drawing upon Austria a full share of the odium of Bismarck's Danish plans, after forfeiting for it the goodwill of the minor States with which it might have kept Prussia in check, and exposing it to the risk of a European war, was to confer upon its rival the whole profit of the joint enterprise, and to furnish a pretext for the struggle by which Austria was to be expelled alike from Germany and from what remained to it of Italy. But of the nature of the toils into which he was now taking the first fatal and irrevocable step Count Rechberg appears to have had no suspicion. A seeming cordiality united the Austrian and Prussian Governments in the policy of defiance to the will of all the rest of Germany and to the demands of their own subjects. It was to no purpose that the Federal Diet vetoed the proposed summons to King Christian and the proposed occupation of Schleswig. Austria and Prussia delivered an ultimatum at Copenhagen demanding the repeal of the November Const.i.tution; and on its rejection their troops entered Schleswig, not as the mandatories of the German Federation, but as the instruments of two independent and allied Powers.

(Feb. 1, 1864.)

[Campaign in Schleswig. Feb.-April, 1864.]

Against the overwhelming forces by which they were thus attacked the Danes could only make a brave but ineffectual resistance. Their first line of defence was the Danewerke, a fortification extending east and west towards the sea from the town of Schleswig. Prince Frederick Charles, who commanded the Prussian right, was repulsed in an attack upon the easternmost part of this work at Missunde; the Austrians, however, carried some positions in the centre which commanded the defenders' lines, and the Danes fell back upon the fortified post of Duppel, covering the narrow channel which separates the island of Alsen from the mainland. Here for some weeks they held the Prussians in check, while the Austrians, continuing the march northwards, entered Jutland. At length, on the 18th of April, after several hours of heavy bombardment, the lines of Duppel were taken by storm and the defenders driven across the channel into Alsen. Unable to pursue the enemy across this narrow strip of sea, the Prussians joined their allies in Jutland, and occupied the whole of the Danish mainland as far as the Lum Fiord. The war, however, was not to be terminated without an attempt on the part of the neutral Powers to arrive at a settlement by diplomacy. A Conference was opened at London on the 20th of April, and after three weeks of negotiation the belligerents were induced to accept an armistice. As the troops of the German Federation, though unconcerned in the military operations of the two Great Powers, were in possession of Holstein, the Federal Government was invited to take part in the Conference. It was represented by Count Beust, Prime Minister of Saxony, a politician who was soon to rise to much greater eminence; but in consequence of the diplomatic union of Prussia and Austria the views entertained by the Governments of the secondary German States had now no real bearing on the course of events, and Count Beust's earliest appearance on the great European stage was without result, except in its influence on his own career. [516]

[Conference of London. April, 1864.]