dungeon, the
torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or
Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the
weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the Marianne, the
Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or
transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,
Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to
Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And in
this singular conflict, what leaders! In Spain, the heroic Juan
Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Goerres, the morning-star of
political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and
the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause. It was
not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the
possibility of united action. Opposed to these were the united
purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression
of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the
great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller
principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,
Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar
Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Kruedener's phrase, had
struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity
of a crusade. From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of
the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel
the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous
despotism.

In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the
place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.
"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to
be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment
of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.
Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a
heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high
with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought,
action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a
living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history,
for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.
But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,
and made rebellion seem unculture