in the three western countries of that Central European area which
the Congress of Vienna left unsettled in 1814, and in a later chapter
we shall see the same principle acting in the two great divisions of
South-East Europe, Austria-Hungary and the Balkan Peninsula. Let us, then,
use this opportunity to pause for a moment, take a general survey of the
map, and consider in broad outline what has actually been accomplished
during the past century and what still remains to do.

From 1814 to 1848, exhausted by the effort of the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars and disillusioned by reactionary statesmanship, the larger
nations slumbered: but Belgium and Greece secured their present liberties,
and outside Europe the national movement spread throughout the South
American Continent. Then came 1848, the "wonderful year" of modern history.
"There is no more remarkable example in history of the contagious quality
of ideas than the sudden spread of revolutionary excitement through
Europe in 1848. In the course of a few weeks the established order seemed
everywhere to be crumbling to pieces. The Revolution began in Palermo,
crossed the Straits of Messina, and passed in successive waves of
convulsion through Central Italy to Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Berlin. It
has often been remarked that the Latin races are of all the peoples of
Europe most prone to revolution; but this proposition did not hold good
in 1848. The Czechs in Bohemia, the Magyars in Hungary, the Germans in
Austria, rose against the paralysing encumbrance of the Hapsburg autocracy.
The Southern Slavs dreamed of an Illyrian kingdom; the Germans of a united
Germany; the Bohemians of a union of all the Slavonic peoples of Europe.
The authority of the Austrian Empire, the pivot of the European autocracy,
had never been so rudely challenged, and if the Crown succeeded in
recovering its shattered authority it was due to the dumb and unintelligent
loyalty of its Slavonic troops."[1]

[Footnote 1: H.A.L. Fisher, _The Republican Tradition in Europe_, p. 193.]

Many of these risings were doomed to failure, but between 1848 and 1871 the
alien governments in the Italian peninsula were abolished, making way for
a unitary government, in the form of a constitutional monarchy, which
embraces with small exceptions the whole of the Italian population of
Europe. In 1871, after three successful wars in seven years against
Denmark, Austria, and France, a Federal Government was established