nk we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and
independence was in course of consummation.

II

(M110) By the end of the first week of August the storm of war had burst
upon the world. "On the 2nd of August, in the insignificant affair of
Saarbrueck, the Emperor of the French assumed a feeble offensive. On the
4th, the Prussians replied energetically at Wissemburg. And then what a
torrent, what a deluge of events! In twenty-eight days ten battles were
fought. Three hundred thousand men were sent to the hospitals, to
captivity, or to the grave. The German enemy had penetrated into the
interior of France, over a distance of a hundred and fifty miles of
territory, and had stretched forth everywhere as he went the strong hand
of possession. The Emperor was a prisoner, and had been deposed with
general consent; his family wanderers, none knew where; the embryo at
least of a republic, born of the hour, had risen on the ruins of the
empire, while proud and gorgeous Paris was awaiting with divided mind the
approach of the conquering monarch, and his countless host."(218) This was
Mr. Gladstone's description of a marvellous and shattering hour.

Talleyrand was fond in the days of 1815 at Vienna, of applying to any
diplomatist who happened to agree with him the expression, "a good
European." He meant a statesman who was capable of conceiving the
state-system of the western world as a whole. The events of August made
the chief minister of Austria now exclaim, "I see no longer any Europe."
All the notions of alliance that had so much to do with the precipitation
of the war were dissipated. Italy, so far from joining France, marched
into Rome. Austria ostentatiously informed England that she was free from
engagements. The Czar of Russia was nephew of the Prussian king and German
in his leanings, but Gortchakoff, his minister, was jealous of Bismarck,
and his sympathies inclined to France, and Czar and minister alike nursed
designs in the Black Sea. With such materials as these Mr. Pitt himself
with all his subsidies could not have constructed a fighting coalition.
Even the sons of stricken France after the destruction of the empire were
a divided people. For side by side with national defence against the
invader, republican and monarchic propagandism was at work, internecine in
its temper and scattering baleful seeds of civil war.

"Many," Mr. Gladstone wrote to Chevalier in September, "seem so
over-sanguine as