ed failure calculated to attract the
world's attention. England had in some sense shared men's notice with
Russia immediately after the settlement of Europe. The "crowning
carnage, Waterloo," was considered her work; and, as the most decisive
battle since Philippi, it gave to the victor in it an amount of
consideration that was equal to that which Napoleon himself had
possessed in 1812. But this consideration rapidly passed away, as
England did nothing to maintain her influence on the Continent, while
Russia was constantly busy there, and really governed it down to the
French Revolution of 1830; and her power was not much weakened even by
the fall of the elder Bourbons, with whom the Czar had entered into a
treaty that had for one of its ends the cession to France of those very
Rhenish provinces of which so much has been said in the course of the
present year. Russia was victorious in her conflicts with the Persians
and the Turks, and the battle of Navarino really had been fought in her
interest,--blindly by the English, but intelligently by the French, who
were willing that she should plant the double-headed eagle on the
Bosporus, provided the lilies should be planted on the Rhine. If the
fall of the Bourbons in France, and the fall of the Tories in England,
weakened Russia's influence in Western Europe, those events had the
effect of drawing Austria and Prussia nearer to her, and of reviving
something of the spirit of the Holy Alliance, which had lost much of its
strength from the early death of Alexander. Russia had her own way in
almost every respect; and in 1846 Nicholas was almost as powerful a
ruler as Napoleon had been a generation earlier, with the additional
advantage of being a legitimate sovereign, who could not be destroyed
through the efforts of any coalition. Three years later he saved Austria
from destruction by his invasion of Hungary,--an act of hard insolence,
which quite reconciles one to the humiliation that overtook him five
years later. He was then so powerful that the reactionists of the West
cried for Russian cannon, to be used against the Reds. There was no
nation to dispute the palm with Russia. England was supposed to be
devoted to the conversion of cotton into calico, and to be ruled in the
spirit of the Manchester school. She had retired into her shell, and
could not be got out of it. Austria was thinking chiefly of Italy, and
of becoming a naval power by incorporating that Peninsula into her