n changed during the five
years which have elapsed since we met here last. Never since the origin
of our race have there been five years more fertile of great events,
five years which have left behind them a more awful lesson. We have
lived many lives in that time. The revolutions of ages have been
compressed into a few months. France, Germany, Hungary, Italy,--what
a history has theirs been! When we met here last, there was in all of
those countries an outward show of tranquillity; and there were few,
even of the wisest among us, who imagined what wild passions, what wild
theories, were fermenting under that peaceful exterior. An obstinate
resistance to a reasonable reform, a resistance prolonged but for
one day beyond the time, gave the signal for the explosion; and in an
instant, from the borders of Russia to the Atlantic Ocean, everything
was confusion and terror. The streets of the greatest capitals of Europe
were piled up with barricades, and were streaming with civil blood. The
house of Orleans fled from France: the Pope fled from Rome: the Emperor
of Austria was not safe at Vienna. There were popular institutions in
Florence; popular institutions at Naples. One democratic convention sat
at Berlin; another democratic convention at Frankfort. You remember, I
am sure, but too well, how some of the wisest and most honest friends of
liberty, though inclined to look with great indulgence on the excesses
inseparable from revolutions, began first to doubt and then to despair
of the prospects of mankind. You remember how all sorts of animosity,
national, religious, and social, broke forth together. You remember
how with the hatred of discontented subjects to their governments was
mingled the hatred of race to race and of class to class. For myself, I
stood aghast; and though naturally of a sanguine disposition, I did for
one moment doubt whether the progress of society was not about to be
arrested, nay, to be suddenly and violently turned back; whether we
were not doomed to pass in one generation from the civilisation of the
nineteenth century to the barbarism of the fifth. I remembered that Adam
Smith and Gibbon had told us that the dark ages were gone, never more
to return, that modern Europe was in no danger of the fate which had
befallen the Roman empire. That flood, they said, would no more return
to cover the earth: and they seemed to reason justly: for they compared
the immense strength of the enlightened part of th