One by one the nations of the world come to their own, have free play for their faculties, express themselves, and eventually pass onward into silence. Our age has beheld the elevation of Prussia. Well may we ask, “What has been her message? What the path by which she climbed into preËminence?” That she would reach the summit, the work of Frederick the Great in the last century, and of Stein at the beginning of this, portended. It has been Bismarck’s mission to amplify and complete their task. Through him Prussia has come to her own. What, then, does she express?

The Prussians have excelled even the Romans in the art of turning men into machines. Set a Yankee down before a heap of coal and another of iron, and he will not rest until he has changed them into an implement to save the labor of many hands; the Prussian takes flesh and blood, and the will-power latent therein, and converts them into a machine. Such soldiers, such government clerks, such administrators, have never been manufactured elsewhere. Methodical, punctilious, thorough, are those officers and officials. The government which makes them relies not on sudden spurts, but on the cumulative force of habit. It substitutes rule for whim; it suppresses individual spontaneity, unless this can be transformed into energy for the great machine to use. That Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in centimetres—a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the educational mill, and brings him out a professor,—equipped even to the spectacles,—a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject, great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of a leech; and who, after many years, revolutionizes our theory of Greek roots, or of microbes, or of religion. Patient and noiseless as the earthworm, this scholar accomplishes a similarly incalculable work.

A spirit of obedience, which on its upper side passes into deference not always distinguishable from servility, and on its lower side is not always free from arrogance, lies at the bottom of the Prussian nature. Except in India, caste has nowhere had more power. The Prussian does not chafe at social inequality, but he cannot endure social uncertainty; he must know where he stands, if it be only on the bootblack’s level. The satisfaction he gets from requiring from those below him every scrape and nod of deference proper to his position more than compensates him for the deference he must pay to those above him. Classification is carried to the fraction of an inch. Everybody, be he privy councilor or chimney-sweep, is known by his office. On a hotel register you will see such entries as “Frau X, widow of a school-inspector,” or “FrÄulein Y, niece of an apothecary.”

This excessive particularization, which amuses foreigners, enables the Prussian to lift his hat at the height appropriate to the position occupied by each person whom he salutes. It naturally develops acuteness in detecting social grades, and a solicitude to show the proper degree of respect to superiors and to expect as much from inferiors,—a solicitude which a stranger might mistake for servility or arrogance, according as he looked up or down. Yet, amid a punctilio so stringent, fine-breeding—the true politeness which we associate with the word “gentleman”—rarely exists; for a gentleman cannot be made by the rank he holds, which is external, but only by qualities within himself. Nevertheless, these Prussians—so unsympathetic and rude compared with their kinsmen in the south and along the Rhine, not to speak of races more amiable still—kept down to our own time a strength and tenacity of character that intercourse with Western Europeans scarcely affected. Frederick the Great tried to graft on them the polished arts and the grace of the French: he might as well have decorated the granite faces of his fortresses with dainty Parisian wall-paper. But when he touched the dominant chord of his race,—its aptitude for system,—he had a large response. The genuine Prussian nature embodied itself in the army, in the bureaucracy, in state education, through all of which its astonishing talent for rules found congenial exercise. One dissipation, indeed, the Prussians allowed themselves, earlier in this century,—they reveled in Hegelianism. But even here they were true to their instinct; for the philosophy of Hegel commended itself to them because it assumed to reduce the universe to a system, and to pigeon-hole God himself.

We see, then, the elements out of which Prussia grew to be a strong state, not yet large in population, but compact and carefully organized. Let us look now at Germany, of which she formed a part. We are struck at once by the fact that until 1871 Germany had no political unity. During the centuries when France, England, and Spain were being welded into political units by their respective dynasties, the great Teutonic race in Central Europe escaped the unifying process. The Holy Roman Empire—at best a reminiscence—was too weak to prevent the rise of many petty princedoms and duchies and of a few large states, whose rulers were hereditary, whereas the emperor was elective. Thus particularism—what we might call states’ rights—flourished, to the detriment of national union. At the end of the last century, Germany had four hundred independent sovereigns: the most powerful being the King of Prussia; the weakest, some knight whose realm embraced but a few hundred acres, or some free city whose jurisdiction was bounded by its walls. When Napoleon, the great simplifier, reduced the number of little German states, he had no idea of encouraging the formation of a strong, coherent German Empire. To guard against this, which might menace the supremacy of France, he created the kingdoms of Bavaria and Westphalia, and set up the Confederation of the Rhine. After his downfall the German Confederation was organized,—a weak institution, consisting of thirty-nine members, whose common affairs were regulated by a Diet which sat at Frankfort. Representation in this Diet was so unequal that Austria and Prussia, with forty-two million inhabitants, had only one eighth of the votes, while the small states, with but twelve million inhabitants, had seven eighths. Four tiny principalities, with two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants each, could exactly offset Prussia with eight millions. By a similar anomaly, Nevada and New York have an equal representation in the United States Senate.

From 1816 to 1848 Austria ruled the Diet. Yet Austria was herself an interloper in any combination of German states, for her German subjects, through whom she gained admission to the Diet, numbered only four millions; but her prestige was augmented by the backing of her thirty million non-German subjects besides. Prussia fretted at this Austrian supremacy, fretted, and could not counteract it. Beside the Confederation, which so loosely bound the German particularists together, there was a Customs Union, which, though simply commercial, fostered among the Germans the idea of common interests. The spirit of nationality, potent everywhere, awakened also in the Germans a vision of political unity, but for the most part those who beheld the vision were unpractical; the men of action, the rulers, opposed a scheme which enfolded among its possibilities the curtailing of their autocracy through the adoption of constitutional government. No state held more rigidly than Prussia the tenets of absolutism.

Great, therefore, was the general surprise, and among Liberals the joy, at the announcement, in February, 1847, that the King of Prussia had consented to the creation of a Prussian Parliament. He granted to it hardly more power than would suffice for it to assemble and adjourn; but even this, to the Liberals thirsty for a constitution, was as the first premonitory raindrops after a long drought. Among the members of this Parliament, or Diet, was a tall, slim, blond-bearded, massive-headed Brandenburger, thirty-two years old, who sat as proxy for a country gentleman. A few of his colleagues recognized him as Otto von Bismarck; the majority had never heard of him.

Bismarck was born at SchÖnhausen, Prussia, April 1, 1815. His paternal ancestors had been soldiers back to the time when they helped to defend the Brandenburg March against the inroads of Slav barbarians. His mother was the daughter of an employee in Frederick the Great’s War Office. Thus, on both sides his roots were struck in true Prussian soil. At the age of six he was placed in a Berlin boarding-school, of which he afterward ridiculed the “spurious Spartanism;” at twelve he entered a gymnasium, where for five years he pursued the usual course of studies,—an average scholar, but already noteworthy for his fine physique; at seventeen he went up to the University at GÖttingen. In the life of a Prussian, there is but one period between the cradle and the grave during which he escapes the restraints of iron-grooved routine: that period comprises the years he spends at the university. There a strange license is accorded him. By day he swaggers through the streets, leering at the women and affronting the men; by night he carouses. And from time to time he varies the monotony of drinking-bouts by a duel. Such, at least, was the life of the university student in Bismarck’s time. At GÖttingen, and subsequently at Berlin, he had the reputation of being the greatest beer-drinker and the fiercest fighter; yet he must also have studied somewhat, for in due time he received his degree in law, and became official reporter in one of the Berlin courts. Then he served as referendary at Aix-la-Chapelle, and passed a year in military service.

At twenty-four he set about recuperating the family fortunes, which had suffered through his father’s incompetence. He took charge of the estates, devoted himself to agriculture, and was known for many miles round as the “mad squire.” Tales of his revels at his country house, of his wild pranks and practical jokes, horrified the neighborhood. Yet here, again, his recklessness did not preclude good results. He made the lands pay, and he tamed into usefulness that restive animal, his body, which was to serve as mount for his mighty soul. Some biographers, referring to his bucolic apprenticeship, have compared him to Cromwell; in his youthful roistering he reminds us of Mirabeau.

To the Diet of 1847 the mad squire came, and during several sittings he held his peace. At last, however, when a Liberal deputy declared that Prussia had risen in arms in 1813, in the hope of getting a constitution quite as much as of expelling the French, the blond Brandenburger got leave to speak. In a voice which seemed incongruously small for his stature, but which carried far and produced the effect of being the utterance of an inflexible will, he deprecated the assertions just made, and declared that the desire to shake off foreign tyranny was a sufficient motive for the uprising in 1813. These words set the House in confusion. Liberal deputies hissed and shouted so that Bismarck could not go on; but, nothing daunted, he took a newspaper out of his pocket and read it, there in the tribune, till order was restored. Then, having added that whoever deemed that motive inadequate held Prussia’s honor cheap, he strode haughtily to his seat, amid renewed jeers and clamor. Such was Bismarck’s parliamentary baptism of fire.

Before the session adjourned, the deputies had come to know him well. They discovered that the mad squire, the blunt “captain of the dikes,” was doubly redoubtable; he had strong opinions, and utter fearlessness in proclaiming them.

His political creed was short,—it comprised but two clauses: “I believe in the supremacy of Prussia, and in absolute monarchy.” More royalist than the King, he opposed every concession which might diminish by a hair’s breadth the royal prerogative. Constitutional government, popular representation, whatever Liberals had been struggling and dying for since 1789, he detested. Democracy, and especially German democracy, he scoffed at. For sixty years reformers had been railing at the absurdities of the Old RÉgime; they had denounced the injustice of the privileged classes; they had made odious the tyranny of paternalism. Bismarck entered the lists as the champion of “divine right,” and first proved his strength by exposing the defects of democracy.

Those who believe most firmly in democracy acknowledge, nevertheless, that it has many objections, both in theory and in practice. Universal suffrage—the abandoning of the state to the caprice of millions of voters, among whom the proportion of intelligence to ignorance is as one to ten—seems a process worthy of Bedlam. The ballot-box is hardly more accurate than the dice-box, as a test of the fitness of candidates. Popular government means party government, and parties are dogmatic, overbearing, insincere, and corrupt. The men who legislate and administer, chosen by this method, avowedly serve their party, and not the state; and though, by chance, they should be both skilful and honest, they may be overturned by a sudden revulsion of the popular will. Such a system breeds a class of professional politicians,—men who make a business of getting into office, and whose only recommendation is their proficiency in the art of cajoling voters. A government should be managed as a great business corporation is managed: it has to deal with the weightiest problems of finance, and with delicate diplomatic questions, for which the trained efforts of judicious experts are needed; but instead of being intrusted to them, it is given over to politicians elected by multitudes who cannot even conduct their private business successfully, much less entertain large and patriotic views of the common welfare. To decide an election by a show of hands seems not a whit less absurd than to decide it by the aggregate weight or the color of the hair of the voters. We speak of the will of the majority as if it were infallibly right. The vast majority of men to-day would vote that the sun revolves round the earth: should this belief of a million ignoramuses countervail the knowledge of one astronomer? Shall knowledge be the test of fitness in all concerns except government, the most critical, the most far-reaching and responsible of all? Majority rule substitutes mere numbers, bulk, and quantity for quality. Putting a saddle on Intelligence, it bids Ignorance mount and ride whither it will,—even to the devil. It is the dupe of its own folly; for the politicians whom it chooses turn out to be, not the representatives of the people, but the attorneys of some mill or mine or railway.

These and similar objections to democracy Bismarck urged with a sarcasm and directness hitherto unknown in German politics. When half the world was repeating the words “Liberalism,” “Constitution,” “Equality,”—as if the words themselves possessed magic to regenerate society,—he insisted that firm nations must be based upon facts, not phrases. He had the twofold advantage of invariably separating the actual from the apparent, and of being opposed by the most incompetent Liberals in Europe. However noble the ideals of the German reformers, the men themselves were singularly incapable of dealing with realities. Nor should this surprise us; for they had but recently broken away from the machine we have described, and as they had not yet a new machine to work in, they whirled to and fro in vehement confusion, the very rigidity of their previous restraint increasing their dogmatism and their discord.

The revolution of 1848 soon put them to the ordeal. The German Liberals aimed at national unity under a constitution. Like their brothers in Austria and Italy, they enjoyed a temporary triumph; but they could not construct. Their Parliament became a cave of the winds. Their schemes clashed. By the beginning of 1850 the old order was restored.

During this stormy crisis, Bismarck, as deputy in two successive Diets, had resolutely withstood the popular tide. He regarded the revolutionists as men in whom the qualities of knave, fool, and maniac alternately ruled; the revolution itself, he said, had no other motive than “a lust of theft.” One of its leaders he dismissed as a “phrase-watering-pot.” The right of assemblages he ridiculed as furnishing democracy with bellows; a free press he stigmatized as a blood-poisoner. When the imperial crown was offered to the King of Prussia, Bismarck argued against accepting it; he would not see his King degraded to the level of a mere “paper president.”

Such opposition would have made the speaker conspicuous, if only for its audacity. His enemies had learned, however, that it required a strong character to support that audacity continuously. They tried to silence him with abuse; but their abuse, like tar, added fuel to his fire. They tried ridicule; but their ridicule had too much of the German dulness to wound him. They called him a bigoted Junker, or squire. “Remember,” he retorted, “that the names Whig and Tory were first used opprobriously, and be assured that we will yet bring the name Junker into respect and honor.” Many anecdotes are told illustrating his quick repulse of intended insult or his disregard of formality. He was not unwilling that his enemies should remember that he held his superior physical strength in reserve, if his arguments failed. Yet on a hunting-party, or at a dinner, or in familiar conversation, he was the best of companions. Germany has not produced another, unless it were Goethe, so variedly entertaining; and Goethe had no trace of one of Bismarck’s characteristics,—humor. He possessed also tact and a sort of Homeric geniality which, coupled with unbending tenacity, fitted him to succeed as a diplomatist. In 1851 the King appointed him to represent Prussia at the German Diet, which sat at Frankfort. The outlook was gloomy. Prussia had quelled the revolution, but she had lost prestige. Unable to break asunder the German Confederation or to dominate it, she had signed, at OlmÜtz, in the previous autumn, a compact which acknowledged the supremacy of her old rival, Austria. While the humiliation still rankled, Bismarck entered upon his career. Hitherto not unfriendly to Austria, because he had looked upon her as the extinguisher of the revolution, which he hated most of all, he began, now that the danger was over, to give a free rein to his jealousy of his country’s hereditary competitor. In the Diet, the Austrian representative presided, the rulings were always in Austria’s favor, the majority of the smaller states allowed Austria to guide them. Bismarck at once showed his colleagues that humility was not his rÔle. Finding that the Austrian president alone smoked at the sittings, he took out his own cigar and lighted it,—a trifle, but significant. He resisted every encroachment, and demanded the strictest observance of the letter of the law. Gradually he extended Prussia’s influence among the confederates. He unmasked Austria’s insincerity; he showed how honestly Prussia walked in the path of legality; until he slowly created the impression that wickedness was to be expected from one, and virtue from the other.

During seven years Bismarck held this outpost, winning no outward victory, but storing a vast amount of knowledge about all the states of the Confederation, their rulers and public men, which was subsequently invaluable to him. His dispatches to the Prussian Secretary of State, his reports to the King, form a body of diplomatic correspondence unmatched in fulness, vigor, directness, and insight. With him, there was no ambiguity, no diplomatic circumlocution, no German prolixity. He sketched in indelible outlines the portraits, corporal or mental, of his colleagues. He criticised the policy of Prussia with a brusqueness which must have startled his superior. He reviewed at longer range the political tendencies of Europe. Officially, he kept strictly within the limits of his instructions; but his own personality represented more than he could yet officially declare,—Prussia’s ambition to become the leader of Germany. In all his dispatches, and in all places where caution did not prescribe silence, he reiterated his Cato warning, “Austria must be ousted from Germany.”

Do not suppose, however, that Bismarck’s political greatness was then discerned. Probably, had you inquired of Germans forty years ago, “Who among you is the coming statesman?” not one would have replied, “Bismarck.” At the opera, we cannot mistake the hero, because the moonlight obligingly follows him over the stage; in real life, the hero passes for the most part unrecognized, until his appointed hour; but the historian’s duty is to show how the heroic qualities were indubitably latent in him long before the world perceived them.

In 1859 Bismarck was appointed ambassador at St. Petersburg, where he stayed three years, when he was transferred to Paris. This completed his apprenticeship, for in September, 1862, he was recalled to Berlin to be minister-president.

His promotion had long been mooted. The new King William—a practical, rigid monarch, with no Liberal visions, no desire to please everybody—had been for eighteen months in conflict with his Parliament. He had determined to reorganize the Prussian army; the Liberals insisted that, as Parliament was expected to vote appropriations, it should know how they were spent. William at last turned to Bismarck to help him subjugate the unruly deputies, and Bismarck, with a true vassal’s loyalty, declared his readiness to serve as “lid to the saucepan.” Very soon the Liberals began to compare him with Strafford, and the King with Charles I, but neither of them quailed. “Death on the scaffold, under certain circumstances, is as honorable,” Bismarck said, “as death on the battlefield. I can imagine worse modes of death than the axe.” Hitherto he had strenuously maintained the first article of his creed,—“I believe in the supremacy of Prussia;” henceforth he upheld with equal vigor the second,—“I believe in the autocracy of the King.”

The narrow Constitution limited the King’s authority, making it coequal with that of the Upper and Lower Chambers, but Bismarck quickly taught the deputies that he would not allow “a sheet of paper” to intervene between the royal will and its fulfilment. Year after year the Lower House refused to vote the army budget; year after year Bismarck and his master pushed forward the military organization, in spite of the deputies. Noah was not more unmoved by those who came and scoffed at his huge, expensive, apparently useless ark than were the Prussian minister and his King by their critics, who did not see the purpose of the ark the two were building. Bismarck merely insisted that the army, on which depended the integrity of the nation, could not be subjected to the caprice of parties; it was an institution above parties, above politics, he said, which the King alone must control. At the same time, the Minister-President actively pursued his other project,—the expulsion of Austria from Germany. When the King of Denmark died, in December, 1863, the succession to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein was disputed. Bismarck seized the occasion for occupying the disputed territory, in partnership with Austria. England protested, France muttered, but neither cared to risk a war with the allied robbers. When it came to dividing the spoils, Bismarck, who had recently gauged Austria’s strength, struck for the lion’s share. Austria resisted. Bismarck then approved himself a master of diplomacy. Never was he more clever or more unscrupulous, shifting from argument to argument, delaying the open rupture till Prussia was quite ready, feigning willingness to submit the dispute to European arbitration while secretly stipulating conditions which foredoomed arbitration to failure, and invariably giving the impression that Austria refused to be conciliated. As the juggler lets you see the card he wishes you to see, and no other, so Bismarck always kept in full view, amid whatever shuffling of the pack, the apparent legality of Prussia. In the end he drove Austria to desperation.

In June, 1866, war came, with fury. One Prussian army crushed with a single blow the German states which had promised to support Austria; another marched into Bohemia, and, in seven days, confronted the imperial forces at Sadowa. There was fought a great battle, in which the Prussian crown prince repeated the master stroke of BlÜcher at Waterloo, and then Austria, hopelessly beaten, sued for peace.

Bismarck now showed himself astute in victory. Having ousted Austria from Germany, he had no wish to wreak a vengeance that she could not forgive. Taking none of her provinces, he exacted only a small indemnity. With the German states he was equally discriminating: those which had been inveterately hostile he annexed to Prussia; the others he let off with a fine. He set up the North German Confederation, embracing all the states north of the river Main, in place of the old German Confederation; and thus Prussia, which had now two thirds of the population of Germany, was undisputed master. The four South German states, Bavaria, WÜrtemberg, Hesse, and Baden, signed a secret treaty, by which they gave the Prussian King the command of their troops in case of war.

Europe, which had witnessed with astonishment these swift proceedings, understood now that a great reality had arisen, and that Bismarck was its heart. In France, surprise gave way to indignation. Were not the French the arbiters of Europe? How had it happened that their Emperor had permitted a first-rate power to organize without their consent? Napoleon III, who knew that his sham empire could last only so long as he furnished his restless subjects food for their vanity, strove to convince them that he had not been outwitted; that he still could dictate terms. He demanded a share of Rhineland to offset Prussia’s aggrandizement; Bismarck refused to cede a single inch. Napoleon bullied; Bismarck published the secret compact with the South Germans. Napoleon forthwith decided that it was not worth while to go to war.

We have all heard of the sportsman who boasted of always catching big strings of fish. But one day, after whipping every pool and getting never a trout, he was fain, on his way home, to stop at the fishmonger’s and buy a salt herring for supper. Not otherwise did Napoleon, who had been very forward in announcing that he would take land wherever he chose, now stoop to offer to buy enough to appease his greedy countrymen. He would pay ninety million francs for Luxemburg, and the King of Holland, to whom it belonged, was willing to sell at that price; but Bismarck would consent only to withdraw the Prussian garrison from the grand duchy, after destroying the fortifications, and to its conversion into a neutral state. That was the sum of the satisfaction Napoleon and his presumptuous Frenchmen got from their first encounter. A few years before, Napoleon, who had had frequent interviews with Bismarck and liked his joviality, set him down as “a not serious man;” whence we infer that the Emperor was a dull reader of character.

Although, by this arrangement, the Luxemburg affair blew over, neither France nor Prussia believed that their quarrel was settled. Deep in the heart of each, instinct whispered that a life-and-death struggle was inevitable. Bismarck, amid vast labor on the internal organization of the kingdom, held Prussia ready for war. He would not be the aggressor, but he would decline no challenge.

In July, 1870, France threw down the glove. When the Spaniards elected Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to their vacant throne, France demanded that King William should compel Leopold to resign. William replied that, as he had not influenced his kinsman’s acceptance, he should not interfere. The prince, who was not a Prussian, withdrew of his own accord. But the French Secretary of State, the Duc de Gramont, had blustered too loudly to let the matter end without achieving his purpose of humbling the Prussian King. He therefore telegraphed Benedetti, the French Ambassador, to force King William to promise that at no future time should Leopold be a candidate for the Spanish crown. Benedetti delivered his message to William in the public garden at Ems; and William, naturally refusing to bind himself, announced that further negotiations on the subject would be referred to the Foreign Minister.

The following morning Bismarck published a dispatch containing a brief report of the interview; adding, however, that the King “declined to receive the French Ambassador again, and had him told by the adjutant in attendance that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the Ambassador.” This deceitful addition produced exactly the effect which Bismarck intended: every German, whether Prussian or not, was incensed to learn that the representative German King had been hectored by the French emissary, and every Frenchman was enraged that the Prussian King had insulted the envoy of the “grand nation.” Bismarck, who had feared that another favorable moment for war was passing, now exulted, and Moltke, who had for years been carrying the future campaign in his head, and whose face grew sombre when peace seemed probable, now smiled a grim, contented smile. In Paris, the ministers, the deputies, the newspapers, and the populace clamored for war. Apparently, Napoleon alone felt a slight hesitation; but he could hesitate no longer when the popular demand became overwhelming. On July 19 France made a formal declaration of war, and the Parisians laid bets that their victorious troops would celebrate the FÊte NapolÉon—August 15—in Berlin. Had not their War Minister, Leboeuf, assured them that everything was ready, down to the last button on the last gaiter of the last soldier?

We cannot describe here the terrible campaign which followed. In numbers, in equipment, in discipline, in generalship, in everything but bravery, the French were quickly outmatched. When Napoleon groped madly for some friendly hand to stay his fall, he found that Bismarck had cut off succor from him. The South Germans, whom the French had hoped to win over, fought loyally under the command of Prussia; Austria, who might have been persuaded to strike back at her late conqueror, dared not move for fear of Russia, whose friendship Bismarck had secured; and Italy, instead of aiding France, lost no time in completing her own unification by entering Rome when the French garrison was withdrawn. Forsaken and outwitted, the French Empire sank without even an expiring flash of that tinsel glory which had so long bedizened its corruption. And when the French people, lashed to desperation, continued the war which the Empire had brought upon them, they but suffered a long agony of losses before accepting the inevitable defeat. They paid the penalty of their former arrogance in every coin known to the vanquished,—in military ruin, in an enormous indemnity, in the occupation of their land by the victorious Prussians, and in the cession of two rich provinces. Nor was that enough: they had to submit to a humiliation which, to the imagination at least, seems the worst of all,—the proclamation of the Prussian King William as German Emperor in their palace at Versailles, the shrine of French pomp, where two centuries before Louis XIV had embodied the ambition, the glory, and the pride of France. The German cannon bombarding beleaguered Paris paused, while the sovereigns of the German states hailed William as their Emperor.

This consummation of German unity was the logical outcome of an international war, in which all the Germans had been impelled, by mutual interests quite as much as by kinship, to join forces against an alien foe. Twenty years before, Bismarck had opposed German unity, because it would then have made Prussia the plaything of her confederates; in this later scheme he was the chief agent, if not the originator, for he knew that the primacy of Prussia ran no more risk.

Let us pause a moment and look back. Only a decade earlier, in 1861, when Bismarck became minister, Prussia was but a second-rate power, Germany was a medley of miscellaneous states, Austria still held her traditional supremacy, the French Emperor seemed firmly established. Now, in 1871, Austria has been humbled, France crushed, Napoleon whiffed off into outer darkness, and Prussia stands unchallenged at the head of United Germany. Many men—the narrow, patient King, the taciturn Moltke, the energetic Von Roon—have contributed to this result; but to Bismarck rightly belongs the highest credit. Slow to prepare and swift to strike, he it was who measured the full capacity of that great machine, the Prussian army, and let it do its work the moment Fortune signaled; he it was who knew that needle guns and discipline would overcome in the end the long prestige of Austria and the wordy insolence of France. Looking back, we are amazed at his achievements,—many a step seems audacious; but if we investigate, we find that Bismarck had never threatened, never dared, more than his strength at the time warranted. The gods love men of the positive degree, and reward them by converting their words into facts. Of the German Empire thus formed Bismarck was Chancellor for twenty years. His foreign policy hinged on one necessity,—the isolation of France. To that end he made a Triple Alliance, in which Russia and Austria were his partners first, and afterward Italy took Russia’s place. He prevented the Franco-Russian coalition, which would place Germany between the hammer and the anvil. From 1871 to 1890 he was not less the arbiter of Europe than the autocrat of Germany.

Nevertheless, although in the management of home affairs Bismarck usually prevailed, he prevailed to the detriment of Germany’s progress in self-government. The Empire, like Prussia herself, is based on constitutionalism: what hope is there for constitutionalism, when at any moment the vote of a majority of the people’s representatives can be nullified by an arbitrary prime minister? Bismarck carried his measures in one of two ways: he either formed a temporary combination with mutually discordant parliamentary groups and thereby secured a majority vote, or, when unable to do this, by threatening to resign he gave the Emperor an excuse for vetoing an objectionable bill. Despising representative government, with its interminable chatter, its red tape, its indiscreet meddling, and its whimsical revulsions, Bismarck never concealed his scorn. If he believed a measure to be needed, he went down into the parliamentary market-place, and by inducements, not of money, but of concessions, he won over votes. At one time or another, every group has voted against him and every group has voted for him. When he was fighting the Vatican, for instance, he conciliated the Jews; when Jew-baiting was his purpose, he promised the Catholics favor in return for their support. Being amenable to the Emperor alone, and not, like the British premier, the head of a party, he dwelt above the caprice of parties. Men thought, at first, to stagger him by charges of inconsistency, and quoted his past utterances against his present policy. He laughed at them. Consistency, he held, is the clog of men who do not advance; for himself, he had no hesitation in altering his policy as fast as circumstances required. With characteristic bluntness, he did not disguise his intentions. “I need your support,” he would say to a hostile group, “and I will stand by your bill if you will vote for mine.” “Do ut des” was his motto; “an honest broker” his self-given nickname.

Such a government cannot properly be called representative; it dangles between the two incompatibles, constitutionalism and autocracy. Doubtless Bismarck knew better than the herd of deputies what would best serve at a given moment the interests of Germany; but his methods were demoralizing, and so personal that they made no provision for the future. His system could not be permanent unless in every generation an autocrat as powerful and disinterested as himself should arise to wield it; but nature does not repeat her Bismarcks and her Cromwells. At the end of his career, Germany has still to undergo her apprenticeship in self-government.

Two important struggles, in which he engaged with all his might, call for especial mention.

The first is the Culturkampf, or contest with the Pope over the appointment of Catholic bishops and clergy in Prussia. Bismarck insisted that the Pope should submit his nominations to the approval of the King; Pius IX maintained that in spiritual matters he could be bound by no temporal lord. Bismarck passed stern laws; he withheld the stipend paid to the Catholic clergy; he imprisoned some of them; he broke up the parishes of others. It was the mediÆval war of investitures over again, and again the Pope won. Bismarck discovered that against the intangible resistance of Rome his Krupp guns were powerless. After fifteen years of ineffectual battling, the Chancellor surrendered. Similar discomfiture came to him from the Socialists. When he entered upon his ministerial career, they were but a gang of noisy fanatics; when he quitted it, they were a great political party, holding the balance of power in the Reichstag, and infecting Germany with their doctrines. At first he thought to extirpate them by violence, but they throve under persecution; then he propitiated them, and even strove to forestall them by adopting Socialistic measures in advance of their demands. If the next epoch is to witness the triumph of Socialism, as some predict, then Bismarck will surely merit a place in the Socialists’ Saints’ Calendar; but if, as some of us hope, society revolts from Socialism before experience teaches how much insanity underlies this seductive theory, then Bismarck will scarcely be praised for coquetting with it. For Socialism is but despotism turned upside down; it would substitute the tyranny of an abstraction—the state—for the tyranny of a personal autocrat. It rests on the fallacy that though in every individual citizen there is more or less imperfection,—one dishonest, another untruthful, another unjust, another greedy, another licentious, another willing to grasp money or power at the expense of his neighbor,—yet by adding up all these units, so imperfect, so selfish, and calling the sum “the state,” you get a perfect and unselfish organism, which will manage without flaw or favor the whole business, public, private, and mixed, of mankind. By what miracle a coil of links, separately weak, can be converted into an unbreakable chain is a secret which the prophets of this Utopia have never condescended to reveal. Not more state interference, but less, is the warning of history.

The fact which is significant for us here is that Socialism has best thriven in Germany, where, through the innate tendency of the Germans to a rigid system, the machinery of despotism has been most carefully elaborated, and where the interference of the state in the most trivial affairs of life has bred in the masses the notion that the state can do everything,—even make the poor rich, if they can only control the lever of the huge machine.

Nevertheless, though Bismarck has been worsted in his contest with religious and social ideas, his great achievement remains. He has placed Germany at the head of Europe, and Prussia at the head of Germany. Will the German Empire created by him last? Who can say? The historian has no business with prophecy, but he may point out the existence in the German Empire to-day of conditions that have hitherto menaced the safety of nations. The common danger seems the strongest bond of union among the German states. Defeat by Russia on the east or by France on the west would mean disaster for the South Germans not less than for the Prussians; and this peril is formidable enough to cause the Bavarians, for instance, to fight side by side with the Prussians. But there can be no homogeneous internal government, no compact nation, so long as twenty or more dynasties, coequal in dignity though not in power, flourish simultaneously. Historically speaking, Germany has never passed through that stage of development in which one dynasty swallows up its rivals,—the experience of England, France, and Spain, and even of polyglot Austria.

Again, Germany embraces three unwilling members,—Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig, and Prussian Poland,—any of which may serve as a provocation for war, and must remain a constant source of racial antipathy. How grievous such political thorns may be, though small in bulk compared to the body they worry, England has learned from Ireland.

Finally, if popular government—the ideal of our century—is to prevail in Germany, the despotism extended and solidified by Bismarck will be swept away. Possibly, Germany could not have been united, could not have humbled Austria and crushed France, under a Liberal system; but will the Germans forever submit to the direction of an iron chancellor, or glow with exultation at the truculence of a strutting autocrat who flourishes his sword and proclaims, “My will is law”? No other modern despotism has been so patriotic, honest, and successful as that of Bismarck; but will the Germans never awake to the truth that even the best despotism convicts those who bow to it of a certain ignoble servility? Or will they, as we have suggested, transform the tyranny of an autocrat into the tyranny of Socialism? We will not predict, but we can plainly see that Germany, whether in her national or in her constitutional condition, has reached no stable plane of development.

And now what shall we conclude as to Bismarck himself? The magnitude of his work no man can dispute. For centuries Europe awaited the unification of Germany, as a necessary step in the organic growth of both. Feudalism was the principle which bound Christendom together during the Middle Age; afterward, the dynastic principle operated to blend peoples into nations; finally, in our time, the principle of nationality has accomplished what neither feudalism nor dynasties could accomplish, the attainment of German unity. In type, Bismarck belongs with the Charlemagnes, the Cromwells, the Napoleons; but, unlike them, he wrought to found no kingdom for himself; from first to last he was content to be the servant of the monarch whom he ruled. As a statesman, he possessed in equal mixture the qualities of lion and of fox, which Machiavelli long ago declared indispensable to a prince. He had no scruples. What benefited Prussia and his King was to him moral, lawful, desirable; to them he was inflexibly loyal; for them he would suffer popular odium or incur personal danger. But whoever opposed them was to him an enemy, to be overcome by persuasion, craft, or force. We discern in his conduct toward enemies no more regard for morality than in that of a Mohawk sachem toward his Huron foe. He might spare them, but from motives of policy; he might persecute them, not to gratify a thirst for cruelty, but because he deemed persecution the proper instrument in that case. His justification would be that it was right that Prussia and Germany should hold the first rank in Europe. The world, as he saw it, was a field in which nations maintained a pitiless struggle for existence, and the strongest survived; to make his nation the strongest was, he conceived, his highest duty. An army of puny-bodied saints might be beautiful to a pious imagination, but they would fare ill in an actual conflict with Pomeranian grenadiers.

Dynamic, therefore, and not moral, were Bismarck’s ideals and methods. To make every citizen a soldier, and to make every soldier a most effective fighting machine by the scientific application of diet, drill, discipline, and leadership, was Prussia’s achievement, whereby she prepared for Bismarck an irresistible weapon. In this application of science to control with greater exactness than ever before the movements of large masses of men in war, and to regulate their actions in peace, consists Prussia’s contribution to government; in knowing how to use the engine thus constructed lies Bismarck’s fame. When Germans were building air-castles, and, conscious of their irresolution, were asking themselves, “Is Germany Hamlet?” Bismarck saw both a definite goal and the road that led to it. The sentimentalism which has characterized so much of the action of our time never diluted his tremendous will. He held that by blood and iron empires are welded, and that this stern means causes in the end less suffering than the indecisive compromises of the sentimentalists. Better, he would say, for ninety-nine men to be directed by the hundredth man who knows than for them to be left a prey to their own chaotic, ignorant, and internecine passions. Thus he is the latest representative of a type which flourished in the age when the modern ideal of popular government had not yet risen. How much of his power was due to his unerring perception of the defects in popular government as it has thus far been exploited, we have already remarked.

The Germans have not yet perceived that one, perhaps the chief source of his success was his un-German characteristics. He would have all Germany bound by rigid laws, but he would not be bound by them himself. He encouraged his countrymen’s passion for conventionality and tradition, but remained the most unconventional of men. Whatever might complete the conversion of Germany into a vast machine he fostered by every art; but he, the engineer who held the throttle, was no machine. In a land where everything was done by prescription, the spectacle of one man doing whatever his will prompted produced an effect not easily computed. Such characteristics are un-German, we repeat, and Bismarck displayed them at all times and in all places. His smoking a cigar in the Frankfort Diet; his opposition to democracy, when democracy was the fashion; his resistance to the Prussian Landtag; his arbitrary methods in the German Parliament,—these are but instances, great or small, of his un-German nature. And his relations for thirty years with the King and Emperor whom he seemed to serve show a similar masterfulness. A single anecdote, told by himself, gives the key to that service.

At the battle of Sadowa King William persisted in exposing himself at short range to the enemy’s fire. Bismarck urged him back, but William was obstinate. “If not for yourself, at least for the sake of your minister, whom the nation will hold responsible, retire,” pleaded Bismarck. “Well, then, Bismarck, let us ride on a little,” the King at last replied. But he rode very slowly. Edging his horse alongside of the King’s mare, Bismarck gave her a stout kick in the haunch. She bounded forward, and the King looked round in astonishment. “I think he saw what I had done,” Bismarck added, in telling the story, “but he said nothing.”

On Bismarck’s private character I find no imputed stain. He did not enrich himself by his office, that hideous vice of our time. He did not, like both Napoleons, convert his palace into a harem; neither did he tolerate nepotism, nor the putting of incompetent parasites into responsible positions as a reward for party service. That he remorselessly crushed his rivals let his obliteration of Count von Arnim witness. That he subsidized a “reptile press,” or employed spies, or hounded his assailants, came from his belief that a statesman too squeamish to fight fire with fire would deserve to be burnt. Many orators have excelled him in grace, few in effectiveness. Regarding public speaking as one of the chief perils of the modern state, because it enables demagogues to dupe the easily swayed masses, he despised rhetorical artifice. His own speech was un-German in its directness, un-German in its humor, and it clove to the heart of a question with the might of a battle-axe,—as, indeed, he would have used a battle-axe itself to persuade his opponents, five hundred years ago. Since Napoleon, no other European statesman has coined so many political proverbs and apt phrases. His letters to his family are delightfully natural, and reveal a man of keen observation, capable of enjoying the wholesome pleasures of life, and brimful of common sense, which a rich gift of humor keeps from the dulness of Philistines and the pedantry of doctrinaires. His intercourse with friends seems to have been in a high degree jovial.

Not least interesting to a biographer are those last years of Bismarck’s life, between March, 1890, and his death, on July 30, 1898, which he passed in eclipse. To be dismissed by a young sovereign who, but for him, might have been merely a petty German prince,—to be told that he, the master throne-maker, was unnecessary to the callow apprentice,—galled the Titan’s heart. Eight years he was destined to endure this mortification; and although his countrymen everywhere hailed him as their hero, the fact of dismissal gave him no repose. Europe has seen no similar spectacle since she bound Napoleon, Prometheus-like, on St. Helena. But Napoleon, chafing his life away there, had at least the satisfaction of reflecting that it took all Europe, allied with Russia’s blizzards and Spain’s heats, to conquer him. Bismarck, storming in his exile from power, felt now scorn, now hate, for the “young fellow” (as he called him) who had turned him out. Here, if ever, Nemesis showed her work. Bismarck’s whole energy had been bent for fifty years on fortifying the autocracy of the Prussian monarchs; and now a young autocrat run from this mould bade him go—and he went. We may believe that it did not solace Bismarck to find that the “young fellow” could get on without him; or to see that in England Gladstone, six years his elder, led his nation till long past eighty; Gladstone,—whom he had so often jeered at as an empty rhetorician,—England, which he despised as the home of representative government. Could it be that constitutionalism was kinder than despotism to master statesmen?

A great man we may surely pronounce him, long to be the wonder of a world in which greatness of any kind is rare. If you ask, “How does he stand beside Washington and Lincoln?” it must be admitted that his methods would have made them blush, but that his patriotism was not less enduring than theirs. With the materials at hand he fashioned an empire; it is futile to speculate whether another, by using different tools, could have achieved the same result. Bismarck knew that though his countrymen might talk eloquently about liberty, they loved to be governed; he knew that their genius was mechanical, and he triumphed by directing them along the line of their genius. He would have failed had he appealed to the love of liberty, by appealing to which Cavour freed Italy; or to the love of glory, by appealing to which Napoleon was able to convert half of Europe into a French province. Bismarck knew that his Prussians must be roused in a different way.

It may be that the empire he created will not last; it is certain that it cannot escape modifications which will change the aspect he stamped upon it; but we may be sure that, whatever happens, the recollection of his Titanic personality will remain. He belongs among the giants, among the few in whom has been stored for a lifetime a stupendous energy,—kinsmen of the whirlwind and the volcano,—whose purpose seems to be to amaze us that the limits of the human include such as they. At the thought of him, there rises the vision of mythic Thor with his hammer, and of Odin with his spear; the legend of Zeus, who at pleasure held or hurled the thunderbolt, becomes credible.

Madame de StaËl said of Rienzi and his Romans: “They mistook reminiscences for hopes;” of the second French Empire and the third Napoleon we may say: “They staked their hopes on reminiscences.”

In our individual lives we realize the power of memory, suggestion, association. If we have ever yielded to a vice, we have felt, it may be years after, how the sight of the old conditions revives the old temptation. A glance, a sound, a smell, may be enough to conjure up a long series of events, whether to grieve or to tempt us, with more than their original intensity. So we learn that the safest way to escape the enticement is to avoid the conditions. Recent psychology has at last begun to measure the subtle power of suggestion.

But now, suppose that instead of an individual a whole nation has had a terrific experience of succumbing to temptation, and that a cunning, unscrupulous man, aware of the force of association and reminiscence, deliberately applies both to reproduce those conditions in which the nation first abandoned itself to excess: the case we have supposed is that of France and Louis Napoleon. Before the reality of their story the romances of hypnotism pale.

After SÉdan it was the fashion to regard Louis Napoleon as the only culprit in the gilded shame of the Second Empire; we shall see, however, that the great majority of Frenchmen longed for his coming, applauded his victories, and by frequent vote sanctioned his deeds. A free people keeps no worse ruler than it deserves.

The Napoleonic legend, by which Louis Napoleon rose to power, was not his creation, but that of the French: he was simply shrewd, and used it. What was this legend?

When allied Europe finally crushed the great Napoleon at Waterloo, France breathed a sigh of relief. Twenty campaigns had left her exhausted: she asked only for repose. This the Restoration gave her. But the gratification of our transient cravings, however strong they may be, cannot long satisfy; and when the French recovered from their exhaustion, they felt their permanent cravings return. The Bourbons, they soon realized, could not appease those dominant Gallic desires. For the Bourbons had destroyed even that semblance of liberty Napoleon took care to preserve; they persecuted democratic ideas; they brought back the old aristocracy, with its mildewed haughtiness; they babbled of divine right,—as if the worship of St. Guillotine had not supervened. During twenty years France had been the arbitress of Europe; now, under the narrow, forceless Bourbons, she was treated like a second-rate power. Waterloo had meant not only the destruction of Napoleon, from which France derived peace, but also humiliation, which galled Frenchmen more and more as their normal sensitiveness returned.

The Bourbons, knowing that they might be tolerated so long as they were not despised, got up a military promenade into Spain, to prove that France could still meddle in her neighbors’ affairs, and that the Bourbons were not less mighty men of war than the Bonapartes. They captured the Trocadero, and restored vile King Ferdinand and his twenty-six cooks to the throne of Spain; and they hoped that the one-candle power of fame lighted by these exploits would outdazzle the Sun of Austerlitz. But no, the dynasty of Bourbon, long since headless, proved to be rootless too: one evening Charles X played his usual game of whist at St. Cloud; the next, he was posting out of France with all the speed and secrecy he could command.

Louis Philippe, who came next, might have been expected to please everybody: Royalists, because he was himself royal; Republicans, because he was Philippe EgalitÉ’s son; constitutionalists, because he hated autocratic methods; shopkeepers of all kinds, because he was ‘practical.’ And in truth his administration may be called the Golden Age of the bourgeoisie,—the great middle class which, in France and elsewhere, was superseding the old aristocracy. Napoleon had organized a nobility of the sword; after him came the nobility of the purse. Louis Philippe could say that under his rule France prospered: her merchants grew rich; her factories, her railroads, all the organs of commerce, were healthily active. And yet she was discontented. The spectacle of her Citizen King walking unattended in the streets of Paris, his plump thighs encased in democratic trousers, his plump and ruddy face wearing a complacent smile, his whole air that of the senior partner in some old, respectable, and rich firm,—even this failed to satisfy Frenchmen. “He inspires no more enthusiasm than a fat grocer,” was said of him. Frenchmen did not despise money-making, but they wanted something more: they wanted gloire.

Let us use the French word, because the English glory has another meaning. Glory implies something essentially noble,—nay, in the Lord’s Prayer it is a quality attributed to God himself: but gloire suggests vanity; it is the food braggarts famish after. The minute-men at Concord earned true glory; but when the United States, listening to the seductions of evil politicians, attacked and blasted a decrepit power,—fivefold smaller in population, twenty-fold weaker in resources,—they might find gloire among their booty, but glory, never. As prosperity increased, the Gallic appetite for gloire increased. Louis Philippe made several attempts to allay it, but he dared not risk a foreign war, and the failure of his attempts made him less and less respected.

And now arose the Napoleonic legend, at first no more than a bright exhalation in the evening, but gradually taking on the sweep, the definiteness, the fascination, of mirage at noonday. Time enough had elapsed to dull or quite blot out the recollections of the hardships and strains, the millions of soldiers killed and wounded, the taxes, the grievous tyranny; men remembered only the victories, the rewards, and the splendor. A new generation, unacquainted with the havoc of war, had grown up, to listen with fervid envy to the reminiscences of some gray-haired veteran, who had made the great charge at Wagram or ridden behind Ney at Borodino. Those exploits were so stupendous as to seem incredible, and yet they were vouched for by too many survivors to be doubted. Was not Thiers setting forth the marvelous story in nineteen volumes? Were not BÉranger and even Victor Hugo singing of the departed grandeur? Were not the booksellers’ shelves loaded with memoirs, lives, historical statements, polemics? Paris, France, seemed to exist merely to be the monument of one man. And wherever the young Frenchman traveled—in Spain, in Italy, along the Rhine or the Danube, to Vienna, or Cairo, or Moscow—he saw the footprints of French valor and French audacity, reminders that Napoleon had made France the mistress of Europe. No Frenchman, were he Bourbon or Republican, but felt proud to think that his countrymen had humbled Prussia and Austria.

Confronted by such recollections, the France of Louis Philippe looked degenerate. It offered nothing to thrill at, to brag over; it sinned in having—what it could not help—a stupendous past just behind it. So the Napoleonic legend grew. The body of the great Emperor was brought home from St. Helena, to perform more miracles than the mummy of a mediÆval saint. Power and gloire came to be regarded as the products of a Napoleonic rÉgime: to secure them it was only necessary to put a Bonapartist on the throne. Contemporaneous with the expansion of this spell, Socialism grew up, and taught that, just as the bourgeoisie had overthrown the old privileged classes in the French Revolution, so now the working classes must emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Political equality without industrial equality seemed a mockery. In this wise the doctrines of a score of Utopians penetrated society to loosen old bonds and embitter class with class. And besides all this, there was the usual wrangle of political parties. The tide of opposition rose, and on February 24, 1848, swept away Louis Philippe and his minister Guizot. Among the many fortune-seekers whom that tide brought to land was Louis Napoleon.

He was born in Paris, April 20, 1808, his mother being Hortense Beauharnais, who had married Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland. The younger Louis could just remember being petted in the Tuileries by the great Emperor: then, like all the Bonapartes, he had been packed off into exile. His youth was chiefly spent on Lake Constance, at Augsburg, and at Thun. In 1831 he had joined the Carbonari plotters in Italy. The next year, through the death of his elder brother and of the great Napoleon’s son, he became the official Pretender to the Bonapartist hopes. People knew him only as a visionary, who talked much about his “star,” and by writings and deeds tried to persuade the world that he too, like his uncle, was a man of destiny. A few adventurers gathered round him, eager to take the one chance in a thousand of his success. Accompanied by some of these, in 1836, he appeared before the French troops at Strasburg, expecting to be acclaimed Emperor and to march triumphantly to Paris. He did go to Paris, escorted by policemen; but his attempt seemed so foolish that Louis Philippe merely paid his passage to America to be rid of him.

The Prince soon returned to Europe and settled in London, where he lived the fast life of the average nobleman. In 1840 he set out on another expedition against France. Carrying a tame eagle with him, he landed at Boulogne: but again neither the soldiers nor populace welcomed him; the eagle seems to have been a spiritless fowl, likewise incapable of arousing enthusiasm; and the Prince shortly after was under imprisonment for life in the fortress of Ham. Nearly six years later he bribed a jailer, escaped to London, and, like Micawber, waited for something to turn up.

The fall of Louis Philippe gave Prince Louis his opportunity. He hurried to Paris, but was considerate, or cunning, enough to hold aloof for a while from disturbing public affairs. In those first months of turmoil many aspirants were destroyed, by their own folly and by mutual collision. Discreetly, therefore, he stood aside and watched them disappear.

Of the several factions, the Socialists and Red Republicans first profited by the Revolution. They organized that colossal folly, the National Workshops, in which 120,000 loafers received from the state good wages for pretending to do work which, had they done it, would have benefited no one. When the state, realizing that it could not continue this preposterous expense, proposed to close the workshops, the loafers became sullen: when the wages were cut off, they throttled Paris. For four days, in June, 1848, they made the streets of Paris their battle-ground, and succumbed only after 30,000 of their number had been killed, wounded, or captured by Cavaignac’s troops. The terror inspired by those idlers of Louis Blanc’s workshops was the corner-stone of the Second Empire.

A few weeks later, Louis Napoleon, elected by five constituencies, took his seat in the Assembly. His uncle’s name was still his only political capital. His own record—the Strasburg and Boulogne episodes—inspired mirth. In person there was nothing commanding about him. An “olive-swarthy paroquet” some one called him. “His gray eyes,” says De Tocqueville, “were dull and opaque, like those thick bull’s-eyes which light the stateroom of a ship, letting the light pass through, but out of which we can see nothing.” In after years “inscrutable” was the word commonly chosen to describe his cold, unblinking gaze. Reserve always characterized his manners; for even when most affable, his intimates felt that he concealed something or simulated something.

In the Assembly he strove for no sudden recognition; outside, however, he and his emissaries busied themselves night and day fanning the embers of Imperialism; and when, in December, 1848, the French people voted for a president, Louis Napoleon received 5,434,000 votes, while Cavaignac, his nearest competitor, had but 1,448,000. How had this come about? Old soldiers and peasants composed the great bulk of his supporters, every one of them glad to vote for “the nephew of the Emperor.” Next, Socialists, blue blouses and others, voted for him because they hated Cavaignac for repressing Red Republicanism in June; and Monarchists of both stripes, believing that he would be an easy tool for their plots, preferred him to the unyielding Cavaignac. Mediocrity and other negative qualities thus availed to transform Louis the Ridiculed into the first President of the Republic. “We made two blunders in the case of Louis Napoleon,” said Thiers; “first in deeming him a fool, and next in deeming him a genius.” Louis Napoleon knew not only how to profit by both of these blunders, but also how to superinduce either belief in the French mind.

Having sworn to uphold the Republic, he began his administration. During several months he let no sign of his ambition flutter into view, but seemed wholly bent on discharging the duties of president. In the spring of 1849, however, he put forth a feeler by engineering the expedition against the Roman Republic. Honest Frenchmen protested, but a majority in the Assembly supported him; and presently the instinct to be revenged on the Romans for defending themselves, and thereby inflicting losses on the French, silenced many who had disapproved of the expedition at the outset. Only the Radicals forcibly resisted, but their revolt was quickly put down. Louis Napoleon gained the prestige of having successfully reasserted French influence in Italy, where, for a generation, it had been supplanted by the influence of Austria. Furthermore, by becoming guardian of the Pope, he propitiated the Clericals, who might some time be useful. That he also roused the wrath of the Red Republicans did not spoil his prospects. One year, two years passed. Faction discredited faction. Every one looked on the Republic as but a preparation for either Anarchy or the Empire. The Reds, irreconcilable and ferocious, terrorized the imagination of every one else. No doubt the majority of honest Frenchmen—if by honest we mean the really intelligent and patriotic minority—wished a republic, but those Red Extremists had made all Republicans indiscriminately odious; and as the Royalist plotters showed neither courage nor ability, the great multitude of Frenchmen came to regard the Empire or Anarchy as their only alternatives. Most of them, having nothing to gain through disorder, leaned to the side which promised to leash the bloodhounds of murder and pillage. Spasm after spasm of terror swept over Paris, and when Paris shudders in the evening the rest of France shudders by daybreak. Anything to prevent the triumph of the Reds—with their guillotine and their abolition of private ownership of property—became the ruling instinct of all other Frenchmen.

Louis Napoleon, we may be sure, took care to encourage the belief that he alone could save France from the abyss. In addition to his recognized newspaper organs, he employed a literary bureau to spread broadcast his portrait, his biography, and even songs with an Imperialist refrain. He knew the political persuasiveness of cigars and sausages distributed among the troops, and of wine dispensed to their officers. He was by turns modest—declaring that his sole purpose was to obey the Constitution—and bold, announcing that he would not shrink from making France strong and prosperous, whenever Frenchmen intrusted that task to him. In his capacity for waiting, he gave the best proof of his ability; and we must add that the Assembly, by its folly, gave him indispensable aid.

The Assembly, for instance, restricted the suffrage, in the hope that, by preventing workmen from voting, the victory of the Reds might be staved off. Again, the Constitution declared that no president was eligible for reËlection until he had been four years out of office. As the time for thinking of Louis Napoleon’s successor approached, the moderates of all parties urged that the Constitution be amended, so that he might be quietly reËlected,—there being no other candidate who promised to preserve order. But the factious deputies, by a narrow vote, rejected the amendment.

Napoleon now saw his chance, and openly assailed the Assembly. He posed as the champion of universal suffrage, the true representative of the people misrepresented by the factious deputies. They proposed to subject France to the uncertainties of a political campaign: his continuation in office would mean the certain maintenance of order. But Napoleon did not rely on demagogy alone: in secret he plotted a coup d’État.

The trade of house or bank burglar long ago fell into disrepute: not so that of the state burglar, who, if he succeed, may wear ermine jauntily,—for ermine, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Louis Napoleon, ready to risk everything, laid his plans for stealing the government of France. The venture was less difficult than it seems, for if he could win over four or five men the odds would be with him. He must have the Prefect of Paris, the Commandant of the Garrison, the Ministers of War and of the Interior: others might make assurance double sure, but these were absolutely necessary.

Early in the spring of 1851 he set to work. Chief among his accomplices was his half brother, Morny,—a facile, audacious man, whose reputation, if he had ever had any, would have been lost long since in stock-swindling schemes; after him, in importance, came Persigny, an adventurer who had fastened on Louis Napoleon fifteen years before; Fleury, a major most active and efficient, without qualm, for he foresaw a marshal’s bÂton; and Maupas, one of those easy villains who, never having been suspected of honesty, are spared the fatigue of pretending to be better than they are. If we assume that all these gentlemen were Imperialists for revenue only, we shall do them no injustice.

Their first move was to send Fleury to Algiers to secure a general to act as minister of war. He had not to search long; for Saint Arnaud, one of the Algerian officers, guessing Fleury’s purpose, offered his services forthwith. But Saint Arnaud stood only fifty-third in the line of promotion among French generals; some excuse must be found for passing by his fifty-two seniors. In a few weeks the French press and official gazette announced an outbreak of great violence among the Kabyles in Algeria; a little later they reported that the insurrection had been subdued by the energy of General Saint Arnaud; then, another proper interval elapsing, Saint Arnaud had come to Paris as minister of war.

It took less trouble to dismiss the Prefect of the Seine, and to substitute Maupas for him. Magnan, who commanded the troops, had already been corrupted. Half-brother Morny, at the critical moment, would appear in the Ministry of the Interior. The National Guard and the Public Printer could both be counted on,—the latter required for the prompt issuing of manifestoes. Everything being ready, the President, after some brief delays, set December 2—the anniversary of Austerlitz, and of the coronation of the great Napoleon—for committing the crime.

---

On the evening of December 1, he held his weekly reception at the ElysÉe; moved with his habitual courtesy among the guests; seemed less stiff than usual,—as if relieved of a burden; then went to his study for a last conference with his fellow-conspirators. The next morning Paris learned that two hundred leading citizens, military and political, including many deputies, had been arrested and taken to Vincennes. Placards declared that the President, having had news of a plot against the state, had stolen a march on the plotters, dissolved the Assembly, proclaimed universal suffrage, and called for a plebiscite to accept or reject the constitution he would frame. At first, the stupefied Parisians knew not what to do. Then the deputies who had escaped arrest met and voted to depose the President; but his gendarmes quickly broke up the meeting, and lodged the deputies in prison. Thanks to the system of centralization which France had long boasted of, Morny, from the Ministry of the Interior, controlled every prefect in France by telegraph. The provinces were informed that Paris had accepted the coup d’État almost before Paris had collected her dazed senses on the morning of the 2d of December.

The chief politicians and other leaders being caged, there was no one left, except among the workingmen, to direct a resistance. They did revolt, and Napoleon and Saint Arnaud gave them free play to raise barricades, to arm and gather. Then the eighty thousand soldiers in Paris surrounded them, stormed their barricades, and made no prisoners. Accompanying this suppression of the mob was the bloodthirsty massacre of a multitude of defenseless men, women, and children who had collected on the boulevards to see the troops move against the barricaders. They were shot down in cold blood, the soldiers (according to general report) having been rendered ferocious by drink. Thus was achieved the crime of the coup d’État.

By this crime Napoleon had demonstrated that he had the necessary force to put down the lawless, and that he did not hesitate to use it; by massacring the innocent throng, he made the army his accomplices, against any risk of their fraternizing with the populace. A fortnight later, 7,439,000 Frenchmen ratified his crime and elected him president for ten years: only 646,000 voted against him. Napoleon the Great, by the coup d’État of the 18th Brumaire, had suppressed the Directory; his imitative nephew could now point to an equally successful 2d of December.

France acquiesced all the more readily because she was put under martial law. One hundred thousand suspects were arrested, and more than ten thousand, were deported to Cayenne and Algeria. Police inquisitions, military commissions, and the other usual devices of tyranny quickly smothered resistance. Under the pretense of suppressing anarchy,—an anarchist meaning any one who did not submit to Louis Napoleon,—persecution supplanted law and justice. Had you asked to see most of the Frenchmen whose names were the most widely known, you would have been told that they were in exile.

Like his uncle, Louis Napoleon waited a little before putting on the purple. Only on December 2, 1852, the anniversary of his crime, did he have himself proclaimed emperor. The mockery of a plebiscite had preceded, and he had assured France and Europe that the “Empire means peace.”

Having reached the throne, he made the following arrangements for staying on it. He organized a Senate and a Council of State, whose members he appointed. The public were allowed to elect members to the Corps LÉgislatif, or Legislature; but as his minions controlled the polls, only such candidates as he preferred were likely to be chosen. He suffered a few opponents to be elected, in order to have it appear that he encouraged discussion. Otherwise, he scarcely took pains to varnish his autocracy. As a deft Chinese carver incloses a tiny figure in a nest of ivory boxes, so did Bonaparte imprison the simulacrum of Liberty in the innermost compartment of the political cage in which he held France captive.

What must the condition of the French people have been that they submitted! How much antecedent incapacity for government, how much cherishing of unworthy ideals, were implied by the success of such an adventurer! And what could patriotism mean, when the French fatherland meant the land of Louis Napoleon, Morny, Maupas, Persigny, and their unspeakable underlings? The new Empire gave France what is called a strong government, by which commercially she throve. Tradesmen, seeing business improve and their hoards grow, chafed less at the loss of political freedom. The working classes were propitiated by public works—the favorite nostrum of socialists and tyrants—organized on a vast scale. Pensions were showered on old soldiers, or their widows. Taxes ran high; the public debt had constantly to be increased: but an air of opulence pervaded France. Established at home, Napoleon now looked abroad for gloire. Before his elevation, some one had warned him that he would find the French a very hard people to govern. “Not at all,” he replied; “all that they need is a war every four years.” Europe had formally recognized him,—no country being more ready than England to condone his great crime. Queen Victoria, the typical British matron, exchanging visits with the Imperial adventurer made an edifying spectacle! Presently the land-greed of England and the gloire-thirst of France brought the sons of the Britons who had whipped the great Napoleon at Waterloo into an alliance with the sons of the Frenchmen who had there been whipped; and in the summer of 1854 British and French fleets swept through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea, and landed two armies near Sebastopol. Of the Crimean war which ensued, we need say no more than that it was immoral in conception, blundering in execution, and ineffectual in results. Nevertheless, it supplied Napoleon III with just what he had sought. He extracted from it large quantities of gloire. Marshal’s bÂtons and military promotions, the parade of returning troops, the assembling at Paris of the European envoys who were to agree on a treaty of peace,—what did all this show but that Europe had accepted Napoleon III at his own valuation? In Russia’s wilderness of snow the great Napoleon had been ruined; now his nephew posed as the humbler of Russia. The great Napoleon had been finally crushed by England: now his nephew had enticed good, pious England into an alliance, and thereby he had surely avenged his uncle. The last European compact, humiliating to France, had been signed at Vienna: the new compact, signed at Paris, bore witness to the supremacy of France.

That year 1856 marks the acme of Napoleon the Third’s career. It saw him the recognized arbiter of Europe. The world, which worships success, forgot that the suave, impassive master of the Tuileries had been Louis the Ridiculed, a political vagabond and hapless pretender, only ten years before. Now, as arbiter, he would meddle when he chose, and the world should not gainsay him. Moreover, he believed his power so secure that he was willing to forgive those whom he had injured. He had gained what he wanted: why, therefore, should they reject his amnesty?

Unscrupulously selfish till he had attained his ends, Napoleon III had, nevertheless, curious streaks of disinterestedness in his nature. What but Quixotism impelled him to promise to free Italy from her bondage to Austria? He might add thereby to his personal renown, but the French people, who must pay the bills and furnish the soldiers, were offered no adequate compensation. Whatever his motives, he crossed the Alps in the spring of 1859, joined the Piedmontese, and defeated the Austrians in two great battles. But after Solferino he paused, grew anxious, and drew back. Many reasons were hinted at: he had been horrified at the sight of twelve thousand corpses festering in the midsummer heat on the battlefield; he perceived that the campaign must last many months before the Austrians could be dislodged from the Quadrilateral; he dreaded to create in Italy a kingdom strong enough to be a menace to France; he was worried at the mobilization of the Prussian army, foreboding a war on the Rhine. Motives are usually composite: perhaps, therefore, all these, and others, made him resolve to quit Italy with his mission only half achieved. But of all his schemes, that Italian expedition has alone escaped the condemnation of posterity.

Possessing a great talent for scenic display, Napoleon dressed his victories so as to get the fullest spectacular effect from them. He could pose now as the conqueror of Austria, and offset the gloire of his uncle’s Marengo with that of his own Magenta. He had more bÂtons and dukedoms to bestow,—more trophies to deposit in the Invalides. The gazettes, the official historians, the court writers, the spell-bound populace, acclaimed the new triumphs. Europe became too small for Imperial France to swagger in. Napoleon the First had meddled in Egypt, and Palestine, and the West Indies; his nephew must do likewise, and seek new worlds to conquer over sea.

Already, however, sober observers noted other symptoms, and soon the list of Imperial reverses grew ominously long. Early in 1860, Central Italy became a part of Victor Emanuel’s kingdom: Napoleon had insisted that it should form a new state for his cousin Plon-Plon. That autumn, Sicily and Naples united themselves to Italy: Napoleon had wished and schemed otherwise. That same year, too, England compelled him to renounce his protectorate over Syria. Then he planned a French empire in Mexico; sent French troops over under Bazaine; set up Maximilian, who appeared to have grafted Napoleonism on our continent. But in 1867 he recalled his army,—“spontaneously” as he said. The world smiled when it reflected that the spontaneity of his withdrawal had been superinduced by a curt message from the United States and the massing of United States troops on the Rio Grande. In 1864 he would have kept Prussia and Austria from robbing Denmark; but as he had only words to risk, they heeded him not. In 1866, when Prussia and Austria went to war, expecting that Austria would be the victor, he had arranged to take a slice of Rhineland while Austria took Silesia. But Prussia was victorious, and so quickly that Napoleon could not save his reputation even as mediator.

At last Europe realized that his nod was not omnipotent,—that Prussia, his enemy, could raise herself to a power of the first rank, not only without but against his sanction. Napoleon also realized that his prestige was tottering. He must have some compensation for Prussia’s aggrandizement. But when he asked for a strip of Rhineland, Bismarck replied: “I will never cede an inch of German soil.” Napoleon, not ready for war, cast about for some other screen to his humiliation; for even in his legislature men now dared to taunt him with allowing Germany to grow perilously strong. To this taunt one of the Imperial spokesmen retorted, “Germany is divided into three fragments, which will never come together.” A day or two later Bismarck published the secret treaties by which North and South Germany had bound themselves to support each other in case of attack.

Thus thwarted, Napoleon schemed to buy the tiny grandduchy of Luxemburg, which had long been garrisoned by Prussian troops. The King of Holland, who owned it, agreed to sell it for ninety million francs. Europe was willing, but Bismarck said no. He would consent to withdraw his troops, to destroy the fortifications, and to convert Luxemburg into a neutral state; more than that he would not allow. And with that Napoleon had to content himself, and to persuade the French—as best he could—that he had frightened the Prussians out of the grandduchy.

In 1863 Bismarck said to a friend: “From a distance, the French Empire seems to be something; near by, it is nothing.” About the same time Napoleon, who had had much friendly intercourse with the Prussian statesman, said: “M. de Bismarck is not a serious man.”

Just as the Luxemburg affair was concluded, all the world went to Paris to attend the Exposition, which was intended to be, and seemed, a symbol of the permanence of the Second Empire. The projectors knew that the immense preparations would enable the government to employ many workmen, who might otherwise be unruly, and that the vast concourse of visitors would bring money to the tradespeople and keep them from grumbling. The ostensible purpose, however, was to dazzle both Frenchmen and strangers by a view of Imperial magnificence; and it was fully achieved.

Paris herself, the Phryne among cities, astonished those who had never seen her, or who had seen her in old days. Where, they asked, were the narrow, crooked streets, in which barricaders once fortified themselves? Were these boulevards, stretching broad and straight,—were these they? And by what magic had the old, irregular dwellings been transformed into miles of tall, stately blocks? New churches, new quays, new parks, new palaces, bearing the impress of grace, symmetry, and a unifying planner, excited the wonder of the cosmopolitan throng of visitors. But the products of industry, the triumphs of the arts of peace, were not allowed to obscure the military glories of the Second Empire. A “Bridge of the Alma” and a “Boulevard of Sebastopol” kept the Crimean prowess in memory; a “Solferino Bridge” and a “Magenta Boulevard” bore witness to the Italian triumphs. And there were pageants, military, courtly, artistic; balls, at which, among the picked beauties of the world, the Empress EugÉnie shone most beautiful; banquets, at which Napoleon sat at the head of the table, with monarchs at his right hand and his left deferentially listening. Little did the on-lookers suppose that the master of those magnificent revels had been lately frustrated by M. de Bismarck, who was merely one of the million whose presence in Paris seemed a tribute to Napoleon’s supremacy.

History, it is said, never repeats: but is the saying true? Is there not an old, old story of Belshazzar and the magnificent feast he gave in ancient Babylon, and the mysterious writing on the wall? And was not another Belshazzar repeating the episode in this modern Babylon less than thirty years ago? However that may be, the Exhibition of 1867 was the last triumph of Imperial France.

Imperialism had made a great show, reproducing, so far as it could, the glamour of the First Empire. Judge how potent that First Empire must have been, when mere imitation of it could thus hypnotize France and delude Europe! But Imperialism, generated by a crime and vitalized by corruption and deceit, was not all France. Honest France, excluded in the beginning, could not, would not, be lured in later. Napoleon would have conciliated, but the men whom he needed to conciliate would not even parley. To offset Victor Hugo and patriots of his rigid defiance, the Emperor had the outward acquiescence of Prosper MÉrimÉe, the worldly courtier; of Alfred de Musset, the weak-willed, debauched poet; and of such as they. But he had the conscience of France against him; to offset that he leagued himself with Jesuits and Clericals. Having exhausted the expedients of force, he had tried the arts of flattery; he had intimidated, he had blandished; he had made vice easy and attractive, in order that, though he could not win over the stubborn to his cause, their character might be softened through voluptuousness. Whosoever could be corrupted—let us give him full credit—he did corrupt in masterful fashion; but conscience, in France as elsewhere, is incorruptible.

Despite his complicated machinery for gagging conscience, protests began to be made boldly. One such protest, uttered towards the end of 1868, rang throughout France; and well it might, so audacious was the eloquence of the protester. Several newspapers had opened a subscription for a monument to Baudin, a Republican killed in the coup d’État. The proprietors of these newspapers were arrested. One of them, Delescluze, had for his advocate LÉon Gambetta, a vehement young lawyer from the South. Before the judge, and the prosecuting attorneys, and the police—all myrmidons of the Emperor—he arraigned the Empire, closing with these words: “Here for seventeen years you have been absolute masters—‘masters at discretion,’ it is your phrase—of France. Well, you have never dared to say, ‘We will celebrate—we will include among the solemn festivals of France—the Second of December as a national anniversary!’ And yet all the governments which have succeeded each other in the land have honored the day of their birth; there are but two anniversaries—the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December—which have never been put among the solemnities of origin, because you know that, if you dared to put these, the universal conscience would disavow them!” Gambetta’s invective did not save his client from prison, but his arraignment of the Empire echoed throughout France.

And all the next year, 1869, though Imperialism abated in language none of its pretensions, it showed in deeds many signs of nervousness. No longer did it think it prudent, for instance, to abet the enormous extravagances of Hausmann, the remodeler of Paris. It even talked Liberalism, and set up a seeming Liberal Cabinet, with Ollivier at its head. “All the reform you may give us, we accept,” said Gambetta bluntly; “and we may possibly force you to yield more than you intend; but all you give, and all we take, we shall simply use as a bridge to carry us over to another form of government.” Evidently the conscience of France, expressing itself through the Republican spokesman, could not be placated or seduced.

A still blacker omen ushered in 1870. Pierre Bonaparte, the Emperor’s cousin, shot in cold blood a journalist, Victor Noir. Two hundred thousand persons followed the victim’s hearse; two hundred thousand voices shouted through the streets of Paris, “Vengeance! Down with the Empire! Long live the Republic!” In April the ministers proposed further reforms, and called for another plebiscite, that worn-out Napoleonic device for deceiving public opinion. Seven and a third million votes were dutifully registered for the Empire, and only a million and a half against it; but the Imperialists did not exult,—a majority of voters in Paris, and forty-six thousand soldiers, had voted no.

To be deserted by the Parisians, on whom Napoleon had lavished so much pomp,—that, indeed, was hard; but the disaffection in the army meant danger. One desperate remedy remained,—a foreign war. Victory would bring to Imperialism sufficient prestige to postpone for several years the impending collapse; meanwhile, public attention would be diverted from grievances at home.

Nemesis saw to it that rogues thus minded should not lack opportunity. The Spaniards having elected an obscure German prince to be their king, the French ministers announced that they would never suffer him to reign. Of his own motion, the German prince declined the election, but the French were not appeased. They would humble the King of Prussia by forcing from him a meek promise. King William refused to be bullied; the French ministers proclaimed that France had been insulted. Not Imperialists only, but Frenchmen of all parties clamored for satisfaction. That love of gloire, that mercurial vanity which, twenty years before, had made them an easy prey to Louis Napoleon, now made them abettors of his breakneck venture. He appealed to their patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel, and they were beguiled.

War came, the Emperor being, by common report, most reluctant to consent to its declaration. He was its first victim. Five weeks after taking the field, he surrendered with nearly one hundred and ninety thousand men at SÉdan. The corruption which through twenty years he had fostered, in all parts of the state where he expected to profit by it, had gangrened the army also, that branch which a military tyrant needs to have honestly administered. And now in his need the army failed him. He had been caught, as every one is caught who imagines that he can be wicked with impunity and still keep virtue for an ally when he needs her. From top to bottom his war department was rotten. Conscripts had, by bribe, evaded service; generals had sworn to false muster-rolls; ministers had connived with dishonest contractors. At SÉdan, Napoleon paid the penalty of the corruption which he had erected into a system; at SÉdan, moreover, he completed that cycle of parallels and imitations which he had made the business of his life. Just as Prussian BlÜcher paralyzed the last rally of the great Napoleon at Waterloo, so Prussian Moltke achieved the ignominy of Napoleon the Little at SÉdan.

Men forget, even when they do not forgive. Frenchmen, furious at the humiliation of SÉdan, cursed Napoleon as the author of it. But after a quarter of a century, although they have not forgiven him, they have come to look on him as victim rather than as villain. Later writers have held him up to be pitied. They describe his long years of suffering from the stone; they paint him during that month of August, 1870, as a poor, abject creature of circumstances, driven to bay by an irresistible foe, buffeted, scorned, despised by his own officers and troops. They show him to us, speechless and in agony, lifted from his horse at SaarbrÜcken; or huddled into a third-class railway carriage with a crowd of common soldiers escaping from the oncoming Prussians; or sitting, as cheerless as a death’s-head, at a council of war; now lodged in mean quarters; now passing gloomily down regiments on their way to defeat, and never a voice to cry Vive l’Empereur; ever growing more and more haggard and nervous with worry, disaster, and endless cigarettes; continually pelted with telegrams from Empress EugÉnie at Paris, “Do this—do that, or the Empire is lost;” until that final early morning interview with Bismarck in the weaver’s cottage at DonchÉry. Latter-day Frenchmen, beholding such misery, have forgotten that Napoleon himself was chiefly responsible for it, and have ceased to execrate.

In closing, let us read, from a letter Bismarck wrote to his wife the day after the surrender, a description of the meeting of Napoleon and his conqueror:—

“Vendresse, Sept. 3, 1870. Yesterday morning at five o’clock, after I had been negotiating until one o’clock, A.M., with Moltke and the French generals about the capitulation to be concluded, I was awakened by General Reille, with whom I am acquainted, to tell me that Napoleon wished to speak with me. Unwashed and unbreakfasted, I rode towards Sedan, found the Emperor in an open carriage, with three aides-de-camp and three in attendance on horseback, halted on the road before SÉdan. I dismounted, saluted him just as politely as at the Tuileries, and asked for his commands. He wished to see the King. I told him, as the truth was, that his Majesty had his quarters fifteen miles away, at the spot where I am now writing. In answer to Napoleon’s question where he should go, I offered him, as I was not acquainted with the country, my own quarters at DonchÉry, a small place in the neighborhood, close by SÉdan. He accepted and drove, accompanied by his six Frenchmen, by me and by Carl (who in the mean time had ridden after me), through the lonely morning, towards our lines. Before reaching the spot, he began to be troubled on account of the possible crowd, and he asked me if he could alight in a lonely cottage by the wayside. I had it inspected by Carl, who brought word it was mean and dirty. ‘N’importe’ (No matter), said N., and I ascended with him a rickety, narrow staircase. In an apartment ten feet square, with a deal-table and two rush-bottomed chairs, we sat for an hour; the others were below. A powerful contrast with our last meeting in the Tuileries in ’67. Our conversation was difficult, if I wanted to avoid touching on topics which could not but affect painfully the man whom God’s mighty hand had cast down. I had sent Carl to fetch officers from the town, and to beg Moltke to come.”

That morning the terms of capitulation were drawn up, and the next day Napoleon went a prisoner to WilhelmshÖhe, whence, in due time, he was allowed to depart for England. At Chislehurst, on January 9, 1873, he died, having lived to see not only the extinction of French Imperialism and of the temporal Papacy, but also the creation of the German Empire and the union of Italy. To prevent all of these things had been his aim.

In a life like Garibaldi’s we see what a disinterested genius can do by appealing to men’s noble motives: the career of Louis Napoleon illustrates not less clearly what a man with talents and without scruples can accomplish by appealing to the instincts of vainglory and selfishness and terror; to the instinct which bullies weak nations and hoists the flag where it does not belong; to the instinct which has not the courage to acknowledge an error, but is quick to impute injuries, and declares that there shall be one conscience for politicians and another for citizens. Let us not flatter ourselves that only the French have cherished these stupendous delusions; let us rather take warning by the retribution exacted from them.

The history of Hungary is in this respect unique: it records the career of an alien tribe which, cutting its way from Eastern Asia to the heart of Europe, founded there a nation, and this nation, after the friction of a thousand years, still preserves its racial characteristics. In 894 Duke ArpÁd led his horde of Magyars—whose earlier kinsmen were Huns and Avars—up the valley of the Danube. Long were they a terror to Europe; then, gradually, they had to content themselves with Hungary as their home. They became Christians; they adopted a monarchical government; alongside of their Aryan neighbors, they took on mediÆval civilization. Europe, unable to expel or to destroy, acknowledged them as citizens. The time came when the Magyars, in a conflict lasting fivescore years, defended Europe against the invasion of another horde of Asiatic barbarians; till, unsupported by their neighbors, the Magyars succumbed to the Turks in the battle of MohÁcs in 1526. Afterwards, for one hundred and fifty years, Hungary herself writhed in the hands of the Mussulman; when that bondage ceased, she had a different oppressor,—Austria.

The Hungarian monarchy was elective, and after the battle of MohÁcs the Magyars chose for their king the sovereign of the Austrian states. The succession continued in the House of Hapsburg, becoming in fact hereditary; but, before the Magyars accepted him as king, each Hapsburg candidate must be ratified by the Hungarian Diet, and must swear to uphold the Hungarian Constitution. When, however, the expulsion of the Turks, at the end of the seventeenth century, left the Austrian sovereigns free to exercise their authority, they set about curtailing the ancient liberties of Hungary. Throughout the eighteenth century that process went on: the Magyars protested; the Emperor-King encroached, or, when the protests threatened to pass into insurrection, he paused for a while and gave fair promises.

Such was the situation when the French Revolution, followed by Napoleon’s colossal ambition, startled Europe. During the quarter century of upheaval, the Magyars, still pouring their grievances into Vienna, remained loyal to their King. After Napoleon’s downfall, the Old RÉgime being firmly reËstablished, Emperor Francis not only failed to keep his promises towards Hungary, but revived the old policy of Austrianization, which meant the substitution of German for Magyar officials, and the removal of the chief branches of government to Vienna. Again the protests became angry, until Francis, baffled and alarmed, convened the Diet. With the year 1825, when that Diet met, began the modern struggle of Hungary to recover that home rule which one after another of her Hapsburg kings had solemnly sworn to respect, and had as perfidiously disregarded. Thus the seed of the Magyar revolution was sown, like that of so many others, in a demand for the restoration of acknowledged rights, and not in a demand for innovation. Home rule,—Hungary to govern herself, instead of being bullied by foreigners who happened to be also subjects of her Emperor-King,—that seemed an object as simple and definite as it was just. Experience soon showed, however, that this cause was not simple; that it no more could be attained alone than gold can be taken from quartz without crushing the quartz and separating the silver and lead, and the crushed quartz itself, from the desired gold. For Hungary was imbedded in an old civilization, which must be broken up before home rule, and many another modern ideal, could be attained.

Imagine a country having an area about as large as the State of Colorado, inhabited by people sprung from four different races,—the Magyar, the Slav, the German, and the Italian: imagine, further, these races subdivided into eight different peoples,—Magyars, having poor kinsmen called Szeklers; Slavs, sending forth four different shoots, Slovaks in the North, Croats in the Southwest, Serbs in the South, and Wallachs in the East; imagine this motley population holding various creeds,—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Unitarian: imagine not merely each race, but each people, cherishing its own language, its own customs, its own ambitions, which inevitably clashed with those of its neighbors: and having imagined all this, you have not yet come to the end of Hungary’s complex organism. Beside the conflicts of race and creed, there were political and social complications.

The dominant race was the Magyars, who numbered, however, only a third of the total population; their prevailing system was the feudal. A few hundred great nobles, or magnates, a considerable body of small nobles and a multitude of artisans, tradesmen, and peasants made up the social strata. Every Magyar who could trace descent to ArpÁd and his followers—though he were but a peasant in condition—was a noble: members of all the other races had no political rights. Hungary proper comprised fifty-two counties, each of which had its local congregation or assembly, which met four times a year, and sent suggestions or bills of grievances to the Central Diet, composed of the Table of Magnates and the Table of Deputies. A Palatine or Viceroy, representing the Sovereign, was the actual head of the kingdom. Outside of Hungary proper, the Croats had their local Diet at Agram, and Transylvania had hers; both also chose representatives to the Hungarian Diet. In a measure, therefore, we may call Hungary a federation, not forgetting, however, that it was a federation in which one race, the Magyars, domineered. The Latin language was the common medium of communication between Hungary and Austria, and among the diverse peoples.

The most significant event of the Diet of 1825 was the use by Count Stephen SzÉchenyi of the Magyar language instead of the Latin. SzÉchenyi, having traveled in Western Europe, came back imbued with large schemes of progress. He helped to introduce steamboats on the Danube; he founded a Magyar Academy; he proposed to join Buda and Pesth by a suspension bridge. By stimulating the material welfare of his country, he hoped that many of the social abuses would vanish without a struggle. And now his use of the Magyar language was a symptom of the awakening of the spirit of nationality,—one of the controlling motives in the history of Europe during the nineteenth century. In Hungary, as elsewhere, the arousing of that spirit was evidenced not only by an intenser political life, but also by a literary revival.

In direct reforms the Diet of 1825 accomplished little,—the Austrian government being still adroit in postponing a settlement,—but it was important in so far as it revealed the presence of new forces, whose nature was as yet undetermined. By the time another Diet assembled, in 1832, several questions had taken a definite shape. Foremost, of course, was Hungary’s demand of home rule, in which all Magyars stood side by side; but when it came to internal affairs, they inevitably disagreed. The advanced Liberals proposed to emancipate the serfs, to extend the suffrage, and to abolish many of the privileges of the aristocracy. How grievous was the condition of the Hungarian serf may be inferred from the fact that, in spite of an improvement decreed by Maria Theresa, he was still bound to contribute to his landlord the equivalent of more than one hundred days’ labor a year; he had no civic rights, and no other chance of redress than in the manorial court presided over by his master. The nobles, on the other hand, paid no taxes, ruled the county assemblies, appointed magistrates, and, except in case of a foreign invasion, rendered no military service, in return for all their exorbitant immunities.

That Magyar aristocracy has played so prominent a part in the history of Hungary that we may pause a moment to describe it. In 1830 the Magyar magnate was still the most picturesque noble in Europe. Like the Spanish grandee and the Venetian senator of an earlier time, he represented one of the highest expressions of the privileged classes. He was haughty, but warm-hearted; emotional, but brave: appeal to his honor, to his magnanimity, and—as Maria Theresa found—he would forget his grievances, disregard his interests, and devote himself body and soul to your cause. He might be ignorant, a spendthrift, an exacting master, but in his capacity for generosity he was—by whatever standard—truly a noble. In old times his forefathers had assembled every year, or when an emergency required, on the plain of RÁkos,—a host of gallant warriors, in brilliant armor and gorgeous cloaks and trappings. There they deliberated—perhaps chose a king or deposed one—and then each rode home with his retinue, to live in a splendor half-barbaric for another year. In his dress the Magyar had an Oriental love of color, and in his music there is a similar glow, a similar charm.

As late as 1840 both the magnates and the lesser nobility clung to their national costume as loyally as to their national constitution. “It now consists of the attilla” writes Paget at that date, “a frock coat, reaching nearly to the knee, with a military collar, and covered in front with gold lace; over this is generally worn, hanging loosely on one shoulder, the mente, a somewhat larger coat, lined with fur, and with a fur cape. It is generally suspended by some massive jeweled chain. The tight pantaloons and ankle-boots, with the never-failing spurs, form the lower part. The kalpak, or fur cap, is of innumerable forms, and ornamented by a feather fastened by a rich brooch. The white heron’s plume, or aigrette, the rare product of the Southern Danube, is the most esteemed. The neck is opened, except for a black ribbon loosely passed round it, the ends of which are finished with gold fringe. The sabre is in the shape of the Turkish scimitar; indeed, richly ornamented Damascus blades, the spoils of some unsuccessful Moslem invasion, are very often worn, and are highly prized.

“The sword-belt is frequently a heavy gold chain, such as our ancient knights wore over their armor. The colors, as in many respects the form, of the Hungarian uniform, depend entirely on the taste of the individual, and vary from the simple blue dress of the hussar, with white cotton lace, to the rich stuffs, covered with pearls and diamonds, of the Prince EsterhÁzy.

“On the whole, I know of no dress so handsome, so manly, and at the same time so convenient. It is only on gala days that gay and embroidered dresses are used; on ordinary occasions, as sittings of the Diet, county meetings, and others in which it is customary to wear uniform, dark colors with black silk lace, and trousers, or Hessian boots, are commonly used.”[1]

Such, in its dress, was the Magyar aristocracy which the reformers set themselves to overcome; and in their character those Magyar nobles—were they magnates or simply gentlemen—cherished a tenacity of class unsurpassed by any other aristocrats in Europe. Nevertheless, the reformers boldly put forth a programme which involved the complete social and political reorganization of the country,—even throwing down a challenge to the aristocracy to surrender privileges in which these deemed their very existence rooted. Parties had begun to array themselves on these lines when Louis Kossuth entered public life.

Born at the village of Monok, Zemplen County, on April 27, 1802, Kossuth had for his father a lesser noble, Slavic in origin, Lutheran in faith, and lawyer by profession. The son received a good education, and began to practice law, which led easily to politics. He sat in his county assembly, was early conspicuous as an advocate of popular rights and as an eloquent speaker. Thus equipped, he took his seat in the Diet of 1832, where, as proxy to a magnate, he had a voice but no vote. There seemed slight chance of his emerging from his proxy’s obscurity, but to genius all conditions are fluid. Kossuth conceived the plan of publishing the reports of the debates in the Diet. The government permitted no newspapers, and trimmed all other publications to suit its views; but the members of both Houses could speak freely, without danger of arrest for any of their utterances in the Diet. To circulate their speeches would, therefore, as Kossuth saw, put within reach of the Hungarians a mass of political reading not otherwise obtainable. Hardly had he begun to publish, ere government signified its desire of buying his press. Deprived of this, he employed secretaries who wrote out his abstracts of the proceedings and sent them through the mails to their destination. Government ordered its postmen to confiscate and destroy. Still unvanquished, Kossuth dispatched his budgets by special messengers. Government was foiled. By these devices, before the close of the Diet in 1836, Kossuth—the obscure magnate’s proxy—had become one of the most widely known men in the kingdom. The reports were literally his reports, giving not only the tenor of the chief debates, but also his comments thereon.

He now proposed to edit in similar fashion the proceedings of the quarterly meetings of the fifty-two county assemblies; but Government, no longer restrained by his inviolability as member of the Diet, arrested him. He spent two years in prison, denied books and all intercourse with his friends, before his case came to trial: then he was sentenced to a further confinement of four years, during which his great solace was the study of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, political and social agitation was swelling. The King, thinking a European war over the Eastern Question imminent, summoned another Diet to vote him a fresh subsidy and more soldiers. But the Diet, indignant and headstrong, refused all help till Kossuth and some other political prisoners should be released. The King yielded. Kossuth came forth a national hero.

After several months spent in recuperating his health, Kossuth, in January, 1841, established the Pesti Hirlap, or Pesth Gazette. That Government acquiesced in this project showed how far the tide of Liberalism had risen. It showed, too, that Government was astute,—hoping in this way to rob Kossuth of his martyr’s halo; deeming it wiser to let him publish openly than surreptitiously; trusting, above all, to the sharpness of its censors’ eyes and scissors. Kossuth, on his side, was equally cunning, versed in the art of dressing his opinions in such guise that the censor could not object to them, though they carried a meaning which his readers knew how to interpret according to his intention. He wrote on all topics with a vehemence and an Oriental heat which won him tens of thousands of admirers. Like any Magyar patriot, he could count on one of the most powerful of allies,—the race hatred between his countrymen and the Austrians. The very word “German” signified, in the Magyar language, vile, base, despicable. There was a Magyar proverb to the effect that “German is the only language God does not understand.” Innumerable illustrations of this antipathy might be cited, but the following, which Paget tells, will serve as well as another: The proprietor of a theatre produced what he considered a fine piece of scenery, in which was represented a full moon, with round, fat, clean-shaved face. When it rose, the audience hissed, and shouted, “Down with the German moon!” The manager took the hint; next night there rose a swarthy-cheeked, black-moustachioed orb. Hurrahs burst from every mouth, and all cried, “Long live our own true Magyar moon!”

Doubt not that Kossuth knew how to kindle the fuel which ages of hatred had been storing. He had the gift peculiar to really great popular leaders of appealing directly to racial pride and passion; so it mattered little that he dealt in generalizations. Speaking broadly, he preached the abolition of feudalism and the aggrandizement of the Magyar nationality. The former purpose brought him and the Liberals into conflict with the conservative aristocracy; the latter inflamed against the Magyars the long-smouldering hatred of their subject peoples.

For the spirit of nationality had awakened these also. The Slavs of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia dreamed of establishing a great Slavic kingdom in Southeastern Europe; they, too, were putting forth a literature. Their Illyrism—to their prospective nation they gave the name “Illyria”—clashed with the recrudescent Magyarism. When the Hungarian Diet decreed that the Magyar language should be taught in their schools, and that every official must use it, they protested as strenuously as the Magyars themselves had protested when Austria tried to impose the German language and German officials on them. “The Magyars are an island in the Slavic ocean,” exclaimed Gaj, the poet and spokesman of Illyrism, to the Hungarian Diet: “I did not make this ocean, I did not stir up its waves; but take care that they do not go over your heads and drown you.” Nevertheless, the law was passed. In the Southland the Serbs along the Danube, in the East the Wallachs of Transylvania, feeling the first tingle of national aspirations, resented this encroachment. Austria—whose motto was, Divide et impera—found her advantage in embittering tribe with tribe and class with class.

For three years and a half Kossuth’s Gazette had an unprecedented influence in Hungary; but in the summer of 1844, disagreeing with his publisher over a matter of salary, he resigned, and expected to found another journal which should draw off the Gazette’s patrons. Government, however, refused to grant him a license. Accordingly, he devoted himself to agitation in another form. In the assembly of the County of Pesth, he discussed with matchless eloquence the great political questions; outside, he organized an economical crusade. Austria burdened Hungary with a tariff which stunted her industrial and commercial development. Kossuth created a league whose members vowed for five years to use only Hungarian products. He projected a railway to Fiume, to secure an outlet for exporting Hungarian goods. He urged the establishment of savings banks and of mercantile corporations. And for a brief time, under this patriotic stimulus, trade flourished.

Thus through all the arteries of the body politic new blood was throbbing. Give a people a great idea, and they will find how to apply it to every concern of life. The Magyar Liberals were surely undermining feudalism; their race was growing more and more restive at Austria’s obstinate delays. When Austria removed the native county sheriffs and put German administrators in their stead, all the Magyar factions joined in denouncing such an assault on their national life. The county system had been the safeguard of Hungary’s political institutions for well-nigh eight hundred years; the sheriff was the foremost official in the county, to whose guidance its interests and civic activity were intrusted. To make an alien sheriff was therefore to check national agitation at its source. Accordingly, the Diet which met in the autumn of 1847 met full of defiance and resentment, though the platform of the Liberals, drawn up by the judicial DeÁk, wore on its surface a conciliatory aspect. After a hot canvass, Kossuth was elected to represent Pesth in the Chamber of Deputies. A few sessions sufficed to establish his preËminence as an orator, and his leadership of the Liberal party. During the winter months of 1847–48 but little was done, though much was discussed. As usual, the Magnates resisted the reforms aimed at their class; as usual, Government temporized and postponed. Suddenly, at the beginning of March, 1848, news reached Presburg of the revolution in Paris, and of the flight of Louis Philippe. That news passed like a torch throughout Europe, kindling as it passed the fires of revolt. At Presburg, on March 3, Kossuth rose in the Diet and interrupted a debate on the financial difficulties with Austria. That question of finance, he said, could never be settled separately; in it was involved the whole question of Austria’s disregard of Hungary’s rights. Hungary must have her own laws, her own ministry; taxation must be equal; the franchise must be extended. More than that, he added, Hungary could never prosper until every part of the Empire should be governed by uniform constitutional methods.

Kossuth’s “baptismal speech of the revolution” took the Lower House by storm. An address to the Throne was framed, which, after fruitless reluctance on the part of the Magnates, a large committee, headed by Kossuth and Count Louis BatthyÁnyi,—the Liberal leader in the Upper House,—carried twelve days later to Vienna. The delegates found the Austrian capital in an uproar. On March 13 Metternich, deserted by the aristocracy on whose behalf he had labored unscrupulously for fifty years, had been hounded from office. The people, after a bloody struggle, had possession of the city, and they welcomed Kossuth as a deliverer; for his “baptismal speech” had made their aims articulate.

The next day, Emperor Ferdinand received the deputation very graciously, and promised to grant their petition. Exulting, they returned to Presburg. A Cabinet was formed in which BatthyÁnyi held the premiership, and Kossuth the portfolio of finance. Soon, very soon, tremendous difficulties beset them: Radicals clamored for a republic; the subject races revolted; the Imperial government proved perfidious.

The key to Austria’s subsequent conduct is this: Austria, at heart a coward, had long been able to play the bully; now, however, her outraged peoples had risen in wrath and held her at their mercy; the bully cringed, promised, conceded; concession brought a temporary respite from danger; thereupon she began to think she had been unduly terrified and to regret her concessions; so she cautiously put out feelers of arrogance, to resume her rÔle of bully. When she met sharp resistance, she quickly drew back again, to await a better opportunity. Throughout this crisis, Emperor Ferdinand, at his best a man of mediocre capacity, was becoming imbecile through epilepsy, and a Court clique, or Camarilla, ruled him and the Empire.

All this was not yet clear to the Hungarians. Assuming the Imperial assurances to be honest, they passed a reform bill abolishing the privileges of the nobles, who were to be compensated by the state for the loss they sustained in the emancipation of their serfs. Bills authorizing equal taxation, trial by jury, freedom of speech, the abolition of tithes, and the extension of the franchise to one million two hundred thousand voters, were adopted with but little discussion. Religious toleration—except for Jews—became the law of the land.

The Magnates having made this unparalleled sacrifice, King Ferdinand came over to Presburg and dissolved the Diet in a speech approving its action, and reiterating his pledge to uphold the Constitution. The Cabinet proceeded to organize its administration,—a task which would have been sufficient at any time to keep it busy, but now extraordinary and urgent matters pressed upon it. The Wallachs, Serbs, and Croats rose in rebellion. Most alarming was the situation in Croatia, where the Slavs were agitating for separation from Hungary. Baron Jellachich, who had just been appointed Ban or Viceroy of Croatia, abetting the insurrection, strengthened the Croat army. In June the Magyar ministers hurried to Innspruck—whither the Emperor and Camarilla had fled after a second outbreak in Vienna—to protest against these rebellious acts. The Emperor assured them that he had given the Ban no sanction; that he had, indeed, dismissed him from the Imperial service. It happened that Jellachich was at Innspruck at this very moment, carrying the notification of dismissal in his pocket, and in his mind an unwritten commission to serve Austria against Hungary.

The rebellion of the Serbs, accompanied by unspeakable atrocities, was openly fomented by Austrian agents; likewise the outbreak in Transylvania. Hungary’s embarrassments increased; she had still to accept Ferdinand’s assurances of good faith, for he was her legal king; but now she knew that the Camarilla, the actual Imperial government, was instigating her enemies.

The newly elected National Assembly convened at Pesth, the ancient capital, early in July. The royal address condemned by implication Jellachich and all rebels, but the insurrection grew in violence from day to day. On July 11 Kossuth made in the Assembly the most effective speech of his life. Posterity stands incredulous before the record of great orators who, Orpheus-like, are said to have moved stocks and stones by their voice; yet not on this account must we disbelieve the record. For posterity can never supply the one thing needful to the consummate orator’s success,—it can never supply the state of mind of his audience. We shall always find that the epoch-making speech was addressed to listeners every one of whom had long been burning to hear just those words. This is why so many of the orations that altered history look faded on the printed page; this is why we must in many cases judge the orator as we judge the singer or the actor,—by the effect he produces on his contemporaries. Kossuth, by this standard, ranks with the first orators of the century, though a later generation is little thrilled by his printed speeches. Men who heard him, even those who heard him speak in a language not his own, and who had listened to Webster and Clay and Choate, declare that they never heard his equal. Upon his own countrymen, to whom his words came charged with the associations which belong to one’s mother-tongue, his eloquence was irresistible.

In that 11th of July speech, at least, we, too, after long years, can feel the glow. The occasion itself was dramatic. Every deputy realized that the crisis of the revolution was at hand,—that Hungary must either turn back, or dare to plunge into an unknown and perilous sea. All were waiting for the decisive word.

Kossuth, just risen from a bed of sickness, with tottering steps mounted the tribune. He was a man of medium height; his hair was brown, his eyes blue; he wore a full mustache and cut his beard sailor-wise, so that it formed a shaggy fringe beneath his smooth-shaven chin. At first, as he spoke, his pallid face and feeble gestures, though they enhanced the solemnity of his words, made his hearers dread a collapse; but presently he seemed to be fired with the strength which burned in his subject, and they listened for two hours, spell-bound and electrified.

“I feel,” he said to them, “as if God had put in my hands the trumpet to rouse the dead, that, if sinners and weak, they may sink back into death, but that, if the vigor of life is still in them, they may waken to eternity.” He then went on to review the quarrel with Croatia, declaring that to that country Hungary had, from immemorial time, accorded all the privileges which she herself enjoyed, and that recently she had conceded to the Croats a wider use of their native language. “I can understand a people,” he said ironically, “who, deeming the freedom they possess too little, take up arms to acquire more, though they play, indeed, a hazardous game, for such weapons are two-edged; but I cannot understand a people who say, ‘The freedom you offer us is too great,—we will not accept your offer, but will go and submit ourselves to the yoke of Absolutism.’” Kossuth next touched on the situation in the South, and showed wherein it differed from that in the Southwest. He told how the Camarilla had sought to compel the ministers to acknowledge the unlawful pretensions of Croatia, and thereby to annul the pledges of the King. He pointed out, as an ominous cloud on the eastern horizon, the recent appearance of a Russian army along the Pruth. When, after this review, he solemnly announced, “The fatherland is in danger,” not a deputy was surprised, not a head shook incredulously. At last he asked for authority to levy two hundred thousand soldiers, and to raise a loan of forty-two million florins, setting forth the means by which he planned to meet this extraordinary measure as eloquently as he had set forth its need.

He had held the Assembly captivated for two hours; now, as he was closing, his strength failed, and he could not speak. The deputies, too, were speechless. For a brief moment intense silence reigned between him and them. Then Paul NyÁry, who only yesterday had attacked the policy of the Cabinet, rose, lifted his right hand as if invoking God to be his witness, and exclaimed, “We grant everything!” In a flash four hundred hands were raised, and four hundred voices repeated NyÁry’s covenant. When quiet came again, Kossuth had recovered strength to say that his request should not be taken as a demand for a vote of confidence. “We ask your vote for the preservation of the country; and, sirs, if any breast sighs for freedom, if any desire waits for fulfilment, let that breast suffer a little longer, let it have patience until we have saved the fatherland. You have all risen to a man, and I bow before the great-heartedness of the nation, while I ask one thing more: let your energy equal your patriotism, and the gates of hell itself shall not prevail against Hungary!”

In March, under the magic of Kossuth’s irresistible oratory, the Magyars had boldly demanded their constitutional rights; now in July, thrilled by the same magic, they pledged themselves to defend their independence to the death.

The summer passed amid recruiting of HonvÉds, volunteer “defenders of the fatherland,” the attempt to quell the insurrection in Transylvania and among the Serbs, and the renewed intrigues of the Imperial Court to browbeat the Hungarian Cabinet. In September, Jellachich, at last avowedly in the service of Austria, prepared to invade Hungary. The Palatine, unable to bring about a reconciliation, quitted the country. The Viennese Cabinet appointed Count Lamberg to assume full control of the military affairs in the kingdom; the Hungarians pronounced his appointment unconstitutional, and they were right. On his arrival at Pesth, he was murdered by a mob. This rash crime caused some of the Liberals to withdraw horrified. BatthyÁnyi resigned the premiership, and a Committee of National Defense, in which Kossuth predominated, was chosen. On October 2, the Camarilla, grown truculent, dispatched Recsey to dissolve the Hungarian Assembly, and bade Hungary to submit to Jellachich. The Magyars heeded neither command. Having equity and law on their side, they acted henceforth on the assumption that the orders which emanated from Vienna could not be attributed to Ferdinand without imputing perjury to him.

War could no longer be avoided. The Committee of National Defense displayed great energy in organizing resistance. Kossuth’s eloquence went over the land, and the cloddish peasant left the plough, the well-to-do tradesman deserted his shop, the lawyer dropped his brief, to become volunteers in the service of their country. A third outbreak at Vienna sent the Camarilla hurrying off to OlmÜtz, and seemed for a moment to assure the final triumph of the revolution. During the three weeks which elapsed before an Austrian army under Prince WindischgrÄtz—he who said that “human beings begin with barons”—could be brought up, the Hungarians debated whether they should go to the assistance of the Viennese, for they wished to be strictly legal. At last they found justification in the plea that they had a right to pursue Jellachich, who was marching to join WindischgrÄtz, across the Austrian frontier. But they decided too late. Their troops were beaten at Schwechat, on the outskirts of Vienna, just as WindischgrÄtz was successfully storming the city (October 29).

For six weeks thereafter WindischgrÄtz devoted himself to stamping out the rebellion in Vienna, and in preparing for a campaign against Hungary. On December 2 poor, weak-witted Ferdinand abdicated, and his nephew Francis Joseph succeeded him as emperor. This change betokened the returning confidence of the Court party. They now felt sure of crushing the revolution, and of restoring the Old RÉgime; but they had no intention that, when the rest of Austria was re-subjected to their despotism, Hungary alone should enjoy a constitutional government. Yet this had been promised by Ferdinand, and he had scruples against openly violating his oath. Therefore, by removing him and substituting Francis Joseph, they had a sovereign unhampered by pledges. To this scheme the Magyars naturally did not bend; their Constitution was their life, and that Constitution recognized no king who had not been crowned by the Magyars, and had not sworn to preserve their rights inviolate.

Ten days before Christmas, WindischgrÄtz opened his campaign. Five armies besides his own invaded Hungary from five different directions. The Magyars had employed the six weeks’ lull in defensive preparations. They gave Arthur GÖrgei, an ex-officer thirty-one years old,—able, stern, selfish, and inordinately ambitious,—the command of the Army of the Upper Danube. He proposed to abandon the frontier and to mass the Hungarian forces in the interior, where they could choose their own ground; but the Committee of Defense insisted that every inch of Hungarian soil should be contested. A fortnight’s operations proved the wisdom of GÖrgei’s plan: the Magyars were easily driven back, and on New Year’s eve the Austrians camped within gunshot of Buda-Pesth. The following day, January 1, 1849, a melancholy procession of ministers, deputies, state officials, fearful citizens, and stragglers, set out from Pesth, carrying with them the precious crown of St. Stephen, the public coffers and archives, and the printing-presses for bank-notes. Debreczin, a town forty leagues inland, became the temporary capital. At Buda-Pesth, WindischgrÄtz celebrated his triumph by holding a Bloody Assize. To envoys from the fugitive government who asked him to state his conditions, he only replied, “I do not treat with rebels.”

Among the Magyars, consternation was quickly succeeded by a mood of desperation,—such a mood as made France invincible in 1792. Again did Kossuth’s eloquence pass like the breath of life over the land; again did his energy direct the equipment of new recruits and fill the gaps of the regiments already in the field. Had the deputies at Debreczin voted as they wished, they would have voted for peace; but they knew that the majority of their countrymen would reject any peace which Austria was likely to offer, and they were ashamed to appear less daring than Kossuth.

The enthusiasm, we might call it the recklessness, with which the Magyars rallied to repel invasion, became a people who counted John HunyÁdi and Francis RakÓczy among their national heroes. Thanks to their patriotic fervor, the Hungarian cause, which seemed about to collapse at the beginning of January, seemed about to prevail at the end of March. Bern had worsted the Wallachs and Austrians in Transylvania; GÖrgei had redeemed Northern Hungary; Klapka and Damjanics had brought WindischgrÄtz to bay in the midlands.

Well had it been for Hungary if these astonishing successes had prevented internal discord, for twofold dissensions now threatened to sap the growing strength. From one side, the generals chafed at being subordinate to the civilian Committee of Defense; on the other, a large body of soldiers and of civilians were angry at the evident drift of Kossuth and his friends towards a republic. GÖrgei, the most conspicuous of the generals, led this opposition. He declared in a manifesto that the army would fight to maintain against every foreign enemy the Constitution granted by Ferdinand, but that they would favor no attempt to convert the constitutional monarchy into a republic. The Committee of Defense, most eager in their patriotism, could not refrain from meddling; they suffered from the delusion common to such committees, and believed that they knew better than the trained men of war how war should be waged. They felt, too, political responsibilities which made them all the more active; and they had, as was natural, their favorites among the officers. Had the government been strong, it would have cashiered GÖrgei; being weak, and solicitous of conciliating so important a man, it tolerated him. But when a government and its generals distrust each other,—as we learned in our civil war,—conciliation can satisfy neither. If GÖrgei lost a battle, his enemies charged him with lukewarmness or disobedience; he retorted by blaming the committee for failing to support him or for breaking in upon his plans. We need not sift the recriminations in detail: it suffices for us to know that, from January on, GÖrgei and Kossuth, and their respective partisans, worked thus at odds.

Nevertheless, among the masses these quarrels had but slight effect. The average Magyar was simply bent on avenging his long score of oppression against Austria. He realized that his own existence depended on that of Hungary, and to him Kossuth’s eloquence was like a trumpet-call of duty. That in performing his duty the Magyar might lawfully wreak vengeance on his oppressors, made duty doubly attractive.

In the early spring, Austria closed the way to compromise by proclaiming a new charter for the whole Empire. This charter declared that all the provinces of the Empire were to be reduced to a common equality, deprived of local rights, and governed by a central administration at Vienna.

The Magyars, then, had nothing to hope. Whether they submitted to Austria or were conquered by her, their ancient Constitution would be blotted out. They would cease to be a nation. Accordingly, on April 14, 1849, they proclaimed the independence of Hungary, calling God and man to witness the wrongs she had suffered from the House of Hapsburg, and setting forth the illegality, truculence, and perfidy of Austria during the past thirteen months. A diet was to be summoned, which should determine the form of government that Hungary would permanently adopt; meanwhile Kossuth was chosen president-governor, and by appointing GÖrgei commander-in-chief he hoped to heal old wounds.

The moment was propitious. The Austrians had been beaten in a great battle (at Isaszeg) on April 7; and most of the fortresses, except Buda, had been recaptured. GÖrgei himself seemed satisfied. The elated Magyars dreamed even of a swift campaign against Vienna, and of bringing the Imperial tyrant to terms which should be acceptable to all his subject races. But their dream, if ever attainable, was spoiled by delay. GÖrgei insisted that Buda must be retaken before he marched farther west, and only on May 21 did he succeed in storming its citadel. By that time a new peril, more terrible than any previous, loomed up. Austria, in despair of subjugating Hungary, had besought Russia to help her, and the Czar, glad of an excuse for interfering, was marshaling his troops on the Hungarian frontier. No assistance could the Magyars secure to offset this threatened intervention. France and England would not even recognize their republic, although Frenchmen and Englishmen privately sympathized with their cause. From Venice alone, the little republic round whose neck the Austrian noose was already tightening, came a heartfelt recognition, which, however, added not a soldier to their army nor a florin to their purse. Desperate, but not yet willing to surrender, the Magyars nerved themselves for a final effort. Kossuth proclaimed a crusade, a levy in mass; every man to arm himself, were it only with a scythe or a bludgeon; perpetual prayers to be offered up in the churches; the enemy to be harassed at all places, to be hindered by the destruction of bridges and stores, and, wherever possible, by open fighting.

Posterity, calmly reviewing a death struggle like this, is amazed that any people could be roused to make that last stand. Plainly enough, the Magyars had three soldiers against them to every one of theirs; ammunition and victuals were failing them; their treasury was empty; their armies could expect no reinforcements: to what end, therefore, protract a hopeless war? Reasoning thus, we miss the secret, not only of the revolutionists of 1848–49, but of all who have ever been kindled by patriotism to defend a cause they held dearer than life. The Magyars would never have gone thus far,—never have felt during that May-month the fleeting exhilaration of victory,—had they not been fired by a passion which not disaster but death alone could quench.

The Russian invasion being assured, the Magyar government held a council of war, at which it was proposed to consolidate the various armies, and to defeat first the Austrians coming from the west and then the Russians coming from the north and east,—a sensible plan, frustrated, however, by delays, some of which were unavoidable. The Austrian army, strengthened by reinforcements from Italy, and commanded by Marshal Haynau, who came red-handed from Brescia, advanced into Hungary, and defeated GÖrgei on the river Waag (June 20–21). The Magyar government and Diet departed for the second time, in melancholy procession, from their capital. By the middle of July one hundred and fifty thousand Russians—eighty thousand of whom were led by the wolfish Paskevitch—had penetrated into the heart of the country. Inevitably, the Magyar forces would be driven in and caught between the victorious enemies: nevertheless, they would not yet submit.

Internal discord alone tarnished the record of the last days of the Hungarian Republic. On July 1, Kossuth removed GÖrgei for insubordination, but GÖrgei’s officers and men protested so loudly that Kossuth thought it discreet to reinstate him. Three weeks later, a fraction of the Diet, assembled at Szegedin, declared the equality of all the races in Hungary, emancipated the Jews, and then, warned by the rumble of hostile cannon, it dissolved forever.

For yet a few weeks we have news of Kossuth hurrying hither and thither to proclaim hope where no hope was; conferring with nonplussed but still resolute generals; dragging after him, like his shadow, those printing-presses for bank-notes, now worth no more than blank paper. Finally, at ArÁd, he resigned the presidency, and appointed GÖrgei dictator with full powers. At VilÁgos, on August 13, GÖrgei surrendered his exhausted army of twenty-three thousand men to RÜdiger, the Russian general. Thus was consummated what the Magyars, frenzied by defeat, branded as GÖrgei’s treason, but what, to an impartial observer, appears an inevitable act. GÖrgei’s course throughout the war cannot be commended: inordinate personal ambition, not treason, was its motive; he may have thought to play the part of Monk, but more likely he had taken Napoleon for his model; one thing alone is certain,—he did not intend that Kossuth should reap the glory of victory, if victory came. In surrendering at VilÁgos he did what every commander is justified in doing, when further resistance could only entail fresh losses without any hope of altering the result.

Learning the capitulation of the main army, the other generals one by one submitted. Klapka alone maintained an heroic defense at Comorn until September 27, when hunger and an empty magazine forced him to surrender. With the hauling down of the red-white-and-green flag from the citadel of Comorn vanished the last symbol of that revolution which, bursting forth at Palermo in January, 1848, had spread through Europe, shaking the thrones of monarchs, and kindling in down-trodden people the belief that a new epoch, a Golden Age of Liberty, had come. Hopes as splendid as men ever cherished had now been shattered, and in their stead only the bitterest memories remained; for as each people pondered in sorrow and oppression the events of those twenty months, it was tormented by the reflection that its own dissensions, not less than the might of its enemies, had wrought its ruin.

Austria, careful by a deceitful silence to encourage the stray bodies of Magyar troops to give themselves up, proceeded to punish Hungary with a severity which matched the persecutions of the French Reign of Terror. In every city Marshal Haynau set up his shambles; in every parish he plied his scourge. Imprisonment, torture, confiscation, overtook the lowly defenders of the Magyar cause; death awaited the leaders. On October 6, at ArÁd, fourteen generals were hanged or shot, and that same day Count Louis BatthyÁnyi was shot at Pesth. GÖrgei was spared, thanks to the personal intervention of Czar Nicholas.

Kossuth and several thousand Magyars took refuge in Turkey. The Sultan protected him, in spite of the threats of Russia and Austria,—protected him because the Turkish religion forbade the betrayal of a refugee,—but kept him for nearly two years in half bondage. Then the Magyar hero, at the instance of the American Congress, was permitted to embark on an American man-of-war. He came to the United States, where he was greeted with an enthusiasm which no other foreigner except Lafayette had stirred. He got boundless sympathy, and no inconsiderable sum of money for prosecuting the emancipation of Hungary; but the times were unfavorable, and the lot of the Magyars concerned very little the rulers of European diplomacy after 1850. Returning to Europe, Kossuth made agitation his sole aim. He strove to interest the great powers in Hungary’s fate; he strove, through secret emissaries, to provoke the Magyars themselves to rebel. The former were deaf; the latter, taught by terrible experience, deemed it folly to attack Austria again in the field. Through the persistent and judicious political agitation led by the sagacious Francis DeÁk, they achieved, in 1867, a recognition of their constitutional rights, and a full measure of home rule.

Kossuth, however, refused to the last to be reconciled. He lived in exile at Turin, a forlorn old man, forlorn but inflexible, amid the memories of exploits which once had amazed the world. There he died on March 20, 1894, having survived all his contemporaries, friends and foes alike, who had beheld the rise and splendor and eclipse of his astonishing career. To be the mouthpiece of a haughty and valiant people at one of the heroic crises of their history was his mission. His genius, his defects, mirror the genius and defects of his countrymen; his glory, being a part of the glory of a whole race, is secure. That race, which ArpÁd led into the heart of Europe, showed, at Kossuth’s summons, a thousand years later, that it had not lost the traits which had once distinguished it on the shores of Lake Baikal and along the upper waters of the Yenisei.

When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient characteristic to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we popularly suppose, but romantic. Science will soon bury our present heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which broader theories may be scanned; to-morrow will make to-day’s wonderful invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with which this later time has been charged will exercise an increasing fascination over poets and novelists and historians, as the years roll on. Oblivion swallows up material achievements, but great deeds never grow old. That many of our writers should not have heard this note of the age argues that they, rather than the age, are prosaic and commonplace. For to what other period shall we turn for a richer store of those vicissitudes and contrasts in fortune which make up the real romance, the profound tragedy, of life? Everywhere the dissolution of a society rooted in mediÆval traditions is accompanied by confusion and struggle,—the birth-pangs of a new order. Classes whose separation seemed permanent are thrown together, and antagonistic elements are strangely mixed; there is strife, and doubt, and excess; sudden combinations are suddenly rent by discords; anachronisms flourish side by side with innovations; new institutions wear old names, and old abuses mask in new disguises.

In such a crisis, two facts are prominent: the unusual range of activity offered to the individual—may he not traverse the whole scale of experience?—and the dependence of the individual upon himself. He rises, or he falls, by his own motion. The privileges of caste avail nothing; for the very confusion produces a certain wild equality, whereby all start at the line, and the swiftest wins. Napoleon’s maxim, La carriÈre ouverte aux talents, is the motto of the century. Napoleon himself is an epochal illustration of the power of the individual to make the momentum of circumstances work for him. The Revolution, it is true, had harnessed the steeds; but Napoleon dared to mount the chariot, grasped the reins, and drove over Europe, upsetting thrones and princedoms and hierarchies. The haughty descendants of immemorial lineage gave place to the brothers and comrades of the “Corsican upstart.” Murat, the son of a tavern-keeper; Ney, a briefless law-student; Lannes, a dyer; Soult, MassÉna, Berthier, Junot, soldiers of fortune; and how many other children of the Third Estate,—laughed at the pretensions of humbled Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Hohenzollerns! Frequent reactions between revolution and restoration serve to emphasize the stress of this crisis; and these contrasts in the conditions of men, revealing human character under the most diverse phases, show how inextricably the romantic and the tragic are interwoven in the average lot.

Nor in Europe only has this spectacle been going forward. The United States also have witnessed similarly rapid transmutations, partly due to other causes. Within a generation we have seen a gigantic national upheaval: three millions of artisans, clerks, merchants, and lawyers were transformed by the magic of a drum-beat into soldiers; and then, the conflict over, soldiers and uniforms vanished, and the labors of peace were resumed.

Follow Abraham Lincoln from his Illinois log-cabin to the White House; follow Grant from his tanyard to Appomattox,—and you can compute the sweep of Fortune’s wheel. These careers were lived so near us that they hardly astonish us; they seem as natural as daylight; and in truth they are as natural as that or any other every-day miracle. As if forgetful of these, we ransack the past, or fiction, or melodramas, for heroes to admire. To weak imaginations, distance still lends enchantment.

Our age has produced one romantic man, however, who had not to wait for the mellowing effects of time to be recognized as romantic. He enjoyed, almost from the outset of his career, the fame of a legendary hero, and he will, we cannot doubt, be a hero to posterity. Some future Tasso will find in his life a theme nobler than Godfrey’s, too romantic in fact for either invention or myth to enhance it. He lived dramas as naturally as Shakespeare wrote them; the commonplace could not befall him. Looking at him from one side we might say, “Here is a Homeric hero, strangely transplanted from the Iliad into an era of railroads and telegraphs!” But if we fix our attention on other qualities, we discover in him a typical democrat, fit product of a democratic age. This man was Joseph Garibaldi, whose career alone would suffice to redeem the nineteenth century from the stigma of egotism and the rebuke of commonplaceness.

Among all the political achievements of our century, none has more of noble charm than the redemption of Italy. Whether we look at the difficulty of the undertaking, or at the careers of the leaders and the temper of the people who engaged in it, we are alike allured and amazed. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy had never been united under one government; nevertheless, from the time of Dante on, the aspiration towards national unity was kept burning in every patriotic Italian heart. During the Middle Age, little republics won independence by overthrowing their feudal lords; then they quarreled among themselves; and then they became the prey and appanage of a few strong families. The Bishop of Rome, forgetful of his spiritual mission, lusted after worldly power, established himself as a temporal sovereign, and elevated his cardinals into temporal princes. Foreign invaders—Normans, Spaniards, Germans, French—swept over the peninsula in successive waves; bloodshed and pillage signalized their coming, corruption was the slime they left behind them. One by one, the refugees of independence were submerged in the flood of servitude; until at last Venice herself, become merely the mummy of a republic, crumbled to dust at Napoleon’s touch. Napoleon promised, but did not give, to Italy the unity or the freedom which she still dreamed of: he parceled her anew into duchies and kingdoms. By that act he broke down ancient barriers and opened a new prospect. Italians beheld the old order, which had so long oppressed them that many believed it must endure perpetually, suddenly dissolved, and in its stead a change, although not the change they longed for. Still, any change, in such circumstances, implies fresh possibilities; and the Italians passed from a lethargy which had seemed hopelessly enthralling into a restless wakefulness.

The twenty years of the reign of Force, of which Napoleon was the embodiment, ended at Waterloo. Europe, exhausted, sank back into conservatism, and was ruled for thirty years by Craft, of which Metternich was the symbol.[2] The Congress of Vienna reimposed the past upon Italy. Monarchs and bureaucrats, like children who amuse themselves by “making believe” things are not as they are, would have it appear that the deluge of revolution, with all its mighty wrecks and subversions, had never been. The Pope was restored in the States of the Church; the Bourbons ruled again in Naples and Sicily; an Austrian was Archduke of Tuscany; Parma and Piacenza were assigned to Napoleon’s wife, Maria Louisa; Venetia and Lombardy went as spoils to Austria; an absolutist king reigned in Piedmont. Evidently the revolution had been but a summer thunderstorm, for the sun of despotism was shining once more. The sun shone; but what of the sultry air? What of the threatening clouds along the horizon? Were these the fringe of the dispersing storm, or the portents of another? Mutterings and rumblings, too, Carbonari plottings, and quickly extinguished flashes of insurrection,—did not these omens belie Diplomacy’s pretense that the eighteenth century had been happily resuscitated to exist forever?

It was during this interval of reaction and relapse, when hope was stifled and energy slept; when victorious despotism flattered itself with the belief that the Napoleonic episode had demonstrated the absurdity of Liberalism; when Metternich, the spider of SchÖnbrunn, was spinning his cobwebs of chicane across the path to liberty,—then it was that the generation which should live to see Italy free and united was getting what learning it could in the Jesuit-ridden schools. Of this generation the most romantic figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Joseph Garibaldi was born at Nice, July 4, 1807. His father was a fisherman, thrifty enough to have a small vessel of his own. Such stories as have come down to us of the boy’s childhood show him to have been plucky, adventurous, and tenderhearted. He cried bitterly at having broken a grasshopper’s leg; he rescued, when only seven, a laundress from drowning; he sailed off with some truant companions for Genoa, and might have vanished forever, had he not been overtaken near Monaco and brought home. His education was intrusted to two priests, from whom, he says, he learned nothing; then to a layman, Arena, who gave him a smattering of reading, arithmetic, and history. As he was quick at learning, his parents wished to make a lawyer or a priest of him; but he had the rover’s instinct and could not resist the enticements of the sea. At length, when he was fourteen, his parents yielded, and he became a sailor.

Of those early voyages, we need mention only one, which took him to Rome. Immense the impression the Holy City made on his imagination! He saw not the Rome of the CÆsars, nor the Rome of the Popes,—the city whose monuments entomb twenty-five centuries of history; but, he says, “the Rome of the future, that Rome of which I have never despaired,—shipwrecked, at the point of death, buried in the depth of American forests; the Rome of the regenerating idea of a great people; the dominating idea of whatever Past or Present could inspire in me, as it has been through all my life. Oh, Rome became then dear to me above all earthly existences. I adored her with all the fervor of my soul. In short, Rome for me is Italy, and I see no Italy possible save in the union, compact or federate, of her scattered members. Rome is the symbol of united Italy, under whatever form you will. And the most infernal work of the Papacy was that of keeping her morally and materially divided.”[3]

Thenceforth the young mariner, who rose rapidly to be mate and master, could not rest for the thought of the Eternal City, and of the country his patriotism craved. During these years, he learned to take Fortune’s buffets: he was captured by pirates, he lay ill and penniless for months at Constantinople,—adventures which in another career would demand more than passing notice, but which he deemed unimportant in comparison with a conversation he had with a young Ligurian, who unfolded to him the dreams of the Mazzinians. “Columbus did not experience so great a satisfaction at the discovery of America,” says Garibaldi, “as I experienced at finding one who busied himself with the redemption of our fatherland.”

Fatherland! the name seemed a mockery to the Italians of that time. Italy, as Metternich phrased it, was only a geographical expression. Seven or eight petty princes, including the Pope, ruled the little patches into which the Peninsula was cut up. All the north, except Piedmont, was directly subject to a foreign despot, Austria; while, indirectly, Austria domineered over Tuscany, Rome, and Naples. Piedmont had a native king, indeed, but Absolutism throve nowhere more vigorously than there. The Jesuits controlled the worship and education of the little kingdom; reactionaries filled the ministerial offices, the army, and the government bureaux; the sovereign himself, Charles Albert, believed devoutly in the divine right of kings, and held that it would be criminal in him, by granting his people more freedom, to lessen the responsibility imposed on him by God. Throughout the Peninsula, no one might discuss politics, whether in speech or writing. It was high treason to suggest representative government; the sovereign’s will was the only constitution. In some parts of the land, the very word Italy could not be used by actors on the stage; and everywhere censors kept watch to prevent the idea of a regenerate Italy from slipping into print.

By foreigners, the Italians were more often despised than pitied; they were believed to be pluckless, wordy, deceitful creatures, who at best had their uses as singers, dancing-masters, and painters’ models. Among themselves, discord (born of ancestral feuds), envy (born of local ambitions, a love of haranguing, and a lack of leaders), had thrice resulted in an abortive revolution. And now, just as the third attempt had failed, and in its failure had discredited the great organizations of conspiracy that had been for fifteen years the hope of Italian patriotism, Joseph Mazzini, a Genoese a year younger than Garibaldi, banished from Piedmont because he had a suspicious habit of walking abroad after dark, formed the new secret society of Young Italy which aimed at not only the political but the social and moral redemption of his countrymen. Garibaldi, eager to hasten the emancipation of his country, joined Young Italy; but in the first plot in which he was engaged his confederates failed to appear at the appointed time, and he was forced to fly from Genoa for his life. “Here begins my public career,” he says in his memoirs.

After being twice captured and twice escaping, he made his way on foot, disguised as a peasant, to Marseilles, where, on opening a newspaper, the first thing he read was the sentence of death decreed against him should he ever be caught in Piedmont. This was in February, 1834. Proscribed but not disheartened, when chance offered he resumed his seafaring. But mercantile voyages grew monotonous. Should he offer his services to the Bey of Tunis, who was seeking a European to take charge of his navy? After hesitation, Garibaldi decided “no.” During a cholera epidemic, he volunteered as nurse in the Marseilles hospital. Finally he shipped for South America. Landing at Rio de Janeiro, he fell in with another exile, Rossetti, and for a while they kept a shop. Soon, however, more congenial occupation presented itself.

Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost province of Brazil, had revolted from the Empire and set up a republic, which it was struggling to maintain. Garibaldi, who could never resist aiding republicans, equipped a small privateer, on which he and Rossetti, with twelve companions, set sail for the south. This was the opening of a life of adventure which lasted twelve years, and which, could we trace it step by step, would be found a nonpareil of heroic deeds and startling dangers. The political and social condition of South America then resembled in lawlessness that period in European history when chivalry had its rise; when, as a foil to the bullying and craft and greed of the many, stood out the courage and honor and courtesy of the few. Garibaldi, whether by sea or land, approved himself a peerless knight. Following him, we should witness now a battle of gunboats far up the river Parana, until, his ammunition having given out, he loaded the cannon with the chain cables; or, again, we should undergo the horrors of a shipwreck near the mouth of La Plata, or join in a desperate battle against great odds at some lonely Paraguayan ranch; we should traverse vast pampas, or thrid the solitude of trackless forests; we should know hunger, thirst, and cold, and be incessantly attacking or attacked; and we should realize that although these campaigns seem mere border forays when compared with the wars of modern Europe and the United States, yet they settled the fate of territories as large as France, and required those martial qualities which beget heroism in any crisis under any sky.

Although we must pass all this, one marking episode in Garibaldi’s life at that time ought not to be forgotten. His ships had been cast away in a storm. He succeeded in swimming to shore, but his dearest comrades perished. He felt lonely, dispirited, and though he was soon to command another cruiser, the excitements of war could no longer dissipate his melancholy. “In short,” he says, in a characteristic passage of his Autobiography, “I had need of a human being to love me immediately,—to have one near without whom existence was growing intolerable to me. Although not old, I understood men well enough to know how hard it is to find a true friend. A woman? Yes, a woman; for I always deemed her the most perfect of creatures, and—whatever may be said—amongst women it is infinitely easier to find a loving heart. I was pacing the quarter-deck, ruminating my dismal thoughts, and, after reasonings of all kinds, I decided finally to seek a woman, to draw me out of my tiresome and unbearable condition. I cast a casual glance towards the Barra: that was the name of a rather high hill at the entrance of the lagune, toward the south, on which were visible some simple and picturesque habitations. There, with the aid of the glass, I discovered a young woman. I had myself set ashore in her direction. I disembarked, and, going towards the house where was the object of my expedition, I had not reached her before I met a man of the place, whom I had known at the beginning of our stay. He asked me to take coffee in his house. We entered, and the first person who met my gaze was she whose appearance had caused me to come ashore. It was Anita, the mother of my sons, the companion of my life in good and evil fortune,—the woman whose courage I have so often envied. We both remained rapt and speechless, reciprocally looking at each other, like two persons who do not meet for the first time, and who seek in the features one of the other something to assist recollection. At last I greeted her and said, ‘Thou must be mine.’ I spoke but little Portuguese, and uttered these hardy words in Italian. However, I was magnetic in my presumption. I had drawn a knot, sealed a compact, which death alone could break.”

A few nights later Garibaldi carried Anita off to his ship, clandestinely as it appears, and they were wedded when they reached another port. She was a companion matching his ideal: she shared his wild fortunes and hardships; she was an indefatigable horsewoman, a dead-shot, and upon occasion she could touch off a cannon.

After years of fighting, Garibaldi obtained a furlough, gathered a drove of cattle, and journeyed across Uruguay to Montevideo. There he was reduced to teach the rudiments of arithmetic in a private school, picking up whatever other precarious pennies he could, until civil war broke out in Uruguay, and he enlisted on the side of the people, struggling to free themselves from a blood-thirsty dictator. Garibaldi’s exploits as a guerrilla and corsair had made him famous, and now he repeated at Montevideo his amazing feats. From among his countrymen he organized an “Italian Legion,” which proved throughout a long service that Italians could and would fight,—two facts which scornful Europe was loth then to believe. He also illustrated his perfect disinterestedness by refusing all rewards beyond a bare means of subsistence. At a time when he held the fate of Montevideo in his hand, he had not money to buy candles to light the poor room where he and his family were dwelling.

Thus, giving his utmost for liberty and the welfare of strangers, he saw the years pass without bringing the one thing he desired most of all,—the chance to consecrate himself to the redemption of Italy. That desire, the ruling passion of his life, had followed him everywhere. I marvel that any materialists exist; for where, in the material world, shall we find anything comparable to the tenacity of ideas? Think not to preserve them by locking them in an iron safe; write them not on stone, which crumbles, but on the human soul, and they shall be indestructible. Have we not daily proof that against remorse, love, hate, ambition, all the powers of the material world—fire or frost, hunger, disease, persecution—dash as harmless as vapor against adamant? By the moral precepts, by which Moses awed his people three thousand years ago, we are awed. They are permanent, being graven on something more durable than tables of stone; and it matters not how many times old Nile is renewed, or whether Sinai itself wear in dust away.

On Garibaldi’s heart of hearts “Italy” was written,—an ideal which nothing could cancel. At length, in the early autumn of 1846 news came to Montevideo that a Liberal Pope had been elected at Rome, that the word “amnesty” had been uttered, and that the Peninsula was throbbing with splendid hopes. Each succeeding message confirmed the presentiment that the longed-for day of action was nigh. Garibaldi, subordinating his hatred of priestcraft to his patriotism, wrote to offer his sword to the new Pope, to whom all Italians were looking as the leader of their crusade for freedom, but Pius never acknowledged the offer. Then Garibaldi and some threescore of the Legion hired a brigantine, which they named La Speranza (Hope), and on April 15, 1848, bade the Montevideans farewell. They had to touch at Santa Pola, on the coast of Spain, for water, where they learned that all Europe was in revolution, and then they dropped anchor at Nice on June 23. Over Garibaldi’s head the death-sentence still hung, but he had nothing to fear, as the events of the past six months had wiped out old memories. Those six months had had no parallel in modern European history. They had witnessed the triumph of revolution from the Douro to the Don.

Not even during the Napoleonic upheaval had modern Europe felt a convulsion like that of 1848: for government and order were as necessary to Napoleon as to his victims, and his revolution was the effort of one lion to devour foxes and wolves,—of one preponderant tyranny to absorb many smaller tyrannies; but the catastrophe of 1848 seemed, to anxious observers, to endanger civilization itself. Society was dissolving into its elements. The many-headed beast had risen, ubiquitous, terrific. Lop off one head, and others grew from the trunk. What substitute could possibly be found in that chaos for the tottering system? Nothing seemed certain but anarchy.

That was the year when sovereigns were suddenly made acquainted with their lackeys’ staircases and the back doors of their palaces. The Pope escaped from Rome in the livery of a footman. Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria, fled twice from Vienna. Louis Philippe, the “citizen king” of the French, put on a disguise, and slipped away to England. Metternich, rudely interrupted in his diplomatic game of chess, barely escaped with his life to London. The Crown Prince of Prussia, subsequently Emperor of Germany, eluded the angry Berliners, a trusty noble driving the carriage in which he escaped. There was a scampering of petty German princes, as of prairie-dogs at the sportsman’s approach. Nobility, whose ambition hitherto had been to display itself, was now wondrously fond of burrows. And just as the frightened upholders of absolutism went into hiding, the apostles of democracy emerged from prisons and exile.

Paper constitutions, grandiloquent manifestoes, patriotic resolutions, doctrinaire pamphlets, were whirled hither and thither as thick as autumn leaves. Every man who had a tongue spoke; speaking, so furious was the din, soon loudened into shouting. But the Old RÉgime was encamped in no Jericho whose walls would tumble at mere sound. There must be deeds as well as words; in truth, more action and less Babel had been wiser. Committees of national safety, workingmen’s unions, civic guards, armies of the people, sprang into existence, and it is wonderful to note with what quickness officers and leaders were found to command them. Universities were turned into recruiting stations and barracks; students and professors became soldiers. There were heroic combats, excesses, reverses bravely borne. Gradually the fatal lack of centre and organization could not be concealed. The leaders disputed as to measures; then followed misunderstandings, jealousies, desertions. Each doctrinaire cared that his plan, rather than the general cause, should prevail. Each sect, each race, feared that it would lose should its rival take the lead. But the purpose of monarchy was everywhere the same,—to recover its footing; and the agents of monarchy, cautiously creeping out of their retreats, began to profit by the divisions among their enemies. Within a year the European revolt was crushed. Nevertheless its lessons abide. It taught that despots cannot be permanently abolished so long as a large majority of a nation require despotic government, and the proof that they require it is the fact that they submit to it; whence it follows that real democracy cannot conquer until a people be educated up to the capacity of governing themselves. It taught that without unity among the heads and obedience among the members no reform can succeed. It taught, finally, that no society which has once attained a certain level of civilization can exist in a state of anarchy; for when anarchy is reached, the opportunity of the strongest man, the tyrant, offers, and the process of reconstruction from the basis of absolutism begins.

To Liberals, in June, 1848, however, the days of tyranny seemed at an end; the Golden Age of liberty, constitutional government, and the brotherhood of nations seemed to have dawned. Garibaldi learned that Lombardy had expelled the Austrians; that Charles Albert, the Piedmontese King, had drawn his sword as the champion of Italian independence; and that the Pope and the other princes, including even Bomba of Naples, had espoused the national cause. The rapid victories of the spring had been succeeded by military inertia; frantic enthusiasm had given place to a chatter of criticism; but not even those who grumbled loudest believed as yet that the cause was in danger.

Garibaldi hurried to the King’s headquarters, near Mantua. He was no lover of royalty, but he would support any king honestly fighting in behalf of Italy. Charles Albert granted him an audience, but avoided accepting his offered services, telling him that he had better consult the Minister of War, at Turin. To Turin, accordingly, Garibaldi posted back, saw that official, received further evasive replies, and departed angry. To have traveled seven thousand miles over sea to fight for his country’s redemption, only to be treated in this fashion, might well astound a blunt soldier who had supposed that every volunteer would be welcomed. In his own case the rebuff was peculiarly astonishing, for he was, presumably, an ally whom any commander would be glad to secure. Europe had rung with the fame of his South American career, and already regarded him as a legendary hero. Imagine Charlemagne refusing Roland’s aid in his campaign against the Paynims, or the old Romans turning coldly away from one of the great Twin Brethren! Although Garibaldi would have despised reasons of state which deprived him of the right of volunteering against Austria, yet the King had to be governed by them. For his excuse in declaring war had been that, unless he interfered, anarchy, followed by a republic, would prevail in Lombardy. To be consistent, therefore, he had to keep clear of even an apparent league with republicanism as embodied in Garibaldi.

Baffled and exasperated, but determined not to be cut off from all activity, Garibaldi went to Milan, where a provisional government with republican leanings still ruled. By it he and his legionaries were hospitably received, and sent out, with a considerable body of raw recruits, to harass the Austrians along the lakes. In a few weeks, however, the main Austrian army had reconquered Lombardy, and the Garibaldians were driven to take refuge across the Swiss frontier.

Garibaldi, like a true knight-errant, now went forth in search of another chance to do battle for freedom. At Florence the republicans did him honor, but were wary of asking him to command their troops, the fact being that each district had leaders of its own, and a host of zealous aspirants, who were patriotically disinclined to make way for even the most distinguished knight-errant. At Rome, whence Pius IX had fled, the revolutionists gave him a warmer greeting, and when, in February, 1849, they set up a republic,—Garibaldi having made a motion to that effect in the Roman Assembly,—they made him second in command of their army. And now, properly speaking, the tale of Garibaldi’s European exploits begins.

We cannot follow in detail the story of the defense of Rome against the French troops sent thither by the perfidious Louis Napoleon, and their allies from Spain and Naples; yet it were well worth our while to give an hour to deeds so brilliant, so noble, so picturesque,—to pass from the Assembly Hall, where Mazzini, the indomitable dreamer, was the dictator, to the fortifications where band after band of volunteers, speaking many dialects, clothed in many costumes, were resolved to give their lives for freedom! We should see Lucian Manara, a modern knight, captain of a legion of brave men; we should see Mameli, the blond poet-soldier, a mere lad; and the brothers Dandolo, and Medici and Nino Bixio, and many another doomed to win renown by an early death there, or there to begin a career which became a necessary strand in Italy’s regeneration. But, most conspicuous of all, we should see Garibaldi, for whom the legionaries and their leaders had such a feeling as the Knights of the Round Table for Arthur their King. Call it loyalty, ’tis not enough; call it filial affection, something remains unexpressed; call it fascination, enthusiasm, sorcery,—each term helps the definition, though none singly suffices. His was, indeed, that eldest sorcery which binds the hearts of men to their hero,—that power which reveals itself as an ideal stronger than danger or hardship or disease, something to worship, to love, to die for.

During her five-and-twenty centuries, Rome had seen many strange captains, but none more original than this, her latest defender, from the pampas of South America. In person he was of middle stature; his hair and beard were of a brown inclining to red; his eyes blue, more noteworthy for their expression than for their color; his mouth, so far as it could be seen under the moustache, was firm, but capable of an irresistible smile. His soldiers, remembering his aspect in battle, spoke of his face as “leonine;” women, caught perhaps by the charm rather than the cut of his features, thought him beautiful. And as if Nature had not done enough to mark her hero, he adopted on his return to Europe the dress which he had worn in South America,—a small, plumed cap, the grayish-white cloak or poncho lined with red, the red flannel shirt, the trousers and boots of the Uruguayan herdsmen and guerrillas.

During that siege of Rome, Europe came to know Garibaldi and his red-shirted companions, who were equally bizarre in character and in costume,—a troop of poets, students, dreamers, vagabonds, and adventurers,—who, with the nucleus of the Legion from Montevideo, were capable, under their chieftain’s guidance, of splendid achievements. Their victories against the Neapolitans at Palestrina and Velletri; their stubborn defense of Rome against the overwhelming armies of France; their bravery at the Villa Pamfili; their desperate struggle to hold the Vascello, where Manara was killed; their unwilling but inevitable yielding of the outposts, and finally of the inner breastworks,—made up a tale of heroism which could be matched only at Venice in that year of waning revolution.

But Europe had declared that there should be no republic at Rome, and after nine weeks’ gallantry the city capitulated to the French, who represented the cause of reaction. Garibaldi, however, did not surrender. On the day when the French made their entry by one gate, he marched out of another, followed by nearly four thousand soldiers. He wound across the Campagna, and then for twenty-nine days he led his troop among the Apennines, evading now the French who pressed on the rear, now the Austrians, who harassed both flanks and threatened to bar the advance. The little army dwindled, but Garibaldi held his purpose to reach Venice, where the Austrian tyrants had not yet forced their return. At length, however, in the little republic of San Marino he was surrounded. All but two hundred of his followers disbanded; with the remainder he eluded the enemy’s cordon, reached the coast at Cesenatico, seized some fishing-boats, and embarked for Venice. Mid-voyage, a fleet of Austrian cruisers came upon them and opened fire. As best they could the fugitives landed, with Austrian pursuers at their heels. Garibaldi and one companion bore Anita in dying condition—she had followed the retreat on horseback all the way from Rome—to a wood-cutter’s hut, where she died. A moment later Garibaldi had to fly.

Of that retreat, and his subsequent hair-breadth escapes in being smuggled across Italy, he has left in his memoirs a thrilling account. For a second time he tasted the bitterness of exile: his first refuge was Genoa, but the Piedmontese government, timid after defeat, informed him that he must depart; he was expelled from Turin at the instigation of the French; England warned him that he must be gone from Gibraltar within a week. Only in semi-savage Morocco did he at last find shelter; thence, after a few months, he came to New York. Consider who it was that Europe thus outlawed, and what was his crime. He was a man whose life had been a long devotion to human liberty, and whose most recent guilt was to have attempted to prevent foreign despots from reËnslaving his countrymen. A system is judged by the men it persecutes.

Wifeless, homeless, chagrined by the thought that Italy had waged her war of independence only to be beaten, Garibaldi began his second wanderings. A real Odyssey we may call it, with its strange happenings. For a year the hero of Rome earned a bare livelihood making candles in Meucci’s factory on Staten Island; then he shipped for Central and South America; captained a cargo of guano from Lima to Canton, and a cargo of tea back to Lima; brought a ship laden with copper, round Cape Horn to Boston; and finally, in May, 1854, he dropped anchor at Genoa, where the government no longer feared his presence. With the proceeds of his mercantile ventures, he bought Caprera,—a mere rock, which juts out of the Tuscan Sea, near the northern tip of Sardinia. There, “like some tired eagle on a crag remote,” he dwelt five years, apparently oblivious to the passing current of events, and wholly intent on coaxing a few vines and vegetables to grow on his wind-swept rock.

Early in 1859 a messenger summoned Garibaldi from his hermitage to Turin. This summons was not unexpected. For months the world had regarded war in Italy as inevitable, and now war was on the point of breaking out.

How had this come to pass? After her defeat in 1849, Piedmont, the little northwestern kingdom of four million souls, had sturdily set about reforming herself. She stood firmly by the constitutional government adopted in 1848; she strengthened her army and her navy; she took education out of the hands of the Jesuits; she encouraged commerce, industry, and agriculture. Thus she proved to Europe that Italians could govern themselves by as good a political system as then existed; to all the other Italians, groaning under Austrian, or Bourbon, or Papal tyranny, she proved that they might look to her to lead the Italian cause.

This marvelous attainment was due primarily to Count Cavour, the statesman who, since 1850, had been almost continuously prime minister of Piedmont; and, in the second place, to Victor Emanuel, the shrewd, honest, chivalrous King, worthy to be the visible symbol of Italy’s patriotism. But Cavour had realized from the beginning that, however strong he might make Piedmont, she would not be able singly to cope with Austria: four millions against thirty-five millions—the odds were too great! So he labored to bring Piedmont into the stream of European life; he allied her to France and England in the Crimean War; and now, at the beginning of 1859 he had persuaded Napoleon III to march the armies of France into Italy to join Piedmont in expelling the Austrians.

All this had been brought about against great hindrances, not the least of which was the keeping in check the Italian conspirators. Since the days of the Carbonari, a certain number of Italians had hoped to set up a republic. Mazzini, now the chief leader of conspiracy, was uncompromisingly republican, holding so little faith in the methods of Cavour and the Constitutional Monarchists that he never hesitated to hatch plots against them as well as against the Austrians. Between these two irreconcilable parties Garibaldi was the link. By preference a republican, he yet recognized Victor Emanuel as the only practicable standard-bearer, and he therefore fought loyally under him; but he distrusted Cavour, scorned diplomacy, and abhorred Napoleon III. In his exuberant way, he insisted that Italians could, if they would, recover independence without begging the rogue, who had crushed Rome ten years before, to succor them.

A volunteer corps, called the Hunters of the Alps, was accordingly organized, with the double purpose of using Garibaldi’s skill as a guerrilla chieftain against the Austrians, and his unique popularity in drawing all sorts of partisans to support the national war. He suspected that the government was not wholly ingenuous; he complained that his volunteers had to swallow many snubs from the regulars; he chafed at being responsible to any superior: but the fact that he had at last a chance of striking the oppressors of Italy outweighed everything else.

Despite the shortness of the war of 1859, Garibaldi and his Hunters proved of real service in it. Varese, Como, remember their valor still; and had not Napoleon III suspended hostilities after the great victory of Solferino, the Garibaldians might have redeemed the Tyrol. But Napoleon’s peace of Villafranca, while it gave Lombardy to Piedmont, left Venetia in the hands of the Austrians, and stopped further operations in the north at that time. During the autumn, however, Garibaldi, with many of his volunteers, went to Tuscany, where a provisional government was then awaiting the propitious moment for annexation to Victor Emanuel’s kingdom. The situation was very ticklish, requiring careful diplomacy: Garibaldi, who shared with General Fanti the military command, wished to have done with diplomacy, to call out one hundred thousand volunteers, and to rely on them to disentangle all complications. Irritated at having his plan overruled, he resigned his command and withdrew to Caprera.

Within three months, however, he was called from his retreat. Secret agents brought word that “something could be done” in Sicily, where for a long time Mazzinians had been preparing a revolt. It needed, they said, but Garibaldi’s presence to redeem the island from Bourbon misrule. He could not resist the temptation. Trusty lieutenants of his had collected arms and ammunition, hired two steamers and enrolled volunteers. At Genoa, where these preparations were making, nobody, except the government officials, was ignorant of their purpose. The government, however, pretended not to see. Cavour could not openly abet an expedition against a power with which Piedmont was not at war; neither did he wish to hinder an expedition for whose success he and all Italian patriots prayed. So he discreetly closed his eyes.

On the night of May 5, 1860, Garibaldi and 1067 followers embarked on their two steamers near Genoa and vanished into the darkness. For a week thereafter Europe wondered whither they were bound,—whether against the Papal States or Naples; then the telegraph reported that they had landed at Marsala, on the morning of May 11, just in time to escape two Neapolitan cruisers which had been watching for them. From that moment, day by day, with increasing astonishment, the world followed the progress of Garibaldi and his Thousand. No achievement like theirs has been chronicled in many centuries. They set out, a thousand filibusters, scantily equipped and undrilled, to free an island of two and a half million inhabitants, an island guarded by an army fifty thousand strong, with forts and garrisons in all its ports, and having quick communication with Naples, where the Bourbon King had six million more subjects from whom to recruit his forces. Grant that the Sicilians fervently sympathized with Garibaldi, yet they were too wary to commit themselves before they had indications that he would win; grant that the Bourbon troops were half-hearted and ludicrously superstitious,—many of them believed that the Garibaldians were wizards, bullet-proof,—yet they had been trained to fight, they were well-armed, and by their numbers alone were formidable. That they would run away could not be assumed by the little band of liberators, any more than Childe Roland could suppose that the grim monsters who threatened his advance would vanish when he upon his slug-horn blew.

And in truth the Bourbon soldiers did not run. At Calatifimi the Garibaldians beat them only after a fierce encounter; at Palermo there was a desperate struggle; at Milazzo, a resistance which might, if prolonged, have destroyed the expedition. In every instance it seemed as if the Bourbons might have won had they but displayed a little more nerve, another half hour’s persistence; but it was always the Garibaldians who had the precious reserve of pluck and strength to draw upon, and they always won. Their capture of Palermo, a walled city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, defended by many regiments on land and by men-of-war in the harbor, ranks highest among their exploits. Less than a month after quitting Genoa, they had liberated more than half the island and had set up a provisional government. By the first of August only two or three fortresses had not surrendered to them.

And now questions of diplomacy came in to disturb the swift current of conquest. Garibaldi determined to cross to the mainland, redeem Naples, march on to Rome, and from the Capitol hail Victor Emanuel King of Italy. Cavour saw great danger in this plan. At any moment, a defeat would jeopard the positions already gained; an attack on the Pope’s domain would bring Louis Napoleon and Austria to his rescue, and might entail a war in which the just-formed Kingdom of Italy would be broken up; furthermore, Cavour believed that assimilation ought to keep pace with annexation. He knew that it would require long training to raise the Italians of the south, corrupted by ages of hideous misrule, to the level of their northern kinsmen.

Such considerations as these could not, however, deter Garibaldi. He grew wroth at the thought that any foreigner—were he even the Emperor of the French—should be consulted by Italians in the achievement of their independence. Eluding both the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese cruisers, he crossed to the mainland and took Reggio after a sharp fight. From that moment his progress towards the capital resembled a triumph. And when, on September 7, accompanied by only a few officers, he entered Naples, though there were still a dozen or more Bourbon regiments in garrison there, the soldiers joined with the civilians and the loud-throathed lazzaroni in acclaiming him their deliverer. Yet only a few hours before their King had sneaked off, too craven to defend himself, too much detested to be defended. Think what it meant that this should happen,—that the sovereign, the source of honor, the fountain of justice, the symbol of the life and integrity of the state, should not find in his own palace one loyal sword unsheathed in his defense, even though the loyalty were hired, like that of the eight hundred Swiss who gave their lives for Louis XVI! By an inevitable penalty, Bourbon misrule in Naples passed vilely away; it had been, as Gladstone declared, the embodied “negation of God:” even in its collapse and ruin there was nothing tragic, portending strength; there was only the negative energy of putrefaction.

Having taken measures for temporarily governing Naples, Garibaldi prepared for a last encounter with the Bourbons. King Francis still commanded an army of forty thousand men along the Volturno, near Capua. There Garibaldi, with hardly a third of that number, fought and won a pitched battle on October 1. A month later he welcomed Victor Emanuel as sovereign of the kingdom which he and his Thousand had liberated. The republicans, instigated by Mazzini, had wished to postpone, if they could not prevent, annexation; but Garibaldi, whose patriotic instinct was truer than their partisanship, insisted that Naples and Sicily should be united to the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy. In all modern history there is no parallel to his bestowal of his conquests on the King, as there is nothing nobler than his complete disinterestedness. He declined all honors, titles, stipends, and offices for himself, and departed, almost secretly, from Naples for Caprera the day after he had consigned the government to its new lord.

Fortune has one gift which she begrudges even to her darlings: she does not allow them to die at the summit of their career. Either too soon for their country’s good, or too late for their personal fame, she sends death to dispatch them. Pericles, Cavour, Lincoln, were snatched away prematurely; Themistocles and Grant should have prayed to be released before they had slipped below their zenith. So, too, Garibaldi lacked nothing but that, after having redeemed a kingdom by one of the most splendid expeditions in history, and after having given it to the unifier of his fatherland, he should have vanished from the earth. Thanks to a kindlier fortune, the old Hebrew prophets were translated, and the Homeric heroes were borne off invisible, at the perfect moment. But while Garibaldi lacked this epic finale to his epic career, the closing decades of his life were as characteristic as any.

In the spring of 1861 he reappeared on the scene at the opening of the first parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, to which he had been chosen deputy by many districts. He came, not jubilant but angry. Nice, his home, had been ceded to France in payment for French aid in the war of 1859: against Cavour, who had consented to this bargain, Garibaldi conceived the most intense hatred, and on the floor of the House he fulminated at the Prime Minister whose “treason had made Garibaldi a foreigner in his native land.” He complained, further, because the officers and soldiers of the Garibaldian army had not been generously treated by the government. The outburst was most deplorable. Many feared that the hero’s testiness might lead to civil war; and though the King arranged a meeting, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation, Garibaldi went from it with bitterness in his heart. Six weeks later, on June 6, Cavour, stricken by fever, died when his country needed him most. Little did Garibaldi realize that in the great statesman’s death he was losing the man who had been indispensable to his success in Sicily, and whose judgment was needed to direct Garibaldian impulses to a fruitful end.

Only Rome and Venetia now remained ununited to the Kingdom of Italy: in Rome a French garrison propped the Pope’s despised temporal power; in Venetia the Austrian regiments held fast. To rescue the Italians still in bondage, and to complete the unification of Italy, were henceforth Garibaldi’s aims. He paid no heed to the diplomatic embarrassments which his schemes might create; for as usual he regarded diplomacy as a device by which cowards, knaves, and traitors thwarted the desires of patriots.

In the summer of 1862, therefore, he recruited three or four thousand volunteers in Sicily, raised the war-cry, “Rome or death,” crossed to the mainland, and had to be forcibly stopped by royal troops at Aspromonte. In the brief skirmish he was wounded, and for many months was confined at Varignano, whither flocked admirers—men, women, and youths—from all parts of Europe. There is no doubt that Rattazzi, then the premier, had connived at the expedition, hoping to repeat Cavour’s master-stroke; but the conditions were different from those of 1860, and the Premier but illustrated the truth that talent cannot even copy genius judiciously. Moreover, by allowing Garibaldi to go so far and by then arresting him, Rattazzi subjected the government to a dangerous strain; for Garibaldi’s popularity was immense, and even those of his countrymen who insisted that no citizen—however distinguished his services—should be permitted to live above the law, and to wage war when he pleased, were as eager as he that Rome should be emancipated.

Untaught by experience, Rattazzi connived at a similar expedition five years later. For several weeks Garibaldi went about openly preaching another crusade. When the French government asked for explanations, Rattazzi had Garibaldi arrested and escorted to Caprera. A dozen men-of-war sailed round and round the rock, forbidding any one to approach or quit it. But one night Garibaldi escaped in a tiny wherry, and a few days later he led a band of crusaders across the Papal frontier. They met the French troops at Mentana, were worsted and dispersed; and again Garibaldi was locked up in the fortress of Varignano, while one party denounced the government for ingratitude towards the beloved hero, and another denounced it for treating him as a privileged person who might, when the impulse seized him, embroil the country in war. If we regard the acquirement of the methods of constitutional government and of respect for law and order as the chief need of the Italians at that time, we can only regret the agitation and expeditions which Garibaldi conducted, to the detriment of his country’s progress.

Meanwhile, in 1866, Venetia had been restored to her kinsfolk, as the result of the brief conflict in which Italy and Prussia allied themselves against Austria. Garibaldi organized another corps of Hunters of the Alps, but the shortness of the campaign prevented him, as in 1859, from going far. In 1870 the war between France and Prussia enabled the Italians to take possession of Rome as soon as the French garrison was withdrawn; so that Italy owed the completion of her unity, not to her own sword, but to a lucky turn in the quarrels of her neighbors. No sooner had the French Empire collapsed, and the French Republic was seen to be terribly beset by the Germans, than Garibaldi offered his services to her. He was assigned to the command of the Army of the Vosges, a nondescript corps, which more than once gave proof of bravery, although it could not match the superior numbers and discipline of Moltke’s men. The French gave him scanty thanks for his services, and at the end of the war he returned home.

During the next ten years he was either at Rome, arraigning the government, the fallen Papacy, and the wastefulness of the monarchy; or he was making triumphal progresses through the land, sure everywhere of being treated as an idol; or he stayed in his Caprera hermitage, inditing letters in behalf of political extremists, Nihilists, fanatics. Yet his popularity did not wane; his countrymen regarded him more than ever as a privileged person, whose senile extravagances were not to be taken too seriously. They loved his intentions; they revered him for the achievements of his prime; and when, on June 2, 1882, he fell asleep in his Caprera home, all Italy put on mourning, and the world, conscious that it had lost a hero, grieved.

On his sixty-fifth birthday (July 4, 1872) he drew his own portrait thus: “A tempestuous life, composed of good and of evil, as I believe of the large part of the world. A consciousness of having sought the good always, for me and for my kind. If I have sometimes done wrong, certainly I did it involuntarily. A hater of tyranny and falsehood, with the profound conviction that in them is the principal origin of the ills and of the corruption of the human race. Hence a republican, this being the system of honest folk, the normal system, willed by the majority, and consequently not imposed with violence and with imposture. Tolerant and not exclusive, incapable of imposing my republicanism by force, on the English, for instance, if they are contented with the government of Queen Victoria. And, however contented they may be, their government should be considered republican. A republican, but evermore persuaded of the necessity of an honest and temporary dictatorship at the head of those nations which, like France, Spain, and Italy, are the victims of a most pernicious Byzantinism.... I was copious in praises of the dead, fallen on fields of battle for liberty. I praised less the living, especially my comrades. When I felt myself urged by just rancor against those who wronged me, I strove to placate my resentment before speaking of the offense and of the offender. In every writing of mine, I have always attacked clericalism, more particularly because in it I have always believed that I found the prop of every despotism, of every vice, of every corruption. The priest is the personification of lies, the liar is a thief, the thief is a murderer,—and I could find for the priest a series of infamous corollaries.”

Thus he read his own character, and we need not subject it to a searching analysis. In action lay his strength. He trusted instinct against any argument. Hence the single-minded zeal with which he plunged into every enterprise; hence, too, his inability to weigh other policies than his own, and his distrust, often intensified into unreasoning prejudice, of those who differed from him. If his kindly, generous nature often made him the dupe of schemers, the wonder is that they did not beguile him into irreparable excesses. He was saved partly by a thread of common sense and partly by self-respect akin to vanity, which kept him constantly on the alert against being used as a tool. Although modest, he knew so well the grandeur of the part he was playing that he took no pains to dissemble the childlike delight he felt at demonstrations of his popularity. The lifelong champion of democracy, he behaved, in practice, as autocratically as Cromwell; a believer in dictatorships, never able to work successfully as yoke-fellow or subordinate to any one else. Like the dreamers, he could not comprehend that human society, being a growth and not a manufacture, cannot be suddenly lifted by benevolent manifesto or patriotic resolution. He scorned parliamentary debates, he reviled diplomacy, he underrated counsel.

But what he had, he had superlatively: valor, presence of mind, geniality, unselfishness, magnanimity,—he had all these, the qualities of a popular soldier, to a degree which made whoever fought with him worship him. No other man of his time, nor perhaps of any time, inspired so many human beings with personal affection—as distinguished from that devotion which other favorite captains have inspired—as he did. Every one of his soldiers felt that in Garibaldi he had not merely a commander but a brother; every person who approached him acknowledged his fascination.

Strip off Garibaldi’s eccentricities, look into his heart, contemplate his achievements,—we behold a hero of the Homeric brood. Again we enter the presence of a man of a few elemental traits, whose habit it was to exhibit his passions without that reserve which belongs to our sophisticated age. Like Achilles, he wept when he was moved, he sulked when he was angry. Equally simple was the mainspring of his action. He obeyed two ideals, and those two of the noblest,—love of liberty and love of his fellow-men: nay, more, he obeyed them as quickly when they led into exile, poverty, and danger as when they led him to a conquest unparalleled in modern history, and to fame in which the wonder and the affection of the world blended in equal parts.

In the making of Italy it was his mission to rouse some of his countrymen to a sense of their patriotic duty, and to lead others to fight for a nation under Victor Emanuel instead of for a faction under Mazzini. Through him, the forces of royalism and of revolution formed an alliance which, although it was almost indispensable to the success of the Italian cause, might never, but for him, have been formed.

Such was Garibaldi, his character, his exploits. Shall we not seek also for the meaning of his career? Shall we not ask, “To what attributes of general human nature had his individuality the key?” That conquest of Sicily was but an episode; long anterior to it was built up the temperament which might have liberated twenty Sicilies, and which found a multitude ready to respond to its least signal.

More than half of our nature is emotion. Men may lie sluggish, they may seem sodden in selfishness, or they may fritter their force away on petty things. But let the hero come,—the Garibaldi, the embodied emotion,—and they will know him as light knows light, or lover his beloved. What just now seemed a dead, sordid mass is tinder, is flame. The craven legions, bewitched and transformed by his example, will follow him anywhere, were it to storm the gates of hell! The immense scope of noble emotion,—is not that the significance, if we seek it, of Garibaldi’s marvelous influence? And has it ever been more certainly displayed than in our very century, miscalled prosaic?