Volume 1

The age we live in : a history of the nineteenth century, from the peace of 1815 to the present time / James Taylor.

  • Taylor, James, 1813-1892.
Date:
[1888?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The age we live in : a history of the nineteenth century, from the peace of 1815 to the present time / James Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    remark, ‘After me the deluge.’ But lie lived to see the utter destruction of his own handiwork, and the thrones which he had propped up by the bayonets of half a million of armed men topple over like a house of cards; while the Emperor of Austria was driven from his capital, and Metternicli himself had to take refuge in England. No apprehensions of changes or reverses, however, entered the minds of the men— ‘ the paltry creatures,’ Gentz terms them, ‘who govern the world,’ and were now busily engaged in reconstructing the map of Europe. The rulers of Austria, Prussia, and Eussia entered into a treaty of ‘ Holy Al- liance,’ as they termed it, in which they solemnly engaged to ‘ remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity; and that considering each other as fellow- countrymen, they will on all occasions and in all places lend each other aid and assist- ance.’ Prince Metternich, however, desig- nates this famous treaty a ‘loud-sounding nothing,’ a union of religious and political- liberal ideas, developed under the influence of Frau von Krudener and Monsieur de Ber- gasse over the Emperor Alexander. The original draft, he says, presented to him by the Czar, was nothing more than a philan- thropic aspiration clothed in a religious garb, which supplied no material for a treaty between the monarchs, and which contained many phrases that might even have given rise to religious misconstructions. His views of the projected treaty, he says, coincided with those of the Emperor Francis, and when the document was shown to the king of Prussia he expressed a similar opinion regarding it. In consequence of this agree- ment of opinion, Metternich was charged by both monarchs to go to the Emperor Alexander as their common representative, and to submit to him their views. In a conversation of several hours he succeeded, not without great difficulty, in persuading the author of the document of the necessity of changing several sentences and omitting some passages entirely. ‘This,’ he adds, ‘is the history of the “Holy Alliance,” which, even in the partial feeling of its orig- inator, had no other object than that of a moral demonstration, whilst in the eyes of the other persons concerned, the docu- ment had no such meaning, and therefore does not deserve the interpretation which was afterwards put on it by party spirit.’ ‘The most unanswerable proof,’ he avers, ‘ of the correctness of this statement exists in the circumstances that never afterwards did it happen that the “ Holy Alliance ” was made mention of before the cabinets, nor, in- deed, could have been mentioned. Only the parties hostile to the monarchs used it as a weapon for the calumniation of the purest intention of their opponents. The “Holy Alliance” was not an institution to keep down the rights of the people, to promote absolutism or any other tyranny. It was only the overflow of the pietistic feeling of the Emperor Alexander, and the application of Christian principles to politics.’ What- ever may have been the real motives which induced the two emperors and the king of Prussia (all three, as Gentz remarks, noted for their ‘mediocrity and ineptitude’) to enter into this ‘Holy Alliance,’ it was generally regarded at the time and long after as a confederacy of the absolute Powers of the Continent against the rights and liberties of their subjects; and their refusal to fulfil their promises to grant con- stitutional privileges to their own people, and the mode in which they employed their arms to overthrow the Spanish constitution adopted by the Cortes with the approval of the king, and to support the petty rulers of the Italian duchies in their arbitrary and oppressive proceedings, showed that the general opinion as to their policy was well founded. The ministers who at this juncture held the reins of power in Great Britain were not unnaturally elated at the triumph of the British arms at Waterloo, and the downfall of the formidable adversary who had so long threatened the security of their own country, and employed his absolute power