sacred from its injustice. The wrongs it did were aggravated by insult, and the complaints they provoked answered by mockery and derision; national independence was trampled on, and national honour profaned.

At last vaulting ambition overleaped itself," and the scorner of mankind found, that intimidation had not extinguished the thirst for revenge. The giant who brooded over the centre of Europe could not grasp both the south and the north with the utmost stretch of his hands. The obstinate valour of England, with Spain, yet unspoiled of her spirit by legitimacy, baffled him in the one-the elements, with the stars in their courses, fought against him in the other. The love of national independence, the sense of national honour, revived in the intermediate regions. The downcast sovereigns took advantage of the season-and, recollecting how their subjects had been beguiled by the fair promises of the first revolutionists, and how bitterly they had resented the breach of them, addressed themselves at once to their pride and their hopes,-protested against the despotism of the prevailing system, and held out its continuance as the only bar to the universal adoption of liberal institutions. The appeal was not made in vain. There was no longer disaffection in their armies, or deficiencies in their contingents. One spirit of zeal animated all parties. For the first time there was an honest concert among the sovereigns themselves, who had at last discovered, that it was their first interest to put down the common foe, and that by nothing but a sincere union could this be effected. They banded, therefore, against him from the East and from the West; and at length succeeded in bearing to the earth that enormous fabric of military power by which they had so long been oppressed.

Then, for a brief season, there was exultation, and good humour, and symptoms of cordiality between subjects and rulers,-charters were granted, and constitutions promised; and professions zealously made of a design to separate the gold that had been brought to light, and tried in the fires of the revolution, from the dross with which it had been debased. But this was a transient and deceitful gleam; and a deeper darkness soon settled on the world. The restored governments, forgetting how much of what they deplored had been owing to their own vices and misconduct, manifested a vindictive jealousy of all that had been done against them; and seemed inclined to provoke a repetition of the insurrections by which they had suffered, by returning to the very follies and abuses by which they had been mainly produced. The dread, however, of the past, the ultimate bad success of the former experiment, and their own continued concert, enabled them to do this with safety; and they used the power which they had thus regained neither with moderation nor mercy. Their charters were revoked-their promises broken-their amnesties violated-the most offensive pretensions were openly put forward-the most revolting prejudices countenanced-the smaller states were relentlessly sacrificed-and the greater ones, made more formidable by their union, assumed a tone of dictation unknown in the history of the world-and used it to proclaim the most slavish doctrines, and to announce their purpose to maintain them at the point of the sword.

Upon this system they have since acted-and so far as they have gone, they have been successful. Arbitrary government is now maintained all over the continent of Europe, more openly in theory, and more rigorously in practice, than it was before the French Revolution was heard of; —and political freedom is more jealously proscribed, and liberal opinions more

vindictively repressed, than in any period of modern history. "The wheel has come full circle:"-and after the speculations and experience of thirtyfive years, we seem at least as far from political improvement as we were at the beginning!

And is this indeed so? Has the troubled and bloody scene passed before us but as a pageant, to excite our wonder and be forgotten? Has this great and agitating drama no moral? Have the errors, and crimes, and sufferings of thirty years taught no lessons?-have the costly experiments in which they have been consumed ascertained no truths? Have the statesmen and philosophers who directed the stormy scene, or the heroes who gave it movement and glory, lived and died in vain? Is political truth a chimera, and political science a dream? Are the civilised nations of Europe in reality unteachable?-or has the progress by which they have advanced beyond the condition of barbarians already attained its limits—and is what remains of their destiny to be fulfilled in painful attempts at improvements that are never to be attained, and impotent struggles with abuses that must for ever recur?

We will not believe it. The affairs of mankind do not revolve in a circle, but advance in a spiral; and though they have their periods of obscuration, as well as of brightness, tend steadily, in spite of these alternations, and by means of them, to a sure consummation of glory. There is, we are firmly persuaded, a never-ceasing progress to amelioration; and though each considerable movement is followed by a sensible re-action, the system moves irresistibly onward; and no advance that is made is ever utterly lost. The years on which we have been looking back have left indelible traces behind them, and both truths and errors have been demonstrated, by experiments a great deal too impressive to be speedily forgotten. The losers and the winners have both been taught by events of the utmost moment and authority. The governments that have been restored to their old forms have not been restored by any means to their old condition; and though the dispositions of the rulers may be the same, the circumstances in which they are placed are essentially different. They feel this, too, in spite of themselves; and begin already to accommodate themselves to the new necessity. A great lesson, in short, has been taught to all nations. They who receive it most willingly will profit the most by it; but its first lines, at least, are impressed on the most reluctant, and must produce a corresponding change on the conduct of all. It is to the nature of this change, and of the other changes to which it must ultimately lead, that we wish now to direct the attention of our readers.

It would be shutting our eyes to the objects that press most importunately upon them, not to admit, that the first and immediate effect of the change to which we have alluded is unfavourable to political freedom. It is a fact no less certain than lamentable, that the governments of continental Europe are at this moment more truly arbitrary in principle and practice than they ever were before; and that it is most likely that they will continue for some time to be administered on these principles. That part of the world is now in its aphelion from the Star of Liberty, and has not yet, perhaps, reached the point of greatest obscuration; but we still believe, not only that it will in due time emerge into greater brightness than ever, but that its orbit is even now converging rapidly to the centre from which its illumination proceeds. To explain this, it is necessary to consider, very briefly, what the

circumstances are which have thus recently strengthened the hands of absolute monarchy.

The first, undoubtedly, is the intimate union they have formed among themselves for the purpose of supporting these principles, the discovery they have made, that it is better for them to fight together against the liberties of their people, than to fight with each other for the mere enlargement of their dominions. The detestable conspiracy into which they have entered, under the blasphemous name of the Holy Alliance, is the great cause and support of the tyrannical maxims upon which each now thinks he may safely proceed to administer his government; and so long as they look upon increase of personal power, and security in practical tyranny, as of more value than mere increase of territory, or of foreign influence, so long, it is not impossible, that this impious confederacy may continue.

Another great source of the strength and present safety of these governments is, the general diffusion of improvements in the art of war, and the maintenance and equipment of armies; by means of which a much smaller force is capable of keeping in awe a larger population, and at the same time a limited revenue enabled to maintain more numerous forces..

These, we think, are the immediate and occasional causes of the confidence and apparent security with which arbitrary power has been recently proclaimed as the only legitimate spring of European government. there is another and a more ominous cause, which is only beginning to operate, and threatens to exercise a more durable influence in support of the same system, though still more likely in the end to counterwork the purposes for which it has been called into action, and this is, the improved knowledge and policy of the absolute governments themselves, and their gradual correction of all abuses which do not tend to maintain their despotism,-a topic which both deserves and requires a little more development.

Tyrannical governments have hitherto been singularly ignorant and prejudiced; and more than one half of the abuses which make them odious in the eyes of their subjects have had no immediate connexion with political rights or institutions, and might have been safely redressed, without at all improving the constitution, or increasing the political consequence of the people. Their great danger has always been in the superior intelligence of the people, with whom the policy of their rulers has usually been a subject of contempt, as well as of resentment, and who, in their plans of reform or resistance, have uniformly had a most mortifying advantage, in point of contrivance, combination, address, and prudence. A new era, however, we think, is now begun as to all these particulars; and though it is impossible that either the oppressors or the oppressed can ever prove a match for freemen in the virtues and talents which are the offspring of liberty alone, it is nevertheless true, that the eyes of the rulers have at last been opened on their own nakedness and weakness, and that great efforts are making, and will be made, to secure to the cause of tyranny some part of those advantages, which the spread of intelligence and general multiplication of talents have lately conferred on all other institutions. The effects of this will soon become apparent in every department of their proceedings. They will employ better casuists and more ingenious sophists to defend their proceedings -they will have spies of more activity and intelligence, and agents of corruption more crafty and acute, than they have hitherto thought it necessary

to retain in their service. But principally, and above all, they will endeavour to rectify those gross errors in their interior administration, which are a source at once of weakness and discontent; and by the correction of which, they will infallibly extend and multiply their resources, while they cut off one fruitful spring of disaffection. They will not only seek therefore to improve the economical part of their government, and to amend the laws and usages by which the wealth and industry of the people are affected, but they will seek to conciliate their good will, by mitigating all those grievances from which they themselves derive no advantage, and which may be redressed without at all advancing the people in their pretensions to the character of freemen. They will construct roads and canals thereforeand encourage agriculture and manufactures, and reform the laws of trade -and abolish local and subordinate oppressions-and endow seminaries of education, and inculcate a reverence for religion, and patronise academies of art;—and all this good they will do, at the instigation of that more enlightened but more determined hostility to popular rights, by which they are now professedly actuated, and with a view merely to these two plain consequences. In the first place, that, by increasing the wealth and population of their subjects, they may be enabled to draw from them larger taxes and supplies, and to recruit greater armies to uphold their tyrannical pretensions; and in the second place, that by the keeping the body of the people in other respects in a comfortable condition, they may have a better chance of reconciling them to the privation of political rights, and not have the discontent which arises from distress to combat at the same time with that which arises from injustice. The roads and canals too are of excellent use for the easy and rapid transportation of armies and their appointments-and religion and education, in the paternal hands of such governments, are known to be the best of all engines for the dissemination of universal servility.

On the strength then of these improvements, and taking advantage at last of that civilisation and intelligence which had formerly been their surest corrective, the arbitrary governments of the present day proposed to become more arbitrary, and more adverse to popular institutions than ever-and to wage a fiercer and more acrimonious war on the principles of liberty, with weapons which liberty could alone have furnished, and which have scarcely ever yet been employed but in her cause. The great strength and hope of freedom was formerly the progressive information and improvement of the body of the people,-obtained chiefly by the influence of the measure of freedom they had gained, and acting alternately as the cause and the effect of its increase but the new policy of despotism has taught it to avail itself of these very circumstances, for the advancement of its own sinister intereststo enlist those arts which are the children of liberty, in unnatural hostility against her and to pervert what has hitherto been regarded as her best aliment and protection, into the main instrument of her destruction. Economical improvements, therefore, with political intolerance-more protection to private rights, with more restrictions on public ones-melioration in municipal laws and corruption in the constitution-less discontent among the lower people, and more tyranny in the government-more luxury in short, and less freedom-are what we must expect to see more and more conspicuously for some years to come, as the first fruits of that more refined and insidious system on which the circumstances of the times have visibly driven the governments of which we have been speaking.

No man can look, indeed, to their recent proceedings, without seeing that such is their plan of policy. France, heading a crusade against national independence, and announcing a creed of unqualified despotism, is full of schools, and engineers and financiers-and gives up the proudest of her palaces to dignify the display of her most homely manufactures. In Germany, new towns and villages and cotton-spinning establishments rise every where by the side of new barracks and prisons; and other trades are encouraged, to give more effectual encouragement to the great engrossing trade of war. In Russia, Alexander is establishing schools for his peasantry, and mitigating the severity of their feudal servitude, while he is digesting better plans for the regular recruiting of his enormous armies; and making factories for his merchants, while he is proscribing the works aud the persons of all who, by word or deed, would encourage, however indirectly, the slightest encroachment on the hallowed purity of his despotism. Even Austria, the most vindictive and low-minded of the confederates-Austria, who has her Italian dungeons full of men of virtue and talent, for suspicions of liberal opinions-who proscribes all political discussion, in speech or by writing, by the most brutal severities*-who pursues the victims of her unmanly tyranny into their foreign asylumst-who recalls her travelling nobility by threats of confiscation, and rewards them, on their return, by arbitrary arrests:—even this Austria is making efforts to conciliate and multiply the lower classes from whom her armies are recruited, by regulations for the improvement of agriculture and manufactures, and large and judicious expenditure, even in Italy, upon works of public utility, roads, canals, and all the enginery of irrigation. The policy, in short, is manifest, and is beginning to take effect. There is now less risk of insurrection in those countries than there has been for the last thirty years; and their governments are likely enough, if they can only act up to the principles on which they have begun, to go on for some time in a tolerably safe course of defiance to all claims of right, and all sorts of popular interference.

But in what way is the experiment to end-and what is the compensation that is ultimately to be made for the present security and imposing attitude of arbitrary power?

We would answer, in the first place, that the improvements which are actually making, though for sinister ends, are a great good in themselves, and add manisfestly to the mass of human comfort and happiness. We must not quarrel with actions that have such results, by enquiring too anxiously

* The punishment of political libel, or verbal sedition, in Austrian Italy, is, for the first offence, the carcere duro for an indefinite period,-which signifies solitary confinement in a dungern, without light, except for half an hour in the day, when the bread and water are supplied, with the indulgence of irons of moderate weight, and straw to sleep on. For the second offence, the carcere durissimo, in which light and food are supplied but once in two days, and the patient is loaded with irons as heavy as can be used without immediate danger to life, and fastened in such a position as to be totally precluded from lying down, and only allowed to seek repose by sitting or leaning on a pillar of stone. These punishments, we have been assured, have been rigorously inflicted for the last two years-their strict execution ascertained by ocular inspection of persons of the very highest rank-and magistrates censured and degraded for yielding to the smallest relaxation.

A great number of meritorious and accomplished individuals have been lately obliged to fly from Geneva upon the imperative requisition of Austria, who did not hesitate, it is said, distinctly to intimate to that insulted republic, that if the proscribed persons were not ordered out of her territory, a military force should march into it, and make them prisoners in the heart of her city. Not contented, too, with interdicting all works that treated of political matters within her own don nions, this usurping power has also insisted on the literary and discursive republic of Genera adopting the same regulation; and, by open and undisguised menace of lawless force, has actuar compelled that small and unfortunate state to pass a temporary law, prohibiting all publications, and all public discourse, in which the merits or demerits of any of the actual governments of Europe are in any way brought into question!