REACTION, a term used in reference to the political history of a nation, to designate that tendency, often showing itself, to recoil from the effects of reform or revolution, and to seek a restoration of the previous state of things. or even of one still more anti quated and despotic. The causes that lead to reaction are various. Sometimes it springs, partly at least., from mere disappointment at the smallness of the risible results of those changes advocated with so much eloquence, and waited for with so much enthusiasm and hope. The inconsiderate imagination of the people expects a millennium' to follow every important change; and when, after the event, men find they are still.in the old world of imperfections, hardships, and sorrows, they are prone to believe that they have been deluded, and are only too willing to lend an ear to the insidious`mis representations of those who are opposed to all progress. But more frequently political reaction springs from immature, or injudicious, or extravagant revolution. TN times
are not yet ripe (as in the first Italian revolts), or the leaders are unfit (as in.the German and Hungarian struggles of 1848-49), or excesses are committed (as in the great French outbreak of 1789), and so a revolution is nipped in the bud, or overthrown on the battle field; or, inflamed with sanguinary thirst of revenge, it goes mad in a "reign of terror," and exhausting itself in unprofitable frenzies, falls at last en easy prey to•any bold and unscrupulous adventurer whom the crowd may elect out of desperation and disgust of anarchy, and whose rule is as absolute as any that preceded it., A reaction may thus, in certain cases, be useful, in so far as it teaches reformers and revolutionists the point beyond which nature forbids them to go; but its agents are almost invariably base in character. odious in their principles, and selfish in their projects. Religious reactions exhibit the same characteristics as political ones, and proceed from the same Causes.