Revolutions of '48.— Meantime, on the Con tinent, the next great progress after 1830 came with the revolutions of 1848. A general ex plosion had been preparing; but again th signal was given by France. The Orleans monarchy had become reactionary; and the socialistic Feb ruary revolution set up the Second Republic. March saw Metternich himself a fugitive, es caping from Vienna in a laundry cart, while thrones were tottering everywhere between Rus sia and Turkey on one side and England on the other. Even England trembled with a Chartist movement and the threat of an Irish rebellion. The kings of Holland, Spain, Denmark and Sweden made constitutional concessions. In Germany and Italy there were complex move ments, working (1) for constitutional liberty and social reform within the several states; (2) for the union of the fragments of the German race into a nation • and (3) for the independ ence of Italians, Slays and Hungarians held in subjection by Austria.
The third movement resulted in wars, out of which Austria finally emerged triumphant; and her victorious army was a ready tool to restore absolutism at home. In Germany the undisciplined Liberals had wasted opportunity, Austria dispersed the Frankfort National As sembly, and, after humiliating unready Prussia at Olmlitz, restored the old confederation (1850). A year later (1851)•the coup d'etat of i Louis Napoleon closed the revolution France and prepared the way for the Second Empire of the next year.
But there had been great gains. Feudalism and serfdom were gone forever, even from Austria. Sardinia, Prussia and the minor Ger man states kept their new constitutions. Swit zerland had become a true federal republic upon the American type. Sardinia, by her sacrifices, and Prussia, in spite of the past mistakes of her timid government, were dearly marked out as the champions of Italy and Germany against Austria. Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia recog nized his mission to unite and free Italy; and Prussia, so recently shamed, had statesmen who would see that next time she should be ready.
From 1850 to 1880.— The next 30 years saw not only the advance toward democracy in England, the victory of nationality and the abolition of slavery in the United States, the formation of the federal Canadian Dominion, on the American model, and the awakening of Japan under American constraint, but also a new federal German Empire, a united, constitutional Italy, a stable French republic, a constitutional Spain and a constitutional, federal Austria Hungary. The period was one of "blood and iron.* Napoleon III, who had drawn England into the Crimean War (1854) to humiliate Russia, was himself drawn by the statesmanship of Cavour into the Austrian War of 1859 to help free Italy. Within a year after the re sulting campaigns in Italy had closed, the Amer ican Civil War began; and before it ended, Bismarck had entered upon his trilogy of wars.
In 1864 he robbed Denmark of the Schleswig Holstein duchies, with the great harbor of Kiel for Prussia's projected navy, and so made trial of the new army he was at once to use (1866) in driving Austria out of Germany by the Six Weeks' War. The North German Confedera tion then formed was expanded into the Ger man Empire by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), into which Bismarck next tricked the despairing ambition of the decaying French government. These struggles completed also the unity of In 1866 Italy recovered Venetia from Austria, and in 1870, when France could no longer interfere, it at last marched its troops into its ancient capital, Rome. Out of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877-78 a new group of Balkan nations was born, mainly Slav in blood, with at least the forms of constitu tional government; but in the Treaty of Berlin, the short-sighted selfishness of England's Tory party, led by Disraeli, kept the Turk from being wholly driven out of Europe, and left smoulder ing the fatal embers of future and vaster con flagrations. Even for the vanquished, in the warlike period, reform grew out of war. The Crimean catastrophe struck the chains from Russia's serfs; the shock of defeat in 1859 and 1866 woke Austria to constitutional progress; only when Germany shivered the sham of the Second Empire did France enter upon tjue re publican life; and it was in the ashes of her old social system that our own South found re generation.
From 1880 to 1914 the Continent of Europe offers a marked contrast to the picture shown by the preceding period. Progress was mainly peaceful, until men began to dream that "blood and iron" were forever out of date. Except Russia, little Montenegro and European Turkey, all the monarchies of Europe had already be come "constitutional," more or less after the English model. In none of the monarchies on the Continent, it is true, were the ministers so powerful, or so truly dependent on the people's will, as in England; and in some the formal constitutional merged into a practical despotism. Political advance consisted during the last period (1) in a growth of "ministerial responsibility"; (2) in a rapid extension of the franchise in almost all countries toward a man hood basis; and (3) soon after 1900, in a swift series of almost bloodless revolutions,_ which set up constitutional forms in Russia Persia and China, until for a time was the only sovereign state on the globe without a representative assembly. Some of the Oriental revolutions were soon undone in part and in most European countries the actual adminis tration of government remains highly aristo cratic. On the other hand, in nearly every Eu ropean land, the Socialists make a formidable political party with much weight in the national assembly; and nearly everywhere the people are training themselves, in compulsory school sys tems, for ultimate control.