ment three times, and the War Office at least four times; when we learn, further, that the same spirit prevailed in other branches of the administration, we can hardly be surprised that the great ruin of the Italian war brought down with a crash the whole edifice of the reaction.

While the internal affairs of the Empire were going from bad to worse, its external affairs were by no means prosperous. All those who understood the German question saw that the triumph gained at the expense of Prussia in 1850 could only be of temporary importance. There were fewer who were aware that Louis Napoleon had been on the very point of declaring war against Austria, immediately after the news of the battle of Novara had reached Paris, or who felt certain that the day would ere long arrive, when France would break with a strong hand the web of treaties which Metternich had woven around the limbs of Italy. A quarrel with Switzerland, and another with Piedmont, came to embitter public opinion in Europe against the Cabinet of Vienna, already roused by the exaggerated, but eloquent declamations of Kossuth, as well in the New as in the Old World. The mission of Count Leiningen to Constantinople on the subject of Montenegro was by many supposed to be a diversion in favour of Russia; and although this has never been proved, and is in itself improbable, it did not tend to make Austria more popular either in France or England. Her uncertain attitude during the Crimean War alternately flattered and dashed the hopes of the West; and although the diplomatist can hardly blame her, the opinion of intelligent Europe was not gained to her side, while she became to Russia the object of the most deadly hostility. Thus, at the table of the Congress in Paris, she had hardly a single real friend, and men began to watch, with all the pleasures of malevolence, the struggle between her and the wily Genevese-Italian, who was destined to rob her of all she had won in the Peninsula by the labours and the crimes of more than forty years.

The isolated position in which Austria was placed after the conclusion of the Russian war, had a very unfavourable influence upon her internal politics. The watchword of the new system was, as we have seen, Viribus unitis,' but now the wielders of these 'united forces,' the Ministers at Vienna, at length thoroughly awake to the fact that their system was a failure, began to throw the blame upon each other. Bruck, the one man of real insight amongst them, occupied his high position as Finance Minister solely in virtue of his merit, and had none of those powerful connexions which are necessary to one who would carry through great reforms without popular support. He passed his time making one concession here, another

there, in the vain hope of getting something useful done. It was all in vain. From the beginning of 1849 to the end of 1858, the public debt rose from 1200 million florins to 2292 million florins, and every source of taxation had in the meantime been strained to the uttermost. The years 1857 and 1858 passed in peace, but without producing any important improvements in the state of things; and at last in 1859 the longdeferred retribution came.

There was no violent outbreak of disaffection, and although Kossuth accompanied the Emperor in his Italian campaign, ready to do what he could to raise Hungary as soon as the French flag appeared on Hungarian soil, he prudently insisted upon its appearance there as a condition precedent. It is of good augury for the non-resurrection of absolutism in Austria that it was not overthrown, but died a natural death. Bach was dismissed in August 1859, and was succeeded by Count Goluchowski, a man of much inferior ability, who had been Governor of Galicia, but who did not do anything as Minister to justify the respectable reputation which he brought into the Government. M. de Hübner became at the same time Minister of Police, and showed, during his short tenure of office, far more consideration for the press, and far more desire for reform, than his predecessor. Both he and the Foreign Minister, Count Rechberg, are believed to have seen, even at this period, that concessions to Hungary had become absolutely necessary. Indeed, M. de Hübner is said to have resigned his portfolio in consequence of the rejection of his plans for effecting something in this direction.

It must be borne in mind that all through the reactionary period the so-called 'Old Conservative party' (whose name, be it remembered, has nothing now to do with the sort of questions which divide our Liberals and Conservatives) amongst the Hungarian magnates, had been protesting as ardently against the system of M. Bach as they had protested against the ideas of Kossuth in 1848. Those who would follow the outs and ins of their long struggle-and no one, we are persuaded, can follow them without having his impression of the political capacity of the Magyars considerably raised-should read the earlier pages of the work called Drei Jahre Verfassungsstreit, the author of which is well known, and is a person whose possession of the best information can be relied upon.

The resolution to break with the system of M. Bach was not, however, taken in a day, and even after his dismissal things went on for a time in the old fashion. Numerous commissions were called into life, charged to advise the Government, but nothing decisive was done, except by a Hungarian Commission,

which refused to report, and reminded the rulers that if they wanted advice about Hungary, the best plan would be to obey the laws and summon the Hungarian Diet. Abroad, the Austrian diplomatists fought hard to recover the ground which they had lost in Italy, and are said to have arranged the preliminaries of a grand Catholic league, which they fondly believed would replace them in their old position, and which would perhaps have given serious trouble if it had not been for Garibaldi's timely landing at Marsala. At home, the reactionists obtained a triumph by driving Bruck to commit suicide, not, however, before he had publicly pointed out that the whole system of government in Austria was rotten to the core.

The first step in advance was made in the end of May 1860, by calling together the assembly which was known as the 'Verstärkte Reichsrath' (strengthened Council of the Empire). Ever since 1851 there had existed a Reichsrath, but this was a mere Governmental board, remarkable for nothing, unless it were that it was a shade more illiberal than the other public departments. The new Reichsrath was an assembly of notables from all parts of the Empire, chiefly, but not exclusively, composed of men of very high rank. What the Government expected from the Reichsrath was advice as to what was to be done in the dire perplexity into which want of money, Hungarian disaffection, and its other misfortunes, had thrown it; but of specific advice it succeeded in getting very little. On the other hand, the Reichsrath thoroughly condemned the existing state of things, and begged the Emperor, in his omnipotence, to find out and apply a remedy. Nothing was further from its views than to make an energetic demand for a constitution, and the Saxon Transylvanian, M. Maager, who ventured to pronounce that dreaded name too loudly, was no doubt thought by the majority of his colleagues a very dangerous person. The chief difference of opinion which was manifested in the Reichsrath, related to the amount of centralization and de-centralization to be maintained in the re-organized Empire. The opinion of the de-centralizing or federalist party prevailed, and the Government proceeded, a week or two after the four months' session of the strengthened Council of the Empire' came to an end, to issue the Diploma of the 20th October 1860. The broad difference between the system of M. Bach, and that inaugurated by the October Diploma, was this,-that, while in the Bach system everything was, as we have seen, regulated, down to the minutest detail, by the Government offices at Vienna, acting under the pressure of unmitigated despotism, in the system inaugurated by the October Diploma, a broad distinction was drawn between those general concerns of the Empire which had

to be regulated at Vienna, and those particular concerns of the provinces, which had to be regulated by the provincial assemblies. Further, a sort of modified system of representation was introduced, by the creation of a new sort of Reichsrath, consisting of one hundred persons, whose members were to be selected by the Emperor from the provincial assemblies.

This was well, so far as it went, but it did not go far enough. Hungary, indeed, had her Diet, which could immediately be called together, and could, if the nation were so minded, proceed to take its share in working this new system. Hungary, however, positively refused to do anything of the sort, and the measures taken to enable it to elect members to the Diet, in the manner customary before the Revolution, wholly failed to lead the country to give up its determination to stand firm in its legal position, and to have the laws of 1848, or nothing. The difficulty in the Germanic or Germanized provinces was different, but not less great. In them there were no provincial assemblies at all adequate to modern necessities, and when Count Goluchowski was rash enough to publish the scheme of provincial assemblies devised by M. Bach, in the height of the reaction, retaining as it did many of the worst features of the prerevolutionary period, he was met with a shout of derision, and soon afterwards retired from office, having made himself 'impossible' on both sides of the Leitha.

His successor was M. Schmerling, of whom we shall have more to say presently, but in the meantime we may observe that it was in the winter of 1860-61, that the two parties which at this moment divide the Empire began to take a definite shape. The nucleus of these two parties, respectively, were the Hungarian advisers of the Court, who thought that if Hungary could only be fully conciliated, other things would in the end come right of themselves, and those German advisers, who thought that if the Germanic or Germanized provinces could be fully conciliated, Hungary might be coerced, and obliged to take its part in working a new system, the driving-wheel of which should be a parliament at Vienna, acting under moderate pressure on the part of the sovereign, a parliament in which the non-Germanic provinces should indeed be fairly and liberally represented, but in the eye of which even Hungary should be merely a province like the Vorarlberg, and not a kingdom connected with the rest of the Empire by the link of the Pragmatic Sanction.

One of the most important incidents of this period was the summoning to Vienna of Baron Nicholas Vay, the leader of the Hungarian Protestants, in their struggle against the encroachments of the central authorities, which was one of the many

results of the unlucky policy which was inaugurated by M. Bach. Vay had been three times tried by Haynau's military commissions; twice he was acquitted, but at last convicted, and imprisoned for two years in Theresienstadt. At this moment he was the most popular man in Hungary; for the religious contest had been really a political one, and had engaged the sympathies, not only of the Protestants, but of other confessions also. This man was now made Chancellor of Hungary, and exerted a most important influence, until he was obliged to retire in the summer of 1861. He is understood to have been one of those most instrumental in raising M. Schmerling to power, probably because, knowing his ability, and miscalculating the strength of his Germanism, he thought that he would understand and be equal to the situation.

It soon became clear, however, that it was not to the views of Baron Vay that M. Schmerling would give his support.

There ought, indeed, as it seems after the event, to have been little doubt as to the scale into which the new Minister would throw his influence. Born in 1805, of a family which belonged originally to the Rhine-land, but which settled last century in Lower Austria, he had passed his early manhood and middle life in the bureaucracy, and is before all things a bureaucrat liberal in the ends he pursues,-not liberal in the means by which he would compass them. A decided opponent of the SYSTEM, he had made himself observed in the provincial assembly of Lower Austria before 1848, and had been sent in the spring of that year to represent Austrian interests at Frankfort. There he took a conspicuous place in the ranks of the Gross-Deutsch party, and combated with all his might the idea of the Prussian Hegemony. On his return to Vienna he became a member of Prince Schwartzenberg's Ministry, but retired from it when it began to move fast down the steep of reaction.

A man with these antecedents was not likely to yield without a struggle to the pretensions of Hungary. If the Hungarians could make good their claims, farewell for ever to the idea of a great united Germany, to which Vienna should give the word of command! The views of the new Minister were no secret to his colleagues, and the breach between him and those who represented the interests of Hungary in the Government became every day wider and wider.

The first result of M. Schmerling's activity was the Patent of February 26th, 1861. This document was in form an addition to the Diploma of October 1860, but in reality it amounted to a new constitution. Instead of the Reichsrath of a hundred members, sitting in one chamber, it created a much larger Reichsrath, sitting in two chambers; and whereas the Diploma of October