among the agricultural labourers, that the emigration from the country villages exceeded anything that the newspapers of the day chose or dared to publish. It is true that, in the neighbourhood of the great towns, the fall in wages was not so perceptible ;—it is true also that the emigration was stimulated by the discovery of gold in California. It is true that that emigration was so extensive as to check the fall of wages; and, very much to the disgust of the Manchester school, eventually to bring them up to their previous level. The peasantry, then, were hungry and discontented. Such were the first consequences of the promised cheap loaf-in other words high taxes on the producer, which rendered production unremunerative. Such were to the peasant the results of free imports and of contracted currency.

Nor were the tenant-farmers more content; they were infinitely more angry with the new policy, and infinitely more determined on change than the country gentlemen. Indeed they suffered more; and the return of ten per cent. on the rent, which was pretty generally made, did very little towards helping them through. Unjust legislation had left them subject to an enormous burden of taxes, and paying a fixed rent to their landlords; while they remarked, with some justice, that the majority of the House of Commons, and the whole of the House of Peers, were rent-receivers, and were thus profiting from the cheapness of necessaries and the dearness of money.

Thus they were led to distrust their landlords, and to agitate for themselves. In some instances, this spirit, as in Nottinghamshire, induced them to start a candidate of their own against the gentry-a symptom over which Manchester and the Peelites no doubt hugged themselves. The former took a turn at calling themselves farmers' friends, and talked about repealing taxes for them, especially the malt-tax, hoping to seduce them, but finding

that the farmers were not to be won, and that if they distrusted their landlords, they were not to be gained over to trust their enemies, they forgot their previous professions, and were found in the government majority against the repeal of that tax when it was afterwards moved for.

Such, however, was the general discontent and distress, not only of the landed but the shipping and commercial interests, that the Manchester men, who had seen the futility of agitating for parliamentary reform, were talking of retrenchments, and preparing haży budgets, proposing to pay off national debts, and generally angling for any sympathy that amidst difficulty and distress they could catch, and that the differences they had sown between landlord and tenant might give them. The continuance of the distress had naturally the effect of lessening the support of the government.

The year 1849 then passed principally in ruin, and talk of retrenchment, and abortive agitation for this purpose, and in the making of promises to help the farmers to obtain some shreds of justice, which as yet have not been fulfilled. Nor was the distress of any interest removed. The reaction of the currency, assisted by the gold discoveries, did not begin to produce that result till 1852. England had sound cause for discontent in these years; but none at all for revolution, in the continental sense of barricades and bullets, or in the Irish one of moral force, tarbarrels, brick-bats, and cabbage-gardens.

CONCLUSION.

"Je soutiendrai mon opinion jusqu'à la dernière goutte de mon encre."

MOLIERE.

LEAVING France for the moment out of the question, during the resettlement of Europe after the revolutions of 1848, two opposite forces appear mainly to have influenced events, Austria on the one hand, and Lord Palmerston on the other. These two may be considered as co-ordinates, to which many subsequent events of importance may be principally referred. We have seen that when the Hungarians had overpowered the forces of their usurping king, he had been obliged to accept the aid of the Czar, who had poured an overwhelming flood of his serf-soldiers on to the Hungarian plains. The Magyars were surrounded, and their commander induced to lay down his arms unconditionally, either by secret promises of protecting the lives of his men, or by the conviction that resistance was hopeless. And though some have asserted that he was influenced by jealousy existing between him and Kossuth, or by the use of direct bribery and corruption, yet there does not appear any very distinct evidence that it was so. But if there had been unity and resolution alike among the leaders and the soldiers, it is clear that any over-match in numbers, or in

position only, is no reason for any commander of freemen to quail. The history of mankind, from Marathon and Thermopyla to the Alma and Inkermann, demonstrates the contrary.

Austrian usurpation and want of faith had rendered Russian intervention necessary to its preservation. Of the Hungarian and Polish leaders many had escaped into Turkey; where some of them, for better security, embraced Mahometanism. Now the policy of Russia was always to seek every cause of complaint against the Turk; and to browbeat him at every convenient opportunity. And though it had been usually the policy of Austria, up to this period, to protect the Porte against Russian encroachment, as a counterpoise to Muscovite obstruction in the Danubian principalities, at that moment, not only was she at the feet of the Czar, but she was raging for the blood of those whose crime was attachment to the legal institutions of their country, and was probably all the more bloodthirsty because they had legal right on their side, and she had not.

In consequence of this temporary identity of interest, Austria and Russia together demanded the fugitives from the Sultan, whom he stoutly refused to give up to their tender mercies in which he was backed by the united fleets of England and France. And though the dispute ran to the extent of a suspension of diplomatic relations, yet as the attitude of the Western Powers, in support of Turkey, was decided and as the Emperor of Russia, with Austria alone, was not prepared at that time to brave their united opposition, when backed by their respective fleets (which had been driven into the Dardanelles by a judicious and diplomatic spell of foul weather), a compromise of the claim was extorted. The Turks agreed to settle the refugees at a distance from the frontier, and to send away any Polish refugees, furnished with foreign passports, who

might be intriguing against Russia. A similar convention was entered into with Austria, with respect to the Hungarians claimed as its subjects. Thus Austria brought England and France into opposition to Russia and itself on the shores of the Bosphorus.

Among the follies of Europe in 1848, a storm in a teacup had occurred in Wallachia. Bucharest had done a revolution-" tout comme un autre "-not a very dangerous one, for it was effected with cheers for the Sultan. The Czar, who had a joint protectorate over the principality, and who appeared to make use of his right to invade its territory whenever it was convenient, immediately occupied that province of Turkey in Europe with his troops, and there established them, very much to the annoyance of the Porte; and he compelled it to agree to a convention, allowing him to keep thirty thousand of them there till Hungary was pacified. The Hungarian quarrel thus gave the Muscovites a desirable opportunity for weakening the Sultan, and occupying the Danubian principalities, where they regularly employ themselves in intriguing against the Turkish protectorate, and in fomenting discontent against the feudal superior of the province. The Wallachians and Moldavians appear to have been in the happy position of having foreign troops constantly quartered upon them, and being alternately hectored over and tutored by all the barbarians in Europe.

What it was that induced the noble lord at the head of the foreign office to engage Admiral Parker, on his way back from the Dardanelles, in the affair of Don Pacifico's bedsteads at the Piræus, is a mystery. Whether it was, that his diplomatic and "judicious bottle-holding" to democracy had been defeated by Russian and Austrian influence, and he considered that in striking at Greece he was aiming a blow at Russia ;-or whether it was that the Greek shipping in the Levant was a cause of commercial