THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
This Congress of the rulers and statesmen of Europe, which opened in September, 1814, and continued its work after the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo, occupied itself with map-making on a liberal scale. The empire which the conqueror had built up at the expense of the neighboring countries, was quickly dismembered and France reduced to its former limits, while all the surrounding Powers took their shares of the spoils, Belgium and Holland being combined into a single kingdom.
As for the rights of the people, what had become of them? Had they been swept away and the old wrongs of the people brought back? Not quite. The frenzied enthusiasm for liberty and human rights of the past twenty-five years could not go altogether for nothing. The lingering relics of feudalism had vanished, not only from France but from all Europe, and no monarch or congress could bring them back again. In its place the principles of democracy had been carried by the armies of France throughout Europe and deeply planted in a hundred places, and their establishment as actual conditions was the most important part of the political development of the nineteenth century.