The second circumstance which tended to coerce, more rapidly than could have been hoped for, the progress of the revolution of 1848, was the firmness and loyalty of the soldiers. It is historically known that it was the defection of the troops which brought on, and rendered irresistible the march of the first Revolution: which induced, in rapid succession, the Reign of Terror, the assignats, the conscription, the capture of Paris, the subjugation of the kingdom. But here, too, experience and suffering came to the aid of deluded and wandering humanity. It was seen that what is unjust and dishonourable is never expedient: that the violation of their oaths by the sworn defenders of order is not the commencement of the regeneration, but the first step in the decline of society: and that to fear God and honour the king is the only way to insure, not only the preservation of order, but the ultimate ascendancy of freedom. On the foundation of the revolt of the Gardes Françaises in 1789, were successively built the despotism of the Committee of Public Salvation, the blood of Robespierre, the carnage of Napoleon. The awful example was not lost on the next generation. The throne of Charles X. was overthrown by the defection of the troops of the line; but it was again found that the glorious fabric of civil liberty was not to be erected on the basis of treachery and treason. None of the troops revolted on the crisis of February 1848. The Guards and the line were alike steady. Marshal Bugeaud, when he received the command, speedily passed the whole barricades, and in six hours would have extinguished the revolt. The throne was lost not by the defection of the troops, but by the pusillanimity of the princes of the blood; and accordingly, when the next contest occurred—as occur it ever will in such cases—the troops were resolutely led, the revolution was put down under circumstances ten times more formidable, though not without a frightful loss of human life.
We are so accustomed to the loyalty and steadiness of the English army, that the possibility of their wavering never enters into our imagination. But still all must admit that we too, with all our boasted safeguards of popular representation, general information, a free press, and centuries of freedom, stood on the edge of an abyss; and that, not less than Austria or Prussia, our salvation had come to depend chiefly, if not entirely, on the fidelity of the soldiers. If the six thousand men who garrisoned London on the 10th April 1848 had wavered, and one-half of them had joined the insurgents, where would now have been the British constitution? Had a hundred thousand men from Kennington Common crossed Waterloo Bridge, headed by a regiment of the Guards, and three regiments of the line, where would now have been the British liberties? Where would have been all the safeguards formed, all the hopes expressed, all the prophecies hazarded, as to its being perpetual? But in that dread hour, perhaps the most eventful that England ever knew, we were saved by the courage of the Queen, the firmness of the government, the admirable arrangements of the Duke of Wellington, and the universal steadiness and loyalty of our soldiers. We are quite aware of the special constables, and the immense moral influence of the noble display which the aristocracy and middle classes of England made on that occasion. But moral influence, often all-powerful in the end, is not alone sufficient at the beginning; physical force is then required to withstand the first assault of the enemy: and, highly as we respect the civic force with batons in their hands; and fully as we admit the immense importance of that citizen-demonstration in its ultimate effects, we ascribe our deliverance from the instant peril which threatened, entirely to the steadiness of the British army, and the incomparable arrangements of their chief.
In the Continental states, order succeeded in regaining the ascendency over anarchy entirely in consequence of the fidelity of the soldiers. On that memorable day, when the Prussian army marched into Berlin playing the old airs of the monarchy, and formed in a circle around, distant only twenty-five paces from the insurgent host, and there tranquilly loaded their pieces, the opposing forces were directly brought into collision; it was seen that, in a few seconds, law or rebellion would be victorious. Law prevailed, as it generally does where its defenders are steady and resolutely led—and what has been the result? Is it that freedom has been extinguished in Prussia, that liberty has sunk under the pressure of tyrannic power, and that a long period of servitude and degradation is to close the bright meridian of her national splendour? Quite the reverse: anarchy has been extinguished in Prussia only to make room for the fair forms of order and liberty, which cannot exist but side by side; the revolutionists are overawed, but the lovers of real freedom are only the better confirmed in their hopes of the ultimate establishment of a constitutional monarchy, such as Prussia has been sighing for for thirty years. It is ever to be recollected that the prospects of freedom are never so bright as when they are in the inverse ratio to those of revolution; liberty is never so safe as where anarchy is most thoroughly repressed; despotism is never so near at hand as immediately after the greatest triumphs of insurrection.
In Austria a different and more melancholy prospect has been exhibited. That great and noble country has been the victim, not merely of the passions of revolution, but of those of race. It has been torn asunder, not only by the ambition of the revolutionists, and the ardent zeal of a people yet inexperienced in social dissensions sighing after freedom, but by the force and inextinguishable rivalry of different and discordant races. The Lombard has risen up against the German, the Bohemian against the Austrian; the Magyars have buckled on their armour against both, and, animated alike by revolutionary zeal and national jealousy, have striven to obtain what they deem the first of blessings—national independence—by revolting against the government of Austria, in the moment of its utmost need. That strange compound of races and nations, the Austrian monarchy, in which it is hard to say whether the Slave, the Magyar, the Teuton, the Lombard, or the old Roman had the preponderance, and the union of which, for so long a period, had been a subject of astonishment to all observers, at length revealed its inherent weakness. Worse than the war of opinion, the war of races began. Like the Lacedemonian confederacy, after the defeat of Leuctra, or the Athenian after the catastrophe of Aigos Potamos, or the Roman republic after the disaster of Cannæ, the Austrian aggregate of kingdoms threatened to fall to pieces on the dreadful shock of opinion which resulted from the success of the French revolution. The contest of nations did not now intervene, to bar the spread of democratic ideas; the military passions were not arrayed in opposition to the civic. Lamartine was perfectly right in his prognostic: the pacific French revolution of 1848 achieved greater conquests, in three months, than the warlike republic of 1793 had gained in ten years. Prussia was apparently revolutionised; Austria was all but won to the democratic side; Vienna, Prague, and Milan were in the hands of the insurgents. Never, in the darkest periods of the revolutionary war, was Austria in such desperate straits, as when Radetsky retreated behind the Mincio, and the treacherous assault of Charles Albert was aided by the whole strength of revolutionary Italy, and the tacit support or lukewarm indifference of France and England.
But in that awful hour, by far the most perilous which Austria ever knew, and which threatened with immediate and irrevocable destruction the whole balance of power in Europe, she was saved by the fidelity of her native soldiers, and the incomparable spirit of her German nobility. Then appeared in its highest lustre what is the principle of life and the tenacity of purpose which exist in an aristocratic society, not yet wholly debilitated by the pleasures and the selfishness of a court. Although the Hungarian nobles, for the most part, sided with the Magyar insurgents; although the whole Lombard troops had passed over from the standards of Radetsky to those of Charles Albert, and all the Hungarians in his service sullenly wended their way back to their native places; although Prague was wrested from the crown by the Bohemian insurgents, and Vienna by a vehement urban tumult in the capital; although Hungary was not only lost, but arrayed in fierce hostility against the monarchy—the noble Austrian leaders never lost heart—they realised the dream of the Roman poet—
"Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinæ."
Windischgratz in Bohemia, Radetsky in Italy, Jellachich in Austria, stood forth as the saviours of the monarchy, and, with it, of the cause of European freedom. Though deserted by their sovereign, who had bent before the revolutionary tempest, they fronted, sometimes, it is believed, in opposition to constrained orders, the dangers with which they were assailed—they acted in conformity with the maxim of a noble people not yet debased by democratic selfishness: Vive le Roi quand-meme! Slowly, but steadily, the forces of order regained their ascendant over the assaults of anarchy. The Tyrol, ever steadfast in its loyalty, first offered an asylum to the emperor, when driven from his capital; Prague was next recovered, and Bohemia coerced by the moral courage and skilful dispositions of Prince Windischgratz; Radetsky, shortly after, reinforced by the loyalty of Austria, regained his ascendant on the Mincio, routed the revolutionary rabble of Italy, and restored Milan to the Imperial government; Vienna, after a desperate conflict, was won by the forces of Order; and Jellachich and Windischgratz enjoyed the proud triumph of having restored his capital to their discrowned sovereign. Hungary, inhabited by a bolder and more numerous race, actuated by stronger passions, held out longest, and was only subdued after a sanguinary conflict, by the aroused vigour and national passions, aided by the support of the Colossus of the North, which has so often sent forth its battalions as the last resource of order and religion, when all but vanquished by the forces of anarchy and infidelity. Yet, though thus constrained, in the last extremity, to call in the aid of the Czar, and array a hundred thousand Muscovites on the plains of Hungary, the stand thus made by the Austrian monarchy is not the less glorious and worthy of eternal remembrance. It demonstrates what so many other passages in the history of that noble people indicate, how great is the strength, and unbounded the resources, of a brave and patriotic nation, even when afflicted by the most terrible disasters; and how uniformly Providence, in the end, lends its protection to a people who have shown themselves worthy of its blessings, by faithfully discharging their duty in a period of disaster. The year 1849 will ever rank with the glories of Maria Theresa, the triumph of Aspern, the devotion of Wagram, as the brightest periods in the long and glorious Austrian annals.
The people of England, ever ready to sympathise with even the name of freedom, and prone beyond any other nation to delusions springing from generous feelings, acting on erroneous information, were at one time much disposed to sympathise with the Hungarian insurgents. They enlisted the wishes of a considerable part, especially of the citizens of towns, on their side. Never were generous and estimable feelings more misapplied. The contest in Hungary, it is to be feared, was not in the slightest degree a struggle for public freedom: it was an effort only to establish the domination of a race in opposition to a lawful government. Like the Sikhs or Ameers in India at this moment, the Normans in England in former times, or the "insane plebeian noblesse" of Poland, whom John Sobieski denounced as the authors of the ruin of his country, the Magyars were a proud and haughty dominant race, not a fourth part of the whole inhabitants of Hungary, but brave and ambitious, and animated with the strongest desire of establishing an independent oligarchy in their wide-spread country. They took the opportunity for asserting their principles when Austria was pierced to the heart, and its provinces, apparently all falling asunder, had the fairest prospect of establishing separate dominions, as in the ancient Roman empire, on the ruins of the Imperial authority. Had they succeeded, they would have established the same monstrous tyranny of a dominant race, which has so long blasted the happiness, and at length destroyed the independence of Poland.
That the contest in Hungary was one for the domination of a race, not the freedom of people, is evident from two circumstances which have been studiously kept out of view by the Liberal party, both on the Continent and in England. The first is that after the emperor had conceded to Hungary the most extreme liberal institutions, based on universal suffrage, the Magyar leaders sent private orders to all the Hungarian regiments in Radetsky's army to leave his banners, and return to Hungary; thus rendering to all appearance the dismemberment of the monarchy inevitable, and surrendering the Italian provinces, the brightest jewel in the Imperial crown, to the tender mercies of Charles Albert. The second is, that, in the contest which ensued, the Hungarians were in the end overthrown. Possessing, as Hungary does, fourteen millions of inhabitants—nearly a moiety of the whole Austrian empire, and four times more than Upper and Lower Austria, with the Tyrol, which alone could be relied on in that crisis—it is evident that, if the whole Hungarian people had been united, they must have proved victorious, and have decided the contest long before the distant Muscovite battalions could have appeared on the theatre of war. The Hungarian insurrection broke out in April 1848, and was aided by contemporaneous revolts in Prague, Lombardy, Venice, and Vienna. To all appearance the Austrian monarchy was torn in pieces. Muniments of war they had in abundance: Comorn, with its vast arsenal and impregnable walls, opened its arms to receive them. When Georgey capitulated, he had one hundred and thirty-eight guns, besides those in the hands of Kossuth and Bem. Fully half the military stores of Austria fell into the hands of the Hungarians, the moment the insurrection broke out. Yet, with all these advantages, they were overcome. This demonstrates that the war was not a national one, in the proper sense of the word: that is, it did not interest the whole people. It was an effort of a gallant and ambitious race, forming a small minority of the population, to establish a domination over the whole remainder of the inhabitants, and sever themselves from the Austrian empire; and a greater calamity than such a separation, both to the Hungarians themselves and the general balance of power in Europe, cannot be imagined.
How was the balance of power to be maintained in Europe, especially against Russia, if the Austrian monarchy had been broken up? Experience had long ago proved that no coalitions for the preservation of the independence of central Europe, either against Russia on the one side or France on the other, had the least chance of success, in which Austria did not take a prominent part. Even the disasters of the Peninsular campaigns, and the awful catastrophe of the Moscow retreat, could not enable Europe to combat Napoleon, till Metternich, at the Congress of Prague, threw the weight of Austria into the scale. It was by an alliance of Austria, France, and England that, at the Congress of Vienna, a curb was put on the ambition of Russia: by a similar alliance that the Turkish empire was saved from ruin, when the Muscovite standards were advanced to Adrianople, and the Pacha of Egypt was encamped on Scutari. It was a coalition of Austria, England, Russia, and Prussia, which in 1834 coerced the ambition of France, when M. Thiers had sent orders to the French admiral to attack and burn the English fleet in the bay of Vourlas, at dead of night. But if Austria had been broken up into a Hungarian, a Lombard, and a Bohemian republic, how was such an alliance to be formed? What central power could, in such an event, have existed under such circumstances, to oppose a mid impediment to the grasping ambition of Russia on the one side, and France on the other? Prussia, it is well known, is entirely under the influence of Russia, and does not, except in the first fervour of revolution, venture to deviate from the policy which it prescribes. Sweden and Denmark are mere subsidiary states. Austria alone is so strong as to be able, with the aid of England, to bid Russia defiance; and is situated so near to its southern provinces, as to be actuated by a ceaseless dread of its encroachments. The breaking up of the Austrian empire would have been a fatal blow to the balance of power, and with it to real liberty in Europe. It would have left the field open to the Cossacks on the one side, and the Red Republicans on the other.