WORLD'S POLITICS AND NINETEENTH CENTURY 303 



reform acts extending the franchise until manhood suffrage is 

 realized in Britain more perfectly than in the United States. Laws 

 have been passed unshackling British trade, greatly to the benefit 

 of the common people. Popular election has been carried into 

 counties and cities, placing the peasant and the mechanic in condi- 

 tion to hold his own against wealth and rank as he could never do 

 before. The extra voting power of the rich has been mostly annulled, 

 the public service purified and opened to the humblest, the adminis- 

 tration of justice immensely improved. A system of public educa- 

 tion has been launched, by which the poorest youth may win intelli- 

 gence that shall be worthy of his freedom and enable him to utilize 

 and enjoy it. 



Nor is the train of causation starting from the French Revolution 

 exhaustively conceived without recalling again the freedom of the 

 Spanish-American republics, the rise and life of the democratic 

 party and of the Monroe Doctrine in the United States, the creation 

 of Belgium, and the liberation of Greece. 



Hardly had the French Revolution democracy begun its race when 

 it suffered serious arrest. An absolutist reaction set in: in France 

 itself, under Napoleon, the restored Bourbons, and, later, the Second 

 Empire; Metternich arose and the Holy Alliance; strife for free 

 institutions was repressed in Germany, Italy, and Spain; reform 

 became and for a time remained a hateful word all over Europe; 

 Louis XVlII dated the state papers of 1814 as of the nineteenth 

 year of his reign, affecting to ignore all that had passed since Louis 

 XVI's death. 



Queen Victoria once said: " As I get older I cannot understand 

 the world. I cannot comprehend its littlenesses. When I look at 

 men's frivolities and littlenesses it seems to me as if they were all 

 a little mad." This insanity of petty-mindedness was never more 

 patent than in Germany after Napoleon's fall. 



The German Confederation was Metternich's tool to stay the 

 advance of liberalism. The presence of the French in Germany had 

 quickened and generalized the wish for constitutional and hatred of 

 personal rule. While peril lasted the powers heeded. Czar Alex- 

 ander received Poland on condition of granting it a constitution. 

 Frederic William promised Prussia a constitution; Article 13 of 

 the Confederation Acts declared that each of the confederate states 

 was to have a constitution with representation. Liberals fully 

 expected that before long constitutional methods would prevail all 

 over the Continent as in England. 



Bitter disappointment resulted, the next period being but a record 

 of Metternich's triumphs, of monarchs' mean devices to evade their 

 pledges and to hush the popular cry. Save Saxe- Weimar, not a 

 state in the Confederation obtained at this time a liberal ground law. 



