308 AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC QUESTIONS 



entered. The Holy Alliance accomplished nothing, and there 

 is no reason to suppose that its members intended to use 

 other than their own good examples to accomplish the ends 

 in view. It was a foolish pledge, conceived in a moment of 

 religious fervor, and as completely disregarded in the practi- 

 cal lives of the signers as though it had never been made. 

 There is no evidence whatever, tending to show that the allies 

 had combined for the purpose of opposing the growth of lib- 

 eralism. It is the other league, the Quadruple league 

 th4t had organized to defeat Napoleon, and that had re- 

 lewed its bonds in the treaty of Paris, November 20, 1815, 

 wherein the propaganda of absolutism was afterward born. 

 Now it so happened that this quadruple alliance, a few 

 years later, quite lost its original identity. England had 

 withdrawn from it, and France and Spain had entered. 

 With the fall of Napoleon, the original purposes for its 

 existence naturally became extinct ; but instead of dis- 

 solving, the alliance continued to live, and to take to itself 

 entirely new objects and ideals in accordance with the chang- 

 ing political conditions in Europe. Now because these new 

 ideas seemed to be in harmony with the vague ideas expressed 

 in the Czar's Christian Family Compact of September 26, 1815, 

 the alliance took shelter under the wing of that forgotten 

 association, and borrowing its title, which, to the zealous 

 monarchs appeared a good one, plumed itself the " Holy 

 Alliance." 



Napoleon had stood before the world as an exponent of 

 liberal ideas, notwithstanding the fact that he filled the 

 thrones of Europe with his relatives and created himself 

 Emperor of France. Upon his final defeat and exile, a re- 

 vival of absolutism set in throughout Europe, except, per- 

 haps, in England, where liberal ideas had gained too firm a 

 footing ever to be uprooted by the mere changing tides of 

 popular sentiment. In France, the same people, who fifteen 

 or twenty years before had idolized Benjamin Franklin, the 

 apostle of democracy, and who had followed Napoleon in his 

 march against absolutism, now welcomed the restoration of 

 the Bourbons with wild acclaim. 



