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 overthrown in 1848. Queen Isabella was deposed in 1868. Her son, Alfonso XII., married his cousin Princess Mercedes Montpensier. She died, not without suspicions of poisoning, within a year of her marriage; and he died, while still quite a young man, before the birth of his only son by his second marriage. Before the accession of Alfonso XII., the question of a successor to Queen Isabella was the proximate cause of the French and German War of 1870-71.

Cobden, travelling in France very shortly before the outbreak of 1848, saw nothing which led him to expect any political disturbance; he believed the future to promise nothing but tranquillity and commercial development, and that Free Trade spelt "peace on earth."

Stockmar was a Free Trader too, but he had learnt that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. He did not look for spiritual results from purely material causes; and perhaps his vantage-ground on what he called the watch-tower of London, or even his position at the "hole in the stove" in Coburg, enabled him to gauge more correctly than Cobden the political forces of the time. He had foreseen the outbreak of revolution, as the result to be expected from despotism and bad government on the Continent, added to the misery and destitution of the great masses of the people. The storm of 1848 did not find him unprepared; and in England and Belgium, where the principles of constitutionalism, as understood and taught by him, had taken firm hold, were almost the only countries in Europe where revolution did not get the upper hand.

But although this was so, 1848 was a sufficiently serious time in England. In Ireland the misery of the people had amounted to actual famine, and not-