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586 them by some five or six thousand men. War has very rarely been conducted on the scale that is known in 1866. Even the greatest of the engagements in our civil contest seem to shrink to small proportions when compared with what took place last summer in Bohemia. The armies of Grant and Lee, in May, 1864, probably were not larger than the Prussian army at Sadowa. At the same time, Austria had a great force in Venetia, and large bodies of men in other parts of her empire, and some in the territory of the Germanic Confederation; and the Prussians were carrying on vigorous warfare in various parts of Germany.

After their grand victory, the Prussians pushed rapidly forward toward Vienna; and names that are common in the history of Napoleon's Austrian campaigns began to appear in the daily journals,—Olmütz, Brünn, Znaym, Austerlitz, and others. Nothing occurred to stay their march, and they were in the very act of winning another battle which would have cut the Austrians off from Hungary, when an armistice was agreed upon. It was so in 1809, when the officers had to separate the soldiers to announce the armistice of Znaym. It came out soon after that the cessation of warlike operations took place not a day too soon for the Austrians, whose army was in a fearfully demoralized condition. Vienna would have been occupied in a week by the Prussians, had they been disposed to push matters to extremities, and that without a battle; or, if a battle had been fought, the Austrian force must have been destroyed, or would have been literally cut off from any safe line of retreat. Probably the house of Austria would have been struck out of the list of ruling families, had the Austrians not submitted to the invaders. Count Bismark is a man who would have had no hesitation in reviving the Bohemian and Hungarian monarchies, had further resistance been made to his will. The armistice was quickly followed by negotiations, and those were completed on the 23d of August, exactly seventy days after the Diet, at the dictation of Austria, had given up Prussia to punishment, to be inflicted by the Austrian sword.

The terms of the treaty of peace are moderate; but it should be understood that what Austria loses is very inadequately expressed by these terms, and what Prussia gains not at all; and what Prussia gains at the expense of Austria, important as it is, is less important than what she has gained from France. From Austria she has taken the first place in Germany; from France, the first place in Europe, which is the same thing as the first place in Christendom, or the world,—meaning by the world that portion of mankind which has power and influence and leadership, because of its knowledge, culture, and wealth. The moral blow falls with greater severity on France than on Austria. Austria had no right whatever to the first place in Germany. There was something monstrous, something highly offensive, in the Germanic primacy of an empire made up of Magyars, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Slavonians, Croats, Illyrians, and other races, and not above a fourth of whose inhabitants were Germans. Prussia had in June last twice as many Germans as Austria, though her entire population was not much more than half as large as that of her rival;