Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/151

 structive European statesmen of the nineteenth century, Bismarck and Cavour, were both the children of Waterloo.

All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing the château gates! Yet more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and insidious radicalisms. Lassalle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier, Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of Repression's jail.