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 The Tsar held the balance, and it was upset when a series of more or less revolutionary manifestations in Germany and elsewhere, followed by a mutiny of his own Guards in 18:20, perverted Alexander to the reactionary cause and threw him into the arms of Metternich. A schism among the Great Powers appeared at the Congress of Troppau in 1820 and was widened at that of Verona in 1823. France developed a disinclination to see reaction re-established in Italy by Austrian arms, and Great Britain to seeing it re-established in Spain (and still more in the Spanish American Colonies) by French arms. On that question Canning broke away from the Quintuple Alliance and sought the support of President Monroe; and a New World was called in to redress the balance of the Old. The French Revolution of 1830 finally severed France from the cause of reaction, and the Quintuple Alliance was thus reduced to a Triple Alliance of the three autocrats of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, who had signed the original Holy Alliance. This tended to create and perpetuate the confusion between the two Alliances, and to saddle British statesmen like Castlereagh, who made the Quadruple Alliance, with the odium of reaction attaching to the Holy Alliance which they refused to join.

Shorn of the Liberal elements in their coalition, the three autocracies continued to repress reform and thus to provoke revolution until the general conflagration of 1848. Their conduct made the