Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/264

254 lived upon the capital placed at her disposal by incessant insurrections and revolutions, without troubling herself with sowing the seed of morality on a soil now almost exhausted. The situation of Austria, in face of its revolution, was, according to M. Ficquelmont, entirely of a different kind. It had been brought into such a position by purely material causes. It was a revolution of weakness. There was a super-abundance of vitality to which the social state gave no employment, and which was cast back upon itself by the languor of a political system, which not only rejected all active measures, but applauded political inactivity as a virtuous moderation. No one was desirous of power. Princes, ministers, and nobles, alike agreed in preferring privacy to the active support of the throne. The signs which were given of change in every direction were seen, but none wished to compromise themselves by early manifestations of mistrust or defence. An almost idolatrous worship of the monarchical principle, permitted none to imagine even that it was possible to fortify sovereign power, unless the initiative came from the sovereign himself. A well-organised administration occupied and filled efficiently all the lower regions. But a want was felt, where superior minds should have been to give movement and direction. The movements of that administration were like a galvanic operation performed on a body whose vital principle was inactive. Those who said they were going to inspire it with a new life, easily carried others along with them; for this body only asked to regain, no matter in what way, the sentiment of self-being which it had lost. The dead who regains life does not ask upon what conditions. Thus, while the revolutions of great states are usually accomplished by the disputes of princes, ministers, or factions for power, the revolution of Vienna took place because there was no one to govern. To believe M. Ficquelmont, such a state of things necessarily imparted also to external politics the same character of negation that belonged to the interior. Everything was reduced to mere appearances. The idea became common throughout Europe, that there only remained the appearance of an empire, easy to tumble down, and still more easy to despoil. This opinion added to the difficulties of the political position of Austria, which only found, among the powers that were not hostile to her, that kind of feeling which is entertained towards a friend whom we look upon as lost. It was thus only within itself that the Austrian empire could seek and find the force necessary to restore confidence to such of her subjects as remained faithful to her, to subject those that were in rebellion, to triumph over external enemies, and to regain its political rank in Europe.

It is unnecessary to follow M. Ficquelmont in the details of the events of 1848 and 1849, viewed in the light imparted to those details by reflection from the Austrian cabinet itself. The minister compares the organisation of the Austrian army to that of the English army in India, which, after defeating its most bellicose opponents, the Sikhs, incorporated a number of them in its own ranks. This is not very complimentary to the European populations, Italian, Hungarian, and Slavonian, that were in arms against Austrian bureaucracy. In the half-civilised East, it is only through the medium of the Anglo-Indian army, that the semi-barbarous Orientals acquire those notions of order and of justice to which they were before utter strangers, and become initiated into the feeling of re-