Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/52

 Personal government in France. 10 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF lt53 chap. The change suddenly undergone by France in ' the winter of 1851 must be shown by-and-by, and its effect upon the peace of Europe will be found to correspond but too closely with what we have last been saying ; but the period now spoken of is one some months anterior to the night of the 2d December, and it was not yet possible in France, any more than in England, that a war should be all at once undertaken by the Executive Government without the approval of Parliament and of the nation at large. Still, the President Louis Napoleon could even then do acts which tended to breed up causes of quarrel between European States ; and we shall see him exerting his power. in Russia. The power of All the Russias was centred in the Emperor, and it chanced that the qualities of Nicholas were of such a kind as to enable him to give a literal truth to the theory that he, and he alone, was the State. in Austria. In Austria the disasters of 1848 had broken the custom of government, and placed a kind of dic- tatorship in the hands of the youthful Emperor. And although before the summer of 1853 the traditions of the State had regained a great deal of their force, still for a time the recovery was not so plainly evidenced as to compel an unwilling man to see it ; and the notion that the great empire of the Danube had merged in the mere wishes of Francis Joseph lingered always in the mind of the Czar, and drew him on into danger. iu Prussia. Even in Prussia, though the countrv seemed to