which astonished the contemporaries and the clever. The clever ones, the statesmen, who, at this troubled epoch of Europe, had still preserved enough liberal spirit to cast their eyes toward the Danube,—Lord Palmerston among others,—remained for a long time incredulous, and endeavored to divine the reward paid for the aid that was lent. Should not the czar retain Galicia as a recompense for his assistance? Would he not procure some positive assurance from the side of the Principalities? was asked in the offices of Downing Street. Nothing of the sort happened, however. The Russians left Austria without a reward, as they had entered it without an arrière-pensée, and the troops of Paskévitch evacuated the country of the Carpathians unladen with booty. A young and ardent orator in the Prussian chambers, with the name (as yet but little known) de Bismarck,—the same who fifteen years later was to project striking a coup au cœur and arming the legions of Klapka,—admired at this moment the brilliant action of the czar, and only expressed the patriotic regret that this magnanimous rôle had not fallen to his own country, to Prussia. It was for Prussia to bring assistance to its elder brother in Germany, to "its former comrade in arms."[8] But it is allowable to suppose that, even with a king as loyal and poetic as Frederick William IV., affairs would have been conducted much less handsomely than with the barbarian of the North, and that similar aid from Prussia would have cost the empire of Hapsburg a part of Silesia or a part of its influence on the Main.

Shall we say, then, that in intervening in Hungary the Emperor of Russia acted from pure chivalry and platonic friendship, that he had no thought of personal interest and the good of his empire? Certainly not; and the czar had too much loyalty not to avow it frankly. He intervened in Hungary, not only as the friend of the Hapsburg, not only as the defender of the cause of order against cosmopolitan revolution; the most powerful motive in deciding him was the presence in the Hungarian army of Polish generals and officers, who intended to carry the war into the countries subjected to Russian rule. In his manifest of the 8th May, 1849, Nicholas expressed himself as follows: "The insurrection sustained by the influence of our traitors from Poland, of the year 1831, has given to the Hungarian revolt an extension more and more menacing.... His majesty, the Emperor of Austria, has invited us to assist against the common enemy.... We have ordered our army under way to quell the revolt, and to destroy the audacious anarchists, who equally menace the tranquillity of our provinces." The language was clear and frank, as was fitting for a sovereign preserving the consciousness of his dignity. This sovereign intended to render himself a service as well as his ally. He was going to stifle in his neighbors' territory an incendiary fire which threatened to harm his own domains; and in the act of intervening, let it be well understood, he at the same time acted in self-preservation.

Well! it seems according to all justice that the gratitude should correspond to the service rendered, and that the law of preservation, the supreme law of nature, should have equal force for the party under obligations as for the benefactor. There is no policy in the world, were it even taken from Holy Writ which could advise voluntary servitude; there is no doctrine, however sublime one wishes to imagine it, which, among the duties of the confession, recommends suicide. Now, it was nothing less than absolute subjection, the ruin of its personality as a great European State, which the Russians demanded of Austria in demanding its assent to their pretensions against the Orient. By geography, by the spirit of races, by religion, the Russian enterprises would strike a mortal blow at the empire of the Hapsburg, if this empire allowed them to triumph. A Danubian power, Austria should take care that the Lower Danube remained neutral, and that it should not fall into the hands of a powerful neighbor, who would then become master of this great river. A Sclavic power in its Oriental provinces, it ought to guard against being placed in immediate contact with an empire pan-Sclavic by tradition and by fatality, and it could not wish it to be planted in the Principalities, in Bosnia and Herzegovania. A Catholic power, it was forbidden to recognize the influence and the protectorate which the orthodox czar claimed over the Christians of the Grecian rite, of whom it counted several millions among its subjects. "My conduct in the question of the Orient! Why it is written on a map?" said Count Buol, to his brother-in-law, M. de Meyendorf, the Russian ambassador. He added that it was also written in history. "I have made no innovation. I have only inherited the political legacy of M. de Metternich."

In fact, in a previous crisis, at the time of the Hellenic insurrection and the war of 1828, the grand chancellor of the court and of the empire had defended this principle of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire with a firmness which nothing could disturb. During eight years he had defended it, braving the storm alone, not allowing himself to be discouraged either by the unpopularity then attaching to the Turkish cause or by the desertion of France. Why should the Russians hope that Austria would now desert this principle so vital for her, that she would desert it at the very moment when it commenced to triumph over the indifference of the Occident, and counted France and England among its most earnest champions?

Placed between a sentiment of gratitude very lively and real, as we have said, and a great political necessity, the government of Vienna has certainly done for gratitude all that it owed. It lavished warnings, prayers, good offices, offers of mediation on the Emperor Nicholas. Austria pardoned Russia more than one want of respect, more than one action of ill humor; it pardoned her the more than airy tone in which it had been disposed of in the effusions with Sir Hamilton Seymour,—the manner in which a certain autograph letter of the Emperor Francis Joseph had been received at St. Petersburg,—the haughty, almost insulting attitude of Count Orlof during his mission at Vienna. It did not cease till the end to calm the irritation of the allies, to modify and alter their programme, to assert the conciliating disposition of the czar, to hope against all hope. It pleaded only for the return in statu quo, repudiating any idea of humiliating or weakening Russia; it demanded nothing from her but the freedom of the Danube, the renunciation of the protectorate, and refused to follow the allies in their demands concerning the Black Sea. Unfortunately, as it happens too often to him who wishes to be equitable and just towards all parties, the Austrian government, by this conduct, ended by alienating France and England and exasperating the Russians. In the summer of 1854, at the very moment when Prince Gortchakof exchanged his post at Frankfort for that at Vienna, an eminent publicist, who was then, so to speak, the mouth-piece of the Occident, and of its generous spirits, almost despaired of Austria, and cried with bitterness that over there, in the Burg, "the Russian alliance was something as sacred as a religion, as fixed as propriety, and as popular as a fashion!" In the spring of the following year, the cabinets of Paris and of London resisted, as too favorable to Russia, a new plan of arrangement presented by Count Buol, and the French government on this occasion reproached Austria, in the "Moniteur