nationality or the wishes of the peoples of Europe but
according to what was called "legitimacy," that is to say, the interests
of the princes. There was only one idealist at the Conference, the Russian
Emperor Alexander, and he was put off with empty phrases.

[Illustration: Germany of 1815.]

For Germany the result of the Conference was the reestablishment, in
smaller numbers and with larger units of territory, of the old undemocratic
principalities, and of a Confederation embodying their dynastic interests.
Several of the larger States, such as Bavaria, Wuertemberg, Saxony, and
Hanover, which Napoleon had raised to the status of kingdoms, were
confirmed in their new dignities, and the kingdom of Prussia, the largest
of them all, acquired, out of the debris of the old Archbishopric of
Cologne and other small ecclesiastical and temporal States, the important
provinces of Westphalia and the Rhineland, which have made possible for
her the industrial growth of the last half century. Cologne, Duesseldorf,
Elberfeld, Essen, and other great industrial centres of Western Germany
will next year be celebrating the centenary of their Prussian connection.
But the chief State in the Confederation and its undisputed head was
Austria, which had for centuries enjoyed the prestige of supremacy over the
German States; and it was the Austrian statesman Metternich who was mainly
responsible for the Vienna settlement.

The German Confederation of 1815-1866 went far outside the boundaries of
modern Germany. It included lands belonging to three non-German monarchs.
The King of Holland was a member of it in virtue of the Dutch provinces of
Limburg and Luxemburg; the King of Denmark for the Duchies of Schleswig and
Holstein; and the Emperor of Austria (who, then as now, ruled over Hungary,
Austrian Poland, and the Southern Slav provinces) for Bohemia, Moravia, and
German-speaking Austria up to and beyond Vienna. The Confederation was in
fact in no sense a national State, and was never intended to be so. It was
a loosely knit assortment of principalities and free cities. Germany
was still broken up and divided in a manner almost inconceivable to the
inhabitants of an old-established unity like Great Britain or France. At
least five different kinds of money, for instance, were in use in the
different States of the Confederation, and, as stamp-collectors know, the
postal system was bewildering in its complexity. More important was
the deep gul