n to power of the despotic Bonapartist empire, whence issued
the revival of the nationalistic theory, leading on one side to
revolution, on the other to conservative resistance and the supremacy
of a warlike state like Prussia. We need go no further for the
determining cause of the two sovereign influences! Cavour and
Bismarck, the two men who predominate our half century, spring from a
common necessity, and in reality emerge from the conference of 1856,
misnamed the "Crimean Race!"

"I was the egg," the chancellor was wont to say, "whence my royal
master foresaw that unity might perhaps be hatched;" and on Orsini's
scaffold the Piedmontese seer knew full well that the Corsican
Carbonaro could not elude the fate lying in wait for him, disguised in
the freedom of Italy. You can dissever none of these facts one from
the other, and we now approach the "one man principle." The
protagonists stand face to face, rather than side by side, but both
are equally the unconscious promoters of that antagonism between
Germany and France which, in fact, has shaped, and still shapes, the
whole policy of Europe.

From this single grand outline, all the minor lines either start, or
towards it tend, indirectly, in convergent curves.

From the vast system formed by the monster-questions--United Germany,
the Latin races, the East, the future of catholicism and the papacy,
the strife of liberty against despotism--from all these parent
problems you can detach none of the smaller incidents of the age; you
are obliged to take count of the little Danish Campaign, which taught
Prussia those deficiencies, impelling her directly to the attainment
of her future military omnipotence, and which, under the abortive
attempts of the Saxon minister, M. de Beust,* gave a timid reminder to
Germany of what her unity had been and might once again be. Each
incident, however local or however remote, formed a feature of the
whole; between 1854 and 1870, you cannot ignore the would-be secession
of the Southern Confederates, which ended in making "all America" the
counterpoise to our older world--neither dare you neglect the Indian
meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory,
and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the
Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in
quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with
dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine