of Westphalia. But what was possible two hundred years ago might
be found impossible to-day. Russia had no existence as a European power
in those days, whereas now she has one of the highest places in Europe,
and a very peculiar interest in not allowing Austria, or any other
nation, to obtain possession of countries like the Roumanian
Principalities, the addition of which to his empire might afford
compensation to Francis Joseph for all he has lost in the south and the
west. It is one of the infelicities of Austria's position that she
cannot make a movement in any direction without treading on the toes of
some giant, or on those of a dwarf protected by some giant who who
intends himself ultimately to devour him.

[32] Prussia, the most thoroughly anti-Gallican of all the parties to
the Treaty of Vienna, completed the work of overthrowing the "detested"
arrangements made by the framers of that treaty. The federal act
creating the Germanic Confederation was incorporated in the work of the
Congress of Vienna, and was guaranteed by eight European
powers,--France, England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and
Portugal. Prussia destroyed the Confederation without troubling herself
about the wishes and opinions of the other seven parties to the
arrangement of 1815. That all those parties to that arrangement were not
always indifferent to their guaranty appears from the opposition made by
Russia, France, and England to Prince Schwarzenburg's proposition, that
Austria should be allowed to introduce all her non-Germanic territories
into the Confederation, that is to say, that the _Austrian Empire_,
which then included the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, should become a part
of Germany, which it would soon have ruled, as well as overruled, while
it would have extended its dominion over Italy. Had Schwarzenburg's
project succeeded, the course of European events during the last sixteen
years must have been entirely changed, or Austria would have been made
too strong to be harmed by the French in Italy, or by the Prussians in
Germany and Bohemia. Russia was specially adverse to that project; and
the Treaty of Vienna was forcibly appealed to by her government in
opposing it. The time had not then come for making waste-paper of the
arrangements of 1815.

* * * * *

RECONSTRUCTION.

The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress may
very properly be made the occasion of a few ea