Poles, and thus, by re-establishing a Polish kingdom
under Austrian influence, to restore the barrier between the two empires
which the partition of Poland had destroyed. But cautious counsels
prevailed, and by the victory of the Russian arms the _status quo_ was
restored (see POLAND).

[Sidenote: Ferdinand I. 1835-1848.]

The years that followed were not wanting in signs of the coming storm. On
the 2nd of March 1835 Francis I. died, and was succeeded by his son
Ferdinand I. The new emperor was personally amiable, but so enfeebled by
epilepsy as to be incapable of ruling; a veiled regency had to be
constituted to carry on the government, and the vices of the administration
were further accentuated by weakness and divided counsels at the centre.
Under these circumstances [v.03 p.0014] popular discontent made rapid
headway. The earliest symptoms of political agitation were in Hungary,
where the diet began to show signs of vigorous life, and the growing Slav
separatist movements, especially in the south of the kingdom, were rousing
the old spirit of Magyar ascendancy (see HUNGARY: _History_). For
everywhere the Slav populations were growing restive under the
German-Magyar domination. In Bohemia the Czech literary movement had
developed into an organized resistance to the established order, which was
attacked under the disguise of a criticism of the English administration in
Ireland. "Repeal" became the watchword of Bohemian, as of Irish,
nationalists (see BOHEMIA). Among the southern Slavs the "Illyrian"
movement, voiced from 1836 onward in the _Illyrian National Gazette_ of
Ljudevit Gaj, was directed in the first instance to a somewhat shadowy
Pan-Slav union, which, on the interference of the Austrian government in
1844, was exchanged for the more definite object of a revival of "the
Triune Kingdom" (Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia) independent of the Hungarian
crown (see CROATIA, &c.). In the German provinces also, in spite of
Metternich's censors and police, the national movements in Germany had
gained an entrance, and, as the revolution of 1848 in Vienna was to show,
the most advanced revolutionary views were making headway.

[Sidenote: Galician Rising, 1846.]

The most important of all the symptoms of the approaching cataclysm was,
however, the growing unrest among the peasants. As had been proved in
France in 1789, and was again to be shown in Russia in 1906, the success of
any political revolution depended ultimatel