and his energetic labors in behalf of literature, educational institutions, freer political conditions, etc.; but when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, the Russian ruler, wearied with great events and dreading revolutionary tendencies, changed his opinions, and was now leagued with the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria in supporting the most stringent measures against all reformers.  Sand was a theological student in the University of Jena, who thought he was doing God’s service by removing from the earth with his assassin’s dagger a vile wretch employed by the Russian tyrant to propagate views which mocked the loftiest aspirations of mankind.  The murder of Kotzebue created an immense sensation throughout Europe, and was followed by increased rigor on the part of all despotic governments in muzzling the press, in the suppression of public meetings of every sort, and especially in expelling from the universities both students and professors who were known or even supposed to entertain liberal ideas.  Metternich went so far as to write a letter to the King of Prussia urging him to disband the gymnasia, as hotbeds of mischief.  His influence on this monarch was still further seen in dissuading him to withhold the constitution promised his subjects during the war of liberation.  He regarded the meeting of a general representation of the nation as scarcely less evil than democratic violence, and his hatred of constitutional checks on a king was as great as of intellectual independence in a professor at a gymnasium.  Universities and constituent assemblies, to him, were equally fatal to undisturbed peace and stability in government.

In the midst of these efforts to suppress throughout Germany all agitating political ideas and movements, the news arrived of the revolution in Naples, July, 1820, effected by the Carbonari, by which the king was compelled to restore the constitution of 1813, or abdicate.  Metternich lost no time in assembling the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, with their principal ministers, to a conference or congress at Troppau, with a view of putting down the insurrection by armed intervention.  The result is well known.  The armies of Austria and Russia—­170,000 men—­restored the Neapolitan tyrant to his throne; while he, on his part, revoked the constitution he had sworn to defend, and affairs at Naples became worse than they were before.  In no country in the world was there a more execrable despotism than that exercised by the Bourbon Ferdinand.  The prisons were filled with political prisoners; and these prisons were filthy, without ventilation, so noisome and pestilential that even physicians dared not enter them; while the wretched prisoners, mostly men of culture, chained to the most abandoned and desperate murderers and thieves, dragged out their weary lives without trial and without hope.  And this was what the king, supported and endorsed by Metternich, considered good government to be.