The Holy Alliance, therefore, soon assumed the character of a “Trust” of absolute monarchs, determined to aid each other when threatened by risings or agitations among their peoples, and to crush liberal aspirations wherever they were to be found in other parts of Europe.  The popular desire for peace was exploited in the interests of unpopular government; settlement by conference in regard to international matters was extended to settlement by a cabal of irresponsible crowned heads in regard to internal constitutional and national questions; a clique of despots threatened the liberties of the world and proposed to back up their decisions by using their armies as police.  One government, however, even in that period of reaction, refused to lend its countenance to such proceedings.  England at first protested and at length took up an attitude of complete opposition, and it is due to her that the Confederation never became really effective.  She had to choose between peace and liberty, and she chose the latter.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See Alison Phillips, The Confederation of Europe, together with his chapter on “The Congresses, 1815-1822” in vol. x. of the Cambridge Modern History.  The whole subject of the Concert of Europe, which can only be touched upon here, is of great importance.  It is again referred to in Chap.  VIII.; see pp. 374 ff.]

The truth is that there were three ideas in the air at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all excellent in themselves, but quite impossible to be realised at one and the same period.  Two of these, the social or democratic idea and the national idea, were made, as we have seen, living issues by the French Revolution; the third, which may be called the international idea, was raised by the Congress of Vienna.  It was an old idea, of course, for it had been embodied in that shadowy “Holy Roman Empire” which was the medieval dream of Rome the Great; but its form was new, and now for the first time it became a dream of the future rather than a dream of the past.  What men did not see then, and still for the most part fail to see, is that the human race can only work out these three ideas properly in a certain order.  Democracy and nationhood may, as in the case of Italy, be acquired by a people at the same moment; but without the realisation of the national idea it is hardly possible to conceive of democratic government for any country.  The national idea, therefore, precedes the social idea, as Mazzini rightly insists.  Still more must it precede the international idea.  By this it is not meant that every nation in the world must have grown to self-consciousness and have possessed itself of freedom before we come within sight of a world-concert and world-peace.  But certainly in Europe itself the national question had to be settled before there could be any chance of establishing an international tribunal.  It is equally certain that the social idea also claims preference of the