“Are the German sovereigns of your opinion?”

“To a man.  It is but this morning that I was honoured with a reception by our good emperor.  His conviction was complete.  But you will not see Austria stir a single step, until war is the outcry, not of her court, but of her people.  The trumpet that leads the march will be blown not from the parade of Vienna or Berlin, but from the village, the pasture, the forest, and the mountain.  The army will be the peasant, the weaver, the trader, the student, the whole of the pacific multitude of life turned into the materials of war; the ten thousand rills that silently water the plain of society suddenly united into one inundation; the eyes of every man looking only for the enemy; the feet of every man pursuing him; the hands of every man slaying him.  The insolence of the Frenchman has contrived to convey a sting of the bitterness of conquest into every heart of our millions, and our millions will return it with resistless retribution.”

“You have cheered and convinced me,” said I, as I rose to take my leave.  “It certainly is rather strange, that France, always mad with the love of seizure, has been able to acquire nothing during the last hundred years.”

“You will find my theory true,” said Gentz.  “The individual insolence of her people has been the real impediment to the increase of her dominions.  She is not the only ambitious power on the face of the earth.  Russia has doubled her empire within those hundred years, yet she has kept possession of every league.  Prussia has doubled her territory within the same time, yet she has added the new solidly to the old.  I am not an advocate for the principle or the means by which those conquests have been accomplished; but they have been retained.  Austria has been for the same time nearly mistress of Italy, and though the French arms have partially shaken her authority, it was never shaken by popular revolt.  And why is all this contradistinction to the flighty conquest and ephemeral possession of France?  The obvious reason is, that however the governments might be disliked, neither the Austrian soldier, nor the Prussian, nor even the Russian, made himself abhorred, employed his study in vexing the feelings of the people, had a perpetual sneer on his visage, or exhibited in his habits a perpetual affectation of that coxcomb superiority to all other human beings, that pert supremacy, that grotesque and yet irritating caricature, which makes the Moi, je suis Francais, a demand for universal adoration, the concentrated essence of absurdity, the poison-drop of scorn.

“When will this great consummation arrive?”

“When the tyranny can be endured no longer; when the people find that they must depend upon themselves for its redress; when a just Providence finds the vindication of its laws required by the necessities of man.”

“From what quarter will the grand effort first come?”

“From the nation most aggrieved.”