It should be carefully noted that these were the very cases which caused
most of the political troubles in the following period. In fact, most of
the political occurrences on the Continent in the years 1815 to
1870--the revolts, revolutions, and wars, that give a special character
to the history of the century--resulted directly from the bad or
imperfect arrangements of the Congress of Vienna and of the so-called
Holy Alliance of the monarchs who sought to perpetuate them. The effect
of this widespread discontent was not felt at once. The peoples were too
exhausted by the terrific strain of the Napoleonic wars to do much for a
generation or more, save in times of popular excitement. Except in the
south-east of Europe, where Greece, with the aid of Russia, Britain, and
France, wrested her political independence from the grasp of the Sultan
(1827), the forty years that succeeded Waterloo were broken by no
important war; but they were marked by oft-recurring unrest and
sedition. Thus, when the French Revolution of 1830 overthrew the
reactionary dynasty of the elder Bourbons, the universal excitement
caused by this event endowed the Belgians with strength sufficient to
shake off the heavy yoke of the Dutch; while in Italy, Germany, and
Poland the democrats and nationalists (now working generally in accord)
made valiant but unsuccessful efforts to achieve their ideals.

The same was the case in 1848. The excitement, which this time
originated in Italy, spread to France, overthrew the throne of Louis
Philippe (of the younger branch of the French Bourbons), and bade fair
to roll half of the crowns of Europe into the gutter. But these
spasmodic efforts of the democrats speedily failed. Inexperience,
disunion, and jealousy paralysed their actions and yielded the victory
to the old Governments. Frenchmen, in dismay at the seeming approach of
communism and anarchy, fell back upon the odd expedient of a Napoleonic
Republic, which in 1852 was easily changed by Louis Napoleon into an