presses are on that instant seized. Let the writer of a book pretend to an opinion of his own on political questions, and his sheets are as good as burned by the public hangman. He may say what he pleases on indifferent matters, may be violent in his Hegelianism or Anti-Hegelianism, may write sentimental poetry, or pleasant tales of no significance, may recount his travels in other lands, or fill the world with learning about Greece and Rome, or the antiquities of Egypt; he may, too, discuss some doctrines of religion, to the extent of Straussian infidelity, but let him beware how he approaches any political subject! The excellent Gervinus is, at this hour, under arrest, for philosophizing democratically in his prolusions on History. Politics are the ark of the covenant, which no common man can touch and live; it is the holy of holies, for ever tabooed to all but the initiated priesthood; it is the high, sacred, indefeasible, inviolable prerogative of the state!

(5.) Yes: the state is all in all in education; and, what is worse, and another of the means by which the people are degraded into mere subjects, the state seeks to become the all in all in nearly every other interest of life. Its aim is to render them wholly dependent upon itself, by keeping them in a position of perpetual pupilage, where they are discharged of every sense of personal responsibility, and deprived like slaves of nearly every motive to personal advancement. Said an official at Vienna to us, when we spoke with some severity of the detestable stringency of the police regulations: "It is true, we deny the people any political life; but then, as a compensation, we take such good care of them in every other respect." "Ah, friend," we replied, "it is precisely in that meddling and officious care that we freemen detect one of your most subtle and devilish devices." He stared, and we proceeded: "You are well aware that every exercise of his rights as a man, by a man, suggests the exercise of others, and therefore you sedulously separate him from every act and business which trains his free agency. You do all that you can for him, in order that he may do as little as he can for himself. Beyond that rudimentary use of his powers, which is necessary to the carrying on of the humbler trades and occupations, you discourage every exertion of his natural and acquired endowments, which might teach him selfreliance, or elevate his consciousness as a man. Beginning with him in his cradle, you hardly let him alone for a moment, never abandoning him to his own resources or the invaluable discipline of cir

cumstances; you fit him with his education, religion, politics, business, amusements, and what not, as an idiot is fitted with a strait-jacket. His individual existence is swamped and smothered in the multitude of his appliances. The government takes the conduct of life out of his hands, leaving him few motives to the exercise of his sagacity, enterprise, self-dependence, or social duty, so that to the end of his days he remains a vassal. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, men of strong original natures, who rise above the disadvantages of their station, but the pliable part of these are immediately seduced over to the side of power, by offers of official distinction and employment, and the rest are branded with the mark of Cain." When we had closed, our Vienna friend had nothing to reply as to the benignant and paternal character of his intermeddling government.

How could he reply, with the stupendous usurpations of government, not in Austria alone, but all over Europe, staring him in the face? He knew very well that he himself had no religion but what the state allowed him, no education but what the state had furnished, no business but what the state had authorized, no liberty to move hither and thither, except as the state should give him a written permit. He looked to the state for the initiation of every measure and thought, and for the means of getting on in every line of life. All the avenues to success were closed to him until they might be opened by favor of the government. The army, the navy, the church, the law, the professorships, even the humbler situations of schoolmaster, bridge-contractor, courier or postilion, were gifts in the possession of his rulers, and neither he nor his sons could lift a hand to break stones upon the highway until the government had clapped its livery upon his or their shoulders, to show the world that they were the servants of the state.

The consequences of this policy are the depression of enterprise, the discouragement of social ambition, the aggrandizement of the ruling classes, and the generation on the part of the people of a feeling of utter dependence and subserviency, which paralyzes their energies, destroys their self-respect, enfeebles the springs of virtue, and withers and blights the impulses of hope. No one is surprised, therefore, in travelling over Europe, to find, in passing from an absolute to a constitutional country, that the aspect and condition of the inhabitants changes at once. Where the pursuits of commerce and manufactures are comparatively open; where places and emoluments are not utterly removed

from reach; where the means of rising to wealth and distinction are not sedulously set round with barriers; where there are other passports to official or social eminence than the smiles of ministers; where industry, character, usefulness, talent have a chance to reap their just rewards in practical successes and the affections of mankind, the whole tone of the community is exalted, the intellect grows brighter and sharper, the energies more vigorous, the virtues manlier, and Nature herself, casting off her sickly languor, shines with new beauty and laughs with joy.

(6) Of course, it is necessary for the European powers in maintaining this watchful guardianship over every interest and motion of society, to keep in operation a most comprehensive, rigid, and unrelenting system of police, whose agents are to be found in every city and village, and almost in every house.

They are more plentiful than the frogs which came upon Egypt, as one of the plagues, and like the frogs, too, they hop and croak through the very kneading-troughs. But they are unlike in one respect, which gives them an immeasurable superiority, as a means of malignant annoyance and abuse; in that they are the most thoroughly organized body in the world,-more compact than the church, and more controllable than the army. The police, with a single efficient head in the capital of a nation, ramified into innumerable subordinate centres, from which lines of communication and circumvallation are spread, like the threads of a spider's web, constitute a vast, consistent, and irresistible machinery, which is every where present with an intelligent and conscious purpose, and yet which works with the terrible precision of a fate. As an open, recognized department of the state, overseeing every thing, examining every thing, minuting every thing, its powers of control are tremendous; a relay of telegraphs, it reports from the most distant parts of an empire the approaches of danger, and then, again, a battalion of cohorts, it rushes to the scene with impetuous velocity, to extinguish the least symptom of trouble. But there is a secret wing of the service, the dread bands of the Espionage, unknown to the public and unknown to themselves, which imparts a mysterious ubiquity and a tenfold effectiveness to its power. There is a fine passage in Gibbon, quoted by De Quincy, in his Cæsars, in which, describing the reach as well as the intensity of the Roman Imperial power, he speaks of the impossibility of an offending subject escaping punishment. If he fled to the wilderness, it pursued him there; it tracked him over the pathless waters of the sea, and in the VOL. I.-28

heart of populous cities, often the most secure and lonely of hiding-places, its eye penetrated his concealment, or its hand snatched him from the throng. Thus all parts of the earth became to him only so many wards of an immense prison.

The secret police of Europe achieves a similar abhorrent universality. Its forces, composed of some of the highest dignitaries, as well as the most wretched creatures of every class and calling,-women of rank and waiters in the cafés, the clerks in shops, the domestics about your table, and even the lowest frequenters of the gambling-houses and brothels, lurk every where, to eavesdrop, to waylay, to pervert, and to accuse. Your property, your freedom, your life itself hangs on their reports, and long years after the circumstances on which some temporary suspicion may have grown, the records of the secluded consistory-this modern Vehm-Gerichtwill rise up against you, like a book of judgment, and betray you to awful penalties. Your trial will be secret as the accusation is, and your fate will only be known to the sweet young family who miss you from the fireside, and the cherished friends that shall feel the warm greetings of your hand no more. Scarcely a prison-house in Europe, from the watery dungeons of Naples to the cold solitudes of Siberia, that does not hear the sighs of victims who have flitted away, in this silent manner, as if they had exhaled, or been carried bodily "from sunshine to the sunless land."

As an example of how this espionage is carried on, we were told last winter in Paris, that a lady of fashionable society, who proposed to give a ball, applied to the police for the usual patrol which attends on such occasions, to preserve order. and regulate the arrival and departure of carriages. The officer demanded six blank invitations, as a condition preliminary, which the lady of course refused. "Will you allow me, then, to look at the list of your guests," asked the man of the law, and when the lady's agent showed it to him, he replied with a smile, "Never mind about the blanks, there are already ten of our friends among the number of the invited." Thus, the creatures of the state manage to be at all public assemblies, as well as in almost every secret society. Where they cannot go themselves, the terror of them does, so that distrust and suspicion is often insinuated into the most friendly intercourse. "Profound silence or hypocritical subservice is the only safety," says Mr. Stiles, our former chargé at Vienna. "The very name of police," says another American, who lived long abroad, "is a word of terror, and the apprehension.

which it causes is equally felt by rich and poor. It is in every one's mouth; and the stranger is no less annoyed by its inquisitiveness regarding himself, than he is surprised at the lamblike submissiveness and fear which it universally inspires."

In times of popular disturbance or revolution, these agents are peculiarly serviceable to the state, in denouncing the leading men of the opposition for alleged crimes; in discovering the secret intentions of political clubs, or inventing them where none exists; in fomenting discords among the insurgents, to whom they profess to belong; in getting up pretences of plots for the massacre of certain citizens; and in creating disgust in the minds of moderate men, by menacing violence, or exaggerating the designs of republicans and socialists. More than half the bloody conspiracies with which the government papers teem, during heated political dissensions, are the pure invention of the police, who thereby frighten timid and conservative souls into reaction.

It has been no unusual thing for these mercenaries to irritate the working people into actual outbreak, or to gather numerous bands of felons, to commit violence and crimes, in order that the government might get the credit, in suppressing them, of having saved society from disorder and anarchy. Louis Napoleon has been a large dealer in this kind of salvation.

(7.) But no branch of this hidden surveillance is more execrable than that which exists in the post-offices of some of the despotic governments. Letters are supposed, even in semi-barbarous nations, to possess somewhat of a sacred and inviolable character, while among civilized men, they are like the confidential whispers of friend to friend, or the profoundest domestic communion of man and wife. There is many a villain who would eagerly rob a sanctuary, who would yet hesitate about breaking a seal. But what barbarians and rascals are loath to do, is a part of the regular machinery of government in despotic states. They force their subjects to intrust correspondence to their offices, and then pry into it to find motives for some petty persecution against their liberty and peace. What double atrocity! Mr. Stiles, in his work on Austria, where this infamous system is more systematically pursued than elsewhere, has a most interesting history of the practice. He says:

"The first regular post established in Central Europe, that of the Turn and Taxis,' was distinguished by such a system of espionage. The knowledge of the affairs of other governments, which the examination of the

correspondence between princes and generals afforded, most naturally suggested the importance of such an engine in matters of internal police; and in the Flemish intrigues, and the Milan conspiracies, in the time of Joseph the Second, it already appeared in full and successful operation.

"The "Turn and Taxis' post, which had its central bureau at Vienna, was presided over at first by a plenipotentiary secret counsellor,' and, under the reign of Joseph the Second, was connected with the police of the city, and with the most secret cabinet of the Emperor, and its operations brought to great perfection by his prime minister, Kaunitz.

"Later, it was called the 'Chiffre Cabinet,' and had its bureau in the Imperial Palace, in that portion of the building fronting the Joseph's Place, known as the 'Stallburg. The principal post in Vienna closed in the evening, most punctually, at seven o'clock, and the letter-bags apparently started off, but they were with great rapidity conveyed to the Chiffre Cabinet,' in the Stallburg.

"Here, by the assistance of a large number of clerks (who, composed of two sets, worked both night and day), the correspondence of ambassadors, bankers, foreign agents, and any letters calculated to exeite suspicion, were quickly selected from the mass, and with great circumspection opened, examined, and copied, a proceeding which lasted usually until midnight, but frequently until daylight, when the mail at length started in truth, upon its destination.

"The lives of the officers and clerks in this department must have been truly deplorable. Although well remunerated, they were, indeed, but little better than state prisoners. They were so strictly watched by the police, that the minutest matters of private conduct and character were familiarly known. How they lived, what they expended, where they went, who visited them and their families; in short, all that they said or did were matters with which the police was at all times perfectly cognizant.

"By the intense application necessary to the unravelling of diplomatic eiphers, and which was carried on with great success, many of their principal adepts lost their minds. But the most serious ills under which they labored, says the historian, were the injuries to conscience in the commission of perjury and forgery, which in the course of their duties they were not unfrequently compelled to undergo. Hormeyer, the able historian of Austria, and for a long time keeper of the Imperial archives in Vienna, after a quarrel with the Austrian officials, entered, in the same capacity, the service of Bavaria, and there, in his last works, written but a few years since, he exposes all the details of this iniquitous procedure, which, but for that circumstance, might have remained to this day undivulged.

"A correspondence, he relates, was carried on for the space of fourteen years, by the

Chiffre Cabinet, with a person in Bohemia, whose letters had afforded grounds for suspecting his loyalty. Assuming the name, and imitating the handwriting of his correspondent in Vienna, they pretended to approve his designs, encouraged him to a full disclosure of his plans, as well as accomplices, and when they were sufficiently divulged, which it seems took fourteen years to accomplish, the whole party were immediately seized and committed for trial.

"The letters were opened, and the seals instantly imitated with a skill that defied detection. The copies of all such correspondence, whose importance warranted the labor necessary in transcribing them, were by order of the Emperor Francis, laid upon his table each day at 7 o'clock, by which hour he returned from the morning mass, and the perusal of these documents, together with the reports of the secret police upon the foreign ambassadors and ministers, their indulgences, expenses, connections and transactions in the city, and which were also presented at the same hour, constituted, it is said, by far the most agreeable portion of his matinal exercises.

"What at first gave great importance to this proceeding-the examination of the mails was the extent of the system, that it embraced the entire bounds of the German Empire, and extended even to the Baltic Sea and to Ostend, limits within which no state or family secrets could possibly remain sacred. By it all the intrigues carried on in relation to the Spanish, Polish, and Swedish crowns were fully disclosed; but owing to the very importance and extent of these discoveries, they could not long remain concealed, and the correspondence between Russia and Prussia in regard to Poland in 1772 coming to light in this manner, led to the establishment of separate government mails and private couriers. To this day no foreign ambassador or minister to Vienna thinks for a moment of committing his dispatches to an Austrian post, but private couriers take charge of and convey their entire correspondence.

"But even these, as Hormeyer discloses, cannot be implicitly relied on. The Prussian couriers, he relates, as early as the reign of Joseph the Second were bribed for life. At the first post station near Pirna, upon the frontiers of Saxony and Austria, from its retired position being a suitable location, a small house was erected, and there a branch of the Chiffre cabinet was located. Upon the expected arrival of the Berlin couriers, they, with their dispatches, were taken charge of by the Austrian agents, conveyed in their own postchaises, and during the most rapid driving they always managed to take full copies of all the important communications. In this way they continued their journey together to the last post station before Vienna, where the dispatch-bag was returned to the courier, and he and the Austrian agents separated, the one directing his way to the Russian embassy, the other to

the foreign office in the Ballhaus Platz; and, at the same moment that Count Keller, the Prussian ambassador, was examining the original dispatches, Prince Kaunitz, imperial prime minister, would be occupied in reading the copies."

There is reason to believe that the French government resorts to a similar treachery to discover information; and we know that even in England, Sir James Graham, to the utter disgrace of his order and his country, avowed openly that he had violated the letters of Mazzini.

(8.) But all these shifts and expedients to maintain the ascendency of the ruling classes would be in vain, if they were not backed up by Force. Force is after all their main reliance, and that is concentrated and embodied in STANDING ARMIES. Two millions of soldiers, well-trained, well-furnished, and constantly on the alert, are the watch-dogs of absolutism, ready to pounce at any moment upon intractable citizens. "They are my extinguishers," said a royal fellow once to a foreigner; to which the foreigner replied, "What if the extinguishers themselves take fire?" But they have provided pretty well against that. Coming from the people, it might be imagined that in all times of excitement, they would sympathize with the people; sometimes they do, when there is a terrible havoc among the crowned heads; but there are many adroit arrangements to prevent such sympathy. Apart from the esprit du corps, which is always operative among troops, and the difficulties of revolt, under the rigor of army discipline, there is this special precaution used. The troops are removed from the localities where those sympathies would naturally lead them to side with the people, are taken away from among their friends and neighbors, and their own people, and sent into distant parts, where the hatreds of nationality, carefully kept up and inflamed, make them indifferent at least to the popular cause. Thus the Hungarians are dispatched to Italy, and the Italians into Hungary, the Croats to Poland and the Poles to Germany. Feeling themselves strangers among strangers, with old animosities of race rankling in their breasts, they are prepared for the work of butchery.

When this cunning device fails, there is yet another resort. It is in the mutual alliance which the monarchs of the different nations have pledged and sworn to each other, an alliance by which they are bound in all desperate struggles with their subjects, to come to each other's aid. It originated in that series of colossal conspiracies against the rights and liberties, which followed what was called the

Congress of Vienna, in 1815, when the Sovereigns of Europe, disregarding the nationalities of race, natural sentiments, traditional remembrances, and popular feeling, partitioned soils and souls, according to their dynastic interests, and swore to sustain each other in the infamous wrong, for ever. A more execrable plot was never conceived, and yet for thirty years it has been executed with an unswerving, relentless, and deadly decision. Italy, Poland, Spain, and Hungary have been sacrificed in succession to its infernal requirements. The rivers of Europe have been made to run with blood for its sake, the prisons of Europe are filled with its victims, thousands of the noblest men in exile curse it in the bitterness of their hearts, and the sighs of orphans, and the groans of widows, bear it to the throne of God for his eternal vengeance.

This, then, is the way they manage to govern the people in Europe. By the skilful use of patronage, of the church, and of education; by the denial of the press, of free-locomotion, and of the rights of trade; by the organization of a ubiquitous police, and by the distribution of standing armies, they bamboozle, delude, suppress, and constrain, until the wretched people, impoverished, ignorant, separated, and set at enmity with each other, are reduced to a slavery from which it seems almost madness for them to hope to escape. Yet, as it is the nature of wrong and malevolence to dig its own grave, their case is not utterly given over to despair, and, in some future paper, therefore, we shall take occasion to show how Thought is subtler than the police, and Truth stronger than the sword.

The

the Limbo of lost notables. Dethroned monarchs and jail-breakers, usurpers and pickpockets, conspirators against dynasties and fugitives with their friends' wives, outlawed patriots and fraudulent bankrupts, disappear from Europe to find their way here by the over-sea railroad; and the most famous among them sink, after a few days of newspaper notoriety and gossip, to the same forgetfulness as the meanest. home-keeping American, if he patiently bide his time, may hope to see the actors on the foreign stage, political as well as dramatic, with greater probability than Barnum would promise a succession of shows. The Connecticut Yankee will point you out the cave where the regicide puritan hid himself from the avenger of blood; the New-Yorker, as the locomotive of the Hudson River Railroad is gaining its topmost speed, after leaving the dépôt at 31st-street, sees on a low rocky point the tan vats, where (some say) Talleyrand curried hides, as more recently Garibaldi made candles in Staten Island; on the curving shore of the Delaware lies the princely domain which a Bonaparte enriched with the spoils of Spain, and a few miles above, on the opposite bank, stand the stables of the country-house from which Moreau went back to die on the field in arms against his master and France. Many of us remember Louis Philippe as a "schoolmaster abroad" among us, rejected by a Philadelphia lady, and looking as like as two pears to Dr. Hare; Louis Napoleon, his now Imperial

supplanter, whose boots the representatives of the oldest names of France are eager to lick, was voted by the few who knew him, a worthless, dirty. debauched vagabond; one Murat put up his shingle as an attorney-at-law in Florida, while his fat brother fought cocks among blackguards at Bordentown. The Hungarian demagogue, half-orator. half-prophet, whose oriental eloquence shook the Continent like an earthquake, after showing, like his types of Greece and Rome, a little white feather, strolls and stars it among our staring democrats for a dollar a head and expenses; nor may the time be far distant, when Pio Nono, again abandoning the City of Martyrs, will sing:

"I've been Rome-ing, I've been roaming," within the classic cloisters of Fordham; and now reigning sovereigns and haughty aristocrats find a safe hedge in our banks and state-funds should the cards be dealt against them at home. Odd, isn't it? that the "insecure and ephemeral republic, which has in its bosom the elements of its own destruction," should be used as the ultimate asylum of life and fortune, when the arsenals and treasurehouses gray with the moss of centuries. crumble before revolutionary fires! and that those who can stir so furiously the caldrons of popular passion, despite of the police and bayonets of strong governments, fail to make on this side of the Atlantic any more fuss than a nine days' wonder!

"Nothing that is rich and strange,
But doth suffer a sea-change."