died by hundreds, and corpses lay for days unburied; before the plague was stayed thousands found an inglorious grave.

THE FRANKFORT PROPOSALS.

THE battle of Leipsic is one of the most important in general history, for it gave the hegemony of continental Europe to Prussia. French imperialism in its death-throes wiped out the score of royal France against the Hapsburgs; Austria was not yet banished to the lower courses of the Danube, but Prussia was launched upon her career of military ag

grandizement. Three dynasties seemed in that battle to have celebrated a joint triumph; in reality the free national spirit of Germany, in danger of being smothered by Napoleonic imperialism, had chosen a national dynasty as its refuge. It is well designated by German historians as "the battle of the nations.» France was destined to become again the sport of an antiquated dynastic system. The liberties which men of English blood had been painfully developing for a century she sought to seize in an instant; she was to see them elude her grasp for sixty years still, until her

democratic life, having assumed consistency, should find expression in institutions essentially and peculiarly her own. Though the conquering monarchs believed that revolutionary liberalism had been quenched at Leipsic, its ultimate triumph was really assured, since it was consigned to its natural guardianship, that of national commonwealths. The imperial conglomeration of races and nationalities was altogether amorphous; that concept disappeared at Leipsic, while another, that of constitutional organic nationalities, was made operative. The successive stages of advance are marked by 1813, 1848, and 1870. The Saxon campaigns display the completion of the process in which the great strategist, stifled by political anxieties, became the creature of circumstances both as general and statesman. The Russian campaign was nicely calculated, but its proportions and aim were those of the Oriental theocrat, not of the prosaic European soldier. With the aid of the railroad and the electric telegraph, they might have been wrought into a workable problem, but that does not excuse the errors of premature and misplaced ambition. The Saxon campaigns, again, are marked by a boldness of design and a skill in combination characteristic of the best strategy, but again the proportions are monstrous, and, what is worse, the execution is intermittent and feeble. As in Russia, the war organism is insufficient for the numbers and distances involved, while the subordinates of every grade, though supple instruments, seem mercenary, self-seeking, and destitute of devotion. Bonaparte had ruled men's hearts by his use of a cause, securing devotion by rude bonhomie, by success, and by sufficient rewards; Napoleon quenched devotion by a lavishness which sated the greediest, losing the affections of his associates by the demands of his gigantic plans. As he felt the foundations of his greatness shivering, he became more and more human. Early in 1813 he said: «I have a sympathetic heart, like another, but since earliest childhood I have accustomed myself to keep that string silent, and now it is altogether dumb.>> He was mistaken: throughout that season he was profoundly moved by the horrors of war; his purse was ever open for the suffering; the King of Saxony was released from his entangling engagements; in spite of his hard-set expression on the retreat from Leipsic, he forbade his men to fire the suburbs of the city in order to retard the pursuit of their foes, and before he left Mainz for St. Cloud he showed the deepest concern, and put forth the strongest effort, in behalf of the dying soldiery.

The immediate effects of Leipsic were the full display of that national spirit which had been refined, if not created, in the fires of Napoleon's imperious career. An Austrian army drove Eugène over the Adige, and Italy, turning on her imperial king in bitter hate and yearning to emulate northern Europe, relapsed into the direst confusion. The Confederation of the Rhine was resolved into its elements: the Mecklenburgs reasserted their independence; King Jerome fled to France; Würtemberg, Hesse Darmstadt, and Baden followed Bavaria's example; and Cassel, Brunswick, Hanover, and Oldenberg were craftily restored to their former rulers before Stein's bureau could establish an administration. Holland recalled the Prince of Orange, Spain rose to support Wellington, and Soult was not merely driven over the Pyrenees- he was defeated on French soil, and shut up in Bayonne. Even the three monarchs, as they sedately moved across Germany with their exhausted and battered armies, were aware of nationality as a controlling force in their future. In a direct movement on Paris they could, as Ney said, «have marked out their days in advance,» but they halted at Frankfort. The coalition had accomplished its task and earned its pay; not a Frenchman, except real or virtual prisoners, was left east of the Rhine. From that point the interests of the three monarchs were divergent. As Gentz, the Austrian statesman, said, "The war for the emancipation of states bids fair to become one for the emancipation of the people.» The three sovereigns were all anxious for the future of absolutism, but otherwise there was mutual distrust. Austria was suspicious of Russia, and desired immediate peace. Russia saw in the restoration of Holland under English auspices the perpetuation of British maritime and commercial supremacy, to the disadvantage of her Oriental aspirations, and the old Russian party also demanded peace. On the other hand, Alexander wished to avenge Napoleon's march to Moscow by an advance to Paris; and though Frederick William distrusted what he called the Czar's Jacobinism, his soldiers, thirsty for further revenge, also desired to prosecute the war; even the most enlightened Prussian statesmen believed that nothing short of a complete cataclysm in France could shake Napoleon's hold on that people and destroy his power. Offsetting these conflicting tendencies against one another, Metternich was able to secure military inaction for a time, while the coalition formulated a series of proposals calculated to woo the French people, and thus to bring Napoleon atonce to terms.

of France retaining control of the Netherlands, Antwerp being the commercial key to central Europe. Such a humor in three of the high contracting parties makes it doubtful whether the Frankfort proposals had any reality, and this doubt is further increased by the facts that the propositions were informally made, and that hostilities were to proceed during negotiation. It is turned into assurance by Metternich's admission in his memoirs that these propositions were intended to divorce Napoleon from the French nation, and in particular to work on the feelings of the army. He says that neither Alexander nor Frederick William would have assented to them had they not been convinced that Napoleon would «never in the world of his own accord » resolve to accept them. Yet the world has long believed that Napoleon, as he himself expressed it, lost his crown for Antwerp; that had he believed the honeyed words of the Austrian minister, and opened negotiations on an indefinite basis without delay, he might have kept France with its revolutionary boundaries intact for himself and his dynasty, and by the sacrifice of his imperial ambitions have retained for her, if not preponderance, at least importance, in the councils of Europe.

Neither Napoleon nor the French nation was deceived; a peace made under such circumstances could result only in a dishonorable tutelage to the allied sovereigns. France abhorred the dynasties and all their works, believing that dynastic rule could never mean anything except absolutism and feudalism. The experiment of popular sovereignty wielded by a democracy had been a failure; but the liberal French, like men of the same intelligence throughout Europe, did not, for all that, lose faith in popular sovereignty; they knew there must be some channel for its exercise. Outside of France, as in it, the most enlightened opinion of the time regarded Napoleon as the savior of society. The Queen of Saxony bitterly reproached Metternich for having deserted Napoleon's "sacred cause. This was because the Emperor of the French seemed to have used the people's power for the people's good. His giant arm alone could wield the popular majesty. It is said that on hearing of the Frankfort proposals, Frenchmen groaned and laughed by turns at the thought of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs, or Hohenzollerns, the very incarnations of German feudality, as leaders of the new Europe. It seemed the irony of fate that civil and political rights on the basis, not of privilege, but of manhood, the prize for which

the world had been turned upside down, should be intrusted to such keepers. Welded into a homogeneous nationality themselves, they could not understand that the inchoate nationalities in other states had as yet nothing but dynastic forms of expression, or foresee that during a century to come the old dynasties would find safety only in adapting royalty to national needs.

Napoleon seems to have been fully aware of French sentiment. In addition, he understood that not merely for this sufficient reason could he never be king of France in name or fact, but also that, having elsewhere harried and humiliated both peoples and dynasties in the name of revolutionary ideals, the masses had found him out, and were as much embittered as their rulers, believing him to be a charlatan using dazzling principles as a cloak for personal ambition. In May, 1813, the Emperor Francis, anxious to salve the lacerated pride of the Hapsburgs, produced a bundle of papers purporting to prove that the Bonapartes had once been ruling princes at Treviso. «My nobility,» was Napoleon's stinging reply, «dates only from Marengo.»> He well knew that when the battle should be fought that would undo Marengo, his nobility would end. In other words, without solid French support he was nothing, and that support he was fully aware he could never have as king of France. If the influence of what France improperly believed to be solely the French revolution were to be confined to her boundaries, revolutionary or otherwise, Napoleon's prestige was gone along with French leadership in Europe. An imperial throne there must be, exerting French influence far abroad. What happened at Paris, therefore, may be regarded as a counter-feint to Metternich's effort at securing peace from the French nation when it should have renounced Napoleon. It was merely an attempt to collect the remaining national strength, not now for aggressive warfare, but for the expulsion of hated invaders.

Having received no formulated proposition for acceptance or rejection, and desiring to force one, the Emperor of the French virtually disregarded the letter of Metternich's communication, and sent a message to the allies that his object had always been the independence of all the nations, «from the continental as well as from the maritime point of view.» This reached Frankfort on November 16, and was interpreted to mean that the writer would persist in questioning England's maritime rights. Thereupon a proclamation was widely posted in the cities of France, which stated in a cant borrowed from Napo

leon's own practice, that the allies desired France «to be great, strong, and prosperous »; they were making war not «on France, but on that preponderance which Napoleon had too long exercised, to the misfortune of Europe and of France herself, to which they guaranteed in advance an extent of territory such as she never had under her kings.» NapoLeon's riposte was to despatch a swarm of trusty emissaries throughout France in order to counteract the possible effects of this call. They found public opinion thoroughly imperial, but profoundly embittered against Maret

as the instigator of disastrous wars. Maret was transferred to the Department of State, and the pacific Caulaincourt was made Minister of Foreign Affairs. On December 2, at the earliest possible moment, the new minister addressed a note to Metternich, accepting the terms of the «general and summary basis.» This, said the despatch, would involve great sacrifices, but Napoleon would feel no regret if only by a similar abnegation England would provide the means for a general, honorable peace. Metternich replied that nothing now stood in the way of convening a con