That this is the true character of the revolutions which have lately taken place on the Continent, and struck the world with such astonishment, from the magnitude of the changes which they involved, and the facility with which they were accomplished, is apparent on the very surface of things. They were all urban tumults, not national movements; the nation was never consulted on them at all. They were all concluded before the provinces heard of their commencement; they succeeded so easily, because the nations in which they occurred had been accustomed to obey the commands of the capital as implicitly as troops do the orders issuing from headquarters. The national consent of France, so far as it could be collected, was decidedly in favour of the Duchess of Orleans and the Count de Paris on the night of the 24th February; for two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies were for that government. But what then? The armed mob, the prætorians of the capital, rushed in--the refractory deputies were dragged from their benches as summarily as the Council of Five Hundred were expelled from their seats by the grenadiers of Napoleon on the 18th Brumaire; a voice called "_C'est trop tard. A l'Hotel de Ville! Vive la Republique!_" and the Orleans dynasty was overthrown, and universal suffrage established. In Prussia the whole affair was a combat in the capital, between fifteen thousand regular troops and thirty thousand trained and disciplined citizens, (every man in Prussia is bred a soldier;) and after one hundred and eighty-seven men on the popular side had been killed, the King yielded, and the nation rushed headlong, from absolute despotism to household suffrage, equal electoral districts, and a single National Assembly. This is just the Cadiz constitution of 1812, which has ever since been the rallying point of the democrats throughout the south of Europe, over again. It was the same at Vienna: the whole affair there was determined in a single day, before intelligence of the commencement of the revolt had reached either Lintz or Presburg. It is ridiculous to talk of these as _national_ movements, or revolutions of the state: they are mere urban tumults, originating in a struggle for the dictatorship in the capital, and decided without the sense of the nation being taken either on the one side or the other.