The convulsions of the French revolution and the Napoleonic conquests did not seem materially to affect the principles and practices of diplomacy. When the Congress of Vienna met to rearrange the state of Europe, it was guided by men who still looked upon diplomacy entirely in the manner of the 18th century, when, in the words of Horace Walpole, “it was the mode of the times to pay by one favor for receiving another.” The idea of restoring the balance of Europe or patching up the rents and cracks in the old system which had been so severely shaken was the purpose which animated these men. They viewed everything from the dynastic interests of their respective rulers and traded off lesser kingdoms and slices of territory with the same spirit of the gamester that has always characterized the absolutist diplomacy. Of the three master minds of the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand, Metternich and Pozzo di Borgo, it may indeed be said that they illustrated both the qualities and the vices of the old diplomacy in a superlative degree. The last named has characterized Talleyrand as “a man who is unlike any other. He wheedles, he arranges, he intrigues, he governs in a hundred different manners every day. His interest in others is proportioned to the need which he has of them at the moment. Even his civilities are luxurious loans which it is necessary to repay before the end of the day.” Talleyrand, himself, has said: “Two things I forbid--too much zeal and too absolute devotion--they compromise both persons and affairs.” He did not, indeed, betray his great master Napoleon, he only quitted him in time. Metternich, who resembled Talleyrand in the complete self-control of a passionless diplomat, had a long and brilliant, but essentially sterile, career. His correspondence shows a keen and luminous spirit with a great mastery of detail, and capacity for manipulating the human pawns; but there is no deep insight, no real constructive policy. Indeed, he supported Alexander I in his efforts for a Holy Alliance or sacred league among nations, but it was conceived in such a form that it would not have interfered with the traditional game of diplomacy. Metternich indeed often pays his compliments to the ideal, as when he praises the league as resting on the same basis as the great Christian society of man, namely, the precept of the Book of Books, “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.” But the details of his policy were governed entirely by the barren principles of balance of power and legitimacy, and showed an utter disregard for the natural and ethnic facts underlying government. Metternich indeed himself at times realized the vanity of political intrigue, as when he wrote to his daughter from Paris in 1815, “This specific weight of the masses will always be the same, while we, poor creatures, who think ourselves so important, live only to make a little show by our perpetual motion, by our dabbling in the mud or in the shifting sand.”