Waterloo brought England into new relations with the nations of Europe. The Congress of Vienna, in which the victors endeavored to restore the damage wrought by the Corsican intruder, added Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and a few less important islands, to the growing colonial empire of Great Britain. The Holy Alliance, which had been suggested by the Czar in 1815, at the friendly meeting of the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian sovereigns at Paris, was in theory a compact between these powerful rulers--"an intimate union on the basis of morality and religion"--but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress, and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism upon limbs that had once known the bliss of freedom, led to fierce intellectual revolt, and sometimes to physical violence. England had made common cause with Turk and Christian, Kaiser and King, against Napoleon, and for a time her statesmen viewed with complacency the Holy Alliance, so reassuring in its name and so pure in its professions; but when it became evident that this mighty league was to be thrown against every liberty-loving people in the Old World and the New, George Canning broke the irksome bond, and put the land of parliaments and constitutional liberty in its rightful place as the friend of freedom and the foe to the oppressor. It was the spirit if not the voice of Canning which was powerful to save Portugal from the Bourbon, to recognize the independence of the revolted American colonies of Spain, and to restrain the enemies of freedom from handing insurgent Greece back to the Turk. His predecessors had been accustomed to sink the interests and desires of England in regard for what the continental power called "the good of Europe." He was the first statesman of his generation who dared to take an independent position on "European" questions--"to write 'England,'" as he phrased it, "where it had been the custom to write 'Europe.'" The policy which he inaugurated marks a turning- point in the history of British foreign affairs. Catholic Emancipation