Lock up the billy bald-coot, Alexander! Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal! Teach them that sauce for goose is sauce for gander, And ask them how _they_ like to be in thrall! Such passages—and there are plenty of them—express the temper to which the Continental Liberals were gradually coming. When they came to it, and found such men as Metternich, and Bomba of Naples, and Charles X. of France, sitting on the safety valves, explosions could by no means be prevented. The political history of the period is the history of those explosions and their consequences; and we all know that there were two principal series of such explosions—the explosions of 1830, and the explosions of 1848. The noise of the first detonations was, as it were, a salute fired in the year of Francis Joseph’s birth; the louder roar of the second greeted his accession. First Italy and then Hungary exploded; and Francis Joseph, as a boy of eighteen, had to face the confusion and try to calm it. The story of his bearing in the presence of the turmoil must not be anticipated; but we may look sufficiently ahead to note that a new Austria, differently constituted, and looking out of a new window in a new direction, had gradually to be re-created out of what might very well have been a wreck. The old Austria over which Francis Joseph began to reign in 1848 was a Teuton Power holding the most prosperous provinces of Italy in its iron grip. That grip has been reluctantly relaxed until only the pressure of one little finger remains; and the new Austria over which Francis Joseph rules to-day has only a small Teuton nucleus, associated with a Magyar nucleus nearly as large, trying in conjunction with it to assert predominant partnership in a large and increasing community of Slavs, and casting envious, but not very hopeful, glances across the Danube towards the Balkan States and the Ægean harbours. So great has been the evolution accomplished within the reign of a single ruler: a ruler who, at the beginning of his reign, did not dare to set his foot in his own capital, and, long before the end of it, had come to be regarded as the one indispensable man in the Empire—the one man whose life must be preserved and prolonged at all hazards, for fear lest his death should entail the collapse of the edifice which he had reared—the one man who sometimes appeared to command the affection of all his subjects. It would be a striking story, even if one related the Emperor’s political achievements without reference to his personal life; but the two things, though commonly separated by political historians, are not really separable.