The following book is the result of many years' work. It aims at showing the links which connected together the various movements in Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire in 1848-9. Many as are the books which have been written on the various parts of that struggle, I do not know of any attempt to link them together. How adventurous this effort is I am most painfully aware, and none the less so because I happen to know that the task was undertaken and abandoned by at least one writer who has many qualifications for it to which I can lay no claim. I allude to my friend Dr. Eugene Oswald, who has most generously assisted me in carrying out the work for which he was unable to spare the time. But I may say without arrogance that however deficient my history may be in the learning and ability which Dr. Oswald's would have shown, as well as in that lifelikeness which his personal share in the important rising in Baden would have enabled him to give to the descriptions; yet I shall at least have no temptation to any one-sided estimate of the merits of the various races concerned in the struggle, a temptation from which the most candid German could hardly escape. My only danger in that matter would be that I might be tempted to speak too favourably of _all_ the movements of those various races; seeing that during my investigations in the cities affected by these movements, I received the most extreme courtesy and kindness from German and Bohemian, Magyar and Szekler, Saxon and Roumanian, Serb, Croat, and Italian; and I feel nothing but pain at any word of criticism I have uttered in these pages that may jar on the susceptibilities of any of those races. It will be noticed, of course, that I have omitted from this history any account of the French Revolution. My reasons for this have been given at the beginning of the seventh chapter. But I may add to what I have said there that I had long felt the disproportionate importance which many people attached to the French Revolution of 1848, in regard to its immediate influence on Europe. From Palermo, not from Paris, came the first revolutionary outburst. From Presburg, not from Paris, came the word that shook Metternich from power, and secured a European character to the Revolution. Under these circumstances, I conceived the idea of telling the story of the European Revolution, without touching on the French part of it, except in the most incidental manner; so that the students of this period may be able fairly to estimate the other influences which produced these great results, unblinded by the splendour which anything done in Paris seems always to have for the student of revolution. One other peculiarity in my book also needs some explanation. I have, as far as possible, avoided references to authorities in notes. Such references only worry the general reader, while the student will, I think, be more helped by the list of authorities which I append to this preface.