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Terrible damage was done by the invaders, cart-loads of church plate were carried off, and many a monastery was sacked and burned. Peace had not long been restored when the struggle broke out between the constitutional party under Pedro of Brazil, who had resigned the throne of Portugal in favour of his daughter, Maria da Gloria, and the absolutists under Dom Miguel, his brother.
The liberals supported her, the absolutists gathered around Don Carlos, and for years there was a bitter struggle in Spain, the strength of the Carlists being in the Basque provinces and Spanish Navarre,—a land of mountaineers, loyal in nature and conservative by habit. The dynasty of the pretender has had three successive claimants to the throne.
There was a movement of folly about Royalist volunteers which was put down, and the Government seems by no means disposed to give way to Absolutists. If the Queen should have a son Spain will probably be tranquil. Talleyrand pretends the French will be reasonable about Algiers. I do not wish them to be so. I believe they could not have made a worse purchase.
Napoleon, with his "reasons of State," was Machiavellian. Machiavelli presided at the shooting of D'Engheim. It was one of the last things which showed "what reason of State may come to, in any age, in the hands of a logician with a knife in his grasp." From the influence of Machiavelli upon the Absolutists, Mr. Morley comes down to his influence in the Republican camp.
Yes, gentlemen, it was the fear of driving the absolutists to fanatical effort, which induced your great Statesmen not to extend to Europe the principle on which they acted towards the New World, and by no means the publicly avowed feeble motives. Every manifestation of your public life in those times shows that I am right to say so.
Abuses were remedied, reforms effected, while the national tendency towards Republicanism strengthened the ultra-Liberal party, to whom the old-time Absolutists allied themselves.