affinities. The partition wall of privilege, rank, or subordination,
interposed between different classes of the European community, had
in some cases been forcibly broken down, and in others had been more
silently undermined. Antiquity, custom, usage, or legitimacy, which
formerly became a shelter to abuses, could not now protect justice and
right from threatened innovation. Everywhere power was challenged on its
rounds, and compelled to give the popular watchword before it could be
allowed to pass. Whether it was a nation that demanded its independence
from a foreign power, as in Belgium and Poland; or a people that
cashiered their dynasty, as in France and Saxony; or a parliament that
changed its administration for a more popular party, as in England; or
republics that liberalized their institutions, as in Switzerland,--all
was movement and change. The breath of revolution sometimes blew from
the suburbs of a capital, as in France; sometimes from the cottages of
the peasant, as in the Swiss mountains; but it was every where powerful.
No institution was held venerable, no authority sacred, that stood in
the way of the popular will. The people had every where got a purchase
against their rulers, and had fixed their engines for a further pull.
The power of domestic military protection had diminished, in proportion
as rulers required its aid; while, at the same time, all Europe seemed
arming for a general trial of strength, or a recommencement of conquest.
Every kind of reform was the order of the day; financial reform, legal
reform, ecclesiastical reform, and parliamentary reform. The year that
has just commenced must resolve the character of many of those vague
tendencies to change, to war, and confusion, which alarmed some and
inspired hope into others at the close of 1830."

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