impatience. In 1809 a national war against Napoleon broke out in Austria. The Tyrolese under Hofer made a heroic struggle, and Archduke Charles won a victory over the French at Aspern. It is true that Napoleon, notwithstanding all this, finally maintained his ascendancy (Treaty of Schoenbrunn, also called of Vienna, 1809), and Austria, thereafter, by the advice of Metternich, who was prime-minister from 1809 to 1848, adopted a policy of inaction. Pursuing an opposite course, the Prussian people rose in a body in 1813 after Napoleon's disastrous campaign in Russia. This revolt Napoleon did not succeed in crushing; on the contrary, he himself was now defeated in the Wars of Liberation by the coalition of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and England.
The interior of Germany, the true home of Teutonic national life, had been forced almost completely into the background during the eighteenth century by Austria and Prussia. During the Napoleonic era it advanced materially in influence as a result of the formation of the secondary states and the growth of national political opinions. Nevertheless Austria and Prussia re-established their military ascendancy over the interior during the Wars of Liberation. In the Treaties of Paris (1814) and at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) efforts were made to do justice to both of these circumstances. Under Metternich's guidance Austria reached the climax of its power at the Congress of Vienna. It became the leading state in Europe, but at the same time it made the Danube and the territory east of the Alps the centres of its power and withdrew completely from southern Germany. Prussia, now likewise recognized as a great power and a leading state of Germany, received, on condition of surrendering a part of its Polish possessions, a strong position in the extreme north-west, but it did not attain the hegemony of northern Germany. The Napoleonic system of secondary states was ratified and amplified, as in the four kingdoms of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Hanover, and Saxony, etc. It was hoped that this settlement would be permanent since it was founded on the joint liability of all the European states, a principle recognized by the Vienna Congress and the maintenance of which was guaranteed both by Prussia and Austria. Moreover the political rivalry between the different faiths was supposed to have been overcome, since of the great powers Austria was Catholic and Prussia Protestant, and both were now on friendly terms. By the award of many Catholic districts to Protestant sovereigns Catholicity had, it is true, sustained great losses in central Germany, Würtemberg being one-third, Baden two-thirds and Prussia almost one-half Catholic. It was thought, however, that none of these states, not even Prussia, could be able thereafter to retain an entirely Protestant character. Moreover Catholicity gained greater influence over the minds of men owing to the Romantic movement and the spread of anti-revolutionary ideas. Metternich, continuing the policy decided upon in 1548 and 1635, committed himself to the following programme: to give a new guarantee to the reawakened national feeling by establishing a German Confederation; that each German state must belong to the Confederation, though without prejudice to its autonomy; that the primary object of the Confederation was to be the defence of the independence and stability of Germany against external foes as well as against revolutionary agitation; but it was also to be allowed to develop into a confederated state by gradually enlarging its authority over the internal affairs of the individual states, such as commerce, economic administration civil and constitutional law. The organ of this confederation was to be a permanent assembly composed of plenipotentiaries appointed by the reigning princes, as in the Imperial Diet prior to 1806. This body was authorized to enact fundamental laws for the Confederation and to organize its administrative machinery (Federal Acts of the Congress of Vienna, 9 June, 1815).
(3) 1815 to 1848.—The Federal Diet was in session from 1816 to 1848 and again from 1850 to 1866 without, however, enacting any fundamental laws or creating any administrative machinery. The only result of the deliberations was a fuller and more detailed but not a more definite statement of the problems to be solved by the confederation (Final Federal Act of Vienna, 1820), and this in spite of Metternich's pressure for the working out of these problems. Prussia and the secondary states opposed all progress in the work of the Diet. Even Metternich was no longer really in earnest about it. In the autumn of 1815 he had concluded the Holy Alliance with the Czar and the King of Prussia and had thereby bound himself to a common policy with the great powers of Eastern Europe, the three countries Russia, Austria, and Prussia being then called the eastern powers. This policy, in view of the possibility of revolutionary agitation, opposed the national and constitutional current of the times. Moreover, as Premier of Austria, Metternich's course had to be directed by the fact that, after the troubles of the reign of Joseph II and the losses sustained in war during the last twenty-five years, the country stood in need of absolute rest. Austria kept its people from all foreign commercial competition and in politics avoided contact with foreign nations. Consequently its policy within the confederation was restricted substantially to the safeguarding of its own interests.
Between 1815 and 1848 Prussia and the secondary states also devoted themselves exclusively to the solution of problems within their own boundaries. Up to 1848 Germany witnessed the most complete autonomy of the individual states in its entire history. The need of national unity was once more entirely ignored. In most of the secondary states much was done to improve the administration and the economic policy. Prussia, the self-reliance of which had been still further intensified by the Wars of Independence waged against Napoleon, completed the reforms that had been started in the period before 1815, although not in the German national spirit of their authors but rather in accordance with antiquated Prussian ideas. Even the new western provinces were as far as possible subjected to the old Prussian law as well as the old Prussian ecclesiastical policy and methods of government. At the University of Berlin, founded in 1909 by William von Humboldt, Hegel raised the Prussian conception of the state, filled with the spirit of Protestantism and rooted in absolutism, to the dignity of a philosophical system. He gave this position to the state as the highest and all-controlling form of society. Nevertheless the individual German states had clearly passed the limit of their capacity for organization. Routine dominated state administration. A well-trained but arrogant bureaucracy seized control of the government in Prussia as well in the secondary states and while it carried to excess the traditional political principles, yet it did not enforce them with the firm hand of the rulers of an earlier era. This was especially the case in the conflict concerning mixed marriage in the fourth decade of the century when the Prussian government arrested Archbishop Droste-Vischering of Cologne as an "insubordinate servant of the state" (1837). Its weakness was also plainly shown when the people of western and southern Germany objected to the interfering supervision of the government officials.
The middle class was indebted to Metternich for more than thirty years of uninterrupted peace, during which he protected it from all disturbances both at home and abroad, and they owed to Prussia laws more favourable to commerce than had ever before existed. These were the moderately protective Prussian customs law of 1818 and the founding (1833) of the cus-
