[271] A severe monetary
crisis was one not unnatural result of this distress, so severe that the
Funds fell to a price below any that had been quoted for many years, and
the reserve in the Bank of England to an amount lower than it had been
at any period since 1828. And these difficulties had hardly been
surmounted when a new revolution in France overturned the dynasty of
Louis Philippe and established a republic. The revolutionary contagion
spread to Italy, where, indeed, the movement had begun. The Pope--Pius
IX.--who had but lately succeeded to the tiara, was forced to flee from
Rome in the disguise of a foreign courier, after his Prime-minister had
been murdered by the mob. Germany was scarcely less disturbed. The
administration of Metternich, who had governed Austria with authority
little less than absolute for nearly forty years, was overthrown in a
tumult in which he himself escaped with difficulty from the violence of
the populace; dangerous riots took place at Munich, at Berlin, and at
the capitals of most of the smaller principalities, and for some time
everything seemed to portend the outbreak of a general war, likely to be
the more formidable as being a war of the revolutionary and republican
against the monarchical principle. Happily, that danger was averted. The
only war which broke out between different nations was a brief contest
in the north of Italy, which the superior numbers of the Austrian armies
and the skill of Marshal Radetsky, a veteran who had learned the art of
war under Suvarof nearly sixty years before, decided in favor of
Austria, and which in the spring of 1849 was terminated by a peace on
less unfavorable terms to Sardinia than she could well have expected.
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