[32] Prussia, the most thoroughly anti-Gallican of all the parties to
the Treaty of Vienna, completed the work of overthrowing the "detested"
arrangements made by the framers of that treaty. The federal act
creating the Germanic Confederation was incorporated in the work of the
Congress of Vienna, and was guaranteed by eight European
powers,--France, England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and
Portugal. Prussia destroyed the Confederation without troubling herself
about the wishes and opinions of the other seven parties to the
arrangement of 1815. That all those parties to that arrangement were not
always indifferent to their guaranty appears from the opposition made by
Russia, France, and England to Prince Schwarzenburg's proposition, that
Austria should be allowed to introduce all her non-Germanic territories
into the Confederation, that is to say, that the _Austrian Empire_,
which then included the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, should become a part
of Germany, which it would soon have ruled, as well as overruled, while
it would have extended its dominion over Italy. Had Schwarzenburg's
project succeeded, the course of European events during the last sixteen
years must have been entirely changed, or Austria would have been made
too strong to be harmed by the French in Italy, or by the Prussians in
Germany and Bohemia.
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