The Treaty of Vienna was an unprincipled compromise among the divergent interests and claims of the dominant Powers, and the triumphant monarchs ignored their promises of national reform or representation.

For one whole generation they resolutely suppressed, so far as they were able, every symptom of an insurgent democratic or national idea.

They sought persistently and ingeniously to identify in Europe the principle of political integrity and order with the principle of the legitimate monarchy.

But obscurantist as were the ideas and the policy of the Holy Alliance, the political system it established was an enormous improvement upon that of the eighteenth century.

Not only was the sense of responsibility of the governing classes very much quickened, but the international system was based on a comparatively moral and rational idea.