effect to the main principles of a Constitutional régime, I think it is probable that he may extinguish the existing arrangement with impunity, and re-establish one more consistent with the efficiency of the executive power, and which may restore the great landed proprietors and the clergy a due share of authority; but to succeed in establishing a permanent system he must speak to the nation, and not give it the character of a military revolution, in doing which the language of Louis XVIII. may afford him some useful hints.'

It would have been difficult to give advice savouring less of any extreme political view, or more consonant with the spirit of the institutions which our own country enjoys. It is curious that the only point in respect of which Lord Castlereagh thought it necessary to go into detail, was the provision of the revolutionary Cortes, copied from America, under which the Ministers of the Crown were banished from the legislature. He expressed a hope that this inconceivable absurdity' would not be repeated, and attributed to it the failure of most of the mushroom constitutions that had grown up since the Revolution. Our generation, that has seen the operation of the same system in America, can appreciate the sagacity which attached such vital importance to a question apparently of detail. He took a similar course with respect to Sicily. He refused to infringe his favourite principle of nonintervention by forcing the King under terror of British arms to uphold the Sicilian Constitution. But he earnestly recommended its maintenance, and was ready to carry his efforts in its behalf to any extent short of actual war. He even proposed as England had acquired in this particular case a right to express her opinion to mark her displeasure at the King's illiberal intentions by breaking off diplomatic relations. But his cautious and sober mind shrank from hurrying his policy to the lengths to which theoretic politicians were prepared to go. Representative institutions were very well in Sicily and Spain, which had not been demoralized by Napoleonic despotism. They might be introduced without alarm in phlegmatic Holland. Though they were a venture full of danger, they must be regarded as the least of many dangerous alternatives in France. But Lord Castlereagh was not prepared to extend the same experiment, without any preparation, to the fickle and inflammable populations of the South. When the proposal was made to him to encourage a demand for representative government in Italy, where the thing was absolutely unknown, and where the Jacobin leaven was still fermenting, he drew back. He thought, and events have fully justified his sagacity, that Italian freedom must be the work of time. His letter to Lord William Bentinck on the subject presents so good a portrait of his mind, with its utter freedom

both

both from impulse and from theoretical statesmanship, that it is worth extracting :

I shall take care not to compromise any of the parties referred to in your secret letter. I fully approve of your giving the project no countenance; nor can I bring myself to wish that the too-extensive experiment already in operation throughout Europe, in the science of government, should be at once augmented by similar creations in Italy.

'It is impossible not to perceive a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation. The danger is, that the transition may be too sudden to ripen into anything likely to make the world better or happier. We have new Constitutions launched in France, Spain, Holland, and Sicily. Let us see the result before we encourage farther attempts. The attempts may be made, and we must abide the consequences; but I am sure it is better to retard, than accelerate, the operation of this most hazardous principle which is abroad.

'In Italy it is now the more necessary to abstain, if we wish to act in concert with Austria and Sardinia. Whilst we had to drive the French out of Italy, we were justified in running all risks; but the present state of Europe requires no such expedient; and, with a view to general peace and tranquillity, I should prefer seeing the Italians await the insensible influence of what is going on elsewhere, than hazard their own internal quiet by an effort at this moment.'—(Ib., vol. x. p. 18.)

These are not the words of a man who disbelieved in the value of freedom, or wished to deny its blessings permanently to any race of men. But neither are they the words of a theorist who could see no blessings to be cherished and no interests to be spared outside of his own political ideal. Lord Castlereagh's was not a mind in which excited feelings had destroyed the proportion between different objects of desire. He knew the very different values of the boons for which men indiscriminately clamoured. The graduation in his mind seems to have stood thus he cared for nationality not at all; for the theoretic perfection of political institutions, very little; for the realities of freedom, a great deal; and for the peace, and social order and freedom from the manifold curses of disturbance, which can alone give to the humbler masses of mankind any chance of tasting their scanty share of human joys-for the sake of this, he was quite ready to forego all the rest. Ambitious hopes or historic sentiments may be gratified by a successful rebellion; but they are the luxuries of the few, while the ruin of war and the cruelties of the conscription are realities that visit all. Lord Castlereagh may be blamed for abandoning popular rights and the independence of nations;' but in truth he was

seeking

seeking to lay the foundation on which they must be built, and without which they cannot stand. He was pursuing too lofty an object to compromise its success for the sake of a liberal propaganda. His whole energies were bent to the one aim of securing that Europe should not again undergo another quarter of a century such as that from which she had just emerged. He sought above all other things so to establish the balance of power that it should not be easily overthrown, and to maintain it jealously as the sole pledge of peace. In all periods of his administration, during the war and after the war, this one paramount object of securing a lasting peace to Europe was the lodestar of his policy. He never suffered it to be obscured for an instant by the smaller gains which were perpetually pressed on him as all-essential by men of hotter natures or feebler minds. The restoration of Venetia's ancient government or Saxony's ancient limits were to him trivialities compared with the rescue of Europe from Napoleon. The sudden and violent introduction of popular institutions among nations to whom they were strange seemed to him a poor and equivocal compensation for the risk of destroying, while it was still fresh and fragile, the European settlement which it had cost so much blood to make. He disliked insurrections for their own sake, because they rarely lead to freedom, while they always endanger peace; but he disliked them still more for the foreign intervention and the foreign annexation of which they are made the mask. He saw that interventions in the internal affairs of other nations on the plea of political sympathy were the real danger to Europe's future peace-the only disguise behind which the ambition of conquest could safely hide itself. Therefore, under his guidance, England always declined to interfere herself, or to acquiesce in the intervention of others. He refused even to give what is now called 'a moral support' to a foreign political party-to interfere in the affairs of other States even with criticisms upon the institutions under which they chose to live. History has amply justified the neutrality which while he lived was bitterly arraigned. At the distance of forty years from the date of his death, we can now judge how much hatred and isolation would have been spared to England if English Ministers had been content to imitate his reserve-how much blood would have been spared to Europe if foreign Cabinets would have learned the regard for the existing rights of smaller States by which his foreign policy was marked.

The very qualities to which his greatness was due have been partly the cause that it has been left to a generation which knew

him not to vindicate his name from undeserved reproach. The very immovability of mind which strengthened him to persevere when others faltered, and pause when others were rushing madly on, had the effect of isolating him among contemporary statesmen. He had not the qualities which make a devoted personal following. Except for the merely corporeal advantages of a splendid presence and a graceful bearing, it might be said that he was absolutely devoid of all the qualities by which mankind are fascinated. It was almost a crucial test of the capacity of English politicians to seek for and appreciate statesmanship for its own sake-to value at its true price the gold that does not glitter; and it is to the credit of the ruling classes in this country that they did not fail under the test. In the House of Commons he was no orator. His sentences were long, wordy, and involved; his style was bald and ungraceful, and often diluted to vapidity by a studied courtliness of language; and his metaphors were so exquisitely confused that they are a by-word to this day. His speeches furnished a fund of inexhaustible amusement to the wits of the time. Lord Brougham has left it on record that it was his custom to beguile the weary hours of a debate by making a collection of Lord Castlereagh's choicest gems as they dropped from his lips. They supplied Moore with material for several pungent epigrams, and they were invaluable to men who, like Byron, sought to prove their own liberality and whitewash their own characters by a rancorous abuse of the rulers who rescued Europe from military despotism. Nor was this unfortunate deficiency compensated by any fascination or brilliancy in private intercourse. Lord Castlereagh was neither a wit nor a scholar: he did not shine in conversation, and rarely attempted to take the lead. Neither in the senate nor the drawing-room did he display any of those showy qualities by which, since bribery fell into disrepute, wavering votes have been ordinarily won. It might have been expected that with all these drawbacks he would have been unable to hold his ground in the House of Commons, and that in Parliamentary campaigns he would have been an encumbrance rather than an assistance to his colleagues. The fact was exactly the reverse. He was during several years their great strength and stay-the only debater on whom the Ministry could confidently rely. The correspondence between him and Lord Liverpool while he was at the Congress of Vienna in the winter of 1814-1815 is a curious evidence of the influence he wielded in the House of Commons. Lord Castlereagh expresses an extreme anxiety to be allowed to see the negotiations to their close, and is quite

sure

sure that some of the other Ministers will be able to steer through the first part of the session without his help. But Lord Liverpool, though fully sensible of the importance of the negotiations upon the Polish and Saxon questions, which were then at their warmest, will not hear of his absence. He writes again and again in the most urgent terms to impress upon him that nobody is capable of managing the House of Commons but himself. No one who reads these letters can doubt the earnest sincerity of Lord Liverpool's entreaties. It is impossible not to see that in his judgment the presence in the House of this verbose and blundering orator, at whom his adversaries affected to laugh, was of vital importance to the very existence of the Government. And in this matter at least Lord Liverpool was no mean judge. Whatever his other capabilities may have been, he was a veteran in Parliamentary warfare; and, as his long possession of power amply proved, he knew what style of leadership it was that could win and could keep the confidence of the House of Commons.

ness.

Lord Castlereagh's influence in the House must have been enormous, if Lord Liverpool rated it so high as to risk the evils of his absence from Vienna at such a time rather than forego it. In truth his matter was so weighty, that it did not suffer materially from the singularly inappropriate language in which it was conveyed. Those times were too critical to leave much room or taste for niceties on the subject of style. The House had been strung by danger to a higher tone than that of literary fastidiousIt looked in its leaders for something more sterling than the glitter of eloquence; and was content to condone the metaphors over which Lord Brougham and Mr. Moore made themselves so merry. Lord Brougham has himself confessed in later times that those who held Lord Castlereagh cheap on account of his style of speaking, cast rather a reproach upon representative government, which ranks eloquence so high among a Statesman's qualifications, than upon him. But though esteem and confidence were accorded to him very freely, and were withdrawn so long as he lived, he does not seem to have awakened warmer feelings. He had not the talents that captivate the imagination, or the warmth of sympathy that kindles love. Men felt to him as to the pilot who had weathered an appalling storm, the physician who had mastered a terrible malady. They recognised his ability, and were glad in a moment of danger to have such a counsellor at hand; but they do not appear to have been drawn to him by the bonds of that intense personal devotion which has united so many great statesmen with their political supporters.

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