The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-05 00:00:00

Nittraturt. The European Revolutions of IH4B. By Edward Stillingfleet Cayley, of the Inner Temple. London : Smith and Elder. WE turned to this work with some interest on account of its subject. 1848 was a most re markable year in European politics, not so much for what was actually done in it as for its cycles of agitation. In many respects it was a disappointing lyear, as its results were calculated to dishearten those who expect that in civilised nations there should be such a modicum of good sense as to make political changes easily accomplished. Mr. Cayley has written his volumes in a style which makes us again ask the question, " What has become of all our young men ?" A promising young man in our time is a per sonage of five and twenty crammed up arti ficially to exhibit experience of fifty-five. Walking blue-books, incarnate cycloptedias, are now-a-days more sought after than vi gorous and sanguine natures, with the genial glow of the spring-time of life. All those artificially-senile people ought to be taught the shrewd French aphorism—' Si la jeunesse " savait, si la vieillesse pouvait." Old men in a waltz are just as ridiculous as blooming young gentlemen in grey wigs. The subject is really an important one, and we shall take an early opportunity of descanting upon it. The author of these volumes, however, to judge by his work, is something better than a specimen of one of those quasi old-young men. He represents faithfully the prevalent tone of the Temple and Lincoln's-inn. He goes in for political honours, and need not have any fear of being " plucked." He has natural ability and considerable attainments, though he has not yet assimilated all the transcribed knowledge of his commonplace book. He has many of the qualities of a political es sayist. His logic is flexible and prompt., but for a historian his rhetoric wants colour and subtle vivacity, and we think that he would appear to greater advantage if he allowed his feelings to mingle more with his thoughts. Politics are not ethics, but morals in action ; and where humanity is at work, there ought to be at least something of the play of passion : and there are various short passages in these volumes which prove that the author has not yet smothered his sensations. The work, however, is unsatisfactory in many respects. It teaches the professed poli tician or journalist nothing that he did not know before; and Mr. Cayley has not, for the benefit of the reader, indexed his reading on the time. The narrative of the period is smoothly reasoned and sensibly discussed in the tone of a dilettanti pamphleteer, but for want of notes it is of little use as a handbook. The author being only an observer, and not an actor, the style does not rise beyond disserta tion ; and retrospective politics are tiresome. A publicist, like an actor, must find his ac count in immediate effect. In another department of our journal last week the faults of bureaucracy were exposed. As a specimen of the lighter style of Mr. Cayley, we shall extract his description of Germanised " graduates : Oxford and Cambridge honours are not held to be indi cations of capabilities of governing men. Man is not ruled by equations, nor is Greek considered to constitute wis dom ; colonies are not governed by iambics, nor is philo sophy held to be sense. In Germany, on the other hand, the student, after leaving the university, does not conde scend to go into trade ; it does not occur to him that there is any obligation to seek to do his duty iu that state of life to which it has pleased God to call him. He is a man of refined tastes and letters, and cannot condescend to help at managing hie father's shop. Classics are incompatible with tallow-chandlery; Greek has no affinity for grocery; philosophy has no connection with farming ; nor the bino mial theorem with tile•draining. He condemns himself to a useless existence, waits for official appointment (and he must wait long, because for every vacancy that occurs there are more than two persons always qualified to till it), dreams, speculates, writes of what, lie does not know, and his existence becomes alike troublesome to himself and to Government. He is in general an accomplished smat terer; what he has acquired has :teen diluted mid cooked for his easy digesam. The crowbar of industry has not been strained by him to burst from rocks of experience On golden grain of truth. That which has cost him little trouble in the getting is lightly squandered. Real educe- Orin .is the formation and training of the mind. To train THE PRESS. the mind requires hard, patient, and independent thinking and work; the mere crude teaching a youth a bundle of facts which he acquires with no labour, and only retain ing, neither digests nor assimilates, is no training at all; they no way nourish his mind, but, deposited there, are utterly as raw and undigested as he swallowed them. He may be a full man, but it is the fulness of a bottle, which will pour out what has been previously poured in, whether vinegar or claret ; he may be a convenient depo sitary of other men's thoughts,—he may have sufficient capacity for holding them, —but to call such a man edu• cated is a misuse of terms, and to trust men to his super intendence is a misuse of humanity ; lie plunges into the arena of politics, the sea of literature, or the fury of a re volution, unchecked by any glimmering suspicion of his own folly, and hurls thrones to the ground, sees the people massacred, and Europe in conflagration, without feeling compunction or remorse; he is as insensitive as a bottle, or a bag : take away what it is filled with, and what re mains? It is difficult to ascertain Mr. Cayley's point of view in judging of European events of 18-18. In one place (vol. ii., p. 279) he writes : Leaving France for the moment out of the question, dur ing the resettlement of Europe after the revolutions of 1818, two opposite forces appear mainly to have influenced events, Austria on the one hand, and Lord Palmerston on the other. These two may be considered as co-ordinates, to which many subsequent events of importance may be principally referred. - - His work would have more animated in terest if he had taken Lord Palmerston as a central figure, and exhibited his gyrations. In some places Mr. Cayley cleverly exposes the vapouring policy of the Premier. Thus, in relation to Don Pacifico, the author ob serves:— What it was that induced the noble lord at the head of the Foreign-office to engage Admiral Parker, on his way back from the Dardanelles, in the affair of Don Pacitico's bedsteads at the Piraeus, is a mystery. Whether it was that his diplomatic and "judicious bottle•holding " to De mocracy had teen defeated by Russian and Austrian influ ence, and he considered that in striking at Greece he was aiming a blow at Russia; Or whether it was that the Greek shipping in the Levant was a cause of commercial jealousy, as has been insinuated, it is difficult to say. He then fastens attention on the double blunder of the Foreign Secretary : After a good deal of discussion, Lord Palmerston re solved to maintain the convention of Athens : thereby in sulting France to such an extent, that the a'nbassador of that power, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, was recalled: thus land ing England in a larger quarrel, breaking the union of the two powers, and giving encouragement to Russia :—a policy which was, on the motion of Lord Stanley, censured by the House of Peers, and escaped the censure of the House of Commons by a narrow majority. Between the two debates, however, the Foreign Minister gave way, and let it be understood by the French Government that he was willing to accept the convention of London. Having thus estranged the English and French Govern ments, and joined the French and Russian together as mediators, in short, having done as much mischief as pos sible, in such a small matter, the Minister appeared dissatisfied with the success he had obtained. And again elsewhere he writes:— Sicily, whose institutions we ourselves had organised during the war, and which had been at its conclusion handed over to Naples on the undertaking to maintain those institutions which were popular in, and suited to the wants of, the island, after maintaining a heroic struggle, was abandoned to its fate ; and its cause, de fended by Mr. Gladstone, became in this year the subject of acrimonious and undignified dispute. That gentleman had written an, energetic, well-directed, but not quite accu rate attack on the barbarities committed by the Neapolitan Government. This pamphlet seemed a windfall to the Foreign-office, who forwarded it to all the diplomatic agents at foreign Courts, requesting that it should be brought under the notice of the Courts to which they were respectively accredited : a course upon which they anim adverted in no measured terms, and against which Naples angrily protested: a course the more to be regretted, as perhaps savouring more of vapouring than of the courage, determination, or wisdom of a statesman. Very similar had been the policy in the Hungarian war. It was un derstood that the Minister sympathised with the Magyars ; but no distinct steps were taken. On the abdication of the Emperor Ferdinand, he did not recognise the Govern ment that Hungary had adopted, and which as an indepen dent State it had an unquestionable right to adopt, as has been shown, by virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction. Such a course could not have been justly blamed, because it would have been a strictly legal one, and it might have been of considerable service to a cause with which England sym pathised. He merely reused the jealousy of Austria, and cast her into the arms of Russia. The thing was done by halves, and done badly. Such seems to be the inevitable fate of English foreign policy. We lost the confidence of Austria by doubtful hostility, and that of the Magyars by dubious sympathy. That last sentence ought to adhere to Lord Palmerston. From first to last his policy may be described by the terms of " doubtful hos tility" and " dubious sympathy." He has always been a hybrid politician, and at once a deceiver and disturber of foreign communi ties. He was well called " the Captain Rock of Europe," and his, like other Rockite pro ceedings, were tracked with blood and violence, SATURDAY, while he ended in having those who had be- lieved him crushed. Never did " Liberalisml" commit a greater mistake than in 1848. As an excursus of a Templar this work is clever, and the vein of fairness and good sense apparent in its pages would make us wish to see some writing on domestic politics from its author. He thinks and feels like an Englishman, and his hearty appreciation of Lord George Bentinck gave us much pleasure. History of the Romans under he Empire. By Charles Merivale, late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Vols. IV. V. Lonlon: Longmans. THE three first volumes of Mr. Merivale's history carry us down to the battle of Actium and the final establishment of the Roman empire. Of the volumes before us the first is devoted entirely to the reign of Augustus, the second to Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. The steps by which the oid Roman aristocracy gradually degenerated into an oligarchy, and by which in turn the oligarchy travellei on to its legitimate goal despotism, are narrated with fidelity and clearness, but the historian would, we think, have done better had he given us in the commencement of his fourth volume a summary of the various causes which contributed to this consummation. Half the benefit of history is lost where the writer is deficient in this analytical faculty. And as we proceed through Mr. Merivale's sustaincd narrative, and mark the copious array of facts all around us, we are unavoidably led to re gret the absence of those welcome " landing places " which Arnold or Gibbon would have eforded us on which to pause and deliberately survey the ground we had traversed. It was said by Horace and Lucan that Rome perished through her own greatness—ln se magna ruunt—and certainly from het wide spread conquests sprang several influential causes of her decay. The substitution of slave labour for free, and the consequent de cline of the native population ; the vast extent of the Ager Publicus, by the monopoly of 'which so terrible an inequality of wealth was created ; and the huge sums of money which were extorted from the provincials by the Roman praetors, thereby enabling them to corrupt the springs of justice—were all the results of centuries of unbroken conquest. These, however, were hut secondary causes. What primarily impaired the vitality of Roman institutions, and loosened the whole fabric of Roman society, was the decay of faith, whether solely attributable to her contact with the corrupt nations of the East we need not pause to inquire. The only two principles on which Governments can rest with security, though that security is widely different in degree, are faith and fear. Mankind have not yet arrived at that stage in which the laws are obeyed from pure reason ; and when a people has lost faith in the sacred character of its institutions, might alone will be able to control its passions. The transition period between the death of the old system and the establishment of the new is one commonly marked by almost unlimited vice, turbulence, and bloodshed ; and such a period was the last century and a half of the republic of ancient Rome. The state of parties in the time of Cicero was exactly in accordance with this view. There were the aristocrats, composed we may pre sume principally of the better sort of plebeians, and some of the most ancient but decayed patrician houses, who were indignant at the superiority of the nobiles, whom they regarded as parvenus. These sighed for the old state of things, as the Tories in George the Second's time professed to sigh for the days of Queen Elizabeth : to them the old Roman constitu tion and the sanctity a law was everything. But they were not afraid of moderate reforms, and would have made large concessions to restore that ancient unanimity of patricians and plebeians which was once supposed to have existed. Of this party, though frequently compelled to disguise his sentiments, Cicero was the head. There were next the oligarchs, or obstinate upholders of things as they were, who persisted on regarding the few great families who had a monopoly of all the powers and honours of the State as the real patrician party—who shut their eyes both to the truths