The Press. — London, England, 1855-05-12 00:00:00

ISittraturt. History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon to the Accession of Louis Napoleon. By Sir Archibald Alison. Vol. IV. London : Blackwood. THE present volume of this history embraces by far the most important events of the period which Sir A Alison has undertaken to illus trate. It relates the agitation for Roman Catholic Emancipation, and the subsequent passing of that measure by the Duke of Wel lington s Government; the fall of his Grace's Administration, with the accession of the Whigs to power, and the great Reform con test; the convulsion occasioned in several European States by the success of the Paris barricades; the measures which marked the first, and, as it seemed, the most critical period of Louis Philippe's reign ; and the complete history of that desperate, and in many respects most noble, attempt made by Poland to re cover her independence. The progress and fortunes of that war are described by Sir A. Alison with the clearness and animation which, as a historian of military operations, has gained him deserved popularity. Of the numerous campaigns he has described none possess stronger interest, or are narrated with greater vigour, than this one which utterly for the time, and perhaps for ever, crushed the nationality of Poland, and immensely in creased the prestige and power of her gigantic conqueror. It is almost ungracious to allude to Sir A. Alison's faults, as it is hopeless to expect that he will now profit by friendly criticism. In this volume, as in all his past writings, his " summings up " are excessively pedantic . The historian is not called on to form a Rha damanthean code of his own, and to judge not only characters, but parties and events, by it. Our author is so resolved to be impartial in all his decisions that he keeps his balance evenly trimmed, and never suffers the reader to escape till he has exhausted the vices and virtues of every political conjuncture, and dealt out what he conceives to be an exact meed of praise and blame to every personage who figures in his page. No author would be more improved by liberal excision ; and we could particularly wish that he had been more sparing of his sententious precepts—such as " There is no " unmixed good in human affairs," and " The " cause of truth is paramount to every other " consideration." The fault is the more striking as the pre sent volume challenges comparison with the best portion of Miss Martineau's extremely lively " History of the Peace," in which events, though often strongly coloured by the writer's prejudices, are related with unusual vivacity and concentration. The " dignity "of the his torical style is carried by Sir A. Alison to the verge of tediousness. But when he confines himself to description he is always instructive and pleasing; and many of his reflections show the penetration of an observant and original mind. There is, for example, great truth in the remark on the Duke of Welling ton's policy in political affairs. After noting the reasons existing for conceding the Roman Catholic claims, the historian proceeds : These difficulties strongly presented themselves to the Cabinet Ministers, and especially the Duke of Welling ton, whose mind, eminently practical and sagacious, had been trained, amidst th• ever-changing vicissitudes of military warfare, to abandon old positions, and take sip new ones when the former had become untenable, and who looked rather to the real and lasting interests of the State than to the individual consistency or reputation of the public men intrusted with its defence. From the time, accordingly, that the Catholic Association had be come so formidable, and the Clare election had proved how powerfully it might be brought to bear on the majority in Parliament, the necessity of" settling the question," as it was called—that is, conceding all the demands of the Catholics—had been secretly discussed in the Cabinet, and plans regarding it submitted to the King. The fall of the Wellington Administration is regarded here as the great turning point in our modern history:— The Wellington Administration, and with it the old system of government in Great Britain, fell, because it had become unsuited to the altered circumstances of the people ; it neither met their wishes, nor provided for their necessities, Ihmh. THE PRESS. The verdict is hardly in accordance with the facts of the Duke's economical and generally prudent Administration. It would be more correct to say that his Government fell because it abandoned its principles, and weakened the confidence of the country in the faith and honour of public men. The measure of Emancipation itself must, like other measures, be judged by its own merits ; but it is very possible to concede that it was essentially just and beneficial, yet deny that the Duke of Wellington's Government was justified in urging it forward. It formed a part of the scheme of Whig policy ; and when the time arrived for carryin g it, the task should have been intrusted to Whig hands. It is not only fatal to the reputation of a party, but in the highest degree injurious to great public interests, for any Government to a$ tempt to maintain itself in power by adopting the measures of its opponents. Had the Roman Catholic Bill been carried by a Whig Adminis tration, that principle of concession to out-of door agitation would never have been delibe rately sanctioned, which has since been fruit ful of mischief, and to which we may, perhaps, in great part attribute the hasty, ill-judged expedition to the Crimea . The Duke of Wellington's " practical good sense " in political affairs is on another occa sion praised with as little justice : Still solicitous to avert, if possible, the dire alternative of a creation of peers, the King, as a last resource, requested his private secretary to write a circular letter to the leading peers, requesting them to stay away from the House of Peers and allow the bill to pass. This ex• pedient had the desired effect. The practical good sense of the Duke of Wellington at once saw that matters had come to such a crisis that one or other of these evils must be incurred, and he wisely adopted the least of the two. Though feeling, as he himself said, that yielding to a threat to create peers was as much a violation of the constitution as such a creation itself, he bowed to necessity, and rose and left the house, followed by above a hundred peers, none of whom appeared there again till after the bill was carried. The policy of this expedient is open to question. Would not the House of Lords have occupied a higher position had they only yielded to compulsion instead of yielding to a threat? It is doubtful, after all, whether the Whigs would have proceeded to extremities. The Reform fever was rapidly subsiding, and at the worst an addition to the peers would have had no more injurious effect than to in crease the influence and power of their house. A brave and open course in political affairs is in reality always the most expedient course. On the conduct of the Whigs in taking advan tage of the July revolution to effect a total change in our representative system, Sir A. Alison remarks with much force 7 The faults committed by the Liberal party during the progress of this great contest were still more glaring, and they may be pronounced upon with more confidence than those of their opponents, because, as they were victorious in the strife, their measures were carried into execution, and have thus been brought to the test of experience. The first wrong step which they took, and which perhaps drew after it all the rest, was bringing forward the retorm question at all, at a time when the nation was convulsed with the triumph of the Barricades, and all calm discus sion of the proposed change, vital as it was, had become out of the question. Considered as a party advantage, indeed, and as a stepping-stone by which they themselves might ascend to power, and terminate the long and hated dominion of the Tories, it was natural that the Whigs should make the most of the French Revolution ; and no one can with reason blame them for having done all they could, by ordinary means, to turn it to the best advan tags. They were fully entitled to do so. They did so: they supplanted the Duke of Wellington's Administra• tion, and seated themselves in power. But having done this, they went a step further, and resolved upon a change in the constitution so vast as should for ever prevent the return of their opponents to power. What was this but setting tire to the house in which they both dwelt, in order to drive their rivals out of the wing which they still occu pied ? The danger was imminent that the whole edifice, as had occurred in France, would be involved in the con flagration. Mr. Pitt had, at no distant period, given a memorable example of what they should have done on occasion of their triumph. In 1784, when be defeated the coalition of Lord North and Mr. Fox, he terminated the reign of the Whigs. which had lasted almostl without interruption for a century, and the majority which he gained in the Commons (136) was just the same as Lord Grey acquired by his dissolution of Parliament in April 1831. But Mr. Pitt made no change in the constitution, when the enthusiasm in his favour, and the majority he had acquired, enabled him to have done so with a certainty of success; he made no attempt to extinguish the Whig boroughs nume rous and corrupt as they were : though a reformer at that time, he abstained from reform when it might have im perilled the State. He had the strength of a giant, but he did not use it like a giant. Thence half a centucy of p ower t o hie party, and the glories of the Revolutiopary SATURDAY, war, and unexampled extension and prosperity to his country. The see-saw style of the author's estimate of the character of lending men is especially observable in the notice of Lord Palmerston. The latter part of the judgment is much nearer the truth than the former:— The great fault of this accomplished Minister —and it is a very serious one, for it has more than once brought his country to the brink of the most serious danger— is, that he never calculates the means at his disposal for effecting the projects which he has at heart, and engages in designs which he has not the means of carry. ing through, or stimulates movements in other countries which he has not the means of supporting. Bred in the school of Pitt, and essentially patriotic in his feelings and ideas, he sometimes forgets the difference in the situation and power of the country at different times, and has often held as high language in diplomatic intercourse, when a reformed House of Commons had not left twenty thOusand disposable men in the country, or ten ships -of. the-line to form a Channel fleet, as when Lord Castle reagh wielded the power of one hundred and fifty thou. and, and one hundred ships-of-the-line bore the royal flag. A sincere Mend of freedom, he has sometimes proved its worst enemy, by stimulating movements of the liberal party among the excitable inhabitants of other States, which the people of this country had neither the means nor the inclination to support, and being forced, in consequence, to leave them to be crushed by the military force of despotic States. With admirable akil. he sr ranged all the other powers of Europe to check the am bition of France on the Eastern Question in 1840 ; and it wrs owing to the influence of his diplomacy that the cordial alliance of France and England was formed which put such a bridle in the mouth of Russia in 1854. But on other occasions his ill-timed assertions of British in fluence have been attended with the utmost hazard; for they brought us to the verge of a war with France, and once with France and Russia united, at a time when the country was wholly unprepared to maintain a contest with either the one or the other. The best commentary on this passage is to be found in the sad tale of the Polish rising. When it first broke forth there seemed a rea sonable chance that the nationality of Poland would be supported by a league of Austria, France, and England . The danger to Austria from the incorporation of the kingdom of Poland with the Russian empire was so obvious and pressing that it overcame all the terrors of the Cabinet of Vienna as to a revolutionary state. The Austrian Consul, accordingly, in the first instance, did not leave Warsaw; and a secret negotiation was opened with the Cabinet of Vienna, the result of which was, that Austria would not object to the restoration of the nationality of Poland, and even to contribute to it by the aban donment of Galicia, provided Poland would agree to accept as King a prince of the house of Austria, and that the whole arrangements were made with the concurrence of the Cabinets of Paris and London. id. Walewaki, ac cordingly, was charged with a mission to sound these two Cabinets on the subject. He met with a favorable re ception at the Tuileries, where he arrived in the beginning of March; but M. Casimir !Wier, who had just suc ceeded to the lead in the French Government, said he could do nothing without the concurrence of the Cabinet of St. James's. M. Walewski had, says Sir A. A:ison, several conferences with Lord Palmerston, but— The Polish Envoy was informed, with every expression of regret, that England could not interfere; and Poland, for the present at least, was left to its fate. In a note the historian quotes the despatch written by Lord Palmerston in answer to the proposal of the French Government for an in tervention in favour of Poland : The undersigned, in answer to the note presented to him by the ambassador of France in order to engage the British Government to interfere, in concert with France, in the affairs of Poland, by a mediation which should have for its object to arrest the effusion of blood, and preserve for Poland a political and national existence, has the honour to inform Ma Excellency Prince Talleyrand that, notwithstand ing the desire of the King of G reat Britain to concur with the King of the French in every proceeding to consolidate the peace of Europe, and above all in one which should have or its object to put an end to the war of extermination of fwhich Poland is this day the theatre, his Britannic Ma jesty is neverthertheless compelled to . . . decline the proposition which Prince Talleyrand has transmitted to him by his note of the 20th of June, judging that the time has not yet come when he could undertake it with success against the will of the sovereign whose rights are incon testable. Yet the writer of this despatch has been constantly held up by the Liberal party as the friend of Poland. To his course on this occa sion we owe that predominance of Russian power which has led to the existing contest. To the masterly narrative of the Polish war we can accord unreserved praise. Poland en gaged in the struggle with a population of four millions and a revenue of 2,000,0001. sterling, against Russia with a population of fifty millions and a revenue of 16,000,000/. Yet for a time victory inclined to the side of the Poles, the Russian forces, as on most occasious at the commenconellt of Iv"' 1 :52