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

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