The Press.
London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

He must break with the past, undo all the work
of tradition and habit, and purge away the old
man by an obligato course of constitutional
government. When he shall have done this—
and not before—his alliance will become from
shadow substance, and his friendship may be
counted as something more than a mere name.
To strip an argument like this of that oracular
and sententious envelope in which the Saturday
Review so skilfully wraps u all its lucubrations
is to refute it. Thus treated, the literal absurdity
of the thing saute aux yeux. We see at a glance
that, this doctrine once admitted, England must
necessarily renounce all alliances, and segregate
herself entirely from the European system. The
reductio ad absurdum could not be more strikingly
illustrated.

In that scattered and incoherent community,
where nations play the part of individuals, that
state illogically enough called "the state of
nature " may be said still to prevail. The nobler
impulses to association seldom, if ever, come into
play. Even the coarser attraction, identity of
interest, is often—thanks to that confusion which
the mass and complexity of its elements are apt
to introduce into every calculation—misunder-
stood and directly violated.

It is the possibility of such a misunderstanding
that the statesman and the journalist should
earnestly strive to avert. In the case in point,
as indeed more or less in every case, this possi-
bility undoubtedly exists. The barbarous maxim,
that England and France are "natural enemies,"
is, unfortunately, so far upheld by historic recol-
lections as to have assumed almost the force of
an axiom with the masses on either, but more
especially on the other, side of the Channel. The
enlightened minority, however, take an exactly
opposite view. These see in the chances of a war
the worst results for European as well as local
interests, however the scale of victory may incline.
Now, it is the singular prerogative of the man
who guides the reins of government in France to
share, notoriously and avowedly, the views of
this enlightened minority, and, at the same time,
to exercise an unprecedentedly potent influence
over the unenlightened masses, whose dispositions
may be presumed less friendly towards us. It
would be difficult to imagine any position claim-
ing more scrupulous minagement, not merely
from England herself, but from every friend to
order and progress.

That we, or indeed any of our brethren of the
English press, should be advocates of pure mo-
narchy per se, it is preposterous to suppose. But
recent history proves, with incontrovertible force,
the danger and absurdity of making of Constitu-
tionalism a bed of Procrustes. Various social
and political complications render the French
Empire, at the present moment, a European
necessity—and, in justifying the broad principle,
justify also, of course within limits, the details.
If these complications escape the glance of the
Saturday Review, we fear that our prothund
contemporary's vision must be of that peculiar
kind which discerns the remote and the indefinite
with marvellous distinctness, while the proximate
and the palpable convey to the retina nothing
but mist and confusion.