The Press.
London, England, 1854-11-25 00:00:00

1106

with the policy of a State which counts
her gains in our loss, her victories in
our slaughter ? Yet this is the State whose in-
terests, according to Lord ABERDEEN, are
identical with our own.
It is impossible that such a state of thkpgrti
can last, impossible even with a Ministry
whose notorious weakness and disunion in-
vite a treacherous policy by promising it
success. But for the mowent Lord ABERBEEVIgI
pathetic entreaties for overtures of peace upon
any terms have met with a response. The
Northern Powers, we are told, are again
busy with negotiations ou the four points as
bases of peace. The boom of the Park guns
is heard through London, and we are in
doubt whether the feu-de-joie is for the
victory at Inkermann, or for the answer
which the Northern Potentates have granted
to our Premier's prayers. It is while the
whole nation is weeping tears of indigna-
tion for the loss of its heroes, that it is again
to be insulted with empty talk of " points "
and " bases," which, if they were realities,
instead of the delusive shadows they are,
could only have the effect of exalting the
power of Austria, of affording her a safer
frontier, extending her commerce, and placing

Turkey at her feet.
What this contest has already cost us is no
more to be summed up in figures than the
value of a limb or a sense can be expressed
by any arithmetical formulae. The blood shed
will cry out against us from the ground, if we
allow it to be shed in vain. England has no
views of aggrandisement, but, in return for the
sacrifices she has made, she must demand
ample securities against further aggression,
not securities on paper, but those solid
securities which arise from depriving a State,
at once too powerful and too ambitious for the
tranquillity of the world, of the means and
capacity of again disturbing it.
The inevitable tide of European events for the
last forty years has had the effect of separating
the policy of England more widely from that
of the great Northern Courts. We speak of
facts irrespective of political sentiments. The
working of our free institutions has unde-
signedly thrown us into an attitude of an
tagonism with despotic Governments. The
divergence has become greater as the popular
element in England has acquired greater
force, and after 1848 the line became more
sharply drawn than at any former period.
The effect of the revolutionary storms of that
epoch was to make the despotic Courts of
northern Europe more despotic, to inspire I
them with greater dread of liberty, and to
induce them to revoke those concessions in
favour of free institutions which they had
formerly made. The sword was unsheathed
as the great instrument of rule, and the
Emperor NICHOLAS, as the mightiest repre-
sentative of despotic Government, began to
regard England with suspicion, as the strong-
hold of that political system directly opposed
to his own.
This antagonism might have slumbered long,
perhaps to a period when other ideas and in-
terests might have superseded it, but for the
accident of Lord ABERDEEN being summoned
to the head of affairs. To him the Europe of
1854 was the Europe of 1814; the holy alliance
was in full force ; the Emperor NICHOLAS was
commander-in-chief of the Conservative in-
terests of Europe, and the Emperor FRANCIS
was his first lieutenant. With those ideas he
was prepared to carry on our Government, with
those ideas he listened complacently to the
first proposals of the Emperor NICHOLAS for the
partition of Turkey, and did what he could to
prepare our public mind for their reception.
He clung to the helm after he had lost the
power to guide it, and he holds on still in
the belief that absolutism must triumph at
last through the intrigues of Austria and the
savage force of Muscovy. But England and
France, he thinks, may perhaps require more
bleeding, and Turkey further exhaustion.
A winter campaign in the Crimea, with a few
more Russian assaults, may do much, with
" the vicissitudes" on which he dwells so
strongly, to weary both nations, and to induce
them to receive submissively the "four points "
when tendered by Austria at the head of half
a million of men, yet unscathed by war, but
fully prepared for it.