International policy. Essays on the foreign relations of England ...

Preface

A FEW words only are needed by way of preface to tliis book. It resembles in form several recent publications : it is a collection of Essays by different writers, each of whom signs his name. It differs from most, if not all, such recent publications in the definiteness of its object and in its immediately political and practical character.

Certain principles are adopted equally by all the contributors, and they are adopted from the political and social system known as Positiyism. But beyond the adoption of these principles, to be shortly stated, no one of the writers is to be considered as committed to that system, unless he himself in his Essay adyances farther.

There are three positions on which the writers are agreed.

First. That the international relations of mankind are a fit subject for a systematic policy.

Secondly. That such systematic policy is to be

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based on the acceptance of duties, not on the assertion of rights ; that it ought to haye a moral, not a political or purely national foundation. All questions, therefore, concerning the interest, power, or prestige of any particular nation are secondary and subordinate. All appeals to motives drawn from such considerations are consistently discarded; all arguments which ultimately inyolye the doctrine of the rights of such nation are put aside as irrelevant and futile.

Thirdly. The arguments advanced are in all cases drawn from considerations of a purely human character, as alone susceptible of legitimate and profitable discussion.

Within the limit of these three propositions all the writers equally, I repeat, accept a connection with the doctrines of M. Comte ; but not beyond this limit. It is important to observe that their responsibility as joint contributors is confijied to this degree of acceptance. Cooperation for a common object ought to be possible, without impairing in other respects the free action of those who cooperate ; and may be possible, if due care be taken by them on their side, and their efforts be met with fair candour on the part of the reader. On minor points there will probably be a certain amount of disagreement. The highly complex nature of the problems to be solved, when we pass

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from the abstract to the concrete, from the theoretical to the practical handling of international affairs, renders this almost ineyitable. Yet, on the whole, it is hoped that a large amonnt of agreement will equally be traceable — a sufficiently large amonnt to be an evidence of the yalne of the system which makes it attainable. The field of subjects treated is wide and varied ; it embraces a number of complicated human relations. It will be much if, writing independently of each other, we arrive in the main at convergent conclusions, and differ only when the difference involves nothing but the value of such and such means. Public opinion on matters of international policy is in a state of chaos. If we attain fundamental agreement on these matters, such a result should draw attention to the method by the aid of which it is attained, no less than to the conclusions which it is our primary object to advocate, and that apart from any consideration of the method.

Note. — With a European war imininent, it may be added that the first three Essays, which treat of Continental affairs, were completed in the course of 1864 and 1865. It seemed needless, in a Yolume dealing with general principles, to introduce any reference to more recent events which affect the forms of expression used rather than the policy or opinions maintained.

Contents

ESSAY PAGE

I. THE WEST. By Richard Congreve, M.A., late FeUow

and Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford .... 1

II

Practically speaking, no distinct relations are observable between England and France as nations until the close of the true period of the Middle Ages. The age of the dissolution of the catholic and feudal system, that had long given some sort of unity to Europe, first shows distinct nationalities and international action. The great French wars of our Edwards and Henrys are at once the symptoms of this decline, and the measure of its effect. It is significant that this great period of temporal and moral anarchy produced the most wanton and most obstinate of these international struggles. 1 have no hesitation in calling this the darkest page in the history of both countries. But the terrific sufi^erings which the French people endured during that long agony, at most but blighted their progress for a time. On our national history they rest as a permanent blot. When reason and justice have taken the place of a barbarous pride in the national traditions, the memory of our French glories — even the very names of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt — mil come home to us as the tale of a wanton and savage folly. They are names which reflect no national honour upon England (however high be the estimate we set on mere personal valour) ; or reflect such honour only as the raids of the plunderers of Italy reflect on the history of Germany and France. They were wars as devoid of legitimate cause as of j)ermanent result. They satisfied no political end; achieved no actual object; could have led, if successful, to no good; and were opposed to tlie rude sense of right even of those unsettled times. Whatever good arose out of them eventually, was due to the ruin they brought upon their authors and promoters. As civil wars only are they explicable ; and such historical palliation as they possess is to be found in the fact that they were but part of the civil convulsion which the failure of the catholic and feudal system produced. It is time that Englishmen ceased to glory in their share in these barbarous national tournaments, and to take a puerile pride in relating how, in the great orgy of degenerate chivalry, their countrymen bore off the largest share of the worthless and bloody prizes. The wars with France are as little worthy of honour as the wars of the Roses, and they teach us only the same mournful lesson.

It is only at the close of the long wars which marked the ruin of feudalism that true political relations exist between England and France as parts of a European body of states. From that time to the present, a period of 400 years, it will be found that whenever the policy of the two countries has been vigorous and wise, whenever they have both been fulfilling their natural functions in that body of states, the relations between them have been friendly and never directly hostile. On the other hand, whenever those relations have been hostile, it has been when one or other was pursuing a policy ruinous in itself, and which it has ultimately been forced to abandon. The wars of England and France mark, in fact, their grand crimes and blunders as nations. Their normal condition — the condition of their grandest national successes — ^is peace; or rather, what is more than peace, cooperation. It is a significant fact, and one which we too seldom remember, that, mere militar}^ glory apart (which can be won in the worst as in the best of causes), all that is noblest as political achievement throughout the vicissitudes of European complications for four centuries, the policy of all the true statesmen who have left us a heritage of wisdom, has been characterised by the maintenance of union with France. Our greatest statesmen and their greatest statesmen — those whose policy we now can profitably recall — all uniformly combined in this. It has been repudiated only by those whose policy has been cancelled by events. The prejudices which have sprung from our ancient and from our recent triumphs in war are so strong on us that propositions like these are regarded as a paradox. They form, however, rules without any true exception. There have been times when the policy of England, or when that of France, was in desperate defiance of all their duties and their traditions. At such moments the weight of the other has been thrown into the opposite scale, and furious contests have ensued. But their normal relations have been those of peace. And no broad survey of history can obscure the truth that, from its consolidation in the fifteenth century down to the latter half of the reign of Louis XIY., the general tendency of the French monarchy has been towards harmony with the English.

The patience and address with which the sagacious Louis XL averted the vainglorious invasion of Edward lY., the transparent want of purpose that invasion betrayed, the anxiety of Louis for peace, the ease with which the English king and his council allowed themselves to be cajoled, mark the close of the long national feud, the substitution of nations for fiefs, and statecraft for military adventure. The French policy of Henry VIII. is little but a repetition of the conduct of Edward. There is the same pretentious invasion, the conventional war-cry, the same willingness to treat, the same mutual respect and desire for peace. With the Louises, Ferdinands, and Henrys of the fifteenth century these conflicts were due rather to inveterate habit than to active animosities; and they had too similar and too arduous duties at home to make any of them very desirous of serious wars. With the sixteenth century — the age of Henry VIII., Francis, and Charles V. — the actual state system of Europe comes clearly into view. We have now the existing national limits, definite international relations, and permanent objects of state. It may be difficult in the confusion which- precedes the first great settlement to trace exactly any intelligible policy; but amidst all the kaleidoscopic complications of the time there stands out clearly the growing importance of England in the European system, the preponderance which at any moment it can give to France, the immense force of both of them united, and the real affinity of their true interests and national objects. Capricious as was the policy of Francis and that of Henry, personal and trivial as were the motives which often controlled it, it was in the main the policy of natural allies and not of natural enemies. Cui adlicereo prceest was the famous motto of Henry, — a motto as true now as it was then. It did not mean the destruction of France. And when at last, at his worst strait, Henry threw his lot in with the captive Francis and enabled him to recover his kingdom, he instituted a great maxim of policy, — that England has an interest in havino^ her neighbour at once progressive and strong, for she has with England the joint protectorate of Europe against absolute dominion and retrograde oppression.

With the growth of the power of Charles Y. (whose life is justly taken as marking the rise of our modern state system) there comes into view clearly the principle which for the three succeeding centuries has more or less distinctly formed the clue to European history. In spite of serious exceptions and perturbations, a clear tendency appears that the conservative forces, both spiritual and temporal, should gather round the House of Austria, and centre in South Germany and Spain; that the jorogressive forces are jointly or alternately led by England and France ; whilst Italy and the whole left bank of the Rhme form at once the battle-ground and the prize. During the sixteenth century, for the most part, the temporal struggle is lost and drowned in the spiritual. Political antagonisms and affinities are merged in the religious. The death-grapple of the two faiths was nerved by a special fanaticism, which overrides all the combinations of policy, interest, and reason. Yet in the midst of these convulsions the same general tendency is at work. France in the struggle is torn into two factions ; her position is nullified ; and her strength paralysed, whilst she is preparing for the middle ground which in the religious aspect of the great contest she has ever since maintained. England, if not so equally divided, sways backwards and forwards with still more violent revulsions. In the mean time the House of Austria is still the centre of the religious as of the political reaction. From time to time some Philip or Catherine steals in, like the genius of evil, to lure

England or France into opposite camps. From time to time the very existence of states seems lost in the violence of civic disintegration. The deadly struggle in which the life of our great sovereign Elizabeth was passed might well have blinded a mind less capacious and calm to the true affinities of states. But in the worst of her straits, in spite of the danger to her person and her people, in spite of the fanatical hatred with which both were assailed by the court party of France, neither Elizabeth nor her ministers ever lost sight of the truth that England and France in the European system are not natural enemies but natural allies. Yet this great truth, which civil convulsion and religious frenzy for a time had obscured, broke forth only into clear light when France had shaken off the fever of reaction, and the wise and noble policy of Henry lY. had begun to restore her to health and vigour.

The spirit of that great king was well met with that of the great queen ; and history can give us no finer instance of political sagacity than we see in the hearty and confiding alliance of these two consummate rulers. "She was another self," said Henry; "the irreconcilable enemy of my irreconcilable enemies." Indeed, if we were to search for the type of the natural attitude of the governments to each other, we could have no better form of it than in the history of this period. Mutual confidence and respect, a generous spirit of cooperation, a consciousness of a common duty, but a spirit always tempered by watchfulness and caution, was the spirit in which they assumed their protectorship of Europe. This is not the place to analyse or weigh the famous Political Design of Henry, the scheme for the pacification and settlement of Europe. Nothing would be more mistaken than to regard it as the chimera of one visionary brain. The scheme was thoroughly reduced to practical working. It had gradually won its way into the cautious mind of the veteran Sully. It received the actual adhesion of a large proportion of the European powers, and nothing but the dagger of Ravaillac prevented its immediate execution. But the scheme, as we read it in Sully, was as thoroughly that of Elizabeth as it was that of Henry. She had been the earliest and the staunchest maintainer of the central purpose of the design. It was impossible without the active cooperation of England ; and on the death of Elizabeth, Henry regarded it as almost annihilated. This is not the place to decide upon its wisdom or its practicability. It may be that, as a reconstructive system, it was impossible or premature ; but the idea on which it rested is an idea as definite as it is true. That idea is the reality of the system of states in Europe, the necessity for their harmony and cooperation, the leading part which her history and position give to France in the common councils of Europe, the need of an intimate alliance with England, and the conviction, that with both combined, the cause of good government, progress, and peace resides. The conception of the greatest of the French kings long ruled the policy of French statesmen. This grand, if premature, idea was maintained by a series of ministers, wise, or respectable at least, down to the time when the tumid ambition of Louis XIY. ruined his country and blotted out his dynasty. Xeither that deplorable catastrophe nor the delirium of the revolutionary wars have succeeded in destroying it ; and it remains now, what it was two centuries and a half ago, the deep conviction of thoughtful minds on both sides of the Channel, and the true key of European politics.

For a moment the fanatical party which struck down the great Henry in the full maturity of his wisdom succeeded in perverting from its path the public action of his beloved country. Their tenure of power was long enough to complete that ill-starred marriage with the House of Austria — that adulterous mingling, it has been said, of the blood of Henry and of Philip. But the genius of France, as though aroused by this outrage, lived again in the spirit of the great successor of Henry ; he who, with yet greater difficulties, carried on the same work with yet greater power — the most consummate of modern statesmen — the profound and majestic Eichelieu. For twenty-six years the policy of France was directed on one unbending but sagacious system, which almost created France as a nation, if it did not create its national character, and which certainly for a century and a half stamped its impress on the history of Europe. The first act of Richelieu as minister was to announce the return to the policy of the late king, and to attempt to reopen the English alliance by the marriage with Charles. At the close of his unbroken career the ground was already prepared for the settlement which resulted in the peace of Westphalia; the settlement which for two centuries has been, and still in some sense is, the basis of the state system of modern Europe ; the settlement which half realised the design of Henry, which his design might possibly have accomplished without the thirty years of carnage. The policy of Eichelieu is far too strongly marked and too well understood to need any commentary

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here. It is a policy so systematic in principle and so rich in its actual fruits that it may be taken as the t}^ical and historical policy of France. As such we can judge it. The policy of France was again in the hands of a great man, and again it was a policy in substance the same. The policy of England is no longer in the hands of a great ruler, but becomes utterly incoherent and contemptible under the intriguing bigotry of the race of Stuart. But the policy of France is not altered ; France again assumes the leadership of the progressive movement in Europe, and again, as a first condition, sohcits the active cooperation of England. The help meet for hhn, which in a later generation he might have found in the political genius of Cromwell, Richelieu was forced to eke out by the mere military genius of Gustavus. The influence of England under the Stuarts was nothing except when it was evil. But in spite of the sore trials to his principles, in spite of the vacillations, bigotry, and falseness of the wretched Stuart courts, in spite even of the demagogic support of La Rochelle, Richelieu was never betrayed into a hostile attitude to England, never even overlooked the inherent strength of her position. The English prisoners at Rhe were sent home honourably; no reasonable opportunity of peace was neglected; and the whole system of the most systematic of modern statesmen supposes cordiahty and union with England. That system was only not carried out with the full cooperation of England because for the time, in her own internal convulsions, England was withdrawn from action abroad. But it was carried out, if not with England herself, with the natural allies of England, — by the same means, to the same end, and with the same spirit with which, both before and afterwards, the name of England was identified. In the hands of Eichelieu the policy of France was modified and developed from that of Henry, but it was essentially the same. To concentrate and complete the greatness of the country without yielding to the lust of covetous aggression; to conciliate and balance the rival fanaticisms in religion without giving victory to either ; to rest the frontiers of states on geographical and national bases ; to establish liberty of conscience without political anarchy; to humble the reactionary dynasties without unlimited revolution; to determine the final ascendency of the progressive over the retrograde system; and to make France the heart of this action by giving her a moral rather than a material empire — such, in brief, was the work of the great dictator.

The policy of Eichelieu was one so solidly based that it suffered scarcely any interruption by his death ; and again, for eighteen years, his system was continued by his servant and pupil Mazarin. The irregular conditions and the inferior capacity of this ministry rob that system, if not of its success, at least of its dignity and distinctness. The characteristic intrigue, the shifting combinations, and the personal meanness which disfigure the statecraft of Mazarin, are but too often repeated by the anecdote-mongers of history as the substance, and not as the adjunct of his policy. Viewed by a broader light, it was but the legitimate continuation of the policy of Eichelieu, as that was the legitimate continuation of the policy of Henry. The weapons of the bygone chiefs tremble in the feebler hands of their successors. But they are yet sufiicient for their work. How right and systematic the task was, the closing triumph of the life of Mazariii — the treaty of the Pyrenees — draws in most striking lines. When we see the ruler of France — and he an Italian, a churchman, and a cardinal — the virtual author of the most concentrated of autocracies, allying himself with the English Republic, mth the acknowledged head of Protestantism, and jointly with him labourmg towards a common object, securing the degradation of the great Spanish despotism and the definite ascendency of France, we recognise the grand current of affairs shaping itself to its determined course across all the minor obstacles of individual Avills and disturbing accidents. Internal difficulties and the complication of interests for a time separated the chief imitator from the great rival of Richelieu ; but as soon as they thoroughly understood each other, so soon as the relations of states grew definite, the policy of Mazarin and of Cromwell was convergent and not antagonistic. Both were in the deepest sense traditional, both were intensely national, and both essentially systematic. And it is of high historical significance that in orbits so different we find their common progression so similar.

But Mazarin, with all his claims as a politician, can as little compare with Cromwell in true sagacity as he can in greatness of purpose. The greatest of the Protestant chiefs was also among the foremost of modern statesmen. Those who look with immoderate pride on our distant dominions, and with immoderate fear on their ultimate abandonment, are the men who mistrust the true greatness and strength of Britain and its inhabitants. Such may learn a useful lesson by turning to the position which England held in Europe under Cromwell — England, witliout Indian, American, or Australian empires; without Gibraltar, witliout Malta, without Hong Kong, and mthout one of those thousand posts where the British flag now studs the Pacific and the Asiatic Oceans.

A few years of a great man's rule raised her from utter insignificance and abasement, to be in material strength among the first, in moral purpose the first of the nations of Europe, the leader of free civilisation and the destinies of the West, the hope and help of the oppressed, the curb of the tyrant. Trammelled as he was by his narrow creed, and fired by the national lust for maritime aggrandisement, the policy of the great Protector abroad tended at times to fanaticism, at times to injustice; but into one error, however imminent, he never fell. He never mistook the truth that the Catholicism of France was, in its way, no less progressive than the Protestantism of England ; that the true ends of both countries could not be served by opposition ; that their cordial union was essential to the security and welfare of Europe. As Richelieu had continued the policy of Henry in France, Cromwell recalled to life the policy of Elizabeth in England ; and the lives of the two wisest of the modern rulers of England, and the two wisest who, in modern times, have ruled France, thus fall in their main notes into perfect harmony and natural sequence.

We come now to the disastrous epoch when all union was destroyed by the fatal influences which had long been gathering within and around the doomed monarchy of France.

The latter portion of the reign of Louis XIV., as the pacific influence of the great Colbert declines, brings us to this disastrous change. It is no less than the contradiction of the policy which the great men of France had upheld for a century, and the annihilation of her well-earned place and influence. The later years of the Grand Monarque form just that period of her history in which France is the farthest from the true political leadership of Europe, at the lowest point of her national greatness. Spurred on by his o^vn mean arrogance and by intriguing bigots, the king, whose duty it was, and whose pride it had once been, to follow the steps of Henry lY. and Sully, of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert, passed over with his whole force to the enemy ; called round himself the retrograde powers which it had been the glory of his throne to have curbed, and used the influence which, to protect Europe from oppression, had been conceded to France, in the very work of making France the oppressor of Europe.

South Germany practically passed over to the side of freedom, and France inherited and extended the sinister traditions of Spain. Dazzled by the power which his predecessors had won in the cause of progress, he turned its forces to the cause of repression. For Europe nothing was left but signal retribution on the apostate dynasty; and the heroic resolution of the great Dutch chief, in whom lived again the antagonist of Phihp, and the daring genius of Marlborough, gave us the few amongst our triumphs over France to which Englishmen can look back with unmixed pride.

The true headship of Europe, moral and intellectual, which the character and genius of Elizabeth and of Cromwell for a season had twice before given her, passed over for a season distinctly to England.

During the whole of the century preceding the Revolution, the movement of Europe is speculative, religious, industrial, and social, rather than political. Political action is feeble and confused, and but one great character occupies the field. Yet whilst it is plain that England bore a large, at times the largest, share in the scientific and industrial movement, in the political sphere she no less manifestly possessed the casting vote, the reserve force, the ultimate appeal of Europe.

During the period of ignoble intrigue which intervenes between the peace of Utrecht and the French revolution, it would be useless to look for any high, or indeed any settled, political purpose. In the collapse of all political aims and convictions, the relations of states are reduced to a mere struggle for material advantages, on the side of England to a blind and profligate struggle for maritime ascendency and colonial empire. This much, however, is clear. The criminal extravagance of Louis XIY. once bitterly avenged, France tends feebly to recover her natural ground; and the English and the French statesmen, or rather the feeble diplomatists of the day, again tend towards a real alliance, watchful and broken as it was. Walpole indeed — a statesman whose sagacious zeal for the general welfare of England outweighs the corrupt means with which he bent a corrupt aristocracy into reason — succeeded during the long years in which he governed England in maintaining unbroken a cordial alliance with France. When the jealousy of a worthless cabal forced him to surrender, first his principles and shortly afterwards his power, it was Spain, ndt France, which was the object of the national antipathy, or rather of the national cupidity.

The triple alliance, the quadruple alliance, both equally point to the fact that, though the old European parties are almost extinguished, the tradition of England and France as allies against the reactionary powers was not wholly forgotten. It is even some compensation to France for the humiliation of enduring such rulers as the Regent Dubois and Fleury, that they had the good sense to cling fast to this principle ; so that their ignoble scheming was far less injurious to their country than that of the ambitious bigots who succeeded them. Unhappily the direction of France passed into the hands of men who, to corruption hardly less than theirs and far inferior vigour, added the retrograde ambition of Louis XIY. France again, under the guidance of incorrigible fanatics or the creatures of royal debauchery, is seen to pass to the side of the oft-stricken House of Austria and the Bourbons of Spain. Aghast at the sight of the new Prussia, which by a happy return to her traditionary policy she had assisted to found, the blind successors of Richelieu joined in the ill-starred coalition to crush the only modern king who was worthy to be his peer,

England, in the main, corrects the balance which the wretched incapacity of French policy is continually unsettling. In the main her action in Europe, always more pacific than those of the other states, though for causes which do her small honour, tends in Europe to the side of order, freedom, and national independence. Beyond the limits of the Western system, it is true, her policy is one long and dark story of colonial aggression and commercial rapacity. But within it she maintains the part which, with the superior advantage of her position, France had in the previous century more systematically supported. She