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preach that England has no more sacred duty and no higher mission than to aid with her whole strength in the overthrow of those "powers unblest,"

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freedom? Who does not feel how different are the feelings with which England would have been regarded, both by patriots and by Sovereigns, if her wishes had been more clear and consistent, and if those wishes, instead "Beneath whose gilded hoofs of pride, of being merely manifested, had either been Where'er they trampled, freedom died." altogether suppressed or been carried out Lastly comes another party-strong in into vigorous action-if, in a word, our the narrow clearness of their formula-wish had been developed into a will? And strong in the shallow intelligibility of their who will deny that the cause of this unhapeconomy-strong in the intense unblushing py indecision lay in the fact that as a nation selfishness of the doctrine they propound- we had no opinion, determination, or policy who insist that our conduct ought to be as in the matter? And what could show more insular as our position; that our wealth, signally how completely in all those memoour power, our security, are all so many ad- rable years we were without a national will vantages given us in order that we may hold than the circumstance that, while our lower ourselves aloof from the rest of the human classes were lynching Haynau, and our family, watch their strifes and fates with a middle classes were welcoming Kossuth with coldly vigilant eye, and be ever ready to pro- an ovation such as never before greeted any fit by their reciprocal follies to make our foreigner or any citizen, and such as threw golden harvest with supreme indifference even our most earnest demonstrations of loyalike out of the ruin of the just and the tri-alty to our Queen into the shade - our umph of the oppressor. "It is idle," say country was in formal alliance and avowed these politicians," to argue on questions of amity with Austria, and our statesmen, even foreign policy; our clear course should be our liberal statesmen, had permitted, conto have no foreign policy at all." nived at, sanctioned the suppression of Hungarian independence, the violation of an ancient and solemnly guaranteed constitution, and the intervention, for the purpose of consummating this enormous wrong, of that systematic, avowed, colossal enemy of all popular rights, whose second step in crime we are now in arms to combat, because we unwisely and unrighteously allowed the first.

It is obvious enough that, out of these conflicting notions and predilections, no policy deserving the name of "national" can be educed, save by the decisive supremacy of one element, or by an harmonious blending of them all. Floating as they now are-coexistent, but unreconciled-both in our legislative and executive atmosphere, they can only produce (as they have produced, to our damage and our shame) vacillating lan- The crisis of the middle of the 19th cenguage, uncertain and therefore ineffective tury, then, which had long been preparing action, impaired influence and reputation, its approaches, surprised England without a perplexity to others, and discredit to our- foreign policy. She found herself in the selves. Of all these evil effects we have seen midst of the battle without having decided instances enough since 1848. We are not on her object, and without having arranged now finding fault, especially, with any states- her plans. She has her creed, her principles, man or any party. It would be uncandid to her systematic line of action still to consider criticize the past with the light which the and adopt. As individuals, we have all of future has thrown over it. It would be un- us our notions, our predilections, our desires; generous and unfair to lay upon individuals but we are agreed upon no consistent and the blame which should be borne by the very intelligible course. We have, fermenting fact we are endeavoring to expound, viz., among us, the elements of a faith and a polithe non-existence of any national foreign cy; but these elements have not yet assumed policy. But who can avoid tracing our a solid shape. We have not yet made up present position, with all its costly parapher- our minds whether we shall fight for princinalia and its questionable issue, to the want ples or merely for interests—whether we of a clear principle and a decisive action in shall maintain our continental alliances, or 1848 and 1849? Who can help a sentiment shake ourselves free from them as soon as we of deep regret that, before the Italian ques- can do so with honor-whether we shall tions arose, we had not decisively resolved content ourselves with merely meeting and what attitude Great Britain should assume staving off the difficulties of the day, or take -what result she should aim at and insist advantage of the contingencies which may upon, and what length she was prepared to arise, and which now seem imminent, to rego with regard to the settlement of the vari- model the political arrangements of Europe, out contests imminent in that peninsula be- so as to lay these difficulties at rest forevertween monarchs haggling for their existence, whether, finally, in the great struggle which and peoples struggling to consolidate their has been begun, and which is ever openly or

subterraneously going on, between despotic engagements, and stand apart in practical pretensions and popular rights, we shall hold if not in actual indifference to the aspiraaloof altogether from the strife; or shall tions, the struggles, the vicissitudes of our give only barren wishes and sickly smiles to neighbors; that whatever may be our private the good cause; or shall support the wrong sentiments, and whatever opinions we may for fear lest the right should triumph too pronounce at home, we are to show no active fiercely, too completely, and too widely; or preference for justice, no active detestation shall throw our whole strength manfully and of oppression in foreign lands; that we are hopefully into the scale of justice, and use to manifest no sympathy by deeds with it first to secure, and afterwards to moderate, patriots struggling for the civil freedom to hallow, and to utilize the victory. which we won with our best blood two centuries ago, or with States fighting for that national independence which in our own case we value beyond mines of unsunned gold; that we must interfere to redress or to repel no wrong, to assist in the assertion of no right; that whatever iniquities be practised, or whoever be the sufferers beneath them, we must imitate the unfeeling Levite and the selfish priest, who " passed by on the other side" must

From The Economist, 24 Nov.
NO. II.

"Stand tamely by, and faintly murmur blame;" that, in a word, we should cease to be members of the great commonwealth of nations except for the purposes of barter.

OUGHT WE TO HAVE A FOREIGN POLICY? We have seen that England, as a nation, is without a foreign policy; that the rules and axioms, the sympathies and antipathies which decided the conduct of our fathers have no longer a firm and undisputed hold upon their children; that though many new ones have been broached, and haye acquired some currency and strength, none have as yet obtained general acceptance; that, in fine, in all that regards our international relations, we are in a state of perilous interregnum-without an established creed, and without a settled line of action. We have no clear perception either of the great objects at which we ought to aim, or of the price we ought to be willing to pay for those objects, or of the system of proceedings by which we should endeavor to secure them. We propose in these papers to contribute such assistance as we may towards supplying good (they ask) have we ever effected by this great desideratum; but before attempting to lay down the principles of our future foreign policy, we have to meet in limine the doctrine of that school which maintains that we ought not to have a foreign policy at all.

Those who preach this policy, unpalatable as it is to the pride, the instincts, and the traditions of Britons, have unquestionably a strong vantage-ground from which to urge their doctrines. They can point to many monstrous follies, to many costly crimes, to many disastrous failures, to many successes more disastrous still, into which our foreign interferences have plunged us. "What real

those perpetual wars and negotiations which our continental alliances and our desire of European influence have brought upon us? What have we gained, save almost universal hatred, and a wholly unprecedented debt? What cordial friend do we possess in the It is true the disciples of this school are not world? What nation can we point to whose as yet very numerous, nor are their doctrines freedom we have established, or whose hapat present very popular; but it would be as piness we have secured? What have we to unwise to ignore them as it is impossible to show for the blood we have shed and the despise them, since, though we hold their treasure we have lavished? To no go further views to be narrow and their standard of back than 1815, what have we done that public morals to be low, their energy and might not better have been left undone? We sincerity are beyond question, and they ap- imposed upon France a race of sovereigns peal to three deeply-rooted sentiments in the whom she detested; and she cannot forgive national mind, all of which we share in us for the humiliation. We sanctioned the reasonable measure, viz., love of wealth, love robbery of Finland from Sweden, and inof peace, and a painful consciousness that a curred her hatred for so doing; and we are great proportion of our past international now speaking of its restoration to Sweden as history is little else than a record of signal one of the probable results of the present follies and stupendous wrongs. The politi-war. We committed an atrocious violation cians of whom we are speaking teach that of every principle of justice in tearing Norwe should adopt the maxim which Wash- way from Denmark to compensate Swedenington left as his parting legacy to his coun- a crime which no State necessity could justrymen-"To have no relations with other countries except commercial ones; " that we should abstain from all foreign alliances or

tify. We forcibly united Belgium with Holland, only in order, fifteen years later, to sanction its forcible disruption. We gave

Venice and Lombardy to Austria, and thus | retiring in despair and mortification from the created a chronic source of revolution and of field. We owe to the world the example of warfare which can never cease till we have a nobler, truer, more consistent course; we severed the unnatural connection. We se- owe to the victims, whether of our criminal cured the triumphs of the so-called constitu- hostility or of our clumsy protection, some tional party in Spain and Portugal at the more substantial amends than a barren cost of much expenditure and perpetual em- confession of error and a vow of penitent barrassment-and our ungrateful and in-inaction. competent protégés snub us and despise us. We set the first example of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which we are now endeavoring to prop up, by tearing away the kingdom of Greece-which we have had to bully and blush for ever since, and which it seems probable enough we may now have to suppress. On the other hand, when we might have done good by interference- have established freedom and prevented wrong -as in the case of Italy and Hungary, we folded our arms and turned a deaf ear to almost the only two righteous and rational supplications that had ever been addressed to us. We have done what we ought not to have done, and have left undone that which we ought to have done. What we have done in the way of interference we have almost invariably had to undo, or to repent of. And when we have run the full cycle of our follies, and redressed all the wrongs we have committed, by severing Italy from Austria, and Finland from Russia, and Norway from Sweden, we shall be in a position to calculate how much of reputation, of money, and of lives, the doctrine of Isolation' would have saved us-how much better and wiser it would have been never to have sinned at all, than to have had to follow up such costly iniquity by such costly atonement."

We do not, assuredly, intend to indorse the whole of this harsh and highly-colored indictment, but it contains too large an element of indisputable truth not to make, and to deserve to make, a strong impression on the popular mind. But while admitting the impeachment we repudiate the inference. We would redeem the errors of the past, not by stupidly standing still, but by retracing false steps-not by merely ceasing to tread the wrong path, but by walking in the right path zealously, resolutely, and with a cautious and an upright mind. We would endeavor to compensate whatever evil we may heretofore have wrought, not by abstaining from international relations altogether, but by conducting those relations in a juster, wiser, and humbler spirit. There is surely nothing in the essential circumstances of a foreign policy that necessarily entails either folly or wrong-doing; and the moment when we are opening our eyes to a perception of our past mistakes, and awakening to a higher sense of duty and a keener sensibility to right, is scarcely the one for

The long and arduous struggle in which the country was engaged for so many years, and which terminated two years ago in the final and irreversible adoption by the nation of the principles of a free commercial policy, naturally concentrated our attention almost exclusively upon economical considerations. Statesmen were occupied as much as merchants with pounds, shillings, and pence. The whole population was resolved into a committee for studying "the wealth of nations." The severe distress which the people underwent in 1842 and 1847, the alarming crisis of the latter period, and the immediate and complete relief which ensued upon the triumph of free trade, gave undue predominance and temporary supremacy to doctrines which secured or professed to secure material well-being. The financial capacity of a statesman rose into paramount importance: capacity of other kinds was undervalued and thrown into the background. The industry which makes money, and the economy which saves it, became the first. virtues respectively of people and of politicians. Public measures came to be tested almost solely according to their tendency to promote the accumulation and diffusion of wealth, and public men to be esteemed, not according to the wisdom with which they administered the public revenue, but according to the smallness of the revenue with which they were contented to carry on the business of the country. Now, it cannot be denied that active and extensive foreign relations are pre-eminently costly, whether they lead to actual interference, or merely to maintaining our army, navy, and diplomacy on such a footing as will enable us to remonstrate with effect. And foreign relations often lead to war, and war is notoriously the most terrible of all drains upon the national resources.

The writers and orators, therefore, who argued for the system of isolation found a most powerful ally in the spirit of calculation, avarice, and parsimony with which recent discussion had possessed the nation. They were able to appeal to the undeniable truths that more than half our revenue is annually expended in paying the interest of a debt incurred by former wars in which our intermeddling foreign policies had involved us, and that more than half of the remaining moiety is swallowed up in what

are called our "national defences," but
which, according to them, it would be more
correct to name our " means of foreign inter-
ference and aggression." It was an easy and
an effective style of popular eloquence to
say It cost so many millions to replace
the Bourbons on the throne of France, and
so many more to guard ourselves against
their possible hostility or actual rivalry when
restored; it cost so much to unite Belgium
with Holland, so much more to effect their
subsequent separation; so much to estab-
lish a constitutional regime in Spain and
Portugal (which countries have never been
of any use to us, and have scarcely ever
ceased to insult us), and so much more to
maintain our fleets in the Tagus, to counte-
nance a Government which cannot sustain
itself in the affections of the nation; so much
to weaken Turkey by liberating Greece, and
so much more to succor the despot we had
weakened, and to bully the wretched insur-
gents we had liberated; —and each of these
several items of our great account costs to
you, the people, at this very moment a penny
on your sugar, twopence on your beer, a
shilling on your tea, and a florin on your to-
bacco and your gin. If we had-and had
had no foreign policy at all-if we could
wipe off at once the debt incurred in former
wars and the costly preparations kept con-
stantly on foot to provide for future ones,
we should only require to raise a revenue of
£15,000,000 instead of £54,000,000."

--

do we measure by a truer standard than we used to do the relative value of the objects of national ambition, not only have we awakened to a clearer perception and a sounder estimate of the rights of others, and a humbler, and therefore juster, apprehension of our own position and its claims and duties, but we value human life, and the human being generally, more highly than we did; and we have a much stronger sense of the degree in which it is possible in national matters to approach the Christian standard of benevolence and justice- of the political applicability of the golden rule. Statesmen, tooeven the hardened, the hacknied, and the cold - shrink from war now, not only on account of its trouble, its risks, its cost, the possible unpopularity it may bring upon them, but from a new-born conception of the tremendous moral responsibility which lies upon those who, directly or indirectly, bring upon humanity such an awful curse. More alive than formerly, in all respects, to the heavy and solemn obligations attendant upon power, they are in this respect peculiarly so. They have begun to feel that those who either provoke, facilitate, or permit an avoidable war, are answerable in the eye of Heaven for all the guilt, all the suffering, all the demoralization, all the nameless horrors, all the fearful contingencies, which war involvesa liability which the rashest and the hottest may well hesitate and tremble to encounter —a liability which, as we have lately seen, Representations winged with so much in- English Ministers seek to avert by a forbeardisputable truth, and driven home by the ance, a reluctance, an enduring hopefulness, barb of a daily fact within every man's cog-pushed to the very verge of wisdom and pronizance, can scarcely fail to give those who deal in them a strong hold both upon the selfish rich and the unthinking poor, especially when unaccompanied with those other truths which are at once their complement and their correction, but which the hearers cannot supply for themselves, and which the speakers are careful not to suggest. Again, the dislike of war has of late become a prevalent and deeply-rooted sentiment in the national mind, in spite of all the efforts of the "Peace Societies" to weaken it by extravagance and caricature. We are no longer the quarrelsome and combative people we once were. We are beginning to estimate "glory" at its true value, and to calculate its real cost. We are learning to shrink from war not only as costly, but as criminal-not only as very generally a signal folly, but as nearly always a heinous sin. It is not apathy, it is not cowardice, it is not even increasing luxury, it is not mainly a love of wealth and a hatred of taxation, that has wrought in us this wholesome change; it is really and sincerely an improved tone of morality and a heightened sense of responsibility. Not only

priety.

These three correct and salutary sentiments of the national mind—love of peace, love of economy, and a conviction of past errors — are the strong grounds on which the advocates for insolating Great Britain from the commonalty of nations rely for the defence of their position. And they can only be successfully met by an appeal to a higher morality, to more generous emotions, and to the dictates of a deeper and more comprehensive statesmanship. Nor do we think it will be difficult to prove that the policy which they recommend, and which we are combating, is not only impossible, but, if practically carried out, would be at once immoral and unwise.

From The Economist, 24 Nov.

AMERICAN SYMPATHIES WITH RUSSIA. Ir cannot, we fear, be denied that, in the contest which we are now carrying on with the gigantic despot of Northern Europe, the feelings and wishes of a considerable portion of the citizens of the United States are not

with us, but against us. This is explicable of a young and powerful State of vast energy enough; there are many reasons for it, some and unlimited pretensions. But we have no creditable, some much the reverse. Russia hesitation in saying that this jealousy and and America are both great slaveholders; uneasiness ought not to be shared or encourboth are given to aggression and territorial aged by reflecting and honorable Americans. aggrandizement; both indulge in dreams of They should leave it to the fillibusters, the universal dominion: the one aspires to the annexers, the slave-dealing Southrons, the supremacy in the Old World, the other to Western barbarians. For it is only such the sovereignty of the New. As yet there that have anything to dread from French and is no rivalry between them; nor can there be British interference. The alliance between for generations; nor need there ever be. They France and England can be dangerous to no come into collision nowhere; their commer- American designs except such as cannot be cial interests are nowhere competitive or openly avowed: it is hostile to no pretensions hostile. The Russians, moreover, have taken except such swollen and aggressive ones as considerable pains to cultivate the personal ought not to be for a moment entertained. good-will of the Americans, especially of the The two great nations of Europe are occutravellers and manufacturers of the great pied with the affairs of the European contiRepublic; and of late they have purchased nent, and will find enough to do in regulating "golden opinions" among the industrial and amending these: there is little likelihood interests by large orders for machinery, that they will seek work elsewhere.* The ships, and other articles of American pro- only interference which the United States duction. Great Britain, on the other hand, though the best customer and the closest business connection of America, is also everywhere her commercial rival and most formidable competitor; and severe competition, in narrow minds, often breeds incipient enmity. The Americans, too, have a strong impression that we are haughty and dictatorial, and they would not be sorry to see us humbled. We do not mean that these sentiments are universal, or that they go very deep; but they exist among a vast proportion of the people; who would grieve indeed to see us seriously injured or disabled, but would rejoice at any smart rap on the knuckless that did not compromise our safety or our liberties.

But among the worthier and more cultivated classes in the United States, the want of sympathy of which we speak is mainly traceable to two causes, which we have ourselves heard alleged by Americans and admit to be not irrational. In the first place, they look with jealousy and alarm upon the close alliance between England and France. "These two mighty nations of the old 'world, firmly and permanently united," they say, "will be too powerful for the independence of the world; they will be able to dictate to all other States; and America will not be dictated to." If we are thoroughly successful in this contest, they fancy, our only real European rival will be effectually humbled, and can no longer be a counterpoise to our pretensions; we shall then virtually rule Europe, and shall soon turn our attention to the proceedings in the New World. If we continue as close friends as now, even the United States will not be able to resist us. Now, we may fairly allow that there is some ground for this feeling, and that a slight and transient jealousy may be excused on the part

can have to fear from France and England must be in cases in which that interference would be admitted to be warrantable and necessary by all the virtuous and patriotic among the Americans themselves. Those who are alarmed at the Anglo-French alliance are men bent on projects which they are conscious no two great and honorable nations can or ought to tolerate: - the alliance can be "a terror to evil-doers" only.

To all others it ought to be a source of the liveliest delight. Not only must the prospect of universal and enduring peace be greatly enhanced by the union between those rivals who in past times have most often disturbed the tranquility of the world, but civilization and freedom must be extended and secured by their friendship. For though France has only at present the faintest vestiges of representative institutions; though her municipal liberties have for a time been seriously curtailed, and she has given to herself a Government which, though not an autocracy, is nearly allied to a dictatorship; - still no one who compares her even now, in the matter of liberty of speech, of writing, and of action, with the unhappy lands which groan under Austrian and Russian sway, can doubt that her influence must be infinitely preferable to theirs, and her condition immeasurably more advanced; and that the cause of progress and well-being must be vastly promoted by her cordial connection with the freest land in the known world-freer even, in all that relates to individual emancipation, than the boasted Republic of the West. It is not easy to believe that man a real well

* Dear John, you are now (busy as the war makes you) seeking work in Central America. We don't wish you to judge of our designs. Above all, we are jealous of your rulers. You are a sensible old fellow yourself, though rather ignorant of foreign matters.

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