No Church. By the Author of "High Church." 3 vols. Hurst and Blackett. Framley Parsonage. By Anthony Trollope. 2 vols. Smith, Elder, and Co. [Nearly if not quite equal to "The Warden" and "Barchester Towers."] Who Breaks Pays. By the Author of "Cousin Stella." 2 vols. Smith and Elder. [Clever.] Under the Spell. By the Author of " Grandmother's Money." 3 vols. Hurst and Blackett. La Beata. By T. Adolphus Trollope. 2 vols. Chapman and Hall. [A pleasant and clever tale.] All for the Best. A Story of Quiet Life. 3 vols. Hurst and Blackett. The Broken Troth; a Tale of Village Life in Tuscany. From the Italian. By Philip Ireton. 2 vols. Macmillan. The Poems of Catullus, translated into English Verse, with an Introduction and Notes. By Theodore Martin. Parker and Bourn. [A fine translation, if not quite up to the mark of Mr. Martin's Horace.] THE NATIONAL REVIEW. OCTOBER 1861. ART. I.-PRINCIPLE AND NO-PRINCIPLE IN FOREIGN POLICY. England and Europe: a Discussion of National Policy. By Alfred H. Louis. London: Bentley, 1861. A few Words on Non-Intervention. "Fraser's Magazine," December 1859. By J. S. Mill. Parker and Bourne. The Principle of Non-Intervention: a Lecture. By Montague Bernard, M.A., Professor of International Law, &c., Oxford. 1861. THERE are few more incongruous or disappointing spectacles on earth than a great nation without a great policy. It is a power without a purpose; a gigantic body without a guiding intellect or an inspiring soul; a drifting, not a steering, ship. Now, the policy of a nation may lack grandeur in two ways, it may be either unworthy or unfixed; it may have no definite and steady aims at all, or those aims may be low and selfish; its goal may be indistinct, or its desires may be mean, or its volition may be feeble. In each and all of these cases, it is beneath its destiny, and a recreant from its duty. A nation that is purely egotistical in its foreign relations can neither be loved nor respected, for it has no social virtues; and, however boundless its resources, it must be weak in the day of trial, for it will have no friends. nation that is fluctuating and capricious in its action, from the want of settled principles or clear objects, may have great power, but can have neither dignity nor influence; it cannot sway others, for it does not know itself; its efforts are thrown away from the lack of persistency and convergence; it can exercise no leadership, for it can inspire no confidence; its friends can never securely count upon its aid; its enemies can always calculate upon its caprices, and play upon its irresolution; unstable as water, it must be content to see far weaker states, if endowed No. XXVI. OCTOBER 1861. R A with clearer vision and a stronger will, overbear it in council, and dictate the terms of treaties and the division of the spoil. The comfort of statesmen, too, as well as the worth and dignity of states, would seem to dictate the establishment of distinct and settled principles of foreign policy. When these have once become so decided and notorious as to be entitled to the name of "national," the work of statesmanship is comparatively easy: it is reduced to the condition of a science to be studied, and an art to be acquired; all then needed in the rulers of the nation are, thorough mastery of facts and circumstances, fertility of resources, readiness of wit, timely firmness, and timely flexibility. The aim is uniform; the pole-star is always the same, and always visible; the maxims of action are laid down, and the only task is to apply them,-to determine how the national purpose can be best attained; to pronounce what our principles say ought to be done, and how prudence and means say it is to be done. Has our country this dignified position? Have our statesmen this supreme comfort, this unspeakable relief? Surely not. We need not waste much time in proving that England does not possess any clear, intelligible, unswerving principles of foreign policy, nor in tracing this want to its cause. The fact, unhappily, is as indisputable as the explanation is obvious and simple. In the last century-in most, indeed, of our recent history, down to the last generation and the last war-we had what might almost be called a steady national policy. Our course, indeed, was not always consistent; our proceedings were not always defensible; our means were not always either wise or righteous; but at least we had certain tolerably well-defined and persistent purposes in view. We had to make head against our only two real rivals and competitors, France and Spain; we had to thwart, to circumvent, to fight, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both united; we had to watch and defeat their intrigues, and to prevent or to counterbalance any increase of territory or of power they might obtain. They were really our only enemies-almost our only external anxieties; for Russia was not yet, Holland had nearly ceased to be, America was still our dependency, and Austria was habitually our ally, and never our competitor. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France was our rival in European influence, and the disturber of our peace at home; Spain was our enemy in distant quarters, and our rival as a great naval and colonising power. In the early portion of the nineteenth century, new elements of international discord came into play, and new states rose into eminence and influence; but it so happened that France became the centre and embodiment of all the hostile forces, so that our old traditional policy of humbling and antagonising France remained as instinctive and predominant as ever. Throughout all these periods, too, one national idea continued paramount and governing-the maintenance of our maritime supremacy, as connected with the multiplication of our colonies and the extension of our commerce. We sought for no European territory: any thing we desired or acquired in that direction was merely for military stations, fortresses, and harbours of refuge for our naval and mercantile interests; but we pursued the aggrandisement of our remote colonial empire with a zeal and pertinacity almost amounting to a passion; nearly all our wars originated, directly or indirectly, out of this national pursuit; nearly all our treaties of peace terminated in some fresh acquisitions in the eastern or western hemisphere; we appropriated dependencies here, we founded settlements there; and all with the one pertinacious and inspiring notion of creating customers to whom we could sell, and from whom we could buy, to the exclusion of all other nationsof monopolising, in a word, as far as possible, the commerce of the world. This might not be a very generous or noble aim; there may have lurked-indeed we have now recognised that there undoubtedly did lurk-a fallacy at the very root of it; but still it was sufficiently distinct, persistent, intelligible, religiously believed in, and unanimously adopted by the nation, to be a guide, a soul, a backbone to our foreign policy. There was a port for the helmsman to steer for a land with whose gorgeous beauty and magnificence the crew could inflame their fancies and reward their toils-a compass by which, as by an unquestioned creed, the captain could direct his course. The English, as a people, knew what they wished for and strove for, and never doubted for a moment that it deserved all their yearnings and all their efforts. Now all this is changed; and the change has not been adequately realised, studied, or accepted. The old maxims have been rudely shaken, if not utterly upset, by modern economic doctrines; the old theory of international relations has been strongly complicated by the new political elements which democracy has introduced; the old combinations and alliances have been deranged and perplexed by the fresh states which have risen up into greatness, and forced themselves into the first rank. Economic science has nearly brought us to the conclusion that a vast colonial empire adds much to our burdens and little to our strength; that it multiplies our assailable points, and does not multiply our available forces; that the mother country is compelled to keep a large army and navy in order to defend dependencies which can render her no aid in return when she herself is threatened; that colonies never pay their own expenses; that they are, in fact, simply a brilliant, but a very costly, dia mond in the imperial crown of Britain. We have discovered that even India, the grandest and most imposing of them all, contributes nothing to our revenue, and drains away millions from our loan-market; while America, which was comparatively worthless to us as a colony, has become a source of enormously profitable trade as an independent republic. We have begun to discover that colonies are only valuable as countries with which we can have a mutually lucrative interchange of our respective productions, and on which we can pour out our surplus population; and we have learned that we can have both these advantages from them without owning them. For a long series of years we have sent more emigrants to the United States than to either Australia or Canada-or, indeed, than to both together; while our aggregate commerce with that one foreign country is greater than that with all our colonial possessions (except India) combined.* In obedience at once to the doctrines of free trade and of free institutions, we now allow our colonies to deal with foreign nations as unrestrictedly as with ourselves, and to emancipate them as soon as they wish to separate and are able to maintain themselves. In short, while still feeling a natural and honourable pride in the wide range of that colonial empire which we long strove so gallantly and perseveringly to found and to extend,-while still, perhaps, in defiance of reasoning and calculation, cherishing a vague notion that it is a main element in our national grandeur and prosperity, and actually contributes to our power, we have already deliberately surrendered all those exclusive advantages for the sake of which alone we formerly desired it; and we are voluntarily curtailing it year by year,-glad enough to turn anxious, costly, and grumbling dependencies into independent, spontaneous, prosperous, and affectionate allies, kindred in race, analogous in institutions, sympathising in principles and views, but free, because full-fledged. But this is by no means the only or the most embarrassing novelty. Formerly, in all our foreign relations, we had simply to consider states as states, represented by their governments, embodied in their kings. But the social convulsions and upheavings of the last seventy or eighty years have rendered this unity of conception impossible and deceptive. In many of the chief countries of Europe we have been compelled to perceive and to reckon with-even where diplomatic decencies forbade Emigrants in the last fifteen years To the North American Colonies To Australian Colonies. To United States Aggregate trade to United States in 1859 Ditto, to all British Possessions, exclusive of India 493,797 2,350,397 . 51,000,000 |