36 Great Britain abandons the Concert [1822-3

uniform in their principles and their objects." This solution was adopted by the continental Powers; and Well in gton, true to his instructions not to countenance any intervention in Spanish affairs, took no part in the conferences that followed. On October 30 the Powers handed in their formal replies to the French memorandum. Russia, Austria, and Prussia would act as France should in respect to their Ministers in Spain, and would give to France every countenance and assistance she might require, " the cause for such assistance, and the period, and the mode of giving it, being reserved to be specified in a treaty." Wellington, on the other hand, on behalf of Great Britain, replied that, " having no knowledge of the cause of dispute, and not being able to form a judgment upon a hypothetical case, he could give no answer to any of the questions."

Attempts were made so to adjust the form of the intervention of the Powers as to avoid an open breach with Great Britain. But the interests of Great Britain were, in fact, too immediately involved to make any compromise with the principle of non-intervention on the occasion possible; and when, on April 7, 1823, a French army of 95,000 men, under the Duke of Angouleme, crossed the Bidassoa, the experiment of a " Confederation of Europe," ruled by a council of the great Powers, was at an end.

This outcome revealed to all the world the essential weakness of the foundations on which the claim of the Alliance to govern Europe rested. The dictatorship of the Allies was, in fact, as much a usurpation as the Napoleonic Empire which they had overthrown ; and it could survive only so long as their own interests did not come into violent conflict. This had been the argument of the Emperor Alexander in his persistent efforts to base his " universal union " on the broader foundation of the Holy Alliance; and his opinion had been backed by the attitude of the minor States. The King of Sweden had protested at Aix-laChapelle against the dictatorship of the great Powers; and after Verona, the King of Wurttemberg, in a circular note signed by Prince Wintzingerode and dated January 2, 1823, had renewed the protest against the attitude of the Powers which had " inherited the influence arrogated by Napoleon in Europe," and had claimed for all sovereign States a voice in international councils. The open defection of Great Britain shook to its foundations the international structure on which, according to Metternich, the safety of Europe still rested. It was not that the attitude of the British Government was based on any new principle, or that its language differed essentially from that which it had always held. It was rather that, in the mouth of Canning, the old phrases had become infused with a new spirit. Castlereagh had lamented the loosening of the international ties which, as he rightly believed, had done so much to secure the stability of the new order in Europe. To Canning they were but a drag on the free initiative of

1823] The policy of Canning 37

Great Britain ; and he made no secret of his satisfaction at their breach. In a letter of January 3, 1823, to Sir Charles Bagot at St Petersburg, he wrote exultantly of " the issue of Verona, which has split the one and indivisible Alliance into three parts as distinct as the constitutions of England, France, and Muscovy." The three autocratic Courts might threaten the Spanish Government, should it prove refractory, with the resentment of collective Europe ; but the policy of the French, as of the British, Cabinet was now directed, not by European, but by national considerations. " So things are getting back to a wholesome state again. Every nation for itself, and God for us all. The time for Areopagus, and the like of that, is gone by." In vain Metternich tried to restore the broken harmony of the Concert. To Sir Henry Wellesley, the British ambassador at Vienna, he complained of the tone of speeches in Parliament, of the licence allowed to popular agitation in favour of revolutionary movements, and declared that Great Britain was in danger of losing her influence in the Alliance. In a letter to Wellesley of September 16, 1823, Canning replied in language too clear to be misunderstood. The policy of the British Government continued to be what it had consistently been throughout. There was no intention of breaking with the Alliance, so far as this confined itself to carrying out the intentions with which it had been originally formed, and which were defined by treaty. " England is under no obligation to interfere, or to assist in interfering, in the internal concerns of independent nations. The specific engagement to interfere in France is an exception so studiously particularised as to prove the rule. The rule I take to be, that our engagements have reference wholly to the state of territorial possession settled at the Peace ; to the state of affairs between nation and nation ; not (with the single exception above stated) to the affairs of any nation within itself. I thought the public declaration of my predecessor had set this question entirely at rest." As for the position of England in the Alliance — " What is the influence we have had in the counsels of the Alliance, and which Prince Metternich exhorts us to be so careful not to throw away ? We protested at Laibach; we remonstrated at Verona. Our protest was treated as waste-paper; our remonstrances mingled with the air. Our influence, if it is to be maintained abroad, must be secure in the sources of strength at home; and the sources of that strength are in the sympathy between the people and the Government; in the union of the public sentiment with the public counsels; in the reciprocal confidence and co-operation tbi the House of Commons and the Crown."

It is not surprising that language, so well justified from the British point of view, but from the continental point of view so " insular," should have led Metternich to speak of Canning as " the malevolent meteor hurled by an angry Providence upon Europe." Even had Metternich been by temperament inclined to " trust the people,"

38 From Verona to the Revolution of July [1823-30

there existed in the heterogeneous empire for the government of which he was responsible, little possibility of any " union of the public sentiment with the public counsels " ; and, whatever the limitations of his outlook and the errors of his policy, he was in a better position than Canning to realise the perils to European peace involved in the stirring up of the dormant forces of nationality. It is clear, indeed, that Canning himself at this time did not realise the full import of his language, nor contemplate the ultimate outcome of the attitude he assumed. He loudly championed the principle of nationality; but for him, as for Metternich, the boundaries of nations were the territorial divisions established at Vienna; and in deprecating the interference of the Alliance in the Ottoman Empire he could even speak of the right of "the Turkish nation" to manage its own affairs. "Our business," he wrote in the letter already quoted, " is to preserve the peace of the world, and therefore the independence of the several nations that compose it. In resisting the Revolution in all its stages we resisted the spirit of change, to be sure, but we resisted also the spirit of foreign domination." Yet it was upon "foreign domination " that the order of the greater part of Europe rested; and the same was true of the British Empire itself; while, during the century to come, the clash of national ideals and ambitions was to be the most fruitful cause of change and of war.

The two burning questions on which, during the interval between Verona and the July Revolution, the Powers split into opposing camps — the Spanish Colonies and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire — were outside the scope of the Alliance altogether; and the attempt to bring them into the sphere of its influence broke down on the opposition of the Powers whose interests were involved. The case of the Spanish Colonies was the most momentous in its results, though in a sense very remote from the issues which loomed largest in contemporary fears. To believers in the divine right of monarchy the establishment of a series of Republics in the New World portended the ruin of all order in Europe ; to doctrinaire Liberals, like Bentham, it meant the triumph of enlightenment through the example given to the world of communities firmly based on the purest principles of reason. The philosopher seriously meditated transferring himself in his old age to Mexico, to share in the glorious work ; the Due de Richelieu had proposed, in order to prevent a worse thing, to set up a Bourbon prince as " King of Buenos Aries' After the easy triumph of the French arms in Spain, the Spanish Government, supported by France, suggested that the fate of the Spanish Colonies should be submitted to a Congress of the Powers. The proposal broke down on the opposition of Great Britain, determined, in Canning's phrase, that if France had Spain it should be "Spain without the Indies." In announcing to Parliament the recognition by the British Government of the South American Republics (1825), Canning

1823-49] Breakdown of the general Alliance 39

exclaimed, " We have called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old." To an age enlightened by very nearly a century's experience of the working of Liberal institutions in the semi-barbarous South American States both the hopes and the fears excited by their establishment seem almost grotesque ; and the event now recognised as most pregnant with momentous issues for the future was the sudden intervention of the United States of America. The reply of the great Republic of the West to the claim of the European Powers to regulate the affairs of all the world was the famous message of President Monroe to Congress, on December 2, 1823, which developed into the " Monroe doctrine" of "America for the Americans."

While the attitude of the United States effectually prevented the attempt to extend the dictatorship of the Alliance beyond the bounds of Europe, events in Europe itself were rapidly tending to complete the process of disruption which the protests of Great Britain had begun. The developments of the Eastern Question had already split the Powers into opposing camps, before the Revolutions of 1830 made the first breach in the "treaties." The independence of Greece was placed under the guarantee, not of the general Alliance, but of Russia, Great Britain, and France ; and, though the independence of Belgium and the establishment of the Orleans dynasty in France were " brought within the treaties" by the Concert of all the great Powers, the result of the Revolution was in effect to split the Alliance in two. The seal was set on this division by the secret articles of the Convention of Berlin of October 15, 1833, between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, by which the principles of the Troppau Protocol were solemnly reaffirmed. Thenceforward the " Holy Alliance " was not even the semblance of a Universal Union, but frankly a league of the three monarchies of eastern Europe for the defence of autocracy against revolution. The last effective assertion of its principles was the intervention of the Emperor Nicholas I, in 1849, to crush the revolt in Hungary. The "Concert of Europe" still subsisted as an effective factor in international relations; but it was based upon the principle consistently asserted throughout by the British Government: the binding obligation of treaties, and the right of the Powers concerned to be called into counsel on any case arising which threatened their interests. It was reserved for another Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, to revive, at the close of the nineteenth century, an ideal similar to that of the original Holy Alliance, in the attempt to establish an international system which should enable the world to rid itself of the ruinous burden imposed upon it by the armed rivalry of the nations.

CHAPTER II
THE DOCTRINAIRES

In March, 1815, France had submitted for the second time to the rule of Napoleon, although united Europe declared him an outlaw and prepared the final effort for his overthrow.

Menacing as were the dangers of France abroad, they did not prevent men who considered themselves called upon to act for their country from fixing their anxious attention on internal political problems. They claimed from the despot, who had ruled France absolutely for fourteen years, the grant of constitutional liberty. These men were Lafayette, Benjamin Constant, Sismondi, and a few others. They represented the very doctrines which Napoleon had constantly rejected. The Ideologues, as he used disdainfully to call them, represented, according to him, the chimeras of abstract politics inherited from the eighteenth century. He did not distinguish between the disciples of Montesquieu and the followers of Rousseau, but held them alike responsible for the anarchy, the terror, and finally for the dissolution of social order. " These twelve or fifteen metaphysicians," he said, " ought to be thrown into the water." In accordance with these sentiments, he silenced the last representatives of free speech in the consular assemblies.

Shortly before Marengo, a few years before Necker's death, the First Consul had an interview with him at Geneva. The former Minister of Louis XVI, who had witnessed the fall of the monarchy, propounded to Napoleon his favourite views. He insisted on the identity between morals and politics, and advised a republican and constitutional form of government. The impression he produced was one of mingled contempt and irritation. Necker's daughter, Madame de Stael, and the other members of his little group, had henceforth to suffer for the fatal mistake of daring to utilise, and at the same time to impose limitations on, the supreme power of Napoleon. During his reign these representatives of the principles of 1789 suffered exile and persecution. They were challenged by the powerful genius who felt himself strong enough to provide France, not only with the military glory and the institutions, but also with the ideas, which she required. Victory, while it lasted, stifled