THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1857.

ART. I.-1. History of Europe, from the Fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the Accession of Louis Napoleon in 1852. By Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON, Bart., D.C.L. 6 Vols. 1852-57. 2. History of Europe, from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. By Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON, Bart., D.C.L. 14 Vols. 1850.

IF the time shall ever arrive-and the contingency is not more improbable than a realization of many of the prophecies contained in these works-when every other contemporaneous record shall have perished, the histories of Sir Archibald Alison will be regarded as a colossal political pamphlet, written in an age of longeval patriarchs and in a land of polemical giants. The author who can devote twelve thousand pages to the perishable vindication of party" cries," will be assumed to have been of a people who yet enjoyed a life of primitive duration, and with whom everything but their reasoning was proportionate to their physical stature. We may question, however, the success of a monster pamphleteering, which is at once the jest of Liberal politicians, and which an eminent Conservative leader (with marked ingratitude) has characterized as a history of Europe written in twenty volumes, to prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories. Yet it must not be forgotten that Sir A. Alison's writings claim credit for the most startling revelations of modern research-they have discovered that the Reform Act was produced by the contraction of the currency, and that the Roman Empire fell to destruction because it had no Corn Laws!

There can be no doubt, that to write a history of the great drama of the last sixty or seventy years involves great difficulties, or, at least, that it calls for the exercise of extraordinary qualifications. This is even more true of the later than of the earlier of the two periods of which Sir Archibald has treated. In dealing

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indeed with bare facts, there exists, in the abstract, more information, in proportion to our proximity to the events that we record. But in questions involving the relations of cabinets, it often happens that this testimony is not available. For a narrative of battles, there are eye-witnesses among our contemporaries whose knowledge is more often freely imparted, and whose considerate statements rarely conflict with one another. But the very existence of these sources of direct and authentic knowledge renders it the more difficult to rely upon the second or third hand statements which have meanwhile appeared, and have not yet been subjected to criticism and analysis. Their existence renders it especially perilous to allow our own imagination to supply the particulars which our library does not yield.

But, in passing from facts to opinions, and in dealing with the tendencies of events whose results are yet incompletely developed, the qualification required for a contemporary historian of Europe. is yet more various and more rare. He requires a profound knowledge of the state of government and of the state of society -of the nature and working of laws and institutions, and of the bent and action of opinion-in every important commonwealth. He requires, above all things, a calm judgment, an entire absence of partisan bias, a total freedom from prepossessions, and a clearness of foresight only to be obtained at once from the deepest and the most comprehensive thought. He must write in a concise style, if he would appreciably advance his unwieldy subject within any practicable compass. He must remember that the disposition of society to look upon political prophets in the light of spurious diviners, is founded on a pretty wide induction that their divinations are almost inevitably wrong. He must combine with these qualities an imitation of the immortal experiment of Thucydides, whose conciseness of narration is exactly proportioned to the relation of details to the main action of his story; and whose philosophy of contemporary events is, not the vaticination of the theorist, but the calm reasoning of the statesman in anticipation of their developed tendency.

It will be seen that, of these difficulties, as they apply to Sir A. Alison's works, part are inherent in the subject, and part are of the author's own making. He might surely, for instance, have left the Peninsular war to Sir William Napier, who had preceded him in the field. He has at least failed to displace that author, or even to put himself in any sort of comparison with him; and he has braved a civilian's difficulty of strategic criticism. His elaborate descriptions of Russia (in his new work) are as inferior to those of Haxthausen, as his elaborate descriptions of Turkey are inferior to those of Ubicini. These authors had also preceded him: and institutions dating long prior to the

Requisites of the Subject, and Defects of the Work. 279

period of the history can have no other concern with it than as they are directly involved in the narrative of events. This system of describing governments and manners extends to other states (in which also we have ourselves travelled); and the descriptions combine a maximum of tediousness with a minimum of fidelity. Sir Archibald's desire to hit his political opponents is so keen and predominant, in every subject of discussion, that he strikes on all sides with an aimlessness which frequently results (as we shall see) in his hitting his own party harder than his opponents, and himself hardest of all. His assertions of policy, which contravene the avowed opinion of the greatest living reputations, are continually put forward without a shadow of reasoning. Where, on the other hand, argument is offered on a few favourite topics of declamation, it is offered so singularly without any defined view or clear notion, that, if we collate the argumentative passages which are scattered over different volumes, on any one subject, the result of the author's deductions is seen, upon his own showing, to be nearly worthless, if not absolutely nil. The style of his criticisms similarly alternates between wearisome flippancy, and the assumption of a compassionate intellectual pre-eminence, which disdains a sarcasm. It is, therefore, the aim of the present criticism of Sir A. Alison's works, not to provoke and initiate controversy, but simply to take up the gauntlet which the author has already thrown down.

Either of these histories devotes itself, as is well known, into one of the two great periods of which the interval between the French Revolution and the accession of Louis Napoleon is composed. These periods are very fairly defined by the author as periods of equal and corresponding activity, respectively in war and in peace. There is, however, this broad distinction to be borne in mind, that the military activity of the former age was (with the exception of its first few years) the instigating activity of the few, while the pacific activity of the later age was the instigating activity of the many. It follows from this distinction, that the changes which this pacific activity has produced, are not alone likely to be more durable; but that they form an inherent part of the social condition of Europe. When, therefore, the virtual direction of the national life had passed into hands so different from those by which that life had previously been controlled, it was impossible but that great changes should result, both in the external and internal relations of nearly every state. It was to be presumed that these changes in the national life would demand a corresponding change in those relations.

It is precisely at this point that Sir A. Alison joins issue with nearly the whole of his generation. He looks upon every change in our domestic government, every fresh phasis in our foreign

alliances, and every expansion in our social and commercial life, as an evidence of our national decline. He regards the European settlement of 1814-15 as a righteous and designedly-eternal settlement; and he ascribes to popular violence every instance of its infraction, and the whole responsibility for the tyranny and insecurity that have since been experienced. The general wisdom of that settlement will hardly, indeed, be disputed, in all the difficulties which then prevailed; but it will nevertheless be seen that those European Governments which are the author's archetypes of Conservatism, were the first to violate its fundamental provisions. Sir Archibald entertains the same view of the actual constitution of England in 1815: and from that starting-point he traces our decline, successively, in the contraction of the Currency; in "the calamity of Free Trade;" in our Colonial policy; in the repeal of the Test Act, and in Catholic Emancipation; in the alleged substitution of "Liberal" for "Conservative" alliances abroad; and in Parliamentary Reform.

The first chapter of Sir A. Alison's new work is devoted to a general survey of this gloomy picture; and it is, in a certain sense, an analysis of all that follows. It ought not therefore to be entirely overlooked, as it at once evinces the manner in which the whole of this great and paradoxical proposition is sustained. We will take, in the first place, the author's argument from free trade, viewed in reference to emigration and to the alleged consequent decline of the population of these islands:

"Great and important as were these results [the Anglo-French alliance] of the social convulsions of France and England in the first instance, they sank into insignificance compared with those which followed the change in the commercial policy and the increased stringency in the monetary laws of Great Britain. The effect of these all-important measures, from which so much was expected and so little, save suffering, received, was to augment, to an extraordinary and unparalleled degree, the outward tendency of the British people. The agricultural population, especially in Ireland, were violently torn up from the land of their birth by woeful suffering: a famine of the thirteenth appeared in the population of the nineteenth century; and to this terrible but transient source of suffering was superadded the lasting discouragement arising from the virtual closing of the market of England to their produce, by the inundation of grain from foreign

states.

"Europe, before the middle of this century, beheld with astonishment Great Britain, which at the end of the war had been self-supporting, importing ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national subsistence, and a constant stream of three hundred thousand emigrants annually leaving its shores. Its inhabitants, which for four centuries had been regularly increasing, declined a million in the five years from 1846 to 1850 [1851?] in the two

Self-Repudiated Theories on Free Trade and Emigration. 281 islands, and two millions in Ireland taken separately."-Vol. i., pp. 10, 11.

This statement is, without exception, the strangest compound of anachronisms and miscalculations that we ever encountered. The scientific world have been content to ascribe the potato disease to some chemical secret which they cannot solve: Šir A. Alison plainly refers this chemical process of nature to the repeal of the corn laws and the contraction of the currency! It will have been observed that he distinctly recounts the famine of 1846 as among the results of these two measures. But waiving this singular discovery, which throws Liebig and Playfair into the shade at once-and granting that the author cannot really have intended what he nevertheless states, let us glance next at the anachronism which this statement involves. He takes the increase or decrease of population as the true index of the expediency of the measures meanwhile in force. We say nothing more of the potato blight in this place; although it is well known that the famine produced by that blight was at its height before the corn laws were, even theoretically, repealed. Waiving this anachronism also, we pass to the author's next assertion, of "the virtual closing of the market of England to Irish produce, by the inundation of grain from foreign states." That Sir A. Alison refers to the operation of this system during 1846-50 is perfectly clear; since he regards the decline of population as the immediate result of the abolition of the corn laws, and specifies that decline during those years. Now, is it possible that he is not aware that the repeal of the corn laws did not come into operation until 1849, and that therefore these results, during three of these years at least, actually co-existed with protective laws? To this it may be replied, perhaps, that Sir Archibald intended to include the commercial legislation of 1842, as well as that of 1846. We answer, therefore, at once, that he is precluded from the benefit of this hypothesis by the very figures which constitute his own argument against the legislation of 1846. For (at p. 56) he appeals to the contrast between the decline of the population in 1846-51, and its previous increase in 1841-46, as an evidence of the distinctive results of free trade.

To turn to the next question-What are the merits of this argument of the alleged decline in the population of the United Kingdom? We have already quoted Sir A. Alison's assertion, that the population of the two islands declined by one million, and that of Ireland alone by two millions, in the five years 1846-50. This, to begin with-and accepting the author's index of prospe rity in population-is a highly satisfactory indication for Great Britain; inasmuch as its population must have increased by one million in the five years, according to Sir Archibald's own statement.