Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 436, February 1852
While this vast transference of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic population to the embryo states of America and Australia has been going forward, the United States of America are rapidly increasing in numbers and extent of territory. The usual and fearful ambition of republican states has appeared there in more than its usual proportions. During the ten years from 1840 to 1850, the inhabitants of the United States have increased six millions: they have grown from eighteen to twenty-four millions. But the increase of its territory has been still more extraordinary: it has been extended, during the same period, from somewhat above two millions, to three million three hundred thousand square miles. A territory nine times the size of Old France has been added to the devouring Republic in ten years. The conquests of Rome in ancient, of the English in India in modern times, afford no parallel instance of rapid and unbroken increase. Everything indicates that a vast migration of the human species is going forward, and the family of Japhet in the course of being transferred from its native to its destined seats. To this prodigious movement it is hard to say whether the disappointed energies of democratic vigour in Europe, or the insatiable spirit of republican ambition in America, has most contributed; for the first overcame all the attachments of home, and all the endearments of kindred in a large – and that the most energetic – portion of the people in the old world; while the latter has prepared for their reception ample seats – in which a kindred tongue and institutions prevail – in the new.
While this vast and unexampled exodus of the Anglo-Saxon race, across a wider ocean than the Red Sea, and to a greater promised land than that of Canaan, has been going forward, a corresponding, and in some respects still more marvellous, increase of the Sclavonic race in the Muscovite dominions has taken place. The immense dominions and formidable power of the Czar, which had received so vast an addition from the successful termination of the contest with Napoleon, were scarcely less increased by the events of the long peace which followed. The inhuman cruelty with which the Turks prosecuted the war with the Greeks, awakened all the sympathies of the Christian world; governments were impelled by their subjects into a crusade against the Crescent; and the battle of Navarino, which, for the first time in history, beheld the flags of England, France, and Russia side by side, at once ruined the Ottoman navy, and reft the most important provinces of Greece from Turkey. The inconceivable infatuation of the Turks, and their characteristic ignorance of the strength of the enemy whom they provoked, impelled them soon after into a war with Russia; and then the immeasurable superiority which the Cross had now acquired over the Crescent at once appeared. Varna, the scene of the bloody defeat of the French chivalry by the Janizaries of Bajazet, yielded to the scientific approaches of the Russians; the barrier, hitherto insurmountable, of the Balkan, was passed by Diebitch; Adrianople fell; and the anxious intervention of the other European powers alone prevented the entire subjugation of Turkey, and the entry of the Muscovite battalions through the breach made by the cannon of Mahomet in the walls of Constantinople.
Great as were these results to the growth of Russia, of the forced and long-continued pacification of Western Europe, still more important were those which followed its intestine convulsions. Every throe of the revolutionary earthquake in France has tended to its ultimate advantage, and been attended by a great accession of territory or augmentation of influence. The Revolution of 1789 in its ultimate effects brought the Cossacks to Paris; that of 1830 extinguished the last remains of Polish nationality, and established the Muscovites in a lasting sway on the banks of the Vistula. The revolt of Ibrahim Pacha, and the victory of Koniah, which reduced the Ottoman empire to the verge of destruction, brought the Russian battalions to Scutari, and averted subjugation from a rebellious vassal, only by surrendering the keys of the Dardanelles to the Czar, and converting the Black Sea into a Russian lake. Greater still have been the results of the French Revolution of 1848 to the moral influence, and through it the real power, of Russia. Germany, torn by revolutionary passions, was soon brought into the most deplorable state of anarchy; Austria, distracted at once by a Bohemian, Italian, and Hungarian revolt, was within a hair-breadth of destruction; and the presence of 150,000 Russians on the Hungarian plains alone determined the Magyar contest in favour of Austria. Immense is the addition which this decisive move has made to the influence of Russia; no charge of the Old Guard of Napoleon at the close of the day was ever more triumphant. Russia now boasts of 66,000,000 of men within her dominions; her territories embrace a seventh of the habitable globe; and her influence is paramount from the wall of China to the banks of the Rhine.
Great as the acquisitions of the Muscovite power have been during the last thirty years, they have almost been rivalled by those of the British in India. They have fairly outstripped everything in this age of wonders; a parallel will in vain be sought for them in the whole annals of the world. They do not resemble the conquests of the Romans in ancient, or of the Russians in modern times; they have not been the result of the lust of conquest, steadily and perseveringly applied to general subjugation, or the passions of democracy finding their natural vent in foreign conquest. As little were they the offspring of a vehement and turbulent spirit, similar to that which carried the French eagles to Vienna and the Kremlin. The disposition of the Anglo-Saxons, practically gain-seeking, and shunning wars as an interruption of their profits, has been a perpetual check to any such disposition – their immense distance from the scene of action on the plains of Hindostan, an effectual bar to its indulgence. India has not been governed by a race of warlike sovereigns, eager for conquest, covetous of glory; but by a company of pacific merchants, intent only on the augmentation of their profits and the diminution of their expenses. Their great cause of complaint against the Governors-General to whom have been successively intrusted the government of their vast dominions, was, that they were too prone to defensive preparations; that they did not sufficiently study the increase of these profits or the saving of these expenses. War was constantly forced upon them as a measure of necessity; repeated coalitions of the native sovereigns compelled them to draw the sword to prevent their expulsion from the peninsula. Conquest has been the condition of existence.
Yet such is the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the energy with which the successive contests were maintained by the diminutive force at the disposal of the company, that marvellous beyond all example have been the victories which they gained and the conquests which they achieved. The long period of European peace which followed the battle of Waterloo, was anything but one of repose in India. It beheld successively the final war with, and subjugation of, the Mahrattas by the genius of Lord Hastings, the overthrow of the Pindaree horsemen, the difficult subjugation of the Goorkha mountaineers; the storming of Bhurtpore, the taming of "the giant strength of Ava;" the conquest of Cabul, and fearful horrors of the Coord Cabul retreat; the subsequent gallant recovery of its capital; the conquest of Scinde, and reduction of Gwalior; the wars with the Sikhs, the desperate passages of arms at Ferozeshah and Chilianwalah, and the final triumphs of Sobraon and Goojerat. Nor was it in the peninsula of Hindostan alone that the strength of the British, when at length fairly aroused, was exerted; the vast empire of China was wrestled with at the very moment when their strength in the East was engaged in the Affghanistan expedition; and the world, which was anxiously expecting the fall of the much-envied British empire in India, beheld with astonishment, in the same Delhi Gazette, the announcement of the second capture of Cabul in the heart of Asia, and the dictating of a glorious peace to the Chinese under the walls of Nankin.
While successes so great and bewildering were attending the arms of civilisation on the remote parts of the earth, a great and most disastrous convulsion was preparing in its heart. Paris, as in every age, was the centre of impulsion to the whole civilised world. Louis Philippe had a very difficult game to play, and he long played it with success; but no human ability could, with the disposition of the people, permanently maintain the government of the country. He aimed at being the Napoleon of Peace; and his great predecessor knew better than any one, and has said oftener, that he himself would have failed in the attempt. Louis Philippe owed his elevation to revolution; and he had the difficult, if not impossible, task to perform, without foreign war, of coercing its passions. Hardly was he seated on the throne, when he felt the necessity in deeds, if not in words, of disclaiming his origin. His whole reign was a continued painful and perilous conflict with the power which had created him, and at length he sank in this struggle. He had not the means of maintaining the conflict. A successful usurper, he could not appeal to traditionary influences; a revolutionary monarch, he was compelled to coerce the passions of revolution; a military chief, he was obliged to restrain the passions of the soldiers. They demanded war, and he was constrained to keep them at peace; they sighed for plunder, and he could only meet them with economy; they panted for glory, and his policy retained them in obscurity.
Political influence – in other words, corruption – was the only means left of carrying on the government, and that state engine was worked with great industry, and for a time with great success. But although gratification to the selfish passions must always, in the long run, be the main foundation of government, men are not entirely and for ever governed by their influence. "C'est l'imagination," said Napoleon, "qui domine le monde." All nations, and most of all the French, occasionally require aliment to the passions; and no dynasty will long maintain its sway over them which does not frequently gratify their ruling dispositions. Napoleon was so popular because he at once consulted their interests and gratified their passions; Louis Philippe the reverse, because he attended only to their interests. Great as was his influence, unbounded his patronage, immense his revenue, it yet fell short of the wants of his needy supporters: he experienced erelong the truth of the well-known saying, that every office given away made one ungrateful and three discontented. The immediate cause of his fall in February 1848 was the pusillanimity of his family, who declined to head his troops, and the weakness of his counsellors, who urged submission in presence of danger; but its remote causes were of much older date and wider extent. Government, to be lasting, must be founded either on traditionary influence, the gratification of new interests and passions, or the force of arms; and that one which has not the first will do well to rest as soon as possible on the two last.
Disastrous beyond all precedent, or what even could have been conceived, have been the effects of this new revolution in Paris on the whole Continent; and a very long period must elapse before they are obviated. The spectacle of a government, esteemed one of the strongest in Europe, and a dynasty which promised to be of lasting duration, overturned almost without resistance by an urban tumult, roused the revolutionary party everywhere to a perfect pitch of frenzy. A universal liberation from government, and restraint of any kind, was expected, and for a time attained, by the people in the principal Continental states, when a republic was again proclaimed in France; and the people, strong in their newly-acquired rights of universal suffrage, were seen electing a National Assembly, to whom the destinies of the country were to be intrusted. The effect was instantaneous and universal; the shock of the moral earthquake was felt in every part of Europe. Italy was immediately in a blaze; Piedmont joined the revolutionary crusade; and the Austrian forces, expelled from Milan, were glad to seek an asylum behind the Mincio. Venice threw off the German yoke, and proclaimed again the independence of St Mark; the Pope was driven from Rome, the Bourbons in Naples were saved only by the fidelity of their Swiss guards from destruction; Sicily was severed from their dominion, and all Italy, from the extremity of Calabria to the foot of the Alps, was arraying its forces against constituted authority, and in opposition to the sway of the Tramontane governments. The ardent and enthusiastic were everywhere in transports, and prophesied the resurrection of a great and united Roman republic from the courage of modern patriotism; the learned and experienced anticipated nothing but ruin to the cause of freedom from the transports of a people incapable of exercising its power, and unable to defend its rights.
Still more serious and formidable were the convulsions in Germany; for these were more inspired with the Teutonic love of freedom, and wielded the arm which so long had been victorious in the fields of European fame. So violent were the shocks of the revolutionary earthquake in the Fatherland, that the entire disruption of society and ruin of the national independence seemed to be threatened by its effects. Government was overturned after a violent contest in Berlin. It fell almost without a struggle, from the pusillanimity of the Emperor, in Vienna. The Prussians, especially in the great towns, entered, with the characteristic ardour of their disposition, into the career of revolution; universal suffrage was everywhere proclaimed – national guards established. The lesser states on the Rhine all followed the example of Prussia; and an assembly of delegates, from every part of the Fatherland, at Frankfort, seemed to realise for a brief period the dream of German unity and independence. But while the enthusiasts on the Rhine were speculating on the independence of their country, the enthusiasts in Vienna and Hungary were taking the most effectual steps to destroy it. A frightful civil war ensued in all the Austrian provinces, and soon acquired such strength as threatened to tear in pieces the whole of its vast dominions. No sooner was the central authority in Vienna overturned, than rebellion broke out in all the provinces. The Sclavonians revolted in Bohemia, the Lombards in Italy, the Magyars in Hungary; the close vicinity of a powerful Russian force alone restrained the Poles in Gallicia. Worse, even, because more widely felt than the passions of democracy, the animosities of Race burst forth with fearful violence in eastern Europe. The standard of Georgey in Hungary – whom the Austrians, distracted by civil war in all their provinces, were unable to subdue – soon attracted a large part of the indignant Poles, and nearly the whole of the warlike Magyars, to the field of battle on the banks of the Danube. Not a hope seemed to remain for the great and distracted Austrian empire. Chaos had returned; society seemed resolved into its original elements; and the chief bulwark of Europe against Moscovite domination seemed on the point of being broken up into several separate states, actuated by the most violent hatred at each other, and alike incapable, singly or together, of making head against the vast and centralised power of Russia.
The first successful stand against the deluge of revolution was made in Great Britain; and there it was withstood, not by the bayonets of the soldiers, but by the batons of the citizens. The 10th April was the Waterloo of chartist rebellion in England; a memorable proof that the institutions and traditionary influences of a free people, suited to their wants, and in harmony with their dispositions, can, in such felicitous circumstances, oppose a more successful barrier to social dangers than the most powerful military force at the command of a despotic chief. Rebellion, as usual when England is in distress, broke out in Ireland; but it terminated in ridicule, and revealed at once the ingratitude and impotence of the Celtic race in the Emerald isle. But a far more serious and bloody conflict awaited the cause of order in the streets of Paris; and society there narrowly escaped the restoration of the reign of terror and the government of Robespierre. As usual in civil convulsions, the leaders of the first successful revolt soon became insupportable to their infuriated followers; a second 10th August followed, and that much more quickly than on the first occasion – a second dethronement of the Bourbons; but it was met by very different opponents. Cavaignac and the army were not so easily beat down as Louis, deserted by all the world but his faithful Swiss Guards. The contest was long, and bloody, and, for a time, it seemed more than doubtful to which side victory would incline; but at length the cause of order prevailed. The authority of the Assembly, however, was not established till above a hundred barricades had been carried at the point of the bayonet, several thousands of the insurgents slain, and eleven thousand sentenced to transportation by the courts-martial of the victorious soldiers.
Less violent in the outset, but more disastrous far in the end, were the means by which Austria was brought through the throes of her revolutionary convulsion. It was the army, and the army alone, which in the last extremity saved the state; but, unhappily, it was not the national army alone which achieved the deliverance. So violent were the passions by which the country was torn, so great the power of the rival races and nations which contended for its mastery, that the unaided strength of the monarchy was unequal to the task of subduing them. In Prague, indeed, the firmness of Windischgratz extinguished the revolt – in Italy the consummate talents of Radetsky restored victory to the imperial standards, and drove the Piedmontese to a disgraceful peace; and in the heart of the monarchy, Vienna, after a fierce struggle, was regained by the united arms of the Bohemian and Croatian. But in Hungary the Magyars were not so easily overcome. Such was the valour of that warlike race, and such the military talents of their chiefs, that, although not numbering more than a third of the population of Hungary, and an eighth of that of the whole monarchy, it was found impracticable to subdue them without external aid. The Russians, as a matter of necessity, were called in to prevent the second capture of Vienna; a hundred and fifty thousand Moscovites ere long appeared on the Hungarian plains – numbers triumphed over valour – and Austria was saved by the sacrifice of its independence. Incalculable have been the consequences of this great and decisive movement on the part of the Czar. Not less than the capture of Paris, it has fascinated and subdued the minds of men. It has rendered him the undisputed master of the east of Europe, and led to a secret alliance, offensive and defensive, which at the convenient season will open to the Russians the road to Constantinople.
At length the moment of reaction arrived in France itself, and the country, whose vehement convulsions had overturned the institutions of so many other states, was itself doomed to undergo the stern but just law of retribution. The undisguised designs of the Socialists against property of every kind, the frequent revolts, the notorious imbecility and trifling of the National Assembly, had so discredited republican institutions, that the nation was fully prepared for a change of any kind from democratic to monarchical institutions. Louis Napoleon had the advantage of a great name, and of historical associations, which raised him by a large majority to the presidency, and of able counsellors who steered him through its difficulties; but the decisive success of the coup d'etat of December 2nd was mainly owing to the universal contempt into which the republican rulers had fallen, and the general terror which the designs of the Socialists had excited. The nation would, perhaps, not so willingly have ranged itself under the banners of any merely military chief who promised to shelter them from the evident dangers with which society was menaced; and the vigour and fidelity of the army ensured its success. The restoration of military despotism in France in 1851, after the brief and fearful reign of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in that everchanging country, adds another to the numerous proofs which history affords, that successful revolution, by whomsoever effected, and under all imaginable diversity of nations, race, and circumstances, can end only in the empire of the sword.
But although the dangers of revolutionary convulsion have been adjourned, at least, if not entirely removed, by the general triumph of military power on the Continent, and its entire re-establishment in France, other dangers, of an equally formidable, and perhaps still more pressing, kind, have arisen from its very success. Since the battle of Waterloo all the contests in Europe have been internal only. There have been many desperate and bloody struggles, but they have not been those of nation against nation, but of class with class, or race with race. No foreign wars have desolated Europe; and the whole efforts of government in every country have been directed to moderating the warlike propensities of their subjects, and preventing the fierce animosities of nationality and race from involving the world in general conflagration. So decisively was this the characteristic of the period, and so great was the difficulty in moderating the warlike dispositions of their subjects, that it seemed that the sentiment of the poet should be reversed, and it might with truth be said —
"War is a game, which, were their rulers wise,
The people should not play at."
But this has been materially changed by the consequences of the great European revolution of 1848; and it may now be doubted whether the greatest dangers which threaten society are not those of foreign subjugation and the loss of national independence. By the natural effects of the general convulsions of 1848, the armies of the Continental states have been prodigiously augmented; and such are the dangers of their respective positions, from the turbulent disposition of their own subjects, that they cannot be materially reduced. In France there are 385,000 men in arms; in Austria as many; in Prussia, 200,000; in Russia, 600,000. Fifteen hundred thousand regular soldiers are arrayed on the Continent ready for mutual slaughter, and awaiting only a signal from their respective cabinets to direct their united hostility against any country which may have provoked their resentment. Such have been the results of the French Revolution of 1848, and the rise of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in the centre of European civilisation.
Disastrous beyond all precedent have been the effects of this revolutionary convulsion, from which so much was expected by the ardent and enthusiastic in every country, upon the cause of freedom throughout the world. Not only has the reign of representative institutions, and the sway of constitutional ideas, been arrested on the Continent, but the absolute government of the sword has been established in its principal monarchies. Austria has openly repudiated all the liberal institutions forced upon her during the first throes of the convulsion, and avowedly based the government upon the army, and the army alone. Prussia is more covertly, but not less assiduously, following out the same system; and in France, the real council of state, servile senate, and mock assembly of deputies of Napoleon, have been re-established, the national guard generally dissolved, and the centralised despotism of Louis Napoleon promises to rival in efficiency and general support the centralised despotism of Augustus in ancient days. Parties have become so exasperated at each other, that no accommodation or compromise is longer possible; injuries that never can be forgiven have been mutually inflicted; the despotism of the Prætorians, and a Jacquerie of the Red Republicans, are the only alternatives left to Europe; and the fair form of real freedom, which grows and flourishes in peace, but melts away before the first breath of war, has disappeared from the earth. Such is the invariable and inevitable result of unchaining the passions of the people, and of a successful revolt on their part against the government of knowledge and property.
Still more pressing, and to ourselves formidable, are the dangers which now threaten this country, from the consequences of that revolt against established institutions, from which the reign of universal peace was anticipated four years ago. Our position has been rendered insecure by the very effects of our former triumphs; we are threatened with perils, not so much from our enemies, as from ourselves; it is our weakness which is their strength; and we owe our present critical position infinitely more to our own blindness than to their foresight. Insensibility to future and contingent dangers has in every age been the characteristic of the English people, and is the real cause why the long wars, in which we have been engaged for the last century and a half, have been deeply chequered in the outset with disaster; and to this is to be ascribed three-fourths of the debt which now oppresses the energies and cramps the exertions of our people. But several causes, springing from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, have rendered these influences in an especial manner powerful during the last thirty years; and it is the consequence of their united influence which now renders the condition of this country so precarious.
The contractions of the currency introduced in 1819, and rendered still more stringent by the acts of 1844 and 1845, have changed the value of money fifty per cent; coupled with Free Trade in all the branches of industry, it has doubled it. In other words, it has doubled the weight of taxes, debts, and encumbrances of every description, and at the same time halved the resources of those who are to pay them. Fifty millions a-year raised for the public revenue, are as great a burden now as a hundred millions a-year were during the war; the nation, at the close of thirty-five years of unbroken peace, is in reality more heavily taxed than it was at the end of twenty years of uninterrupted hostility. The necessary consequence of this has been, that it has become impossible to maintain the national armaments on a scale at all proportionate to the national extension and necessities; and it has been exposed, on the first rupture, to the most serious dangers from the attacks of artless and contemptible enemies. Our Indian empire, numbering a hundred millions of men among its subjects, was brought to the verge of ruin by the assault of the Sikhs, who had only six millions to feed their armies; and the military strength of Great Britain is now strained to the uttermost to withstand the hostility at the Cape of Good Hope of the Caffres, who never have brought six thousand men together into the field. In proportion to the extension of our colonial empire and the necessity of increased forces to defend it, our armaments have been reduced both by sea and land. Every gleam of colonial peace has been invariably followed by profuse demands at home for a reduction of the establishments and a diminution of the national expenses; until they have been reduced to so low a point that the nation, which, during the war, had a million of men in arms, two hundred and forty ships of the line bearing the royal flag, and a hundred in commission, could not now muster thirty thousand men and ten ships of the line to guard Great Britain from invasion, London from capture, and the British Empire from destruction.
Still more serious, because more irremediable, in its origin, and disastrous in its effects, has been the change which has come over the public mind in a powerful and influential part of the nation. This has mainly arisen from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, and the long-continued peace to which it has given rise. The nation had gained such extraordinary successes during the war, and vanquished so formidable an opponent, that it had come to regard itself, not without a show of reason, as invincible; hostilities have been so long intermitted that the younger and more active, and therefore influential, part of the people, have generally embraced the idea that they would never be renewed. Here, as elsewhere, the wish became the father to the thought; the immediate interests of men determined their opinions and regulated their conduct. The pacific interests of the Empire had increased so immensely during the long peace; so many fortunes and establishments had become dependant on its continuance; exports, imports, and manufactures, had been so enormously augmented by the growth of our Colonial Empire, and the preservation of peace with the rest of the world, that all persons interested in those branches of industry turned with a shudder from the very thoughts of its interruption. To this class the Reform Bill, by giving a majority in the House of Commons, yielded the government of the State. To the astonishment of every thinking or well-informed man in the world, the doctrine was openly promulgated, to admiring and assenting audiences in Manchester and Glasgow, by the most popular orators of the day, that the era of war had passed away; that it was to be classed hereafter with the age of the mammoth and the mastodon; and that, in contemplation of the speedy arrival of the much-desired Millennium, our wisdom would be to disband our troops, sell our ships of the line, and trust to pacific interest in future to adjust or avert the differences of nations. The members for the boroughs – three-fifths of the House of Commons – openly embraced or in secret inclined to these doctrines; and how clearly soever the superior information of our rulers might detect their fallacy, the influence of their adherents was paramount in the Legislature, and Government was compelled, as the price of existence, in part at least, to yield to their suggestions.