may have recourse to it. I repeat it, the whole truth, about the Congress of Vienna ought not to be published, still I think that from it we may draw useful considerations, counsels, and opinions. . . . The copy of a memorandum by M. Pozzo di Borgo, which I have found, proved that the emperor acted with knowledge of the facts, his eyes open to all that was to be said for or against the question. M. Pozzo di Borgo and M. de Stein, the two men gifted with the most superior talents among all on this stage of Vienna, were most bitterly opposed to Poland, under whatever form it was intended to favour her.'

In

When this letter was penned in Paris, the writer had long been an exile. He did not become one till after bitter trials and a twofold struggle. First with Emperor Alexander, who granted a constitution to the Poles, permitted them in their diets to use their native language, vote their own taxes, and even re-established a national Polish army. But here, as in other departments, reactionary men urged reactionary measures, and the tyranny exercised under Alexander's name proved to Adam Czartoryski that the romantic dreams of a young grand-duke are one thing, the selfish and imperious necessities of kingcraft another. He remonstrated. August 1821 he writes:- Rarely now do I importune you with my letters to this low ebb had their friendship reached. It lasted till October 1823, and then, in nine curt lines, Prince Adam sent in his resignation as curator of the university of Wilna, an office which he had retained up to that time. Alexander died in 1825, and the Polish policy of Nicholas was epitomised in his celebrated message to the Poles: No dreams, gentlemen; no dreams.' On the terrible sufferings of the Polish nation during his reign this is not the place to enter. Seen from his own point of view, the policy of Nicholas was, however, as successful as it was cruel. He again epitomised the situation when he said. that this was a family quarrel, with which outsiders had nothing to do.' He did contrive so to isolate the Polish from European questions, that outsiders, in 1830, did not interfere in the ten months' civil war, which is one of the most sanguinary on record. In it Prince Adam Czartoryski played a part, and he was head of the provisional Government at Warsaw, having for his military supporters Chlopicki, Skrzynecki, and Dembinski. The result as regarded Prince Adam was exile.

He was married to Princess Anna Sapieha-Kodenska, and her estates, like those of the Korzec branch of his own house, lay in Galicia, beyond the theatre of what Nicholas termed the family quarrel.' But here, too, an

event occurred in 1846 which affected Prince Adam profoundly. To Cracow in 1815 neutrality and independence had been secured, and this independence, ratified under the great seal of England, was clothed with the reciprocal ratification of all the Powers. Metternich never, however, regarded this with a favourable eye, and he declared that Cracow was a foyer of revolt, a source from which, thanks to the Polish immigrants and emigrants, poison was disseminated in all the adjoining countries. This verdict he repeated over and over again, and when the troubles of 1845-46 broke out, the blame was not only laid on the great Polish families in emigration, but proclamations bearing the names of Prince Adam Czartoryski, and of his nephew, Ladislas Zamoyski, were forged in the official newspapers.* On account of a proclamation which he never wrote, and which no one even went through the comedy of attempting to bring home to him, the estates of his wife in Galicia were sequestrated. Adam Czartoryski was a patriot: as such he would never have been privy to the Galician Jacquerie of February 1846; and as he was a patriot, he again deplored the appearance, by 1861, in the ranks of the Polish patriots, of the desperadoes and socialists of Paris.

He lived on in the Hôtel Lambert, convinced that if history has already often recorded the justice of God, she may do so again, and that it is only by the principles of justice and good faith that the peace of the world can be maintained. His house, with its vast courtyard, looked like a little oasis of dignity and silence in the world of busy Paris; it was a centre of kindness and charity to Poles in a foreign land, and, thanks to its influence, the bread of exile was found less salt by many a solitary emigrant.

* We may refer our readers to the Edinburgh Review, vol. lxxxv. (1847), for an account of the incorporation of the free city and territory of Cracow with the Austrian Empire, an article which was written by the desire, and with the assistance and approval, of the late Prince Consort.

ART. X.-1. The Present Position of European Politics, or Europe in 1887. By the Author of Greater Britain.' 8vo. London: 1887.

2. Des Causes actuelles de Guerre en Europe, et de l'Arbitrage. Par EMILE DE LAVELEYE. Bruxelles et Paris: 1873.

IT T is a relief to ourselves, and we hope it may be a relief to our readers, briefly to survey the present position of European politics, leaving behind us the clamour of Irish rebels and repudiators, and the practices of their English allies who are not ashamed to use the vilest instruments for their selfish purposes. Ireland, after all, is but a speck on the glass of a telescope whose vast range commands the civilised world, and even the habitable globe. We therefore prefix to these remarks a volume which professes to take the most recent survey of European affairs, to which we add M. de Laveleye's essay on the causes of war. The writer of the English volume, whose name is now withdrawn from notice, is known to be a man conversant with public affairs both in England and on the Continent, and who has even held high office in the foreign department of State. We are surprised, therefore, that in this rapid review of the policy of Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, he has not produced a better and more finished work. The style of these essays is loose and discursive; the facts quoted by the writer, on no satisfactory evidence, are thrown together without method; and, as we shall endeavour to show, the inferences drawn from them are to the last degree unsubstantial. But what strikes us most forcibly as the defect of this book is the total absence of any sense of justice and injustice, of right and wrong, and of any indignant protest against the pernicious doctrine that might makes right. The author displays a complete indifference to those principles of international law which must in the long run govern the fate of nations, and he offers no discriminating analysis of the political principles which regulate the policy of every well-ordered State. If we believed the reasoning of this writer, peace and war would become the result of mechanical forces or chance; but the study of politics would be abject if it led to no higher results than these.

We start, however, from the same point as our author when he observes in limine that the present position of the European world is one in which sheer force holds a larger 'place than it has held in modern times since the fall of

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Napoleon.' Strangely enough, he adds that the present reign of force in Europe dates from the period of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. This is a total misrepresentation. The disruption of Europe, which tore up the treaties that had survived the convulsion of 1848 and the Crimean war, dates from the invasion of Italy under the Emperor Napoleon III. and M. de Cavour in 1859, followed by the dismemberment of the Danish monarchy by the German Powers in 1864, and again by the total overthrow of the Germanic Confederation in 1866, and the establishment of the military ascendency of Prussia, which led to the war of 1870 and subsequent events. The Treaty of Berlin, far from being a destructive instrument, was an attempt, not altogether unsuccessful, to set limits to Russian aggression, and to re-establish the concert of the Great Powers on Eastern affairs. But it is true that the great events which preceded it had swept away every trace of the last general settlement of Europe; that no general international treaty is in existence which can claim undisputed authority; and that no complete and confidential alliances can be said permanently to unite any of the European Powers. When, therefore, this writer speaks of the ascendency of sheer force, he means the absence of international law the absence of any standard of equity and positive right to which the differences of nations can be referred, and the extinction of those principles on which a system of European polity can alone be solidly founded.

The Treaty of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, and the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, were great public acts sanctioned by all the Powers for the purpose of regulating their mutual relations. Exhausted by long wars, and sincerely anxious for the establishment of lasting peace and the reduction of military establishments, the parties to those treaties sought to substitute the authority of public law for the rule of force, and to place the rights of each under the protection of all. They extended to the humblest members of the European community, such as the free cities of Germany, the republic of Cracow, and the canton of Geneva, the same rights which were claimed by empires; and the overthrow of the controlling authority of these great conventions, which formed the basis of public law in Europe, has been followed by the extinction of the independence of a multitude of minor states, and a sense of insecurity pervading the whole fabric from which the greatest Powers are not exempt. If, therefore, sheer force holds a larger place than it has held since the fall of Napoleon, the true significance

of that fact is that the authority of public law has been shaken or destroyed, and with this aggravation, that the sheer force exercised by Napoleon ruled during a time of war, whereas the present lawless state of Europe has sprung up and exists during a period of protracted peace-of peace, indeed, not undisturbed by frequent alarms, and imposing upon the overburdened populations of the Continent an enormous expenditure of men and money in military establishments scarcely less intolerable than war itself. Such, however, is the present position of European politics. Our object in the following remarks is not to dwell on the diplomatic incidents of the day, to which this writer appears to us to devote more attention than they deserve, but rather to point out those general principles which must ultimately regulate the policy of nations and the course of human affairs.

The actual condition of the principal states of the Continent as described by this writer resembles that of machines charged to excess with explosive materials, and ready to burst forth upon some trifling occasion in all the horrors of universal war; but we seek in vain in these pages for any clear intimation of a direct cause sufficient to justify the outbreak of hostilities, and we entirely deny that the occurrence of disturbances among the semi-civilised peoples of the Balkan, or in the remoter parts of the globe, is an adequate cause for a contest which would convulse the world. In this respect Prince Bismarck has shown a wise and haughty indifference to the petty incidents which are made the most of by newspaper correspondents and officious diplomatists, and he places the maintenance of peace upon far broader and higher grounds than the possession of an island in the Pacific Ocean or the independence of Bulgaria. Lord Beaconsfield is said to have remarked that we make our lives miserable by the anticipation of evils which never 'happen,' and we should escape the scares which periodically agitate the stock exchanges and fill the newspapers with idle rumours if we looked with more confidence to the general political principles which must govern the conduct of statesmen. This writer himself, who draws such formidable inferences from the present state of European polities, and appears to see a conflagration breaking out at every corner of the European fabric, is obliged to acknowledge

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that

Rumours of war are bad enough, but it is not easy to see whence at this moment actual war is likely to come. France does not intend that war shall grow out of the Egyptian question. France is not going

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