FAILING CONGRESS—WHAT? T ITE controversy which has been evident in the
Cabinet all the past week, which has produced four successive Cabinet Councils on as many days, and has led to at least one offer of resignation, has apparently ended, and for one result England finally declines to attend a Congress of Paris. The great scheme for assembling Europe in council to discuss the grievances of the world and remedy them through a tribunal armed with the power of law, instead of through a great faction fight, with nations for partizans and armies for weapons, has been frustrated by English action. Whether Russia accedes or refuses, the great South German Power, always jealous for her last foothold in Italy, will eagerly grasp at the pretext, and without England or Austria no agreement having the binding force of a European compact can be so much as ex- pected. The" Congress," should it meet at all, which becomes more and more improbable, will be a mere "Conference," and Napoleon may find,, as private litigants so often find, that personal communication only deepens jealousy and dislike. The country, though regretting a project which had in it something strangely attractive, will not, we think, refuse to endorse the decision, will probably, rather from instinct than argument, arrive at some such conclusion as this : —Had England possessed at this moment what she only seems to possess, a Minister enjoying the perfect confidence of the people, yet familiar with all the springs of Continental action; able to threaten war with the certainty that the country would follow his lead, yet resolved not to permit a war except for some visibly adequate end, she might have put her habitual distrust of Napoleon and her permanent dread of vain speculation for once aside, and by guiding, or checking, or doubling the immense force of France, have secured an endurable peace for the world. As it is, the practical difficulties are too visible, the possible advantages too uncertain, the confidence of the country in its rulers too resigned, for any experiment so vast to awaken the necessary enthusiasm. The project in England is given up, and men turn from it uneasily to speculate, from data which grow every moment more uncertain, upon what Napoleon will do next.
They see plainly enough that it is on him that all action depends, that so long as he halts all Europe will halt, if only out of wariness, that so long as he and Great Britain can by any possibility keep step wars must be limited in area, in time, and in destructive effects. But then they cannot decide how long he will halt, how long he will suffer the alliance to remain a possibility, how suddenly or in what direction he may burst into an isolated course of activity of which no one can see the end. It is felt rather than known that there is war at hand, but the objects and direction of that war are still matters of feverish speculation. Napoleon will war with Russia for Poland ; he will fight Germany for the Rhine ; he will finish his work in Italy ; he will settle the Eastern question with Russia for an ally,—such are a few out of the speculations gravely discussed in papers frequently well in- formed within this single week. Every new accident in Europe, the death of a petty king, the vote of a powerless Diet, even the resolutions of princes whose very names had but yesterday been forgotten, furnish new cause for alarm ; and so perturbed is the public mind, that for the first, and we trust the last, time in history, a resolve of the " Saxon " Duchies, whose very names politicians can barely spell, has affected all European exchanges. Men acknowledge on all sides that everything is shifting visibly, that plans and speculations are equally futile till we know what the ruler of France may intend to do in that much dreaded-future "the coming spring."
One-half of all this alarm is, we believe, unfounded. That the Powers, and especially Russia, are arming fast, is evident ; that war will come with the spring is only too probable ; that any war, however well justified, must at first be disastrous, la certain ;but this talk about all manner of wars at once can be productive only of unreasoning panic. The people who accept, or even consider, the huge mass of rumours, and suspi- cions, and personal stories which the exiles and the gossips are tossing by cartloads into the papers of the continent, forget the first two elements in the question,—the character of Louis Napoleon and the public opinion of France. In the long run, and on external politics, those two elements will be found, when rightly estimated, either to be, or believe themselves to be, en rapport, and to estimate one without counting the other is to calculate aberrations in the solar system with one of the planets forgotten.
The moment they are considered together whole sets of vague apprehensions will at once be laid aside. This secret Russian alliance, for example, might, for aught anybody can tell, be possible to Louis Napoleon. We doubt if it is, for it would involve sooner or later that conflict with England which, except in the last resort, when every other prospect has failed, he does not wish to provoke_ But admit that it is on certain conditions possible to himself, there remains the question, is it possible to Prance? Napo- leon is no Oriental despot, no Caliph or Great Mogul, to wage mighty wars in spite of all sections of his own people. His- role is to represent France, or where that is impossible, as in the Italian war, then the party of progress in France—the party which, and not the rich, has the courage to make revo- lutions. Neither of these two Powers, neither France as a nation nor the progressive classes of France, desire MX alliance with Russia. The Republicans would regard it with horror, as a final breach with the Revolution, as a menace to- social advance through every part of the Continent; the bourgeois would regard it with tremor as leading to the one contingency they dread—a final rupture with England ; the- priests cannot see heretics exalted without a pang of annoy- ance; the cultivated classes would sigh over the hopes they have indulged for Russo-Poland, and the army would rage at a policy which, while it abandoned the comrades who died by their sides at Borodino, would cut off from thebi finally the hope of a march on the Rhine. For the Russian Czar, un- scrupulous as he may be, cannot abandon the one friend who, in his extremity, has threatened war on his behalf. The alliance with Russia for active objects is, in the present state of French opinion, with men's minds all ulcerated by the stories told of General Berg and decrees actually published by Mouravieff, simply impossible. So is a direct attack on all Germany in order to gain the Rhine. Napoleon is not a gambler who stakes immense wealth already in hand in order to gain double or quits, and though a blow for the Rhine- might, if successful, finally seat his dynasty, failure would as finally unseat it. Even if he goes to war for Poland he must move with exceeding wariness, for England might not tolerate- farther aggression, and the one object the Hapsburgs never abandon is the hope of a German crown. They dare not sell the Rhine, and without their consent war for a frontier involves a contest between France unaided and the whole Germanic people backed by the recovering Russian strength. Napoleon plays for quick and decisive wars, and though he may, and we trust will, strike a blow for Poland, still with Mexico on his hands, Germany sulky and suspicious, and England ever watchful, his object will be to limit, not to en- large, the area and scope of his operations. War, of course, may produce any amount of unexpected or undeserved results; but those results are not Aimed, and it is the suspicion of possible plans, of deep-laid intrigues for aggrandizement, which produces such perturbation. Of course, if Prussia, for- getting alike her history and her treaties, with her people in open conflict with their King, and a Ministry whose best future will be to escape the block, is mad enough to rush upon Denmark, the Emperor of the French may have a great opportunity. But even then the annoyance of Great Britain at his aggrandizement, and the chance of a European coalition, which we should not without guarantees help him to resist, would tend to make him hesitate before he changed a war "for the public law" into a war for boundaries. There are rocks- enough ahead, and while Europe is subjected to the ambition of one great brains uncertainty must continue ; but it is not by feeding imaginations fast getting morbid that men can clear their eyes. Every sheet in the dark looks a ghost, and Europe is in the dark; but it is at least well to remember the vast antecedent improbability that any ghost should be there.
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