MINISTERS OF A CENTURY.'
IT has sometimes been said that the generation before our own is the one of which we know least. If that is still true, our ignorance is our own fault. Books dealing with the long reign of Queen Victoria have multiplied, and since it has become the fashion to split up the history of our own country into periods and to give each to a different writer, the nineteenth century has more than once ended "A History of England." Mr. Marriott's volume is the latest example. It begins with the Settlement of 1815, and it ends with 1901. The first fifteen years of the century naturally belong to its pre- decessor. Napoleon, though he has influenced much that has happened since Waterloo, was the offspring of the revolu- tion in which the eighteenth century closed. Mr. Marriott's treatment of his subject deserves real praise. He has his own opinions, and he does not conceal them. But a writer who had no opinions on matters so near his own day would have few readers, and Mr. Marriott, while he is not afraid to pass judgment on characters and events, is never loth to add that otherworkers in the same field have come to different conclusions. Occasionally, perhaps, he does not state the full case on the other side. Thus he defends the Six Aote, on the ground that occasions arise when the use of force " is essential to the existence of civil society." But the really serious charge against Castlereagh's home policy is not that he used force to maintain order, but that he used it for the purpose of checking the growth of opinions which were not his.
Very early in the volume we come upon a series of contrasts between words and deeds which have lately been reproduced with curious fidelity. It was agreed by the Treaty of London, concluded between France, Great Britain, and Russia in 1829, that the Porte should be informed by the three Powers that " they intend to exert all the means which circumstances may suggest to their prudence to obtain the immediate effect of the armistice [to be offered to Turkey and Greece] by preventing all collision between the contending parties ... without, however, taking any part in the hostilities between them." The his- torian of to-day will have to record another Treaty of London expressed in somewhat similar language and leading possibly to similar results. Happily the parallel goes no further•. Another• King's Speech will not describe a Greek victory as "an untoward event." In the end, however, Wellington, who had succeeded Canning as Prime Minister, did not carry out the policy to which this phrase seemed to commit Lim. He declared, indeed, that the Treaty of Adrianople, which con- cluded the subsequent war between Russia and Turkey, was "the death-blow to the independence of the Ottoman Porte and the forerunner of the dissolution and extinction of its power," but he made no effort to bring the conflict to a different conclusion. The Duke', prophecy was to wait over eighty years for its fulfilment and then to come true only in part. The statesmen of Europe have yet to learn that the con- tinuance of Turkish rule in any part of Europe is a perpetual invitation to its Christian neighbours to bring the long process of expulsion to an end. Or rather, perhaps, they prefer this • Rowland ohne Wseess. B3 J. A. B. Marriott, M.A. London Methuen and Ca [1011. utta danger to the greater one which might follow upon the attempt to make a final division of the Sick Man's estate. Two of the efforts to keep some fragments of it in the Turk's hands are associated with two out of the four great Ministers whose policy furnishes Mr. Marriott with most of his material. Palmerston made the Crimean War; Disraeli helped to make the Treaty of Berlin. Whether the first of these events could have been avoided is a point upon which the most competent witnesses are at issue. In one sense the decisive step may be indirectly credited to Lord John Russell Even after the Porte had declared war against Russia, Lord Aberdeen "still continued to talk peace in London and St. Petersbnrg." But Russell had chosen this moment of all others for raising the question of Parliamentary reform, and upon this Lord Palmerston resigned the Home Secretaryship. With the moat popular member of his Cabinet gone, Aberdeen could hardly have remained in office, and the Coalition between the Peelites and the Whigs must have come to 811 end. In view of this catastrophe Palmerston "was induced to withdraw his resignation." But before doing this he had asked and obtained his price. On January 4th, 1854, the allied fleets of France and Great Britain entered the Black Sea. It is probable, however, that if none of these incidents had happened, war would still have been declared, unless the Cabinet bad been bold enough to recall Lord Stratford de Redeliffe. And so decided a step would equally have involved the loss of Palmerston, and thus the result would have been the same. The one thing that could have made peace certain would have been the anticipation by fifty years of the revolution in English foreign policy which was effected in 1907. In January and February, 1853, says Mr. Marriott, the Tear "expressed his anxiety to come to an agree- ment with England in regard to the Eastern question, ' lest the sick man should suddenly die upon our hands and his heritage fall into chaos and dissolution.'" He was prepared, indeed, with a specific scheme. Sew* Bulgaria, and the Danubian principalities were to be erected into independent States under Russian protection, and England, to secure her route to the East, might annex Egypt, Crete, and Cyprus. Here were the materials, at all events, for an understanding which might have saved us not only the Crimean War, but all the annoyance and coat inflicted upon us by Russian action in Central Asia. But the time for the admission that Russian policy in the Near East was not an object of suspicion to Great Britain was still far off. Twenty years later a greater man than Palmerston achieved a greater triumph. Without firing a shot Disraeli helped to snatch from Russia the fruits of the Treaty of San Stefano. In has case, however•, the motive of action was different. Palmerston was content to live from hand to mouth and check Russian expansion where and when an opportunity presented itself. Disraeli's policy was founded an the conviction that if Russia could be "bottled up" for twenty years she would break up by in- ternal strife. He foresaw the revolution which actually came, though he did not realize the conservatism of the Russian people and the strength which their. Government derives from it.
Of the four great Ministers whose careers cover so large a part of the century two will be remembered for their foreign policy and two for their finance. Of Palmerston's long Parliamentary and official life—" he was in the House of Commons for nearly sixty years and in office for nearly sixty "—the most important incident was the Belgian Revolu- tion. In 1813 two ill-matched peoples had been started on a joint career, and by 1830 the errors of their Dutch Sovereign had made the continuance of the union impos- sible. Encouraged by the revolution of July, the Belgian towns took up arms in August, and by November, when th: Powers imposed an armistice, a National Congress Jana demanded independence and the exclusion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Of these conditions Palmerston was a firm supporter, but when the Belgians went on to elect the second eon of Louis Philippe as their King, Palmerston, who held that this would lead to the early absorption of the new kingdom by France, was able to secure the offer• of the crown to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Thus, thanks to his firm- ness, " three definite results bad been achieved : an essential part of the settlement of 1813 had been destroyed without an European war; an independent Belgian kingdom, under a Constitutional monarchy and a European guarantee, had been brought into being ;"and France, though the Most effusive and most effective friend of Belgium, had been compelled to forgo any hope of territorial acquisition for herself." To Palmerston's activity in other fields two ware with China and one with Russia, the long ill-feeling between France and England, and a reckless indifference to the courtesy due to foreign Powers and to his own Sovereign bear repeated witness. Once, and once only, his sympathies were on the losing side, and then he went so far as to tell Bismarck that those who attempted to violate the rights and independence of Denmark " would find in the result that it would not he Denmark alone with which they would have to contend." Mr. Marriott pleads that by that time he was old, that he was not himself Foreign Secretary, and that " there had arisen in Central Europe a diplomatist for whom Palmerston even at his beet would have been no match." Certainly it needed a Foreign Secretary with a very different training from Palmerston's and a very different ideal of diplomatic success to hold his own against a statesman who never let his words go beyond his power to make them good.
The real triumphs of Peel's career, as of Gladstone's, were financial. It is not impossible that his conviction that the Catholic question "must be settled once for all" was mainly the work of Wellington. Mr. Marriott quotes a sentence from the Duke's speech in introducing the Relief Bill in the Lords, which has a special value at the present time "I am one of those who have probably passed a longer period of my life engaged in war than most men, and principally, I may say, in civil war, and I must say this, that if I could avoid, by any sacrifice whatever, even one month of civil war in the country to which I am attached, I would sacrifice my life in order to do it." Peel saw as clearly as the harshest of his critics that the Settlement of 1829 ought not to come from his Govern- ment. But he also saw that no other Government could do the work, and we may be sure that when he took it upon himself he knew his colleague's mind, and was prepared to sacrifice his own reputation for consistency rather than see the Duke's prediction verified and Ireland become, even for a month, the theatre of civil war. It was hard that he should find himself under a somewhat similar necessity seventeen years later. But on the Corn Laws he yielded not to well-founded fear, but to the conviction that Free Trade was right in principle. Twice—in 1842 and 1845—the Prime Minister himself "took personal charge of the finan- cial proposals of the Government," and the effect of his legislation on the country was shown by the rise of Consols from 89 to 99. Gladstone had no opportunity to rival Peel's action in 1846, but his statement that "all excess- in public expenditure beyond the legitimate wants of the country is not only a pecuniary waste, but a great political and, above all, a great moral evil," may rank with Peel's definition of a Finance Minister's duty, " We must make this country a cheap country for living."
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