MR. / .S FE'S HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE.*
THE second volume of Mr. Fyffe's History, of which the first appeared in the year 1880, fully maintains the level of his work. It is a book that is much wanted, and one which well fulfils its aim. To describe it succinctly, it stands in the same relation to European history ae Mr. Justin MacCarthy's History of Our Ours Times stands to English history. It does not pretend to be exhaustive or learned ; and yet it is based upon a careful study of the original authorities by a trained mind. It is meant for every-day readers. It is short, accurate, and easy to read. It deals with a period of history of which it is not easy to find any continuous account, except in the dreary pages of Alison, or in text-books for schools. The style is vigorous. The facts are well worked in. Detail is not allowed to become wearisome, because every detail given bears on the general plot of the History. No one country is dealt with at the expense of the others, and we do not know any book in which the solidarity of modern Europe, as one great community whose civilisation must stand or fall as a whole, is more strikingly brought out. We have said that Mr. Fyffe's book owes most of its value to the fact that it is the work of a man who, although he has not written with any pretension of learning, has studied the original authorities. We are not lees surprised than Mr. Fyffe himself that he has not been permitted to study the English Foreign Office Records for a later period than the end of 1815. It appears that— "A rule not found necessary at Berlin, and some other foreign capitals, still closes to historical inquirers the English documents of the last seventy years. Restrictions are no doubt necessary in the case of transactions of recent date, bat the period of seventy years is sorely unnecessarily long. Public interests could not be prejudiced, nor could individuals be even remotely affected, by the freest exami- nation of the papers of 1820 or 1830."
We think that every one will agree that "the writer who first has access to the English archives after 1815, will have an advantage over those who have gone before him," and we hope he may have an early opportunity of distinguishing himself.
e A History of Modem Morope. By C. A. Fyffe, M.A. Vol. II. From 1814 to 114t8. Loudon : Cassell and Co., Limited. 18843.
Mr. Fyffe's present volume provides many points of interest for the general reader. The period from 1815 to 1848 is one out of which all the questions which most intensely interest the political world at the present time take their rise. We should say at once that Mr. Fyffe's is a political History, and does not touch upon the material, or social, or literary history of Europe during the period of which it treats. Bat it makes plain the origins of the political questions which now agitate Europe. There is nothing that is so vague to most of us as the general history of fifty years ago. A few of the leaders of the world may remember the Pragmatic Sanction and the origin of the struggle between Don Carlos and the Spanish Monarchy. They may know when the Eastern Question first became a vital me for England, and recollect the time when Count von Moltke, a young Staff officer, was attempting to show the Porte how to defeat Mehemet .Ali. But most of no know nothing about these things. We cannot remember them, and we do not know where to find the history shortly told. The fact that the history of these years contains the germs of the European questions of the present day makes their history deeply interesting to the present generation.
Among the other interesting things in this volume, there is a good account of the War of Greek Independence, showing how curiously the policy of Russia swayed between the desire to gain influence in the Turkish Peninsula, and the holy horror of all rebellion against constituted authority, even the authority of an infidel Government. This horror of revolution on the part of all the European Governments is the key-note of the whole period. The first note of a better spirit was heard in Canning's reversal of Castlereagh's policy, and his direct inter, ference in favour of Greece. We are glad to say that Mr. Fyffe, who not only disclaims but successfully avoids all party bias, does ample justice to Castlereagh, and shows that he was not so reactionary as has generally been believed. Castlereagh has always stood in England for reaction incarnate, and nothing that Mr. Fyffe can say alters the fact that he was the most re- actionary English politician of his time. It is therefore somewhat amusing to know that Castlereagh had to bear with a good deal of sermonising from Metternich, who considered him his dis- ciple, but a disciple not very sound in the faith. As to Metter- nich himself, no man ever carried to such excess the doctrine that the mass of the population in any country should have nothing to do with the laws, except to obey them. Indeed, he carried his practice much further. It was not only against the mass of the people that he fought. The nobles of Hungary, as well as the reformers in England or France, earned his bitter hatred by demanding constitutional rights. Perhaps the most cynical and outrageous thing he did was to insist, in 1831, upon the restoration of the Pope's execrably misused authority in the name of good government and order, a course which, as Mr. Fyffe says, "extinguished Austria's claim [in Italy] to any sort of moral respect." Yet this was the man whose ideas dominated all the Governments of Europe from 1815 to 1830, and even from 1830 to 1848, every Government with the exception of France and England. The practical gist of the political creed whioh thus prevailed was that the slightest opposition to any European Government justified the interference of all the rest, but that no amount of oppression on the part of " legitimate " authority would justify any interference whatever. This doctrine, " which would have empowered the Czar to throw the armies of a. coalition upon London if the Reform Bill had been carried by force," was, we are bound to say, never accepted in England even by Castlereagh. But it was acted upon by every other European Government during the period to which this volume relates. It was under Canning that the opposite policy took root in England. We hope that the policy of putting moral, or even material pressure upon the barbarity and tyranny of European Governments, and of openly declaring sympathy with nations fighting to be free, and occasionally offering them the support of the British Government, is not one which any English party at the present moment would like to see abandoned..
Coming to the Eastern Question, in which this principle seems to us from an English point of view to be of the most vital im- portance, we can trace within the period we are reviewing the rise and growth of the idea that the road to India is the key to English interests in the East. Pitt held that England was interested in the maintenance of the Ottoman State on account of the balance of power in Europe. But the danger of Russia making a treaty with Napoleon by which she should be allowed to conquer the Porte, and her subsequent action in the Greek Rebellion, began that antagonism of English and Russian interests in the East which has prevailed to the present moment. The danger that Russia might cat off England from direct communication with India was probably at its greatest in 1833, when the Porte seemed helpless against Mehemet Ali, and Russia was its only friend. Never has Russia been so near her great end as at the time when she concluded the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi with the Sultan. " In fact," as Mr. Fyffe says, " the success of the Russian diplomatists had been too great ;" and it was only after this treaty, by which the Sultan became the mere dependant of the Czar, that the other European Governments were able to agree among themselves that the Porte, though nominally an independent State, must for the future be placed under the joint protection of Europe. The possibility of establishing an overland route to India, either by way of the Euphrates or by the Red Sea, was just at this time engaging the attention of the British Government, and therefore it was equally im- possible for it to consent either to a Russian Protectorate at Constantinople, or to the contemplated usurpation of Mehemet Ali, who in that case would have possessed the whole coast from Alexandria to Constantinople. The opening of the Suez Canal has, of course, made inevitable the continuity of this policy on the part of England, a policy which has so far been completely successful, and the story of which will, we suppose, be traced in the next volume of Mr. Fyffe's History.
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