CHAP. I.] RUSSIA. — AUSTRIA. 13 the Western principle of Self-government by Representation, the minutest proceedings of Peter and Catherine in Russia will become as interesting as any incidents in the lives of Greek or Roman heroes. Generations yet unborn will watch with eager eyes the pulling down of Finnish huts in the marshes, to make way for palaces of stone; and the last waving of the bulrushes and reeds, where trim gardens were henceforth to be; and the first dimple in the surface of stagnant lakes, when the canals were ready to drain them away; and the placing of block upon block, as the granite embankments rose along the Neva, raising it from a waste of fetid waters into a metropolitan river. This river may turn out to be our modern Rubicon; and the stroke of Peter's hammer on the ship-side at Saardam may send a louder echo through future generations than to the ear of our own time. This great empire, seeking admission among the European states, at first alarmed them; and the audacious and aspiring cast of mind of Peter and Catherine justified such apprehension for the time. But it soon appeared that their efficiency beyond their own territory bore no proportion to their ambition, and that they were not likely to prove themselves potentates except within their own boundary. The sovereigns of Russia would have said, and often did say, that they were considering their people during the whole of their reigns. It is true that they encouraged industry and commerce, and instituted prodigious works of improvement. But this was not the consideration of the Peoples of Europe which the progress of time was rendering necessary, and for want of which the whole system broke up. It was for the glory of the State and country, in consideration of the unit and not of the aggregate, that the great works of Peter and Catherine were done. They were done at the expense of justice and kindness to individuals. They were done with ignorant and fatal precipitation. They were done in an impatient and boastful spirit; and the people felt no gratitude where they were aware of no benefit. In as far as they shared the vanity of their sovereign, they boasted and exulted in the sovereign's glory; but there was nothing done or doing for the Russian people which could render them of any use in the day of European convulsion. Austria. The same may be said in regard to the great and venerable empire of Austria. There was nothing on which the Emperor Joseph prided himself so much as on his reforms. Yet, they were so done - with so much self-will and personal regards-that they exasperated those whom he professed to benefit. One of his reforms lost him the Belgian provinces of the empire; and another alienated the affections of Hungary. Thus, while Austria in her reduced state was looked 14 PRUSSIA.-ENGLAND. [Book I. upon as an unexceptionable unit in the Balancing System, there was nothing in the condition of her people which could for a moment retard, or in any degree modify, the explosion which overthrew the arrangement. Austria has been mentioned as in a reduced condition. She was reduced, not only by actual loss of dependencies, but, yet more, in regard to continental influence. There could have been no balance in Europe if Austria had retained, with all her vast territories, an undisputed supremacy of influence. Prussia was aggrandized, up to the point of rivalship. The partition of Poland, in 1772, seems to have been acquiesced in more easily than it might have been, by other powers, on account of the strength it gave to Prussia. Prussia had indeed become a notable Prussia. unit in the European system: but we have the Great Frederick's own report of the state of his country and people a dozen years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. "The nobility was exhausted," he says, in the History he wrote of his own time, "the Commons ruined, numbers of villages were burnt, and towns impoverished. Civil order was lost in a total anarchy: in a word, the desolation was universal." He lent money to the towns, settled destitute people in the wastes, drained marshes, patronized manufactures, and, best of all, emancipated the peasants from hereditary servitude. Yet, his people were not happy; nor did they love him. His military system was so severe that his soldiers hanged themselves in their misery ; and the whole country groaned under the burden of a standing army of 200,000 men. The appearance of activity and an improved financial condition throughout the north of Germany deceived observers who regarded States only as units: but it is now well known that under all the arrangements, and amidst all the enterprises of Frederick of Prussia there was no genuine civil liberty—nothing that could keep the weight of the people on the same side of the balance with the kings. England. As for the two leading States of Europe, France and England, their destiny in the moment of convulsion had been fixed long before as all destiny is and with more clearness than is common in political affairs. The English revolution of a century before had secured a better condition for the British nation, in regard to civil liberty, than was enjoyed by any other people in Europe; and the transient oppressions exercised or attempted by panic-stricken or one-sided statesmen under the alarm of convulsion were of small account in comparison with the securities for constitutional freedom in the long run. No discontent of the British people certainly contributed to the European explosion which destroyed the Balance of Power. The insular position of England rendered her circumstances so CHAP. I.] FRANCE.-STANDING ARMIES. France. 15 Her far different from those of other States as that she could never be suspected of aims of continental conquest. The imputations cast on her by her great rival were of arrogance in overbearing other people's will and affairs; insatiable rapacity about annexing islands and distant coasts to her dominions; and a shopkeeping ambition to monopolize the commerce, and command the industry, of the world. This was another way of saying that her function was to be mistress of the seas; as her great rival was, beyond question, the most formidable warlike power on the continental battle-field of ambition. As for France, she was, before the breaking out of the Revolution, very strong; and she was spoken of as stronger than she was. population was above 25,000,000; but it was unhappy. Her authority and dominion over her neighbors were very imposing; but there was discontent beneath; and, when the conquests of the Revolution were made, and France claimed to be the ruling power from the Texel to the Adriatic, she was in fact weakened by her new conquests, which were no more really French than they had been before. Her great standing armies, by Standing which she had been distinguished since Louis XIV. armies. augmented them to a prodigious extent, were a cause of weakness in one direction, while they were an element of vast strength in another. The institution of standing armies was a feature of an advanced social condition at the outset. It showed that the time had come for that division of industry under which the large majority of the inhabitants of a country pursued the business of their lives, contributing from the fruits of their labor to maintain a set of men to do the necessary fighting. The excitement and the horror of war were incalculably lessened by this arrangement, and the interests of peace were, in the first instance, remarkably promoted, by the tranquillity in which the greater part of the population and their employments were left. But then, this institution of standing armies became so oppressive as to be a main cause of revolutionary action in France and other countries. When Louis XIV. increased his forces, so as to exhibit to Europe the new spectacle of a standing army, at all times adequate to all contingencies, his neighbors began to muster armies which might keep his in check; and thus the practice of expanding the military element went on through Europe, till Prussia, under the Great Frederick, had a peace-establishment of 200,000 men, and France, under the last Bourbons, of 500,000 men. The resident inhabitants felt this force to be at once a severe burden in point of cost, and an irksome restraint; and they revolted against this, among other grievances. Thus, the machinery which was considered a means and proof of strength, and which was said to be provided for the maintenance of the 16 MINOR EUROPEAN POWERS. [Book I. Balancing System, for the repression of overgrown power in one direction, and the support of oppressed weakness in another, - proved so heavy as to become in itself destructive of that which it assumed to preserve. While France was confident at home, and dreaded abroad, on account of her military preponderance, she was on the point of being put to her last shifts to preserve her place in Europe at all. It may be noted, in contemplating the position of the two great rival States, that England was more likely to find favor in the eyes of other continental powers than France, since her kind of supremacy involved little danger to her neighbors. France, with her vast military resources, was a dangerous neighbor. The naval power of England might vex and harass the States, and cripple their commercial resources; but it could not keep them always in peril of their lives. In the midst, therefore, of a general dislike of her "arrogance," England was more trusted and less feared than France, among the company of European States. As for the smaller powers Holland was gained over from Minor Euro- the French to the English alliance, by the honest and pean Powers. skilful management of Lord Malmesbury, just before the breaking out of the French Revolution. It was of little consequence what Spain did. Spain was too essentially feeble to affect much the destinies of other States; but her natural and political tendencies were to alliance with France. Portugal was feeble too and she and Spain were always prone to quarrel; and Portugal was our ally. Turkey was rescued from absorption by Russia just before the death of Catherine; and it could hardly now be called a power at all. Italy, also, was soon proved to be at the disposal of the greater potentates, having small inherent force. Sweden and Norway were not likely to give any trouble spontaneously; nor did they seem in the way to require any especial protection. The Balancing System was not founded on treaties, or any sort of express compact. It was a product of Time, a necessary stage of civilization, as we have said; and the natural force by which States united to keep the strongest in check, and uphold the weakest, appears indeed to have manifested itself, in its own season, as the counteracting and compensating forces of nature do, whether men call for them or not. In such cases, there is usually something involved which men overlook; and in this case of the Balancing System there were elements of which kings and statesmen were wholly unaware. They were counting and placing their units, supposing all safe, not seeing that these units were aggregates, with a self-moving power. Kings were no longer what they had been. They must have Ministers who were not their own tools, but who bore some rela CHAP. I.] BONAPARTE FIRST CONSUL. 17 tion to the people at large. In England, this had so long been a settled matter that nobody thought of questioning it. In France, the Bourbons never could clearly see it. They never saw, that, if it once became a matter of contest whether a European monarch and his tools should rule with or without a regard to the interests and needs of the people, the matter could end no otherwise than in the defeat of the despot. So the Bour- French Revobons were driven forth from France, as the Stuarts lution. had been from England; and all the world waited with intense anxiety to see what would become of France in regard to the Balancing System. Consul. The matter was made clear, after some years of struggle, by a Corsican youth, who was an engineer, without pros- Napoleon pect, and without fortune, when the French Revolu- Bonaparte. tion broke out. By his military talents, and his genius for command, he had risen, before the opening of our century, to such a point of eminence, that on his life seemed to hang the destinies of the world. In 1796 he crossed the Alps, leading the armies of France to the conquest of Italy, whence he compelled the Pope and the other Italian sovereigns to send the treasures of art to Paris. He there defeated five Austrian armies; and showed his quality at home by wresting from the French Directory, and concentrating in himself, the entire control of the army. In 1798, he conquered Egypt, threatened India, and, in 1799, overran Syria, where, however, he was repulsed at Acre by the British under Sir Sidney Smith, and driven back upon Egypt. Returning to Paris, he carried all before him; and the year closed on his appointment as First Consul for life. He was invested Made First with supreme executive authority. The first mention of his name in the published journal of the great British diplomatist, Lord Malmesbury, occurs in November, 1796.1 "Well brought up at L'Ecole Militaire clever, desperate Jacobin, even Terrorist - his wife Madame Beauharnois, whose husband was beheaded - she now called Notre Dame des Victoires." On the 23d of August, 1799, he told his army in Egypt, by a short letter, "In consequence of news from Europe, I have determined immediately to return to France.” Early in October," says our matter-of-fact Annual Register,2 "Bonaparte landed suddenly at Fréjus, in Provence, like a spirit from another world." Before the last sun of the century had set, he was the greatest potentate of the world. The wearied and worn people of France rested on him as the power which was to give them repose; and the magnificent succession of his first acts seemed to justify their confidence. Social order was restored and maintained; the public exercise of religion was reestablished; and, by treaty with the 1 Lord Malmesbury's Diaries, iii. 293. 2 Annual Register, 1799, p. 316. |