our guarantee? A public demonstration to Europe ought to have shown that there was such a treaty and guarantee, that it was acknowledged, and that England, for her own honour, would maintain it. Russia sent a squadron to the Bay of Kiel, to show her readiness to maintain her similar guarantee of Sleswick to Denmark. The British cabinet was negociating for three years, to prevent the effusion of blood, while every day of those three years was marked by bloodshed in the country which England was bound by treaty to protect from all invasion. There is no room for negociation about the fulfilment of a negociated and concluded bargain, treaty, or guarantee between sovereigns. Negociation belongs to the terms, not to the fulfilment of terms agreed upon between nations. The British cabinet is guilty of the bloodshed of these three years in Sleswick, 1848, 49, and 50. The future historian will ask, what were the secret influences which paralysed the British cabinet, and prevented our ministers from acting with the decision and promptitude which humanity, as well as our national honour, and the sound policy of maintaining treaties, demanded. Here, on the Continent, men have no hesitation in saying that Lord Palmerston was swayed, naturally and necessarily, by the wish and the political necessity in his situation, of doing nothing very disagreeable to Prince Albert and the petty German princely families who at that time surrounded the throne, and appeared to constitute the British court: that the Royal Consort, a good, amiable, kind-hearted German prince, bred in the very focus of Germanism, at the university of Bonn, could not but be favourably disposed to the German or Prussian cause, that it would have been inconsistent with his education, character, feelings and tastes, if he had not, and that to this influence must be ascribed the want of energy and sound policy in the British cabinet, and the deep stain on our national honour. The country cannot be too jealous, whatever ministry may be in power, of a Prussian or German influence in the cabinet. -- CHAP. V. LITERARY MEN NOT THE MOST CAPABLE OF CONDUCTING STATE AFFAIRS. THE LITERARY POWER IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THE COUNTERPART OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL POWER IN THE MIDDLE AGES. RULES BY THE SAME AGENCY, VIZ., THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.— ITS FIRST DEBUT, THE GERMAN MOVEMENT OF 1848, NOT PROMISING. ITS DEMORALISING SYSTEM OF SPREADING DELIBERATE FALSEHOODS THROUGH THE PRESS TO EXCITE THE PEOPLE. INSTANCES FROM PROFESSOR VENEDEY'S SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN OF THIS ABUSE OF THE PRESS. -FALSE AMBITION OF THE LITERARY POWER IN THE FRANKFORT PARLIAMENT. ITS CONSEQUENCES NOW. -DEMORALISATION OF THE PUBLIC MIND BY THE FALSE THEORIES GENERAL WIL 66 - " PSEUDO-PATRIOTS.— PROFESSOR INCON AND STATEMENTS OF THE LITERARY POWER. WE sometimes find in our newspapers and other periodical publications the gentle insinuation, or modest complaint, that literary men in England do not receive the social consideration, political influence, and pecuniary reward, or provision from the state, which they deserve, and which they enjoy on the Continent. We see few or no places, and none of importance, and few and scanty pensions bestowed on our literary men. Our poets, historians, and philosophers live and die at their own expense, without public aid. We have no Royal Academy with its pensioned members. We do not take our members of parliament, our prime ministers, ambassadors, or high functionaries, from the body of our great political writers, philosophers, or professors at our Universities. In France and Germany, how many literary men, Thiers, Guizot, Lamartine, Dahlmann, Arndt, Venedey, and a host of others, have been sent to the parliaments of those countries, and placed by the unanimous voice of the people at the helm of the state to guide the public affairs, solely on account of their literary merits. With us, men of much higher talents and more statesmanlike views, and with whom these could not venture to break a lance in the fields of literature, philosophy, and political economy, languish in the obscurity of their lodgings, writing articles for the columns of The Times, of the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review, or our other eminent periodical journals, which surpass, in reasoning powers, just views, and extensive knowledge of all the social and political interests of mankind, all that those continental writers ever produced, or are capable of producing! Is this a social evil, or only an evil to the class of our literary men? Have the French and German philosophers and authors conducted successfully, wisely, with good sense, prudence, and judgment, the great public interests and affairs entrusted to them in 1848, 49, and 50, on account of their literary and intellectual eminence, or have they failed, as completely as ordinary mortals, in steering their governments through the storms which, in Germany at least, they had conjured up themselves? The results show that the mind formed in literary pursuits is not the best prepared to deal with men and realities in social economy or in affairs of state. It is not a matter of course that the eminent literary man, philosopher, professor, or author must be a good minister of state, or a great financier, or even a man of practical views, unshaken steadiness, and of reliability and political honesty. G The history of Germany and France, since 1848, has not raised the character of literary men in the field of politics, or proved that they are not in their right places in their libraries and class rooms. The future historian of the first half of the nineteenth century will find a remarkable similarity in principle, progress, and social influence over public and private affairs between the power of the Press in our times and the power of the Church in the middle ages. Ecclesiastical power is almost extinct as an active element in the political or social affairs of nations or of individuals, in the cabinet or in the family circle, and a new element, literary power, is taking its place in the government of the world. In the early history of the Church of Rome, we see pope arrayed against pope, ecclesiastical authority against lay authority, in temporal as well as spiritual affairs, monastic orders against secular clergy, one order of monks against another, and all the clerical men, popes, bishops, abbots, priests, monks, quarrelling, denouncing, excommunicating each other; yet all, as by a common instinctive impulse, working together for the elevation of the ecclesiastical power to be the governing power in society, to be the head and hand of all social and political action. There was no conspiracy, no combination, no secret society carried on from age to age, for promoting ecclesiastical power. It was a common tendency given by the educational means being centralised in the Church, to all the educated, influential, governing classes, whether lay or clerical, and however discordant among themselves, to act and work for the aggrandisement of the Church, and for the extension of ecclesiastical influence. The same spirit and the |