fully, almost tamely. It belongs to the character of the man, and to the fatalist superstition with which it is notoriously tinged, that he should think to win the favour of Fortune by imitating, in the commencement of his military career, the very details of his uncle's earlier exploits. The great Emperor's first command was on the soil of Italy; his first victory was in Piedmont; the first enemy with whom he tried his strength was Austrian, and Nice was his first territorial acquisition. Up to this point-the last is being accomplished as we write the second Emperor, with something less of talent and something more of opportunity, has carefully picked out the footsteps of his great exemplar. The anxious, momentous question for Europe and England is, how far will this model be copied-how far will this path be followed out?

There are old men living still to whom the proclamations and the despatches, the sophistries and the falsehoods of the last fifteen months must sound like the echo of a longforgotten tale. They have heard all about

merits of his own, but simply because he bore | splendid fall. He follows his precedent faitha name associated in the hearts of the French peasantry with a fame which they cherished and a policy they would gladly see revived. He has profited by his uncle's glory: he cannot renounce his uncle's system. He has nothing save the one gewgaw of military distinction to offer as a bribe to the fierce political passions which his bayonets hold in check. It is ridiculous to speak of a sentiment of loyalty to the conspirator of yesterday, who is the Emperor of to-day; and no one but Mr. Bright would talk of social liberties in a land where those blessings are illustrated by a mute tribute and a shackled press, and drawing-rooms swarming with spies. He has nothing to give his people in exchange for all he has taken from them, except that martial intoxication for the sake of which they will readily pawn alike their prosperity and their freedom. So long as he heaps triumph on triumph and adds conquest to conquest, so long it is probable his subjects will not murmur at the weight of their wellgilded chain. But, unfortunately, this system of distracting attention from domestic suffer-geographical frontiers' and 'natural boundaing by the glitter of military success, adds to its own exigencies by its own action. Wars, and, still more, rumours of wars, are the deadliest enemies of trade. The Emperor's chief claim on the adhesion of the middle classes was the hope that a strong, stern Government would be able to repress the ever-heaving forces of Revolution, by which all other Governments had been overthrown. But a chronic alarm of war is almost as fatal to the operations of trade as the panic of Revolution. When the operations of trade are materially slackened, and the accumulations of idle capital are mounting higher and higher in the coffers of the Bank of France, it means diminished employment and narrowing sustenance for thousands and thousands of working men. There is but one device, old as the origin of statecraft, for charming away their discontent; its fury must be turned upon some foreign foe. Thus the Emperor is driven into a vicious circle. The more Europe is disturbed, the more trade will slacken and suffering increase in France; and the more suffering increases at home, the more restlessly must he prosecute his aggressive plans in order to avert the danger with which it menaces his throne. He may have struggled hard against the necessity; he may have earnestly desired to pursue a milder policy and enjoy a less troubled term of power; but the imperious exigencies of an usurped dominion, the relentless logic of a false position, are driving him to try again the fatal but fascinating career, in which all his uncle's matchless genius could only secure for him a

ries' before. When they are told that there are populations burning to be annexed to the empire of France, they remember that they have often heard of the same phenomenon in days gone by, and they know precisely what it means. It must seem strange to them now again to hear the first notes of the old song which in youth was so familiar to their ears; stranger still to find that with it have been reproduced the clique of wellmeaning simpletons who are deluded by its burden of hypocrisy and fraud. It is indeed a gloomy prospect if we are fated to go again through the same experiences before we shall have learned the lesson which we had only too well by heart some fifty years ago. Savoy first-what next? Is the process of revendication' to stop there? Has France no other expansible frontiers? Will not a river serve as a natural boundary quite as appropriately as an Alpine range? And what is the policy of England to be, when next the empire gives a practical proof that it is 'peace' and 'fights only for an idea?” If we are to predict the probable course of England from what it has been in recent years, the prospect does not promise much either to our safety or our honour. England had once a traditional policy which was not very difficult to fathom or to apply. She did not meddle with other nations' doings when they concerned her not. But she recognised the necessity of an equilibrium and the value of a public law among the states of Europe. When a great power abused its superiority by encroaching on the frontier of its

The tone of their diplomacy remained as bold and plainspoken as of old. Too often it was not until they came to put their grand professions into action that they felt the effect upon their position of the clipped and starved establishments which the new philosophy had imposed. They dared not lift up their arm to strike, lest its nervelessness should be betrayed. This is the origin of that mixture of brave words and craven acts that has disgraced our foreign policy since the Reform Bill, and on which foreigners have so often commented with scorn. In dealing with smaller nations the fatal weakness was not necessarily exposed-we could still act with vigour and hold our own; but, in dealing with a stronger power, the certainty that bold language was an idle vaunt and that immediate war was inevitable destruction forced us into a tone of concession and humility so marked in its contrast, that it could not escape the host of detractors to whom our former triumphs and present freedom have given birth. They justly hold us up to scorn as reversing the ancient Roman maxim

as subjugating the weak and sparing the proud alone. Lord Macaulay's description, of the hated Claudian house, who

'yelping with currish spite,

weaker neighbours, she looked on their cause | lects to the measure of their new instructors. as her cause, and on their danger as the forerunner of her own. But a change has come over the spirit of our policy in recent years. It is no longer dictated by any single principle, but it is the confused and heterogeneous resultant of two conflicting elements. The traditions and the habits of the old far-sighted and manly doctrines, which admitted the duties that England owes to the European commonwealth of which she is a citizen, still linger among our leading statesmen. But they have been sadly modified by the maxims of a very different philosophy. The gambling and reckless spirit of trade, which never cares to count up distant possibilities and lives only for the chances and profits of the morrow, has bred a school of politicians whose chief claim to attention is that they cast out as barbarous all the precautions on which our ancestors relied. They have selected an age in which steam has infinitely multiplied our intercourse with Europe and has provided facilities for an invader which none of us are as yet able accurately to estimate, to proclaim, as a new discovery, that we ought to be as completely disconnected from the politics of Europe by the Channel as the Americans are by the Atlantic. They would realize the old Roman taunt and make us more than 'penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. Just as they ridicule all perils of Still snap and bark at those that run, and run invasion as an old wife's tale, so they inveigh against all active efforts to maintain the peace and public law of Europe as a piece of wasteful Quixotism and an act of treason against trade. They can understand the right of one man to employ force to restrain another man from violence or theft; they admit that in the interests of the community the burglar or the highwayman must be hunted down; but when the argument is raised from the man to the people, from the community of individuals to the community of nations, their logic fails them and refuses to go further. No statesman has as yet professed this creed in its simple and pure absurdity; but it has, nevertheless, from time to time, exercised some influence in the House of Commons, and, through the House of Commons, on the Cabinet. If its pusillanimity was repulsive to the high spirit of the English people, its remissions of taxation were not the less grateful to their commercial instincts, and to this part of the Manchester faith the House of Commons has occasionally listened. The inevitable result, little as Parliament may have intended it, was to tinge with this miserly and blind philosophy the spirit of English policy abroad; but the statesmen who had been brought up in wider views could not at once narrow their intel

from those that bite'

aptly represents the estimate of our degeneracy which, soon after the influence of the new school came into play, began to prevail, and still prevails, at most of the Chancelleries of Europe. The cheese-parings of a few years have almost wholly lost us the prestige which it had cost four hundred millions to acquire.

So long as the same poisonous element is suffered to infect our policy, so long the same dishonour will be its result. National ignominy is the logical consequence of Manchester finance. So long as our arguments are weak, the more we meddle the more we shall be disgraced. If Mr. Gladstone's aspirations for a return to the estimates of 1852 are to be realized, we had better renounce at once and for ever our position as an European power. If we are to take Mr. Bright's view of war, we had better take his view of diplomacy as well. Anything is better than feeble and impotent braggadocio. To try and secure by vapouring a position which we will not or cannot attain by fighting, is a policy worthy of no potentate above the calibre of the Emperor of China. We must abandon all dreams of watching over and protecting the infant growth of Italian liberty; we must

But a far heavier share will be the portion
of that Minister who, with deeper and more
successful art, shall have schemed, by a
finance ingeniously galling and unjust, to
make England fret and revolt against the cost
of those defences which are
the very charter
of her national existence.

forget the glorious part we have borne in greed of gain have forced themselves to becurbing the unscrupulous and desolating am-lieve that the age of Saturn has returned. bition of France; we must publicly renounce, as beyond our strength, the guarantees that we have given to Switzerland and Belgium. We must stand calmly, nay humbly, by, while the frontier of the Rhine is added to the frontier of the Alps, and Antwerp becomes, under French auspices, a standing menace to the Thames. This is the only safe and consistent policy, if we are to return to the skeleton army and mouldering navy of Lord John Russell's administration. It is the inevitable corollary of a renewal of that 'thrift' to which Mr. Gladstone is so fond of pointing with applause, unless we are willing that our diplomacy should become a systematic game at brag. Though it might be ignominious in the eyes of those who set their heart on historical traditions, yet, for a time at least, it would be cheap. But no self-delusion, however resolute, can really convert the Channel into an Atlantic. Once at Antwerp the Emperor might possibly remember his solemn promise that Waterloo should be avenged. Whether his appearance on the coast of Sussex would be held, on sound financial principles, to justify an increase of the estimates, is a point on which the Manchester school have never distinctly made up their minds. Mr. Bright would no doubt impartially balance the profit and the loss. He would have an opportunity of deciding in his own case whether 'social' or 'political liberties' were to be preferred. On the one hand, the Morning Star' would assuredly receive an avertissement; on the other, Mr. Bright, as Préfet de la Tamise, would walk out to dinner before the premier Duke. He would probably set himself to learn French with the consolatory reflection, that an annexation to the Empire of France would be a greater boon even than a commercial treaty, inasmuch as it would imply absolute Free Trade.

All these objections, and more also, were urged against the Budget; and their cogency was rather ignored than disproved. But their weight was as nothing against the bribes which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had adroitly offered to the most active interests in the country. For the purpose of passing a budget, a Minister cannot afford to wait till the genuine and solid public opinion of the nation is expressed. True national opinion is a vast, unwieldy machine, which it takes a long time to set in motion. It is slow of thought, and slower still of speech; and weeks and months must pass before it can be irritated to that point of excitement at which it finds vent in words and actions. A genuine national approval of the Budget could not be elicited until the time for deciding on the Budget had passed by; and a Minister who should frame his scheme with a view to that approval would probably, by the time it came to solace him, be safely installed on the front Opposition bench. A Chancellor of the Exchequer who wishes to drive his Budget through by force of external pressure must rely, not on the most substantial and most numerous interests, but on those which are the most glib and the most alert. Mr. Gladstone has always been fully alive to this maxim of political wisdom. The landed interest of this country is probably the most important of any, both from the magnitude and the specially national character of its wealth; but, though tough and strong, it is unquestionably slow. Mr. Gladstoffe has long known better than to ally himself with the landed gentry; he fearlessly digs his malttaxes, and succession duties, and hop adjustments into their unresisting carcases, knowing well that the quick stream of political events will have carried him and his measures far ahead long before the assailed landowners have collected their wits sufficiently to return the blow. He knows it is the wise

That an invasion is no absolute impossibility, this Review has already demonstrated in a paper that will not speedily be forgotten. Few persons will be of opinion that such an event is probable, so long as the people and government of England are on their guard. But everything turns on this condition. It will not be attempted so long as our defences are efficient: if they be neglected, the attrac-part to throw himself in full confidence upon tion of such a pillage may prove too strong for the most virtuous ally. The responsibility of so appalling a calamity, if ever it should occur, will be exclusively on those who shall have persuaded the tempting prey to lay aside her armour as too burdensome to wear. Much of the guilt will rest, no doubt, on the heads of the fanatic school who for mere

the manufacturers and the journalists, who are bred up to agitation, and who are well practised in simulating, by dint of monster meetings and fierce leading articles, the accents and the power of the real public voice. They have answered his confidence and carried him in triumph through his difficulties. Possibly, by the time that Members