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instruction of the French people for the future finally out of the hands of the clergy; and the expulsion of the Jesuits is a measure which they have always had at heart, and on which they may now think themselves strong enough to venture.

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In the East, the conclusion of the definitive treaty between Russia and Turkey closes the diplomatic part of the drama, and consummates the august application of the principles of public law by the Areopagus of Europe.' All the Areopagites will have carried off those portions of the spoil upon which they had respectively set their hearts-Russia, the sections of Armenia and Bessarabia; Austria, the Herzegovina and Bosnia; England, Cyprus; while the other great powers, if they have not taken anything at present, have probably secured some interest in the future, and have at all events established, by general concurrence, principles of occupation' and ' rectification,' which cannot fail to be convenient to anyone who happens to have an eye on Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Syria, Tunis or Trieste.

England is in doubt as to the value of her acquisitions. Cyprus is a disappointment. It has no harbour, it is a perennial abode of fever, and the chief effect of its annexation hitherto has been to increase the number of desertions from the army. Turkish Armenia it protects about as much as it protects Terra del Fuego. A coaling station is the only thing which its apologists now contend that it can be. A misleading glamour had been cast by the goddess of beauty round her favourite island. Nor is this the only instance in which diplomacy and statecraft, with all their shrewdness, have been drawn by an historic illusion into the pursuit of a shadow. The destinies of the world are supposed to turn upon the possession of Constantinople. That city, when it was the link between the Eastern and Western portions of the Empire, as well as the capital of the

whole, was undoubtedly the most important place on earth. But its importance is now greatly diminished, and it can hardly be said to command anything but the Black Sea, to which commerce will always have free access in time of peace, while no trader will want to enter it in time of war. From the occupation of Rome by the new Italian monarchy, in the same manner, the consequences were expected to flow which might have flowed from her occupation by a victorious power in her imperial day. Once the mistress and centre of civilization, Rome is now a city of antiquities, remote from navigation and commerce, and encircled by malaria. Cyprus was a prize when the neighbouring coasts of the Mediterranean, instead of being a desolate cemetery of the past, teemed with population and abounded with commercial life. Its harbours were good when the vessels to be sheltered were not the monster ironclads of our time, but the comparatively diminutive barques of the Phoenicians, the Ptolemies or the Venetians. All the circumstances are now changed, but fancy keeps her eye fixed upon the past.

The diplomatic embroglio may be at an end and the Treaty of Berlin may have been formally carried into effect; but what England has undertaken is to reform the Ottoman Em pire, and having reformed it, to establish it in its integrity and independence,' as the perpetual guardian of British interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. Towards the fulfilment of this design, no progress seems to have been yet made. Professions and covenants on the part of Turkey have always abounded, but nothing is done. The Turk himself is the abuse. The evil is the domination of a conquering race with a religion which is the spirit of conquest; and this evil is not likely to remove itself or to concur heartily in measures for its own removal. Enterprising correspondents of an English journal have been penetrating the interior of Asia Minor, which has

sunk from its ancient prosperity, not only into a wilderness, but into an unknown land. They find desolation and misery; in place of a government, only the plundering ascendancy of a barbarous horde. Politicians deride the chimeras of Utopian speculations; yet they can complacently undertake to regenerate a country in which there is not only no political or social order but no scurce of national life, and to make this country a rampart of civilization. They are going back to the old nostrum. An attempt is being made, under the rather suspicious auspices of Sir Austin Layard, to set cn foot another Turkish loan. But the credulity even of clergymen and widows has probably by this time been exhausted.

After war comes plague, of which Turkey in the integrity of its filth and fatalism has always remained the home and source. These multiplied horrors would seem to strengthen the case of those who wished to try at least to solve the Eastern question without a war. Such, let it be remembered, was the policy of the Liberal party in England. They did not want peace at any price. They wanted to put forth the power of England, if necessary, to compel the Turk to cease from the oppression which all Europe had denounced, and which forced the oppressed communities to call for Russian aid. That the Turk, when approached with firmness, must have complied, it is, as Lord Shaftesbury says, childish to doubt. The virtual emancipation of Bulgaria, and probably that of Bosnia and the Herzegovina also, would then have been obtained without war, massacre, plague and desolation; and the emancipated people would have looked to England instead of Russia, as their deliverer and friend. They have been flung into the arms of Russia solely by despair.

In a dispute arising out of the affairs of Roumania, Russia and Austria have apparently been showing their teeth

to each other. The struggle will some day come, and it can hardly fail to be fatal to Austria, the motley elements of which are destitute of any bond of union; that once powerful tie, the fear of the Turk, having been removed; while the attempt to fuse Magyar, Slav and German into a nation under a single Parliamentary government has entirely miscarried. Assailed by Russia, the Austrian Empire would hardly be able to rely on any support but that of the Magyar; the heart of the Slav would be with the enemy, and the German would probably seek at once to get clear of the wreck and enter the confederation of the Fatherland. In this direction, probably, we shall have to look for the opening of the next great series of those events, caused by movements of race, which are apparently destined to break up old combinations, obliterate old landmarks, and cast Europe in a new mould.

In Germany, Bismarck and the Emperor are grappling with that which, from its present aspect, threatens to be the new and more tremendous Revolution. But in their persecution of Socialism they seem to encounter resistance not from the Socialists alone. No doubt the moderate Liberals are keenly conscious of the fact that Socialism itself, as a seditious movement, is the immediate offspring of the cruel military system which Bismarck and the Court uphold; though the general loosening in the German mind of the religious beliefs on which the old order of things fundamentally rested, has no doubt been followed in Germany, as it will be in other countries, by a sympathetic disturbance of the whole social frame. Failing Parliamentary support, a resort to military force for the purpose of repression would be quite consistent with Bismarck's character; but the military system in Germany is, to a certain extent, its own political antidote. A nation is not to be coerced

by Janissaries when every man of it has been trained to arms. Meantime the King of Bavaria, by squandering the money of his people in building a more miraculous Versailles, and outvying in other ways the extravagance of Louis XIV., or rather that of an Eastern Sultan, shows that, if he is not mad, there must still be in Southern Germany, at least, a considerable fund of submissiveness in the character of the people.

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Afghanistan has evidently been reduced to an anarchy which will no doubt be bloody, but as bishops are satisfied that this has been done on grounds of distinct ethical validity' and for a 'spiritual' purpose, the national conscience may sleep in peace. People are beginning naturally to ask, if this is the true version of Christianity, why they should have left the Church of Thor and Woden. The wave of Jingoism has swept round the full circuit of the Empire, and led to an invasion of the country of Cettewayo, a savage who appears to have mounted some steps in the ascent at least of military civilization. For defending his wilds he is styled a ' rebel,' a name which belongs to him no more than it did to Caractacus. Of course he will succumb, and his people will share the fate of other na tive races whose lands have been coveted by Europeans. As Mr. Roebuck said.the first business of the settler is to clear the country of wild beasts, and the most noxious of all wild beasts is the wild man.' In this war again, missionaries are mixed, and they appear not to recoil from the use of shot and shell as harbingers of the Gospel. Had their spiritual ancestors been of the same mind, the nations of modern Europe, including England herself, might never have attained their civilized existence. Christian missionaries, throwing themselves without the Martini-Henry rifle or any other ethical' apparatus, among tribes probably neither less

wild nor more gifted by nature than the Zulus, sowed the seeds of civilization together with those of religion, and laid the foundations of European Christendom.

The last sentence had been just penned when the calamitous news arrived of the destruction of a British column by the Zulus. The pang

is great; the wound to a first-rate power is but a scratch, and the disaster, we may be sure, will soon be, if it has not already been, signally repaired. But the event is one which breeds reflection. Barbarians acquire with comparative ease the military part of civilization; long range weapons have cancelled the ascendancy of drilled masses of troops, and the savage is a skirmisher by nature. If the races which have hitherto been trampled down by the foot of European conquest, learn the use of the rifle, they may some day turn with terrible effect on the conqueror, and in the East especially, the contest hitherto unvarying in its results, may become a much more chequered scene. The Chinaman, for instance, is reckless of life; his numbers are inexhaustible; give him the new weapons; give him as organizers and commanders the mercenary soldiers, plenty of whom are now to be found, and the dreams of Chinese conquest which many English adventurers cherish may prove somewhat difficult of fulfilment.

In England, the Government has won the election for North Norfolk. The seat was theirs before, but they have held it by an increased majority. The constituency is inade up of two elements, a body of landowners with their tenant farmers, of an eminently agricultural type; and the great seaport of Yarmouth, which as a separate centre of representation, has been disfranchised for corruption and thrown into the county. This, say the defeated Liberals, is a bad index of national opinion on diplomatic and constitutional questions. It may be so,

but the strength of the Conservative party lies in this, that it is not merely a party of opinion, but a party of great interests, the landed aristocracy and gentry with their obedient phalanx of tenant farmers, backed by a great mass of commercial wealth, and supported on one flank by the Established Church, and on the other by the Licensed Victuallers. So long as the interests hold together, the power of the party will endure, unshaken by questions of foreign policy or by any questions which do not seem to the landowner and farmer more important than the land; to the clergyman, than the Establishment; to the brewer and publican, than beer. The North Norfolk election is significant, let the Liberals say what they will. It indicates that, supposing the election to be held in the present frame of the public inind, though the Government will probably lose the cities which they won from the Liberals in 1874, they are not likely to lose more. English sentiment, however, from the increase of popular knowledge, intercourse, travelling and intellectual stimulants of all kinds, has become infinitely more mobile and variable than it was; and a delay of six months may utterly falsify the forecast of today.

In the compact confederation of English Conservative interests, there is one point of possible weakness which the action of economical rather than political forces may some day, and perhaps at a not very distant day, disclose. Hitherto the political subordination of the tenant farmer to his landlord has been complete, and attempts to run farmers' candidates against the landlords' candidates in the counties have almost invariably come to nothing. So it has been while both interests were piosperous and the farmer was satisfied with his condition as a tenant-at-will. But a time of adversity has now come; complaints are heard that agriculture is no longer a remunerative occupation; landlords are

compelled to lower their rents, and there is one applicant for a vacant farm where there were ten before. The English farmer may grow discontented, and, like the Irish farmer, strike for fixity of tenure. In that case the political situation in England would at once be greatly changed. Every day brings home to us the lesson that, frame political institutions as you will, their working is controlled by the social forces, without a knowledge of which the political observer is totally at fault. In the months, however, which are likely to elapse before the general election in England, there is reason to believe that the political alliance between the landlords and the tenant farmers will not only remain unimpaired, but be strengthened by the antagonism of the farmer to the labourer, who is in a state of industrial insurrection, and to whom the Liberal party propose to extend the suffrage. This triple division of the agricultural interest forms a feature in English society and politics scarcely found in those of any other country.

The Conservative leaders seem to thin' it necessary to look out for new sources of strength, and we hear of negotiations going on, though at present unsuccessfully, between them and the Roman Catholics, for the foundation of a Roman Catholic University in Ireland. Politicians can hardly be accused of allowing their tactics to be embarrassed by prejudices, if they seek support at one time by passing an Act for the suppresion of Ritualism, and at another time by founding what, under the auspices of Cardinal Manning and his Irish lieutenants, would certainly be an Ultramontane University. But in an alliance between Conservatism and Ultramontanism, there is nothing unnatural. The Church of Rome is the great Conservative Church of Europe, and the great organ of reactionary sentiment of all kinds; and the numerous secessions to it among the English nobility are produced by influences at least as

much political as religious. Its Hildebrandic antagonism to emperors and kings belongs to the remote past. It has long subsisted by an alliance with monarchy and aristocracy, the attempt of the more speculative and adventurous spirits among its priesthood, such as Lamennais, to heave anchor and go afloat on the tide of the democratic future, having always come to nothing. In virtue of her political position, the Church of Rome has received, and perhaps in increasing measure receives, the support of men who have no sympathy with her religious system, such as M. Guizot, who was distinctly inclined to uphold the temporal power of the Papacy as a Conservative rallying point, though in religion he was a Protestant and something more. So long as the Roman Catholics of Ireland and England were suffering under political disabili ties, they were glad to ally themselves with the Liberals for the purpose of breaking that yoke; but having now, by Liberal aid, achieved political equality, they naturally, and irrespectively of any special negotiations or intrigues, gravitate towards the party of social and political reaction. Before long, there will probably be a complete and declared union of the Irish priesthood with the English Tories. On the other hand, the Irish Protestants, who have hitherto been Tories, may be expected to come over to the Liberal side. Not only so, but that growing element among the Irish Catholics which is more political than ecclesiastical, and cares more for Home Rule than for the Papacy, is likely also to separate from the Bishops, and to connect itself with the democratic wing of the Liberal party in England.

On their side the Liberals, in view of the coming contest, are exerting themselves to improve their organization. Mr. Chamberlain, M. P. for Birmingham, who is the master spirit in this sphere, seems to have succeeded in inducing most of the cities to form Liberal Associations, and in get

ting the different associations to act together. It is said that this system is opposed to the independence of mind which is the Liberal's cardinal doctrine and his boast. There is force in the objection, and it may be added that artificial organization, if not managed with great delicacy and tact, is apt to breed jealousy among the rank and file, to which expression, fatal to the cause, might be given under the cover of the ballot. But party discipline in the case of the Eng lish Liberals may plead a justification which it cannot plead in the case of the United States. The English Liberals are fighting against an organization which, though spontaneous, and that of a class not of a caucus, is more tremendously compact and coercive than any caucus which the tyranny of party ever devised. Nothing can exceed the force of the social pressure exercised by Conservatism in England, both on the wealthy and on all who are dependent on wealth. In the rural districts especially, a Liberal, whether he belongs to the upper class or the lower, has socially to take his life in his hand. In the House of Commons disobedience to the party whip on the Conservative side is almost unknown. It was matter of perfect notoriety that many Conservatives voted against their declared convictions both for the Suffrage Bill of 1867 and for the title of Empress of India. In the case of the Suffrage Bill, in fact the very men who, at Lord Derby's command, went with downcast looks into the lobby for household suffrage, had a few months before been vociferously cheering the strong anti-extension speeches of Mr. Lowe. Organization has its evils; but English Liberalism is compelled to choose between organizing and being a rope of sand opposed to a band of iron.

The approaching contest between the parties will be one of unusual interest, because the issues will be remarkably clear and broad. They will vitally

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