to redress. Thus, sometimes we are found intervening and sometimes standing aside, only really roused to dangerous activity when our international philosophy is dangerously threatened.

The theory does us credit when it is compared with the philosophy of the super-state which has haunted the Continental imagination at least since the days of Napoleon and perhaps even longer. Europe, said an acute epigrammatist in 1870, has exchanged a mistress for a master; and every powerful nation of the Continent, of whatever sex, has, in fact desired, according to the measure of its ability, to sit in the seat which Spain once occupied, which France occupied so long, which Germany held but yesterday, and which France holds again to-day. We may, perhaps, not pharisaically, thank God that in this thing we have not been as other nations were or are. And yet the idea of the super-state is, after all, no worse than a treacherous approach to that 'parliament of man, that federation of the world' of which the poet has spoken and for which, unless it perish on the road, our Society appears, in some sense at least, to be bound. War is become too Pyrrhic for profit, too ghastly for romance; and in the very madness of the struggle for mastery there is, perhaps, to be discerned-just as some have seen behind the bloodshed of the Jacobin and the Bolshevist the promise of a new heaven and earth-some dream of a world set free from conflict and coerced into unity by the sword itself. Science, by its terrors as well as by its strides, urges us ever more earnestly to be friends, and if to use the words that Lord Grey has made his own-we will not quickly learn we shall greatly suffer.

In such conditions the old doctrine of the Balance of Power falls, as one might say, automatically out of date. It presupposed Europe divided into two armed camps, with Britain poised above them and ready to descend in vengeance upon the aggressor. But, if we are seeking universal peace, we shall hardly begin by ranging the nations as if for war, or by ourselves adopting, with however admirable intent, the attitude of a lion about to spring. A League of Nations, which presumes the peoples of the world to be gathered in peace and amity under a single roof, is, therefore, no development of the

theory of the Balance of Power, but the institution, or at least the revival, of another notion altogether-a version, if we like, yet strangely secularised, of what was once before presented to Europe in the idea of the Holy Roman Empire. Towards that conclusion, however, British foreign policy during the last century has increasingly, if spasmodically, moved, and in any attempt to estimate the worth of British Foreign Secretaries we may find it the safest criterion of judgment.

The movement begins, not inappropriately, with the inception of the Foreign Office in 1782, and the advent to power, in succession, of those two great pacificists, Pitt and Fox. The country, when Fox became our first Foreign Secretary, in 1782, was just emerging from an epoch which had given it the British Empire and lost it the American Colonies. The two conditions which dominate the situation to-day-the all-sufficiency of our possessions and the alienation of our kinsfolk-were already present. The tranquillity of the world had grown to be for us an indubitable need and the friendship of the United States, therefore, an assured, if still remote, necessity. Our spiritual affinities and our material interests bound us to America, where peace seemed a sovereign good; our geographical situation to the Continent, where war was still regarded as a glorious adventure. In the realm of ideas we were for a full century to be as men standing in the valley of decision.

There are thus two schools to be found among our exponents of foreign affairs-the school of Fox and Pitt, of Castlereagh and Aberdeen and Salisbury, of Lord Grey and Lord Lansdowne, and the school represented by Canning and Palmerston, by Lord Birkenhead, and, if one can trust oneself to have caught the colour of a chameleon, by Mr George also; and the two are contrary the one to the other. In their ultimately divergent points of view amid a large agreement and continuity of practice lies the touchstone of British foreign policy during the period covered by these volumes. We may glance at their interaction during the three critical junctures of the Napoleonic, the Crimean, and the recent Wars.

That Pitt as well as Fox was a pacificist in a sense sometimes regarded as damaging to a man's reputation

for patriotism, is a fact not easy to be contested by those who consider his approval of the Peace of Amiens. So gross, indeed, did Pitt's pacificism appear to some of his contemporaries that when some one remarked that Malmesbury (who as the best diplomatist of the day had been sent to France to attempt peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Government) seemed a long while in reaching Paris, Burke observed that it was no wonder since he had to go all the way upon his knees. The truth is that Pitt's mind was constantly poised between the rival claims of peace and security and was little affected by the belief which actuated his Foreign Minister - Grenville - that wars to the knife should be fights to the finish. Circumstances proved too strong for him, as they proved to be too strong also for Fox in the year after his death, but the pacific tradition that he did so much to encourage among the Tories, lived on in Castlereagh who, rather than Canning, was his disciple, and in Aberdeen, who was literally a child brought up in his house. No one, perhaps, will be able to study with attention Prof. Webster's masterly account of the last Coalition against Napoleon without some feeling of astonishment at the moderation of the Allies in the hours of hope and victory. They were dealing with one who had marched his armies into almost every capital on the Continent and to whose selfish ambition some fifteen years of human life had been sacrificed; yet, so urgent were they to come to terms without resorting to extreme measures, that not once but twice-at Frankfort when they proposed the Rhine frontier, and at Châtillon, when they proposed the frontiers of France before the Revolution-they offered him not only peace, but a good peace. He refused, and they continued their advance; but Castlereagh, even in that hour, strove to realise Pitt's dream, first adumbrated in the Anglo-Russian negotiation of 1805, of 'the establishment in Europe of a federal system assuring the independence of weak States and presenting a formidable barrier against the ambition of the stronger.' His achievement fell short of his aims; and the League of Nations that he had in view took shape only as a twentyyears mutual guarantee on the part of the Four Allies against France. But, as Prof. Webster tells us, there

can be no doubt that, if he had been able, he would have phrased the compact differently and made it an alliance not merely against France, but against whatever Power broke the Peace.

The Quadruple Alliance, thus formed at Chaumont in 1814, was fortified in November 1815, by an article providing for the meetings of the Sovereigns and Governments concerned at arranged intervals, and was expanded by the inclusion of France in 1818 into 'A Union strengthened by the ties of Christian brotherhood' between the Five Great Powers. Castlereagh's system, so consolidated, did not conflict with that of the Holy Alliance, but differed from Alexander's conception in two important respects-in its exclusion of the lesser Powers from European counsels and in its refusal to interfere in the domestic affairs of other States. If the project of the Russian Emperor deserved Castlereagh's description of 'sublime nonsense,' the plan of the British Foreign Secretary might, not inappropriately, have been characterised as sublime common sense, and, in so far as it merited to be so called, it represented the best that Great Britain has to give.

Canning, though in practice he preserved much semblance of continuity in the administration of foreign affairs, built upon foundations different from those of his predecessor. His more famous phrases, 'Every nation for itself and God for us all,' and 'I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old,' give us the measure and limit of his thoughts; whilst there can be no doubt that he drew away from the policy of European Congresses which had been the sheet-anchor of Castlereagh's system. He was, in fact, the apostle of nationality, and he aimed at nothing better than a balance of power.

To those ideas Palmerston was the heir; and he will be rated high or low very much as we think them sound or shoddy. If the struggle for existence obtains, and is designed to obtain between the various races of Humanity, as it certainly does between the different species of animals, we must recognise in war and preparation for war, in conflict and dominion, the natural law of our being. With such a philosophy to get the better of our neighbours, and to give one's country the

pre-eminence become the end of political endeavour; and Palmerston may then be reckoned, from a civic point of view, to have been the perfect man. He bluffed, he blustered, he hectored, he bullied, he made broad our phylacteries and sought out for us the foremost places in the synagogues; and there are those-Prof. Hearnshaw and Mr Reddaway, it would seem, among them-who take him for a true representative of his country, a great Briton, and a great British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Such methods as his have, indeed, as the thirty-years' reign of the Emperor William II has sufficiently demonstrated, their times and seasons of success; but it appears, notwithstanding, to be true that no Briton has ever done more than Palmerston to confuse the Continental mind as to the real temper of British policy or the ultimate objects of British endeavour. No other has at any rate an equal record of diplomatic infelicity. Time after time he offends the Powers of Europe, both great and small, by his ill-judged interference or his unhappy phrases. Now it is Russia to whose Court he causes ambassadors to be accredited, both in 1831 and 1834, without first obtaining the customary consent of the Emperor. Then it is the United States, whose susceptibilities in regard to the right of searching merchantmen supposed to be engaged in the slave-trade, are wounded in 1841, almost to the point of war, by an aggressive dispatch. Or, again, it is France whose distrust he excites by his dubious manœuvres in the matter of the Spanish Marriages in 1846; or Spain whose Government he lectures so impertinently with reference to domestic administration that his dispatch is actually sent back to him—a rare humiliation. Once more it is Austria, whom he takes occasion to insult over the brutal assault made in London upon General Haynau. Or-if a catalogue of folly does not put too great a strain upon the reader's patience-it is Greece whom he bullies on the doubtful pretext that Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew and not a desirable one at that, is technically a British subject. Finally, it is Denmark whom his boastful, empty menaces, directed against the greater German Powers during the SchleswigHolstein controversy, mislead and undo.

Palmerston is a great statesman after the manner of