the coalition against the French Republic in 1793, Fox and Wordsworth both regarded it as a tragedy. They were right, just as they were right when a dozen years later they both urged on the war against the hegemony of NapoleonFox as Prime Minister, and Wordsworth as national sonneteer.

It must always be a disputed point whether or not in 1793 England could have avoided war with the Jacobins. They were difficult folk to live at peace with. As regards other countries they never took to heart the warning of the radical Burns:

'The kettle o' the Kirk and State
Perhaps a clout may fail in't;
But deil a foreign tinkler loon
Shall ever ca' a nail in't.'

But, whether avoidable or not, the participation of our country in the despots' coalition against France was the source of innumerable evils of which we were only able in 1914 to gauge the full magnitude.

Fox thought that if our governing class had sympathized with the French Revolution, and supported it against Prussia and Austria, France would never, in mad desperation, have called up the devil of Jacobinism to defend her against foes within and without. Perhaps the view was too generousit certainly was too generous to commend itself to the British propertied classes of the day—but it was at worst a generous error which no enemy of Prussianism and no friend of the third French Republic can condemn as unworthy of a British statesman. There is a ludicrous inconsistency in those who condemn Fox as unpatriotic and at the same time keep Bastille Day and praise the heroic deeds of the Republican soldiery, who, dressed in rags, and singing the 'Marseillaise,' saved France and freedom from the despotic invaders. These people seem to forget that Fox's alleged crime was his protest against our joining the despotic invasion.

It is impossible to go on for ever having it both ways. Either the French Revolution was an entire mistake, as Burke thought, or else Fox was largely in the right. In the former case we are on the wrong side to-day, battling away for democracy,' the rights of man,' and' the swinish multitude'; but in the latter case we are in the right now, and can be proud

that England produced Fox to blurt out the truth when it was less palatable than it is to-day. It is just as much due to our French alliance that we should revise our historical views of the war of 1793 as it is due to the American alliance that we should celebrate July the Fourth. We were, most of us think, more in the wrong in 1776 than in 1793, but to assume that we were saving Europe' when we endeavoured to crush France in 1793-4 is to state a complicated problem in terms far too simple. It would be at least as true to say that, if the Duke of York had got to Paris, England would have been Liberty's executioner, and that the liberal movement of the nineteenth century would have been strangled by us at birth.

Some people attempt to separate Fox from Wordsworth in this matter. But the thought of the two men started from the same point in 1793 and arrived at the same conclusion at the time of Fox's death in 1806.* On England's entry into the war in 1793 Wordsworth exclaims:

'What, then, were my emotions, when in arms
Britain put forth her freeborn strength in league,
Oh, pity and shame! with those confederate Powers.

Not in my single self alone I found,

But in the minds of all ingenuous youth

Change and subversion from that hour. No shock
Given to my moral nature had I known

Down to that very moment.'

When he wrote those lines for Book X. of the Prelude in 1804, he was strong for the war against Napoleon, but his sober and more conservative judgment still regarded our original participation against France nine years before not only as a blunder but as a crime. The whole long passage in the Prelude devoted to the subject should be carefully studied by any admirer of Wordsworth's political poetry who blames Fox and Grey for taking precisely the same view. If it is the test of patriotism to approve the war of 1793, then Wordsworth was no patriot.

The terrible reaction of forty years which the war caused

* Wordsworth's feeling for Fox at the moment of his death is enshrined in the noble lines written at Grasmere, Loud is the Vale.'

in our domestic politics and society, just at the moment when reform was overdue and the problems of the Industrial Revolution required more instead of less political liberty, led for awhile to a moral and physical deterioration of the masses, and has left marks even now plainly discernible in the social, educational, and political evils of our land.

That untimely domestic reaction was the inevitable result of a war in which we set out to fight democracy abroad in alliance with Prussia and Austria. To-day exactly the opposite is happening. We notice an increasingly democratic tendency in our polity and our political philosophy as the war proceeds. Liberty has to await the return of peace, but democracy grows apace even under the Defence of the Realm Act. Contrast these two facts: then Grey was denounced as a traitor because he proposed to abolish rotten boroughs in war time; now Conservative statesmen enfranchise women and pass what is practically manhood suffrage as a war measure. So, too, during the Napoleonic war small grants for popular education were rejected on the ground that education would make the lower orders discontented with their lot; in this war popular education has been endowed as no government in the fat years before the war would be at the trouble or expense to endow it.

The reason of this profound contrast which appears in everything—the treatment of the private soldier, the handling of combinations of workmen '- is not merely that a hundred years have passed since the days of Pitt; it is also that then we were fighting against democracy and now we are fighting for it. Then our allies were Prussia, Austria, and the reactionary and clerical parties in every State. Now these same parties are our enemies in every country, from Spain to Russia. Our friends are the democrats and liberals everywhere, and our allies are France, America, Italy, the children of three revolutions. It follows from this fortunate regrouping of our alliances that, with a single exception, every important conservative paper in Britain to-day does homage to the principle of democracy, and scouts the whole theory of Burkian politics in the spirit of which we waged the great struggle against France.

A great war necessarily has a profound effect on the policy and philosophy of the nation engaged in it. The war with

Spain made us Protestants. The war with Louis made us Whigs and Tolerationists. The war with revolutionary France made us Tories. The war with Germany makes us Democrats-not Socialists, Liberals, or Conservatives, but just all Democrats. Since the disappearance of the Czar ally, and the full entry of America, this tendency is even more marked than at the beginning of the war.

It is remarkable that we began to change our party in Europe almost immediately after Napoleon was shut up in St. Helena. We did not even wait for a Liberal reaction at home. Castlereagh and Wellington themselves grew suspicious of their own handiwork. When Wellington walked out of the Congress of Verona, and withdrew England from the counsels of the Holy Alliance, the victor of Waterloo must have dimly perceived that his former allies were a precious set of scoundrels. He began, negatively, a change of policy which Canning, no longer an 'anti-Jacobin,' soon made more active than the old Duke liked. Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, developed Canning's Liberal lead in foreign policy, helping Italy to become free. Disraeli made a temporary reaction, saving the Turkish Empire and bringing Austria into the Balkans. He thereby prepared our Balkan catastrophe of 1915, and the present dangers to our position in the East. Then Gladstone and Salisbury, in the last unhappy decades of the century, resumed our Liberal policy abroad, but with little efficiency or success. Little indeed could be done so long as the great weight of military predominance lay with the despotisms of Eastern Europe, according to the settlement of 1815.

In 1848 Europe had striven to throw off these masters, and failed. That great crisis ended in a disaster to liberty on the continent from the effects of which Italy and France alone recovered in the following generation. Central and Eastern Europe had the chains of 1815 riveted on them more strongly than ever in 1849, and that is why we have at last been obliged to fight this war.

England, in 1848, remained neutral, much to Mazzini's Our conservative statesmen, far less democratic than their successors to-day, were frightened by the spectacle of popular revolutions abroad. And the Liberal party was

divided between the ignorant jingoism of Palmerston, as hostile to France and the United States as it was to Prussia and Austria, and the pacifism of Cobden and Bright. Those two rendered England immense service. They first, while Gladstone was still deceived, unmasked the Turk as a' liberal ally; they prevented us from going to war with France about nothing, and with the United States on behalf of the poor oppressed slaveowners. But Manchester's service in foreign affairs, indispensable as it was in these respects, was purely negative. It had no crusading ambitions, wisely perhaps as things then stood. The Manchester doctrine was that England could be a world by herself away from the general politics of Europe.

And so it came to pass that the only achievement of our well-meaning Victorian foreign policy was the aid we gave to the liberation and union of Italy. Italy was the only country-not excepting the United States of which our oliticians had personal knowledge. If Russell and Gladstone, and many of their followers, had not had intimate friends among the Italian exiles, we should have made a sad mess of the Italian as we made of the Turkish and American problems. In 1914, fortunately for the world, we knew our America as well as our grandfathers knew Italy. It was the counsellors of Kaiser Wilhelm who had succeeded to Palmerston's and Gladstone's ignorance of things American.

After 1870 the dominance of military despotism in the counsels of Europe was more marked than ever before. In place of the effete ancien régime of Metternich, always apologetic and on the defence against a Liberalism that was recognized as the spirit of the age,' despotism under Bismarck became itself the spirit of the age '-efficient, boastful, aggressive, contemptuous in the name of modern science and culture of the 'retrograde formulas of Liberalism.' Even in England it was the fashion twenty years ago to speak of Bismarck as the one great figure of the century; Cavour was forgotten, Gladstone despised, Lincoln ignored. Although this German reading of history had lost ground in England before 1914 it was still the prevalent note in the world's thought when the war broke out. In obedience to this doctrine, the new, efficient, scientific despotism of Prussia challenged the 'effete' democracies of the world to prove their Darwinian fitness VOL. 228. NO. 466.

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