afford: and it follows, that in all questions involving such a principle, the habit of merely washing the nation's hands of its negation by a simple protest, whenever we can afford to do more, is the next thing in effect to joining those who enact the negation in deed.

Mr. Mill's concluding paragraph, upon the right of intervening to secure non-intervention, in the intestine quarrels of other countries where another stranger is about to interfere forcibly on one side or the other, shows at once the great practical dilemma which is sure to arise, and indicates, though only generally, the mode of meeting it:

"The doctrine of non-intervention, to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments. The despots must consent to be bound by it as well as the free states. Unless they do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to this miserable issue, that the wrong side may help the wrong, but the right must not help the right. Intervention to enforce non-intervention is always rightful, always moral, if not always prudent. Though it be a mistake to give freedom to a people who do not value the boon, it cannot but be right to insist that if they do value it, they shall not be hindered from the pursuit of it by foreign coercion. It might not have been right for England (even apart from the question of prudence) to have taken part with Hungary in its noble struggle against Austria, although the Austrian government in Hungary was, in some sense, a foreign yoke; but when, the Hungarians having shown themselves likely to prevail in this struggle, the Russian despot interposed, and joining his force to that of Austria, delivered back the Hungarians, bound hand and foot, to their exasperated oppressors, it would have been an honourable and virtuous act on the part of England to have declared that this should not be, and that if Russia gave assistance to the wrong side, England would aid the right. It might not have been consistent with the regard which every nation is bound to pay to its own safety for England to have taken up this position single-handed. But England and France together could have done it; and if they had, the Russian armed intervention would never have taken place, or would have been disastrous to Russia alone : while all that those powers gained by not doing it was, that they had to fight Russia five years afterwards, under more difficult circumstances, and without Hungary for an ally."

Such intervention is always moral, but perhaps not always prudent; it may be inconsistent with the regard which a nation is bound to pay to its own safety to assert the principle singlehanded. Such are the limitations which even Mr. Mill is obliged to set to the practical working of his rule, arising from the "friction," so to speak, inherent in all sublunary problems, that indeterminable element which varies in strength with the circumstances of every particular occasion. If the balance of strength is on the side of right, then the right will prevail.

But if it is not? if the calculation of the cost, which "every nation is bound" for its own safety to make, goes to prove conclusively that we cannot afford on our own account to attempt in the special instance the enforcement by arms of the doctrine, of which we hold the negation to be utterly wicked and indefensible? if France, or whatever other ally it might be, whose help would justify our prudence in the appeal to extremes, is not to the fore,-what is then to be done? What possible course can be taken which may gain any thing for the cause of fair play? At least this. Put on record not only the protest, but the reason why it is a protest only. Let it be known and felt that we would interfere on that behalf, if we could do so with a reasonable prospect of success; and that wherever we can, we will. Instead of satisfying our own vanity by the assumption that it is not because we are afraid that we do not interfere, but by virtue of an absolute business rule of neutrality except where England's interests are immediately engaged, let us have the moral courage to say in so many words that we are afraid; and to show by our demeanour, that it is only from want of confidence in our own strength to carry the struggle to the end, that we look on for the present at what we cannot and will not approve. The real increase of risk in taking up such an attitude would not, under any circumstances, be as considerable as it might seem; and the probabilities that on any fresh instance of clearly wrongful intervention some other power would be ready to join us in our protest, or even to take the initiative in a more active measure, would be incontestably increased by the previous assurance of our readiness to assert our principles in unison with any sufficient ally holding the same. It is not, in truth, by the preponderating force of a single power, brought to bear materially upon a wrongdoer a little weaker than itself, that the dominion of an international principle is imposed. A campaign may end in a victory, and the actual struggle be determined in this way, between the parties and for the occasion; but it is by the moral weight and increasing momentum of a conviction gradually permeating the majority in the council or battle-field of civilised states, that the permanent conquest of opinion, the addition of a new article. to the slowly-written code of the comity of nations, is securely

won.

Of the current question of the reorganisation of Italy, France has said already that the day of armed foreign intervention in the internal affairs of that peninsula has gone by for ever. According to the treaties of Villafranca and Zurich, the ducal dynasties are still not accepted as defunct, and are (let us say, for want of a better word) restorable; according to the words of the French Emperor, neither they, nor any other foreign do

'mination, are to be imposed upon Italy by force. What, it has been asked, is the need or use of our professing a readiness to intervene for the purpose of affirming or enforcing a proposition which France has volunteered already, and which she can affirm as easily by herself? It may, perhaps, be too sanguine to hope, even after Lord John Russell's loud and early declarations as to the terms upon which alone England would be ready to take part in a Congress, and the consequent interchange of private parleys which have resulted in our actual agreement to do so, that our ministers have succeeded in making it more or less clear to themselves to what extent the Emperor's words are to be construed as identical with a pledge that the free-will of the Italians shall not be forced in any way. After the curious comment upon the value of the phrase of "Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic" supplied by the treaty of Villafranca, it was certainly not unreasonable to inquire categorically what the latest Napoleonic idea of the reconciliation of Italian freedom with the maintenance of those bases of agreement, which it was the ostensible task of the Congress to scrutinise, might chance to be. But it could scarcely be expected that the scheme of a confederation of the remaining and the restored Italian dynasties should have been avowedly supplanted in the projects of the French Emperor before the ink of Zurich was well dry; and it is useless to inquire what other alternative arrangement may have lain from the first in that aliâ mente repostum. Yet it may be inferred, from the latest change of demeanour on the part of the French press, and from other indications of the political atmosphere of the imperial circle, that the French government is for the moment genuinely anxious to keep upon good terms with England on this and on other questions. If we have treated our mysterious imperial neighbour to a straightforward, open, and earnest explanation of the policy which it is our intention to adopt in the Congress, it is still not out of place to hope that a general concurrence on his part may be looked for, if the preliminary contradictions of the private settlement with Austria are once swept away.

It is hardly necessary at this juncture to labour the point, that in reality the truest interests of France, England, and Italy coincide. It is at least as much for the benefit of France, and therewithal for the personal benefit of the sovereign now ruling in France, as it can be for our own, that Italy should be able to guide herself without even French leading-strings, and should add a compact and considerable make-weight to the family of European powers. In regard of the unalloyed beneficial effect which the formation of a strong kingdom of North and Central Italy would have upon the Italians themselves, it is hardly too

much to say, that no single educated Englishman who has thought on the subject, and watched the events of the last half-year, feels any hesitation either of judgment or sympathy. The first December Number of the Revue des Deux Mondes, that warily but unflinchingly maintained camp of refuge for liberal thought and feeling in France, affords sufficient testimony that from both of these points of view the section of French opinion which, for its moral and intellectual accuracy, is best worth regarding, coincides with our own. If the momentary pride in the military brilliancy of la belle guerre has yet sobered down among those who welcomed back the army of Italy, the reflective side of the French temperament may already have begun to recognise generally, that the real and solid glory to be gained in the Italian cause lies, not in the memory of Solferino, but in establishing through the Congress of Paris the only permanent result which can justify the countless expenditure of human life, energy, sorrow, and pain, of which Solferino was the type and the close. Whatever support can be given by ourselves, or by such expressions of public opinion as the French people is competent to utter, to that simple, straightforward, and only satisfactory solution which the French Emperor, whether he wish it in his secret heart or no, is precluded by diplomatic engagements and ecclesiastical ties from originating, it is our duty and our interest, as it is that of the French people, to give in the most emphatic manner. Whatever motives may have induced the imperial assent to those conditions which affect the régime of Central Italy, neither motives nor conditions are ours to be bound by, and it is now idle to dissect them too closely. Our task, after once entering into Congress as revising authorities of the diplomatic status of Italy, is to oppose the sternest resistance of common sense and common justice to the ratification and enforcement of those conditions by Europe; and to veto the substitution of any mezzo termine that may dislocate that union for which the Italians have pronounced so unanimously, which they have virtually accomplished, and which they have calmly, prudently, and patiently done every thing permitted them to render permanent and secure.

It cannot be too often repeated, that the true work of a Congress is not to pull to pieces and reconstruct de novo the map of Europe upon arbitrary principles, nor even upon plausible and apparently logical grounds. A Congress has no more right than the youthful Cyrus to assign, upon equitable considerations, the short boy's long coat to the tall boy, and the tall boy's short coat to the small boy; it must deal with things as it finds them, and take cognisance of accomplished facts as well as of signed documents. Those who quote as a crucial instance the prece

dent of the Congress of Vienna, to prove by custom the jurisdiction inherent in European congresses, as enabling them to do something at once more actively arbitrary and more authoritatively binding in the transfer of title than can be done by individual states without the use of material force, omit to take into account the general disruption of historical boundaries, and the contradictory maze of inchoate titles to various national estates all over Europe, caused by the wars of the French republic and empire. The parties to the Congress of Vienna had to act as a kind of encumbered estates court, and confer a fresh title, which should thenceforward be clear of all the registered or unregistered claims and charges of past history. Such an exceptional compulsory jurisdiction was only justified by the necessities of the time; and it cannot for a moment be pretended that a similar entanglement in kind or degree is the characteristic of the Italian question of 1860. The complication of the problem is not one which has to be met, but one which has to be made. The question has worked itself clear, if the Congress will only keep it so, and not attempt the restatement of it in the old confused terms. The plenipotentiaries of the powers met in Paris have no more legitimate authority to reparcel out into the old or modified subdivisions, for the convenience of European or particular interests, those Italian provinces which have achieved their own independence and declared their own union, than the encumbered estates court has to force within its own bar the property of the first reluctant and solvent landowner, and compel him to sell it in small building-lots for the public advantage and the individual profit of chance speculative purchasers.

If, notwithstanding the presumed concord as to the bases of the meeting, England should in congress perceive that her name and weight are to be used for the purpose of adding authority to any such proceeding as this, what is the course for her to adopt? It may be hoped that our plenipotentiaries will have the clearest instructions and the most definite understanding on this head. It is not by a mere note of protest or expression of dissent, nor by the most strenuous and efficient advocacy in argument alone, that the sense of England would be adequately given. It is not even by a flat refusal to continue the deliberations under the conditions involved in such a contingency, not even by throwing the whole responsibility of a wanton and arbitrary assumption of judicial power, the whole scandal and difficulty of execution, upon such parties as might be ready to take it up, and simply withdrawing into the cover of a disapproving neutrality,-that our national duty would be fully satisfied. For the reasons generally indicated above, it is impossible to lay down categorically beforehand any scheme