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OUR EPILOGUE ON AFFAIRS.

monarchies of Europe from that age to our own.

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In feudal times, the

military nobles were the great check upon monarchical ambition. The monarch could not be insensible, that he was stronger than the noble, only as the supply of vassals furnished by nobles made him so. The policy, accordingly, of those who wore crowns, was to draw power to themselves by subtracting it from those who wore coronets. Only as nobles should become much weaker, could kings hope to become stronger. To bring about this change, monarchs descended, after the manner of the pontiffs, to become, in appearance at least, the patrons of democracy. In many ways they used the people against the nobles, that, by such means, if by no other, the latter might be humbled. The monarch claimed the right to receive appeals from the municipalities and from vassals who invoked his protection against the real or alleged oppressions of their immediate superiors. In this manner the people of localities were opposed to the authorities of localities-greatly to the damage of the latter. The appellant jurisdiction of kings, became the exact parallel of the appellant jurisdiction of popes. The people

hoped for good from this change of masters; but the good came not. They had been seduced from their allegiance to the authority nearest to them, but it was that they might be enslaved to a tyranny more remote and more central. By degrees, the municipalities, the administration of law, the right to determine what should be law-everything governmental, was wrested alike from peer and people, and made subject to the pleasure of the crown. The canon law became to the popes, what the civil law had been to the Cæsars; and what the civil law had been to the Cæsars, that, as the civil lawyers contended, it should be to the sovereigns of modern Europe.

In this manner kings greatly improved their revenue. They could now afford to substitute troops of mercenaries in the place of contingent supplies of armed men by their great vassals. Foreign war became possible. Becoming possible, it became a fact. In such enterprises, the feudal soldier, who could not be taken from his home at the most for more than a hundred days, was useless. Thus all things tended to a suppression of the power of the nobles, and of the power of the people, and to the elevation of kings. In our own country affairs have taken this course at intervals, but, on the whole, only partially. On the continent it has been wholly thus-especially in Austria, Spain, France, and Prussia. The mercenaries of the crown, aided by the intrigues of diplomacy, have made those countries all that we find them.

One great secret of this success in the working of the monarchical principle lies in the fact, that the monarchy in these cases has been

one, while the powers which it has aimed to subdue have been wanting in unity, and open to every influence that might generate distrust, faction, and weakness.

From the twelfth to the eighteenth century, monarchy has been the form of power by which peoples have been flattered into revolt against nobles, that the two being divided, each might be conquered in its turn, and both be brought into the due measure of subjection to a central supremacy.

It cannot be borne too much in mind, that military despotism and spiritual despotism have not only grown up together, but that they rest on the same maxims, and are the fruit of the same policy. Twin powers are they, the one fastening on the body, the other on the soul. Together have they lived and reigned, and together will they perish.

For perish they will. This must be, or the future of Europe must be retrograde-awfully retrograde. The great European sovereignties have grown up from vanity as much as from ambition. The court of a great king must be brilliant. There must be a show of literature, science, and art. There must be a large force that may be presented in all the pomp and circumstance of its vocation. To sustain such force there must be heavy taxation; but the people, to bear heavy taxation, must be great producers, and to be great producers they must be in a great degree intelligent.

It is because these things link themselves in this manner together, that our great historians of the last century—our Humes, Robertsons, and Gibbons-always speak of tendencies towards the consolidation of monarchies, as of tendencies embracing, as a matter of course, the advance of nations or peoples. The misconception is a shallow one, though common for a season to many great men.

The aim has

By such steps, however, the people of Europe have been, in a sense, politically educated. In this manner they have outgrown the regime of absolutism under which they have been born. been, to favour their improvement up to the point which should leave them wholly subservient to the splendour of the throne, and to stop there. But that has not been possible. The risk was inevitable that they would pass beyond that point, and in so doing become antagonist to such rule. What was probable in this respect has come to pass. Great and permanent changes are ever the work of instructed minorities, not of uninstructed majorities. These minorities are everywhere, and when their day of power shall come, the majorities will be ready to do their bidding. The people have elevated monarchy, until it has become the Frankenstein of all liberty; and kings have

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elevated the people, until they threaten to become the Frankenstein of all monarchy.

In this posture of matters, the policy of the sovereigns of the continent, great and small, with slight exception, is to undo whatever has taken with it the tendency to awaken a passion for freedom; and to do whatever may be needful to be done to reduce the people to a state of quiescence in servitude. The monarchical power of the past centuries must be perpetuated; and, if necessary to that end, the barbarism of the past centuries must be restored. Monarchs are not made for nations-nations are made for monarchs. States have their breath from dynasties-dynasties have not their breath from states. This may not be the language of the men, but it is the language of their measures. Their words may not be such as we have used, but their spirit is such as those words express. The genius of Napoleon saw this conflict of forces looming in the distance. His words from the rock of St. Helena were, fifty years hence Europe will be CosSACK or REPUBLICAN.' Such is the alternative before it at this hour.

Europe cannot remain at its present point. It must decline or advance. Its decline would be towards all abjectness, such as would give it a prey to Russia, much as the Roman Empire became a prey to the northern nations. Its advance might be by means of popular institutions in alliance with monarchy. But this supposes the appearance of princes eminent in wisdom and patriotism, upon a scale that history has never presented-in short, to expect it would be to expect the miraculous. Everything seems to foreshadow that the form in which the advance is to come, is by sweeping all monarchical conventionalisms entirely away. Everywhere the question is one between princes and peoples. Nowhere is there anything deserving the name of a peerage to share in it. The extreme powers of society are the powers that have become marshalled against each other-and it seems to be their destiny that they should take their stand upon extreme maxims. The maxim of the persons now ruling, manifestly is 'all or none;' and the people so ruled, have no choice but to accept this antagonism upon its own terms. The purpose on either side has thus become more and more a purpose to exterminate; the words on the one side being, 'Death to every form of popular liberty;' the words on the other being, 'Death to every form of power incompatible with that liberty.'

In this grave conflict on which side is the scale likely to turn? Continental affairs, just now, if looked upon only on their surface, seem to give everything in favour of the absolutists. But the surface is not all-and parts are not the whole.

Even the dark cloud that has come over France has its silver edge.

Its first good effect has been apparently to postpone the contemplated rising of 1852, which we believe would have been found premature, and have ended in failure. Its further effect will probably be to contribute not a little to the success of the next movement of that nature, when its more convenient season shall have come.

Will there be war? If so, will it be pleasant to the absolutist to feel that he leaves a people at home who will be hoping every day to hear that their armies have been beaten? Yea, will it be pleasant to be assured that the armies themselves are composed of men in danger of looking at the object for which they are called to fight as one for which it were better to lose than to win? Above all, will it be deemed a trifle that the first disaster in the field may act as a signal for insurrection in the capital?

Will there be peace? But peace sustained by keeping up a full war establishment will be felt to be unreasonably costly. A monstrous army, a monstrous priesthood, a monstrous police, and a monstrous host of functionaries even beyond these, giving you something like half the nation as consisting of creatures who do nothing but consume, is no very pleasant prospect for those on whom it devolves to be the only producers. Even the mammon-worshippers of France, both great and small, who have shown themselves so willing to barter their liberties and their country, and to make light of perjuries and murders upon any scale, so they may only be allowed to buy and sell and get gain, may find that they have not been so wise as they suppose in their generation. To keep up the war establishments of the continental states must be to beggar their commerce; while to diminish those establishments must be to hazard the rising of the people, and the extinction of absolutism. Such is the 'fix' into which the diplomatists of Europe have brought their affairs. Deliverances have come-great and memorable—in circumstances far less promising. Powers which are hated, become extinct as they become weak; and of all social reformers, a bankrupt exchequer is the most potent. If, a hundred years hence, the name of king should become in the greater part of Europe-as it is very likely to become as synonymous with tyrant as it was in old Greece, the change will be the natural result of such doings as have characterized the Red Royalties which now divide the continent between them.

One word to our Socialist friends. Nine-tenths of the wrongs now fixing their pressure so terribly on the men of France, and on men elsewhere, are to be laid at your door. Nay-be not wrathful, for we must go further, and say that what has happened is only a fraction of what is still to happen of like kind, if your communistic preachings are to be continued. In this land even, the monied people and the

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comfortable people, would seek protection from the bayonet to-morrow, rather than trust to you for it; would see all law put into abeyance, rather than accept your economic dreams in the place of law. You have given Louis Napoleon, and the despots, their needed bugbear; and they have used it as such men will ever use such godsends. There is no ally the present ruler of France could so ill spare as Proudhon. Of all the adversaries of a great principle, there are none so much to be feared as the man whose bent is to ride it to death.

Kossuth finds the people of America warm and brave-hearted towards him and his cause-their rulers cautious. But our brother Jonathan is getting new ideas, new feelings, and will be seen ere long doing new things. Meanwhile Kossuth has found new enemies in old colleagues. Prince Esterhazy is a Hungarian magnate; he has titles and estates; he writes from Vienna what will please Vienna about Kossuth; and the titles and estates of the said prince are his, as the price of doing worship to the destroyers of his country. In such a case the mystery and the virtue are alike small. Casimir Batthyanyi writes from Paris-and sorry we are to see such a man so write. Like prince Esterhazy, this second magnate is wise in the sort of wisdom that comes after the event. Both blame the hero for doing what both had been his helpers in doing. Both describe him as doing now what he is not now doing; and finding them false in respect to things we know, for the present we write false upon their sayings about the things we do not know. Both, moreover, have given us what we are to receive as an image of Kossuth; and were the illustrious exile here, and disposed to repay these assailants in their own coin, we doubt not that he could do it as with usury. Meanwhile the Count Teleki, Mr. Toulmin Smith, and others, have spoken the effective word on the other side. Kossuth has suffered as much, all his life through, from envious magnatism at Pesth, as from arbitrary imperialism at Vienna. To secure the affections of the people, was to incur the hate of their oppressors. Our estimate of Kossuth was given before he had reached our shores. It was the picture of a man whose strong points were not without their alliance with weaker ones-but the weaker came, in our belief, from his yielding goodness, not from the want of a sincere reverence for principle. His organization and temperament are not of the massy and harp description; on the contrary, he is of a make much too sensitive to be in the element genial to him amidst the rough experiences through which he has passed. Were there a stronger smack of the Napoleon devil in him, he would be, no doubt, in the judgment of many, a greater man.

Concerning our own politics, the great fact is, that our two old

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