Studies in Literature and History

After the end of the Crimean War the Russian Government could turn its undivided attention to the enterprise of finishing the conquest of the Caucasus. The preliminary work of cutting roads through the forests, throwing bridges over rivers and ravines, destroying the enemy's petty forts, and throwing forward detachments to occupy important points, was carried out actively during 1857; and in the next summer three separate columns, under one supreme command, drove back Shamil's bands, and took up strong positions in the heart of his country. The inhabitants, severely harried by the Murids, who maltreated ferociously all villages that would not join them, took refuge under Russian protection; and though Shamil made several bold attempts to break through the circle that was gradually encompassing him, he was compelled to abandon Vedén, so long his home, which was taken in April 1859. The forest tracts were now entirely under Russian control, and the highland tribes were rapidly surrendering to the Russian commanders, whose strategy it was to avoid frontal attacks upon large bodies prepared to fight behind entrenchments, but to make resistance impossible by enveloping movements. In the mountains, which had so long defied the armies of the Czar, the local chiefs and their clansmen were now falling away from Shamil, who was forced to retreat hastily with a few hundred followers to his stronghold at Gooneeb, where he entrenched himself for a final stand, knowing well that defence was hopeless, yet resolved to die fighting. But his men were almost exterminated by the overpowering numbers which the Russians threw upon the fortifications in their assault. When the outworks had fallen, and the place was practically won, the Russian commander, who desired to capture Shamil alive, suspended the final rush upon the spot where he still held out, and sent him a message that his life would be spared on surrender. He yielded, and rode out to meet the Russian lines; but a burst of cheering from the Russian soldiers at sight of him so startled him that he went back. A Russian officer persuaded him to turn again.

In the foregoing pages we have run rapidly over Mr. Baddeley's narrative of the long and laborious operations by which the Russians gradually made good their footing in the Caucasus, and at last consolidated their dominion. We have necessarily omitted many curious incidents and exploits characteristic of a deadly struggle between antagonists representing the collision of archaic with modern societies, the clash of two religions eternally irreconcilable, the deadly wrestle of assailants and defenders unlike in everything but their tenacious intrepidity. The story, until Mr. Baddeley wrote it, has hitherto been little known in England. Yet Englishmen should be interested in this singular and striking example of the obstinate resistance that can be opposed by free and warlike tribes to the organised military forces of a first-class European Government; for they are not without similar experiences of their own. And moreover the long contest for possession of the tracts lying between the Black Sea and the Caspian, on the borderland between Europe and Asia, had its effect in the wider sphere of Asiatic politics. If the Russians, in their wars with Turkey and Persia, had not been constantly distracted by the raids and revolts of the Caucasian highlanders, the consequences to these two Eastern kingdoms might have been much more serious. It will be remembered that at this period (1826-8) we were actively concerned in preserving Persia's independence insomuch that the Russians had accused us of fomenting hostilities against them. At a later time also Sir Henry Rawlinson, writing in 1849, when Shamil was still formidable and undefeated, observes that it would have been impossible for Russia, with her communications at the mercy of such an enemy, to carry her arms farther eastward into Asia, or to contemplate territorial extension in that direction. And in a subsequent Note, of 1873, he points out that not until after Shamil's surrender in 1859 did Russia begin to push her way continuously along the upper course of the Jaxartes river toward Tashkend and the Asiatic midlands. So long, indeed, as the mountains between the two seas were unsubdued, they formed an effectual barrier to the expansion of Russia into Central Asia; but when that frontier fortress of Islam had been captured, and when the Circassians had emigrated into Turkish territory, the onward march of Russia went on securely and speedily. Tashkend was taken and Kokand annexed in 1866; and soon afterward the communications between the Russian base in Georgia and the Russian garrisons in Turkestan were firmly established. Thereafter the flood of Russian conquest overflowed irresistibly the plains of Central Asia, until it was arrested by another breakwater, the kingdom of Afghanistan. It is true that the North-western Afghan borderlands were comparatively open and easily penetrable by an invading force; but beyond them lie lofty ranges with passes at high altitudes, guarded by a hard-fighting and intractable people, and on the farther side of these mountains stands the rival European Power whose policy it had been always to retard and obstruct the Russian advance across the Asiatic Continent. We may conjecture that if Afghanistan had been left, as the Caucasus was left after the Crimean War, isolated and obliged to rely on its own resources for defence, the drama of the Caucasian wars would have been repeated. The Russians would have besieged and reduced without great difficulty this second mountain fortress; and after another similar though less protracted struggle the Afghans would have undergone the same fate as the Daghestanis. The Czar's rulership, solidly established in the two natural strongholds that stand on either side of the great central plains, and command, east and west, the exits and entrances, would have been supreme throughout Mohammedan Asia.

That the Russian armies were forced to halt on the edge of Afghanistan is thus a point of cardinal importance, and it marks a turning-point in the career of her expansion. It also produced a situation that is the outcome of the different strategy adopted by England and Russia respectively, in circumstances not otherwise very dissimilar. For whereas the Russians had been compelled by imperative political and military exigencies to conquer and occupy the Caucasian highlands, the policy of the British Government has always been not to subjugate Afghanistan, but to preserve its independence and to fortify it as an outwork for the protection of the gates of India. It is due to this fundamental distinction of aim and object that the history of the relations of the British with Afghanistan during the nineteenth century, and of their management of the tribes on the Afghan border, differs widely from Mr. Baddeley's narrative of events and transactions in the Caucasus. Nevertheless in both instances the general situation presented a strong resemblance. The Russians, pushing their dominion down from the north to the Black Sea and the Caspian, were checked and baffled for many years by the woods and precipices that lay across the line of their march into Trans-Caspia. The British, moving up by long strides north-westward across India, came to a halt at the foot of the Afghan hills fifty years ago; and to this day they have scarcely moved farther. Here they were met by races almost identical in character and circumstances with the tribes of Daghestan, fanatically attached to the faith of Islam, profoundly influenced by religious preachers, prizing their liberty above their lives, and looking down from their rugged uplands upon a great military power that had swept away many principalities and subdued all the cities of the plain below. If the British had pressed onward and endeavoured to take possession of Afghanistan [which had indeed been occupied by the Moghul empire in its prime] they would certainly have been involved in a series of sanguinary conflicts, revolts, and costly expeditions not unlike those which put so severe a strain upon the Russian armies in the Caucasus. This, as we know, they did not do; they adopted the alternative of asserting an exclusive protectorate over the country; they were content to remain outside it so long as no rival power was allowed to set foot in it. Yet we know that even this much more prudent policy was carried out at a heavy cost. The British army suffered at least one grave disaster by the total destruction of a division in the retreat from Kabul in the winter of 1842-3. And the Afghan War of 1878-80, with the massacre of the British envoy and his escort at Kabul in 1879, showed us the perils and difficulties of even a temporary and partial occupation.

At the present moment, however, the objects of our policy have been satisfactorily fulfilled. The Russians have settled with us the frontier line between their dominion and Afghanistan, and have bound themselves to respect it. With the Afghan Amir we are on friendly terms, and we have taken up our permanent position on his Eastern border towards India, reserving to ourselves the control of the tribes within a broad belt of territory, otherwise independent, between the Afghan kingdom and British India. This tract is intersected by lofty ridges running parallel for the most part to our frontier, with precipitous slopes toward India, with a few practicable passes and numerous gorges formed by the drainage from the watershed, enclosing some fertile valleys along the courses of the rivers, inhabited by a hardy population that is broken up into manifold clans and sects by the configuration of their country. The Caucasus, as we learn from Mr. Baddeley, 'is peopled by a greater number of different tribes and races than any similar extent on the surface of the globe'; and it is precisely from the same causes, difficulty of intercourse between villages secluded in the valleys or perched on the heights, scarcity of sustenance, inbred jealousy of each other, feuds and factions, that the groups of the Afghan borderland dwell apart, become estranged or hostile, are at constant war with each other, and cannot unite against a common enemy. But while in the Caucasus this trituration of the people has produced a multiplicity of dialects, the Afghan borderers speak a language that is generally the same.

In Dr. Pennell's book, the title of which stands at the head of this article, we have a vivid description, drawn from life, of the names, habits, and peculiarities of these primitive communities, with many incidental examples of the relations existing between them and the British officers who are in touch with them on the frontier. Lord Roberts, in a short introduction that may be taken as a guarantee of the accuracy and authenticity of the volume's contents, tells us that it is a valuable record of sixteen years' good work by a medical missionary in charge of a mission station at Bannu, on the north-western frontier of India. And Dr. Pennell's experience, acquired in the prodigious enterprise of taming and converting to Christianity some of the most murderous ruffians and inveterate robbers in Asia, has provided him with a rare insight into their character, and furnished him with numerous anecdotes of their strange inconsistencies and wayward, impulsive nature. On the Afghan frontier, indeed, we may survey a situation that has frequently recurred in the history of organised governments, whenever they have found themselves in contact, and therefore in collision, with intractable barbarism. Immediately across the border line may be seen in the Afridi tribes a complete and living picture of man in his aboriginal condition of perpetual war, under no government at all, in daily peril of ending by a violent death a life that in the pithy words of Hobbes is 'poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' A few steps back into the British district brings us among men, often of the same breed and tribe, dwelling without arms in peace and security, pleading before regular law courts, learning in English schools, occupied in commerce and industry under the protection of magistrates and police. The contrast in morals and manners is as abrupt as the transition from the Afghan hills to the Indian plains. Such is the frontier along which British officers are charged with duties of watch and ward. Their business is to guard the Indian districts that march with the wild borderland, to prevent or punish incursions by the marauding tribes who have continued from time immemorial to live in practical anarchy. They obey no laws and acknowledge no ruler, though in emergencies they appeal alternately to the Afghan Amir for assistance against the British and to the British Government against any encroachments by the Amir.

The Afghan character, writes Dr. Pennell, is a strange medley of contradictory qualities, in which courage blends with stealth, the basest treachery with the most touching fidelity, intense religious fanaticism with an avarice that will even induce a man to play false with his faith, and a lavish hospitality with an irresistible propensity for thieving. It will be remembered how 'Muridism,' the spirit of religious enthusiasm inflaming political hostility, was stirred up by the Mullahs of the Caucasus against the Russians, and embittered the resistance of the tribes. The same elements of fiery hatred lie close below the surface on the Afghan borderland. Dr. Pennell tells us that there is no section of the Afghan people which has a greater influence on their life than the Mullahs, who sometimes use their power to rouse the tribes to join in warfare against the English infidels; and that a prelude to one of the little frontier wars has often been some ardent Mullah going up and down the frontier, like Peter the Hermit, inciting them to break out. The notorious Mullah Powindah, who is still a firebrand on the border, is reported to possess a magical charm that renders his followers invulnerable before English bullets. Whether he led them in person to battle is not mentioned; though he could hardly adopt the excuse of Friar John, who, as Rabelais tells us, made a liberal distribution of mirific amulets to his soldiers, assuring them that those who had firm faith in their efficacy would come to no harm. He added, however, that to himself the charm would be useless, because unfortunately he could not believe in it. Such an explanation would be coldly received among the Afghans.

Under the exhortations of these Mullahs their students often became Ghazis.

It is manifest that this sporadic Muridism might become epidemic under serious and widespreading excitement, but the provocation that leads to petty frontier wars comes entirely from the tribes, who make predatory incursions upon the Indian villages and refuse all reparation. In every tribe, as Dr. Pennell tells us, the outlaws who live by raiding and robbery, and the Mullahs who detest the infidel and fear his rule, are the fomenters of crime and outrage.

The vendetta, or blood-feud, our author tells us, has eaten into the very core of Afghan life. At present some of the best and noblest families in Afghanistan are on the verge of extermination through this wretched system. Even the women are not exempt. In a village which the missionary visited he noticed that the houses communicated laterally by little doors all down one long street; and on inquiry he was told that some time before a great faction fight had been carried on between the two rows of houses. The villagers 'were always in ambush to fire at each other across the street. The only way to get to the supply of water was to go from house to house to the bottom, and in order to do this without exposure the doors had been made, while by common consent they had agreed not to shoot while getting their supplies from the stream.' Another anecdote relates how a British officer visited a petty chief in his tower, and would have opened a window to look at the country round. 'He was hurriedly and unceremoniously pulled back by the Afghan, who told him that his cousin had been watching that window for months in the hope of an opportunity of shooting him there.' In fact the chief was actually shot at this window a short time after the visit. From the universal enmity existing between cousins in Afghanistan the proverb 'as great an enemy as a cousin' has become a household word. 'The causes of 90 per cent. of these feuds are described by the Afghans as belonging to one of three heads—women, money, and land; and on such matters disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than strangers.' We may compare Mr. Baddeley's account of an almost identical state of things in Daghestan. It was split up (he says) 'into numerous khanates and free communities of many different races and languages, for the most part bitterly hostile one to another. Strife and bloodshed were chronic between village and village, between house and house ... and of many contributory causes none had operated so powerfully in originating and perpetuating this state of things as the elaborate system of blood-feud and vengeance.' And he gives one instance of a quarrel that arose from the theft of a hen from a villager, who retaliated by appropriating a cow. The retort was by taking a horse, upon which the murders began.

But it may be more interesting to remind our readers that these feuds were 'in full swing' not so very long ago in our own island. A remarkable description of the state of the Border between England and Scotland in the sixteenth century and earlier has recently been published.[39] In a chapter headed 'The Deadly Feud' the author tells us that blood-feuds set family against family and clan against clan; and he quotes from a report submitted by Burghley to the English Government a passage in which the term is defined thus:

Feuds of the most bitter and hostile character, we are told, were an everyday occurrence, and were carried on with the most ferocious animosity on both sides. The feud was inherited along with the rest of the family property. It was handed down from generation to generation. The son and grandson maintained it with a bitterness which in some cases seemed year by year to grow more intense. It affected a man's whole social relationship, and gave rise to endless animosities and heart-burnings.

In fact the whole description in Mr. Borland's book of the feuds prevalent three centuries ago on our own Border might be applied to those now actually raging among the Afghans, with the simple alteration of time, places, and names. The comparison is worth making, if only to show that similar conditions and circumstances produce everywhere the same results; and that there is yet hope for the wild Afghan, if hereafter it should be his destiny to fall under a strong government that can enforce laws, though this is the fate which he most dreads. No axiom is more easily refuted by historic experience than the commonplace saying that men cannot be made moral by statutes; the truth is that respect for a neighbour's purse or person cannot be inculcated by any other method.

It was the political division along the Scottish Border that so long prevented the suppression of lawlessness, and when the two kingdoms were united it gradually ceased. On the frontier between Afghanistan and India the British Government keeps the peace within its own districts, but maintains only a fluctuating and ineffectual control over the tribal territory. Yet it is manifest that no permanent pacification can be accomplished until both sides of the line are brought under the same firm and civilised administration. For such a purpose it would be necessary, and would be practicable, to establish strong posts among the turbulent highlanders, to make roads, and probably to insist on a general disarmament, as the Russians did in the Caucasus. But the British Government has always been reluctant to undertake so arduous and so costly a task; though until some measure of that kind is found possible, the intestine strife and chronic disorder must continue; and in fact it is the natural and inevitable solution of the problem.

In short, to manage a country without occupying it is no less impossible than to steer a boat without taking a seat in it. The process of subordinating the Afghan tribes to effective control will probably go forward slowly and at intervals. It may be that when one part of the country is taken resolutely into hand, the rest will be overawed and quieted; but we doubt whether any other remedy can be found for the feuds and forays that from time immemorial have distracted this borderland, which has preserved the primitive conditions of life and habits that have long disappeared from the frontiers of all other civilised nations. Yet the objections to pushing forward our landmarks into these mountains are great and manifest, while the disadvantages of the present system are equally patent. The attempt to protect our subjects by a line of outposts, to adopt the tactics of stationary defence, varied by occasional sallies forth from our cantonments to pursue assassins or to punish depredators by destroying houses and crops, is to assume a somewhat impotent and undignified attitude, hardly creditable in the case of a mighty empire worried by mere highland caterans. The Indian Government, therefore, finds itself placed in a dilemma: to advance or to stand still is equally difficult; nor is any practicable issue out of this situation to be foreseen.

We are compelled, unwillingly, to pass over without the notice that it undoubtedly deserves Dr. Pennell's very impressive accounts of his intercourse, as medical missionary, with the strange folk whom he was trying to reclaim from savagery, of the risks which he faced with cool courage and self-command in his travels among them, and of his quaint theological disputations with arrogant Mullahs, whose invincible ignorance easily convinced a congenial audience of their argumentative superiority. His skill in surgery naturally invested him with a high reputation among people who were incessantly fighting—he had more success in healing their wounds than in curing their vices. His general 'Deductions' in regard to the present state and prospect of Christian missions in India are well worth attention, and with his survey of the existing conditions and tendencies of religious movements in India all who have studied the subject will generally agree. He lays stress on the delusion that to assault and overthrow the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, if such an achievement were possible, would be to lay open a clear field for the success of Christianity. 'Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become new gods.' Such attacks upon Eastern religion 'may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory ... but they are at the same time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the unquestioning devotion which have been the crown and glory of India for ages.' The wisdom and enlightened morality of these warnings are incontestable. But at such questions we can only glance, although from one point of view they may be said to have an important bearing upon the main subject of this article.

In conclusion, we may observe that the frontiers of European dominion in Asia are the battleground upon which the forces of archaic and modern societies meet in arms for decisive conflict. In the ancient world the contest was only ethnical and political; the rude tribes were coerced into amalgamation with an expanding State, far superior in power and usually more humane. 'The nations of the empire[40] insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people.' But the antique polytheism had no fanatical element; the deities of the victorious Romans were often acknowledged and accepted by the conquered population. Whereas in these latter days the Russians in the Caucasus and the English on the Afghan border have discovered that in the passionate religious animosity between Islam and Christendom lies the mainspring of the stubborn energy and fierce hatred that so long held their armies in check, and that still prevents the establishment of even a pacific modus vivendi on the most important frontier of India.

L'EMPIRE LIBÉRAL[41]

The fourteenth volume of L'Empire Libéral, issued in 1909, carries M. Émile Ollivier's very interesting reminiscences of that eventful period up to the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870. It contains many curious particulars of the incidents and transactions culminating in the rupture with Prussia that brought about the downfall of his ministry and the ruin of the Second Empire. Autobiographies by men who have taken a prominent part in the momentous scenes which they describe have often the powerful effect of a dramatic representation: the actors reappear on the stage; they plead for themselves; they give vivid impressions of the scenes; they repeat the very words that were spoken; they revive the intense emotion of the audience during the contest between those who are hurrying on toward some fatal catastrophe and those who are striving to prevent it. M. Ollivier's volume is the story of a great historic tragedy; the principal dramatis personæ are celebrities of the first rank; on their speech and action depend the destinies of France, and the spectators are the nations of Europe. If we make due allowance for the fact that the author's main object is to explain and defend the part which he himself played in these important affairs, we may credit him with an honest desire to set a strange, complicated, and oft-told story in a clear light before the present generation.

M. Ollivier cites, in the first page of this volume, Machiavelli's observation that mankind at large judges those who give advice in affairs of state not by the wisdom of their counsels but by the results. He agrees that this method is not rational, looking to the haphazard course of human affairs, but he admits that the multitude can judge by no other standard; and he appeals to historians for an impartial revision of the popular verdict, founded on careful examination of the real facts and circumstances. Yet he fears lest in his own country the decline of patriotic enthusiasm, the cooling of military ardour, that he notices in France at the present time, may have rendered Frenchmen incapable of realising the hot resentment, the intense susceptibility to affronts, the element of heroism, which were dominant forty years ago in the national character. And he therefore has little or no expectation that the falsehood of legends which have been circulated regarding the events of 1870 will be proved, to his countrymen, even by the most irrefragable demonstration. All political parties in France, he says, have combined to hold their own ministry responsible for that calamitous war; he despairs of obtaining from them a hearing. He awaits with resignation the time when some inquisitive student of history may light upon a dusty copy of his book in the recesses of a library, and may set himself to explain how these things actually happened to readers of the future.

The story of the decline and fall of the second French empire has often been told; yet it may be worth while to remind English readers of the political situation in France just forty years ago. The Emperor Napoleon III., importuned by reformers and reactionaries, by those who pressed him to step forward into Liberalism, and by those who insisted that he must stand still, had at last decided upon making those changes in the form of his government that inaugurated the Liberal Empire; and on January 3, 1870, the new ministry took office, supported by the goodwill of the moderate party in the Chamber of Deputies and by the general approval of the country. M. Ollivier was recognised as its leader and spokesman, chosen by the emperor, and enjoying his particular confidence; though he was not prime minister in the English constitutional sense, for the power of issuing direct orders, and of overruling the Cabinet, was still reserved to the sovereign; nor was he always consulted in important military or foreign affairs. The complex and enigmatic character of Napoleon III. is becoming gradually intelligible to the world at large, and public opinion has lately been veering round to a less unfavourable conclusion upon it than heretofore. He had long been reviled as a truculent despot, artful and dangerous, powerful and perfidious; the genius of Victor Hugo had set on him a brand of infamy. In reality, if we may trust later French writers, there was much that was good in his nature, and they are disposed to regard him with compassion. M. de la Gorce says that throughout his life Napoleon had been a humane prince. From the entertaining memoirs of General du Barail, whose military services brought him into frequent relations with the emperor, we should draw the impression that the emperor was affable, considerate, and sincerely well-intentioned. Giuseppe Pasolini, the Italian statesman, found him simple and easy in conversation, naturally right-minded and kindly,[42] though weak and irresolute. He was equally capable of forming bold projects or adopting cautious decisions; but he was apt to hesitate and turn round at the moment for action; and it was just here that he was so unlike his uncle, Napoleon I., who would have classed him among the idéologues whom he despised. He invented the theory of nationalities to justify his polity of encouraging the unification of Italy, and of permitting the aggrandisement of Germany; in the former instance he alienated the Italians by refusing obstinately to allow them to occupy Rome; in the latter case his neutrality when Prussia attacked Austria in 1866 was the proximate cause of his ruin. He might have read in Machiavelli's Principe a warning of the danger of standing aside when the neighbouring potentates come to blows. The result, it is there said, is that the winner in such a contest becomes doubly formidable, while the loser resents your neutral attitude, and will not help you when the victor turns upon you with all his strength. Machiavelli declares that this policy has always been perniciosissimo; and so it proved to be in the case of the French Empire. In domestic affairs also the Liberal Empire took up a kind of half-way position, which was assailed by the extreme parties on both sides; for thorough-going Imperialists like Rouher asserted that a Napoleon could only rule by retaining absolute authority; while uncompromising Liberals demanded full parliamentary control. Ollivier's ministry took office with the avowed object of gradually extending constitutional administration; but he found that, as Tocqueville had said in his Ancien Régime, the most dangerous moment for an absolute government is when it endeavours to introduce reforms.

General du Barail, in the memoirs already quoted, gives M. Ollivier full credit for his honesty, ability, and sincere patriotism in undertaking his difficult task, which was begun in an evil hour, and failed through adverse circumstance. In May 1870, Ollivier, who was holding the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, transferred it to the Duc de Gramont, foreseeing no troubles abroad, and desiring to give his whole attention to politics at home. The external policy of the ministry was decidedly pacific; they relied on a quiet moment for developing the new constitutional system; they had no notion of changing horses in mid-stream, yet most unluckily they were caught by a sudden flood. At the end of June it was announced in Madrid that Leopold of Hohenzollern, son of the Roumanian prince, had accepted the crown of Spain that had been secretly offered to him by Marshal Prim; and the news, M. Ollivier says, startled all France like the bursting of a bomb. It had always, we must remember, been a cardinal maxim of French statesmanship that the maintenance of a preponderant influence in Spain was essential to the security of France; while, on the other hand, a complete subordination of Spanish to French interests has been held by other governments to be dangerous to the balance of power in Europe. The collision between these two principles had been the cause of great wars and diplomatic quarrels. Louis XIV. only succeeded in securing the Spanish throne for his grandson after a long war. When Napoleon I. made his nefarious attempt to impose his brother on the Spaniards as their king, his pretext was that under the Bourbon dynasty Spain had always been a dependency of France; and it had been the invariable aim of English policy to prevent a close association of the two kingdoms. The question had long been regarded on all sides as one of vital importance; and in 1869, when some information of secret negotiations between Bismarck and Marshal Prim had leaked out, the French ambassador at Berlin, Benedetti, had warned Bismarck that France would oppose the election of a Prussian prince to the vacant throne of Spain. Bismarck had treated the information as an improbable rumour, yet he had carefully abstained from a formal assurance that the king would forbid Prince Leopold to accept any such offer.[43] It was therefore quite certain that in 1870, when the relations between France and Prussia were in a very critical state, the announcement that Prince Leopold had been chosen for Spain would be treated as a most threatening move on the political chessboard. Italy was under deep obligation to Prussia for aid in expelling the Austrians from Venice; the St. Gothard railway had been openly promoted and subsidised by Germany for direct and secure communication with Italy in case of need; and now the family connection which was obviously contemplated would bring Spain into the circle of alliances that Bismarck was drawing round the French frontier. It was a strategical manœuvre that the imperial government was bound to resist. Within France all factions were for once unanimous in demanding immediate and resolute protest; and the clerical party, very powerful in that country, were especially vehement in denouncing the project of placing the scion of a great Protestant dynasty on the 'throne of Charles V.' M. Ollivier tells us that when the news first reached him it brought upon him suddenly and painfully the presentiment of impending war, to the discomfiture of all his efforts for the preservation of peace until the Liberal Empire should have been consolidated in France.

The plot—for it was nothing less—had been skilfully concerted between Berlin and Madrid; and even the parts to be played in anticipation of French remonstrances had been rehearsed. When Benedetti went to the Berlin Foreign Office for explanations, he found that Bismarck was absent at his country house and the king at Ems; and Von Thiele, the Under-Secretary, cut short his interrogation by replying at once that the Prussian Government knew nothing of, and had no concern with, the Hohenzollern candidature, adding that the Spanish people had a right to choose their own king. At Madrid, notwithstanding the French ambassador's attempts to check Prim's jubilant activity, Leopold's acceptance of the crown was proclaimed to all the foreign courts as a matter for joyful congratulation; and the Cortes were summoned for July 20 to elect their new monarch. To demand satisfaction from Spain would have been to fall into Bismarck's net; for the Hohenzollern prince would have been elected nevertheless, and if French troops had then marched into Spain the Prussian army would have crossed the Rhine, whereby the French would have been placed between two fires. It was necessary to fix the responsibility for these proceedings upon Prussia, and to act promptly; but the precise line to be adopted was the subject of anxious deliberation in the emperor's council—that is, in a meeting of the Cabinet presided over by him. Finally, Ollivier proposed, as he has told us, to speak out so plainly that Prussia must understand France to be in earnest, and to say that the Hohenzollern could not be permitted to reign at Madrid. Marshal Le Bœuf had assured the council that the army was in the highest condition of efficiency and readiness; and when M. Ollivier inquired whether, in the event of war, any help from other governments could be relied upon, Napoleon produced certain letters from the Austrian emperor and the King of Italy, which he interpreted as distinct assurances of armed support in the case of a rupture with Prussia. The wording of a declaration to be made before the French Chamber of Deputies was carefully settled—it was delivered next day (July 6) by the Duc de Gramont, and received with immense enthusiasm. Some objection was taken, then and afterwards, to its menacing tone; but we may agree with M. Ollivier that this outspoken warning to Prussia was at the moment judicious and effective; and we may admit that up to this point no exception could be taken to the procedure of the French Government.

M. Ollivier dates from July 6 the first of five phases, or alternating changes (péripéties), which the diplomatic campaign, as he terms it, traversed in its headlong course. They are successively described and commented upon in the chapters of his volume; and they may be here set down in his own language, for the guidance of our readers through the complicated transactions that ensued:

These are, in fact, the five acts of a portentous drama, full of shifting scenes and striking situations, on the issues of which depended the fortunes of France and of Germany; it was played out with ill-omened rapidity in nine days. In regard to the train of causes and consequences that brought France to the tremendous disaster upon which the curtain fell, diverse accounts have been given to the world by the leading actors—by M. de Gramont, by Bismarck, Benedetti, and, the latest by many years, by M. Ollivier. His narrative does raise somewhat higher the veil which has hitherto kept in partial obscurity certain dark corners of the stage upon which these things went on. We know more now of the precise motives and considerations, the personal influences and impulses which diverted the Cabinet, after starting on the right path, into leaving it for rash and perilous adventures. On some points of interest he is, indeed, still reticent, and on others his evidence is in conflict with different narratives; but in regard to facts actually known to him we may accept his testimony, though in matters of opinion we may sometimes differ from him.

M. Ollivier insists that Gramont's declaration of July 6 was altogether irréprochable; he writes that he has read it again after so many years with satisfaction. He admits that it contained, substantially, an intimation to Prussia that she must choose between withdrawing the Hohenzollern candidate and accepting war with France; but he argues that this straightforward and peremptory warning was justified by its effects; that Bismarck was taken aback and discomfited by the resolute attitude of the French ministry, supported enthusiastically by the Chamber of Deputies; and that Prince Antoine was thereby so intimidated as to compel his son Leopold to retract his acceptance of the Spanish crown. On the other hand, this stern language alarmed cautious deputies, and though it stirred Paris to a pitch of wild excitement it was read with uneasiness in the cooler air of the French provinces, where the prospect of imminent war met with scanty welcome.[44] The foreign governments were startled. Bismarck, in his Reminiscences, says that it was an 'official international threat, uttered with the hand on the sword-hilt,' From the Austrian chancellor, Count Beust, came earnest advice against marching hastily into Prussia; while the British Cabinet, in particular, doubted the wisdom of taking up such high ground, from which it might be difficult to retreat, at the opening of a grave and complicated question. And our ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, whose calm judgment and friendly counsels M. Ollivier acknowledges unreservedly, exerted himself throughout this critical time to deprecate precipitate words and deeds.

Simultaneously Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, had been ordered to seek an interview with the Prussian king, and to impress upon him the necessity of appeasing the just indignation of the French people by forbidding Leopold to accept the crown of Spain. The king replied, as is well known, that he had treated the candidature entirely as a family matter, quite apart from the sphere of international politics; that he had nevertheless communicated with Leopold, and could give Benedetti no positive answer until he should have heard from that prince. If, as has been asserted, the king had been cognisant of Bismarck's secret negotiations, this reply was more evasive than ingenuous; and we may note that he immediately directed his own ambassador, Werther, who was present at Ems, to return at once to Paris. M. Ollivier scores the king's order to the credit of Benedetti's diplomacy, since it amounted to an admission that the question in debate was much more than a mere family concern. And he adds that he immediately urged Gramont to allow no more equivocation upon this essential point, but to press Werther for a straightforward reply upon it. It will be seen that this pressure was carried rather too far at the French Foreign Office, with an important effect upon the course of negotiations.

But at this juncture supervened the coup de théâtre, as M. Ollivier styles it, which opens the second act of the drama. Olozaga, the Spanish ambassador at Paris, had been left in complete ignorance of the privy correspondence between Prim and Bismarck for procuring the nomination of a king from the Hohenzollern family, and this sudden revelation of its result by no means pleased him. He proposed to the Emperor Napoleon to despatch to Prince Antoine at Sigmaringen (in Prussian territory) an agent of his own, who should use every effort to convince the prince that his son must be imperatively commanded to withdraw his acceptance of Prim's offer. The emperor, whose sincere wish was for peace, consented willingly, and the mission was entirely successful. By long and strenuous argument the envoy had finally persuaded the father that his son, Leopold, would find himself in a precarious position on the Spanish throne, with France alienated and openly hostile; and the result was that Prince Antoine not only laid on his son a positive command to withdraw, but also telegraphed the decision to the principal German newspapers, to Olozaga at Paris, and to Madrid. According to M. Ollivier, Bismarck felt the blow keenly; it shattered his carefully organised plans; he found himself baffled and humiliated; he has himself said that his first thought was to resign office.[45] To the king, on the other hand, the news brought welcome relief; he supposed that he had now only to await Prince Antoine's letter confirming the public telegram, when the dispute would naturally drop with the disappearance of its cause. This was, moreover, the expectation at that moment of the French emperor, who observed that, if France and England were preparing to fight for the possession of an island in the Channel, it would be absurd to go to war after discovering that the island had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

In those days, M. Ollivier explains, any telegram of political interest that passed over the Paris wires was communicated, by special arrangement, to the Ministère de l'Intérieur; and accordingly he received a copy of Prince Antoine's message to Olozaga before it reached its address. The contents filled him with exultation—he could feel no doubt that peace had now been triumphantly secured, mainly by the unflinching tone of the Cabinet's declaration. He carried the paper with him to the Chamber, where Olozaga rushed up to him in the lobby, drew him into a corner, read to him with much obvious excitement the telegram which Ollivier had already in his pocket, and hurried on to the Foreign Office. Naturally the incident aroused general curiosity; the deputies surrounded the minister, and eagerly pressed him for information. M. Ollivier tells us that he hesitated for some time before divulging his secret; but that on the whole he found no good reason for withholding news that would certainly appear within a few hours in the evening papers, so he read out the telegram to all present. We believe that few men, who had not been trained by experience to the cautious habits of official life, would have done otherwise. But M. de la Gorce[46] has pointed out that the chief minister ought to have kept silence until the renunciation had been approved and confirmed by the King of Prussia, who was in hourly expectation of Prince Antoine's letter, and whose acquiescence, transmitted through Benedetti to the French Government, would have probably brought the whole affair to an honourable termination. It may be objected that this is to argue from consequences, since known, which could hardly be foreseen at the moment; yet one must admit that reticence would have been preferable, for we have to remember that M. Ollivier was disclosing a telegram intercepted, so to speak, on its passage to a foreign embassy, thereby forestalling not only the Spanish ambassador but also the French Foreign Office.

The news ran round the Palais Législatif, inside and outside, and spread through Paris with electrical rapidity.