The pillars of Hercules

Oct. 10th.

I considered it quite a feat to get at this Spanish key to the Straits, having been foiled in two attempts, the one by land, the other by sea: once the Spaniards stopped me, once the Moors. Like its vis-à-vis, to which it stands at right angles, it is a rocky tongue, joined to the main by a low and narrow neck, and pointing down the Mediterranean. It is all rounded and smooth: in its figure it presents nothing salient, and in its defences displays nothing formidable. The place derives its character not from the fortifications, but from the gardens, and each serves the purpose of the other. The public works are all laid out as pleasure-grounds, and the cactus orchards are disposed in alleys on every rising ground, so as to form stockades.

The tongue is formed of a chain of six dunes, or hillocks, with a seventh considerably larger at the eastern point, on which is seated a small fortress. These are the seven brothers whence the name is supposed to be derived.[47] The fortifications, like those of Gibraltar, are directed, not to command the sea, but to defend it against the land. It has no level ground in front, swept by its galleries and batteries; but, instead, a hill approaches nearly to the glacis, and looks into the works. The landscape beyond stretches away, wooded and picturesque, to the foot of the chain or block of mountains which fill up this angle of Africa, overshadowing Tetuan on the one side, Tangier on the other, and ranging along the Straits. The only sign of human habitation is a small enclosure of white walls, with a tower perched on the green mountain side, like a city on old tapestry in some Arcadian scene. All was silent in that landscape, and it might have been taken for a panorama, but for the Roman vexillum[48] fluttering from the tower, which showed that a Saracen eye watched the keep of the Goth.

Two thousand years before Gibraltar was heard of, Ceuta was an important place. It is enumerated as one of the three earliest of cities. Since the discovery of Gibraltar their fortunes have been strangely similar. Each has been wrested from the land to which it belonged. Each is held by a foreign Power to which it is useless. Neither has been won in honourable war: the one usurped, the other pilfered—the wrongful possession of each is the tenure by which the other is held. Spain retained Ceuta when she abandoned Oran as a set-off to Gibraltar, and England, who abandoned Tangier, must have lost Gibraltar but for the help of the Moors, which was rendered because Spain occupied Ceuta; so that, if Ceuta were not Spanish, Gibraltar would not be English; and if Gibraltar were not English, Ceuta would not be Spanish. The Spaniards lose their own door-post of the Straits, and seize the post of their neighbours; the English abandon Tangier (alone of the Portuguese possessions diverted from Spain), and seize that of the Spaniards. In the history of sieges, they both present the most remarkable incidents, from the unparalleled amount of power directed against the one, and the length of time expended in attempts to reduce the other. Both have at various times exhausted the countries to which they belonged, and the nations by which they have been held. Ceuta brought on the fall of Gothic Spain. Gibraltar was the immediate cause of the war of the Spanish Succession; and finally the smuggling trade of Gibraltar furnishes the school for the proficients for whom Ceuta is the prison.

During the war the Spanish Government placed Ceuta, to defend it from France, in the possession of England. Several English establishments were formed, and considerable sums expended, in the belief that England would never give it up; but the immorality of the Government had not then overtaken the baseness of the people. The Moorish Government, however, thought this an opportunity of recovering its own, and having furnished supplies to Gibraltar, and to our fleet, and corn for our army in Spain, conceiving itself entitled to some favour, claimed the restitution of the place. The appeal proved ineffectual, although it was backed by the offer of a million of dollars. The English Government could not, as may be supposed, well urge on the Spanish Government the claims of its Moorish ally. Muley Suleyman expressed the anguish of his spirit in a distich which might have suggested Moore’s celebrated lines on Poland:—

“There is no faith in our foe,
There is no comfort in our friend.”

We landed within a mole or jetty which corresponds with the Ragged Staff at Gibraltar, thence ascended by a stair to the gate, crossed a bridge, and found ourselves on a lively esplanade. An alley of trees opened upwards through the straggling town, and a terrace along the sea-wall stretched eastward to the extremity of the promontory. The buildings were in the Moresco style with the columned court. The arms of Spain are to be seen at Gibraltar beside those of England—here the arms of Portugal are beside those of Spain. To the whitewash of the Spaniards and the Moors, was here added the yellow of the Portuguese, running two or three feet as a skirting round the court-yards, and along the streets: everything was dazzlingly bright, exquisitely clean, and elaborately ornamented.[49]

The streets are one continuation of tesselated pavement, green, white, and red. The white is marble, the black a very dark serpentine, and the red ancient tiles, which are used as outlines for the figures: the gutter is in the centre, the pattern running on each side with a border joining in the middle. The running pattern is a device, such as a sprig in a Tuscan border; but here and there, you find more ambitious conceptions—a snake, a stag, a ship, a coat-of-arms, a dog attacking a bull, and, in one place, the figure of a man. I have seen something of the kind in the garden of the fortress at Lisbon. There were also the hollow bricks along the tops of walls for flowers, and the demi-flower pots, which they nail against the walls and houses, converting them into perpendicular parterres. They have also adopted the Moorish tesselated pavements for the garden walks, and yet they have neglected to copy that garden architecture which I observed at Kitan—halls and alleys constructed of a lacework of reeds, than which there is nothing more beautiful; and as to its uses, what can be so well adapted to the training of foliage and flowers, so fitted to ensure the luxuries of the clime—that is, shade and air—and to afford protection against its inclemency—the sun with his heat and light?

But the Spaniards here are as little in Africa, as if they were in garrison at St. Juan d’Ulloa. There is not a man who knows the language of the country. They live like cattle in a pen, and spend their lives here without ever having been without the walls. They are under strict blockade—a vidette on the hill, a picket at the gate. Should a Moor bring in eggs, he has to steal out of sight of his own sentries; and to furnish an ox, is to commit a capital offence. When the Christians venture within reach of the Moors, they are shot like dogs: they meet only after despatching a flag of truce. What a ludicrous disproportion between this array of towers, battlements, materials, troops, and discipline, and the half dozen wild mountaineers in a reed hut on the other side. It was said of the Arabs by a French general, “Among them, peace cannot be purchased by victory.” Defeat does not bring submission, nor hopelessness despair, because the brain has not robbed the heart, nor the tongue the brain. They cannot comprehend the wisdom, that a fact which is wrong should be submitted to because it is accomplished, and called a fact.

As I was, some time before, sailing by Ceuta in a bullock-boat, from Tetuan, a Spanish sailor called the attention of a young and delicate-looking Moor, who had embarked with us on his way to Mecca, to the Spanish flag flying on the fortress. The young man, who had scarcely spoken before, seemed absorbed in grief; started to his feet, his eyes glowing and his fists clenched, and roared out: “That no Christian, that Moor land.”

The Government of Algiers recently projected sending steamers to touch regularly at the Spanish Presidios to gain intelligence of what was going on in the interior. They were then to present themselves in the Bay of Tangier, communicate with the French Consul, visit Gibraltar, and return to Algiers—a nicely-devised scheme to convince the Moor that a conspiracy against them was on foot, common to France, England, and Spain. But the French Government not having altogether resigned itself into the hands of its “Algerines,” thought proper to appoint a superior officer of another service to go this round and report upon it. The first place he called at was Melilla; he inquired, “What news from Morocco?” The governor told him that he would be able to satisfy his curiosity on the day following, as they expected the Madrid papers. The French Admiral dined with the governor, took a siesta, Spanish fashion, and had, on awaking, an opportunity of judging of the intercourse with the interior. Two or three Moors got into an out-post unobserved, and had escaped in like manner, leaving behind the bodies of six Spaniards, but carrying off the heads.

The next morning I started early to visit the works on the lines, accompanied by a merchant of the place whom the governor sent to me, as the person best qualified to act as cicerone. Issuing from the first gate, we came on a drawbridge: below ran the sea over yellow sand, there being a clear passage by the ditch from one side to the other. Fishing-boats were splashing round the sharp angles. The old lofty Portuguese battlements rose above us; these masses of building are enormous, though the space of ground covered is small. The body of the place from which we had emerged, consists of a curtain and two bastions, three hundred yards in length, ninety feet in height; the bastion to the south carrying a second, is twenty feet higher. As we proceeded, ditch succeeded to ditch, and battery to battery. There are three lines and three ditches, with corresponding demi-lunes; in all six tiers of guns. The basis from sea to sea does not exceed four hundred yards, and the radius may be equal: I give the dimensions from memory. There are few guns mounted; I counted about one hundred and fifty embrasures for guns, and twenty beds for mortars. The inner curtain is completely pitted with shot and grape. The upper works and merlons are refaced.

Emerging from the fortification, we began to ascend the hill: the face of it was cut into by level spaces, the earth banked up by stone walls, lining which, infantry could level their pieces up the hill. The whole ground is mined and traversed by passages, the roofs of which project above the soil with loop-holes. The vidette on the hill pointed out to us on a brow opposite, at a short distance—but divided by a chasm—the Moorish post, a low shed of reeds: we saw no one. Some fig-trees in the gulley between, we were forbidden to pass; and he warned us to keep always in his sight. I came suddenly on a mass of ruins clustering round eminences, or running in long straight lines, castellated and turreted: the angles were fresh and sharp. The holes left in the walls by the fastenings of the planks, into which the compost is beaten, gave them the appearance of enormous pigeon-houses. There were no Roman blocks; yet the style was Roman. There was none of the massiveness of the Moorish, but their materials. There was more of the palm-like lightness of Fars than of the troglodyte of ancient or modern Africa. I hoped that these might belong to some remnants of the earlier and untraced races; but a nearer inspection soon decided that question. A gate on the western face is still almost perfect, and is Moorish; yet who can find the date of that style which may have belonged to the days of Juba, as well as to those of Almanzor and Abderahman.

My companion was excessively alarmed when I proposed to visit the ruins, as they are beyond the neutral ground. I endeavoured to relieve him, by making a forward cast through the brushwood. He followed, detailing how those savages would lie for hours in wait for a shot, and how a few days before a man had been wounded at the same place. Presently he exclaimed, “A Moor! a Moor!” I had, however, for some time seen the figure in a clear space on the opposite brow, wrapped in its haik, and motionless.

How pleasing would it not be to find the original of some dubiously-figured chimera! What then to discover a living representative of a race that has left behind it an undying name and immortal ruins? Such was to me that solitary figure. The Assyrian bowed his back to the burthen and his neck to the yoke, and the first of conquerors became the meanest of slaves. The Mede served in his turn, and so the Persian. The Egyptian, the first and greatest, became the outcast of nations. The Macedonian and Attic conquerors of the East were bondsmen at Rome. The Roman was a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, at the door of the Gothic hut and the Vandal tent. In all times, in all climes, the conquered have dwelt as Helot bondsman or slave with the conqueror. This wild man, this Moor, alone has followed no conqueror’s car, and served no master’s bidding. Vanquished, he has departed—disappearing from the land which ceased to own him lord. He has not by familiarity worn out the terrors of his name, nor the indignation of his heart; and there he stands to-day, not yielding to facts his reason, nor to fortune his fate.

But to compare the old Moor of Spain with the African Moor of to-day, might appear like comparing the British of to-day with their (assumed) naked ancestors. It, however, seems to me doubtful whether the old light be all extinct. Look at the Moor! Is there not dignity in his deportment—grandeur in his costume? The produce of the looms of Morocco to-day equals in beauty and taste, if it does not surpass, that of any country. At Tetuan the Mosaics are now made which adorn the Alhambra. Science has departed, but is that an essential of greatness? When a nation sinks to the barbarism that follows light, it is indifferent to honour: it hates itself more than its foe or conqueror. The Moor is not such.

The Moors at home are more wedded than any Mussulman people to their usages; more fanatic, more abhorrent of all intercourse with strangers. When they come to Europe they make themselves at home. They are seen at Gibraltar, in the streets, on the battlements, sauntering in the public walks, as if they entirely belonged to us. The civil magistrate represents them as orderly and peaceable: the police-court may be said to ignore their existence: legal practitioners declare that the cases of litigation chiefly arise from their being overreached. They are an example of sobriety, industry, and integrity. Their community at Gibraltar is neither small nor select, nor composed solely of those in easy circumstances: they come and go, and many are flying destitute from war and persecution. No one has heard of a Moor being a drunkard, or a swindler: no one doubts a Moor’s word: no one fears either his vengeance or his ferocity.

But may it not be that these men are here influenced by European manners? May they not, like the civilized and instructed classes of the Spaniards, be assimilated to Europe? There precisely is the difference. A Moor, after spending twenty years in Europe, goes back and demeans himself as if he had never left home. They carry their habits with them, and at Gibraltar live much in the same way as to the south of the Straits. As a people, they avoid us more than any other, excepting, perhaps, the Japanese: yet, individually they have greater intercourse with us, and in a more familiar manner; because from the distance and the difficulties of the land journey, the pilgrims almost always go and return from Egypt in European vessels.

As we returned into town, a stone nearly the size of a man’s head was shown to us, by which the skull of the Portuguese commander who first entered the place was, like that of Pyrrhus, broken by a woman from a tower. A Moorish sovereign, who was so wounded, despatched himself like Abimelech, with his own sword, to cover the disgrace.

The Romans at one time substituted this place for Tangier, as a provincial capital; yet it has neither a harbour nor road, being at the extreme point of the land, and shut out by a range of mountains from a fertile and peopled country, while Tangier is at the bottom of a bay, surrounded with rich lands, and is on the highway from Spain to Mauritania, from the ocean to the interior.

To us a capital is different from what it was to the Romans: we have a mass of organization and administration, which requires that it should be placed at the head in respect to the members. We expect to find all this in vigour under so rigorous a government as that of Rome. But Rome gave herself no such trouble; introduced neither principles, nor laws, nor language, nor costume. These spread, because not forced. The field of administration, down to her latter days, was kept sufficiently clear for each individual to embrace the whole: the subdivisions of modern statesmanship and government were unknown.[50]

Her judicatories were solely appellant: the people were everywhere free to follow their own customs, execute their own laws, select their own magistrates, impose their own taxes. In fact, the Romans were kings: they reigned, they did not administer; nor did they scatter their strength in exciting irritation on every point; but remained with a force collected to smite resistance whenever it appeared, and which they were careful never to provoke by systematic interference.

Ceuta might thus, cut off from traffic and population, be a good provincial capital for those masters in the art of governing men—that art which, like health in the body and judgment in the mind, depends not on science and labour, but abstinence and simplicity.

The idea of the Romans in garrison at Ceuta was incessantly returning on me, and prompting pictures of the consequences. The Romans to-day at Ceuta would be masters of Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, as rapidly as the Saracens were of Spain, after showing themselves at Gibraltar. When the French first attacked Algiers, the Moors, having heard that Europe was governed by justice (the justice that every one understands), were ready to invite them; but the French were soon found not to be Romans: they had not the bath, not the toga, not the salutation of the Roman or Eastern; they could in their persons command no respect. In ablutions, tone of voice, gesture, manner of eating, disregard of religious observances,[51] they could only excite the disgust of a Mussulman. Very subordinate matters are principles of administration, and forms of government, compared to the cleanliness of the bath, dignity of deportment, ceremony and etiquette. But to the elegance of costume the Roman did, however, add forms of administration equally adapted, as his warlike discipline and personal habits, to enable him to gain and secure ground as a conqueror,—he would have left the Moor or the Algerine to the jurisdiction of his own code—he would have left in their hands the administration of their own laws: he would have given to their senate the power of impeaching a Bugeaud or a Vallée before the Senate of Rome.

When the Romans possessed that country, it was four or five times as populous and not less warlike or stubborn in spirit. For four hundred years their dominion endured with almost unbroken tranquillity. During that period it was the granary of the world. It replenished, not exhausted, the Roman treasures—it supplied and did not drain her armies. During all that, time there was neither parliamentary law, nor Royal ordinances for its good government; there were no scientific commissions to inquire into its state; there were no quartos of statistical information published for the enlightenment of its rulers; there was no system of colonization, no project of enlightenment, Christianity, or civilization; there was no flamen of Chalons,[52] sacrificing to Mars and Bellona for successful raids and butcheries. Rome held Africa with two legions; France began[53] with a half more than that number; she has now ten times as many: it costs her as much in outlay as the Imperial expenses of the whole empire under Augustus; and notwithstanding all the unfortunate French can do, the people will not be civilized[54]—and run away.[55] In fourteen years a European government has reduced the population to one-half. With ten thousand men the Turks managed to hold Algiers, and to govern it in tranquillity. Instead of the public debt of a “civilized” government, they left behind a large treasure;[56] yet their troops would have raised the contempt of any European officer, and their government that of every European politician.

I have met some Frenchmen who believed that the French went to put down piracy: I know no Englishman who doubts it. England attacked Algiers with the view of putting an end to Christian slavery, and relieving the smaller powers from the disturbance of their Mediterranean trade, she having no quarrel of her own with that State. She succeeded,[57] retired—kept and claimed nothing.

The first quarrel between France and Algiers was about a debt to a Jew merchant of Algiers, which France refused to pay. This was an outstanding balance of eighteen millions of francs, on the accounts for the supply of France with grain for her necessities. By enormous bribing of the Chamber of Deputies, the money was repaid: it went into French pockets. In the list of recipients are names which may not astonish a future age, but which would astonish this.

The last quarrel was about the same Jew and the coral fisheries. The French consul having, according to instructions, made a quarrel,[58] and excited the anger of the Pacha, he flung towards him his fan. The consul was not touched. France got the pretext she wanted for not paying the money, and pillaged the treasury of Algiers of £5,000,000. England and Holland, who, at their own cost twenty years before, had put an end to roving and to Christian slavery, nevertheless believe that France went to Algiers to put down piracy and to spread civilization: an instance of the value of the press in enlightened times.

Rome conquered the warlike west, and the rich east, and possessed the countries she conquered. The great people, lying in the heart of Europe, possessed of unparalleled power, in as far as warlike means go, and unequalled unity, subjugates a little state of pirates—or at least so called pirates—without numbers, wealth, service, or literature, and immediately France is subjugated by Algiers. I have heard Hassam Pacha, the Ex-Dey of Algiers, say, “the barricades of July have avenged me.” Abd-el-kadir in like manner sees himself avenged by the barricades of February. Each African treachery is followed by a Parisian revolution. Had it been Rome, Abd-el-kadir might have become pro-consul, or like Severus,[59] emperor: pro-consul or emperor, he could have become Roman. But it is a modern government: it is France which conquers Algiers; then the Frenchman becomes an Algerine, and order has to be restored in a constitutional state, by Algerine practices.

France, in putting down the Algiers of Africa, was preparing herself to become the Algiers of Europe.

With the same certainty that Pyrrhus foretold the destruction of Carthage or Rome, by the bone of contention which Sicily afforded, may the destruction of England or France, or both, be prognosticated from the French occupation of Africa. France by her mismanagement has only retarded the explosion, and she has not the courage to withdraw. Her invasion of Africa was as little her own purpose or will, as the invasion of Spain in 1823. A foreign hand planned and prompted it in mystery at Versailles, and publicly hailed and encouraged it from beyond the English Channel,[60] whence alone was to be apprehended censure or dissatisfaction.

Ceuta is the great Botany Bay of the Spaniards. There were here recently three thousand five hundred convicts; but two thousand have been sent off to Castille to work on some canal there; those left are the worst class, transported for not less than ten years and “retention,” which means that they may be kept as much longer as the governor thinks fit. After five years’ residence, they are hired out. The landlord of the café where I stayed gave them, as a class, an excellent character. Inquiring the kind of crimes some of them had committed, he said, “the two young men who attend you are here for murder.” There is here a greater accumulation of malefactors than on any other spot of the earth, yet you might lay down gold in the streets with impunity. There are abundant facilities for escape; the sea is open, the town accessible at every point; there are boats all round, and the convicts outnumber the other population. They are not, as in Gibraltar, driven in gangs, ironed, and with “Convict” stamped on every article of their dress. Here they go about free; the watchmen in the street at night are themselves convicts. This humanity in the treatment of convicts extends equally to slaves: the Spaniards extend to them the protection of the laws, giving up to them the feast days; allow them progressively to re-purchase their liberty, and when they have done so, admit them to perfect equality of consideration with the white men.

The governor was no less interesting than the Presidio. He seemed like an exile of ancient times, and with a melancholy dignity dwelt on the thought of his country. He had been several years an emigrant in Europe, without knowing or choosing to know any language save his own. He laboured to assure me that many things that were done were not according to the heart of the nation, and repeated several times, “If I could go with you into the peasants’ huts, and make them speak what is in their minds, you would have reason to respect Spain.” He had been forty-four years in the service, and had never known his country, except suffering from injuries inflicted on her by foreign powers, while Spain had done nothing against any one. But that was not all. “It is impossible for a Spaniard not to feel that his country is the object of—” and here he paused as if to muster courage to utter the word “desprecio.” He was pleased when I said that the real Spaniards were dumb, and the bastards loquacious, and the stranger who wished not to mistake Spain must close his ears. He asked the proportions of the two:—my answer was, as one and a half to ninety-eight and a half.

“Whoever says that Spain is poor or weak, lies.—Where do you see a people that work so little, and possess so much? Where in Europe is there a government so extravagant, or such a horde of public functionaries? The ‘administrators’ in Spain would supply France, Germany, and England put together; and what is all the political agitation, except a scramble for these posts? We want no new laws or constitutions; but only to administer those that our fathers have left us. One man, without genius or originality, but with courage and honesty, might make Spain the happiest country in Europe. As to resources, I say they are enormous. If you were to put in one heap the money that goes into the public treasury, and in the other, that which is kept back by the public functionaries, the latter would be the higher of the two. All we want is order. Look at our army. What can Europe show superior in vigour, endurance, discipline, intelligence, or docility? Look, too, at its numbers: two hundred thousand!”

I ventured to dissent on this last point, and showed that Spain entered on her war with France without any army, as on her war with England at the beginning of the previous century. On both occasions she had no fleet. Armies were requisite to attack, but incapacitated for defence: heroic defences were always made by a people, as shown in the contrast of Algeria with Poland; as shown in the contrast of Spain with Germany and Italy, which had all bowed before Napoleon: Spain’s strength appeared after army, king, government, had been swept away; she was the only country in Europe whose people did not want soldiers to protect them, &c.

I observed that Spain stood in an anomalous position. Unlike a secondary state, she had nothing to apprehend on the score of her independence; unlike a first-rate one, she was engaged in no schemes against the independence of other people: that an army in Spain was consequently as needless as it was noxious.

He replied, that what I said did not apply specially to Spain, and might be predicated of the whole of Europe; to which I readily assented. His Spanish self-love, for a moment alarmed, was soothed when I showed him that I was as adverse to standing armies for the internal interest of the great and preponderating States, as he could be, because of the facilities which it gave them of interfering with and oppressing the others. I pointed to this, as the master-disease of our times, and as signalized as such even in the last century, by some of the greatest men; that it feeds, as Montesquieu says, upon itself, growing by competition; and that, independently of their misuse, standing armies by their pressure must ultimately bring every one of the existing European States to the ground.

Spain, separated by the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe, as she is distinct from them in ideas, could easily relieve herself; she had fewer obstacles to contend with than any other State, except England. Our whole parliamentary history had been a struggle of patriotic men against standing armies and funded debt. He himself had admitted, that one honest man might restore Spain; and how so, unless there were great abuses in practice which had not degenerated into principle? He had particularized the armies of functionaries; let him add to these this horde of two hundred thousand regulars.

“Where is the man,” he said, “to do it?” I observed, that it could only be by seeing and showing what was wrong, that the man could ever be made or found to put it right.

This conversation was strikingly recalled to me by a book, entitled “Political Testament of Cardinal Alberoni,” which, on my return, I found at a stall. I turned over the pages with extreme curiosity, to see if it presented any stamp of authenticity. One of the first sentences I fell upon was the following:

“It is an error of this and the preceding century to think that the strength of a nation consists in the large number of regular forces kept on foot. To be convinced of the falsity of this notion, we have only to cast an eye on the wars of Europe within these four or five hundred years. As soon as an army is beaten on the frontier, the prince, whose troops are vanquished, has no other resource left but to clap up a peace: his country lies open to the enemy, and he has only cowardly burghers and disheartened peasants to oppose to veteran soldiers. He loses a whole province as soon as the capital of it surrenders. He is reduced to bury himself under the ruins of his throne, or to comply with the conditions prescribed by the conqueror.

“But when princes undertook only to lead their people in defending their country, they reckoned as many soldiers as subjects: the whole state was a frontier against the enemy, who were sure to meet with opposition so long as they fought to conquer. Every inch of ground was disputed. When a city or town surrendered, after repeated assaults, it did not capitulate for the other towns within its jurisdiction. Every borough, every village cost a siege. So long as a prince kept but a corner of his country, he might hope to drive the enemy from what they possessed, and to recover all he had lost. The most powerful prince in Europe was dreaded only as his ambition might give disturbance and uneasiness to his neighbours. They were sure that time would impair his strength, like a body worn out by too frequent attrition.

“The difference between the reigns of Charles VI. and Louis XIV., in France, shows this contrast in its full light. The King of England was then master of the finest provinces in France, quiet possessor of its principal cities, and crowned at Paris; while his adversary, though reduced to the single lordship of Bourges, was able to hold out against him. Louis XIV. sees a frontier province invaded by two of the enemy’s generals; he offers, at St. Gertrudenberg, the fruit of twenty victories, to persuade them to retire. His kingdom is still untouched: millions of his subjects have not so much as heard the sound of the enemy’s cannon, and yet he does not think himself able to make a stand against seventy or eighty thousand men. He has not as yet lost one battle on his ancient territories; nevertheless, he thinks that nothing more remains for him than to die gloriously, pushed on by temerity and despair. The enemy is still two days’ journey from the frontier, which this kingdom had at the time when Philip Augustus withstood and triumphed over the joint efforts of all Europe; and Louis the Great believes it impossible to hinder the enemy from making a conquest of his kingdom. Though he has a country two hundred leagues in extent behind him, above a hundred on each side of him, yet he does not think this sufficient to secure him an honourable retreat. Jandrecy and Quenoy determine the fate of France. Valenciennes and Dunquerque, Arras, Amiens, Cambrai, Maubeuge and so many other strong-holds, which his predecessors either never possessed, or, if they did, afterwards resigned, without imagining they weakened thereby their throne; all these places, I say, to him appear as of no sort of use, because he has no regular troops to defend them.

“If the land forces of Spain had been upon this footing in the beginning of the present century, the nation would have beheld with as much security as contempt, the combination of the Courts of Vienna and London to impose a master upon her, and to divide her possessions. With the advantages in regard to war, which this kingdom has even from nature, it might have bidden defiance to France herself conspiring with the other Powers, to oblige her to submit to the treaty of partition.”

It was quite intelligible to me now, that three great rival nations should concert to banish Alberoni from the counsels of the grandson of Louis XIV. He had penetrated to the Gothic foundations of the society of the peninsula, and had ascended to those Gothic pinnacles, from which he could survey the littleness of his contemporaries. He foresaw in the event of a general military despotism, the possibility of Europe’s being recovered by the latent energy of the Spanish people, and the ultimate range of his provision and prophecy was Southern and Western Europe quelled, and its rivalries composed by the intrusion of the two northern powers, Prussia and Russia.

He was above the arts of government, and knew where the greatness of his adopted country resided. He scouted acquisitions as a source of splendour to the state, or patronage as a means of strength to the government.

The great men of the period attained by peculiar powers the management of men; but there is not one whose words time has undertaken to confirm. Where is Richelieu’s management; Colbert’s finance; where are Fleury’s devices; or Louis le Grand’s victories? They have vanished with the fortunes they created, and have left us such instruction only as we may derive from the cell of a culprit, or the fragments of a column.

Those who have prognosticated one among a thousand events, have been held wise in their generation. Alberoni has traced out before the event the salient features of the European system, as if he were describing it now. He foresaw the failure of all the endeavours of the Bourbon courts to restore the Pretender. He warned them that their fleets would fail against England, told them that[61] “cruisers” were the only effectual arm with which to assail her commercial greatness, laughed at their projects of a hundred thousand men in arms in the Highlands, or in Ireland, and recommended as a surer recipe for ruining England, the securing “Ten members of the House of Commons, with a few Peers of note.” He pointed to the sagacity of William III., who had established his throne by the then bold but well-considered measure of plunging the country in war, and loading it with debt.

He furnishes a parallel to Talleyrand, both driven from office by a combination of foreign powers;[62] but all Europe feared the Cardinal of Parma, Russia alone feared the ex-bishop of Autun.

Spain, in the selection of public servants, to a certain degree imitated Rome, and resembled Russia. She did not think, that, to insure fidelity and authority, it was necessary that they should be her own nobles and chief men, as in the case of all modern European governments. Spain owed perhaps to the caprice of her monarchs, a facility which Rome possessed by the comprehensive nature of her institutions. Rome, however, so dignified the nations only that she had already incorporated; Russia, the subjects of the state she purposes to acquire.