EUROPE.

I PROPOSE to devote this evening to a very brief survey of the various States which unite with us to form the European political State system, but before entering upon it, I must remind you that this address will cover the same ground as my Peterhead address in the end of last year. I shall try studiously to avoid repeating anything that I then said, but as the condition of Europe remains in many respects the same, there are, of course, not a few matters on which I should naturally touch to-night, which will be absent from the remarks I am about to make to you, and I must ask all those who have a strong interest in foreign affairs, to read what I shall say to-night along with what I said on the 19th December last.

FRANCE. The internal history of our nearest neighbour, during the present year, has been the history, not very interesting to us in its details, of the partial accomplishment of those liberal reforms, which were shadowed forth in the Emperor's letter of the 19th June 1867, together with the carrying out of that unhappy scheme of army organization, into which a brave and usually confident people was hurried in the panic which was caused by the battle of Königgrätz.

In the last and least creditable of its works, the Government has shown no want either of firmness, or of energy; but in the other it has shown great want of both. Nothing, it has been said, is less wise than to proceed upon antagon

istic principles of action, and Napoleon III. has been doing this, during the last few months, to a very dangerous extent. Now, it has seemed as if he were about frankly to accept the policy which is understood to have been urged upon him by M. Emile Ollivier, and to bid for the support of all those Liberals who had no connexion with the old parties, and, again, he has seemed ready to fall back upon the maxims which are cherished by the majority of the Corps Législatif, which is more Imperialist than the Emperor.

Such a policy could have but one result, unrest and feverish anxiety in the public mind. Every day brings new rumours, sometimes favourable, sometimes unfavourable, to the crowning of the edifice. The smallest incidents are magnified into important events. One day it is a miserable little paper that appears about to bring on a crisis, and the next it is the obstinacy, or spirit, call it what you will, of a schoolboy, who refuses to accept a prize from the hands of the Prince Imperial. This kind of thing has been going on any time the last seventeen years in Parisian society. Certain salons have always been repeating cela ne peut pas durer, but now the waves of opinion seem stirred not only more deeply, but, above all, much more widely. The success of M. Grévy in the Jura has been rightly considered an ominous circumstance, to which the easy triumphs of the Government in some other departments have been by no means an adequate set-off; and the public favour which appears to be accorded to M. Ténot's book on the coup d'état, taken together with the Baudin subscription, is another proof, if proofs were wanted, that the new generation of Frenchmen has not forgotten the violence by which the present régime was inaugurated, and has, at least to some extent, forgotten that fear of the red spectre which made the "2d December" possible.

The relations of the Empire with other powers have not been disturbed by anything so alarming as the Luxembourg affair, but they have, so far as Germany is concerned, been very uneasy, and the semi-official and opposition press has done

its best to increase difficulties which required no increasing. The language of the Emperor in his speech at the opening of the Chambers was calculated to diminish the irritation against Prussia; and there can be no doubt that his early experiences have made him too well acquainted with the state of German feeling to allow him to cherish any illusions as to the possibility of France being accepted as a deliverer from the tyranny of Berlin. We may be very sure that, if he ever moves a man towards the Rhenish frontier, it will be bitterly against his will. A man of his age, character, and tendencies, is not likely to plunge into a war of colossal magnitude and most uncertain result, from mere "gaiety of heart," as his countrymen say. He will do so only if he makes up his mind that, of two evils, a war which may sweep his dynasty away is the one least to be dreaded. Whether the combined force of Liberal discontent and military impatience will be sufficiently great to make him believe war to be the less dangerous alternative, is the great secret of the future.

The views of the leading French tacticians, I take to be very well summed up in the enclosed note of a conversation with one of them, which was lately forwarded to me :- "The treaties of 1815 gave us a detestable frontier. We are, putting aside railways, twenty-one days' march from Berlin, while the Prussians are only nine from Paris. We could tolerate such a state of things when Germany was only a defensive power, but since 1866 that is no longer the case, and we have at our gates a nation of 30,000,000, which may, at any moment, become aggressive. We were obliged to accept the changes of 1866 and 1867, because we were not prepared. To-day we are prepared. The Emperor does not want war, but the status quo is our ultimatum. If they pass the Main, we fight.”

The fallacy of the above consists in assuming that Germany will or can become aggressive, as against France, an error which may be forgiven in a military man, but is not to be forgiven in a politician, and yet some of the politicians of France,

from whom we might have expected better things, are even less reasonable than the general whom I have been quoting.

France possesses few political writers so distinguished as M. Prévost-Paradol. Paris is never wearied of praising his felicitous turns of expression, and the Academy opened its doors to him at an exceptionally early age. With all that his countrymen say about his brilliancy of expression, readers in other countries cannot fail to agree, but when they go on to praise, not the manner, but the matter, we are obliged to part company with them. The last chapter of his recent work, La France Nouvelle,' is a compendium of everything that a wise Frenchman should not think about foreign politics. It would be difficult to point to any piece of writing more calculated to do mischief by irritating the self-love of a proud and susceptible people. If we are to choose between the foreign policy of this quasi-Liberal manifesto, and the foreign policy of the Imperial Government, we cannot have a moment's hesitation in thanking Heaven that the grip of a power, which has hitherto proved irresistible, is at the throat of all those who sit at the feet of M. Thiers.

M. Prévost-Paradol would probably say, that the disapproval of the rivals and enemies of his country—and he considers every nation which is tolerably near and tolerably powerful to be an enemy-is only a confirmation of the truth of his views. I must, however, disclaim, in the most emphatic manner, any hostility to France. Like M. Prévost-Paradol, I am obliged to admit that the question of cosmopolitan preponderance is already decided against the French, and in favour of the Anglo-Saxon race; but it seems to me that, in Europe, France may still for a long time hold the first place. The way, however, to do this, is not to rush into a mad war with Germany, in which victory and defeat would be almost alike disastrous, but so to order her internal affairs as to prevent the disproportion between the numbers of Frenchmen and Germans becoming so

1 La France Nouvelle. Par M. Prévost-Paradol. Paris, 1868.