There are in Europe two great questions: the question called
social and the question of nationalities.... The map of Europe has
to be re-made.... I affirm with profound conviction that this
movement of nationalities has attained in Italy, in Hungary, in
Vienna, in a great part of Germany, and in some of the Slavonian
populations, a degree of importance that must at no distant period
produce decisive results.... The first war-cry that arises will
carry with it a whole zone of Europe.—MAZZINI (1852).
I
“My confidence in the Italian parliament and people,” Mr. Gladstone wrote
to Lacaita at the end of 1862, “increases from day to day. Their
self-command, moderation, patience, firmness, and forethought reaching far
into the future, are really beyond all praise.” And a few days later,
again to Lacaita—“Your letter proves that the king has not merely got the
constitutional lesson by rote—though even this for an Italian king would
be much; but that the doctrine has sunk into the marrow and the bone.” The
cause was won, and the work of construction went forward, but not on such
lines as Cavour’s master-hand was likely to have traced. Very early Mr.
Gladstone began to be uneasy about Italian finance. “I am sure,” he wrote
to Lacaita in April 1863, “that Italian freedom has no greater enemy in
the Triple Crown or elsewhere, than large continuing deficits.”
As events marched forward, the French occupation of Rome became an ever
greater scandal in Mr. Gladstone’s eyes. He writes to Panizzi (October 28,
1862):—
My course about the Emperor has been a very simple one. It is not
for me to pass gratuitous opinions upon his character or that of
French institutions, or on his dealings with them. I believe him
to be firmly attached to the English alliance, and I think his
course towards us has been, on almost every occasion, marked by a
friendliness perhaps greater and more conspicuous than we have
always deserved at his hands. It is most painful to me to witness
his conduct with regard to Italy.... He conferred upon her in 1859
an immense, an inestimable boon. He marred this boon in a way
which to me seemed little worthy of France by the paltry but
unkind appropriation of Nice in particular. But in the matter of
Rome he inflicts upon Italy a fearful injury. And I do not know by
what law of ethics any one is entitled to plead the having
conferred an unexpected boon, as giving a right to inflict a gross
and enduring wrong.(78)
It was in 1862 that Mr. Gladstone made his greatest speech on Italian
affairs.(79) “I am ashamed to say,” he told the House, “that for a long
time, I, like many, withheld my assent and approval from Italian
yearnings.” He amply atoned for his tardiness, and his exposure of Naples,
where perjury was the tradition of its kings; of the government of the
pope in the Romagna, where the common administration of law and justice
was handed over to Austrian soldiery; of the stupid and execrable
lawlessness of the Duke of Modena; of the attitude of Austria as a
dominant and conquering nation over a subject and conquered race;—all this
stamped a decisive impression on the minds of his hearers. Along with his
speech on Reform in 1864, and that on the Irish church in the spring of
1865, it secured Mr. Gladstone’s hold upon all of the rising generation of
liberals who cared for the influence and the good name of Great Britain in
Europe, and who were capable of sympathising with, popular feeling and the
claims of national justice.
II
(M31) The Italian sentiment of England reached its climax in the reception
accorded to Garibaldi by the metropolis in April 1864. “I do not know what
persons in office are to do with him,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord
Palmerston (March 26), “but you will lead, and we shall follow suit.” The
populace took the thing into their own hands. London has seldom beheld a
spectacle more extraordinary or more moving. The hero in the red shirt and
blue-grey cloak long associated in the popular mind with so many thrilling
stories of which they had been told, drove from the railway at Vauxhall to
Stafford House, the noblest of the private palaces of the capital, amid
vast continuous multitudes, blocking roadways, filling windows, lining
every parapet and roof with eager gazers. For five hours Garibaldi passed
on amid tumultuous waves of passionate curiosity, delight, enthusiasm. And
this more than regal entry was the arrival not of some loved prince or
triumphant captain of our own, but of a foreigner and the deliverer of a
foreign people. Some were drawn by his daring as a fighter, and by the
picturesque figure as of a hero of antique mould; many by sight of the
sworn foe of Giant Pope; but what fired the hearts of most was the thought
of him as the soldier who bore the sword for human freedom. The western
world was in one of its generous moments. In those days there were
idealists; democracy was conscious of common interests and common
brotherhood; a liberal Europe was then a force and not a dream.
“We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time,” Mr. Gladstone said nearly
twenty years after, “can many of us never forget the marvellous effect
produced upon all minds by the simple nobility of his demeanour, by his
manners and his acts.... Besides his splendid integrity, and his wide and
universal sympathies, besides that seductive simplicity of manner which
never departed from him, and that inborn and native grace which seemed to
attend all his actions, I would almost select from every other quality
this, which was in apparent contrast but real harmony in Garibaldi—the
union of the most profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour.”(80)
He once described the Italian chief to me as “one of the finest
combinations of profound and unalterable simplicity with
self-consciousness and self-possession. I shall never forget an occasion
at Chiswick; Palmerston, John Russell, and all the leaders were awaiting
him on the _perron_; he advanced with perfect simplicity and naturalness,
yet with perfect consciousness of his position; very striking and very
fine.” Garibaldi dined with Mr. Gladstone, and they met elsewhere. At a
dinner at Panizzi’s, they sat by one another. “I remember,” said Mr.
Gladstone, “he told a story in these words: ‘When I was a boy,’ he said,
‘I was at school in Genoa. It was towards the close of the great French
Revolution. Genoa was a great military post—a large garrison always in the
town, constant parades and military display, with bands and flags that
were beyond everything attractive to schoolboys. All my schoolfellows used
to run here and there all over the town to see if they could get sight of
one of these military parades and exhibitions. I never went to one. It
struck me then as a matter of pain and horror, that it should be necessary
that one portion of mankind should be set aside to have for their
profession the business of destroying others.’ ”
Another side of Garibaldi was less congenial. A great lady wrote to Mr.
Gladstone of a conversation with him. “I talked to Garibaldi with regret
that Renan was so much read in Italy. He said ‘_Perche?_’ and showed that
he did not dislike it, and that he has also in leaving Rome left very much
else. I know that woman’s words are useless: the more men disbelieve, the
more they think it well that women should be ‘superstitious.’ You are not
likely to have _arguments_ with him, but I would give much that he should
take away with him some few words that would bring home to him the fact
that the statesman he cares for most would think life a miserable thing
without faith in God our Saviour.” To another correspondent on this point
Mr. Gladstone wrote:—
The honour paid him was I think his due as a most singularly
simple, disinterested, and heroic character, who had achieved
great things for Italy, for liberty well-understood, and even for
mankind. His insurrection we knew and lamented, and treated as
exceptional. No Mazzinian leanings of his were known. I read the
speech at the luncheon with surprise and concern.(81) As to his
attenuated belief, I view it with the deepest sorrow and concern,
I need not repeat an opinion, always painful to me to pronounce,
as to the principal causes to which it is referable, and as to the
chief seat of the responsibility for it. As to his Goddess Reason,
I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the
continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we
neither want nor warmly relish in England, but they are different
from its excesses, and the words will bear an innocent and even in
some respects a beneficial meaning.
The diary records:—
_April 12._—To Chiswick and met Garibaldi. We were quite satisfied
with him. He did me much more than justice. 14.—Went by a
desperate push to see Garibaldi welcomed at the opera. It was
good, but not like the _people_. 17.—At Stafford House 5-1/4—6-½
and 9-1/4—12-½ on Garibaldi’s movements. In a conversation he
agreed to give up the provincial tour. 20.—In the evening the
great entertainment to Garibaldi came off. Before the door at
night say a thousand people all in the best of humour, the hall
and stair full before dinner. A hostile demonstration invaded us
at ten, but we ejected them. I settled about to-morrow with
Garibaldi, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Palmerston, and Lord
Shaftesbury. My nerves would not let me—hardened as I am—sleep
till after five.
(M32) Suddenly one morning the country was surprised to learn that
Garibaldi was at once departing. Dark suspicions rose instantly in the
minds of his more democratic friends. It had always been rather bitter to
them that he should be the guest of a duke. They now insisted that the
whig aristocrats were in a panic lest he should compromise himself with
the radicals, and that he was being hustled out of the country against his
will. This suspicion next grew into something blacker still. A story
spread that the Emperor of the French had taken umbrage, and signified to
the government that the reception of Garibaldi was distasteful to France.
Lord Clarendon promptly denied the fable. He told the House of Lords that
the Emperor (of whom he had recently had an audience) had even expressed
his admiration for the feeling of which the reception was a sign. Lord
Palmerston in the other House explained that Garibaldi was going away
earlier than had been expected, because at home he went to bed at eight
and rose at five, and to a person of these habits to dine at half past
eight and to remain in a throng of admirers until midnight must
necessarily be injurious. Still the fog hung heavy on the public mind. A
rider was now added to the tale, that it was the chancellor of the
exchequer who out of deference to the Emperor, or to please the whigs, or
out of complaisance to the court, had induced the hero to take his hurried
leave. Mr. Gladstone was forced to explain to the House of Commons, seldom
reluctant to lighten its graver deliberations with a personal incident,
that the Duke of Sutherland had carried him to Stafford House; there he
found that Garibaldi had accepted invitations to thirty provincial towns
and that the list was growing longer every day; the doctors declared that
the general’s strength would never stand the exhaustion of a progress on
such a scale; and the friends there present begged him to express his own
opinion to Garibaldi. This Mr. Gladstone accordingly did, to the effect
that the hero’s life and health were objects of value to the whole world,
and that even apart from health the repetition all over England of the
national reception in London would do something to impair a unique
historical event.(82) The general was taken to show excellent sense by
accepting advice not to allow himself to be killed by kindness. At any
rate he firmly declared that if he could not go to all the places that
invited him, it was impossible for him to draw a line of preference, and
therefore he would go to none. His radical friends, however, seem to have
instilled some of their own suspicions into his mind, for two days later
(April 23) Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Clarendon: “I am to see Garibaldi
at Cliveden this evening, and it is possible that some occasion may offer
there for obtaining from him a further declaration. But since I received
your note the following circumstance has occurred. Clarence Paget has been
to me, and reports that Mrs. ——, a well-known and zealous but
anti-Mazzinian liberal in Italian matters, who is also a friend of
Garibaldi’s, has acquainted him that Garibaldi himself has made known to
her that according to his own painful impression the English government do
consider the prolongation of his stay in England very embarrassing, and
are very anxious that he should go. What a pity, if this be so, that this
simple and heroic man could not speak his mind plainly out to me, but
wrapped himself in the depths of diplomatic reserve, instead of acting
like Lord Aberdeen, who used to say, ‘I have a habit of believing
people.’ ”(83) After three or four days at Cliveden the general still held
to his purpose. “_April 24._—Cliveden. Conversation with Garibaldi. The
utmost I could get from him was that it would be sad if the Italian people
should lose its faith.” So Garibaldi forthwith sailed away from our
shores.(84)
When all was over, an Italian statesman wrote to Panizzi that though he
thought Garibaldi one of the choicest natures ever created,—enterprising,
humane, disinterested, eminent in national service, yet neither he nor any
other citizen was entitled to set himself above the laws of his country,
and that such a man should be officially received by the heir to the
throne and by secretaries of state, was a thing to be bitterly deplored by
every sensible man.(85) Still history can afford to agree with Mr.
Gladstone when he said of Garibaldi—“His name is indeed illustrious, it
remains inseparably connected with the not less illustrious name of the
great Cavour, and these two names are again associated with the name of
Victor Emmanuel. These three together form for Italians a tricolour as
brilliant, as ever fresh, and I hope as enduring for many and many
generations, as the national flag that now waves over united Italy.”
III
The tide of vast events in this momentous period now rolled heavily away
from the Danube and the Bosphorus, from Tiber and Po and Adriatic sea, to
the shores of the Baltic and the mouths of the Elbe. None of the
fascination of old-world history lends its magic to the new chapter that
opened in 1863. Cavour had gone. Bismarck with sterner genius, fiercer
purpose, more implacable designs, and with a hand as of hammered iron,
strode into the field. The Italian statesman was the author of a singular
prediction. In 1861 when Cavour was deprecating angry protests from the
European powers against his invasion of the Marches, he used words of
extraordinary foresight to the representative of Prussia. “I am sorry,” he
said, “that the cabinet of Berlin judges so severely the conduct of the
King of Italy and his government. I console myself by thinking that on
this occasion I am setting an example that probably in no long time,
Prussia will be very glad to imitate.”(86) So the world speedily found
out.
(M33) The torch of nationality reached material for a flame long
smouldering in two duchies of the remote north, that had been incorporated
in Denmark by solemn European engagements in 1852, but were inhabited by a
population, one of them wholly and the other mainly, not Scandinavian but
German. Thus the same question of race, history, language, sentiment, that
had worked in Italy, Poland, the Balkan states, rose up in this miniature
case. The circumstances that brought that case into such fatal prominence
do not concern us here. The alleged wrongs of her brethren in
Schleswig-Holstein unchained such a tempest of excitement in central
Germany, that the German courts could hardly have resisted if they would.
Just as powerless was the Danish government in face of the Scandinavian
sentiment of its subjects and their neighbours of the race. Even the
liberals, then a power in Germany and Bismarck’s bitter foes, were
vehemently on the national side against the Danish claim; and one of the
most striking of all Bismarck’s feats was the skill with which he now used
his domestic enemies to further his own designs of national
aggrandisement. How war broke out between the small power and the two
great powers of Austria and Prussia, and how the small power was
ruthlessly crushed; by what infinite and complex machinations the
diplomacy of Europe found itself paralysed; how Prussia audaciously
possessed herself of territory that would give her a deep-water port, and
the head of a channel that would unite two great seas; how all this ended
in Prussia, “the Piedmont of the north,” doing what Cavour in his Piedmont
of the south had foretold that she would be glad to do; how at Sadowa
(July 3, 1866) Austria was driven out of her long hegemony, and Hanover
incorporated; and to what a train of amazing conflicts in western Europe,
to what unexpected victories, territorial change, dynastic ruin, this so
resistlessly led up—here is a narrative that belongs to the province of
history. Yet it has a place in any political biography of the Palmerston
administration.
In such an era of general confusion, the English cabinet found no powerful
or noble part to play. Still they went far—almost too far to
recede—towards embarking in a continental war on behalf of Denmark, that
would have been full of mischief to herself, of little profit to her
client, and could hardly have ended otherwise than in widespread disaster.
Here is one of the very few instances in which the public opinion of the
country at the eleventh hour reined back a warlike minister. Lord
Palmerston told the House of Commons in the summer of 1863 that, if any
violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights of Denmark or to
interfere with its independence and integrity, he was convinced that those
who made the attempt would find in the result that “it would not be
Denmark alone with which they would have to contend.”(87) This did indeed
sound like a compromising declaration of quite sufficient emphasis.
It seems, says Mr. Gladstone,(88) that this statement was
generally and not unnaturally interpreted as a promise of support
from England. Lord Palmerston does not seem to have added any
condition or reservation. Strange as it may appear, he had spoken
entirely of his own motion and without the authority or knowledge
of his cabinet, in which indeed, so far as my memory serves,
nothing had happened to render likely any declaration of any kind
on the subject. I have no means of knowing whether he spoke in
concert with the foreign secretary, Earl Russell, with whom his
communications, agreeably to policy and to established usage,
were, I believe, large and constant. When the question was
eventually disposed of by the war which Prussia and Austria waged
against Denmark, there was much indignation felt against England
for the breach of her engagement to give support in the case of
war, to the small power so egregiously in need of it. And there
was no one to raise a voice in our favour.
As the year advanced (1863) and the prospect of war came nearer,
the subject was very properly brought before the cabinet. I
believe that at the time I was not even aware of Lord Palmerston’s
declaration, which, owing to the exhausted period of the session,
had I believe attracted no great amount of attention in England.
Whether my colleagues generally were as little aware of what
happened as myself I do not know, but unquestionably we could not
all have missed learning it. However we did not as a body
recognise in any way the title of the prime minister to bind us to
go to war. We were, however, indignant at the conduct of the
German powers who, as we thought, were scheming piracy under cover
of pacific correspondence. And we agreed upon a very important
measure, in which Lord Palmerston acquiesced, when he had failed,
if I remember right, in inducing the cabinet to go farther. We
knew that France took the same view of the question as we did, and
we framed a communication to her to the following effect. We were
jointly to insist that the claim of the Duke of Augustenburg
should be peacefully settled on juridical grounds; and to announce
to Prussia and Austria that if they proceeded to prosecute it by
the use of force against Denmark, we would jointly resist them
with all our might.(89)
This communication was accordingly made to Louis Napoleon. He
declined the proposal. He said that the question was one of
immense importance to us, who had such vast interests involved,
and that the plan was reasonable from our point of view; but that
the matter was one of small moment for France, whom accordingly we
could not ask to join in it. The explanation of this answer, so
foolish in its terms, and so pregnant with consequences in this
matter, was, I believe, to be found in the pique of Louis Napoleon
at a reply we had then recently given to a proposal of his for an
European conference or congress.(90) We all thought that his plan
was wholly needless and would in all likelihood lead to mischief.
So we declined it in perfect good faith and without implying by
our refusal any difference of policy in the particular matter.
Throughout the session of 1864 the attention of the country was fixed upon
this question whether England should or should not take part in the war
between Germany and Denmark. The week before the time arrived for the
minister to announce the decision of the cabinet, it became clear that
public opinion in the great English centres would run decisively for
non-intervention. Some of the steadiest supporters of government in
parliament boldly told the party whips that if war against Germany were
proposed, they would vote against it. The cabinet met. Palmerston and Lord
Russell were for war, even though it would be war single-handed. Little
support came to them. The Queen was strongly against them. They bemoaned
to one another the timidity of their colleagues, and half-mournfully
contrasted the convenient ciphers that filled the cabinets of Pitt and
Peel, with the number of able men with independent opinions in their own
administration. The prime minister, as I have heard from one who was
present, held his head down while the talk proceeded, and then at last
looking up said in a neutral voice, “I think the cabinet is against war.”
Here is Mr. Gladstone’s record:—
_May 7, ’64._—Cabinet. The war “party” as it might be called—Lord
Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Stanley of Alderley, and the
chancellor (Lord Westbury). All went well. _June 11._—Cabinet.
Very stiff on the Danish question, but went well. _June
24._—Cabinet. A grave issue well discussed. _June 25._—Cabinet. We
divided, and came to a tolerable, not the best, conclusion.
It seems almost incredible that a cabinet of rational men could have
debated for ten minutes the question of going to war with Prussia and
Austria, when they knew that twenty thousand men were the largest force
that we could have put into the field when war began, though moderate
additions might have been made as time went on—not, however, without
hazardous denudation of India, where the memories of the mutiny were still
fresh. The Emperor of the French in fact had good reason for fearing that
he would be left in the lurch again, as he thought that he had been left
before in his attempts for Poland. Your intervention, he said to England,
will be naval; but we may have to fight a people of forty millions on
land, and we will not intervene unless you engage to send troops.(91) The
dismemberment of Denmark was thought an odious feat, but the localisation
of the war was at least a restriction of the evils attending it.
(M34) A high parliamentary debate followed (July 4) on a motion made by
Mr. Disraeli, “to express to Her Majesty our great regret that while the
course pursued by the government had failed to maintain their avowed
policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has
lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and
thereby diminished the securities for peace.”(92) Cobden taunted both
front benches pretty impartially with the equivocal and most dishonourable
position into which their policy had brought the country, by encouraging a
small power to fight two great ones and then straightway leaving her to
get out as best she might. The government was only saved by Palmerston’s
appeal to its financial triumphs—the very triumphs that he had himself
made most difficult to achieve. The appeal was irrelevant, but it was
decisive, and ministers escaped a condemnation by no means unmerited on
the special issue, by a majority of eighteen. The Manchester men agreed to
help in the result, because in Cobden’s words they were convinced that a
revolution had been at last wrought in the mischievous policy of incessant
intervention. Mr. Disraeli’s case was easy, but to propound an easy case
when its exposition demands much selection from voluminous blue-books is
often hard, and the orator was long and over-elaborate. The excitement of
an audience, aware all the time that actual danger hovered over the
ministry, revived afresh when Disraeli sat down and Gladstone rose. The
personal emulation of powerful rivals lends dramatic elements to
disputation. Lord Palmerston had written to Mr. Gladstone beforehand—“We
shall want a great gun to follow Disraeli. Would you be ready to follow
him?”
_July 3._—I was happy enough, aided by force of habit, to drive
bodily out of my head for the whole day everything Dano-German.
But not out of my nerves. I delivered during the night a speech in
parliament on the Roman question.
_July 4._—H. of C. Replied to Disraeli. It took an hour and
thirty-five minutes. I threw overboard all my heavy armament and
fought light.
Nobody who is not historian or biographer is likely to read this speech of
Mr. Gladstone’s to-day, but we may believe contemporary witnesses who
record that the orator’s weight of fact, his force of argument, his
sarcastic play of personal impulse and motive, his bold and energetic
refutation of hostile criticism, his defiant statement of the ministerial
case, so impressed even a sceptical and doubting House that, though his
string of special pleas did not amount to a justification, “they almost
reached the height of an excuse,” and they crushed the debate. The basis
was the familiar refrain upon Mr. Gladstone’s lips,—“The steps taken by
the government, what were they but endeavours to bind together the powers
of Europe for fulfilment and maintenance of an important European
engagement?” Still history, even of that sane and tempered school that is
content to take politics as often an affair of second-best, will probably
judge that Mr. Disraeli was not wrong when he said of the policy of this
era that, whether we looked to Russia, to Greece, to France, there had
been exhibited by ministers a confusion, an inconsistency of conduct, a
contrariety of courses with regard to the same powers and a total want of
system in their diplomacy.(93) It is true, however, that just the same
confusion, inconsistency, and contrariety marked Russia, France, and
Austria themselves. Another speaker of the same party, as mordant as
Disraeli, and destined like him to rise to the chief place in the councils
of the nation, went further, and said, in following Cobden in the debate,
“If Mr. Cobden had been foreign secretary, instead of Lord Russell, I
fully believe this country would occupy a position proud and noble
compared to that which she occupies at this moment. She would at least
have been entitled to the credit of holding out in the name of England no
hopes which she did not intend to fulfil, of entering into no engagements
from which she was ready to recede.”(94) Well might Mr. Gladstone enter in
his diary:—
_July 8._—This debate ought to be an epoch in foreign policy. We
have all much to learn. Lord Palmerston’s speech was unequivocally
weak in the mental and the bodily sense. I think it was to-day
that the Prince of Wales rode with Granville and me; he showed a
little Danism.