Waterloo brought England into new relations with the nations of
Europe. The Congress of Vienna, in which the victors endeavored
to restore the damage wrought by the Corsican intruder, added
Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and a few less important
islands, to the growing colonial empire of Great Britain. The
Holy Alliance, which had been suggested by the Czar in 1815, at
the friendly meeting of the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian
sovereigns at Paris, was in theory a compact between these
powerful rulers--"an intimate union on the basis of morality and
religion"--but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the
mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the
dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir
again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter
had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to
opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress,
and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all
constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism
upon limbs that had once known the bliss of freedom, led to
fierce intellectual revolt, and sometimes to physical violence.
England had made common cause with Turk and Christian, Kaiser and
King, against Napoleon, and for a time her statesmen viewed with
complacency the Holy Alliance, so reassuring in its name and so
pure in its professions; but when it became evident that this
mighty league was to be thrown against every liberty-loving
people in the Old World and the New, George Canning broke the
irksome bond, and put the land of parliaments and constitutional
liberty in its rightful place as the friend of freedom and the
foe to the oppressor. It was the spirit if not the voice of
Canning which was powerful to save Portugal from the Bourbon, to
recognize the independence of the revolted American colonies of
Spain, and to restrain the enemies of freedom from handing
insurgent Greece back to the Turk. His predecessors had been
accustomed to sink the interests and desires of England in regard
for what the continental power called "the good of Europe." He
was the first statesman of his generation who dared to take an
independent position on "European" questions--"to write
'England,'" as he phrased it, "where it had been the custom to
write 'Europe.'" The policy which he inaugurated marks a turning-
point in the history of British foreign affairs.