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Cronstadt on a grander scale, a repetition of the never-to-be-forgotten days 01 the Parisian week. Truly, quite enough; first, because after all there is something heart-moving in the meeting of the representatives of two great States; and then because some things, when they are deliberately reiterated, gain a new significance and a larger import.

However, it is not my purpose to expatiate here once more on the rancoRussian friendship. Let it be sufficient for me to point out that the mere efflux of time is giving the lie to the prophets of misfortune, that years go by and that the unnatural coupling does not seem to slacken, and that, even among the upheaval and the earthshakings of an Eastern crisis, that alliance has kept solidly enough its ground. We may foresee with some degree of confidence that the personal intercourse of the heads of the two States will yet more strengthen it, and that the mob, always easy to be moved and enthused, on the banks of the Neva as well as of the Thames or the Seine, will give to the president of the French Republic a reception nearly as warm as that the czar had last year in Paris. All that is very well, but what I want to show is how this tightening closer of the bonds of the Franco-Russian entente offers a new occasion for the drawing nearer of England. suredly it is not a mere fancy to find some analogy between the feelings recently ripened and brought to a head in England by the Jubilee and those Russia is accustomed to entertain. The two States are two, or rather are the two, great world-empires. While Britain has got her possessions disseminated over the whole surface of the globe, a magnificent estate on which the sun never sets, Russia, herself disproportionately distended, holds in a lump, attached to her side, her immense Siberian domain. England is queen of the seas, and has scattered down her colonies on the whole extent of the ocean. Russia is wedded to the land, continental to the core, and hems only the fringe of her garment with the

As

foam of billows. England is the free mother, or perhaps only the eldest-born sister, of free daughters or of equal sisters; Russia, herself held in the hollow of the hand of an all-powerful autocrat, has no liberal institutions, no selfgovernment for her most distant dependencies.

With all these differences, who does not feel the strange similarity of circumstances? Empire is fate, and England as well as Russia is more and more every day urged on, led away, carried away by the weight of dependencies. For both countries the problems of international politics are more and more stated in terms of empire. For both the great question is to live up to a great future without compromising the present or repudiating the conquests of the past. Both are struggling with this new power, Imperialism in England, Panslavism in Russia, which threatens to enslave or to embroil them. It would be foolish to close the eyes to the dangerous consequences involved in the advent of these new forces. They make undoubtedly, to some extent, for discord and war.

However, one thing is reassuring. There is no fatal antagonism, no preordained hostility between the two world-empires. On the contrary, each one of them has its appointed sphere and element. A rivalry between them would be madness. Long ago, a clearminded statesman ridiculed the very idea of a duel between the whale and the bear. In fact, there is only one ground-I do not say where such a struggle is natural, but where it is possible. India has always been looked on, either at Petersburg or at London, as the appointed theatre of a great Russo-English war. It remains to be seen if really it would be so very easy to gain access to this mountain-encircled peninsula. In any case India is, at the utmost, the possible ground; it will never become the legitimate cause of a war. There is no germ of a conflict in the possession of those three hundred millions of subjects. But then, where are, just now, these latent antagonisms, these causes of mutual suspicions,

which have so long embittered the relations of the two countries, and which yet prevent their cordial understanding?

III.

Everybody-the first man in the street-will tell you. 'Tis all in this blessed word-not Mesopotamia-but the Eastern question. Not to go farther off, since the Crimean war there has been a settled attitude of diffidence and hostility between the two nations. What is strangest of all is that the two countries have accomplished a complete reversal of their Eastern politics, they have made a true chassé-croisé, they are now occupying each one just the position the other occupied twenty years ago, and was denounced roundly for occupying it-and yet they do not seem any the nearer a sincere reconciliation!

There was a time when the shibboleth of English diplomacy, the Alpha and Omega of wisdom and statesmanship in Eastern matters, was that old, battered formula, the integrity and the independence of the Ottoman Empire. This was the time when Russia, always on the alert, always wide awake in order to fall upon Turkey, favored by all means, foul and fair, the progress of the dismemberment of the Empire, promoted the formation and the emancipation of new vassal States, and looked fixedly on the dome of St. Sophia as on the landmark of her forward march. To-day we see England indignant because Lord Salisbury has not gone out alone to war with Turkey, and because he makes to the other powers, in the first rank of which is Russia, the sacrifice of postponing the liquidation of the estate of the Sick Man. Russia, who has made at Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Athens too, the experiment of that freedom of heart which is the only form of thankfulness practised between nations, is become the guardian, the friend, perhaps the residuary legatee, of the Padishah. So it has come to pass that in this queer exchange of policies, the two governments have literally taken one

the place of the other, and, none the less, they continue to look on each other with a supreme, incurable diffidence.

Such a misunderstanding is not to remain forever, even if the present healthy habit of working in some kind of concert does not make away in the long run with such prepossessions. It is impossible for right-minded people to keep things upside down forever. After all, England has no sufficient reason to suspect Russia because Russia is gradually coming to something like the point of view of England ten years ago, and vice versa. And what is more, both countries, if you look under the surface, are not so very distant the one from the other. Granted that England feels herself more or less coerced by her conscience to try to hasten the liberation of the Christian nationalities in Turkey, she does not at all want the immediate disruption of the Ottoman Empire with all it involves. Suppose Russia as very much wedded as you can fancy to the new method of guardianship and supremacy in Turkey; you are not authorized to impute to her the wicked resolution to prevent the gradual emancipation of the vassal races in the East.

almost completely

In fact, when you look to the results of a half century of history, what do you see? That famous conversation between the Czar Nicolas and Sir Hamilton Seymour is realized by events. We could easily fancy the Crimean war a figment of Mr. Kinglake. It has not changed an iota in the state of the world-I mean of the Eastern world. If the allied armies had not fought and bled and suffered the horrors of the great winter before Sebastopol, things would be exactly the same except for the unhappy victims who fell on the battlefields of the Crimea with the proud illusion that they kept back the grandsons of Peter the Great on their way to the Bosphorus! Such a lesson must be taken to heart. What a warning, too, in the memory of 1877, when Lord Beaconsfield was nearly letting loose a great war in order to maintain the in

tegrity of Turkey, snatched away from victorious Russia a part of her spoils, and put back under the yoke of the sultan eastern Roumelia, fated to be freed eight years later with the concurrence of Great Britain, and a part of Armenia, condemned to become the cockpit of Turkish homicidal fury!

When a nation-a just, generous, conscientious nation-has such a record, when she remembers years and years of unhallowed quarrels against Russia on behalf of the unspeakable Turk, she may very well pause before throwing herself into a new struggle with her ancient rival on account of a total reversal of sides. A little thought, a little sincerity, a little disinterestedness are amply sufficient to show that, within bounds, England and Russia are getting on the same ground; that the one has forsworn her foolish Turcomania and the prejudices of Stratford de Redcliffe, while the other has given up the brutal simplicity of the method of conquest and dismemberment; and that both have never been more ready for an agreement. It would be superfluous to lay stress on the supreme gravity of the moment; everybody knows that, now or never, the Concert of Europe is to solve peacefully the Eastern question, and that, if it fails, as seems too possible, it will have tolled the knell of many things besides the peace of eastern Europe. Every body feels more or less darkly that England and Russia have perhaps more than any other two powers the ball at their feet, and that it rests chiefly with them to make the European Concert a byword and a mockery, or to initiate with its first work a fair era of goodwill and progress among the nations.

IV.

It is a popular saying that empires, exactly the same as private individuals, are drawn close together by common ill-wills or enmities as much as or even more than by common friendships. Nothing is less in my mind than to lay a gross, misleading emphasis on facts of which the true import dwells chiefly in delicate shades. It would be

a notorious exaggeration to speak of the antagonism of Russia and Germany just at the time when William the Second, notwithstanding the rope which so inopportunely whipped his eye, is going in state to return to Nicolas the Second his visit of last year. However, we have only to read the Bismarckian press in Germany to measure the extent of the cooling between the two nations since the time when the old chancellor knew how to bind Russia to his system, while chaining Austria to the wheels of his triumphal car. Between the two great neighboring emperors there is a mutual diffidence, a growing coldness, a little tempered down by the long habit of dynastic intimacy, but ready to go down to the freezing point under the blighting influence of temper and psychological peculiarities. The relations of Russia and Germany have known hitherto three distinct phases: first, the honeymoon of the Drei-Kaiser alliance; then the scarcely less idyllic period of the double ménage, when Bismarck, that Don Juan, supplemented the lawful homely bonds of Austrian matrimony by a regular flirt with Petersburg; now the half-veiled bitterness of the Franco-Russian understanding.

During all this time, England, faithful to the Palmerstonian system, has remained-or, ought we to say has fancied she remained?-outside any international connection in her splendid isolation. The Cabinet of St. James's professes a perfect hate for Continental encumbrances and eventual engagements. Lord Derby as well as Lord Granville, Lord Rosebery or Lord Kimberley as well as Lord Salisbury, have remained shy before the seducements of the Western States. They have seen the Triple Alliance rise, grow, become the all-spreading upas-tree of Europe, lose something of its glory and begin to scatter some of its leaves. They have seen France and Russia, conscious of their loneliness, stretch out their hands and mutually seize them. It was a very flattering prospect to remain free, equally distant from both systems, with a perfect right to con

sort, according to the wants of the day, with the one or the other. Only it was -it is a dream.

At first, perhaps, England was able to keep aloof, to drive back successfully the advances of the leading partners in the other firms. Just now things have altered. Germany, or rather, since Germany is bodily in a man, William the Second, seems to pursue towards England the policy of a disappointed lover. Nobody has forgotten the sudden flash of his telegram to President Kruger. Since that time there have been hot and cold fits. The official and officious press of the Fatherland has been sometimes unduly hostile, sometimes threateningly friendly, nearly always coarse and uncourteous. It has been more and more obvious that Germany-or at any rate her imperial master-feels that the drift of the fates, between both countries, makes more and more for a rivalry, evidently not to be decided without the arbitrament of arms. The greatness of the British Empire, as set off by the Jubilee, importunes and plagues to death the soul of the modern Cæsar. He, too, wants a world-wide empire. He, too, wants a navy such as that which made such a splendid appearance in the roads of Portsmouth. He wants colonies. He wants a Germany beyond the sea as there is a Britain beyond the sea. Such day-dreams fill his mind. Even his internal policy is for the largest part determined by those loose, grand projects. When a statesman agrees to help or to pretend to help these undertakings, he may have been in his youth a Social Democrat, and in his ripeness that more hateful politician, a Liberal; he becomes, as Herr von Miquel, the favorite coadjutor, the chosen minister of William the Second. When, on the contrary, he shows some coldness, some diffidence, he is immediately out of favor, as the Prince of Hohenlohe.

All that must give some food for reflection to the minds of English statesmen or publicists. If it is true that between Germany and Britain the final struggle is but a matter of time; if be

tween the two countries, notwithstanding the relations of blood and the dynastical bonds, good observers discern something not very different from the state of mind in France and Prussia during the four years which separated Sadowa from Sedan, it is evident that every lover of his country will look with new eyes on the question, no longer a merely theoretical one, of the alliances of England. Where is the man who, following with some care the slow development of the Eastern crisis, and the cumbrous working of that heavy machine, the European Concert, has not noted that the two poles were occupied by Germany and England; that, notwithstanding sweet words and polite forms, there was no love lost between their public men and their diplomats; no agreement-not even always the agreement to differ peaceably-between their leading statesmen, ministers, or sovereigns, and that, in fact, without the constant, well-meaning mediation of third parties, they would have left the common ground and taken each her own path? If such is the case when Europe is resolved to remain at one and to astonish the world by her unanimity, it is easy to guess what will be the state of things at the first encounter of a new difficulty.

My readers have perhaps noted with some surprise that, hitherto, I have carefully abstained from mixing up France with that question of the English alliances. In truth, as I have already had occasion to speak my mind in this review on the relations of France and England, I have purposely tried to look at this problem on every side but the French one. It seems to me that if the suitableness and, much more, the necessity of a Russo-English entente were made good to the satisfaction of the public mind, there would be much less difficulty in trying the same demonstration with France. After all, in this case, "the movement has been proved by walking:" a cordiale entente between Waterloo and Sedan has been one of the facts of modern history. Such a precedent is not wholly to be disdained.

I know it is the custom to look down upon the period when the Peels, the Aberdeens, the Russells, the Derbys and the Palmerstons held out their hands loyally and had them locked in the peaceful grasp of the Molé, the Thiers, the Guizot, the Drouyn de Lhuys and the Walewski themselves. However, we must not forget that it was the time when our fathers did great things without boasting, knew how to unite freedom and empire without attitudinizing imperially, and how to lead Europe in the path of progress. Doubtless, the thing is no more, and there must have been a cause for the change. But let us for the present only remember that a Franco-English friendship has been possible and that both countries have not exactly had to lament its fostering. If there is nothing to prevent a mutual understanding between Russia and England, what should hinder France from making a third in the arrangement? It is only necessary for those who in England dream such perfectly reasonable dreams not to forget that it is absolutely of no avail to try a flirtation with Russia without France. The coupling of France and Russia is one of the few steady, fixed points of the present state of things. Subject to this there is nothing at all against the attempt of an entente à trois. In fact, I dare to say the true inwardness of the Franco-Russian friendship makes such a completion necessary.

At first, perhaps, it was possible to mistake more or less unwillingly the real character of that understanding, and to see in it a kind of war-engine. One of the weaknesses of this contrivance was that, even amongst its best friends, it was erroneously taken for an instrument of revenge. Time and experience have made away with this mistake. It has been more and more obviously proved that the Franco-Russian alliance is an alliance, not of war, but of peace; not of revenge, but of equilibrium; that its end is to make Europe again a reality, to give a counterpoise to the too preponderating power of Germany and her confeder

It

ates; to put the security of the world on a broader and steadier basis than the good-will of a leading potentate. That such is the object of the FrancoRussian alliance has been sufficiently removed from doubt by its results. is a fact that, during the last three years, while the Eastern crisis unfolded its interminable coils, France and Russia have been by their mutual understanding, by their spirit of conciliation, the true honest brokers of the European Concert. France, after all, in so doing, is acting in strict conformity to her genius, to her interests, and to her history. In the East, she has always known how to be the friend of the Turk and the guardian of the Christians. She wants the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, insomuch as it means the absolute exclusion of all egoistical and untimely attempts on the estate of the Sick Man, something like a self-denying ordinance. At the same time, she has no other wish than the gradual enfranchisement of the Christian nationalities, the constitution of native States subject only to the preservation of the peace. Everywhere she is animated by such feelings.

Truly, it cannot be very difficult to find a way to the good-will of a nation so chastened by the lessons of misfortune. Of course there are on the broad surface of the earth many points where the interests of England and France nay clash. I make bold, however, to say that not even in Egypt are these divergencies above the reach of a wellmeaning diplomacy. The hour is come to look in the face all these small difficulties and to make a choice between two ways. I have tried to show the drift of events between Germany and England, the gradual estrangement, the nearly unavoidable conflict of the future. I must not pass in silence over the counterpart of this antagonism; I mean the so striking, so oft-renewed, so newly emphasized advances and offers of good-will the German emperor is making all the while to France.

Nobody ignores the immense, the nearly insuperable difficulty which pre

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