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From the Saturday Review, Dec. 23. OUR INTERNATIONAL SHORTCOMINGS.

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safe, is free from war; and if, now that the | cannot deny that this had the effect, to a decisive moment is come, the French decide great extent, of driving the American flag to stay, at all hazards, till their task is com- from the sea, and of transferring much of plete, and it becomes certain that the Amer- American shipping and American comicans will not interfere, the Mexicans will merce to the very Power whose subjects had gradually learn to accept a situation from created the necessity for such a change. which there is no escape. The Emperor NA- Lord Russell did, in a great measure, rest POLEON will be a bold man if he keeps his his defence on the ground that he had been troops in Mexico, for he is only protracting obliged in all the steps he took to consider an effort that may never yield any good re- our municipal law, and the interpretations sult; he will provoke the ceaseless disappro- which English judges and English tribunals bation of the Americans, and he will be ad- had put, or were likely to put, on that law. hering to the one act of his reign which Further, we refused arbitration, and proFrenchmen of all ranks and all parties pro- posed instead a Commission from the connounce to be a mistake. But he will also sideration of which the only matters in be a bold man if he withdraws his troops, which the Americans felt and publicly owns that he has been wrong, should be excluded. All this sounds very or gives his subjects reason to think that he bad, and even if we have a defence further has yielded to threats, and has conceded to than appears in the President's statement, fear of the Americans what he would not yet we must regret that the primâ facie case concede to a desire for the approbation of against us is so strong. For the proposal of a France. Commission there is, we conceive, no defence whatever. It was a pure diplomatic blunder. It was one of those illusory offers which are intended, not to facilitate negotiations, but to throw on the opposing party the onus of rejecting them. To the rest of the case there is a defence which in a great measure would, we hope, be considered by any impartial judge a good defence; but then it is a defence that cannot be put in the telling and concise way in which the accusation against us can be put. Lord Russell, being called on to act, examined how far he had power to act; and, seeing that we and the United States had substantially the same provisions in our municipal systems of law for dealing with such cases, acted in accordance with those provisions, and did exactly what the United States had done when a precisely similiar case arose during the war of Portugal with Brazil. Afterwards it was clear that these provisions were ineffectual; and then Lord RUSSELL, no longer taking our municipal law as the measure of our duty as a neutral, boldly invented and enforced a method of preventing the issue of Confederate armed cruisers which was quite illegal, but which was effectual, and satisfied practically the requirements of the Americans. This is substantially our defence.. We, in the first instance, did adopt our municipal law as the standard of our duty,. because, as it was our law, and as it also. had the sanction of being substantially identical with the municipal law of the United States, it might be reasonably supposed to be effectual for its object. When it failed, we no longer treated it as the measure of our duty, but invented a new

THAT part of the President's Message which refers to England, and to the measures taken by our Government with regard to Confederate cruisers, contains matter for the gravest and most serious reflection, and raises apprehensions to which it would be folly to close our eyes. The President brings a heavy charge against us, and the worst of it is that this charge is more easily stated than answered. After premising that the formal accordance of belligerent rights to the insurgent States was unprecedented, and has not been justified by the issue, and taking care not to allege that the declaration of blockade was not technically a warrant for the counterstep of according these belligerent rights, he goes on to say, what is quite true, that it was only through the action of England that the accordance of these rights made much difference. No one can deny that "British ships, manned by British subjects, and prepared for receiving British armaments, sailed from the ports of Great Britain to make war on American commerce, under the shelter of a commission from the insurgent States." It is also true that these ships, having once escaped from British ports, ever afterwards entered them in every part of the world, to refit, and so to renew their depredations. Further, we unfortunately THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1465.

system of action which enlarged the meas- of particular officials is not a matter on ure of our duty very considerably, and which foreign arbitrators can properly depractically answered its purpose. This cide. But it must be acknowledged that seems to us a good defence, and especially as against the Americans. They, like ourselves, know all the difficulties which beset the Governments of free States when they try to limit the operations of their subjects. They had, and still have, a municipal law for preventing similar damage to belligerents, which our recent experience proves to be ineffectual. They, like Englishmen, know how embarrassing it is for a Government to be called on to take cognizance of everything that happens along a vast line of coast peopled by an enterprising, self-reliant, unscrupulous population. They ought to judge us with all the indulgence which they would certainly have claimed for themselves had our positions been reversed, and had they been the neutrals and we the belligerents.

It is also very difficult to state, in a summary and telling way, the causes why we were justified in refusing arbitration. It seems so fair, so conciliatory, to say, as the PRESIDENT does, that the United States, finding great questions of international law involved in the matter, proposed, in the honest and sincere love of peace and goodwill, to refer the whole case to arbitration. Nor is it certain that an English Minister who had accepted arbitration would have done as wrong as Lord RUSSELL did who declined arbitration, and offered in lieu of it an illusory Commission. But if we are right in the main point-if we took our law as the measure of our duty only until we found it inefficacious, and if we had this excuse for taking it as such measure in the first instance, that the greatest of our sister maritime nations had estimated the measure of its duty in exactly the same way the only question to refer to arbitration in the case of the Alabama was whether we had fulfilled the measure of our duty by doing all that our law allowed us to do. Here arbitration could have been of little good. Admit that, in this first and experimental case, Lord RUSSELL had nothing to do but to lay the facts before the Law Officers, and act as they advised, the real question must then be whether Sir ROUNDELL PALMER looked up his papers fast enough; and as one of the few days during which the papers were before the Law Officers was a Sunday, the issue might turn on the question whether he could have been expected to stay away from church to get up the case of the Alabama. The diligence

this does not touch the question whether we could have referred to arbitration the issue as to our being entitled to consider our municipal law the measure of our duty, in the first instance; and Lord RUSSELL ought to have considered this point more closely, and argued it more fully, in his despatch to Mr ADAMS. All that, however, is past now. The opportunity for obtaining from an arbitration an interpretation of the duty of neutrals is gone by, if we could ever have availed ourselves of it; and it would be exceedingly satisfactory if we could see now any means of establishing such rules for the future as would relieve us, and every other maritime nation, from the dread of seeing commerce preyed on by such vessels as the Alabama. The best way, undoubtedly, would be to promote the assembling of a Maritime Congress, at which every danger to belligerents and neutrals from the escape of such cruisers should be discussed. But, after reading the PRESI DENT's Message, we have little hope that a Congress could be got to meet for their discussion. The line which the Americans are inclined to take is very obvious. They say that they do not want to dispute any more with us, or to quarrel or make claims; but they will wait till we are at war, and then we shall find out by our own experience what it is to suffer as they have suffered. And if the Americans will not help us to call a Congress, we may be sure that France will not. The Emperor has too keen a recollection of the slight which, as he thinks, we put on him by refusing the Congress which he proposed, to do for us what we declined to do for him.

England, therefore, if she acts at all, must act for herself and by herself. Of course, if she takes any measures for the security of commerce now which she did not take when the American war was going on, it will be said that she is acting from fear, and from a mere selfish desire to avert from herself the injuries she has entailed on others. The Americans would be certain to say this, and would give us to understand that our repentance came too late. But that may not be a sufficient reason for not doing all that we can to be in the right; and even if considerable caution must be used in devising and proposing any changes, it can never be amiss to consider what salutary changes we might effect. Many changes have been proposed that

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would not be at all salutary, and views have | weakly obstinate, and dictatorial man, has been propounded of our duty as neutrals succumbed to the intense feeling of racethat would, if adopted, place us at the hatred and race-suspicion which alienates mercy of any belligerent who might call on the white colonists of Jamaica from the deus to carry them into practice. But some scendants of their former slaves, it is only a changes, more or less effectual and benefi- remarkable illustration of the highly contacial, might be made. In the first place, as gious character of certain moral disorders our existing law does not express the meas- to which we are all liable. The close analure of our duty as neutrals, and as our ogies which exist between physical and morGovernment, in order to fulfil that meas- al organisms are really very remarkable. ure, was forced to defy and infringe our In both alike we find that the most hopeless law, we might profit by our experience, kinds of disease are seldom contagious, and bring our law up to the proper stand though not unfrequently hereditary; in both ard. We might give our Government the alike we find many of the most fatal dispower to deal with all vessels of war in con- eases, that is, of those which, though selstruction, as they dealt with Mr. LAIRD'S dom hopeless, attack and frequently destroy steam-rams. And, in the next place, it de- multitudes in a very short time, what our serves consideration whether we might not Registrar-General calls the zymotic class, — borrow a lesson from the PRESIDENT'S to be exceedingly temporary in their naremark that we greatly aggravated the in- ture, and if survived at all, scarcely likely jury caused by the escape of the Alabama to leave the constitution weaker for the atand her sister cruisers when we allowed tack. Cancer, consumption, scrofula, none them to come into British ports to refit. of them contagious, all of them slow in Need we do this for the future? The their approaches, all of them hereditary, Spanish Government, immediately on hear- resemble the mental diseases which arise ing of the war with Chili, announced that, if a Spanish vessel of war captured any ship bearing a Chilian commission, but which had not issued from a Chilian port, it would treat the crew as pirates, which is a confused and technical periphrasis for hanging them. The only reason why a belligerent should not take this course is that he lays himself open to reprisals; and the Chilians might reply that, if this were done, and a Chilian man-of-war ever captured a Spanish vessel, the whole of the captured crew should be hanged in retaliation. It is for the belligerent to decide whether he likes to take this risk. But a neutral might perhaps say that no vessel of war of either belligerent should enter any of the harbours of the neutral unless it had issued from the port of the belligerent having already been invested with a military character. All that the neutral would have to do would be to refuse shelter, and this he might do probably without accepting any burden of duty that he was not able to bear. The next time that a great war arises, if England is happily a neutral, it may be worth while that she should announce at the outset that this will be the principle by which she will be guided in the reception of belligerent

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from organic taints in the will, or what in some cases is equivalent, deficiency in healthy social impulse caused by predominance of will. No moral disorder is more hereditary than a consuming pride (closely allied to insanity), which we may call an isolating will-disease; it is pride in great measure which has sapped the strength of the Ottoman race and insulated it in a sort of lonely and fatalistic despair. Pride in its intensest forms may be called moral consumption, and is curiously allied with certain forms of unnatural cruelty, impurity, and sin, which may be called moral scrofula, disorders which so far from being infectious, destroy by their very tendency to evade that social influence which, once brought to bear on them, would extinguish them immediately. And yet no kinds of vices are more distinctly hereditary than these unnatural forms of cruelty, these secret vices of proud natures. Again, the contagious physical diseases which trouble children so much, and are usually dangerous only to youthful blood and overflowing vitality, usually diseases of the skin, have their analogue in the social vices which, though often of the same class as the unsocial, vices of cruelty, for instance, as between race and race, vices of profligacy which are so catching in Universities and any large associations of young men, have always in them something absolutely distinct in kind from the deeper, unsocial, more hopeless organic diseases which are hereditary, but not contagious. As a rule, we believe the conta

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gious mental diseases do not originate in the will, but in the sympathies and the social emotions, and only overpower the will through its weakness; while the deeperrooted organic diseases originate in the centre of our individuality—the will, and creep like a cancer thence to the more superficial portions of our nature.

But if this were true, then it would seem to follow that men of strong wills and weak social impulses would be less liable to moral contagion than men of weak will and strong social impulses; and almost all women, who though less generally social than men, are far more closely bound up with the few nearest and dearest to them than men themselves, would be more so. But how would this apply to the illustration of moral contagion with which we set out? Mr. Eyre is unquestionably a man in some sense of more than strong will, of irresistible obstinacy, and there is nothing to show that he is a man of strong social impulses; what is known of him seems rather to imply an insulated man. We believe the explanation in his case would prove that it is not so much his general liability to infection, as his liability to infection in this particular case, which has caused this fatal attack of the prevalent disease. We know that in the case of all infectious physical diseases there is something, extremely difficult to analyze, called predisposing causes. It is by no means universally true that mere delicacy is a predisposing cause. In one visitation of a great epidemic it has been remarked that all the weakly and sickly persons came off with no ill result, while the strongest and healthiest fell at the first touch. Again, at other times these diseases wither all the sickly plants at once, and leave the healthy ones comparatively uninjured. So it is with moral infections. There are not only generally predisposing causes to catching the contagion, such as strong social impulses, weak will, and an early education adapted to receive the poison instead of to repel it, but special predisposing causes, such as the tendency of the alarm, when it arises, to lend strength and justification to deep-seated currents of purpose already excited in the mind. So far as it is at present possible to judge, this would be Mr. Eyre's case. He was not a timid man, and not originally liable to the feeling of racehatred and caste-privilege. Had he been in Jamaica as a mere observer, as one of the people unidentified with any part in the political struggle which had been going on, he would probably have never taken the

infection of the anti-negro passion which has burst out there so violently, -nay, might have done much to stem the tide of impetuous feeling. But it seems that he had been engaged in a vehement political quarrel with the party commonly called the negro party in the Assembly, about many local matters of expenditure as well as general policy, and the naturally tenacious spirit of the man's purposes rendered him peculiarly open to the infection of any hostile feeling running directly against this party. We do not of course mean to imply that Mr. Eyre used a passion he did not share for his own purposes. That would be the most shocking of all wickednesses. The whole purport of our remarks is to show that he did catch the infection from a special predisposing cause, the ready and rapid conducting medium supplied to him by the intensity of his own indignation against the party which was resisting as he thought the wise and salutary exercise of his authority in the island. If you are already angry with anybody, you must be very impartial indeed not to believe far more easily what others have to say against him than you would do if no such anger had ever been excited. Mr. Eyre was certainly very angry with the Gordon party in the assembly before these troubles began and the planter panic broke out, and this anger was apparently the special predisposing cause which rendered him liable to an infection he would not otherwise have taken. It is nothing more than an individual illustration of the ordinary remark on the greater liability to be deceived by fallacious reasoning displayed by an audience who agree heartily with an orator's practical ends, than is displayed by an audience who are indifferent to the ends which he tries to promote, and judge his reasoning therefore simply by its reasonableness. Convoke an assembly to promote reform, or the abolition of slavery, or anything else, and the weakest arguments will excite even enthusiasm in an audience that goes heart and soul with the drift of the speaker, when they would excite contempt in those who are convinced that he is wrong. In precisely the same way the spread of a moral infection must depend very much on its finding a state of feeling identical in drift, though not in origin, with the state of feeling it would promote. This is of course the true reason of the highly contagious character of bad sentimental morality — in French novels or elsewhere. It is not the depth of the sentiment itself, but the high

ly conducting medium of the passions it| finds ready to its purpose, which renders so feeble a poison dangerous.

those

If, as we have ventured to suggest, the region of infectious diseases is usually the social emotions and sympathies which bind classes and nations together, and so propagate either false morality or false sentiment almost with as little free choice among the individuals as there is in the meal as to whether it shall or shall not be leavened by the yeast, then it would follow that the great disinfectant must be judgment,

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From the Spectator 30th Dec.

LES ETATS-UNIS PENDANT LA GUERRE.

Ir is a curious, to an Englishman an unpleasantly suggestive, fact that the best

work ever written on America should have

had a Frenchman for its author. Upon the absolute merits of De Tocqueville as a political observer opinions may differ, but there can be no question that on the whole his work is the ablest and most exhaustive which has yet been published concerning As a rule, French treatises on

America.

solitary that habit of mind which habit- American affairs have been infinitely fairer ually interposes a kind of minute capillary | and more impartial than those which have repulsion between the pressure of social in- proceeded from English authors. Yet it is fluences and the attitude of its own secret very hard to conceive at first how this should be the case. thought, which clears a space, as it were, We all know by like a juggler with his balls in a crowd, round experience how difficult, if not impossithe will, into which it will not admit the presble, it is for a Frenchman really to undersure of social influences till it has given its stand English character, or institutions, or sanction to their tendency. Such a habit politics; and it is not easy to see how the of mind would really operate to save so- mere fact of crossing the Atlantic should ciety from false corporate judgments, much give a Frenchman an appreciation of the as the cellular system of building iron ves- Anglo-Saxon nature of which he is uttersels operates to save a ship from the disas-ly devoid in the Old World of Europe. trous effects of leakage. As it is, when a There is a story told of Kant, that on his moral accident happens to the social nature of influential persons in any closely organizedsociety the bad results are never isolated, and sometimes extend so rapidly that the whole ship founders. But if the ship is built of non-communicating cells, one cell may

death-bed he said: —

cannot understand it. If English writers

"Nobody can explain my philosophy except Hegel, and he cannot understand it." In much the same way we should say that nobody but Englishmen can explain America, and that they about the model Republic could ever realfill and all the others remain as water-tight as before. It is true, as we have admitted, that ize the simple fact that Americans are the worst social vices, even social cruelty and vices, strength and weakness, energies Englishmen, with all our national virtues and impurity, are seldom so utterly destructive of the soul as the organic tenden- and failings, differing from us only in the cies to disease originating in a perverted would be able to understand America in different conditions of their lives, they will, which, though often hereditary, are never very contagious. Yet a French or a way no foreigner, or certainly no FrenchJamaica reign of terror destroys the souls man, can ever hope to do. As, however, as well as bodies of multitudes, and steels no amount of experience or observation by cruel wrongs the souls of multitudes ever seems able to persuade Englishmen of whom it does not destroy. A perverted this patent fact, they never can give any

and evil enthusiasm is as terrible a force as

estimate of America which does not err on

one side or the other. Owing to this fact French writers on American subjects have a great advantage over English ones. They do not see as much as the latter, but what

any which does not imply absolutely the constutitional exhaustion of a great community. Nor are men less in need of the disinfectant we have mentioned who apparently, like Mr. Eyre, are not naturally liable they do see they see it in its natural light. to be affected vehemently by social influ- The minor differences of customs and manences, if they permit special conductors, such as political hostility, to open the gates of their minds to besieging influences which, acting alone, would have had no chance of triumph.

ners which strike Englishmen so much are not perceptible to foreign observers. To a writer like Mr. Russell, or Mr. Sala, or

Les Etats-Unis pendant la Guerre. By Auguste Laugel. Paris: Baillière.

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