IV.
Where shall we find a nobler tone of statesmanlike philosophy than in the following condemnation of that policy which attached Genoa to Piedmont[91]—a condemnation not the less remarkable for the orator’s not unskilful attempt to connect his former opposition to the French Revolution with the war he was then waging against the Holy Alliance?
“One of the grand and patent errors of the French Revolution was the fatal opinion, that it was possible for human skill to make a government. It was an error too generally prevalent not to be excusable. The American Revolution had given it a fallacious semblance of support, though no event in history more clearly showed its falsehood. The system of laws and the frame of society in North America remained after the Revolution, and remain to this day, fundamentally the same as they ever were.[92] The change in America, like the change in 1688, was made in defence of legal right, not in pursuit of political improvement; and it was limited by the necessity of defence which produced it. The whole internal order remained, which had always been Republican. The somewhat slender tie which loosely joined these Republics to a monarchy, was easily and without violence divided. But the error of the French Revolutionists was, in 1789, the error of Europe. From that error we have been long reclaimed by fatal experience.
“We now see, or rather we have seen and felt, that a government is not like a machine or a building, the work of man; that it is the work of nature, like the nobler productions of the vegetable or animal world, which man may improve and corrupt, and even destroy, but which he cannot create. We have long learned to despise the ignorance or the hypocrisy of those who speak of giving a free constitution to a people, and to exclaim, with a great living poet:
‘A gift of that which never can be given
By all the blended powers of earth and heaven!’
“Indeed, we have gone, perhaps as usual, too near to the opposite error, and not made sufficient allowances for those dreadful cases, which I must call desperate, where, in long-enslaved countries, it is necessary either humbly and cautiously to lay foundations from which liberty may slowly rise, or acquiesce in the doom of perpetual bondage on ourselves and our children.
“But though we no longer dream of making governments, the confederacy of kings seem to feel no doubt of their own power to make a nation. A government cannot be made, because its whole spirit and principles spring from the character of the nation. There would be no difficulty in framing a government, if the habits of a people could be changed by a lawgiver; if he could obliterate their recollections, transform their attachment and reverence, extinguish their animosities and correct those sentiments which, being at variance with his opinions of public interest, he calls prejudices. Now this is precisely the power which our statesmen at Vienna have arrogated to themselves. They not only form nations, but they compose them of elements apparently the most irreconcilable. They made one nation out of Norway and Sweden; they tried to make another out of Prussia and Saxony. They have, in the present case, forced together Piedmont and Genoa to form a nation which is to guard the avenues of Italy, and to be one of the main securities of Europe against universal monarchy.
“It was not the pretension of the ancient system to form states, to divide territory according to speculations of military convenience.
“The great statesmen of former times did not speak of their measures as the noble lord (Lord Castlereagh) did about the incorporation of Belgium with Holland (about which I say nothing), as a great improvement in the system of Europe. That is the language of those who revolutionize that system by a partition like that of Poland, by the establishment of the Federation of the Rhine at Paris, or by the creation of new states at Vienna. The ancient principle was to preserve all those States which had been founded by Time and Nature, the character of which was often maintained, and the nationality of which was sometimes created by the very irregularities of frontier and inequalities of strength, of which a shallow policy complains; to preserve all such States down to the smallest, first by their own national spirit, and secondly by that mutual jealousy which makes every great power the opponent of the dangerous ambition of every other; to preserve nations, living bodies, produced by the hand of Nature—not to form artificial dead machines, called nations, by the words and parchment of a diplomatic act—was the ancient system of our wiser forefathers, &c. &c.…”