Before the Eastern questions were settled, other complications commenced in Western Europe. Belgium, restless from the French Revolution of 1830, rose against the House of Orange and claimed independence. Civil war ensued; but the great powers promptly intervened, even to the extent of arresting a Dutch army on its march. Beginning with armistice, there was a long and fine-spun negotiation, which, assuming the guise alternately of pacific mediation and of armed intervention, ended in the established separation of Belgium from Holland, and its recognition as an independent nation. Do you ask why Great Britain intervened on this occasion? Lord John Russell, in the course of debate at a subsequent day, declared that a special motive was “the establishment of a free constitution.”[72] Meanwhile the Peninsula of Spain and Portugal was torn by civil war. The regents of these two kingdoms respectively appealed to Great Britain and France for aid, especially in the expulsion of the pretender Don Carlos from Spain and the pretender Dom Miguel from Portugal. For this purpose the Quadruple Alliance was formed in 1834. The moral support from this treaty is said to have been important, but Great Britain was compelled to provide troops. This intervention, however, was at the solicitation of the actual Governments. Even after Spanish troubles were settled, war still lingered in the sister kingdom, when, in 1847, the Queen addressed herself to her allies, among whom was Great Britain, the ancient patron of Portugal, who undertook to mediate between her and her insurgent subjects, in the declared hope of composing the difficulties “in a just and permanent manner, with all due regard to the dignity of the crown on the one hand, and to the constitutional liberties of the nation on the other.”[73] The insurgents did not submit until after military demonstrations. Liberty and Peace were the two watchwords.
Then occurred the European uprising of 1848, with France once more a Republic; but Europe, wiser grown, did not interfere even so much as to write a letter. The case was different with Hungary, whose victorious armies, radiant with Liberty regained, expelled the Austrian power only to be arrested by the armed intervention of the Russian Czar, who yielded to the double pressure of invitation from Austria and fear that successful insurrection might extend into Poland. It was left for France, in another country, with strange inconsistency, to play the part which Russia played in Hungary. Rome, after rising against the temporal power of the Pope and proclaiming the Republic, was occupied by a French army, which expelled the republican magistrates, and, though fourteen years are already passed since that unhappy act, the occupation still continues. From this military intervention Great Britain stands aloof. In a despatch, dated at London, January 28, 1849, Lord Palmerston makes a permanent record, to the honor of his country, as follows: “Her Majesty’s Government would, upon every account, and not only upon abstract principle, but with reference to the general interests of Europe, and from the value which they attach to the maintenance of peace, sincerely deprecate any attempt to settle the differences between the Pope and his subjects by the military interference of foreign powers.”[74] This statesman gives further point to the position of Great Britain in contrast with France, when he says: “Armed intervention to assist in retaining a bad Government would be unjustifiable.”[75] Such was the declaration of the Lord Palmerston of that day. How much more unjustifiable the strange assistance now proposed to found a bad Government! The British minister insisted that the differences should be accommodated by “the diplomatic interposition of friendly powers,” which he declared a “much better mode of settlement than an authoritative imposition of terms by the force of foreign arms.”[76] In harmony with this policy, Great Britain, during the same year, united with France in proffering mediation between the insurgent Sicilians and the King of Naples, the notorious Bomba, in the hope of helping good government and liberal principles. Not disheartened by rebuff, these two powers, in 1856, united in friendly remonstrance to the same tyrannical sovereign against the harsh system of political arrests, and against his cruelty to good citizens thrust without trial into the worst of prisons. The advice was indignantly rejected, and the two powers that gave it withdrew their ministers from Naples. The sympathy of Russia was on the wrong side, and Prince Gortschakoff, in a circular, while admitting, that, “as a consequence of friendly fore-thought, one Government might give advice to another,” declared, that “to endeavor by threats or a menacing demonstration to obtain from the King of Naples concessions in the internal affairs of his Government is a violent usurpation of his authority, and an open declaration of the right of the strong over the weak.”[77] This was practically answered by Lord Clarendon, speaking for Great Britain at the Congress of Paris, when, admitting the principle that no Government has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, he declares that there are cases where an exception to this rule becomes equally a right and a duty; that peace must not be broken, but that there is no peace without justice; and that therefore the Congress must let the King of Naples know its desire for the amelioration of his Government, and must demand amnesty for political offenders suffering without trial.[78] This language was bold beyond the practice of diplomacy, but the intervention it proposed was on the side of humanity.
I must draw this chapter to a close, although the long list is not yet exhausted. Even while I speak, we hear of intervention by England and France in the civil war between the Emperor of China and his subjects,—and also in that other war between the Emperor of Russia on the one side and the Poles whom he claims as subjects on the other, but with this difference, that in China these powers take the part of the existing Government, while in Poland they intervene against the existing Government. In the face of positive declarations of neutrality, the British and French admirals have united their forces with the Chinese; but thus far in Poland, although there is no declaration of neutrality, the intervention is unarmed. In both these instances we witness a common tendency, directed, it may be, by the interests or prejudices of the time, and, so far as it has proceeded, it is, at least in Poland, on the side of liberal institutions. But, alas for human consistency! the French Emperor is now intervening in Mexico with armies and navies to build an imperial throne for an Austrian Archduke.
There is one long-continued British intervention, which speaks now with controlling power; and it is on this account that I reserve it for the close of what I have to say on this head. Though not without original shades of dark, it has for more than half a century been a shining example to the civilized world. I refer to that intervention against Slavery, which, from its first adoption, has been so constant and brilliant as to make us forget the earlier intervention in behalf of Slavery, when, for instance, at the Peace of Utrecht, Great Britain intervened to extort the detestable privilege of supplying slaves to Spanish America at the rate of four thousand eight hundred yearly during the space of thirty years, and then again, at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, higgled for a yet longer sanction of the ignoble intervention; nay, it almost makes us forget the kindred intervention, at once sordid and criminal, by which this power counteracted all efforts for the prohibition of the slave-trade even in its own colonies, and thus helped to fasten Slavery upon Virginia and Carolina. The abolition of the slave-trade by Act of Parliament, in 1807, was the signal for a change of history. A British poet at the time gave exulting expression to the grandeur of the epoch:—
“‘Thy chains are broken, Africa, be free!’
Thus saith the island-empress of the sea;
Thus saith Britannia. O ye winds and waves,
Waft the glad tidings to the land of slaves!”[79]