[27] See the remarkable articles, based on unpublished documents by M. Hanotaux, in the Revue des deux Mondes, Sept. 15th and Oct. 1st, 1908, on “Le Congrès de Berlin.”
[28] “No man ever had a more effective manner of asseverating, or made promises with more solemn protestations, or observed them less,” Il Principe, Cap. 18.
[29] Cf. Lord Ampthill’s despatch (Aug. 25th, 1884). “He has discovered an unexplored mine of popularity in starting a colonial policy which public opinion persuades itself to be anti-English, and the slumbering theoretical envy of the Germans at our wealth and our freedom has taken the form of abuse of everything English in the Press.”—Fitzmaurice’s Granville, II, 358.
[30] For a careful examination of the story see Fitzmaurice, II, 234 and 429.
[31] There is a spirited, but not altogether convincing, vindication of Ferry in Rambaud’s Jules Ferry, p. 395. It is not Ferry’s honesty that is in question, but his perspicacity.
[32] Its profound reactions have been worked out by the hand of a master in Sorel’s L’Europe et la Révolution française, and, in particular, in his La Question d’Orient, which is a searching analysis of these tortuous intrigues.
[33] Cf. Bismarck’s Erinnerungen (the chapter on the Alvensleben Convention): “It was our interest to oppose the party in the Russian Cabinet which had Polish proclivities ... because a Polish-Russian policy was calculated to vitalize that Russo-French sympathy against which Prussia’s effort had been directed since the peace of Paris.”
[34] Life of Lord Lytton, II, pp. 260 seq. On the whole story see Hohenlohe passim; also Hanotaux, Vol. III, ch. iv; de Broglie’s Gontaut-Biron and Fitzmaurice’s Granville. The cheerfully malevolent Busch is also sometimes illuminating.
[35] It was on this occasion that, according to Hanotaux, quoting from a private document of the Duc Decazes, Lord Odo Russell reported an interview with Bismarck, in which the latter said he wanted “to finish France off.”
[36] Cf. Albert Sorel: “La diplomatie est l’expression des moeurs politiques”; and cf. his remarkable essay, “La Diplomatie et le progrés,” in Essais d’histoire et de critique.