Far less does the independence of the church, or her non-dependence on the political order and its variations, imply that politics, as is but too often assumed, are independent of the moral law of God, and therefore that statesman, civil magistrates, and rulers are under no obligation to consult in their acts what is right, just, or conformable to the law of the Lord, but only what seems to them expedient, or for their own interest. All sound politics are based on principles derived from theology, the great catholic or universal and invariable principles which govern man's relation to his Maker and to his neighbor, and of which, while the state is indeed in the temporal order the administrator, the church is the divinely instituted guardian and teacher. No Christian, no man who believes in God, can assert political independence of the divine or spiritual order, for that would be simply political atheism; and if men sometimes do assert it without meaning to deny the existence and authority of God in the spiritual order, it is because men can be and sometimes are illogical, and inconsistent with themselves. Kings, kaisers, magistrates, are as much bound to obey God, to be just, to do right, as are private individuals, and in their official no less than in their private acts.
The first question to be asked in relation to any political measure is. Is it morally right? The second, Are the means chosen for carrying it out just? If not, it must not be adopted. But, and this is important, it is the prerogative of God to overrule the evil men do, and to make it result in good. "Ye meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." Hence when things are done and cannot be recalled, though not before, we may lawfully accept them, and labor to turn them to the best possible account, without acquitting or approving them, or the motives and conduct of the men who have been in the hands of Providence the instruments of doing them. Hence there are two points of view from which political events may be considered: the moral—the motives and conduct of those who have brought them about; and the political—or the bearing of the events themselves, regarded as facts accomplished and irrevocable, on the future welfare of society.
If we judge the recent territorial changes in Italy and Germany from the moral point of view, we cannot acquit them. The means by which the unity of Italy has been effected under the house of Savoy, and those by which [{218}] that of Germany has been placed in the way of being effected under the house of Hohenzollern, it seems to me are wholly indefensible. The war of France and Sardinia against Austria in 1859, the annexation to Sardinia of the Duchies, and the AEmilian provinces subject to the Holy See, the absorption by force of arms of the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the still more recent war of Italy and Prussia against the same power, resulting in the mutilation and humiliation of the Austrian empire, and possibly in depriving the pope the remainder of his domain, are, I must hold in every sense unjustifiable. They have been done in violation of international law, public right, and are an outrage upon every man's innate sense of justice, excusable only on that most detestable of all maxims—the end sanctifies the means.
But regarded from the political point of view, as facts accomplished and irrevocable, perhaps they are not indefensible, nay, not unlikely under divine Providence to prove of lasting benefit to European society. I cannot defend the coup d'état of Napoleon, December 2, 1851, but I believe that the elevation of Louis Napoleon to the French throne has turned out for the benefit of France and of Europe. I condemned the means adopted to effect both Italian and German unity, but I am not prepared to say that each, in view of the undeniable tendency of modern politics, was not in itself desirable and demanded by the solid and permanent interests of European society. Taken as facts accomplished, as points of departure for the future, they may have, perhaps already have had, an important bearing in putting an end to the uneasiness under which all European society has labored since the treaties of Vienna in 1815, and the socialistic and revolutionary movements which have, ever since the attempted reconstruction of Europe after the fall of Napoleon, kept it in continual turmoil, and rendered all government except by sheer force impracticable.
The tendency of European society for four or five centuries has been, on the one hand, toward civil and political equality, and on the other, toward Roman imperialism. European society has revolted against mediaeval feudalism, alike against the feudal aristocracy and the feudal monarchy, and sought to revive the political system of imperial Rome, to place all citizens on the footing of an equality before the law, with exclusive privileges for none, and to base monarchy on the sovereign will of the nation. It would be incorrect to say, as many both at home and abroad have said, that European society has been or is tending to pure and simple democracy, for such has not been, and is not by any means the fact; but it has been and is tending to the abolition of all political distinctions and privileges founded on birth or property, and to render all persons without reference to caste or class eligible to all the offices of state, and to make all offices charges or trusts, instead of private property or estates. Under feudalism all the great offices of the state and many of the charges at court were hereditary, and could be claimed, held, and exercised as rights, unless forfeited by treason or misprision of treason against the liege lord. It was so in France down to the revolution of 1789, and is still so in England in relation to several charges at court, and to the House of Peers. The feudal crown is an estate, and transmissible in principle, and usually in fact, as any other estate.
Since the fifteenth century this feudal system has been attacked, throughout the greater part of Europe, with more or less success. It received heavy blows from Louis XI. in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Henry VII. in England, and Maximilian I. in Germany. The tendency in this direction was resisted by the Protestant princes in Germany, leagued against the emperor, the Huguenot nobles and the Fronde in France, and by the whig nobility in England, because while it [{219}] strengthened the people as against the crown, it equally strengthened the crown against the nobility. The British reformers to-day, under the lead of John Bright, are following out this European tendency, and if successful, will abolish the House of Peers, establish civil and political equality, but at the same time will increase the power of the crown, and establish Roman imperialism, which the Stuarts failed to do, because they sought to retain and strengthen the feudal monarchy while they crushed the feudal aristocracy.
But for the king or emperor to represent the nation and govern by its sovereign authority, it is necessary that the nation should become a state, or body politic, which it was not under feudalism. Europe under feudalism was divided among independent and subordinate chiefs, but not into sovereign independent nations. There were estates but no states, and the same proprietor might hold, and often did hold, estates in different nations, and in nations even remote from one another, and neither power nor obedience depended on national boundaries or national territory. There was loyalty to the chief, but none to the nation, or to the king or emperor as representing the national majesty or sovereignty. Hence the tendency to Roman imperialism became also a tendency to nationality. Both king and people conspired together to bring into national unity, and under the imperial authority of the crown, all the fiefs, whoever the suzerain or liege lord, and all the small principalities that by territorial position, tradition, language, the common origin, or institutions of the inhabitants, belonged really to one and the same nation.
The first of the continental powers to effect this national unity was France, consisting of the former Gallic provinces of the Roman empire, except a portion of the Gallia Germana now held by Belgium, Holland, and the Germanic governments on the left bank of the Rhine. The natural boundaries of France are those of the ancient Keltica of the Greeks, extending from the Alps to the Atlantic ocean, and from the Mediterranean sea to the English channel and the Rhine. France has not yet recovered and united the whole of her national territory, and probably will never be perfectly contented till she has done it. But after centuries of struggle, from Philip Augustus to Louis XIV., she effected internally national unity which gave her immense advantages over Italy and Germany, which remained divided, and which at times has given her even the hegemony of Europe.
The defeat of the first Napoleon, the restoration of the Bourbons, and the treaties of Vienna in 1815, arrested, and were designed to arrest, this tendency of modern European society under all its aspects, and hence satisfied nobody. They prevented the free development and play of the tendency to national unity and independence, re-established aristocracy, and restrained the tendency to equality, and reasserted monarchy as an estate held by the grace of God and inviolable and indefeasible, instead of the representative monarchy, which holds from the nation, and is responsible to it. Those treaties grouped people together without any regard to their territorial relations, natural affinities, traditions, or interests, without the slightest reference to the welfare of the different populations, and with sole reference to the interests of sovereigns, and the need felt of restricting or guarding against the power of France. A blinder, a less philosophical, or a more ignorant set of statesmen than those who framed these treaties, it is difficult to conceive. The poor men took no note of the changes which had been produced during four or five hundred years of social elaboration, and supposed that they were still in full mediaeval feudalism, when people and territory could be transferred from one suzerain or one liege lord to another, without offending any political principle or any sentiment of [{220}] nationality. Of all legislators in the world, reactionists suddenly victorious, and not yet wholly recovered from their fright, are the worst, for they act from passion, not reason or judgment.
From the moment these treaties were published a social and political agitation began in nearly all the states of Europe. Conspiracies were everywhere, and the revolutionary spirit threatened every state and empire, and no government could stand save as upheld by armed force. Bold attempts at revolution were early made in Naples and Spain, which were defeated only by foreign intervention. Hardly a state was strong enough in the affections of its people to maintain order without the repressive weight of the Holy Alliance, invented by Madame Krudener, and effected by the Emperor Alexander and Prince Metternich. Austria dominated in the Italian peninsula, France in the Spanish, and Russia in Poland and Germany; Great Britain used all her power and influence to prevent the emancipation of the Christian populations of the East, and to uphold the tottering empire of the Turks. The Holy Father was at once protected and oppressed by the allied powers, especially by Austria; the people everywhere became alienated from both church and state, and serious-minded men, not easily alarmed, trembled with fear that European society might be on the eve of a return to barbarism and oriental despotism.