DIFFICULTIES OF ENGLAND IN DEALING WITH KINGS. 13

stitution or a charter for every people: far from it ; they approved of a compact between Louis XVIII. and the French, but they did not care for the unstable Cortes of Spain. They admired old-fashioned Monarchy as being generally the safeguard against Jacobins or levellers; but they wished every king, whether bound by a compact or not, to be moderate and righteous. They had resisted Napoleon because he was worse than a Jacobin in fraud and violence; in an earlier age they would have cried out against the three sovereigns who in the spirit of Napoleon parcelled out Poland as their spoil. A certain amount of punishment they would inflict, or allow to be inflicted, on Napoleon's tributaries, but more as a warning than for revenge, and in the spirit of prudence rather than of reaction. They were deferential enough to crowned heads; but they seldom, if ever, forgot that they were accountable to an aristocratic Parliament charged with ancestral thoughts of equity and generosity.

Since the nations of Russia and Prussia had not by their sufferings earned a right to be consulted by their lords, there was no home influence to check the two potentates of the North-East in resuming the evil designs of their unjust predecessors. They tried to settle their own affairs without regard to the quickened conscience and enlarged wisdom of educated Europeans. Russia was to take almost all Poland, and Prussia the whole of Saxony. The utter destruction of Saxony seemed to others too great a punishment for siding with France; and as the Saxons had deserted Napoleon at the critical battle of Leipzig,

14 ARRANGEMENTS MADE IN AND NEAR GERMANY.

they were viewed with some charity by the Austrians, who a few months earlier had done the same. Austria therefore protested against this arrangement, and was backed by England. There would have been, it is thought, a deadlock and a rupture, had not Talleyrand turned the scale against the two potentates.

Thus did France at once recover her position as the equal of the four allied States; and she continued to act in harmony with the two champions of moderation. There was no other dispute of equal importance with this; and when Russia, already enlarged at the expense of Sweden and Turkey, was forced to be content with part only of Poland, Prussia, taking other parts of Poland, and such bits of Saxony as rounded her estate on the Elbe, was with general consent strengthened on the Rhine to make head against any future Bonaparte, and was still further consolidated by bartering and haggling with Sweden on the Baltic coast. Provided nothing was done quite so violent as the extinction of Saxony, the English rulers acquiesced in many little adjustments made by the Germans and the Scandinavians, which need not here be described. One, however, of these arrangements deserves notice.

Norway became, with the tacit approval of the victorious monarchs, a perfect democracy; for when severed from the absolute kingdom of Denmark, to punish the Danes for being faithful to France, it was not incorporated with its neighbour Sweden, although nominally subjected to the King of Sweden; it has ever since the release from Denmark enjoyed the firm

NORWAY, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND, VENICE. 15

establishment of a democratic Republic, with titular monarchy as an ornamental coping-stone.

The diplomatists who sanctioned the linking of Norway with Sweden intended to reward the French soldier who then ruled Sweden for helping to subdue Napoleon; they were not far from having to aid him. in subduing the Norwegians; they acquiesced in the bargain struck between him and his new set of subjects. Since the brief conflict which preceded the settlement, the two kingdoms of Scandinavia, though differing in constitution, have had no disputes about the choice of a king, and have had no occasion for using their several armies and fleets.

To the ancient and glorious confederation of Swiss Republics the Allies gave back what France had taken away; and since 1815 its soil has not been insulted by strangers in arms.

The Venetian Republic, which had fallen through the decay of civic virtue, and had been given to Austria by France in 1797, was thought unworthy of revival; and the confirmation of the gift as an enlargement of her old domain in North Italy and on the shores of the Adriatic was but a set-off to the voluntary concessions made elsewhere by Austria.

But there was yet another Republic whose fate was not quite so easy to settle; nor could it be merged in a kingdom without a solemn appeal from the Congress of Vienna to the only High Court in which a case could be argued in the hearing of Europe, the British Parliament. This case requires attention, since it shows that England was even then regarded

as a nation with a lively conscience. The city of Genoa, once famous for commercial enterprise and armed colonies in the Levant and in the Black Sea, had in the eighteenth century borrowed money of a French king, and to pay her debt had parted with the island of Corsica. That was the first time that a people rebelled against being treated like the cattle of a mortgaged farm; and the Corsicans were in their fruitless resistance applauded, if not aided, by the educated gentlemen of England: an incident here mentioned to account for the imperfect sympathy of Englishmen with the Genoese.

During the struggle with Napoleon, Sicily had been rescued and defended by English forces. When the time came for encircling the tyrant with armies, Lord William Bentinck, an enlightened soldier, came from Sicily with a few thousands of his garrison, and marched from Leghorn to Genoa, summoning all Italians to join in throwing off the yoke. He went beyond his instructions in promising to restore the old liberties of Genoa; and when he took the city he was not able to save it from being annexed to the neighbouring kingdom of Sardinia. So the citizens had to wait, like all the rest of Italy, for the liberty that was to ripen in the coming generations.1

If Bentinck was imprudent, if Bentinck's masters were unjust, such censure as was due came, as censure always comes on England, from her own writers and

1 The island Sardinia gave a title, then a century old, to a monarch who held under more ancient titles the Subalpine regions called Piedmont and Savoy.

THE TREATMENT OF HOLLAND.

17

speakers. The cause of the Italian city was pleaded by Sir James Mackintosh with a calm authoritative statement of facts and principles, which may even now serve orators as a model. The grant of a seaport to Piedmont was well meant, and turned out well for Italy. The modern Genoese may be glad that British arms set them free from the stranger, and that the protest made against the subsequent annexation was equivalent to a eulogy spoken over the grave of their municipality.

There was yet another state which England was bound to treat with generosity, and to guard from the encroachments of great monarchs-her neighbour and old rival, Holland. The Dutch had been by Mr. Pitt's skilful policy saved from the undue interference of the French Government before the Revolution. But they had been after that Revolution drawn into the whirlpool of Jacobin excitement. Their consequent subservience to France cost them dear; for they had to give up some, not all, of their trifling possessions in India, the better part of their sugar plantations in South America, all that they held in the rich island of Ceylon, of which the conquest was then incomplete, and that part of South Africa which took its name from the Cape of Good Hope. All this they lost in the long war, and transferred by the treaty of peace to England. Men who remembered how they had helped England to shake off a traitorous king and to contend against Louis XIV. might well be pained at this dismemberment of a grand Colonial Empire: for it looked as if evil were returned for good.

C