the interests of the nation, whose responsibility is to the nation, and whose sole duty is to act for the interests of the people they govern. It is happily true, from everlasting to everlasting, that a policy of justice and magnanimity is best for the interests of the nation; and therefore the policy of England has as wide a scope for generous and lofty action as that of any people whose master “makes war for an idea,” or any nation which rushes into conflict on behalf of an oppressed country: but it is impossible for a constitutional state to proceed as despotic and democratic governments do in adopting such an international course as some that the world has witnessed within five years.
We may find an illustration of the difference in the narrower range of social life. There are chivalrous knights in modern society as in the olden time. An unincumbered citizen may rush into many a conflict, and bear a share in many an enterprise which a family man cannot righteously engage in. A man with wife and children “has given hostages to fortune,” and has chosen what shall in the main be his course of duty. While he gives his countenance to the right on every occasion, and exerts himself to expose and defeat the wrong; while he sacrifices much of fortune and of repose on great occasions, and leads his family to do the same, he cannot virtuously desert them and their interest as his bachelor neighbour may sacrifice his own. When the whole family, of an age to judge of what they are doing, agree in a desire of self-sacrifice, well and good: and it is well and good when a nation entertains a conviction and a will which sanction a course of devotedness in its government. We have witnessed such a spectacle at home in our own day, when we went to war with Russia: and in such an hour the term “England” truly means, not the government usually so called, but the whole nation, acting and speaking as one man.
Four years ago we had experience of the way in which that policy of non-intervention was regarded, which brought up the somewhat careless analogy which at times misled De Tocqueville himself.
When the French people and their newspapers, in the spring of 1859, were exulting in their own moral grandeur in “going to war for an idea,” and contrasting the devotedness of France with the non-intervention of England, their cry was echoed in many directions. The Americans taunted us with excessive prudence; and the American correspondents of some of our leading newspapers, not only reported the popular contempt which surrounded them, but undertook to assure us that our course was wrong, and to foretell the day when we should repent of our backwardness to aid struggling Italy. To this I can add that personal friends of my own, in our own country, wrote to me at that time,—“Do tell me why we are not helping Italy as the French are. Do tell me why you yourself are not saying a word to help us on in fighting for that cause which we have always professed to honour. If ever there was an occasion for striking for the right, surely this is the one;” and so on.
I need not repeat here the various reasons, theoretical and practical, general and special, which I alleged, in reply, on behalf of non-intervention. I will refer only to the one we are at this moment concerned with:—that the government had to consider, not only its relations to Austria on the one hand and France on the other, but its obligations to the people of England. In the case of the late war with Russia, the highest interest of the English nation was concerned in checking the aggressions of Russia, and preserving the balance of power in Europe; and we then saw how heartily, and with what singular accord, the nation could embark in a war. But in the case of Italy, no such stake was involved; and no administration, and no sovereign, could be justified in subjecting the people of England to the calamities of war, either to gratify the sentiment of any portion of society at home, or to aid the Italians, who, if they were adequate to the new political existence they desired, would be able to obtain it for themselves. Experienced observers have no faith in a national freedom achieved by foreign arms; and so I said, adding that it was too Quixotic an enterprise for the English mind to join company in a war for freedom with the French who had allowed theirs to be extinguished at home. The case has already been illustrated by time and events. Americans, French, and everybody else, have long seen which was the truer and nobler policy. All the world admits now what the dispassionate and disinterested support of England has been and is to Italy; and what has come of the sacredness of the French promise to make Italy “free, from the Alps to the Adriatic,” and of the generosity which “went to war for an idea,” and came back bearing a booty of two provinces; and which has used its services, such as they were, in humbling, repressing, baffling, and irritating the people whom it presented to the world as its own protégé. I need not ask which is the morally nobler and the politically safer party,—the trustees of the British people who did their duty at home and abroad while giving their voice and their countenance to the right, or the French Emperor, with his violated pledges, his extortions, and his tyranny in blighting the fruits of the “idea” for which he sacrificed the lives of scores of thousands of his helpless subjects. If anybody has any doubt about which has been the best friend to Italy and freedom, let him ask the Italians, “from the Alps to the Adriatic,” and a good deal further. If he desires to appreciate justly the magnanimity which the French government claims as its distinctive quality, let him go and see what the effect of the conscription is on the rural population of France; let him hear what is said of the war in Italy in households which perforce sent out sons, brothers, fathers, who have never been heard of since—involuntary soldiers who were thrown unrecognised into the cholera pit, or into the trench dug for the dead after each battle. Let him go among the working classes, and witness a kind and degree of poverty unknown in England, and hear how the people like the process of providing the money with which the Emperor makes his magnanimous interventions, without the sacrifice of a single luxury of his own. While admiring the sublime in the aspirations of France after the glory of leading the nations in the path of freedom