Taranaki Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 29, 1912. A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 180, 29 January 1912, Page 4

Taranaki Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 29, 1912. A PEEP BEHIND THE SCENES.

There has been published recently in England a most interesting book, viz., the "Memoirs and Letters of Sir Robert Morier," who- wafc regarded as one of Britain's. greatest ambassadors. It was onee said of him that he carried more brains in' his head than all Britain's other ambassadors put together. He reigned between 1826 and 1876, and saw much of what went on behind the scenes of those stirring tiines. Indeed, he himself played no* inconsiderable part in the history of Europe. Sir Robert has been described as the British Bismarck, without the opportunities of his great rival, for rival he was. The two men resembled each other in their massive physique, in their imperious will, r in their keen intellect, and in their im- | mense 'grasp of European affairs. Both men towered intellectually and physically above their fellows. Both were men of strong passions, of great industry, with an Olympian contempt for the idiots and knaves by whom they felt themselves surrounded. And, perhaps, as a natural consequence, each recognised in the other his natural rival: predestined enemies whom the Fates decreed should grapple together in deathless enmity till the end of their days. Bismarck achieved, Morier tried to achieve, and Sir Robert smarted bitterly at the end under the consciousness of his rival's triumph. His ambition was to have been Foreign Secretary, and it would not have been for want of trying if Sir Robert Morier had not made the British Empire the mistress of the world. For he was passionate in Imperialism as in everything else. For a great many years he j was British Ambassador at Berlin. It was there that he measured swords with I the great Bismarck. Morier believed in ' a Liberal Germany. But he recoiled in horror from the Prussianised Germany incarnate in Bismarck. During the first twenty years of his diplomatic existence France was the devil of the Continent. The great problem was to chain up this great red dragon, lest its thirst for gloire should desolate Europe. The next twenty years were spent in a similar strenuous endeavor to chain up the German devil which had inherited the throne from his French predecessor. And ever and always Morier raged with exceeding wrath against the fatuity and blindness of England, which would not see her providential mission, or, seeing it, wouid not perform it. This supreme national apostaey culminated in Mr. Gladstone's I refusal to veto the Franco-German war ' of 1870, which Morier maintained could j have been stopped by one word from Britain. "Twenty years ago that word would have been whispered as a matter I

of course, 110 matter what Ministry had teen in power. It would have been forwarded mechanically from the Foreign Office as a mere matter of routine." But, instead of that, Britain declared to Continental Europe, at the most solemn moments in her history, that Britain had henceforth no interests in common with her. Said Morici in one of his letters:—

"Thy people are not my people, nor my people thy people; the thread of silver sea makes us safe, as safe as the eightfeet parapet round a Spanish bull-ring. We have first-class place and the best of opera-glasses; let us look on then at the great tauromachia—deeply interested in the sight and keenly sympathising now with the matadors, now with the bull, but as spectators.

In view of the discussions on British foreign policy which have absorbed public attention lately it may be well to extract this extremely luminous exposition of the.doctrine of the balance of power, or, as he once called it, the "cordon sanitaire." Morier writes to Lady Derby in 1870, saying that he has been much struck in studying the history of Europe from 1815 to 1848 to find how very often Europe was in imminent peril of war from the ambition and the vanity of France:—

If we enquire why it was that forty years went by withoiit France kicking Qver the traces,- we find tljat she was prevented doing so by a general coalition I of Europe against her—partly acknowledged, partly tacit. Austria, Prussia aid Russia are really coalesced against her, the i recollections of the first fifteen years of the century having become a sort of "idee fixe" on their side, and leading them to act instinctively as one whenever any danger threatened from Paris. It is the part of 'England in the matter which is so important and so worth studying. She does not stand \vith the three Northern Powers, as they are called; on a great many points she and France go together; as long as France restricts her action to legitimate objects (as in the creation of the Belgian kingdom in 1831) we go heartily with her and stand together as the representatives of Western Progress versus Eastern reaction, but the moment she shows the cloven foot and attempts to assert her, claim to a privileged position we at once throw our weight on the side of the Northern Powers, and make her feel that (to use the language of Trafalgar Square, which, I presume, will soon be the recognised phraseology of England) "we wouldn't stand any of that humbug." It is most interesting to 1 watch the kind of clock-work regularity with which the process, goes on. During the Belgian negotiations we step in some five or six times this Way, so that England becomes the regulator by which the expansive force of France is utilised beneficially and productively, but always kept ih check whenever it threatens to become destructive. Hence I venture on what I believe to be a sound generalisation. The peace of Europe was maintained for nearly forty years by a "cordon sanitaire" being traced round France, three-fourths of which was of iron rigidity, the remaining fourth being elastic and so fashioned that she could take all the air and exercise required for the good of her health. The Northern Powers treated France like an incurable and dangerous maniac; we treated her like a person on the whole sane, but subject to dangerous hallucinations, and reserved to ourselves the power of falling back upon the handcuffs and strait waistcoats kept in store by the* Northern Powers. This satisfactory system was first broken bv the Crimean War, the only perfectly useless modern war that has been waged.—Vol. 2, p. 214. England, having flung away her chance of preserving peace, had to face the consequences in I lid shape of a Prussianised Bismarck-ridden Germany. Morier was quick to detect the change and all it meant. Discussing with Baron Stockmar in December, 1876, reported German schemes for remodelling the map of Europe, he burst out as follows: ... If these changes are to be "octroyes" upon Europe by the mere will of M. de Bismarck jand in utter contempt of all law, justiy''and international honesty, then one, would wish to see EnglandxS*%id her last man and her last cartrid' in opposing so damnable'a'restoration of the worst periods of modern history. ... I believe that the lust of "gloire," kindled as it is within her (Germany), will burn with much more terrible- fierceness than it ever did in the "grande nation," even as coal burns more terribly, when once it is kindled, than straw. -

Stockmar having expostulated, pointing out that the Germans were much too sober to indulge in dreams of "gloire," Sir Robert explained and amplified his meaning. Not lust of he said, was likely to \)e developed in Germans by the possession of absolute power in Europe, but "arrogance and overbearingness are more likely to be developed in a Teutonic race—not boasting or vaingloriousness." He livfed to see his fears realised when, in 1874, the BismarckMolt ke school evolved the doctrine that prospective and hypothetical and abstract danger, as distinct from any immediate, palpable, real, and concrete danger, is a sufficient reason for the strongest neighbor attacking the weaker, and for establishing a "casus belli." This doetrine was on the point of being put into practical application in 1875, when Sir Robert Morier, with the help of Russia, checkmated Bismarck in his scheme for attacking France. , Bismarck tried to cover up his tracks, pretending that the war scare was,only a Bourse manoeuvre: "But," so Lord Odo warned Morier, behind our backs Bismarck raves like a maniac, and swears lie will take his revenge." No sooner had, thirteen years later, the grave closed over the Emperor Frederick than the bitter attacks upon Morier, then Ambassador at St. Petersburg, who was accused in a virulent press campaign of having furnished Marshal Bazaine with information as to the movements of the German armies in 1870 and the imprisonment and trial of Geffeken, on the charge of high treason, for publishing the Emperor Frederick's | diary—a charge he was acquitted of by . the Leipsiz Tribunal—proved how well aware the Iron Chancellor had been all .the while of the identity of those by | whom his plans had been foiled, and that he had neither forgiven nor forgotten. The whole of the trouble of Europe, ever ince 1870, according'to Morier, is directly traceable to Germany's having learnt and exaggerated the besetting vice of the people she had conquered. For there is - no denying that the malady under which Europe is at present suffering is caused by German Chauvinism, a new and fur. more formidable type of the 4is-

ease than the French, because instead of being spasmodical and Undisciplined, it is methodical, calculating, cold-blooded and self-contained. ,