the meanest of the angels that fell, and is more corrupting to the soul, and more perilous to its salvation, than any system of secular despotism ever devised. Though, therefore, we have in this contest no sympathy with Russia, we have just as little with Great Britain, fighting simply to maintain her mercantile system, and to keep the world enslaved to her low and grovelling system of materialism, threatened by the advance of Russia to a command of the great routes of commerce. We like not the attitude of Russia, and for religious rather than political or commercial reasons we wish her permanently humbled, and are as unwilling as our Scottish friend and correspondent to see her influence extended.

But we cannot regard the attitude of Russia as the result of any extraordinary fault of hers. Aggressive she may have been; but the other powers of Europe are more to blame than she, for she has but availed herself, for her own aggrandizement, of their crimes and blunders. It was their national rivalries, schisms, heresies, and wars with one another, that gave her the opportunity, and invited her to become what she is. They abandoned the defence of Christendom against the Turk, quarrelled with the Pope, despoiled the Church, made war on religion or on one another, and left Russia to fight the battles of Christian civilization against Mahometan barbarism, and to strengthen herself by so doing. England, under pretence of protecting the Protestant heresy, joined with her in preparing the way for the partition and suppression of Poland, that great crime as well as great political blunder; France, by an alliance with the Turk first, and afterwards with Gustavus Adolphus and the Protestant princes of the empire, prevented the restoration of German unity, broken by Luther's Reformation, and thus destroyed the only European power that could impose an effectual restraint on Russian ambition in the West. These powers, therefore, must blame themselves, not her, if she avails herself of the advantages they have afforded her, and leaves them to reap the fruits of their own madness and folly.

The real object of the Allies in the present war is, no doubt, to restrain the power of Russia, and to prevent her from obtaining those commercial advantages over them, which seem to be all but within her reach. Are they likely to gain this object? We think not, for they cannot strike 14

THIRD SERIES. - VOL. III. NO. I.

an effectual blow at the heart of her power, and we can conceive no practicable political combinations by which they can render permanent any advantages they may obtain by the fortune of war. We would not exaggerate her military strength, or underrate theirs. The Allies may gain the victory in battle, they may take Sebastopol, the whole of the Crimea, Finland, the Caucasian and Transcaucasian provinces, and for a time close to Russian ships the commerce of the Baltic and the Euxine, but Russia will not even then be essentially weakened. She may be thrown back upon herself for a time, but that will not harm her. She will turn her attention to the development of her internal resources, to the construction of roads and railways, and to completing a system of internal communications, which will prepare her for carrying on any future war with greater ease and expedition. No arrangement that will be made will prevent her from ultimately recovering the provinces that may be wrested from her, and standing before Europe, after a brief delay, stronger than ever.

If no territory be taken from Russia, and if she at the conclusion of peace retain all her present territorial advantages, nothing will have been gained by the war. If she is to be dismembered of a certain number of her provinces, the grave question comes up, What is to be done with them? The Allies cannot annex them to their own respective states, because they are not contiguous, and their defence would cost more than they are worth. They could be retained only by keeping their fleets and armies all the time on the war footing, and rendering war the permanent state of Europe. They cannot, or will not, annex them to any adjoining state strong enough of itself to retain them. They may restore to Turkey the provinces taken from her by Russian arms, but this would not form a bulwark against the future advance of Russia. The Allies cannot expect to reduce Russia lower than she was at the accession of Peter the Great, or to render the Ottoman Empire stronger than it was at the same period. Turkey will therefore be no more able to retain them, than she was to prevent their original loss. Besides, if Turkey, a Mussulman power, were rendered strong enough to stand alone against her Northern neighbor, she would herself be, as she was but recently, a more formidable enemy to Christian civilization than Russia, for the lowest form of Christian civilization

is infinitely superior to the highest Mahometan. France and England might, indeed, guarantee the possession of the restored provinces, but such a guaranty would be vexatious to them, and would after all prove ineffectual. Russia might seize the opportunity, when they were at war with one another, or otherwise sufficiently employed, to recover those provinces. Finland, Livonia, and Esthonia might be given to Sweden, but Sweden would not be strong enough to keep them, any more than she was formerly to prevent Russia from taking them.

The Allies, supposing the fortune of the war favorable to them, might reconstruct the kingdom of Poland, provided they could, which is not likely, gain the consent of Prussia and Austria; but they cannot reconstruct a Poland strong enough to stand alone even against the Russia that would remain. You cannot reconstruct a Poland that will be stronger or more united than was the Poland of the beginning of the last century, certainly not strong enough for the purpose, as experience has proved. There is no Poland now, except with the Poles abroad. Russianized, Prussianized, and Austrianized as the Polish people now are, they cannot form a united and independent kingdom, able to stand alone. If Russian Poland is detached from the Czar, it must be annexed to some German power. But this would be a source of weakness rather than of strength, because the Poles, though they love not Russia, hate the Germans, and, if they cannot be independent, would prefer being an integral element in a great Russian empire to being a part of a German state, alien to them both in blood and language. It would always be a field for Russian intrigue, and afford an opening not only for Russia to recover it, but also to subject the German power to which it was annexed.

Even if the Allies should succeed in arms, which it is possible they may do, it would be next to impossible so to reconstruct a map of Europe as to prevent Russia from speedily recovering the provinces taken from her, and repairing her losses; for she is an agricultural rather than a maritime power, and has her resources within herself. Her present position and strength are not an accidental result, due to a temporary policy or to brute violence. They are less the result of violence than of the natural course of events. No doubt she could, and even ought, to have resisted that course, but that she has not done so is no more

to be censured, than that the absorption of India by the British East India Company was not resisted by Great Britain. In modern times, at least, nations consult their interests, not what a high sense of justice or a nice sense of honor would dictate. Few, if any, of the wars which have resulted in the aggrandizement of Russia have been begun by her, or if so, without as plausible pretexts as conquering or growing nations usually have. Most of her acquisitions have been either the recovery of old territory possessed by her before the Tartar conquest, or made from barbarian tribes with whom peace was impossible. She is the natural centre to which gravitate all the members of the great Sclavonic family, and has been for a long time in a position in which she could hardly help profiting by the divisions, wars, and rivalries of the other European nations. Her growth being in the natural course of European and Asiatic events, a natural, not a forced growth, it is no easy matter for the rest of Europe, by any new polit ical or territorial combinations, to prevent her from recovering whatever she may lose by the fortune of war, or from ultimately obtaining those commercial advantages which would enable her to reduce France and Great Britain, especially Great Britain, to the rank of second or third rate powers, leaving for the first rank only herself and the United States. She is a vast centralized power, animated by a single spirit and moved by a single will; they are divided into separate nations and states, distracted by diversities of race, religion, and interests, and led on by various and conflicting counsels and policies. In the actual state of things, she is stronger than any one of them, and it is out of their power to form a permanent league against her. They might about as easily form themselves into a single federative state, and each give up its autonomy. They can. never agree among themselves to do anything of the sort.

The attempt to resist effectually the natural progress of any great living national power by leagues, coalitions, or alliances between feebler states, has never yet succeeded. Where the end is to overturn a dynasty, or to dethrone a prince, no longer national, or to effect a purpose which can be gained by a battle or a campaign, coalitions may answer. They answered in the long run against Napoleon the First, for though he attracted the admiration of the French, he was not the living impersonification of the French people; he was not rooted in the national heart,

and could count on being supported only so long as he was successful. He became nationalized, so to speak, only after his death, by the contrast of his reign with that of the effete Bourbons. But where the force needs to be constant and permanent, it must, in order to be effectual, be that of a single nation, strong enough to stand alone. If Great Britain were as strong by land as she is by sea, and if her dominions lay alongside of Russia, or if Russia were merely a commercial power, she would, perhaps, be able single-handed to cope with her. If France adjoined Russia, she would also, we think, be able to cope with her. But neither is the case, and no single power contiguous to Russia is or can be made strong enough to stand alone against her, unless it be Austria.

The danger from Russia to the West is only as by her advance in the East she deprives the Western powers of the commerce of Asia. She cannot advance with advantage to herself any farther westward than she has already done. Germany prevents Russia from laying her empire alongside the French, as much as Germany prevents France from laying hers alongside Russia. The two empires cannot, even by the conquest of Germany, become contiguous. Napoleon the First had the command of all Germany, but France did not leap the Rhine, as he found to his bitter discomfiture on his retreat from Moscow. The autocrat of the Russias, were he to command all Germany, would find that Russia would not leap the German frontiers. Germany would be in his way as much as she was in Napoleon's. The great danger is to Austria, regarded as separate from Germany. The German element is not the strongest in her empire, and she lacks unity and compactness. Half of her population have more sympathy of race with Russia than with her, and it would not be difficult to detach from her Bohemia, Galicia, Hungary, Croatia, and her Italian possessions, leaving her only the Tyrol and her hereditary Duchy. Through the disjointed nature of the Austrian dominions, and the heterogeneous character of her population, she is not able to stand alone against Russia, who can in spite of her continue to advance in the East, swallow up Armenia, Anatolia, and Persia in Asia, and the whole of Turkey in Europe, and the greater part of her own empire, in case she attempts resistance. Here is the danger.