him to a quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of
successors. He is said (I know not how truly) to have one virtue left;
that of faithfulness to his word. Only by showing him that we too abhor
treachery and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe
standing-ground in our own peril. And this we have done; and for this
we shall be rewarded. But this is surely not all our duty. Even if we
should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of the Eastern
Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussulman, the struggle
will not be over; for Russia will still be what she has always been, and
the northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to the contest with
fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to enact the part of a new Macedon,
against a new Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of
that balance of power, which is but war under the guise of peace.
Europe needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger
union, than can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause
of order. She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age united the
free states of Europe against the Anarch of Spain, and delivered the
Western nations from a rising world-tyranny, which promised to be even
more hideous than the elder one of Rome. If, as then, England shall
proclaim herself the champion of freedom by acts, and not by words and
paper, she may, as she did then, defy the rulers of the darkness of this
world, for the God of Light will be with her. But, as yet, it is
impossible to look without sad forebodings upon the destiny of a war,
begun upon the express understanding that evil shall be left triumphant
throughout Europe, wheresoever that evil does not seem, to our own
selfish short-sightedness, to threaten us with immediate danger; with
promises, that under the hollow name of the Cause of Order--and that
promise made by a revolutionary Anarch--the wrongs of Italy, Hungary,
Poland, Sweden, shall remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria,
two tyrannies, the one far more false and hypocritical, the other even