THE EUROPEAN CONGRESS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXI, Issue 1194, 9 February 1864, Page 2

THE EUROPEAN CONGRESS.

The customs and the law of. all the world are very suspicious of absolutely gratuitous proceedings. They endeavour to protect the simple, and to protect themselves against those who are not so simple, who appear before the world as spontaneous movers and disinterested benefactors. There must be some wisdom in a universal prejudice founded on a common instinct and dictated by nature. No doubt, law itself discovers that the property and rights within its cognizance are transmitted much better in the order of descent, affinity, alliance, purchase, and other secular causes, than by the more capricious and impulsive rule of private or public benevolence. So a man is always supposed to have an interest, an object, or a duty capable of definition and measurement. When men enter a meeting, they must have a known ground ot interest or duty to stand upon. When a man appears as a deliverer of his conscience, or a messenger from Heaven, he unites against himself all who are conscious of a more humble footing, and who are content to be so taken. Even law itself is at a disadvantage when it interposes without extreme necessity to reconcile, or reduce to order, those who think they have really something to quarrel about. Such is the weak and odious position which England is invited to take in a European Congress. She can only appear with high-sounding moralities addressed to persons who are not moralizing, but playing a game of prizes and forfeits. In such a company England will always be as the stranger who intruded himself among them, and must needs be their judge. If we could imagine a man taking his post in a country fair, and preaching the moral duties of horsedealing, that would be our case in a Congress. The man who is most respected in that sphere is he who gets the most, or pays the least, for a given animal. If England is ever to enter a European Congress without more than the present occasion, she must either be an idle listener or she must take the office of preacher and adviser. Her position will be at once difficult and invidious. She has certainly a large budget of suggestions, but she will have to wait for opportunity and willing ears. We give a great deal of our time to business, and very little to preaching and praying; and the latter is about the proportion of talk that England is likely to have in a Congress —that is, so long as she confines herself to her original footing, as a perfectly disinterested and unprejudiced adviser. Indeed, if she is perfectly consistent, and so continues, she will come under the spirit of her own law which forbids the presence of a " spiritual person " in her leading House of Legislature. The general impulse of the crew will be to throw the troublesome prophet to the mercy of the storm, which his presence will be supposed to have created.

But the discomfort of an unmitigated unpopularity will remedy itself by a worse evil; and, that she may not be abused and insulted by everybody, England will naturally seek the friendship of some, and, therefore, the enmity of others. The bad position of a representative who represents nothing but the public opinion of his country, and some harsh conclusions upon the conduct of its neighbours, will itself be an element in the materials of intrigue, and will be used by those who can use everything to their purpose. Every time the British Representative receives a rebuff, he will be driven to seek that sympathy which even the severe and impracticable sometimes require. In the years 1814 and 1815 England brought to the Congress immense sacrifices already made, and professions that required no proof. She had done all that she could, and nothiug remained but to offer the moral of the tale which for twenty years had been sounded in the ears of all nations. But when she had done everything even to refunding as much as if she had been the conqueror, she found herself a mere shadow of the past. Mortified aud out of temper, she quarrelled as all the rest did, and was on the point of an alliance with France against Russia, when Napoleon threw away his own chance by escaping from Elba, and taking the game once more into his own hands. It is impossible to say what England may be driven to do when she finds her words received with contemptuous neglect. It is said to be a reason against war that it is like a ball, in | which though you know your first partner you do not know your last; but if a nation enters a Congress with no partner at all, it is still less able to foresee what may change its resolution. The worst of all solitudes is to be alone in a crowd, and even the assumption of superiority does not make it agreeable. Yet what will the British Representative be able to do in his original character but sit on his throne of opinion and proclaim those maxims of justice and piety the sound of which, according to the poet, aggravates the torments of the damned? His first appearance in the Congress will be simply as one of those statues which, speechless and blind, hold their idle scales over the heedless mob of a market or an exchange. We know how little power the works of the mightiest artist have to, overawe the living conscience or palsy the rude hand. So the statue will have to grow warm, to flush, to throb, to move, to descend from its pedestal, to take a part in the work before it. That is what the British Representative will most certainly do, and neither people nor statesmen can say what he will not do, what partnership he will not make, whose game he will not play, and whether when all is over the East or the West, the North or the South, Sovereigns or nations, will have most reason to thank him.

But even if it were possible to preserve a proud superiority to parties and interests, and to carry out the character of umpire, that is the very character already assumed by the Sovereign who opens the proposed Congress. Even that barren dignity is denied us, and, having nothing to gain in a substantial sense of the word, we find the honors of impartiality already claimed by another. .France is to be the /Eolus who governs the winds; France, the Jove who distributes with equal justice the warning nod and avengiug brand. Napoleon 111. proclaims to Europe what we have been proclaiming in every mode possible in a country and with a Constitution such as ours. By a dexterous obtrusion of his personal history he points out that, of all Sovereigns, he is the best qualified to instruct, to conciliate, and to do all else necessary to a European settlement. He alone has played all honorable parts, suffered exile, confinement, poverty, and contempt; endured the threats and malignitjr of all parties and powers; and he alone is capable of entering into all feelings and wants, understanding all difficulties, and mediating between the direst antipathies and the fellest antagonisms. How can England, stable, well-to-do, and

tranquil, always rich, and always the same, pretend to vie with a man raised by Providence for the very purpose? There is only one thing wanting to complete the proof of a mission which makes such demands on our homage and even our credulity. It. is that this almost preternatural personage should have shown himself exempt from the foibles which mark the common herd of successful adventurers. But, though France may be glad for the moment to overlook a few excesses of power, some trifling annexations, and a policy of aggrandizement, neither we nor the rest of Europe can forget so complacently. "What we see in France is the man of violence, not the founder of a temple of justice and peace. Yet the last is the character claimed in this address to the Sovereigns of the Old World. Not even is this to be ours. What, then, shall we have to do in this Congress, should it ever be more than an ideal conception ? There is no place left to us. The honors of peace and war, of abounding mercy and prevailing strength, of conception and execution, of a humble bearing and a magnificent hospitality, are all to attach by natural gravitation to France. We should not grudge her anything that would make her happy and contented, if only because we know not how soon her fortunes may be ours; but we must still ask what part is left us by this ambitious performer, aad in what guise we are to enter the scene. We might be content with even a second or a third ratepart, but we are left with none at all.—Times, Nov. 13.