Part 6

Before the Eastern questions were settled, other complications commenced in Western Europe. Belgium, restless from the French Revolution of 1830, rose against the House of Orange and claimed independence. Civil war ensued; but the great powers promptly intervened, even to the extent of arresting a Dutch army on its march. Beginning with armistice, there was a long and fine-spun negotiation, which, assuming the guise alternately of pacific mediation and of armed intervention, ended in the established separation of Belgium from Holland, and its recognition as an independent nation. Do you ask why Great Britain intervened on this occasion? Lord John Russell, in the course of debate at a subsequent day, declared that a special motive was “the establishment of a free constitution.”[72] Meanwhile the Peninsula of Spain and Portugal was torn by civil war. The regents of these two kingdoms respectively appealed to Great Britain and France for aid, especially in the expulsion of the pretender Don Carlos from Spain and the pretender Dom Miguel from Portugal. For this purpose the Quadruple Alliance was formed in 1834. The moral support from this treaty is said to have been important, but Great Britain was compelled to provide troops. This intervention, however, was _at the solicitation of the actual Governments_. Even after Spanish troubles were settled, war still lingered in the sister kingdom, when, in 1847, the Queen addressed herself to her allies, among whom was Great Britain, the ancient patron of Portugal, who undertook to mediate between her and her insurgent subjects, in the declared hope of composing the difficulties “in a just and permanent manner, with all due regard to the dignity of the crown on the one hand, and to the constitutional liberties of the nation on the other.”[73] The insurgents did not submit until after military demonstrations. Liberty and Peace were the two watchwords.

Then occurred the European uprising of 1848, with France once more a Republic; but Europe, wiser grown, did not interfere even so much as to write a letter. The case was different with Hungary, whose victorious armies, radiant with Liberty regained, expelled the Austrian power only to be arrested by the armed intervention of the Russian Czar, who yielded to the double pressure of invitation from Austria and fear that successful insurrection might extend into Poland. It was left for France, in another country, with strange inconsistency, to play the part which Russia played in Hungary. Rome, after rising against the temporal power of the Pope and proclaiming the Republic, was occupied by a French army, which expelled the republican magistrates, and, though fourteen years are already passed since that unhappy act, the occupation still continues. From this military intervention Great Britain stands aloof. In a despatch, dated at London, January 28, 1849, Lord Palmerston makes a permanent record, to the honor of his country, as follows: “Her Majesty’s Government would, upon every account, and not only upon abstract principle, but with reference to the general interests of Europe, and from the value which they attach to the maintenance of peace, _sincerely deprecate any attempt to settle the differences between the Pope and his subjects by the military interference of foreign powers_.”[74] This statesman gives further point to the position of Great Britain in contrast with France, when he says: “Armed intervention _to assist in retaining a bad Government would be unjustifiable_.”[75] Such was the declaration of the Lord Palmerston of that day. How much more unjustifiable the strange assistance now proposed _to found_ a bad Government! The British minister insisted that the differences should be accommodated by “the diplomatic interposition of friendly powers,” which he declared a “much better mode of settlement than an authoritative imposition of terms by the force of foreign arms.”[76] In harmony with this policy, Great Britain, during the same year, united with France in proffering mediation between the insurgent Sicilians and the King of Naples, the notorious Bomba, in the hope of helping good government and liberal principles. Not disheartened by rebuff, these two powers, in 1856, united in friendly remonstrance to the same tyrannical sovereign against the harsh system of political arrests, and against his cruelty to good citizens thrust without trial into the worst of prisons. The advice was indignantly rejected, and the two powers that gave it withdrew their ministers from Naples. The sympathy of Russia was on the wrong side, and Prince Gortschakoff, in a circular, while admitting, that, “as a consequence of friendly fore-thought, one Government might give advice to another,” declared, that “to endeavor by threats or a menacing demonstration to obtain from the King of Naples concessions in the internal affairs of his Government is a violent usurpation of his authority, and an open declaration of the right of the strong over the weak.”[77] This was practically answered by Lord Clarendon, speaking for Great Britain at the Congress of Paris, when, admitting the principle that no Government has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, he declares that there are cases where an exception to this rule becomes equally a right and a duty; that peace must not be broken, but that there is no peace without justice; and that therefore the Congress must let the King of Naples know its desire for the amelioration of his Government, and must demand amnesty for political offenders suffering without trial.[78] This language was bold beyond the practice of diplomacy, but the intervention it proposed was on the side of humanity.

I must draw this chapter to a close, although the long list is not yet exhausted. Even while I speak, we hear of intervention by England and France in the civil war between the Emperor of China and his subjects,--and also in that other war between the Emperor of Russia on the one side and the Poles whom he claims as subjects on the other, but with this difference, that in China these powers take the part of the existing Government, while in Poland they intervene against the existing Government. In the face of positive declarations of neutrality, the British and French admirals have united their forces with the Chinese; but thus far in Poland, although there is no declaration of neutrality, the intervention is unarmed. In both these instances we witness a common tendency, directed, it may be, by the interests or prejudices of the time, and, so far as it has proceeded, it is, at least in Poland, on the side of liberal institutions. But, alas for human consistency! the French Emperor is now intervening in Mexico with armies and navies to build an imperial throne for an Austrian Archduke.

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There is one long-continued British intervention, which speaks now with controlling power; and it is on this account that I reserve it for the close of what I have to say on this head. Though not without original shades of dark, it has for more than half a century been a shining example to the civilized world. I refer to that _intervention against Slavery_, which, from its first adoption, has been so constant and brilliant as to make us forget the earlier _intervention in behalf of Slavery_, when, for instance, at the Peace of Utrecht, Great Britain intervened to extort the detestable privilege of supplying slaves to Spanish America at the rate of four thousand eight hundred yearly during the space of thirty years, and then again, at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, higgled for a yet longer sanction of the ignoble intervention; nay, it almost makes us forget the kindred intervention, at once sordid and criminal, by which this power counteracted all efforts for the prohibition of the slave-trade even in its own colonies, and thus helped to fasten Slavery upon Virginia and Carolina. The abolition of the slave-trade by Act of Parliament, in 1807, was the signal for a change of history. A British poet at the time gave exulting expression to the grandeur of the epoch:--

“‘Thy chains are broken, Africa, be free!’ Thus saith the island-empress of the sea; Thus saith Britannia. O ye winds and waves, Waft the glad tidings to the land of slaves!”[79]

Curiously, it was the other color which gained the first fruits of this revolution, by triumphant intervention for the overthrow of White Slavery in the Barbary States. The old hero of Acre, Sir Sidney Smith, released from long imprisonment in France, sought to organize a “holy league” for this purpose; the subject was discussed at the Congress of Vienna; and the agents of Spain and Portugal, anxious for the punishment of their piratical neighbors, argued, that, because Great Britain had abolished for itself the traffic in African slaves, therefore it must see that whites were no longer enslaved in the Barbary States. The argument was less logical than humane. But Great Britain undertook the work. With a fleet complete at all points, consisting of five line-of-battle ships, five frigates, four bomb-vessels, and five gun-brigs, Lord Exmouth approached Algiers, where he was joined by a considerable Dutch fleet, anxious to take part. “If force must be resorted to,” said the Admiral in general orders shortly before, “we have the consolation of knowing that we fight in the sacred cause of Humanity, and cannot fail of success.” Less than half a day was enough, with such a force in such a cause. The formidable castles of the great Slavemonger were battered to pieces, and he was compelled to sign a treaty, confirmed under a salute of twenty-one guns, which in its first article stipulated “the abolition of Christian Slavery forever.” Glorious and beneficent intervention! Not inferior to that renowned instance of Antiquity, where the Carthaginians were required to abolish the practice of sacrificing their own children,--a treaty which has been called the noblest of history, because stipulated in favor of human nature. The Admiral who had thus triumphed was hailed as Emancipator. He received a new rank in the peerage, and a new blazonry on his coat of arms. The rank is continued in his family, and on their shield, in perpetual memory of this great transaction, is still borne _a Christian slave holding aloft the Cross and dropping his broken fetters_. But the personal satisfactions of the Admiral were more than rank or heraldry. In his despatch to the Government, describing the battle, and written at the time, he says: “To have been one of the humble instruments in the hands of Divine Providence for bringing to reason a ferocious Government and destroying forever the insufferable and horrid system of Christian Slavery, can never cease to be a source of delight and heartfelt comfort to every individual happy enough to be employed in it.”[80]

I have said too much with regard to an instance, which, though beautiful and important, is only a parenthesis in the grander and more extensive intervention against African Slavery, which was already organizing, destined at last to embrace the whole human family. Even before Wilberforce triumphed in Parliament, Great Britain intervened with Napoleon, in 1806, pressing him to join in the abolition of the slave-trade; but he flatly refused. What France would not then yield was exacted from Portugal in 1810, from Sweden in 1813, and from Denmark in 1814. An ineffectual attempt was made to enlist Spain, even by temptation of pecuniary subsidies,--and an appeal was made to the restored monarch of France, Louis the Eighteenth, with the offer of a sum of money outright or the cession of a West India island, in consideration of the desired abolition. The Prince Regent wrote with his own hand to the latter, assuring him that he could not give a more acceptable proof of his regard than by consenting to the abolition. Had gratitude to a benefactor prevailed, these powers could not have resisted; but Lord Castlereagh confessed in the House of Commons, that in France there was distrust of the British Government “even among the better classes of people,” who thought that its zeal in this behalf was prompted by desire to injure the French colonies and commerce, rather than by benevolence. The British minister was more successful with Portugal, where pecuniary equivalents led to a supplementary treaty, in January, 1815. This was followed by the declaration of the Congress of Vienna, on motion of Lord Castlereagh, 8th February, 1815, denouncing the African slave-trade “as repugnant to the principles of humanity and of universal morality.” Meanwhile Napoleon returned from Elba, and what British intervention failed to accomplish with the Bourbon monarch, and the Emperor once flatly refused, was now spontaneously done by him, doubtless in the hope of conciliating British sentiment. His hundred days of power were signalized by an ordinance abolishing the slave-trade in France and her colonies. Louis the Eighteenth, once again restored by British arms, and with the shadow of Waterloo resting upon France, could not do less than ratify the imperial ordinance by a royal assurance that “the traffic was henceforth forever forbidden to all the subjects of his most Christian Majesty.”[81] Holland came under the same influence, and accepted the restitution of her colonies, except the Cape of Good Hope and Guiana, on condition of the entire abolition of the slave-trade in the restored colonies, and also everywhere else beneath her flag. Spain was the most indocile; but this proud monarchy, under whose auspices the African slave-trade first came into being, at last yielded. By the treaty of Madrid, of 23d September, 1817, extorted by Great Britain, it stipulated the immediate abolition of the trade north of the equator, and also, after 1820, its abolition everywhere, in consideration of four hundred thousand pounds, the price of Freedom, paid by the other contracting party. In vindication of this intervention, Wilberforce declared in Parliament, that “the grant to Spain would be more than repaid to Great Britain in commercial advantages by the opening of a great continent to British industry,”--all of which was impossible, if the slave-trade was allowed to continue under the Spanish flag.[82]

At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1818, and of Verona, in 1822, Great Britain continued her intervention against Slavery. Chateaubriand, in his history of the latter Congress, pauses to express his admiration of the “singular perseverance” in this cause manifested by her at all Congresses, amidst questions the most urgent and interests the most pressing.[83] Here her primacy was undisputed, and her fame complete. It was the common remark of Continental publicists, that she “made the cause her own.”[84] One of them portrays her vividly, since 1810 waging “relentless war” against the principle of the slave-trade, and by this “crusade,” undertaken in the name of Humanity, making herself the “declared protectress” of the African race. These are the words of a French authority.[85] According to him, it is nothing less than “relentless war” and a “crusade” which she has waged, and the position which she has achieved is that of “protectress” of the African race,--while no less a person than Chateaubriand recognizes with admiration the “singular perseverance” she has displayed in this practical extension of Christianity. Not content with imposing her magnanimous system upon the civilized world, she carried it among the tribes and chiefs of Africa, who, by her omnipresent intervention, were summoned to renounce a barbarous and criminal custom. By a Parliamentary Report, it appears that in 1849 there were twenty-four treaties in force between Great Britain and foreign civilized powers for the suppression of the slave-trade, and also forty-two similar treaties between Great Britain and native chiefs of Africa.[86]

This intervention was not by treaties only; it was by correspondence and circulars also. And here I approach a part of the subject which illustrates the vivacity of its character. All British ministers and consuls were so many pickets on constant guard in the outposts. They were held to every service by which the cause could be promoted, even to translating and printing documents against the slave-trade, especially in countries where, unhappily, it was still pursued. There was the Pope’s Bull of 1839, which Lord Palmerston transmitted for this purpose to his agents in Cuba, Brazil, and even in Turkey, some of whom were unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain its publication, although, curiously enough, it was published in Turkey.[87]

Such zeal could not stop at the abolition of the traffic. Accordingly, Great Britain, by Act of Parliament, in 1834, enfranchised all the slaves in her own possessions, and thus again secured to herself the primacy of a lofty cause. The intervention was now openly declared to be against Slavery itself, assuming its most positive character while Lord Palmerston was Foreign Secretary,--and I say this sincerely to his great honor. Throughout his long life, among all the various concerns in which he has acted, there is nothing to be remembered hereafter with such gratitude. By his untiring diplomacy her Majesty’s Government constituted itself a vast Abolition Society, with the whole world for its field. It was in no respect behind the famous World’s Convention against Slavery, held at London in June, 1840, with Thomas Clarkson, the pioneer Abolitionist, as President; for the strongest declarations of this Convention were adopted by Lord Palmerston as “the sentiments of her Majesty’s Government,” and communicated officially to British functionaries in foreign lands. The Convention declared “the utter injustice of Slavery in all its forms, and the evil it inflicts upon its miserable victims, and the necessity of employing every means, moral, religious, and pacific, for its complete abolition, an object most dear to the members of this Convention, and for the consummation of which they are especially assembled.”[88] These words became the words of the British Government, and in circular letters were sent over the world.

It was not enough to declare the true principles. They must be enforced. Spain and Portugal hung back. The Secretary of the Antislavery Society was sent “to endeavor to create in those countries a public feeling in favor of the abolition of Slavery”; and the British minister at Lisbon was desired by Lord Palmerston to “afford all the assistance and protection in his power for promoting the object of his journey.”[89] British functionaries abroad sometimes backslided. This was corrected by circulars setting forth “that it would be unfitting that any officer holding an appointment under the British Crown should, either directly or indirectly, hold or be interested in slave property.”[90] The Parliamentary Papers which attest the universality of this instruction show the completeness with which it was executed. The consul at Rio Janeiro, in slaveholding Brazil, had among his domestics three negro slaves, two men and a woman; “of the men one was a groom and the other a waiter, and the woman he was forced to hire to nurse one of his children”; but he discharged them at once, under the antislavery discipline of the British Foreign Office, and Lord Palmerston, in formal despatch, “expresses his satisfaction.”[91] In Cuba, at the time of its reception, there was not a single resident officer, holding under the British Crown, “who was entirely free from the charge of countenancing Slavery.” But only a few weeks afterwards it was officially reported from Havana that there was “not a single British officer residing within the consular jurisdiction who had not relinquished, or was not at least preparing to relinquish, this odious practice.”[92] This was quick work. The metamorphosis was prompt as anything in ancient fable. Every person holding office under the British Government at once set his face against Slavery, _and the way was by having nothing to do with it, even in employing or hiring the slave of another,--nothing, “directly or indirectly”_.

Lord Palmerston, acting in the name of the British Government, did not stop with changing British officials into practical Abolitionists, whenever they were in foreign countries. He sought to enlist other European Governments, and to this end requested them to forbid their functionaries residing in slaveholding communities to be interested in slave property or in any holding or hiring of slaves. Denmark for a moment hesitated, from unwillingness to debar them from acting according to the laws where they resided, when the minister at once cited in support of his request the example of Belgium, Hanover, Holland, Sweden, Naples, Portugal, and Sardinia, all without delay having yielded to this British intervention, and Denmark ranged herself in the list.[93] Nor was this indefatigable Propaganda confined to the Christian powers. With a sacred pertinacity it reached into distant Mohammedan regions, where Slavery was imbedded not only in the laws, but the habits, the social system, and the very life of the people, and called upon the Government to act against it. No impediment deterred,--no prejudice, national or religious. To the Shah of Persia, ruling a vast, outlying slave empire, Lord Palmerston announced the desire of the British Government “to see the slave-trade put down and the condition of Slavery abolished in every part of the world”; “that it conceived much good might be accomplished in these respects, even in Mohammedan countries, by steady perseverance, and by never omitting to take advantage of favorable opportunities”; and “that the Shah would be doing a thing extremely acceptable to the British Government and nation, if he would issue a decree prohibiting for the future the importation of slaves of any kind into Persia, and making it penal for a Persian to purchase slaves.”[94] To the Sultan of Turkey, whose mother was a slave, whose wives were all slaves, and whose very counsellors, generals, and admirals were originally slaves, he made a similar appeal, and he sought to win the dependent despot by reminding him that only in this way could he hope for that good-will which was so essential to his Government; “that the continued support of Great Britain will, for some years to come, be an object of importance to the Porte,--_that this support cannot be given effectually, unless the sentiments and opinions of the majority of the British nation shall be favorable to the Turkish Government,--and that the whole of the British nation unanimously desire, beyond almost anything else, to put an end to the cruel practice of making slaves_.”[95] Such, at that time, was the voice of the British people. Since Cromwell pleaded for the Vaudois, no nobler voice had gone forth. The World’s Convention against Slavery saw itself transfigured, while platform speeches were transfused into diplomatic notes. The Convention, earnest for Universal Emancipation, declared that “_the friendly interposition_ of Great Britain could be employed for no nobler purpose,” and, as if to crown its work, in an address to Lord Palmerston, humbly and earnestly implored his Lordship to use his high authority for “connecting the overthrow of Slavery with the consolidation of Peace”; and these words were at once adopted in foreign despatches, as expressing the sentiments of her Majesty’s Government.[96] Better watchwords could not be, nor any more worthy of the British name. _There can be no consolidation of Peace without the overthrow of Slavery._ This is as true now as when first uttered. Therefore is Great Britain still bound to her original faith; nor can she abandon the cause, of which she was the declared protectress, without betrayal of Peace, as well as betrayal of Liberty.