Walter Alison Phillips

“ Such was Alexander’s mood when the downfall of Napoleon left him the most powerful sovereign in Europe. With the memory of Tilsit still fresh in men’s minds, it was not unnatural that to cynical men of the world like Metternich he merely seemed to be disguising “under the language of evangelical abnegation” vast and perilous schemes of ambition. The puzzled powers were, in fact, the more inclined to be suspicious in view of other, and seemingly inconsistent, tendencies of the emperor, which yet seemed all to point to a like disquieting conclusion. ”

“ To Faust himself, somnambulist and medium, Mephistopheles had—according to Kiesewetter—a real existence: he was “the objectivation of the transcendental subject of Faust,” an experience familiar in dreams and, more especially, in the visions of mediums and clairvoyants. He was thus a “familiar spirit,” akin to the “daemon” of Socrates; and if he was also half the devil of theology, half the kobold of old German myth, this was only because such “objectivations” are apt to clothe themselves in forms borrowed from the common stock of ideas current at the time when the seer lives ”

“ Yet, by a curious inversion of the whole idea of titles of honour, an inherited title has come to be far more valued than one bestowed; [12] it has the peculiarly aristocratic virtue ascribed by Lord Palmerston to the most Noble Order of the Garter: “There is no damned merit about it;” it has the crowning quality that it must needs be the monopoly of the few. Hereditary titles sink in value, indeed, just, in proportion as they become common. In the United Kingdom their value has been kept up by the rule of primogeniture: there can be only one bearer of such a title in a single generation. ”

“ In the early summer of 1798, after a siege of only a few days, he surrendered the island, with its impregnable fortifications, to Bonaparte, and retired ignominiously to Trieste, carrying with him the precious relics of the order—the hand of St John the Baptist presented by the sultan Bayezid, the miraculous image of Our Lady of Philermo, and a fragment of the true cross. ”

“ After the fall of the monarchy Robespierre was in effect the Jacobin Club; for to the tribunes he was the oracle of political wisdom, and by his standard all others were judged. [3] With his fall the Jacobins too came to an end.
Not the least singular thing about the Jacobins is the very slender material basis on which their overwhelming power rested. France groaned under their tyranny, which was compared to that of the Inquisition, with its system of espionage and denunciations which no one was too illustrious or too humble to escape. ”

“ The belief in the imminent collapse of the Ottoman dominion was weakened almost to extinction; so was the belief, which inspired the treaty of 1856, in the capacity of Turkey to reform and develop itself on European lines. But the Ottoman empire remained, the mistress of vast undeveloped wealth. The remaining phase of the Eastern Question, if we except the concerted efforts to impose good government on Macedonia in the interests of European peace, or the side issues in Egypt and Arabia, was the rivalry of the progressive nations for the right to exploit this wealth. ”

“ BALANCE OF POWER, a phrase in international law for such a “just equilibrium” between the members of the family of nations as should prevent any one of them from becoming sufficiently strong to enforce its will upon the rest. The principle involved in this, as Hume pointed out in his Essay on the Balance of Power, is as old as history, and was perfectly familiar to the ancients both as political theorists and as practical statesmen. In its essence it is no more than a precept of commonsense born of experience and the instinct of self-preservation ”

“ There can be no harm if ignorant and simple people, or religious women, light candles in honour of the martyrs. “We are not born, but reborn, Christians,” and that which when done for idols was detestable is acceptable when done for the martyrs. As in the case of the woman with the precious box of ointment, it is not the gift that merits reward, but the faith that inspires it. ”

“ The Personnel of the “Corps diplomatique.”—The establishment of diplomacy as a regular branch of the civil service is of modern growth, and even now by no means universal. From old time states naturally chose as their agents those who would best serve their interests in the matter in hand. In the middle ages diplomacy was practically a monopoly of the clergy, who as a class alone possessed the necessary qualifications: and in later times, when learning had spread to the laity as well, there were still potent reasons why the clergy should continue to be employed as diplomatic agents. ”

“ But the Montagnards made up by their fanatical, or desperate, energy and boldness for what they lacked in talent or in numbers. They had behind them the revolutionary Commune, the Sections and the National Guard of Paris, and they had gained control of the Jacobin club, where Brissot, absorbed in departmental work, had been superseded by Robespierre. And as the motive power of this formidable mechanism of force they could rely on the native suspiciousness of the Parisian populace, exaggerated now into madness by famine and the menace of foreign invasion. The Girondists played into their hands. ”

“ The pope still addresses his fellow-bishops as “venerable brothers”; but from the Roman Catholic Church the fraternal union of coequal authorities, which is of the essence of episcopacy, has vanished; and in its place is set the autocracy of one. The modern Roman Catholic Church is episcopal, for it preserves the bishops, whose potestas ordinis not even the pope can exercise until he has been duly consecrated; but the bishops as such are now but subordinate elements in a system for which “Episcopacy” is certainly no longer an appropriate term. ”

“ He is, however, also the devil, as the age of the Reformation conceived him: a fallen angel who has not forgotten the splendour of his first estate, and who pictures to Faust the glories of heaven, in order to accentuate the horrors of the hell to which he triumphantly drags him. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is altogether another conception. ”

“ It must be remembered that the bishops were at this time great secular princes rather than Catholic prelates; with rare exceptions, they made no pretence of carrying out their spiritual duties; they shared to the full in the somewhat shallow “enlightenment” of the age. As princes of the Empire they had asserted their practical independence of the emperor; they were irked by what they considered the unjustifiable interference of the Curia with their sovereign prerogatives, and wished to establish their independence of the pope also. ”

“ But though, in his own opinion, triumphantly vindicated, he did not again take office; he maintained, none the less, as a critic and adviser no mean influence on the counsels of the Austrian court, though it was contrary to his advice that Austria signed the treaty of the 2nd of December 1854 with France and Great Britain. He lived to see the beginning of the struggle of France and Italy against Austria, dying on the 11th of June 1859.
Probably no statesman of all time has, in his own day, been more beslavered with praise and bespattered with abuse than Metternich. ”

“ As to the qualifications for an ambassador, it is clearly impossible to lay down a general rule, for the same qualities are obviously not required in Washington as in Vienna, nor in Paris as in Pekin. Yet the effort to depict the ideal ambassador bulks largely in the works of the earlier theorists, and the demands they make are sufficiently alarming. Ottaviano Maggi, himself a diplomatist of the brilliant age of the Renaissance, has left us in his De legato (Hanoviae, 1596) his idea of what an ambassador should be. He must not only be a good Christian but a learned theologian ”