TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CONGRESS OF BERLIN. THIS Congress may fail, after all, and we begin to fear that if an imperfect success is failure, it will fail ; but until it has failed, it may worthily attract the attention of the civi- lised world. It could do such strange things, and is so strange itself. No scene more striking has been presented in this half century, overcrowded as it has been with historic scenes. It is the first great assemblage of the European Powers that has been held in the capital of the newest of all great States— the first recognition that, for the time at all events, substantial power in Europe has shifted its centre Eastward. Nothing but a history like that of 1866-71, of the five years which transformed the newest and least regarded of the Great Powers into the foremost and most powerful, could have induced all Europe to select for its debates a city so remote and so little attractive to men who have seen all of luxury and convenience that Europe has to show,—a city, too, in which, of all others, they will be least regarded. For by a strange irony in their fate, just as Berlin is assigned a sort of European primacy among cities, the Berliners are discussing, not the rise of their Empire, but her possible fall, the evil symptoms of social un- rest, of which the attempted assassination of her Emperor is but the one most noticed by the world. A Congress at Berlin would have seemed to our ancestors as strange as a Parliament at Hawick. The Congress sits in an old palace, the Palace of the Radziwils, the very name of which must remind its members perpetually of the only European State which within the last three hundred years has dropped out of the roll of nations, and has been, perhaps finally, divided among its neighbours. Partition, the palace will suggest to them, is not always a temporary expedient. The members of Congress are most of them among the foremost statesmen of Europe, and two of them, at least, will live in future history. There will, within no long time, be a Bismarck literature in Germany, possibly in Europe, and centuries hence historians will make reputations by their pictures of the great Reiter-diplomatist, the dragoon-statesman, the Goetz-Richelieu, the man who in himself sums up so well the characteristics of the old and of the new Germany. Nor can we doubt that as the dreams of Alberoni are still studied, as men still read lives of the Cardinal de R,etz, as Bolingbroke still interests statesmen, and as Napoleon III. still appeals to those who love to investigate the puzzles of character, future historians will dwell lovingly on the memoirs and the letters, the caricatures, and the "Lives of Queens" which will slowly reveal to our children the true objects of the Sphinx-like personage who, whether the first civil statesman in Europe or only the first charlatan, is in either capacity at least the second figure in the Congress of Berlin. Nor, though these two stand by themselves, are the other attendants at the Board men to be readily for- gotten. Prince Gortschakoff has governed Russia for twenty-one years, has for that long period stood at the centre of its secret history, has seen one Czar almost master of Europe, snubbing France, re-establishing Austria, dictating to Germany, and then passing from life, perhaps voluntarily, a beaten and hope- less man ; and has seen another, defeated in a war with Turkey and its allies, enfranchising his people, renewing the contest with the secular foe, triumphing greatly, and then quietly obeying a summons to the European bar. Just think, apart from his career, what Prince Gortschakoff must know, what secret history he could write, what reputations he could shatter with a phrase ! Is there another man who is sure whether Russian diplomatists are the most artful or most stupid of their kind ? Lord Salisbury and Count Andrassy are smaller men, but even they represent two of the most ancient political forces still surviving, the English and the Hungarian aristocracies, and in all but the prejudices and ignorance which aristocracies cannot avoid, represent them well. France has done well to choose M. Waddington to represent her, for it is her historic peculiarity to succeed when her agent is a naturalised foreigner; and Turkey does better to send the astute Greek who for years has supplied her Foreign Office with despatches, and who sits at the Board the latest, let us hope the last, specimen of those Greeks who for nearly two thousand years have placed capacity and knowlege at the service of races which have become great in the world mainly because they succeeded in en- slaving their own. Be the master Roman, or Turk, or Slav, the Greek has still found the brain. A Greek fitly represents Turkey in her hour of fate, if only that enslaved mind may be avenged on tyrannic matter. Lord Odo Russell is a man to whom England looks in an emergency ; St. Vallier, the one French diplomatist who has won con- fidence from Prince Bismarck ; Count Schouvaloff, the future Chancellor of an Empire, and the one Russian, perhaps, who has understood England—for Pozzo di Borgo was no Russian —and Count Corti, an Italian who, if Constantinople gossip• may be trusted, has, if not the force of Cavour, at least his supple finesse. Men say there that even a Greek cannot take him in,. or a Turk drive him from his path. Kings may be satisfied to regard such an assemblage of intellects, and think that the Envoys are but agents ; aristocrats may be pleased, for seven of the greatest—Bismarck, Gortschakoff, Schouvaloff, Andrassy, St. Vallier, Salisbury, and Russell—belong distinctively to their order ; while plebeians need not be dismayed by the spectacle, for the eighth, though full of the pride of a pedigree to which even Schouvaloff's is modern—and he represents Princes older than the Grand Princedom from which sprang the Czarship—is the son of a mere littdrateur, and was once a clerk in a London attorney's office, hoping, perhaps, to die a Member for the Tower Hamlets.
And if the assemblage is remarkable, so also is its object. The men who sit there, if they could but agree, have the power to carve the world ; and before them, avowedly to be carved, lies the Eastern half of the Roman Empire,—the half which, after many vicissitudes, escaped the vivifying conquest of the Northern barbarians, only to be crushed beneath the deadening conquest of the barbarians from the South. If Spain were but there, the whole Western Empire would be deciding at last upon the fate of the Eastern. The power to fulfil the purpose of which the Papacy in its first thousand years always dreamed, but dreamed in vain, for which the hosts of Crusaders struggled through two centuries fruitlessly, which tempted Charlemagne when he received a proposal from the Empress Irene, and Charles V. when Lepanto had saved the coasts of the Mediterranean, has been placed by fate or Providence in the hands of that Council- Board. Rome in its grandest height of power never pos- sessed one inch which they either do not inherit, or have not the power, if they please, to replace under a regenerating civilisation. From the Persian Gulf to the northern confines of Dacia, from Batoum to the Atlas, every village that Justinian ruled lies stretched out at their disposal. They can give Numidia order, and protection to the people now, as then, slaving for others in the Valley of the Nile. Syria is theirs, and Armenia ; " Asia," studded with cities ; Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace, the hundred islands of the Mediterranean, as well as the land where peasants still speak the tongue carried among barbarians by Trajan's colonists. Just think that these men can settle, if they please, as they sit there, the future of Athens and of Carthage, of Jerusalem and Alexandria, of Antioch and Divan, as well as of Constantinople, with Bagdad as a mere incident in the arrangement, and scholars at least will realise that they are looking on at a most marvellous scene. It will neverthe- less, we fear, be a disappointing one. Publicists who have not forgotten history may amuse themselves with thinking of the grandeur of such a task as Congress might attempt, of the new career the world might run if a steam-plough were safe in the Valley of the Orontes, or if wheat could be once more reaped in peace before Iconium, and may smile to themselves as they think of stupid English Squires, anxious mainly for a Meat Bill, working indirectly so beneficent a revolution ; but the Englishmen of to-day are not capable of the position, they can see nothing but the bold barbarians who but for Christi- anity would be so like themselves, and without their consent the Eastern world can enjoy nothing but resignation. The dreams are all dreams. There will be struggles over details, trumpery little questions of fortresses and frontiers, and triumphs over minute victories such as that Turks still remain on the Egean or that Bayazid is not Slav, and Turkish Bonds will be raised to thirty, and Mr. Disraeli will be a Duke, and "the East" will be left once more to anarchy and decay. And who are we, fiat- nosed barbarians that we are, that we should complain when the descendant of an unmixed people has so decreed? " Parliamentary Government is an excellent thing, but my race has seen and has survived the Pharaohs,"—and has seen and will survive alike the decay of the East and the greatness of the little island which to-day, by a mysterious chance, could revivify her again.
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