SURRENDER OF GIBRALTAR.
"IN the multitude of councils there is safety." Our Government has been favoured with many proposals for its guidance, abroad and at home; but the last piece of advice given to it, with all sincerity and much force, is perhaps the most striking, the most novel, and at once the most difficult to accept and the most attractive to many of our countrymen. It is, in the first place, to restore Gibraltar to Spain, not simply for the purpose of relinquishing that peninsular rock and reEstablishmg Spain in her rights, but for the purpose of illustrating the great fact that England has returned to national morality, and is resolved to establish peace in Europe, so far as her own acts go ; furthermore, to revise our course of policy as a member of the European family. This is the advice of Mr. Richard Congreve, a former Fellow and Tutor of Oxford University ; an accomplished writer and a bold politician.* The course by which Mr. Congreve arrives at this definite advice is remarkable. It appears to set out in a direction exactly the opposite of its purpose, and comes to its port as it were by circumnavigation. We epitomize the argument. Western Europe constitutes a state-system; its communities can only act as part of a larger community. When they are disunited., there will be a suspension of the progress that Europe ought to make in civilization. They have been combined at different times. Brought together by the strength of the Roman Empire, they attained an extraordinary progress under the long-continued pax Romano." The Saxon conquest divorced them from Europe, and isolated England ; the Norman conquest restored England to her relationship with the Continent. History has seen many efforts at this union —the Roman Empire, the Spiritualism of the Middle Ages, the Catholicism of regenerate Europe ; each failing from some defect in its comprehension of intellectual or economical ideas. Catholicism, for example, looked coldly on the rise of industry, with jealousy on intellectual development. Protestantism, which was a reaction against the errors of Catholicism, mistook a partial truth for a whole truth, failed to supply positive grounds of action, and tended to insulation. Diplomacy, however imperfectly, has in some slight degree at least attested the desire of the nations of Europe for united action. It is in this united action that the course of civilization finds its vitality. Throughout the history of the world we have seen a tutelage of mankind by the superior race—a guardianship of the Yellow or the Black in the White race. England has aimed at enforcing that tutelage ; but she cannot do it effectually while she mistakes her place in Western Europe—while she preserves an attitude of isolation, or arrogates to herself that place which is not hers, the first. For the facts of the past as well as the present day indicate France for the leader of Western Europe ; and it is only by action with the leader, and with the other states of the West, that England can give full effect to her own intellectual and moral impulses. At present the whole of Europe is torn with disquiet. Italy is but the most prominent cause of uneasiness ; in the Danish succession, in the Danubian Principalities, the Austrian occupation of Tuscany, the French of Rome, the position of Sardinia, the Austrian tenure of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, and in the Prussian claim to Neuchitel, are dangers for the peace of the Continent. The late war has at last shaken the theory that civilization is to be promoted by discord. The most indispensable preliminary for a right public opinion is peace ; to begin the revision of the right management of Western Europe, we must enforce peace. The aspiration of Falkland is the aspiration of Congreve. But at present Europe is in a state of jealousy as between nation and nation —as between nations and governments. The royal families, with an imperfect diplomatic organization, keep up a mistrust by their two millions and a half of soldiers, without establishing their own power or attaining the paramount influence that is dreaded. Strong to alarm, both Austria and Prussia are feeble in outward aggression. Russia, who can overbear and dictate, cannot possibly rule beyond her own confines ; and by the temptations of war in alien countries she is diverted from the true business of civilization and development at home. England can scarcely advise ; for her own conduct has not been perfectly pure, her own position is not one that disarms jealousy, her own counsel has not been disinterested.
The perception of these faults indicates the amended course of action ; and here we come by circumnavigation back to Mr. Congreve's counsel. The most notable instance of English intrusion, of English claim to dictate upon the European continent, where it is not her place to dictate, is the possession of Gibraltar. It is hers prescriptively, by the tenure of a century and a half. Her acquirement was not positively. without flaw, but it is legal. She can hold it if she please. Spain is the very contrast to England ; for, by strength of will, indomitable energy, and real internal power notwithstanding apparent disunion, England is independent of the world, and needs not fear any combination ; while
Spain with a glorious past, once the terror and arbiter of Europe, has fa: ri lien to lowest rank, through dynastic quarrels and mis direction of national energies. She cannot wrest Gibraltar from us. We should perhaps regret the loss as much as Queen
* "Gibraltar, or the Foreign Policy of England. By Richard dongreve, M.A." Published by Parker and Son, and es_pecially dedicated to the late Jahn Burgoyne Blackett, Member for Newcastle. Mary, who died for the loss of Calais; but was that loss any real privation to us? Do we not now see how little we gamed by it—how much its retention would have morally weakened our position? It is the same with Gibraltar. "Noblesse oblige " : restore it to Spain ; attest your honesty; retire from European dictation and conflict ; concentrate all your energy upon revising your policy abroad and at home ; and withdraw, not to an isolated position, but to self-reflection. Establish peace so far as England's shore is concerned, by an example of generous morality to the world; and thus compel "the nationalities" to understand and accept the new dispensation. That is the new policy. It is the grand principle which is to supersede the crude Cobdenic idea of nonintervention, though it swallows up that minor serpent. It is a more pious version of "administrative reform," with higher motives and larger scope. It is the grand solution of the Income-tax, for the burden of Mr. Congreve's sons is "disarm!" It is the Quaker policy made poetical. It is the imaginative crowning perfection of public education. It lends a religious grandeur and an artistic unity to all the agitations and public impulses which at present stir the country.
Yet we apprehend that even Mr. Disraeli will not rise up in his place in Parliament and introduce a bill, a resolution, or an address to the Crown, for carrying out the Gibraltar policy. Two doubts lie at the very root of the proposition. One suggests a question to Mr. Congreve himself ; the other refers to the English nation. Can our public rise to this high argument ? Are our people yet sufficiently educated to put faith in the wisdom of marching naked among armed foes and treacherous friends ? It has been said that the fiercest dog will stand awed by the natural majesty of a naked human being, the inferior creature cowering before the descendant of Adam. Yet we conceive that, pleasing as the theory may be, few men would think it safe to descend into a dog-kennel because they had taken off their clothes. At least it would require a very long education in that course of conduct to snake us feel much confidence in it. The second doubt lies in an omitted part of this pamphlet, which we rather expect to discover in Mr. Congreve's Edinburgh Lectures. To England he assigns the second place in Europe—the ancillary ; to France the first. For .joint action in the community of nations, internal unity is needed ; and what presents that in so promising a form as the Empire "? Does Mr. Congreve's Gibraltar policy contemplate a "pax Romano." under the modern Ccesar, with Louis Napoleon as the Paterfamilias of the European family ?
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