BOOKS.
LORD AUGTJSTUS LOFT1JS'S DIPLOMATIC REMINISCENCES.*
" JE connais trente imbeciles qui feraient d'excellens Am-
bassadeurs," wrote Chiteaubriand, when Minister of Foreign Affairs, to a friend who was curious to know how the higher
French diplomatic posts would be filled up. Leaving the illustration of this idea of the author of the "Genie du Christianisme " to the competent Downing Street experts, we venture on the opinion that in an examination conducted on ChAteaubriand principles, the author of the volumes before us would have been plucked. The " Reminiscences" are the work of a man with more brain than the ambassadorial average, shrewd powers of observation, liberal sympathies, and a strong dose of wholesome John Bull feeling. How much his services were appreciated in Downing Street is 'apparent from the fact that one of our Legations was raised from a lower to a higher rank, while the fundamental Statute of the Order of the Bath was re-edited by the Queen, all to give Lord Augustus Loftus claims to a better pension, and to bring the dignity of G.C.B. the more rapidly within his reach. Afterwards, when his country's calls on his faculties and purse had run to the bitter end, he was granted the Nirvana of a lucrative Colonial Governorship, so as to allow him bodily, mental, and financial recuperation. These and other surprises of a rapid career cannot be quite explained by the potency of the rule, nisi Dominus frustra.
As a survey of modern international politics, the ex- Ambassador's book is interesting and useful. To some tastes it might have been most palatable if it had not been
• The Diplomatic Reminiscences of Lord Augustus Loftus, P.C., G.C.B. 1862-79. Second Berks. 2 vols. London : Cassell and Co. 1894.
compiled according to the prescription, Rj—take one part personal and social description, and ten parts despatch. To the predominance of the quotations from official reports are seemingly due certain genuflexions of the author's language, which read as if "made in Germany," or like extracts from the Court Circular of Sargon or Nebucadnezzar. Alluding in 1894 to a ball given in 1868, this reverential pen writes that the British Embassy was "honoured by the presence of their Prussian Majesties, when the King proposed the health of her Majesty the Queen, our Gracious Sovereign." Again, "I was so sensible of his Majesty's wish for peace, that I ventured to speak to his Majesty in furtherance of it, and: to inquire whether the object so ardently desired by his Majesty," &c. In the same way His Lordship was " honoured " by invitations to Court, he was always "very graciously received," and a message of sympathy sent to Windsor was "laid at the feet of the throne." These obeisances of speech, which crowd the book, are not paid to crowned heads alone ; Prince Gortschakoff figures largely as "his Highness."
In spite of the aphorism falsely fathered on Bufton, the style is very often, as the history of literature and art shows, utterly unlike the man. The written manner of Lord Augustus Loftus is not himself, for in conversation with exalted personages, however lofty, far from being on the cringe, he was constantly ready with "the retort courteous," or even with "the reproof valiant." His Majesty the King of Prussia having graciously deigned to send Lord Augustus a summons to dine at his Majesty's table, there ensued some talk on European armaments, in which the Ambassador did not join until his Majesty vouchsafed the remark that the English army was "so small." This brought down our representative, who replied that, although small in absolute numbers, our troops had always beaten our enemies in every European war in which we had been engaged. On grounds of humanity, not of ambition, England had just sent an expedition to Abyssinia, which had released some of our own people, with several of his Majesty's subjects, had taken Magdala, and then left the country. "I doubted whether any of the great military Powers could have done as much." To a less friendly interlocutor Lord. Augustus made an excellent remark. Meeting Prince Gort- schakoff at Baden-Baden, he brought forward the mission of General Stolietoff to Cabal, sent with arms to Shere Ali in flat violation of Russia's promises in regard to her recognised sphere of Central-Asiatic influence. The Emperor, said the Prince, would never forego his right of sending " compli- mentary " (?) missions to foreign rulers. "Do not forget," added his Highness, "that the Emperor is an independent sovereign ruler over eighty millions of subjects." "I re- plied that I was quite aware of the fact, as also that my Gracious Sovereign the Queen was ruler over more than two hundred (nearly three hundred ?) millions of subjects." To which his Highness could only answer that the Russian Empire was united, while our population was scattered. The Ambassador proceeded to say in plain terms that the despatch of Stolietoff was a breach of the engage- ment which Russia had taken to England. Moreover, M. de Giers had expressly assured him that there neither had been, nor was, "any intention of sending a mission to Cabal." In his retreat from this little difficulty, his Highness seems to- have cut a poor figure, saying, amongst other things, that probably M. de Giers, at the time acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, had himself no information of the Stolietoff mission!' To that ultra-representative of Muscovite aggression, the late Grand Duke Constantine (who, with M. de Seniavine, was the inventor of the Crimean War), Lord Augustus gave, on one occasion, a vigorous answer. The Grand Duke having told him in categorical terms that Russia's wish was to reach the Hindu Kush and make it the frontier of Afghanistan, the. Ambassador replied, Jamais, Monseigneur ; l'Oxus eat la frontiere naturelle." Touchstone would have been pleased with this.
On the subject of the invasion of India, the Emperor Alexander II. said to Lord Augustus Loftus, " Ce serait une folie," while General Skobeleff held it to be prac- ticable. His opinion was contested by other military authorities ; but that was twenty years ago. At the time of the Crimean War, one of the first military personages of Russia said to a British friend, "The day may come when I shall water my horse in the Ganges." At that time the Empire of the Czars was bounded by the Syrdaria (hardly known then except under its classical name, the Jaxartes), and her advanced post on the Caspian was Alexandrovsky, on the northern peninsula of Mangishlak. The frontier has since been pushed ten degrees of latitude further south; the" Inde- pendent Tartary " of the old maps has been wiped out; Mery may be reached by rail, post-card, and telegram ; while the Cossacks are permanently established, with British recog- -mition, at Chilli]. Dukhtaran, fifty-five miles, as the crow (or vulture) flies, north of Herat, and, for anything any one knows to the contrary, on "Wood's Lake" on the Pamirs. Regard- ing the chapters of the Russian advances to India, which were within his own horizon, Lord Augustus uses lan- guage which, though courteous, is as explicit as possible. He shows that from first to last the process was the same. Was China to be annexed, or the Turcomans attacked, or Mery occupied, or the final advance to be made towards Herat, or a secret mission to be sent to Shere Ali, in each case the accomplishment of the move was preceded by assurances, repeated, formal, and solemn, given to the British Government, verbally and in writing, that no such measure was in contemplation. "But," observes Lord Augustus Loftus, "when the favourable moment came, those assurances were discarded without the smallest hesitation." The Shiva story deserves special statement. Count Schouvaloff was instructed to give Lord Granville the most solemn assurances I la Rnsse " que pas un ponce de terrain ne serait pris par la Russie." Upon that, Shiva was annexed, minus its capital, a proceeding of which Count Schouvaloff was so utterly ashamed that he gave the Emperor his opinion "that the non-fulfilment of these assurances reflected on the Imperial Government," and proposed to retire from the service. Out of this mess the Emperor tried to flounder, by saying that the ." inch " meant not the Khanate, but the town. To our Ambassador elect at St. Petersburg, the whole of his pre- decessor's polite but scathing arraignment of Russia's Punic Faith may be recommended for careful study.
The author's tenure of the Berlin Embassy covered the period of the Prussian wars with Austria and France. On the internal affairs of Germany his views seem very sensible. In opposition to almost the entire body of our domestic official opinion, he held that Germany ought to be allowed, almost encouraged, to constitute herself according to her own devices, as Italy had done. His verdict on the events of 1866 is, that although in driving Austria into war Prince Bismarck was the champion of a policy of progress "worthy of a great statesman and a zealous patriot," his ends were not achieved with clean hands. "There were no real grounds for war between Austria and Prussia, as regarded the question of the Elbe Duchies ; " but, as an Austrian diplomatist un- politely put it, "the two thieves quarrelled over their spoils." Lord Augustus declines to adjudicate between Prince Bis- marck and Count Benedetti in their squabble as to the authorship of the secret treaty for the aggrandisement of Prussia and France at the expense of their neighbours. He argues that the person (Benedetti) in whose handwriting the MS. Treaty stood must "bear the prima-facie attribution of its authorship," and remarks that the Emperor Napoleon's idea that countries and populations could be handed about like merchandise, was a disgrace to an enlightened age. Also, that when proposals of such character (annexation of Belgium and the like) "have been pursued for a series of years, an equal responsibility rests on those who make and those who entertain them." That is, to fall into a more ver- nacular style, in this affair the pot had no right to call the kettle black. Arcades combo. On the occurrence of the so- called "War in sight" incident of 1875, when Prince Bis- marck was believed to be preparing an unprovoked invasion of France just to make assurance more sure, Lord Augustus Loftus was no longer in Berlin. Respecting the Russian intervention in favour of peace, on which as Ambassador in St. Petersburg he must have been well informed, he is not very explicit. The pressure put on the Emperor William at Ems by his nephew the Czar, and on Prince Bismarck at Berlin by Prince Gortschakoff, is over-minimised when de- scribed as " influence " and "wise counsels." The peacemakers went beyond that ; they gave it to be understood that Russia would not hesitate to oppose by arms a gratuitous onslaught on the French Republic. From sketches of personal and social life at the Courts to which he was accredited, the author provokingly refrains. He says the Russian ladies wear very fine clothes, "the perfection of a certain Mr. Worth,"—a startling way of naming a poten- tate at least as famous as any Emperor or King in the book. He does not tell us what Miinich society thought when he trod on the fundamentals of aristocratic propriety by asking a man of science—the chemist Liebig—to join his family dinner. His Excellency was quite capable of addressing his invitations to Professors of History also. The learned in that department would have been rather startled at an excursus in these volumes, in which the Elector Palatine, known as "Winter's King," who married the daughter of our James L, and lost his throne by his defeat of the White Mountain, is called "the first and only King of Bohemia." According to the books, that country had its own crowned heads from the time of Frederick Barbarossa downwards, that is, four centuries previous to the Elector Palatine's brief tenure of the crown. The royal Bohemian lines included several monarchs famous in history, amongst them German Emperors, to say nothing of the Bing so familiar to our- selves from his capture at Crecy by the Black Prince, his ostrich plumes, and his somewhat mythical motto, " Ich dien." Such details, with the significant allusions in The Winter's Tale, were perhaps too esoteric for the elder diplomatic mind. To our rising Ambassadors, who have been brought up under the competition craze, they would doubtless be well known. May the new generation do the State as good service as that recorded in the present memoirs of a British representa- tive of the pre-examination age.
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