TOPICS OF THE DAY.
COUNT VON BeLOW.
THE main effect of the recent passage of arms between Great Britain and Germany has been, we think, to lower the -general repute of Count von Billow. He is acknowledged to be a -facile speaker, an adroit manager, and a man who comprehends his countrymen ; but as regards the most important of his duties, the con- trol under his master of foreign affairs, there is a wide- spread distrust of the soundness of his judgment, which recent incidents have increased. He found Germany fenced in with the goodwill of all the Powers but France, which when alone is powerless to disturb her, and he has helped to produce a situation in which, as we pointed out a fortnight since, Germany is nearly isolated. He has a wide knowledge of diplomatic facts and great general felicity of statement, but there is some defect of imagina- tion in him which forbids him to see the effect of his words or acts upon foreign opinion. He could not perceive that for a special Ambassador from China to perform the kow- tow before a foreign Prince was degrading and impossible. He failed to see the effect of his economic policy upon public feeling in Russia., where great and small depend for their prosperity upon free-trade in cereals. He does not comprehend the depth of the bitterness produced in the United States by the obvious wish of Germany that Spain should be successful in the Spanish War. He is blind, it may be, no doubt, wilfully blind, to the fact that Italy is slip- ping once more towards France, and thinks because Signor Prinetti gives him pleasant assurances that Italy is as devoted to the Triple Alliance as she was in the days .of King Humbert. He did not see, what we think much inferior men would have seen, that any depreciating expression about the Triple Alliance would be interpreted in Austria, as it has been interpreted, as a slight upon Austrian useful- ness as an ally. If the Alliance is no longer of the first importance, which is the meaning, expressed or implied, of the Count's remark that it has ceased to be in- dispensable, Austria is no longer of the first import- ance either, and every Austrian feels as if he had re- ceived, not indeed an insult, but a slight. The Poles of Prussia occupy just the position of the Irish in the -United Kingdom, that is, of aquick people ruled by a slow one, and they are therefore irritating, but what could be less judicious than to tell the Poles : "We conquered you at Waterloo, and we mean to keep you" by the sword. The objects of any reasonable Government of Germany as regards its Polish subjects are fusion and forgetfulness, and Count von Billow seeks them by menaces which in a people whose Utopia is in the past suggest memories of endless wrong.
Just look, again, at Count von Billow's management of the quarrel with Great Britain. The German people, dis- liking the English, who, as they think, stand in the way of their expansion and enrichment, have willingly listened to absurd calumnies about their rivals' conduct in South Africa, and have snatched at a purely historical remark by Mr. Chamberlain, intimating that if we ever resorted to severity we could find precedents in the history of the Franco-German War, to indulge in an explosion of insult. They want to make us feel that they hate us, and endeavour to realise their want by pictorial and literary abuse, often more grossly coarse than English abuse was a century ago. Count von Billow who knows perfectly well that we have committed no atrocities in South Africa, and that Mr. Chamberlain had no intention of insulting anybody, but only of defending the British Army as any historian might, thought it advisable to calm this agitation, and when it reached the Reichstag rose to expose it. All, however, that he could find to say was that it was not the "interest" of Germany to say such things about a friendly: Power, with which she had never fought and had now important political relations. That was really the substance of the Chancellor's rebuke, and it was of course interpreted, both in Germany and England, as implying that there was reason for the agitation and the violent language, but that politicians were bound to be discreet. He may be a villain, implies Count von Billow, but he ii a rich man and a customer. The total effect. therefore, has been an almost complete alienation of British feeling from Germany, and a doubt whether under such circumstances we have not better treatment to hope for frem the Dual Alliance than from the Germans, who hitherto have always been regarded as more or less our kinsfolk and good friends. Mr. Chamberlain's strong yet calm retort that he would not rebuke a foreign Minister or receive rebuke from him, and that he had nothing to retract or to defend, has been accepted as a just expression of national indignation. Mr. Chamberlain, who is supposed. on the Continent to govern England as well as her Colonies, and to be a kind of malevolent bogey always seeking occasions of quarrel, has distinctly risen in popular esteem throughout the kingdom and in the Colonies by virtue of increased belief in his capacity of self-restraint. Count von Below has, in fact, given him a grand opportunity of showing himself under the eyes of all Europe as at once the firmer and the more dignified of the two statesmen. Is that successful management?
We are quite ready to believe that the German Chan- cellor desired to be civil, and that it was not so much that he lacked the intention of conciliating as that he could not get rid of the wish to provoke applause from those immediately around him. He grew perplexed between the two multitudes, those of Germany and those of England ; and the incident reveals a fact which will as time rolls on become of greater, and, we fear, more dis- agreeable, importance. The diplomatists of Europe are puzzled how to deal with the popular intrusion into their sacred mystery. They know how to deal with Princes and Foreign Ministers, when to be smooth, when to be sarcastic, when even, if they are able men, to be " illumi- nating " ; but when the multitude intervenes they are perplexed. They see it has power, they dread its un- reason, sometimes even unduly, but they do not know how to address it, how to reach its mind, how to avoid saying things which, though diplomatists may under- stand them, any multitude may misinterpret. They fail in the most extraordinary way to explain things quite capable of explanation, say, in an after-dinner speech, and then every now and then commit themselves when they never dreamed of a committal. Count von Billow, it is quite clear, hardly knew how to address his own multitude, whom he wished to calm without affront- ing them; or our multitude, whom he wished more or less to conciliate, but did not in the least understand. Ambas- sadors and such folk will have, we feel certain, to discover some way of reaching the people among whom they dwell as well as their rulers, though we frankly confess a mode of doing it except through speeches, which might be dangerous, is as yet invisible to us. Do not let us be mistaken. We infinitely prefer secret diplomacy, in which an error can be explained or an offer made without pro- ducing an excitement among the ignorant ; but we dread the present position of affairs, in which unrestricted calumny or misrepresentation may poison the minds of a whole people, whom in the last resort their leaders cannot resist. The favourite charge of the Germans against our soldiers has been that of violating women,—a crime from which the British, the American, and the German Armies have since 1815 been singularly free. Yet even this it has apparently been inconvenient for diplomatists publicly to deny. It must surely be possible at least to deny with evidence statements such as those which the Times col- lected on Monday without violating all the traditions of diplomacy. If it is not, then half the use of diplomacy is gone, and it will cease from what we honestly believe to be not only its first function, but its conscious, per- manent object,—namely, to maintain peace among jarring nations, , separated by their histories, their interests, or their pride, and liable unhappily, when great interests are at stake, to be mentally poisoned by manufactured lies.
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