Littell's Living Age/Volume 125/Issue 1619/An Unconsidered View of the Future of Europe
AN UNCONSIDERED VIEW OF THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.
There is one aspect of the present condition of Europe which subjects the amiable delusions of thirty years since to perhaps the most dramatic form of exposure which they could have received. The doctrine that "the individual withers and the race is more and more," had, a generation ago, a political as well as a social application. There was probably no article of the orthodox Liberal creed more firmly held by Liberals than the belief that the influence of individual will, the importance of individual lives, would steadily diminish with the progress of the democratic principle. Just now, when Europe has been in a ferment at the idea that one man is bent upon plunging her into war, and has recovered her composure on learning that another man is disposed to preserve the peace, the doctrine to which we have referred may be said, perhaps, to have reached the nadir of its discredit. Its utter refutation by facts is somewhat singular, considering that the democratic principle, on the progress of which its realization was said to depend, has undoubtedly progressed. The "year of revolutions" was but a year, but we cannot deny that everything is changed in Europe since those eventful days when crowns were tumbling to the ground everywhere, like so many apples in a gale of wind. The Constitutions of 1848 did not all of them wear very well, it is true; but the influence which begot them left its mark, and that a deepening and widening mark, upon European politics. No absolutist government of the present day is as despotic as it was before 1848; some which were absolutist then are today more or less constitutional in character. In none is it possible to say that the people count for as little as they used to do in the government of their country. Yet, in spite of all this, events have tended to concentrate power in fewer hands, until at last it has been possible to say that the fate of Europe rests at the arbitrament of two men, and that of the two the one whose power is less absolute in theory is perhaps the most powerful in fact. But whatever the nature of these two individual forces, whether original or delegated, there can be little doubt of their magnitude even apart from each other, or of the overwhelming force which they could exercise in combination.
To say, however, that the fate of Europe depends on a single will, or upon the will of two or three men, is to say that it depends upon one or two or three lives. And it is this reflection which is perhaps the most humbling to democratic pride in the matter. For if to the lives of those who concentrate the material power over Europe in their hands be added the life of the most powerful spiritual chief, we cannot but feel how precarious are the conditions on which all our attempts to forecast the European future must be made. Prince Bismarck, the czar, the pope — how much depends on the duration of two of these lives; how much might be changed by the termination of the third! And is there even the average security for the longduration of any of the three? Last week Pius IX. entered upon his eighty-fourth year. Prince Bismarck’s is neither in point of age nor in point of health a life to which one could confidently add another decade. He is an overworked super-sensitive man of upwards of sixty, bearing a greater load of official anxieties and responsibility than has been borne by any statesman of this century. He marches under it — but less erectly and with not so firm a step, noticeably, as he was wont to do. The czar is not old, but then he is not strong. He has been for some time in that state which is described as "giving anxiety to his friends;" and observers of his appearance at Berlin report the improvement in his health in very guarded terms. The life of no one of these three is such that men of prudence would count upon its long continuance with any degree of confidence, and the death of any one of them might, and probably would, alter the whole aspect of European affairs. The struggle between Germany and the Papacy which is distracting that country, and ever threatening to embroil her with her neighbours, could not but be affected either for good or ill by a demise of the triple crown. Whoever might be the new pope, it is certain that the relations between him and Germany would differ in one way or another from those maintained by the present pope. Whether he were Liberal or Ultramontane — prepared to "come to terms with the modern spirit," or as rooted in opposition to it as Pius IX. himself — the situation would be changed; for if Pius IX. were able to transmit his opinions to his successor he could not transmit his personality; and that is not an unimportant element in the present situation. We have, moreover, to consider what turmoil, what intrigue, what persuasion and threatening will probably arise over the election of the new pope; and nobody knows what such strife might not end in. Again, the death of the Emperor Alexander would be fraught with momentous consequences in another way. It would remove the control of the policy of Russia from the hands of a sovereign who is at least on a footing of personal sympathy with the German emperor, to place it in the hands of a successsor whose sympathies and likings are believed to incline strongly the other way. And a czar sympathizing with France would not be the most likely or the best-qualified moderator of the hatred with which a large portion of his subjects regard Germany. On the effects of the death of Prince Bismarck himself it is unnecessary to speculate, for every one must feel that the removal of a statesman whose policy has been more emphatically personal than that of any statesman perhaps within living memory, and whose individuality makes itself felt at every turn of German or even European politics, would be far-reaching indeed. But the death of the emperor of Germany himself — another aged man — might also seriously affect the future. The strong will and the keen vision of the statesman would yet remain, but they would energize under different conditions; the material upon which the Imperial chancellor would have to work would be altogether changed, and therewith the results of its operation, probably.
The ease with which we can in practice put aside and ignore these considerations altogether is a proof that nations, like men, behave as though they believed in human immortality upon earth. We count upon the endurance of lives as we do upon the stability of the order of nature, and seem as little to suspect that we are building upon a foundation which may crumble at a touch. We talk of the "policy of Germany," "the pacific views of the czar," the "irreconcilable attitude of the Papacy," as though these things were as eternal as the stars, and subject to as little variation as their motions in the heavens. It is strange how seldom we reflect that these three phrases are but names for the individualities of three mortal men, two of whom show no very marked promise of long life, while the other has already outlived the allotted human span.