English traveller leaves his place in a railway carriage for a moment, and when he returns he finds it occupied by a German. He asks as well as he can for his seat, but his remonstrances are treated with contempt. Finally, he proceeds to eject the intruder from his seat. Such is the story as it is related, and of course it is impossible in strictness to justify the act of a man who takes the law into his own hands, in place of calling in the aid of the railway officials either in Germany or elsewhere. Our countryman is dragged off to gaol; in point of fact from one gaol to another; he is silenced when he endeavours to justify himself, and to throw the blame upon the intruder. The magistrate, in deciding upon the affair, in place of confining himself to the circumstances of the case, indulges in a tirade of vulgar abuse against England and the English; the substance of which was, that we were distinguished above all other nations for “shamelessness and blackguardism.”
It is more than probable if any English magistrate had spoken in the same way from the justice-seat about the subjects of any foreign prince, that his dismissal from the office for which he had evinced his unfitness would have been the instant result. Not so in Prussia. Although the Englishman aggrieved was a gentleman by station, and therefore a very unlikely person to have misconducted himself upon a public railway; and although he was attached to the court of our Queen, and therefore, as one would hare supposed, he might have obtained a hearing at Berlin, all justice was denied. The act of the provincial magistrate was endorsed by his superiors, and the journals throughout the country were forbidden to speak of the transaction otherwise than by lending their assistance to abuse our countrymen. This, however, was not all. Even after this insult to a gentleman who was particularly attached to her service—and after this slur upon the nation of which she is the sovereign, Queen Victoria left our shores upon a visit to her daughter. Will it be believed, that when the Royal yacht which had been appointed to await the British Queen had reached Mayence, a parcel of raggamuffin custom-house and police officers actually offered to board her, in order to ascertain if there were any contraband goods in the boxes and cabins of the British Sovereign and her suite? The officer in command very properly refused to admit them on board—he would have deserved to have been pitched into the Rhine had he done otherwise—and told our Prussian friends that he was quite prepared to use force to resist their intrusion, if necessary. Whatever their true feeling may have been, the Prussian custom-house people shrank from absolutely attempting to board the Royal yacht by force, and telegraphed for orders to the upper powers. With unwonted courtesy, an order was sent back, granting immunity from search to the yacht which had conveyed the Queen of England upon a visit to the Prussian Court. Never in the history of nations -will a record be found of such a coarse and unprovoked outrage upon the proprieties and decencies of public life. Never perhaps, until the Prussians led the way, was one sovereign, upon a visit to another, made the subject of such an insult. Talk of the feelings of the French towards Englishmen! Louis Philippe, or Louis Napoleon, would have scorned to use the meanest servant in the suite of a Sovereign who was honouring his court with a visit, in the manner in which these Prussians have handled our Queen. It is only a nation committed to a selfish isolation which could make, to say the least, such a very great mistake.
But what is the meaning and what has been the result of this Warsaw meeting of the other day? What has come of this last attempt to replace the European system upon the basis of the old Holy Alliance of 1815? The question concerns us nearly, not only because such an alliance would infallibly lead to political complications in which England must be involved, but because it is said that Lord John Russell has in some measure given in his adhesion to Prussia. So great was the effect of the courtly solemnities recently enacted in Germany, even upon the mind of a man who has been matured in the free air of the British House of Commons. The fact seems incredible, yet it is certainly true, that the scolding letter of the Prussian Minister to the Sardinian Court was forwarded, if not composed, after the interview with the British Minister of Foreign Affairs. Now if there be one point in the political life of Great Britain in the year 1860 more clear than another, it is the total estrangement of ideas between ourselves and the rulers of Germany. They have failed us in the hour of our need, and their system of government—even granting that it is the wisest and best for the nations which dwell between the Rhine and the Russian Frontiers, the Baltic and the Alps—is so totally different from our own, that it cannot command our sympathy, nor even our adhesion. When we turn from the governments to the people, we find that we are cordially detested even by those whom we would gladly have assisted by all means in our power. When Felix Schwarzenberg was in power in Austria, and that is but twelve years ago, an Englishman was treated like a mad dog whenever he showed himself in the Austrian dominions. Not only was a chance traveller exposed to all the vexations and annoyances which could be inflicted upon him by the Custom House officers and the police, but he was even tabooed in the society of Vienna. English ladies, who were so unfortunate as to be engaged as governesses in that capital—aye, even English nurserymaids—were summarily discharged from their situations. Truly, when the apprehensions of Europe were recently aroused by the military ambition of the French Emperor, there was a slight renewal of familiarity—not of cordial relations—between the statesmen of Austria and Great Britain; but even of this there is an end. As soon as it was clear that the dislocation of the Austrian empire in the Italian peninsula was regarded in these islands with universal complacency, the Austrian Court turned from us once more, and, so far naturally enough, sought for sympathy and assistance in more congenial quarters. Hence the attempt to renew the old relations with the Cabinet of St. Petersburgh. The instincts of despotism have re-united those whom the pressure of actual warfare had separated for the moment.