and Mr. Gladstone on this occasion deeply wounded my feelings. I was not quite satisfied with the behaviour of Lord Clarendon, when he left, without notice, the original despatch of Mr. Fish. But our characters were safe in the hands of the British Parliament and the British people. It was a different question when the accusation of falsehood and hypocrisy was laid in the name of the Government of the great Republic before five arbitrators of different nations.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary took for their model, apparently, the character of Donna Inez in the poem of Don Juan' :

Calmly they heard each calumny that rose,

And saw his agonies with such sublimity,

That all the world exclaimed 'What magnanimity!'

So let it be.

The more I respect the constitution and the character of the great American Republic, the more am I inclined to feel calumnies from such a source. Happily, neither the memory of Lord Palmerston nor my character are likely to suffer from the charges of Mr. Fish. It is to be hoped that, on any similar occurrence, the British nation will have better defenders than those who held the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the years 1871 and 1872.

Had Lord Granville remembered his promise to

see me before the President of the Council departed for Washington, I should have advised him not to insist on the weak parts of our case.

6

I assent entirely to the opinions of the Lord Chief Justice of England, that the Alabama' ought to have been detained during the four days in which I was waiting for the opinion of the law officers. But I think that the fault was not that of the Commissioners of Customs, it was my fault, as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

I should have been glad to have admitted that fault as plainly and as explicitly as General Washington admitted his mistake in 1793.

I have only further to say that I do not wish to impute to Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville any personal ill-will to me in all this matter. But they seem to have been quite unaware that the United Kingdom is a great country, and that its reputation ought to be dear to every British heart.

CHAPTER XIII.

POLICY FOR THE FUTURE.

WHEN I first came into public life the great empire of Napoleon was tottering to its downfall. Yet his insane confidence in his star was scarcely abated. Having been successful in a trifling action in the interior of France, he said to three of his marshals who were with him at supper, 'In six weeks we shall be on the Vistula.' The abdication of Fontainebleau put an end to these dreams. He himself had said with his wonderful sagacity, 'If the Emperor of Austria were driven five times out of Vienna he would come back with undiminished strength; but if I am once driven out of Paris, I may never sit on the throne again.'

In expectation of the fall of Napoleon there were two great problems to be solved: Who should be the Sovereign of France? What should be the boundaries of France?

The restoration of the Bourbons was agreed to without much difficulty.

The future extent and limits of France seem to have been decided by the advice of England.

The Emperor Alexander told Count Pozzo de Borgo that Lord Aberdeen had spoken to him of the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine as the future limits of France. Pozzo de Borgo replied that neither the Prince Regent nor his Ministers would consent to such frontiers.

Not long after this Lord Castlereagh wrote to Lord Aberdeen to instruct him that the English Ministers would grant the limits of the French Monarchy in 1792 as the boundaries of the kingdom of Louis XVIII.

Upon this question hung the decision then made, and perhaps the future history of France. Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph, the mock-King of Spain, that if it fell to his fortune to sign peace with the allies, and they granted him the natural frontiers of France, meaning the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine, he would do all in his power to observe that peace; but if they gave him a restricted frontier, he should seize the first opportunity of making a quarrel, and endeavour to recover the whole of the left bank of the Rhine.

Such was the quarrel upon which, after fifty-six years of peace, Napoleon III., the nephew of the great Napoleon, fastened in July 1870 as a fit cause for renewed war in Europe. Napoleon III.--inferior to

the first Napoleon in preparing for war, in collecting his armies for war, and in making war-fell in 1870 as his uncle had done in 1814. But the contest is

not yet over. The French nation is hungry for the recovery of Alsace and the surrendered parts of Lorraine.

As soon as Napoleon III. took the command of his army at Metz, he informed them, in an order of the day, that they would have many sieges to undertake. Those sieges were, doubtless, the sieges of Cologne, of Coblentz, of Mentz, of Landau. His hopes were disappointed, his projects defeated. But the quarrel remains for the present or for a future generation. The objects to be sought are, a restored French Empire on the one side, a powerful and united Germany on the other.

It is easy to see on which side are the interests of England and of Europe.

Perhaps it will be enough for the United Kingdom in 1874, as it would have been enough in 1792, to refuse the most tempting offers of France, and to keep aloof from the quarrel.

We may rely upon the prudence of Germany, of Austria, and of Russia, that these three Powers will remain banded together in spirit, if not in form. Some eight or ten months before the war of 1870 broke out, Lord Clarendon informed me of his own knowledge that Prussia had an understanding with