Part 5

When the allied sovereigns were met in Napoleon's capital after Waterloo, the Czar of Russia conceived a thought which seemed to him to be an inspiration. In the ecstasy of the hour of deliverance from the sword which had been the nightmare of the continent for a generation Alexander proposed to his fellow potentates a covenant binding them to be governed by the principles of Christian justice and charity in their dealings with their own subjects and in their mutual relations. Sincere and pious as the Czar undoubtedly was, this agreement, which was accepted by the other monarchs, excepting George IV. of England, did not produce the results which one might suppose from its name, the Holy Alliance. It was used not only to stifle the spirit of liberty in western Europe, but its baleful influence was felt in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In effect it was a trades- union in which the allied crowned-heads undertook to stifle popular liberty wherever it showed signs of life. When Alexander explained his proposal to the English commissioners at Paris they could scarcely keep a straight face at its absurdity. Yet though England refused to become a member of the Holy Alliance, she did allow herself for a period of several years to be ruled by its decisions, or at least to allow them to be enforced without a protest.

Such in brief was the chain of events which associated the foreign policy of England with that of the Holy Alliance. The brilliant statesman who broke away from this foreign policy and led England out upon a line of independent action was George Canning.

The future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister was born in London, April II, 1770. His father was an Englishman from the north of Ireland, who had read law, but failed to get clients, and had succeeded at nothing, from pamphleteering to selling wine. He died on his babe's first birthday. The widow married an actor and essayed a stage career. What would have become of little George had he remained in his mother's company is an interesting speculation. An actor called the attention of his uncle, a London banker, to the probability that the lad was on the high road to the gallows--to which in those days more than one road led. This uncle, Stratford Canning, assumed the responsibility of the child's education, sent him to Eton and later to Oxford. At the former he distinguished himself by his witty contributions to "The Microcosm'--most famous of school-boy periodicals--and at the University where he was graduated, B.A., in 1791 he won some distinction in literature and oratory, taking the University prize with his Latin poem. At Oxford he passed through the "blissful dawn" of which Wordsworth sang, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution of 1789 and of the British Whigs who supported it--Fox, Sheridan, and their sort. He came up to London as the tide was turning, and his own opinion was among the first to change. Pitt, the Prime Minister, had been apprised of his talent, sent for him, and had him "chosen" to the House of Commons, a simple matter in those unregenerate days, when the Tory chieftains had their pockets full of boroughs.

Pitt gave Canning a minor government office--he was not yet thirty years of age--and treated him almost as a son, the young man reciprocating the regard with a really filial devotion. He was ambitious for advancement, and discontented with his slow promotion. In 1797, in company with other choice spirits, he began the publication of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical which for nearly a year held up to merciless ridicule that section of the British public which still countenanced the ruling ideas of the French Revolution. When the King's refusal to yield on the question of Catholic emancipation (1801) compelled Pitt to resign, Canning went out of office with him. Addington, the stupid mediocrity who succeeded Pitt, provoked Canning's pen to fresh lampoons, some of them long remembered for their savage personalities.

When Pitt resumed the premiership, in 1804, to direct the new struggle with Napoleon, he again bestowed office upon Canning, and when he died, in 1806, Canning became the leader of the group of Pittites who endeavored to perpetuate his ideas. In 1807 he entered the cabinet in the important capacity of Foreign Secretary.

As Foreign Secretary under the spiritless premiership of the Duke of Portland, Canning was allowed free hand. The two years and a half during which he directed the foreign office were marked by a succession of moves which gave a new aspect to the contest with Napoleon.

Canning entered upon his duties just as the Fourth Coalition was being hammered to pieces, on the same anvil which had destroyed the others. By the Treaty of Tilsit (July, 1807), Napoleon prepared to unite the northern nations in his war on British commerce. Hearing or divining his purpose to further this project by seizing the fleet of Denmark, Canning dispatched an armed force to Copenhagen with a demand for the surrender of the Danish ships. The order was executed, and the Danish vessels were brought back to England, though at the cost of a bombardment of the Danish capital. The French Emperor's eye was fastened on the fleet of Portugal as another auxiliary, and when the Regent refused to accede to his request, Napoleon dispatched Marshal Junot to drive him from his kingdom and hold its ports and fortresses against England.

England now stood almost alone, and Napoleon hoped to complete her ruinous isolation by destroying her trade with Europe. His "Continental System," which was to make the continent commercially independent of Great Britain, was foreshadowed in his Berlin Decrees. Fresh decrees were now met by fresh Orders in Council, "shutting out from the continent all vessels which had not touched at a British port." It was Canning whose genius caught at the strategic possibilities of a war in the peninsula (Spain-Portugal) as a practical opening on the French flank for a final blow at the Napoleonic power. Napoleon's interference in the government of Spain by dethroning its monarchs and giving the crown to his brother Joseph had exasperated that proud nation and provoked the spirited people to arm against the intruder. The Portuguese were scarcely less bitter against the French conqueror. Canning perceived the possibility of gaining a foothold in these kingdoms, which were easily accessible by sea, and by utilizing the spirit and resources of the aroused nations to consolidate a power there which would threaten France itself, whose borders the great soldier had thus far kept inviolate. How ably Sir Arthur Wellesley fulfilled Mr. Canning's desire the life of Wellington has already shown.

The Peninsular Campaign was scarcely under way when Canning and Castlereagh, the War Secretary, quarreled and the former resigned from the cabinet. Yet from his place in the House the ex-minister continued manfully to uphold the general who was doing England's work in Spain. There was need of all the support his genius could contribute to this task, for parliament was slow to grasp the deep purpose of the campaign, was impatient for results, and prone to grumble at the bill of expense. Yet in the end Canning enjoyed the satisfaction of pointing to the complete verification of his hopes. He might have been Foreign Minister in the Liverpool ministry at its outset (1812) had he been willing to acquiesce in the leadership of Castlereagh in the House of Commons. This would have given him the direction of English policy in those critical years in which the Napoleonic empire was broken up and European affairs rearranged by the powers at Vienna. He lived to regret this as the greatest error of his career. He was sufficiently humbled after four years to join the government forces as president of the India board, resigning in 1820. In 1821, when on the point of going out to India, of which he had been appointed governor-general, his prospects suddenly changed. On the death of his rival, Castlereagh, Canning became Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons. The prize which he had long schemed to secure, and had finally given up, suddenly fell into his hand. Canning's mind could not but revert to the lost opportunity of 1812. Not in a century would the Foreign Minister again have a world to set in order. He wrote to a friend, "Ten years have made a world of difference, and have made a very different sort of world to bustle in than that which I should have found in 1812. For fame it is a squeezed orange, but for public good there is something to do, and I shall try--but it must be cautiously-- to do it. You know my politics well enough to know what I mean when I say that for 'Europe' I shall be desirous now and then to read 'England.'" The closing sentence was the keynote of his policy. For years it had been customary for representatives of the powers to treat all important matters as "European questions," and England had become habituated to a diplomacy which kept English interests in the background for the sake of the commonweal of Europe--Europe and the Holy Alliance being synonymous. "When Castlereagh," said Canning, "got among princes and sovereigns at Vienna, he thought he could not be too fine and complaisant."

When Canning began to represent England in her relations with foreign countries, he found the Holy Alliance in full vigor. In fact, the Czar, Kaiser, and King had just met at Laybach (1821) and issued a manifesto declaring that "useful and necessary changes in legislation and in the administration of states could only emanate from the free will and from the intelligent and well-weighed convictions of those whom God has made responsible for power. Penetrated with this eternal truth, the sovereigns have not hesitated to proclaim it with frankness and vigor. They have declared that, in respecting the rights and independence of legitimate power, they regarded as legally null and disavowed by the principles which constituted the public right of Europe, all pretended reforms operated by revolt and open hostilities." In plain terms the three monarchs, claiming to rule by divine right, reasserted their determination to interfere in the private affairs of any state to suppress movements which seemed to their majesties to be revolutionary. The powers had already acted according to this program in Piedmont and Naples, and were preparing to interfere in behalf of the Bourbons in Spain, the Spaniards in the revolted American republics, and the Turks in Greece when Canning came to power. To the Congress of Verona, where these and other questions were to be considered by the powers, Canning sent Wellington to speak for England. In accordance with his instructions the duke stood for non- intervention. Europe had no business to restore the Bourbon to the throne from which the nation had thrust him; on the same principle Greece must be allowed to fight out her own cause with the Turk; as for the Spanish-American colonies, why they were already lost to Spain, and England had recognized them as independent states. France undertook to do alone for the Spanish monarch what the Holy Alliance wished to do in the name of Europe. In this England acquiesced, but Russia's attempt to second the French in their Spanish project by military support was stopped by Canning's threat that such an act would only result in England's making the Spanish cause her own. "The admission of the jurisdiction of the Holy Alliance over Europe was a course which he deemed it vital at almost any cost to prevent," says Hill. "The time for Areopagus and the like of that," as Canning put it, "has gone by." And again, "What should we have thought of interference from foreign Europe when King John granted Magna Charta, or of an interposition in the quarrel between Charles I. and his Parliament?" To bring his colleagues around to his view, Canning showed them that the interference of the Holy Alliance in the affairs of Ireland might be justified upon the same grounds on which the argument for intervention in Spain was based. The King, never too fond of the brilliant commoner, whose presence in the ministry he considered scarcely less than a personal affront, had the temerity to criticise the policy which was so obnoxious to his fellow crowned heads. He thought that the English recognition of Spanish-American independence was as wicked as the French alliance in 1778 with the insurgent English colonists under Washington. Canning's recognition of Spanish-American independence was a sagacious stroke. It not only gave strength to his contention that peoples had a right to decide for themselves who should rule them, without consulting the despots of Europe, but its timeliness was masterly. Glorifying his own course in one of his most famous Parliamentary orations, in December, 1826, he explained why he had not joined the Spaniards in making armed resistance to the French invasion. He said: "Is the Spain of the present day, the Spain of which the statesmen of the time and William and Anne were so much afraid? Is it, indeed, the nation whose puissance was expected to shake England from her sphere? No, sir, it was quite another Spain--it was the Spain within the limits of whose empire the sun never set; it was Spain with the Indies which excited the jealousies and alarmed the imaginations of our ancestors. . . . If France conquered Spain, was it necessary in order to avoid the consequences of that occupation that we should blockade Cadiz? No, I looked another way: I sought the material of compensation in another hemisphere. Contemplating Spain such as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old!"

Greece began her struggle for independence in 1821. The heroism which her people displayed in their unequal battle with the Turks attracted the attention and sympathy of many persons all over the world, especially those who saw in the modern Greek the representative of the race which had once been the intellectual leader of Europe. The powers of the Holy Alliance, however, were inclined to regard the outbreak with coldness, seeing in it a fresh manifestation of the then growing disposition of European peoples to rise against the tyranny of their anointed kings. England held aloof from their conferences in regard to the matter, trusting to their discordant interests to break up their concert of action, since the Russian czar, as the head of the Greek faith, might be counted upon in the long run to befriend the Greeks, especially as such a step would carry the Russian influence into the Balkan Peninsula and mark a full stride toward Constantinople, then as now the goal of Russian ambition. Canning employed Wellington to negotiate an agreement at St. Petersburg for the rescue of Greece. Ultimately England, Russia, and France signed a protocol which was to establish Greece as a self-governing state, tributary to the Porte, but free in matters of commerce and religion. In 1827 the three powers demanded an armistice looking toward a treaty settlement, and threatened to use force to compel a cessation of hostilities. The Porte defied the powers, and his fleet having fired upon the allied vessels, the battle of Navarino was precipitated in October, 1827. The result was the expulsion of the Turks from the country, and the early establishment of the complete independence of the kingdom of Greece. Canning did not live to see the consummation of his hopes in Greece. His health, which had for several years been much enfeebled, gave way completely, and on August 8, 1827, he died, at the age of fifty-seven. He had then for six months held the highest office in the gift of the nation.

In February, 1827, the illness of Lord Liverpool had made it necessary to reorganize the cabinet and choose a new Prime Minister. After much hesitation the King sent for Canning. Most of his former colleagues declined to serve under him because he was a professed pro-Catholic, and they were still of the opinion that the Protestant constitution of England would be endangered if the Irish demand for Roman Catholic emancipation should be granted. Others were found to take the place of Wellington, Peel, Eldon, and the other Tory leaders, and the Canning ministry got under way, only to be abruptly halted at the grave. The remains of the Prime Minister were deposited in Westminster Abbey, where a statue by Chantry recalls his manly form and expressive countenance.

Even in so slight a sketch as the foregoing, some characteristics of the man stand forth. Canning's wit, while its mordancy cost him many friends, distinguishes him among English statesmen. The talent which had stood him in good stead as boy-editor of "The Microcosm" at Eton, and which is to be seen in the slings and arrows of "The Anti-Jacobin," he never quite lost. His pen was always ready to dash off a scrap of lampooning verse, and flashes of wit and extended passages of humor enlivened the brilliant orations by means of which he explained and defended his policies in Parliament. As an orator his speeches were of exquisite polish, and the voice, gesture, countenance and entire bodily presence of the speaker contributed to their tremendous effect. There were not wanting those who criticised his oratory as savoring more of the stage than the rostrum, but such persons were aristocratic political opponents who would not let the world forget that this man whose genius outshone them all was the son of a third-rate actress. Be it said to Canning's credit that he did not forget his mother, but made her comfort in her declining days the object of his solicitous care.

Mr. Hill, whose study of Canning has been of great assistance in the preparation of these pages, thus goes to the heart of his foreign policy: "The principle which made Canning the antagonist of the propaganda of French principles in Europe during the early part of his political life made him during his later years in an equal degree the antagonist of the principles of the Holy Alliance which it is his great glory as a statesman to have defeated. The Holy Alliance endeavored to impose upon other nations principles and a law of life not their own. As Canning objected to the Holy Alliance, so he would have objected to its present secular substitute, the Concert of Europe, which simply means the agreement of the great powers to inflict their will upon the small ones, not allowing them to develop according to their native forces and genius, but constraining them to such forms and confining them within such limits as suits the convenience of a despotic hexarchy of states, or of a majority of them. The country which is England at home should be England abroad, reserving all its freedom of action. Canning's foreign policy, which was for 'Europe' to read 'England,' and to 'get rid of Areopagus and all that,' was sound and statesmanlike and abundantly justified by its results."

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. How did England join with the rest of Europe in undoing the work of Napoleon? 2. Give the chief events in the early life of Canning. 3. Why did Canning authorize an attack on Denmark? 4. What was his relation to the Peninsular War? 5. What was his "lost opportunity" of 1812? 6. How did he set forth his plans when he became foreign secretary in 1821? 7. What interference in the affairs of Europe did the Holy Alliance attempt? 8. How did Canning defend his recognition of Spanish-American independence? 9. What part did England play in the liberation of Greece? 10. What were the personal qualities of Canning?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GEORGE CANNING. Frank H. Hill. POETRY OF THE ANTI-JACOBIN. Edited by Charles Edmonds.

STEPHENSON AND THE RAILWAY

In a bare room of a laborer's tenement in the colliery village of Wylam, in Northumberland, on the 9th day of June, 1781, was born a babe to whose mind and hand England was to owe as much in future years as to any high-born minister of the crown. Indeed, one might trust the world to give a verdict in favor of George Stephenson, the founder of the steam railway as against his sovereign, King George III. himself.

The father, the "old Rob" of the village boys, was the fireman of the pumping engine at the colliery hard by. His father before him--the Stephensons were no pedigree-hunters, and traced their line no farther- -was a Scotchman who, so far as anything was remembered of him, had come into the north of England as a gentleman's servant. Robert was a favorite with the village children, to whom he gave the freedom of the fire-room, and was a boon companion of his own houseful of boys and girls, kindling their fancy by his headful of tales, and sharpening their observation of the beauties of nature by making them the companions of his walks a-field, where the birds and other living things were the objects of his peculiar interest and love.

As soon as little George was old enough to "take notice" he must have discovered the railway which ran before his father's door, and his earliest responsibilities were connected with the oversight of his younger brothers and sisters lest in their play they should fall under the wheels of the cars or the hoofs of the horses that supplied the motive power. The road was a wooden tramway along which coal cars were dragged from the mines to tidewater.

The first tramways in the northern coal-fields were made by laying a track of planking on wooden sleepers. This device was more than a century old when George Stephenson was born. In some places this had been improved by plating the planks with iron. While the Wylam lad was still a barefoot boy, cast-iron rails were being introduced in Leicestershire, a wheel having been designed with a flange to keep it on the narrow track. Thus the railway was brought to a stage which needed only the application of steam to its motive power to carry it into a new and vastly enlarged phase.

The fireman's son was set to win his share of the family bread before he was ten. He tended a widow's cows, led the plow- horses, and hoed turnips before he entered a colliery as a breaker-boy, where his task was to pick out stones and other foreign substances from the fuel. Sixpence a day was the wage. Soon at twopence more he was promoted to drive the gin-horse that, circling around a capstan, hoisted the buckets of water and coals out of the pit. At fourteen he became his father's assistant in the fire-room at Dewley Burn at a shilling a day. At fifteen he obtained a foreman's position in another colliery. At seventeen he had gone over his father's head, and had charge of a pumping engine at Water-row Pit. When his wages reached twelve shillings a week he thought he was "a made man for life," but his ignoble content was soon disturbed. Always fascinated by machinery, as he was by birds and animals, he made a pet of his engines, studying them with a singular fondness, and making himself master of their principles and their parts. This knowledge prompted him to learn more, especially to find out something about the improved engines of Boulton & Watt, of which rumors had reached the enginemen of the north. To do this he must learn to read, an art which he seems to have considered superfluous until he was eighteen. Never did student work harder than Geordie Stephenson at his new task, amazing his teachers and his mates by his progress at "the three R's." He was now brakesman of a hoisting engine, dividing his small leisure between his studies and his cobblery, for he added to his earnings by mending shoes. His income was now some ninety pounds a year. He saved his first guinea and felt himself a rich man. At twenty-one he married a farmer's house-servant and went to housekeeping in a cottage at Wellington Quay.

It would be a long story, however interesting, to follow the young mechanic through the experiences by which he won a name in all the North Country as the cleverest of "engine doctors," eking out his wages by making lasts, mending watches, and even cutting out coats and trousers for the wives of the pitmen to sew up for their husbands. His desire to provide his motherless boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father. So boy and man progressed together in their educational partnership.

When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight, furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters. For fifty years inventors had been turning out steam engines of considerable promise in the model stage, but of little practical performance. Indeed, about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical Traveler," the legs of which were moved alternately by steam, but the bursting of its boiler on its trial trip put an end to its picturesque career of doubtful usefulness.

One Mr. Blackett, an enterprising collier of Wylam, introduced the ideas of Trevithick and Blenkinsop to the Tyneside and so brought them under the observant eye of the Killingworth enginewright, who had such a clever way of smoothing away difficulties in complicated machinery. After repeated and costly experiments, Mr. Blackett evolved a type of locomotive which, though noisy and clumsy, did better work than any of its predecessors.

After making a careful study of what had been done by others, George Stephenson came to the conclusion that he could improve upon the existing locomotive models. This was about 1813, when he was about thirty-four years old. He said to his friends that "there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, if the works could be made to stand." One of his employers, Lord Ravensworth, advanced the necessary money for constructing his first "Traveling Engine" at West Moor, the colliery blacksmith undertaking to carry out his designs. Dr. Smiles's description of this locomotive may be reproduced: "The boiler was cylindrical of wrought iron, eight feet in length and thirty-four inches in diameter, with an internal flue tube twenty inches wide passing through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders of eight inches diameter and two feet stroke let into the boiler, working the propelling gear with cross heads and connecting rods. The power of the two cylinders was combined by means of spur-wheels which communicated the motive power to the wheels supporting the engine on the rail. . . The engine thus worked upon what is termed the second motion. The chimney was of wrought iron, round which was a chamber extending back to the feed pumps, for the purpose of heating the water previous to the injection into the boiler. The engine had no springs, and was mounted on a wooden frame supported on four wheels." The engine made its trial trip July 25, 1814, on which occasion it showed a speed of four miles an hour in drawing a load of thirty tons. This engine was named "Blucher," after the distinguished Prussian field-marshal.