CHAPTER XII. Conclusion.-Settlement of Greece.-The Pacha of Egypt. -State of Turkey.-Conquest of Syria.-Portugal.-Alliance of Great Britain and France.-Foreign Politics of France.-Italy.--Poland.-Domestic Politics.-La Fay. ette. The Students.-Riots of February.-The Périer Cabinet.-Anniversary of the Three Days.-New Cham. bers.-The Peerage.--Banishment of the Bourbons.. Riots at Lyons.-Civil List.-The Newspaper Press. Conspiracies.-Death of Périer.-Funeral of Lamarque.State of Siege.--La Vendée.-The Duchess of Berri.State of Parties.-Anticipations. THE Revolution of the Three Days was a popular movement, a spontaneous insurrection of the French people in the interests of France. It restored to power the men of the Republic and the Empire: it drove out of power the men and the principles of the Restoration. Strive as men will to disguise the fact, declaim as they may on the opposition between the cabinets of Louis Philippe and the doctrines of the Three Days, still the grand truth remains visibly before us, that revolution as such then resumed its influence in France and in Europe. We have traced the progress of the revolutionary spirit in those countries, where the cry of victory from the heroes of July found an echo; we have seen its effects in Belgium and England, deeply and permanently changed for the better in political condition by its means; we have seen it beaten down and suppressed in Spain, Italy, and Poland; we still see it steadily at work in Germany and Switzerland. But our view of the subject would be lame and imperfect, if we did not recur for a moment to the course of events in France subsequently to the enthronement of Louis Philippe, SETTLEMENT OF GREECE. 303 and consider the question of his alleged abandonment of the principles of the Three Days. In fine, the present condition of the French, as the fruit of the Revolution, as indicative of the direction wherein it has impelled the people and the government, constitutes the appropriate conclusion of this Review. Let us pause a moment on the threshold, to contemplate some few points in the cotemporary history of Europe, which have not yet been touched, but which bear upon the foreign policy of France. These are the final settlement of the Greek question, and the civil wars in Portugal and Turkey, all, it may well be supposed, incidentally affected by the spread of liberal opinions consequent on the Three Days, though by no means part and parcel of that grand popular movement, like the political changes of the period elsewhere in Europe. - As for Greece, its destiny was long since a thing resolved. Whatever purpose Russia might have entertained, of extending her dominion in that quarter, circumstances had compelled her to relinquish it, while at the same time new prospects of ambition were opened to her in other parts of the Turkish Empire. Neither England nor France could contentedly see the Northern Colossus, with one foot on the shores of the Mediterranean and the other at the Arctic Sea, overstriding Europe. They interposed, efficaciously, and in season, so as to prevent this dreaded, and not impossible, consummation. Nor could the arts of Count Capo d'Istrias avail to give permanent ascendency to Russian influence in the Morea and the Islands. Leopold, to be sure, might suffer himself to be terrified into loosening his hold of the sceptre he had clutched; but neither France nor Britain did for that depart from its determina tion to see constituted in Greece a really neutral State, wherein they should find scope for influence equally with Russia. The timely turbulence of the chiefs of Maina, in occasioning the violent death of Capo d'Istrias in October of 1831, removed one great obstacle to the final adjustment of the question in a manner satisfactory to Western Europe. All things now conspired to prompt the speedy selection of a sovereign for Greece, on the same principles, which had led to the nomination of Leopold in 1830. Such absolute anarchy had possession of the Greeks at present, that the well disposed among them gladly submitted to the dictation of the Allies. They pitched upon the boy Otho, a son of the King of Bavaria, to be King of Greece, again recurring in this matter to Germany, once the workshop of nations, officina gentium,- but now only the workshop of kings and queens, having, in its numerous sovereign houses, an ample surplus supply of that material at all times on hand ready to meet any extra demand in the rest of Europe. By treaty concluded in May 1832, the three Powers, England, France, and Russia, made arrangements in concurrence with Bavaria, and with the assent of the Greek National Assembly, for the establishment and support of the new King, Bavaria furnishing him with troops, and the other Powers with a loan of money, part of which was appropriated to indemnifying the Porte for a forced extension of the Greek frontier to the gulfs of Arta and Voto. Otho embarked for Napoli in December, to restore, if it might be, the reign of peace and prosperity in the Morea, and give back to Athens its traditional part in the affairs of Greece. While the restoration of Greece, thus at last accomplished, lopped off one of its conquests from the Ottoman Empire, events were occurring in other parts of it, which seemed to threaten its utter dissolution. The navy of the Porte had been destroyed at Navarino. The Sultan was thoroughly humbled by the victorious Russians, whose policy suffered his power to linger on through a sickly existence prostrate at their feet, independent only in name, and but the puppet in fact of the rival States of Christendom. Just then the Pacha of Egypt, who had faithfully served the Porte in its troubles until nearly one half of the Empire of the Caliphs had fallen to his share in the shape of conquest or recompense, stretched out his hand upon Syria, so naturally associated in political fortunes with Arabia and Egypt. Not without some reason, indeed, the ancients reckoned Egypt a part of Asia rather than Africa.* Its population is now, like that of Syria, mainly Arabian. And remembering the condition of the Mahometan Kingdom of Egypt, when the crusaders first made it known to modern Europeans, that it was the great Saladin, Sultan of Egypt,who ruled and defended the Holy Land, when Richard of England and Philip of France led the third Crusade, - that it was in proceeding by the way of Damietta that Saint Louis sought to effect the deliverance of Jerusalem, calling to mind these our very elementary ideas of modern Egypt, we shall readily conceive how invitingly Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus lay as it were under the very eye of Mohammed-Ali. Certainly it has not been want of power, nor any blindness to his own consequence, which so long restrained the Pacha of Egypt from establishing an independent monarchy on the Nile. Pompon. Mela, de Situ Orbis, lib. ix, cap. 9. t Russell's Ancient and Modern Egypt, p. 227. Far in advance of the Porte in all the arts of government and of civilization, having educed order out of chaos, possessing an army and a marine organized after the European model, with abundant pecuniary means, and a country so tranquil that travellers may pass unmolested from Alexandria to Syene as they would in the civilized States of Christendom, Mohammed-Ali still divided his resources, whether pecuniary or military, with the Sultan, and of himself upheld the sinking religion of the Prophet in the very land of its origin. During so long a period, while the Viceroy might at any hour have defied the Porte, he faithfully served its interests, and after subduing the Wahabees in Arabia, undertook, and but for the interposition of the three Powers would have accomplished, the reconquest of Greece. Ample evidence of his disposition to act in obedience to the general policy of the Divan occurs repeatedly in the pages of Planat's Regeneration of Egypt.* Indeed what stronger proofs of this could he render than to hazard his troops and his navy upon the fortune of war at Missolonghi and Navarino? Seriously as Mohammed-Ali suffered by the destruction of the combined Turkish and Egyptian fleet in the battle of Navarino, he did not come out of the war wholly gainless. Candia fell into his hands, quite as much from the incapacity of the Sultan to retain it himself, as on account of the merits and losses of Ali in the contest with Greece. In this instance, as in others, the weakness of the Porte was the strength of Mohammed-Ali, as became more signally apparent after the Russians dictated to Mahmoud their own terms of peace in his city of Adrianople. *See, for instance, Letters xxiv, xxx and xxxv, pp. 185, 222 and 314. See, also, Dekay's Turkey, p. 457. |