WORLD'S POLITICS AND NINETEENTH CENTURY 295 



nized part of international law. The congress was an epoch in 

 international law. Private international law may be said to have 

 had its birth here, as public international law had its birth at the 

 Congress of Westphalia. Certain valuable forms and rules for inter- 

 national intercourse date from this congress. A lively interest now 

 first began to be manifested in Europe's common weal. New agree- 

 ments were here set in train for the free navigation of rivers having 

 an international character. The powers united to do away with the 

 slave trade and directed new attention to the rights of foreigners 

 resident in any land. " The business policy of the eighteenth 

 century had as its fundamental principle that one nation's gain is 

 another's loss. Now for the first time a European treaty appealed 

 to the doctrine of the new political economy, that the alleviation of 

 commerce is for the common interest of all peoples." 1 Only in 

 tariff legislation has Adam Smith been ignored. In this field even 

 Great Britain is considering whether or not to disown him. 



The five powers of the Holy Alliance sought at the Congress of 

 Aix la Chapelle and still more at the congresses of Laibach and 

 Verona, to fix as a bottom tenet of international law the principle 

 of dynastic legitimacy. They damned as revolution all limitation 

 by constitutions of a sovereign's power and all tampering with the 

 territorial lines traced at Vienna. They further assumed the duty 

 of protecting in their possessions the sovereigns then on thrones, 

 and of assuring and guarding the public law of Europe as they under- 

 stood it. 



This effort the march of events and of European public opinion, 

 which by this time began to count for a good deal, soon brought 

 to naught and rendered ridiculous. The Bourbons ceased to reign 

 in France. Revolutions in Italy dispossessed a number of families 

 restored in 1815. The Pope surrendered his temporal power. 

 Belgium was separated from Holland, and Savoy joined to France, 

 while Austria lost her best Italian lands. Germany became a unit 

 and an empire, besides appropriating Alsace and most of Lorraine. 

 The Spanish American republics remained independent of Spain. 



October 27, 1860, Lord John Russell sent abroad perhaps the bold- 

 est dispatch which a British Minister ever drew: " The governments 

 of the Pope and the King of the two Sicilies, he said, provided so ill 

 for the welfare of their people that their subjects looked to their 

 overthrow as a necessary preliminary to any improvement. Her 

 Majesty's Government were bound to admit that the Italians them- 

 selves are the best judges of their own interests. Her Majesty's 

 Government did not feel justified in declaring that the people of 

 southern Italy had not good reasons for throwing off their allegiance 

 to their former government. Her Majesty's Government therefore 



1 V. Treitschke. 



