THE 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



OF 



POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND THE BELLES LETTRES. 



Vol. VIII.] NOVEMBER, 1829. [No. 47. 



THE POLITICAL STATE OF ENGLAND AND EUROPE. 



Since we last addressed our country, an event of the most extraor- 

 dinary rank has been completed, pregnant with the most formidable 

 prospects to Europe, and involving the first interests of the British 

 empire in the most anxious and menacing perplexity. The Turkish 

 empire has been broken down to its foundations. The direct results of 

 this tremendous revolution are the immediate hazard of that balance of 

 power which the ablest minds have deemed necessary to the general 

 peace of nations ; the seizure of the highest European influence by an 

 empire essentially warlike, ambitious, and devoted to territorial aggran- 

 dizement ; and the corresponding fall of England from that highest rank, 

 casting down with her the principles of peace, public justice, and the 

 enlightened self-interest of the civilized world. 



This is the primary evil of the success of Russia ; and none can be 

 greater. The world must, from this time forth, prepare for war. The 

 overthrow of Napoleon had given Europe the prospect of times when 

 the invention of man might be turned from mutual undoing to mutual 

 good ; to a noble rivalry in the arts of peace ; to literature, commerce, 

 the cultivation of the human race and the human understanding, in 

 those vast, outlying portions of the world which had till now been the 

 empire of the lion and the serpent; the magnificent increase of human 

 happiness by the secrets and opulence of the earth ; the wringing from 

 stubborn nature, by the grasp of mechanical and philosophical discovery, 

 that sceptre whose possession makes man only a little lower than the angels. 

 But all this must be, for the time henceforth, at an end. No government, 

 from this hour, can feel secure in throwing its strength into that gentle 

 but noble emulation which covers its field with the harvest of national 

 industry and virtue. It must treasure its resources for another field. 

 No man can send his glance into the future without finding it obstructed 

 by the clouds of a fierce and general hostility, the rising clouds of blood 

 and conflagration. A power has started up in the midst of the richest pros- 



M.M. New Scries,— Vol. VIII. No. 47- 3 Q 



