6i8 



The Review of Reviews. 



development of Asia. Our diplomatists seem to have 

 inherited his faith in the (lermanic Diabolus ; but 

 whether any of them iiave any living faith in a living 

 Deus I cannot say. .Still, it is interesting to note that 

 in its own flaccid fashion the permanent bureaucracy 

 that shapes the policies of .Sir Edward Grey as clay 

 in the hands of the potter still bears the impress of 

 the masterful mind of Sir Robert Morier. It is anti- 

 German, and in a kind of way it is pro-Russian. 



" I LOVED HIS COUNTRY AND I HATED HIM." 



Yet, like many another ami-German, Sir Robert 

 Morier was nu foni passionately devoted to the 

 German people. In this he resembles Lord Haldane 

 and many another whose dislike of German policy is 

 deep-rooted in their admiration for German philo- 

 sophy, German literature, German art. But there is 

 no hate like love to hatred turned, and Sir Robert 

 Morier made up for his devotion to the German 

 people by a whole-hearted hatred of the German 

 Empire as it was created by Prince Bismarck. 

 Indeed, one of the chief counts in his voluminous 

 indictment of the Iron Chancellor was that he had 

 materialised and brutalised the genius of Germany. 

 " Bismarck made a great Germany," he once quoted 

 to me, " but he has made little Germans." Hence the 

 more he loved the Germans the more he hated the 

 man who had destroyed the soul while unifying the 

 body of Germany. 



HIS VIEW OK BISMARCK. 



In " Truth about Russia," a book long since out of 

 print, there were two chapters — " Concerning Reptiles 

 and Worms," and " Bismarck the Peacemaker " — 

 which were written under the direct inspiration of 

 Sir Robert Morier. I read them over to him in MS., 

 and rejoiced greatly at his emphatic commendation 

 of my handiwork. Therein, written out as in round 

 te.xt hand, was the conception which the great 

 Ambassador had of the great Chancellor. " Imagine 

 Prince Bismarck as a great personification of the 

 Society of Jesus, as despotic, as unscrupulous, and as 

 false as the Jesuits pictured in the Orange lodges . . . 

 Germans have disappeared, only Germany remains — 

 a gigantic figure which has only one brain — and thegrey 

 matter of that brain is Bismarck. To build up that 

 Frankenstein, the once independent headstrong 

 Germans have been mashed into a kind of bloater- 

 [)aste of humanity ; the individual unit has disappeared, 

 only the amalgam remains. In llie evolution of the 

 intelligence of the German state it has eliminated its 

 conscience. The man of blood and iron sticks at 

 nothing in order to secure his ends. Falsehood, force, 

 intrigue, treachery, war, are alike instruments in his 

 hand, and are judged by him exclusively from the 

 point of view of their relative efficiency." 



HIS PRO-GERMAN DREAM. 



Morier's imagination, in these later days, was 

 dominated by his conception of "the malignity of the 

 Demon Omnipotens of Berlin." But for the first 

 twenty years of his diplomatic career he simply 



worshipped Germany and the Germans. Under the 

 tutelage of Baron Stockmar, and the stimulating 

 influence of the future Emperor and Empress Fredeiick, 

 he revelled in the belief as to the high destinies to which 

 Germany was called, and the conviction that she 

 would eventually prove "a light to lighten the Gentiles, 

 and to have a future more beautiful than any other 

 nation's past." To this vision, and to the hope oi 

 " the political and heart union of England and 

 Germany," he devoted hard and conscientious work 

 for twenty years of his life. Why, then, the great 

 change ? 



HIS AWAKENING. 



The answer is written at large in almost every page 

 of the second volume of these Memoirs. Morier 

 believed in a Liberal Germany fashioned after the 

 similitude of the Crown Prince Frederick. He 

 recoiled in horror from the Prussianised Germany 

 incarnate in Bismarck. And his bitterness sprang 

 largely from his deep conviction that if England had 

 not abdicated her position in Europe, it was the 

 Germany of Frederick, and not the Germany of 

 Bismarck, that would have been evolved by the stern 

 but sure working of Destiny. 



During the first twenty years of his diplomatic 

 existence trance was the devil of the Continent. 

 The great problem was to chain up this great red 

 dragon, lest its thirst for gloire should desolate Europe. 

 The ne.xt twenty years were spent in a similar 

 strenuous endeavour to chain up the German devil 

 which had inherited the throne from his French 

 predecessor. 



THE APOSTACY OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



And ever and always Morier raged with ex- 

 ceeding wrath against the fatuity and blindness of 

 England, which would not see her providential mis- 

 sion, or, seeing it, would not perform it. This 

 supreme national apostacy culminated in Mr. Glad- 

 stone's refusal to veto the Franco-German war of 

 1870, which Morier maintained could have been 

 stopped by one word from us. "Twenty years ago 

 that word would have been whispered as a matter of 

 course, no matter what Ministry had been in power. 

 It would have been forwarded mechanically from the 

 Foreign Office as a mere matter of routine." But 

 instead of that, we declared to Continental Europe, 

 at the most solemn moments in her history, that we 

 had henceforth no interests in common with her: — 



Thy people are not my people, nor my people thy people ; 

 tlie ititead of silver sea makes us sale, as safe as the eight-feet 

 parapet round a Spanish bull-ring. We have lirst-ratc places 

 and the best of opera-glasses ; let us look on then at the great 

 tauromachia— deeply interested in the sight and keenly syuipa- 

 thising now with the matadors, now with the l<uli, but as 

 spectators. — Vol. 2, p. 21S. 



THE LAW OK THE CORDON SANITAIRE. 



In view of the discussions on British foreign policy 

 which have absorbed public attention last month it 

 may be well to extract this extremely luminous expo- 

 sition of the doctrine of the balance of power, or, as he 





