The Holy Alliance

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EARLY POLICY OF THE HOLY ALLIANCE: THE AMERICAN MONARCHY In ancient times among the more civilized peoples it was held to be the greatest of all crimes to make war upon those who were willing to submit to arbitration the settlement of their difficulties; but against those who de- clined so fair an...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EARLY POLICY OF THE HOLY ALLIANCE: THE AMERICAN MONARCHY In ancient times among the more civilized peoples it was held to be the greatest of all crimes to make war upon those who were willing to submit to arbitration the settlement of their difficulties; but against those who de- clined so fair an offer all others turned, and with their combined resources overwhelmed them, not as enemies of any one nation, but as enemies of them all alike. So for this very object we see that treaties are made and arbiters appointed. Grotius, Mare Liberum, 1608. Although no formal declaration of policy accompanied the signing of the Holy Alliance, this very reticence had aroused general distrust in the liberal circles of Europe and the United States. The growing suspicion that the Act of September 14, 1815, was but the credo of a revived dogma of legitimacy was proved by subsequent events to be well founded in fact. Metternich, even while turning to his own devious and complicated diplomatic purposes the bond of indiscriminate solidarity which bound the signers of this Pact of Kings, feigned to distrust the Tsar's Jacobinism, yet he alone among the statesmen of Europe appears to have held this belief. He was, moreover, confident of his ability to control the Autocrat's liberal vagaries.1 Alexander's early liberalism had in fact given place to a new concept: the Divine Right of rulers placed in the same relation to their people as a father to his family.2 Moreover, in a clause of the Quadruple Treaty of Alliance, the Tsar saw a means to make effective this paternal spirit through reunions devoted to the great common interests. s He now urged that the sovereigns of Europe and their representatives should continue the practice developed by the politico-military conclaves which...