no strength can avail without watchfulness, and no greatness can endure except either by means of capacity, or honour. You are pitted against capacity without being possessed of it; your natural defence is honour, and you have lost it. ENGLAND-FRANCE-TURKEY. Our readers will have observed the statement which has appeared in the public journals, to the effect that England and France have come to a determination to offer their assistance to the Sultan, in the event of any rebellion taking place among his own subjects, in consequence of his declining or delaying to go to war with Russia. This result is precisely what has been, time after time, foretold in this journal. We have asserted that, if the Turks were not allowed to fight the Russians, we should have to fight the Turks. If our squadron goes to support the Sultan, it goes, of course, to fight the Turks. And if to fight the Turks, it is, of course, to fight for the Russians. In the supposed case, it will be found that we began by assisting the Turks, because they were too weak: we end by fighting them, because they are too powerful. THE ERROR. "There are two things I do know," said M. Thiers, "history and geography." Modest, indeed, is the pretension; but what has the possession availed? A man may know all facts that have happened, and be yet unable to deal with the smallest incident that occurs ;-possessed of the declivation areas of every continent, peninsula, and ocean, he may stumble on a molehill, and be caught in a gin. The man who looks to history as enabling him to deal with events, is an astrologer substituting mouldy records for shining stars. The caster of nativities would transfer to earth the order of Heaven; the philosophical statesman transfers to men the inconsistencies of Time. That wonder of wonders, that inscrutable mystery and presumptuous oracle-that fleeting, wavering, fragile, and immutable, flimsy and awful being is man, by his varieties, his variations, his uncertainties, his doubts, and his fallacies. If no two leaves of the immeasurable forests are so framed that they shall coincide, how shall sequence be observed in the aggregate of the march of the thought and the events of mankind? There is in our nature a permanent, unchangeable, centripetal force, which is-Truth, in its various forms of virtue, justice, and judgment; to attain to the perfection and performance of which is the end of all faculties and their excellence. Where and so far as it prevails, the order of mankind is as that of nature, and the law of society is as that of the stars, to which, in instinct, we assimilate the Powers that secure to us repose and happiness. There is also a centrifugal force, the converse of these; uncertain and erratic in its essence, and producing the mutations of fortune. Man, as is his wont, forming his idea of his Creator on his own image, has from the earliest times imagined two principles struggling for command, living on their antagonism, and convulsing the children of men, whose hearts are the field of their spiritual war ;-Evil everywhere the disturber; Good the preserver and restorer. Divesting this contest of its imaginative features, and reducing it to its practical application, we have before and around judgment and fallacy, whose conflict creates all the affairs of the world. As the circumstances of no age and of no moment tally with those of another age and another moment it is that the fallacies from which they spring have shifted; in fact, every age has its own. It is not that the resources of error suffice to give variety to events, but its character is such as to depend upon dissimilarity. A folly once exposed is a folly for ever; but a folly to succeed must be wisdom. An illusion once exploded is known by its name; an illusion to deceive must be a maxim and a truth. The fallacy of this age and moment is-we must preserve peace. The truth which it suppresses, and by which it can only be destroyed, is-we must do justice. Under the illusion, we are about to convulse the world with words and gunpowder. This has never happened before, and, having accomplished its task, it will henceforward be unavailable for the service of evil and the advantage of craft. THE MALEFACTORS. September 20th. "Divide your happy England into four."-Henry V. So the murder is out! On the 3d of September, when all the journals, without exception, were congratulating themselves and the country on the solution of the Eastern difficulties, by the adoption, by the Porte, with modifications, of the conjoint note, and the acceptance of those "unimportant" modifications by the Conference of Vienna, we closed our reply to them in these words : "The matter is not ended. We are nearer war than ever we were, and that war will come from nothing but the cry of peace. The Turks do not dread war if Englishmen do. In God's name, then, let them fight their own battles. Their battles are yours. If you persist in restraining them from fighting Russia, the day will come when YOU WILL HAVE TO FIGHT THEM YOURSELVES." On the 13th of September, that is to say, ten days after these words were published, "the Parliament being out of the way, the Queen being out of the way, and the irrelevant members of the Cabinet being out of the way," the four Foreign Secretaries quietly assembled in Downing Street, and decided to send orders to Constantinople to enforce upon the Porte the withdrawal of the modifications which the European Conference had accepted. Not content with this, and in case the Sultan should find himself unable to resist the exasperation of his people, they sent orders for the squadron to advance into the waters of the Bosphorus to support him against his subjects. Nor content with this, they also despatched orders to Omer Pasha to forbid him from passing from one province to another of his Sovereign's dominions. They have consequently contemplated a rebellion as the result of their despatch, and provided means for putting it down; these means being the allied squadron which they have sent to the Trojan coast to support weak Turkey against powerful Russia. They have not acted in concert with France; they have forced the French Government. On receipt of the despatch, that Cabinet was filled with astonishment, and taken wholly by surprise, and it was only from the imperativeness of the act of England that its concurrence was yielded, in order not to be left alone opposed at once to England and Russia. For ourselves, we were prepared; we knew it all; we have asserted it all; now it is no longer an hypothesis, but an event; incredible as an, hypothesis, it is indubitable as an event. It remains with the nation to deal with it. In all former transactions, in which from their criminal nature, responsibility rested somewhere, it was impossible to get at the authors; the public acts, like the leaders of journals, were anonymous. It is not so in this case. The necessity in which they stood to get rid of colleagues has concentrated on themselves the eyes of the world, and affords the means of retribution. Argument has gone by; words are superfluous; the cry of JUSTICE is the only one that can now be raised. There is no alternative; either the laws of England have to be exercised in their penal vigour upon the persons of four traitors, or the Czar of Russia commands the world! For the second time we assert, "It is not yet ended." No; not by the release of your squadron-not by the anchorage in the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn-not by its discharges of grape and its volleys of bombs-not by its holding prisoner the Sultan, or its overawing for a time the capital and the Empire. Have "the Four" contemplated the contingency of the Sultan, even with their support, being unable to obey their order? What, in that case, will happen? happen to the Sultan, even as it has happened to Turkey. It will Nothing of all this has been done through ignorance; if it were so, it would not be the less criminal, for an English Minister has no commission for such deeds, and these Ministers have had no sanction that can bear them harmless. It has been all consciously done. The results were too clear not to have been foreseen; the steps have been too insidious not to have been calculated; the words too ambiguous not to have been perfidious. We may have reason, as often hitherto stated in these columns, for attributing to Lord John Russell and Lord Clarendon a miserable infatuation; but the other two of the four who have usurped England, can claim the benefit of no inexperience, uncertainty, or illusion. Not a word has escaped from them, not coherent to their end; nor could those men, who for years have denounced the policy of each other as infatuate or perfidious, have combined save for a purpose-however desperate or incredible it might have been a short time ago believed. The catastrophe is however still in the hands of two menOmer Pasha and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe: the one may have anticipated, or may rebel against the orders; the other may decline to execute them; but there is little hope of either, for Russia would not have sprung the crisis without good grounds, and in either contingency the advantage is lost of the FACT OF WAR, which, when established between Russia and Turkey, immediately brings safe and honourable peace. Now we have to learn upon what grounds the Cabinet acts? If merely upon the telegraphic despatch, may we not have to-morrow, or next day, conditions added in view of this very contingency of a movement of Omer Pasha, which will enable the Cabinet of St. Petersburg even then to fall back on its Allies, keeping them in the field which secures it everything, and deprives the Porte of everything? Who is there to put a question, or to demand an explanation? Putting aside all considerations of justice and of policy,admitting to any extent the solution and explanation of mistaken theories, ignorance and infatuation, and looking merely at the acts of England as affecting Turkey,—will any one deny that they are perfidious, cowardly, and brutal ? -- THE DEFENCE. It may not have struck the public that the Times was not the paper to announce the decision of the Cabinet of the 13th. It oozed out at Paris, and found its way to the columns of a morning paper: it has remained ignored to the Paris Correspondent of the Times down to yesterday. It was commented upon in all the London weekly papers; it is ignored in the leader of the Times of Monday. In that leader the assumption is, that Russia has "no right (sic) whatever," that the Conference is wholly independent of her influenee, and that if the Turks take the matter into their own hands, the "arbitration of Europe" has, in that case, "become superfluous." Such is the defence put up, amounting to the suppression of the fact. It, however, conveys a piece of wonderful |