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precedent to stability and peace. Henry IV, or perhaps his great minister Sully, sought a remedy in the establishment of a federal Europe; William Penn suggested the setting-up of an international tribunal of arbitration (1693); while, at the close of the wars of Louis XIV, a French divine, the Abbé de St Pierre, published an elaborate Projet de traité pour rendre la paix perpetuelle entre les souverains chrétiens' (1713).* Kant published his famous essay on 'Perpetual Peace' in 1795; and nine years later the crowned mystic, the Tsar Alexander I, sent his friend Nikolai Nikolaievich Novosiltsov on a special mission to England to lay before Pitt the Tsar's scheme for the reconstitution of the European polity on the lines of a great Christian republic. The ideas then adumbrated afterwards took practical shape in the Holy Alliance of 1815.

This brief reference to a remarkable succession of 'peace projects' will sufficiently indicate the dissatisfaction with which the existing polity was regarded alike by thinkers and by practical politicians. But diplomacy was not, as is too frequently assumed, the cause of the prevailing anarchy'; it was the consequence of it. Nay more, it was an attempt to mitigate the inconveniences which resulted from the dissolution of the mediæval unities. Yet from the first it was regarded with suspicion. 'An ambassador,' according to the jocose definition of Sir Henry Wotton, 'is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.' If for 'good' we might read destruction,' the definition would command wide and serious acceptance among a large number of latterday pacificists.

Diplomacy, and particularly 'secret diplomacy,' has come in for hard knocks of late. It would be impossible within the prescribed limits of this article to attempt any vindication of its methods, or to estimate the results of its activities, even were the materials available. For reasons already indicated, the materials are not available, nor, unless the legal custodians of our State Papers can be induced to offer more generous opportunities to responsible students of recent history, are they likely to

An English translation of the first two volumes of this interesting work was published in 1714.

be. In the absence of materials the prosecution and the defence are alike at a disadvantage. Something may be learnt from memoirs, biographical or autobiographical, such as those of Sir Robert Morier, Sir Horace Rumbold, Lord Redesdale, and Lord Lyons; but much of the evidence derived from such sources is necessarily ex parte, and accusation and apology must, therefore, be based largely upon conjecture. If, however, it is permissible, in the absence of any possibility of definite proof, to hazard a conjecture, it would be in the direction that diplomacy has done infinitely more to preserve peace and to retard war than many of its more vociferous critics would be disposed to allow. Lord Cromer once confessed that what he most feared, during his reign in Egypt,

was not deliberate action taken by the diplomacy of any nation, but rather the occurrence of some chance incident which would excite a whirlwind of national passion, and which, being possibly manipulated by some skilful journalist who would focus on one point all the latent hysteria in France or England, would create a situation incapable of being controlled by diplomacy.'*

Lord Cromer may not have been in a position of complete detachment as a critic, but few men were better qualified to form a judgment, and none was more honest in expressing a judgment when formed. Diplomacy was, in his view, the handmaid of peace; war the confession of failure. It is true that recent revelations have lent colour to the views popularised by Mr Norman Angell as to the mischievous machinations of war-lords and diplomats'; but the depravity of individuals does not involve the condemnation of a system. 'Diplomacy' may be blameless, though the diplomatist be guilty. In any case, if the argument attempted in the foregoing pages be sound, diplomacy is the necessary concomitant of that states-system which has characterised and dominated the European polity for the last four hundred years. Is that system destined to pass and to give place to a new order? and, if so, on what lines is the reconstruction of Europe likely to take place? Are we to look to a revival of the cecumenical order of the Middle Ages,

* Political and Literary Essays' (Second Series), p. 290.

to the realisation of Dante's dream of a world-state under a world-emperor? Such was unquestionably the vision which floated before the eyes of some of the most gifted sons of Germany when the German people, with their Kaiser at their head, plunged the world into the cataclysm of war. The world,' said Prof. Karl Lamprecht in August 1914, will be healed by being Germanised.' The omens to-day do not seem favourable to this solution of the problem.

6

Must we, then, look for a solution to some modification of the schemes which, ever since the modern statessystem emerged, have from time to time been devised to afford some softening of the asperities, some escape from the recurrent catastrophes which quickly revealed themselves as inherent in the new order? Shall we, like Dr C. W. Eliot, the venerable and venerated ex-President of Harvard, look to the realisation of the scheme which, in one form or another, commended itself to the political idealism of Henri IV, to the piety and benevolence of the Abbé de St Pierre, to the calm and detached reason of Immanuel Kant? Is security and stability to be found in the establishment of a League of Nations, equipped with a complete apparatus of super-national federalism? These are large questions; they are naturally suggested by a review, however summary, of the history of European diplomacy, and they are likely to force themselves with ever-increasing insistence upon a world which for some years has been face to face with all the hitherto unimaginable horrors of modern warfare. It is impossible, however, even to attempt an answer in the concluding sentences of this article. It must, for the present, suffice to have indicated the genesis of the problem by which Europe and the world are to-day confronted.

J. A. R. MARRIOTT.

Art. 14.-SINN FEIN.

I.-Sinn Fein and Germany.

THIS article deals only with the period before the war, during which the Sinn Fein movement originated and became allied with Germany, and its home and foreign policy was formulated. The Irish rebellion of Easter week 1916, and the recent revelation by the United States Government of the plots in America, have given the public some insight into the dangerous connexion between Sinn Fein and Germany. The meaning and ultimate aim of the insurrectionary leaders in Ireland, when they refer in their speeches and resolutions to the 'Peace Congress and the Freedom of the Seas,' may perhaps be gathered from the following pages.

During the first six months of 1904, a series of articles on the Resurrection of Hungary' appeared in the United Irishman.' The writer was Arthur Griffith, the creator of the policy of Sinn Fein ('Ourselves Alone'). His object, as he stated in the preface to his book,† was

...

'to point out to his compatriots that the alternative of armed resistance to the foreign Government of Ireland is not acquiescence in usurpation, tyranny and fraud. . . . A century ago in Hungary a poet startled his countrymen by shouting in their ears, "Turn your eyes from Vienna or you perish." The voice of Josef Karman disturbed the nation, but the nation did not apprehend. Vienna remained its political centre until fifty years later. The convincing tongue of Louis Kossuth cried up and down the land: "Only on the soil of a nation can a nation's salvation be worked out."

"Through a generation of strife and sorrow, the people of Hungary held by Kossuth's dictum and triumphed gloriously. The despised, oppressed and forgotten province of Austria is to-day the free, prosperous and renowned Kingdom of Hungary.... Hungary is a nation. She has become so because she turned her back on Vienna. Sixty years ago Hungary realised that the political centre of the nation must be within the nation. When Ireland realises this obvious truth and turns her back on London, the parallel may be

* A weekly paper first published in Dublin in 1899. It claimed to be the 'pioneer organ of Irish-Ireland.'

+ The Resurrection of Hungary.' Dublin: Duffy, 1904.

completed. It failed only when two generations back Hungary took the road of principle, and Ireland the path of compromise and expediency.'

The Resurrection of Hungary' had an enormous circulation, and the preface to the second edition claimed that no book published in Ireland within living memory had been so widely read.' This was the genesis of Sinn Fein. In the forefront of the pamphlet were the words of Sydney Smith: 'It is impossible to think of the affairs of Ireland without being forcibly struck with the parallel of Hungary'; and in a hundred pages was compressed a vivid sketch of the history of the Hungarian constitutional struggle against Austria from 1849 to 1867, when, after Sadowa, the emancipation of Hungary was achieved and the Emperor Francis Joseph was crowned King at Pesth.

'Hungary won her independence under Déak (Griffith urged) by refusing to send members to the Imperial Parliament at Vienna or to admit any right in that Parliament to legislate for her. She demanded absolute territorial and political integrity, and declined to regard the Emperor of Austria as King of Hungary or to regard Austria as other than her enemy until these things were granted.'

It was no consideration of justice, he wrote, that moved Beust to settle the Hungarian question.

'The sole consideration that moved him was that, if the Hungarian question was not settled to the liking of the Hungarians, the Hungarians would settle it themselves by disrupting the Empire. . . . Twenty years later, Beust frankly stated the position. Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any more interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold with Klapka doing Bismarck's bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to the almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this he felt bound to accede to the views of the Déak party.'

It seemed clear to Griffith that, as the ancient Hungarian constitution. was revived, so could Irish independence again be won, as acknowledged in the English Renunciation Act of 1782, which enacted that