vided always we are prepared to incur a small additional expense. But the system by which the Prussian Landwehr is officered, as detailed in the foregoing pages, is at least worth an experiment among ourselves. The one great lesson, however, which the English people should lay to heart is that any military system which is to stand the test of war must be perfected experimentally during peace, and that it will be too late to begin to organise after the storm of war has overtaken us. The English people must be told that the army for which they pay so dearly is a mere rabble of battalions-battalions highly disciplined, no doubt, but still a rabble, entirely destitute of any machinery for combined action. The Militia and Volunteers have no connection with the regular army or with each other, and are, moreover, very imperfectly trained. The only remedy for this state of things is to adopt such a territorial organisation of our military force as shall give to each of its now isolated units its defined place in the grand army of England: with this view, to divide the whole country into military districts; to form in each district permanent mixed brigades of regular, militia, and volunteer battalions, with their proper staff, which shall be assembled yearly in district camps of exercise; and, finally, to provide each district with the stores and equipment necessary to enable its division or brigade to take the field, fully prepared for war, on the mere order to mobilise. The military reforms of the War Minister have resulted, so far, only in a reduction of our battalions and squadrons to a numerical strength which excites ridicule or alarm, according to the disposition of the observer. Twenty thousand efficient soldiers have been discharged, and no provision made, except in theory, for supplying their place. The recruiting, which was supposed to be going on favourably, has received a check; the inducements offered by Mr. Cardwell to old soldiers to enrol in the ranks of the reserve have been ludicrously ineffective; and the whole of the civil departments of the army are in a transition state! And the consequence of all this is, that when England aspires to exercise any influence in European affairs, her counsels are met with a civility that hardly conceals contempt. Let there be no mistake, however, in this matter. It is the English people themselves, and not any particular Government, who are answerable for the state of our military armaments, which we have above described without any exaggeration. The army estimates must be cut down despite the storm of military criticism, and departmental improvements may follow afterwards' was the language of the leading Vol. 129.-No. 258. 2 II organ organ of public opinion. But the people appear to be now thoroughly aroused, to feel it is high time to have done with trifling; and if the present Government is not prepared to act in earnest, let it make way for one which will endeavour to restore England to her position among the nations, which the so called economical policy of successive administrations has so seriously compromised. ART. VI.-1. Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1795. Von Heinrich von Sybel. Dritte, vermehrte u. verbesserte Aufl. 3 Bde. Düsseldorf, 1865-6. 2. History of the French Revolution. By Heinrich von Sybel. Translated from the third edition of the original German work, by Walter C. Perry, Esq. 4 vols. London, 1867-70. 3. Oesterreich und Preussen gegenüber der französischen Revolution bis zum Abschluss des Friedens von Campo Formio. Von Hermann Hüffer. Bonn, 1868. 4. Oesterreich und Deutschland im Revolutionskrieg. Ergünzungsheft zur Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1778 bis 1795. Von Heinrich von Sybel. Düsseldorf, 1868. 5. Die Politik der deutschen Mächte im Revolutionskriege bis zum Frieden von Campo Formio. Von Hermann Hüffer. Münster, 1869. 6. Polens Untergang und der Revolutionskrieg. Von Heinrich von Sybel. In Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, vol. xxiii. 1. Heft. Munich, 1870. HE most important contribution, yet offered to our knowledge of the epoch of the French Revolution by the research and intelligence of the modern school of German historians, is fitly dedicated to its veteran chief, the illustrious Leopold von Ranke. Master and disciple are worthy of one another; and there is an organic connexion between their labours. For it is not as an isolated series of events that Professor von Sybel treats the great convulsion of government and society in France; nor as a mere supplement to the history of the French Revolution that he traces the relations between its progress and the general history of Europe during a momentous period of seven years. It was not, indeed, he reminds us, the political programme of the Assembly of 1789, but it was the same object which that Assembly hoped to obtain for France, which the nations of Europe had been struggling to reach ever since the close of the Middle Ages. That object was the removal of all unfounded and and imaginary authority, the loosing of all arbitrary bonds, the overthrow of all unnatural barriers.' In matters political this war against ancient institutions had been opened, not by the peoples, but by the monarchs of the eighteenth century. Their self-confidence, their oblivion of the eternal laws of humanity in the midst of their schemes for ameliorating the condition of mankind, led them into deplorable errors and excesses. It was as if their efforts had been designed to illustrate the intolerance which may accompany crude theories of toleration, and the blindness which is the occasional result of a too sudden enlightenment. The same is doubly true of the reforms attempted in the democratic revolution of the French people. This Revolution was in its origin due to the same impulses which had formerly brought Germany into conflict with the hierarchy, raised Holland against Spain, England against the Stuarts, and America against England. But it was the fatal error of the Revolution to 'declare war, not only against pretended authority, but against all moral laws whatever, and thus to falsify every one of its immense tasks.' Thus the French nation was involved in the inevitable chain of consequences which entails crime as the result of wrong; and thus the acceleration of the overthrow of feudalism, which Europe owes to the Revolution, was outweighed by permanent evils. It failed, not because its object, the destruction of the ancient order of things, was in itself perverse, but because the French nation entered upon the movement under a heavy load of inveterate immorality.' Accordingly, both what was good and what was bad in the French Revolution, were the historical heritage of the past. Neither, therefore, the ideas of 1789,' nor the excesses and horrors of the September men and their successors, furnish history with the basis for her judgment of the French Revolution. • What revolution is in internal affairs, conquest is in foreign policy.' The myth, still venerated in certain quarters, according to which the excesses of the Revolution were due to the pressure exercised by the menaces of the European powers, has not only been discredited under the light of candid historical inquiry; but it sinned à priori against the irrefutable principle that revolutionary states must be conquering states, and conquering states revolutionary. Yet the fatal course of the movement would not so utterly have changed the face of Europe, had not another revolutionary, and conquering, power co-operated from the East. The tyranny of Catharine of Russia was revolutionary in its origin and in its essence as that of the Comité as * See the 'General Review' in chap. i. book v. pp. 193 ff. vol. ii. of the English Translation. du 2H 2 du Salut Public. She sat on a throne to which she had no shadow of right, and which she had reached by violence and murder; she ruled, a foreigner, over a people who hated her and loathed her sway. Church and State were alike prostrate under her feet. No personal liberty, and no real security of property, existed in Russia under her dominion. The Czarina was the mother of the poor' just as the Jacobins were the patrons of the mob. She, too, as a despot, was necessarily a conqueror. Her very immorality corresponded, like that of the revolutionary tyrants, to the moral decay of her people. Her foreign policy, directed in the first instance towards the acquisition of Poland, in. the second towards that of Constantinople, came to absorb all the energy of her government. The danger to Europe from the East was equal to that from the West: and from these two quarters the tempest of revolution and conquest broke over Europe. In the midst lay the conservative powers of Austria and Prussia. The former, encumbered rather than strengthened by the empty honour of the Imperial crown on her sovereign's head, was hesitating for the last time as to the abandonment of a policy into which thewelfare of Germany, as such, entered even as a subordinate element. The latter was a Great Power, and yet not a Great Power ; jealous of her new territories, yet trembling for their security; proud of her military strength, yet chary of spending a single unnecessary dollar in its maintenance, and conscious rather of her historical rivalry with Austria than of her destiny to oust the latter from the beginning of Germany. Unfortunately for themselves and for Europe, both were still absolute' monarchies, and both, during the period of the Revolutionary war, were ruled over by sovereigns utterly devoid of comprehension of their tasks. The worst foibles of the Habsburgs and of the Hohenzollerns were respectively predominant in Francis II. and in Frederick William II. Called upon to govern as well as reign, the former was a mixture of selfish stolidity and intriguing greed, with Viennese bonhomie in his words and Florentine perfidy in his heart; while the latter was a romantic pietist, fond of military glory so far as it reflects upon a king, but in matters of state always incapable of leading, and frequently incapable of being led, in the direction of a policy at once vigorous and intelligent. Around and about them lay the minor principalities of the Empire, the owner or life-tenant of each trembling for its existence, * King George III. described his royal brother to Lord Malmesbury (when setting out for Berlin) as an honest man at the bottom, although a weak one.' (Diaries and Correspondence of the Earl of Malmesbury,' vol. iii. p. 6.)His honesty, or obstinacy, was of the kind which holds out till the eleventh hour,and then gives way. and and ready to purchase its continuance on any terms and in any quarter. Yet the sole guarantee for the preservation of the empire lay in union between Austria and Prussia; and that union a war against the Revolution could only consolidate, if Austria and Prussia carried it on with the determination of maintaining the very status quo which it lay in the dynastic interests of either to overthrow. If, on the other hand, the two great German Powers regarded the revolutionary operations of France in the West, and of Russia in the East, not as the danger of Germany, but as their own opportunity, the end of that war was not to be foreseen. And thus it came to pass. The history of the Revolutionary War is summed up by Professor von Sybel in a metaphor, of which few will be disposed to dispute the truthfulness: While the furious storm with its dashing waves was undermining the protecting dams, the warders were quarrelling about the fragments of the wrecks which drifted towards them.'-vol. ii. p. 373. (Engl. Translation.) In his account of these quarrels among the warders, i,e. in his narrative of the attempts of Austria and Prussia to make harvest for themselves out of the proceedings and ulterior schemes of Catharine of Russia on the one hand, and on the other out of the progress of the very French war in which they were engaged as combatants, we surmise that the majority of Sybel's readers will find the most attractive, because the most novel, portion of his volumes. Yet his book, to be appreciated as it deserves, should be appreciated as a whole. It is not yet indeed, in one sense, complete; for the peace of Basle, with which it concludes, only closes the first act in the great European drama; just as the dissolution of the National Convention at Paris constitutes only a preliminary warning of the fall of the French Republic. No thorough view of the Austrian policy will of course have been obtained until the narrative has been continued (as we rejoice to find Professor von Sybel intends to continue it) as far as Campo Formio; and we even live in hopes that Häusser's friend may supplement the labours of the lamented Heidelberg historian as far as Luneville and Amiens.* Yet, as the book stands, it finds a natural termination in the events of the year 1795; and the mighty figure of Buonaparte only falls as a shadow of the future across the pages of its concluding volume. Within these limits the author has sought to reach that kind of completeness which lies neither in the accumulation of We observe that a fourth edition is now appearing of Ludwig Häusser's admirable work, Deutsche Geschichte vom Tode Friedrichs des Grossen bis zur Gründung des deutschen Bundes.' We shall occasionally refer to the third edition (Berlin, 1861-3). striking |