not aiming at the same mark. In the interview with the Turkish authorities which preceded the battle, Codrington discussed seriously the question of the armistice. Rigny on his side assumed a provocative tone, and talked of exchanging balls and powder.

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It was not by chance that the French Admiral's frigate, the Siren, received the first fire of the enemy at Navarino, and the man who had intended to bring about a fight, if possible, was satisfied. The Turkish fleet was destroyed. The English Government immediately pronounced the battle of Navarino an unfortunate accident". An accident it certainly was not. The destruction of the Ottoman fleet, on October 20, 1827, was, in the words of Emile Bourgeois, a premeditated declaration of war, secretly approved by Charles X, determined by his Admiral; a French declaration of war against Turkey in favor of the Greeks. And this action received for various reasons the enthusiastic support of French public opinion.

A year after Navarino, France asked and received from the Conference of London a mandate to protect the Greeks against the Turks. Fourteen thousand Frenchmen were sent to the Peloponnesus in August of that year. In a campaign of two months they restored to the Greeks all that the Greeks had lost to the Turks. This, and the Russo-Turkish war which was going on at the same time, broke the resistance of the Sultan. The subsequent launching of Greece as a new and independent State was merely a matter of political and diplomatic adjustment, rendered inevitable by the military events which began at Navarino.

France also performed a significant part in the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium, an event practically contemporary with the creation of the Kingdom of Greece. This is a complicated chapter in diplomatic history, to only two or three points of which is it possible to allude. The erection of the Kingdom of Belgium into an independent State was the work, not of the Belgians, although they made a certain contribution, but of European diplomacy. This was natural and indeed inevitable, for if that kingdom were to be erected it would be at the expense of the settlement of 1815. It had been the Great Powers at the

Congress of Vienna which had pronounced Holland and Belgium one; it was for them, not for the immediately interested parties, to pronounce the divorce, if divorce there was to be. The instinct and the manifest intention of the Eastern absolutisms, Russia, Prussia and Austria, were to intervene to suppress the Belgian insurrection of 1830 by force of arms and to preserve the United Kingdom of the Netherlands intact for the purpose for which it had been instituted, namely as a barrier against France; as a protection against those deadly political gases which that seething caldron was, in the opinion of the Holy Allies, constantly giving forth.

But the autocracies of the East reckoned without one accomplished diplomatist, as they had been inclined to reckon without him sixteen years before at Vienna, only to find out the futility of their imaginings. Talleyrand was on the scene again, in the full vigor of his seventy-seventh year. Having been offered the Foreign Secretaryship by the new King, Louis Philippe, he had declined that office but had requested to be made Ambassador at the Court of Saint James's. And so he was now in London, his mind working to full capacity. And he now proceeded to add an appropriate and finished companion piece to his brilliant work at Vienna. This, Talleyrand's final contribution to the history of European diplomatic art, showed no loss in power. As cool and flexible as ever, as subtle and sinuous, this master of the craft sketched and painted and retouched until he had a picture which quite suited him, but to which his partners at the green table gave only a forced admiration.

Talleyrand had not been at his post a week before he had in concert with Lord Aberdeen found a method of avoiding war, simply, as he said, because that was his sole object. A war between the reactionary Powers on the one hand, and France and Belgium aglow with revolutionary fevers on the other, might easily be the outcome of this conflict in the Netherlands. Such a war might assume general and devastating proportions; at any rate its course would be quite incalculable. To prevent war, Talleyrand signed with Lord Aberdeen a secret agreement which invited and authorized Europe to regulate in conference in London the dispute between the Belgians and the Dutch. The East

ern absolutisms, though with varying indications of annoyance, acquiesced in this procedure, rendered formidable by the entente of France and England. The initiative here was Talleyrand's.

Thus began negotiations which were most intricate, longdrawn-out, precarious and critical. This diplomatic skein it is impossible to unravel here, but if anyone is interested in tracing the steps of a very wary person advancing, amid manifold ambushes and quicksands, toward a steady goal, he will be amply repaid by keeping at the heels of the astute ex-Bishop during this redoubtable crisis. Talleyrand had not had an unrivaled experience of Europe for nothing. Imperturbable, flexible, resourceful, resilient, without haste, without rest, he turned and retreated and advanced as the moment might demand, but never lost sight of the path and the objective. There were smaller crises within the greater one, and he was ready for them, too. Once, when the King of Holland had nearly won Belgium back, France intervened with 40,000 men and stayed the process, incidentally rescuing the shaky throne of Leopold I shortly after that monarch had mounted it. England did not relish the sight of French troops in Belgium, and wished to get them out as speedily as they had come. Yet Palmerston admitted to a German, Stockmar, a confidant of Leopold, that “without the aid of France, the Belgians would have been put back beneath the yoke". A year later, in 1832, the French army recrossed the frontier, this time under Marshal Gérard at the head of sixty thousand men, and besieged the citadel of Antwerp, which the King of Holland had refused to hand over to Belgium, but which he was now compelled to yield. And the adroitness of Talleyrand's diplomacy had won a revenge for the treaties of Vienna. "I see," said Lord Londonderry, "I see France dominating us all, thanks to the skillful and active policy of her representative."

Thus we see that the old diplomacy, whose most consummate practitioner was Talleyrand, accomplished good in its day as well as evil, preserved the peace sometimes as well as sometimes precipitated war. It is not unreasonable to hope that the new diplomacy of our day may do as much in an age which is prone to consider itself purer still.

Thirty years after the events just described, France played the

leading part in aiding two other peoples to achieve the selfsame goal. Napoleon III was then in power, equipped with a very pithy formula, the prodigious principle of nationality. This principle, as the Prussian minister in Paris informed the incredulous Bismarck, meant, in the mind of the Emperor, the right possessed by all peoples freely to choose their own nationality. The Congress of Paris of 1856 gave Napoleon the opportunity to recommend this principle to a most unsympathetic audience, composed of men not given to romance in international affairs. It was the Roumanian question that enabled him to make his début in a rôle which he was most anxious to try and which he was not soon to abandon.

The situation was as follows: The Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia had long formed a part of the Turkish Empire, but Russia had secured a right of protectorate over them on the ground of religious affinity. This right was now considered to have been abolished by the Crimean War, a war in which Russia was the loser. But did this elimination of Russia mean that Turkey should be permitted to resume her former unrestricted, unqualified control of the two provinces? Needless to say this was not at all the idea of the Roumanians. They desired independence, but, realizing that that was quite beyond the realm of possibility at that moment, they wished the next best thing, namely, the union of the two principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, as a step toward that freedom and grandeur which their archeologists and historians had for a generation been telling them were rightly theirs. Napoleon III was most sympathetic with the aspirations of this people, which loved to consider itself of Latin origin and which dwelt fondly and complacently upon the memories of ancient Dacia and the career of the Emperor Trajan. It was largely through Napoleon's efforts that a considerable step was taken toward the realization of Roumanian aspirations. At the Congress of Paris, Napoleon demanded the union of the two principalities under a foreign prince, the Duke of Parma. This he did not secure, but he did secure the right of the people of the two principalities to be consulted as to their desires and, by insisting that this consultation, which the Turks attempted to nullify, should be fair, and that the will of the Roumanians as

revealed by it should be respected, Napoleon greatly helped forward the union of the two provinces which became the basis of the Roumanian State.

This advancement of the Roumanian people toward the realization of statehood was the sole durable result of the Crimean War. Napoleon continued to manifest a benevolent interest in this people, the first-born of his principle of nationality. It is piquant to recall that when Couza, their first Prince, was driven out by the Roumanians in 1866, it was Napoleon who warmly approved and supported the candidacy of his successor, Prince Charles of Hohenzollern, founder of the present reigning house of Roumania. It is no less piquant to observe that the only branch of the Hohenzollern family now ruling in Europe is the one thus greatly helped on its way by the man who was to have another experience of a very different sort with another Hohenzollern candidacy.

One of the Roumanian negotiators in this transference of a throne, wishing to tempt Prince Charles to accept it, said to him: "You see on this map all these countries, Transylvania, the Banat, Bukovina, Bessarabia, all peopled with Roumanians. This is the future which is entrusted to you." This remark was made in 1866. Fifty-two years later the successor of Charles looked upon a map thus radically altered. Roumania Irredenta was to become Roumania Redeemed in the vast reconstruction of our day as a result of a war in which her best friend was the leading combatant, France.

In the creation of still another product of the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Italy, the service of France was so conspicuous and is so well known that I do not need to do more than mention it. The fundamental fact in that creation, the condition absolutely precedent to the independence and unification of Italy, was the shattering of the power of Austria in the Peninsula. As long as Austria maintained her position there, nothing could be done. Neither the Italian people nor any Italian State could hope alone to dislodge the mighty incubus and thus enable the national energies to soar. Cavour saw this with perfect distinctness and framed his policy accordingly. He sought an ally whose military power would be equal or