by all the journals of England, because he did not command his troops to fire upon the people. Well, other powers and other princes have since occupied his seat, who have asserted their authority in a very different way, and are denounced in the same organs as tyrants because they did order their troops to fire upon the people. I think every man has a right to have his feelings upon these subjects; but what is the moral I presume to draw upon these circumstances? It is this, that it is extremely difficult to form an opinion upon French politics; _and that so long as the French people are exact in their commercial transactions and friendly in their political relations, it is just as well that we should not interfere with their management of their domestic concerns_.” The same ideas animated him in 1854, when he pointed out that ten years earlier the Czar had, by a secret manœuvre, sought to provoke an estrangement which had not endured, but which the Czar was led to believe enduring when the Crimean War broke out. The same guided his hearty approval of Mr. Cobden’s aims in relation to France. What he objected to in the later Italian Treaty was that it embodied “reciprocity” too late--at a time when for England reciprocity could secure no more. In 1858--the Walewski affair--Disraeli termed our alliance with France “the key and corner-stone of modern civilisation.” After the Treaty of Villafranca, Disraeli advised England not “to go to congresses and conferences in fine dresses and ribands, to enjoy the petty vanity of settling the fate of petty princes,” but to have recourse to “your ally the Emperor of the French”--a monarch who, as Disraeli said some years afterwards, “... has been created and can only be maintained by the sympathies of his people--a proud, imperious, and apt to be discontented people.” In 1860, when many were jubilant over Italy’s united nationality, Disraeli, demonstrating its present incompleteness, asserted that its accomplishment must come not through the “moral influence of England,” but “by the will and the sword of France”--though this did not blind him to contingent perils.