other for the maintenance of its rights and welfare is the condition of that existence. Force gives the blockader no rights beyond what the blockaded party possessed; i. e. prohibition and seizure.

The principle, then, which established blockade as an act of war, and not of peace, was sound in itself; and whereas warblockades are but a portion of the operations against an enemy, and therefore are not likely to last, a peace-blockade, as excluding all other and active measures, is most likely to last: and this to the detriment of innocent parties: for the blockader injures the enemy only by injuring the friendly powers.

But does humanity profit by this system in the aggregate? The detestable Brutus and the detested Verres both inflicted greater miseries and loss of life by peaceful blockades than open execution could have done. Does not the very facility with which a strong power might thus attack a weaker, form a strong inducement, and lead to the probability of its frequent adoption among nations, who would hesitate before going to direct war? And would it not, further, be a frequent incentive to war among friendly powers, whose commercial relations could never be safe if this, an act of the last necessity hitherto, should be adopted as the first?

In war, too, weaker powers form alliances and succour each other: thus, not merely preserving a balance of powers, and thereby the existence of states, but also affording supplies in cases of prohibition by blockades. And yet the blockade which is expressly to preserve peace, would turn the simple act of interalliance into an act of war!

If then not only the consequences, but the necessary concomitants of an act of blockade, are acts of war, the act itself is one of war, and not of peace: and to affirm the contrary is to confound the two principles. The modern innovation, then, which inflicts general in preference to particular injury, superior in the aggregate, scarcely inferior in nature, and differing only in the mode; which induces insecurity everywhere, and offers temptations, by its facility, to the stronger; which affords no means of alleviation, or compensation; which prolongs indefinitely the distress of unoffending parties, making their welfare dependent, not on the prudence, but the obstinacy of the powers at variance; which gives the right of violence to peace; which permits one government to exercise the powers of another government without possessing itself of them; and which recognizes this forcible interference with the existing rights of another power as an act, not of hostility, but of peace, is therefore an ERROR OF REASONING, and a CONFUSION OF OPPOSITE PRINCIPLES. It can be in

tended only for strong states against the weak; for insidious hostility against the unprepared and its tendency, so far from alleviating misery, is to increase it, by multiplying and universalizing the sense of injury, and increasing the chances of collisions on the slightest occasions.

We repeat, that the recognition of a blockade in time of peace is admitting the effectiveness of all merely nominal blockade; for it admits that the simple act of claiming a power over another state supersedes the, hitherto unquestioned, necessity of actually holding that power before it can be exercised.

We lay down these principles without any particular reference to actual politics. In regard to these we must observe that the case of New Granada is scarcely a precedent; for to inflict injury on the minister of a friendly power is in itself an act of war, and justifying a reprisal of war, after satisfaction was refused. In the cases of Buenos Ayres and Mexico it was a matter of commercial and private injury, and redress and compensation were offered. To take the first, and this the sole, precedent therefore, is at once admitting the necessity, and the impossibility, of finding a precedent. And yet the two last instances, and Antwerp, and that of New Granada, contrasted with the acquiescence in the seizure of the Vixen and the recent American hostile aggression, all go to prove that what is termed a peace-blockade is a measure of the strong against the feeble merely, and carefully avoided between powers of anything like equal strength. France, however, that has so long taunted England as a nation of shopkeepers, has now rendered herself fully obnoxious to the charge uttered by Sheridan against the East India Company of uniting the meanness of a trader with a robber's heartlessness.

Our gallant neighbours may like to have the whole passage at hand, in order to apply it the more readily.

"Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur."

"There was something in the frame and constitution of the Company, which extended the sordid principles of their origin over all their successive operations; connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest achievements, the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates. Alike in the political and military line could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals: and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits; an army employed in executing an arrest; a town besieged on a note of hand; a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was that they exhibited a government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre and the petty traffic of a merchant's counting-house; wielding a truncheon with one hand and picking a pocket with the other."

Though there certainly are portions of this description which

do not apply to the case before us, there is nevertheless so striking a similarity in the general details with the spirit of the system recently adopted in France, as fully to warrant the introduction of the above passage here;-if not altogether as a likeness, yet as a beacon to the gallant spirits whom a paltry and intriguing feeling of chandlery is misleading into piracy under the name of honour; and whom it is wished to induce to seek glory in oppressing a nation already the prey of factions; and this, too, for the sake of a few speculators in Compensations. Yet were a point of comparison wanting, we would ask whether the disclosures, officially made, respecting military peculation at Algiers, would not justify even stronger language than the above vague sarcasm against a body of English merchants uttered by a parliamentary profligate?

For many features of the following portrait an original might possibly be found at the present day.

"It would be sufficient merely to consider in what consisted the prepossessing distinction, the captivating characteristic of greatness of mind. Was it not solely to be traced in great actions directed to great ends? In them, and in them alone, we are to search for true, estimable magnauimity. To them alone can we justly affix the splendid title and honours of real greatness. There was indeed another species of greatness which displayed itself in boldly conceiving a bad measure, and undauntedly pursuing it to its accomplishment. But had Mr. Hastings the merit of exhibiting either of these descriptions of greatnesseven of the latter? he saw nothing great-nothing magnanimous- -nothing open-nothing direct in his measures or in his mind. On the contrary, he had too often pursued the worst objects by the worst means. His course was an eternal deviation from rectitude. He either tyrannized or was deceived, and was by turns a Dionysius and a Scapin. As well might the writhing obliquity of the serpent be compared to the swift directness of the arrow, as the duplicity of Mr. Hastings' ambition to the simple steadiness of genuine magnanimity. In his mind all was shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious and little; nothing simple, nothing unmixed: all affected plainness and actual dissimulation: a heterogeneous mass of contradictory qualities, with nothing great but his crimes and even those contrasted by the littleness of his motives, which at once denoted both his baseness and his meanness, and marked him for a traitor and a trickster."

:

ART. IX.-Gli Arabi in Italia; esercitazione storica di David Bertolotti. Torino. 1838.

THE name of Historical Exercise, most justly bestowed by the author of the present volume upon his work, defines so precisely both its scope and mode of execution, that we are precluded at once from any very extravagant expectations either as to the information it imparts or to the ability with which the task is performed. It may fairly however be pleaded in justification, that the materials extant for the labour are so imperfect and scanty, and the facts and details in general so utterly unknown to historians, that any formal attempts to arrange them into one close and connected tissue of history would itself be a work of mere imagination, rendering the attempts at continuing and classifying, with a view to philosophize upon them, in itself derogatory to the judgment of

the writer.

There is perhaps nothing more striking and remarkable in all literature than the entire ignorance evinced by European writers generally, and of all ages, of the events of Asiatic history as connected with the leading points of their own; unless indeed when these came into actual contact. This omission, however, arises in far less degree from mere ignorance of the different languages of the barbarians, and any possible difficulty of access to their historians, than from the distinction in essence between the spirit of the European and Asiatic families of mankind.

We mark this distinction not the less forcibly because there has been an absolute affinity, a positive descent, in the first instances, of the former from the last; and an ample intermixture by the accidents of time and conquest in various subsequent periods: for, notwithstanding the identity in the first, and amalgamation in the latter cases, the distinction exists as though no such intermixtures had ever taken place; and in this, the latest century of the world, the difference is as clearly marked as in any of those that have ever preceded it. It is a difference that renders equally nugatory all researches of history, geography, and philology; a difference of civilization, not so much in degree as in nature; consisting not at all in the opposition of attributes, such as fixedness and mobility; but in an essential distinction of genius, antagonist in the two nations, and without reference to capacities, powers, and passions. The cause, if, haply, not referable to climate, we think hopelessly obscure: the consequence is undeniable. Throughout Asia it has found mental subservience, and enacted LAWS: in Europe it has every where produced deliberative resistance, and has established INSTITUTIONS.

When, in immediate connection with our subject, the charac

teristic distinctions are so widely apart, the fact furnishes us with a clue to the otherwise inexplicable indifference and ignorance of oriental history in writers brought, as cotemporaries, and from other and national causes, into almost personal contact with them: and, to confine the deduction to the one question before us, it is hence that in all probability arises the mutual ignorance of Chris. tian and Moorish writers: for though, in Spain, there are undoubtedly some instances to the contrary, yet these are far fewer than generally supposed, and to no very great extent. The Spanish historians of the Moorish wars do unquestionably in their narratives refer to the Moorish writers; but generally speaking it is but upon indispensable occasions; accidental notices, brought out by mutual relation of the same events and seldom do we get more than a casual glimpse of the internal state of the hostile nation, of those individual traits, of those scenes of private life and feeling that in Asiatic bosoms act with so strong an influence over public affairs, and that bring down calamity upon a whole race or people from the fierce conflagrations of a spark long nourished in a single breast. The Zegri feuds with the Abencerrages are proof of this.

A consequence also follows from hence, and one of some importance to our views of history; for it admits as a general principle in our researches after the causes of the rise or decline of kingdoms, and in international cases, the fact which was so well observed by Montesquieu in the internal affairs of single kingdoms. Oppressions of the sovereign, he observes, are borne by the people, and to the utmost so long as they are general-but when oppression takes a discriminating form; when violence is offered not merely to accidental rights and property, but to the internal state of society and to the domestic circle, resistance commences at once; and spreads from the one individual outraged to the generality of the party oppressed, as in the case of Wat Tyler.

A due consideration of this fact, and of its origin, in the strongest impulses of our nature and also in the created rights of property, will at once induce us to extend the analogy to all that class of circumstances which are affected by similar feelings, and which stand in relation to foreign rather than domestic events: for there is no difference, we submit, in the passions of the individuals thus outraged, whatever difference there may be in their political relations, as native or foreign and if, therefore, we can believe that the insult offered to his child by a tax-collector first roused Wat Tyler to rebellion against his sovereign, there is surely no wisdom in discrediting, as many writers have done, that the outrage offered to his daughter by a monarch leagued Count