Lord Salisbury's Essays
Before he became the Marquess of Salisbury (inheriting from his father), he was Lord Robert Cecil, and then Viscount Cranborne. Under the first name, long before he became Prime Minister, he wrote essays on politics, primarily in the Quarterly Review.
In 1905, two collections of his essays were published: Essays by the late Marquess of Salisbury K.G.: Biographical; and Essays by late Marquess of Salisbury K.G.: Foreign Politics. These are probably his best essays.
Then there is the collection from 1972 I already cited: Lord Salisbury on Politics.
I managed to find the 1905 "Biographical" collection at the U of T library. There are only two lives: Castlereagh and Pitt; but there are two long essays on Pitt.
Both Castlereagh and Pitt were known to many as Tories, and even reactionaries; this was a description with which Salisbury was pretty comfortable for most of his life. But he also was very intelligent, and argued for an intelligent approach to politics--not fighting battles that are over, giving ground when necessary, and not only when under attack. To some extent, in writing about people from more than 50 years earlier, he is trying to correct the views of Whig/Liberal historians, especially Macaulay. Salisbury argues that there was no consistency in Whig views over these years; their sympathy for the French Revolution, and then for Napoleon, was sporadic, and led primarily to embarrassing interventions in foreign policy. They became the party that led the way on free trade and extending the franchise, yet when Pitt led the way on these issues, he was attacked by the Whigs of the day.
Castlereagh was Foreign Minister during the end of, and the aftermath to, the Napoleonic Wars. The greatest event in which he took a direct part was the Congress of Vienna in 1814. The goal of the Congress was to re-make Europe as much as possible the way it was before Napoleon's conquests. This was largely successful, and Salisbury stresses that an unusually long peace was the result. Castlereagh worked closely with, and often praised in public, some autocratic or pre-modern regimes. Was he himself a reactionary, on the wrong side of history?
"The energies of a whole school of political writers were devoted to the task of persuading his countrymen that he was the English representative of the Holy Alliance, and an accomplice in every freak of tyranny that was perpetuated from Warsaw to Cadiz."
Did Castlereagh and the men he worked with treat the peoples of Europe like "herds of cattle," ignoring the national aspirations of various peoples who were forced back into the old empires? According to Salisbury, it was essential for Castlereagh to make promises in order to keep the Coalition together during the war: the "strategy" of the allies was its "weakest" part; diplomacy was its "strongest." Afterward, besides the obligation to keep one's word, it was still essential to give the key players what they wanted in order to build a peace that would last.
Here Salisbury has some fun. Who were the nationalities who were to be liberated in 1814? In a few years, they were forgotten, and a whole new cast of characters were now constantly discussed--whose aspirations where usually in direct competition with those of the old groups. Salisbury says this makes the "conservative" point that nationalism, even at best, simply does not provide a guide for action. Is a national group truly ready to act on its own? If it does, is it able to defend itselfk, or does it simply become an attractive prey to a neighbour? Does its political independence make war less likely, or more?
Freedom means at least partly peace and security, the opposite of war. Napolean promised freedom, but kept on delivering more and more war, with wholesale confiscation of property, and martial law.
Castlereagh didn't have the knack or the inclination to deliver any high-flown oratory about any of this. Maybe the stuff that's most relevant to the present day: "...the clever world is very intolerant of plain, practical statesmen. It maintains, sometimes with very good reason, that where the imagination is stunted, it is merely because the whole mind is stunted too; and that the claim to practical common sense is often only a euphemism for a narrow intelligence straitened by an abject regard for precedents and for routine."
Ordinary people, on the other hand, supposedly tend to distrust clever or brilliant people.
Bush was seen as a plodder before 9/11--there may have been indications of a kind of ideological attack on the income tax, very much a 19th century issue, but otherwise there was a lot of attachment to precedent and routine. Since 9/11, however, he seems to be the dreamer who is leading the people on a largely uncharted course.
With Pitt, who presided as Prime Minister over the beginning of the Napoleonic war, the controversy is mainly about the crackdown on domestic security, including the suspension of habeas corpus. Salisbury has fun pointing out that the United States, the great democracy, has gone much farther in repression during the Civil War. He admits that by definition one can never say in hindsight that a government, if it succeeded in keeping down insurrection, went too far or not. He points out that Whigs in the 19th century did many of the same things in Ireland that Pitt did. And he says there was good evidence, some of which remained secret, that there really were plots brewing in England to support Napoleon.
I notice that Cass Sunstein has actually said the Bush Administration has been quite restrained when it comes to domestic security, compared to the Administration during any previous major war.
If you get a chance to read any of this, the essay on "The House of Commons" in the 1972 book has a very funny description of the actual working of that ancient institution.
UPDATE: I guess I'm interested in people who applied great intelligence to being fundamentally cautious. Bush seems to be applying not so great intelligence to being not so cautious. The "liberal" critique of the Congress of Vienna can still be seen and heard--even the charge that propping up the old monarchies helped bring about World War I a hundred years later.
Salisbury points out instead that after the Congress, the great powers in Europe were at peace (with each other) for 40 years: "Europe has not enjoyed so long a repose from the curse of war since the fall of the Roman Empire."
Of course, Britain wanted to preserve a stable status quo in Europe, in which everyone was hesitant to take bold action, because Britain already had the biggest empire going around the world, and didn't want to share with other Europeans. To his credit, Salisbury never or almost never argued that the traditions he was defending as a practical matter were actually sacred, or even better than some new alternative. It was more that the attempt to change was risky, and might do more harm than good. He argued that Britain shouldn't lecture about big countries subduing weak ones, or minorities: "England...owns, without any consent of the peoples whatever, more nationalities than she can comfortably count."
Finally (for now): I'm interested in the argument that after World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire should have been rescued yet again. The loss of a centralizing power in central and eastern Europe helped the Bolsheviks take over Russian, and then threaten their neighbours. Taking out the German royal family may have helped bring about Hitler. The intervention of the U.S., exactly when Wilson chose to intervene, led directly to the decision of German and Austrian officers to transport Lenin to Russia.
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