wrote, "Our influence, if it is to be maintained abroad,
must be secure in its sources of strength at home: and the sources of
that strength are in the sympathy between the people and the government;
in the union of the public sentiment with the public counsels; in the
reciprocal confidence of the House of Commons and the crown."[2]

It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that Canning was wholly
right and Metternich wholly wrong. The conditions of the Habsburg
monarchy were not those of Great Britain,[3] and even if it had been
possible to speak of a public opinion in the Austrian empire at all, it
certainly possessed no such organ as the British parliament. But the
argument may be carried yet further. In the abstract the success of the
policy of a minister in a democratic state must ultimately rest upon the
support of public opinion; yet the necessity for this support has in the
conduct of foreign affairs its peculiar dangers. In the difficult game
of diplomacy a certain reticence is always necessary. Secret sources of
information would be dried up were they to be lightly revealed; a plain
exposition of policy would often give an undue advantage to the other
party to a negotiation. Thus, even in Great Britain, the diplomatic
correspondence laid before parliament is carefully edited, and all
governments are jealous of granting access to their modern archives. Yet
a representative assembly is apt to be resentful of such reservations.
Its members know little or nothing of the conditions under which foreign
affairs are conducted, and they are not unnaturally irritated by
explanations which seem to lack candour or completeness. Canning himself
had experience of this in the affair of the capture of the Danish fleet
at Copenhagen; and Castlereagh's diplomacy was hampered by the bitter
attacks of an opposition which accused him, with little justice, of
pursuing a policy which he dared not reveal in its full scope to
parliament. Moreover, the appeal to public opinion may be used as a
diplomatic weapon for ends no less "selfish" than any aimed at by the
old diplomacy. Bismarck, whose statesmanship was at least as cynical as
that of Metternich, was a master of the art of taking the world into his
confidence--when it suited him to do so; and the "reptile press," hired
to give a seemingly independent support to his policy, was one of his
most potent weapons. So far the only necessary consequence of the growth
of the power o