ion and a mystical vein of sheer
undiluted idealism. Probably it would be true to say that he began by
being an idealist, and was forced by the pressure of events to adopt
reactionary tactics. Perhaps also, deeply embedded in the Russian nature
we generally find a certain unpracticalness and a tendency to mystical
dreams, far remote from the ordinary necessities of every day. It was
Alexander's dream to found a Union of Europe, and to consecrate its
political by its spiritual aims. He retained various nebulous thinkers
around his throne; he also derived much of his crusade from the
inspiration of a woman--Baroness von Kruedener, who is supposed to have
owed her own conversion to the teaching of a pious cobbler. Even if we
have to describe Alexander's dream as futile, we cannot afford to dismiss
it as wholly inoperative. For it had as its fruit the so-called Holy
Alliance, which was in a sense the direct ancestor of the peace programmes
of the Hague, and, through a different chain of ideas, the Monroe Doctrine
of the United States. We are apt sometimes to confuse the Holy Alliance
with the Grand Alliance. The second, however, was a union of the four
Great Powers, to which France was ultimately admitted. The first was not
an alliance at all, hardly, perhaps, even a treaty. It was in its original
conception a single-hearted attempt to arrange Europe on the principles of
the Christian religion, the various nations being regarded as brothers who
ought to have proper brotherly affection for one another. We know that,
eventually, the Holy Alliance became an instrument of something like
autocratic despotism, but in its essence it was so far from being
reactionary that, according to the Emperor Alexander, it involved the
grant of liberal constitutions by princes to their subjects.

DIPLOMATIC CRITICISM

But just because it bound its signatories to act on certain vague
principles for no well-defined ends, it was bound to become the mockery
of diplomatists trained in an older school. Metternich, for instance,
called it a "loud sounding nothing"; Castlereagh "a piece of sublime
mysticism and nonsense," while Canning declared that for his part he
wanted no more of "Areopagus and the like of that." What happened on this
occasion is what ordinarily happens with well-intentioned idealists who
happen also to be amateur statesmen. Trying to regulate practical
politics, the Holy Alliance was deflected from its original purpose
because