, they
thus acquired protection against Moslem fanaticism.

In this way arose the system of Consular Protection which was long a
boon to Jews in the Ottoman Empire and in the Barbary States.[6]

In spite of these experiences the idea of diplomatic intervention for
the promotion of religious toleration in foreign States, especially on
behalf of non-Christians, has only prevailed within narrow limits. It
has been largely circumvented by the fact that such interventions must,
even with the best will in the world, be more or less conditioned by the
_raison d'etat_. Unless they are likely to promote policy, or at any
rate to coincide with policy, the usual course when they are invoked is
to take refuge in the so-called principle of non-intervention.

It was, indeed, not until the seventeenth century that the question was
seriously discussed at all by the jurists, although Cromwell had already
laid down the splendid principle, in the case of the persecution of the
Vaudois, that "to be indifferent to such things is a great sin, and a
deeper sin still is it to be blind to them from policy or ambition." The
first impulses of the international lawyers were much in the Cromwellian
spirit. Bacon, Grotius, and Puffendorff all strongly maintained the
legality not only of diplomatic but also of armed intervention to put
down tyranny or misgovernment in a neighbouring State, and a century
later they were followed by Vattel. Sweden acted upon the principle in
her intervention on behalf of the Protestants of Poland in 1707, and, in
1792, it was given its widest scope, and was formally adopted, by the
French Revolution in the famous decree of the Convention which promised
"fraternity and succour to all peoples who wish to recover their
liberty."

The doctrine, however, lingered only anaemically through the early
decades of the nineteenth century. In face of the growing delicacy of
the international system, it was gradually abandoned for the
conservative principle of non-intervention, based on the independence
and equality of all States.[7] But even this principle has not always
been observed in regard to small States, although, curiously enough,
Russia invoked it against Great Britain for the protection of King
"Bomba" of Sicily, in the case of the Neapolitan prison horrors.[8]
Abstention from intervention in certain glaring cases of inhumanity by
foreign Governments--such as the persecution of the Russian Jews--has
been defended on t