ater policy of Pitt. Then came the Congress of Vienna, and the
deliberate attempt to reconstruct the map of continental Europe, and to
decree the destinies of nations according to the despotic principles of
the Holy Alliance.

Canning soon recognized the fact, obvious enough, one might have thought,
even to a man of intellect far lower than that of Canning, that the
traditions, the instincts, and the feelings of a people must count for
something in the form and manner of their government, and that there are
forces at work in the hearts and minds of peoples which can no more be
governed by imperial and royal decrees than can the forces of physical
nature itself. He {39} had unconsciously anticipated in his own mind
that doctrine of nationalities which afterwards came to play so momentous
and so clearly recognized a part in the politics of the world. He saw
how the policy of Castlereagh had made England the recognized ally of all
the old-world theories of divine right and unconditional loyalty, and had
made her a fellow-worker with the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance for the
restoration of tyranny all over the European continent. He understood
the nature and the meaning of the new forces which were coming up in
political life; he saw that the French Revolution was not destined to end
in the mere restoration of mediaeval despotism. He saw that the American
Revolution had opened a new chapter in the history of the modern world,
and that no man, whether he called himself Tory or Whig, was fit to be
intrusted with the administration of England's foreign policy who had not
learned the lessons taught by the closing years of the eighteenth and the
opening years of the nineteenth century. Canning had much of that
imaginative faculty without which there can hardly be any real
statesmanship. Even his gift of humor helped him in this way. He was
able to understand the feelings, the tempers, and the conditions of men
with whom he had little opportunity of personal contact. He could bring
himself into sympathy with the aspirations of peoples who were wholly
foreign in race to him, and who would have been mere foreigners and
nothing else in the eyes of many of his political colleagues.

If Lord Londonderry had lived and had continued, as no doubt he would
have done, to hold the Foreign Office, he would have been England's
representative at the Congress of Verona. The new chances opened by his
death inspired that demand for th