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XLIX.—­RUSSIA AND THE BALANCE OF POWER.

[Syracuse.]

At Syracuse, in New York State, Kossuth was received with an address of the usual cordiality by the ex-Mayor, Harvey Baldwin.  Of his ample reply a portion may here be presented to the reader.  After alluding to Dionysius and Timoleon, he came back to the subject of Russian interference in Hungary, and declared that he would not appeal to their passions, but to their calm reason, although he approved of excitement in a good cause, and at any rate trusted that Truth and Hope would never be out of fashion at Syracuse.  He continued:—­

Gentlemen, as the destination of laws in a well-regulated community is to uphold right, justice, and security of every individual, rich or poor, powerful or weak, and to protect his life against violence and his property against the encroachments of fraud and crime—­so the destination of the laws of nations is to secure the independence even of the smallest States, from the encroachments of the most powerful ones.  Force will prevail instead of right, so long as all independent nations do not unite for the maintenance of those laws upon which the security of all nations rests.

I say all nations, because weakness is always comparative, not absolute.  A combination of several leagued powers can reduce to the condition of comparative weakness even the strongest power on earth.  Without the law of nations there is therefore no security for nations.  But the European powers have long ago substituted for the rule of justice the so-called balancing system—­that is to say, the political balance of power among nations.  That system is iniquitous, for it is founded, not upon the national right even of the smallest nation to be maintained in its independence, but upon the natural jealousy of the great powers.  With this system the independence of the smallest States is not sure by right and by law, but only depends on the consideration that the absorption of such smaller States might aggrandize one of the great powers too much.  In this system humanity is taken for nothing—­the mutual jealousy of the powerful is all, and the implicit guarantee for the security of the weaker ceases, wherever the powerful can devise a plan of spoliation which leaves the relative forces of the spoliators the same as before.  It is thus the world has seen the partition of Poland—­that most iniquitous—­most guilty spoliation ever witnessed.

The balancing system would have protected Poland from absorption by one power, but it has not protected it from partition between these rival powers.  Formerly, separate leagues between several States have been as a protecting barrier against the ambition of a single powerful oppressor.  In the case of Poland, the world saw with consternation a confederacy of great powers formed to perpetrate those very acts