[7] See The Confederation of Europe, by Walter Alison Phillips (Longmans), esp.  Chapters V and VI.  Cf. also Political and Literary Essays, by the Earl of Cromer, 2nd series (Macmillan), on The Confederation of Europe.

THE HOLY ALLIANCE

The figure of Alexander I dominates this epoch.  His character exhibits a very curious mixture of autocratic ambition 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 its chief author,