G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

That England and Italy should be on friendly terms is essential for the peace of the Mediterranean and of Africa. It is also essential for the peace of Europe, and therefore, in all probability, for the prosperity and independence of both countries. An ideological war between the great Powers of Europe would destroy all that is left of good in our civilization. Italy and England can cooperate to avert that catastrophe. Such cooperation involves no disloyalty on Italy's part to her German partner, nor on ours to France. There is a common European interest—peace. I feel deeply grateful to Mr. Chamberlain for his cheerful courage in taking a definite step towards reconciliation, in face of great difficulties in the path.

Dictatorship and democracy must live side by side in peace, or civilization is doomed. For this end I believe Englishmen would do well to remember that the Nazi form of government is in large measure the outcome of Allied and British injustice at Versailles in 1919.

As regards "predominance in Europe," whether "Germany wished" it or not, she would have got it, if she had once more overrun France. And she would have overrun France as well as Belgium if England had not intervened. Then there would have been an end of the independence of all Continental States in face of Germany, and in face of such a Europe British independence could not have been maintained. German predominance would have been just as fatal to us whether it had been intentionally or unintentionally acquired. Such at least was Grey's view, and it will always be the view of many Englishmen.

Instead of a little power, occasionally exercised at the expense of great unpopularity, the Monarch, by retiring from politics, acquired an immense popularity outside, and retained important influence behind the scenes. The new popularity of the Monarch was proved at the Jubilees of Victoria and of George V. The new English Democracy is in love with the Crown. Radicalism, founded by Tom Paine in the days of George III, had had strong Republican tendencies, but they had withered away as the Crown retired from politics. The modern Labour Party has no quarrel with the English Monarchy. The symbolic importance of the Monarch has greatly increased even in our own day. The Crown is the one symbol that all classes and parties can without reservation accept.

The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was indeed the one large measure of reform that became law between the French Revolution and Castlereagh's death in 1822. It is greatly to the credit of our ancestors that England, in her death-grip with Napoleon, should have given time and thought to do justice to the negro. It was a fine use to make of the sea power that Nelson bequeathed us for the duration of the war. And, at the return of peace, the world-wide influence that Trafalgar and Waterloo gave to England's representatives was used by Castlereagh and Wellington, in consultation with Wilberforce, to further the suppression of slave trading under every flag.

Linguistic ignorance and racial isolation are our greatest national dangers in the new era opened out by the War. We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would. Yet we are untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them. Foreign policy is merely an outcome of our other international relations, and can only give official expression to our national ignorance or our national understanding of other races. The League of Nations is not a substitute for mutual understanding; rather it assumes that such understanding exists, and if that cannot soon be brought into existence, the League will fail, and with it the hopes of mankind.

In our own day classics have been dethroned without being replaced. But throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our statesmen were so brought up that they thought of Rome as the hearth of their political civilization, where their predecessor Cicero had denounced Catiline; where the models of their own eloquence and statecraft, as taught them at Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had been practised and brought to perfection. And, therefore, the ruins of the Forum were as familiar, as sacred, and as moving to Russell and to Gladstone as to Mazzini and Garibaldi themselves. This was a prime fact in the history of the Risorgimento.

It is perhaps in the sphere of political institutions that the English have been most original in their native invention, from the time of Magna Charta downwards, or even from the time of William the Conqueror. Certainly it is in politics that the world at large has borrowed most from us; for our literature, though as great as the Greek or Latin, has had relatively little influence outside the English-speaking nations. In politics modern Italy, under Cavour, went to school in England, borrowing thence her constitutional monarchy and parliament. Yet even in the realm of political ideas, where we have taught more than we learned, how much we owed to Ancient Rome! The Conservative idea of respect for law and of the sovereign regal power was throughout our history sanctioned by the glamour of classical association hanging round the words Lex, Rex, Imperator. Our Plantagenet and our Tudor foundations were built on the Roman model. And no less in the realm of Liberal thought, the ideal of Roman Republican virtue, perpetuated in Livy, Plutarch, and Tacitus, did as much to inspire Milton, Sidney, and the opponents of the Stuarts as the Old Testament itself.

The occupation of Tripoli appears to rest on the same basis as the occupation of other parts of North Africa by other European Powers—viz., on the law of force. Some of us wish, for the sake of our friends the Italians, that the Italian State had continued to rest on the stronger, nobler, and more economical basis of a free national union of a single race. But the Italians may know their own affairs best, and in any case we are in no position to scold them for imitating ourselves.

The discredit to the good name of England if she drifts, however unintentionally, into a partition of the Persian State with the Russian Government, and the consequent setback to the moral element in our foreign policy, cannot lightly be faced.