A re-enactment of the Battle of Olszynka Grochowska, on February 25th 1831. It followed the November Uprising of 1830, an ill-fated attempt to throw off colonial rule under Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, and was fought in the woods near Grochów just to the east of Warsaw – a victory on the day for the Poles, but they did not pursue their advantage. Russia feared the spread through Poland of western European politics, religion and society, which was understandable given Napoleon’s brief capture of Moscow in 1812, and the litter of broken countries he had left in his wake.
Part 1 of 2
IF it were the province of Great Britain to administer justice to all the people of the earth — in other words, if God had given us, as a nation, the authority and the power, together with the wisdom and the goodness, sufficient to qualify us to deal forth His vengeance, then should we be called upon in this case to rescue the weak from the hands of their spoilers.
But do we possess these favoured endowments? Are we armed with the powers of Omnipotence: or, on the contrary, can we discover another people rising into strength with a rapidity that threatens inevitably to overshadow us? Again, do we find ourselves to possess the virtue and the wisdom essential to the possession of supreme power; or, on the other hand, have we not at our side, in the wrongs of a portion of our own people, a proof that we can justly lay claim to neither?* [...]
Two wrongs are likely to have been in Cobden’s mind. A cost of living crisis caused by the Government’s economic policies at home and abroad was causing severe hardship for low income families, especially in industrial towns such as Cobden’s Manchester; Cobden’s tireless and ultimately successful campaign for The Repeal of the Corn Laws established his reputation as one of the country’s most eminent Liberals. And in Part II of England, Ireland and America (1835), Cobden stated plainly that London’s treatment of Ireland ‘presented a grosser spectacle of moral and physical debasement than is to be met with in the whole civilised world’, and that it would have drawn forth a humanitarian intervention from us had any other European nation treated one of its subject peoples so.
Précis
Writing in the mid 1830s, Richard Cobden stepped into the debate over Russia’s recent annexation of Congress Poland, saying that the business of meting out justice by humanitarian interventions was all very well, but it required a degree of wisdom and power which might be found in Heaven, but judging by our politicians’ domestic record, definitely not in Westminster. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Congress of Vienna in 1815, a coloured engraving of a painting by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1767–1855). It was here at the Congress that the trouble started: European powers released from Napoleon’s grip gathered at Vienna to divide up his short-lived French Empire with contemptuous disregard for peoples and traditions, thinking only of the rights and interests of governments. Sir Sidney Low believed that mistakes made at this Congress contributed significantly to the Great War in 1914-18: see Bungling Tinkers!. Unfortunately, none of the countries that meddled so disastrously at that Congress ever doubted their own wisdom or right to meddle thereafter.
WE shall here be encountered with a very general prepossession in favour of our maintaining what is termed a rank amongst the states of the Continent — which means, not that we should be free from debt, or that our nation should be an example to all others for the wealth, education, and virtues of its people, but that England shall be consulted before any other countries presume to quarrel or fight; and that she shall be ready, and shall be called upon, to take a part in every contention, either as mediator, second, or principal.
If we go back through the Parliamentary debates of the last few reigns, we shall find this singular feature in our national character — the passion for meddling with the affairs of foreigners — more strikingly prominent in every succeeding session. Our history during the last century may be called the tragedy of ‘British intervention in the politics of Europe’.
Précis
In another pamphlet written shortly afterwards, Cobden addressed those who saw in military interventions a way to maintain Britain’s global profile. A country may earn respect by doing justice at home, he said; but Victorian Britain would not be remembered fondly for appointing herself as judge, jury and executioner for the wrongs of other nations. (55 / 60 words)
