Essays Political Social and Religious Author:Richard Congreve Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WEST. REPRINTED FROM ' INTERNATIONAL POLICY,' PUBLISHED IN l866. The decline of the power of Catholicism, and the consequent disunion of mediaeval Euro... more »pe, were first evidenced by disorder in the international relations of its several constituent States. It is in the same international relations that the restoration of order must begin, as the first step to the reorganization of modern Europe on a sound basis; to the reconstitu- tion of a new union analogous to, not identical with, that offered by Catholicism. This is shortly the ground on which the present work rests for its justification in dealing with the largest questions of human policy. The right settlement of these questions is the indispensable condition of all the more special ones which press for solution. The instinctive sense that this condition is indispensable is nowhere seen more clearly than in the language of those who would wholly renounce any attempt at its fulfilment. It is loudly urged by the partisans of the doctrine of non-intervention, at present in the ascendent, that we should, in our own interest, abstain from any handling of such matters. We should thus be free to turn our attention to what more immediately concerns ourselves. This is a settlement of its kind— unsound in principle and not possible in practice ; still a settlement, and betraying the consciousness that the internal order which its advocates aim at depends primarily on the order without. Rejecting their conclusion, we may accept as valuable their agreement. We are told that we are incompetent; that human intelligence must abandon as hopelessly beyond its capacity the direction of the affairs of the world. In the conviction that such a view is at once erroneous and noxious— erroneous in its estimate of man's capacity ; noxio...« less