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Leader (1850-1860), 22nd March 1856, Edition 1 of 2, Page 275, Untitled Article

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    • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

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      Untitled Article

      ! " NOTICES TO CORRESPONBENTS , No f tofcice can be taken of anonymous communications Whatever is intended for insertion must be authenticated by" the name and address of the writer ; not necessarily fot- publication but as a . guarantee of his good faith . It ia impossible to acknowledge the mass of letters we receive . Thfirinscrtiou is ofteji delayed , owtngtoa press pf ^ natter ; and > vhen omitted , it is frequently from reasons quite independent of the merits of the communication . "We cannot undertake to return rejected communications . During the Session of Parliament it is . often impossible to find room lor correspondence , even the briefest .

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      THE LATEST AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC PAPERS . The correspondence between the Governments of the United States and Great Britain on the recruitment q \ iestion , which has been officially published in America , is in our hands . The correspondence on the subject of Central America has also been received , and we are ia a position to judge of the actual state of the

      relations of the two countries . Thanks to the share which the public has now been enabled to take in these questions , the relations grow more favourable . It is quite too late ia the day to render it necessary for us to resume the whole of these papers ; the less since they do not come up to the present date , and we are not necessarily limited I o the space of time which they oover . We shall , therefore , deal entirely with the main results .

      The recruitment question itself may now be considered completely obsolete . It has descended entirely to a personality ; and we think that the relative position of perwons can , be distinctly assigned . The Americans complain that we had , by our agents , broken the express statute law of the United States . Lord Clarendon replies by arguments intended to show that , although in old countries " civitas career es £ "—that ; is , the citizen 5 a bound to the town by the customs and

      obligations of citizenship , as if the town were a pi'ison—yet in freo countries u civitas career non est" —the citizen is freo , and may enlist in the armies of Great Britain , if it so please him For there is no demagogue will go so far ai your British peer when he is on Yankee land and is in opposition to tlie administration fo : the time being . No barn-burner can oufcrui Lord Clarendon in his argument against cen traliaed authority . The argument , howeve : matters little . The British Government hs given up the legal point , tind the question hs

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      tune , or even hope , played before their ianc ^ the prizes of the most vulgar lust , and , by means which it Is not for us to recur to in detail , attained an unparalleled success . Suddenly , when that success appears complete , English journalism , which affects to hold sacred th « principles of legality , and still more saored the debts of "honour , " transfigures the usurpation into a conquest , and speaks of the ' * vast acquisitions " of Napoleon the Third , —acquisitions including the spoliation of the Orleans family , the results of stupendous jobbery at the Bourse , the seizure of the entire revenues of France

      . After this , the people of France may well doubt wt ether they belong to themselves , or the Bonaparte family . Are they a nation , are they an " acquisition ? " And the peop of England may well find their ideas of ri gh and wrong confused , and hesitate whether to esteem Washington as a patriot , or to despise him as " unsuccessful . " Had he " acquired " the United States of America , grasped the sceptre before it was offered to him , abolished the central and local legislatures , sent the chiefs of the War of Independence to pestilential

      coloifranee in the night , when the nation was enervated , and had lost for a time its senses and its dignity . Since the first Revolution we have not seen , in that country , an eclipse of eighteen years . Were the throne to become vacant to-morrow , the actual occupants of the Tuileries must vanish like fantoccini ^ and the Infant of [ France would remain to be educated as a Pretender , perhaps to yriginate , at a

      future day , new conflicts and miseries among his countrymen . He is aot born with brighter omens than that King of Rome who came into a world of purpie , who was received by the people as though he had been , the Dauphin of the Bourbons , who was saluted by cannon , bonfires , imperial panem et circenses and whose birth exasperated the animosity of the royalists and strengthened the confederacy of the republicans .

      The offer of a political amnesty has been elicited by " the universal congratulation , and joy ; " that is to say , the Empire implores the adhesion of those good citizens who defended the laws and institutions of France , and who , for their attachment to legality , were transported or immured . Hoav many of the eighteen hundred survivors of Algeria and Cayenne does Napoleon expect to win by this act of conditional grace ? It is but one form of the official fanfaronade that now

      overwhelms the political existence of France . Surely it is cynicism or irony to review these manifestations in the Momteur , and to pronounce them , " to all appearance , sin-cere . " Let us he just to all men . As a governor , Napoleon the Third lias displayed intelligence and vigour ; but to speak of his sincerity , of his protestations , is to recall the oaths of the Presidentship , gratuitously repeated , and ratified by solemn appeals in the presence of God and man .

      THE " CHILD OF FRANCE . " We must all , as men , sympathise with , the hopes and affections of a woman enduring the sufferings that make her a mother . But what felicitations can we offer to Eugenie , Empress of the French ? Another Pretender is born to France ; another Napoleon ; another Discord . The ritual of usurpation , ordained b y the first Empire , is copied by the second . 1856 is the reflex of 1811 . From the Grand Chamberlain ' s

      programme of official joy , to the non-official report in the Moniteur of festivities and congratulation s , Napoleon the Third borrows the forms , the illustrations , the words that were employed to inaugurate tlie cradle-career of the Second . Names and dates being changed , Paris has lived over again , exactly the week of ceremonial lustre that marked the birth of the King of Rome . Napoleon , fourth of the name , is given to the French as their Emperor , and is proclaimed " The Child of France . "

      Whereupon , the response of the leading journal in England is , that the child of the Coup d \ Etat has a better right to the throne of France than any other Frenchman ? What right ? The right to a Crown is acquired by hereditary descent , or by election . If Napoleon the Third reigns , as the elect of France , France lias not elected his baby . The nation that gives may take away j it cannot confiscate its own sovereignty ; still less can this generation renounce the ri ghts of posterity . But , if the new Napoleon is to inherit the Empire

      , under the principle of hereditary succession , there exists a line of princes with claims prior to his , paramount to his , and these are the branches of the Boukbon monarchy . Unless respectable conservatism in England has been seized with a revolutionary infection , it must be blind indeed to write against the very principle of hereditary government , against all vested titles , all prerogative and prescription . The sycophants of the French empire do not know on what grounds to congratulate France , or to flatter the new child of the Tuileries .

      They would be frank if they oonfessed that , Napoleon the Third being Emperor , powerful , triumphant , irresistible , tliey flatter him , as they would flatter Washington , if a Washington could be in that position . It is not his character they regard , but his success . They would salute , with the same praises , a worse or a bettor man . Louis NarousoN , grasping the sceptre , was the avatar of the party of Desperation . Himself a bankrupt , when by leave of the Republic , whose laws he outraged , he set foot on the epil of Franco , ho gathered to his cause a band of adventurers , without position , character ,

      formes , ruled by decrees under the pretorian asgis , and given a " Child" to America , would his have been a household name in England , would lie have been our admiration , our example ? But he would have been a Success , and what more , or better , is Napoleon " the Thlrd ? Or , if Warrest Hastings had constituted himself , by force , the heir of the Great Mogul , which the English Government could , not easily have prevented , would not the * purple of Delhi adorning the splendid crime have changed it into a virtue ?

      It is our calamity that we no longer approve ot blame by any standard of right j we observe no distinction between good faith and ' perjury , usurpation and justice . This is a hard saying , which must be said ; but it is not said by us from any desire to turn the late event in Paris into an occasion for raillery or personal rancour . Our readers know as well as we that things have come to this result . We have seen a political robbery in France , and we hear it called an " acrmisit . ion ; '" wp spp f . Tio we hear at called an " acquisition" we see the

      ; hereditary and the elective principle ignored b y a government of bayonets , and we are told that the usurper transmits a right superior to that of all other Frenchmen . If we could believe the God of tkistice to be the regulator of human success , there would indeed be a chaos , and all moral and Christian laws would be figments when weighed against the results of a midnight fusillade . V < R Victis . No other maxim -would be safe .

      It must be satisfactory to the self-respect of all intelligent Frenchmen to know that beyond the blind excitement of the populace , and the salaried servility of the Chambers , much of this adulation is not current in France . Nor is it wholl y inexcusable in England . Through the humiliating rhapsodies of the press , and the haze of public opinion , run . s the radical

      lallacy of the . Alliance . Napoleon is Francein the sight of the English people . But in the sight of history , Napoleon is not France , for if a country be represented by any men or set of men , it is by its wisest and best , and the best and wisest of France are in eternal and ineradicable hostility to the regime of the Coup d'Etat ,

      But , with eighteen years between us und the possible accession to the French throne of a fourth Napoleon , it would be absurd to exaggerate the importance of the birth that happened last Sunday at the Tuileries . Legitimacy was absent , the elective principle w « s absent , the principle of power was only present in the person of the Empiskok , who , again , is only powerful because he oame upon

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      Maw »> £ tfrgft ' j fft ^ E LEA ® IE , 275

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      SATUKDAT , MARCH 22 , 1856 .

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      Ifahlic Maim

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      There is nothing so revolutionary , because there is nothing so unnatural and convxusive , as the strain to keep things fixed when all the world ia by the very law of its creation in eternal progress . — -Da . Aenou > .

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), March 22, 1856, page 275, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2133/page/11/