eign rescripts, the phrase, "Italy free to the Alps and the Adriatic," is simply a manière de dire, a Pickwickian expression, which, interpreted by the light of the famous pamphlet, "The Emperor Napoleon III. and Italy," notoriously an efflux of imperial inspiration, means "the Mincio for a frontier, and an Italian confederation animated by the Papacy, and administered and controlled by Austria." If then Sardinia, and Venetia, and Lombardy, and Tuscany, and Romagna, are disappointed at the result, they have only to blame their own dulness of apprehension for not comprehending the true sense of engagements, which, to those who had duly studied the oracular pamphlet, was so plain that he who runs might read. This is, however, not the interpretation which the Emperor himself, just now, puts on his own words, though it may answer as a reserve to fall back upon hereafter, in case of emergency. But in the midst of all this uncertainty of the present and the future, there are some very prominent facts, in the near and in the distant past, to which it is important to draw the attention of our readers. One of the most striking and significant circumstances connected with the recent peace is, that the two Emperors ascribe their common failure in carrying out, to the letter, their respective programmes, the one, of "conquest and annexation, to the Var," the other, of "the expulsion of the house of Hapsburg from Italy," — to one cause, the treachery of their "allies," both meaning the same allies, namely England and Prussia. Whether the concord between the jeremiades of the two Majesties, the apostolic and the unanointed, proves them to be separate parts of a well-concerted composition, or whether the sovereigns in their concluding voluntaries have accidentally run into the same set of harmonics, is at present doubtful; but the coincidence between the imperial manifestos is rather ominous, and certainly lends some countenance to the suspicion of a private understanding between the autocrats, in virtue of which perfidious Albion and tardy Prussia may be called to account for their delinquencies, Russia benevolently standing by, to see fair play and help the strongest. What is not less remarkable is the fact that both the com plainants are quite in the right, for both have been deserted by those who ought to have been, or who pretended to be, their allies. When Napoleon proclaimed the principle of national independence and self-government as the foundation of European general polity, and offered to take upon himself the responsibility of establishing it, and at the same time of extirpating the foul incubus which has, for centuries, so heavily oppressed the liberties of the Continent, the secular power of the Papacy, he had a right to demand that Protestant and progressive England and Prussia should aid him with at least their moral influence, as promptly and as cordially as did either of them in his usurpation of the French throne. He had, we repeat, the right to demand this of powers, whose refusal to afford such countenance would be a base betrayal of the principles which lie at the root of all that is great and all that is excellent in the history of either. And England, at least, independently of any obligations implied in her present relations with France, had been long committed, by the nearly unanimous voice of her people and the authoritative declarations of her Ministry, to the principle of the surrender of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom by Austria, and the independence of the Italian states. On the other hand, the expectations of Austria had as wellgrounded, if not as just, a foundation. England and Prussia were parties to the iniquitous arrangement of 1815, by which Lombardy and Venice, after the Emperor Francis and his generals had disarmed their hostility by promising them liberty and independence, were subjected to the hated Austrian yoke; they had both tacitly assented to the treaties, nominally secret, but well known to every diplomatist, by which Austria had secured to herself ultimate accession to the sovereignty of several of the lesser Italian duchies, and had bound the king of Naples to the perpetual maintenance of the detestable tyranny which has so long trodden in the dust the people of the Two Sicilies; they had formally and officially approved the forcible overthrow of the Roman Republic in 1849, and the restoration of the treacherous and malignant pontiff, who was first to set the ball of revolution in motion, by affecting to favor the principles of liberal government, and the first to sacrifice those who had been deceived by his professions; and they had acquiesced in the Austrian occupation of Romagna, with all its murderous cruelties, as well. as in the garrisoning of the fortresses of Tuscany by Austrian myrmidons, for the entire period which has elapsed since the disastrous events of 1849. Such was the joint position of England and Prussia with respect to the Austrian empire and its tyrannical and aggressive policy. And what were their individual relations with that power? England, though committed to the principle of Italian independence, had limited her action to an expression of the opinion, that Austria could not quietly and peaceably maintain possession of Northern Italy; and whenever any question of the right of Austria to do wrong has assumed a practical shape, England has always ranged herself on the side of the oppressor. Nay, she has uniformly treated Austria, in the direct relations between them, with the most humiliating, grovelling deference. Her post-office, when required, has served as a bureau d'espionnage for the Austrian political inquisition. British subjects have often been wantonly insulted, beaten, imprisoned, by the petty authorities of Austria, both in her own legal territory and in provinces "protected" by her, without even a demand for redress on the part of their own government; and in the Mather case it was finally settled, after much negotiation, that if an Austrian official prefers the more summary course of cutting down in a public street an Englishman who ventures to wear an unsized hat, or to walk out without a taxed cigar in his mouth, the weregild shall be a thousand francesconi, which, considering the difference in the value of money, is about the price of a Saxon churl in the glorious days of the Danish dynasty in England. And, finally, when in the Crimean war France wished to compel that selfish and unprincipled power to aid the Allies in the contest undertaken by them for the common defence of Europe, and less for that of Turkey than of Austria in resisting an invasion the success of which would have infallibly deprived her of her Slavonic provinces, and of the navigation of the Danube, England inter -- fered to protect her, and even encouraged her in occupying, plundering, and brutally oppressing large and fertile provinces of the Turkish empire. So much for the antecedents of England. Add to this, that though the British envoy at Turin, himself an enemy to the policy of Sardinia and the liberation of Italy, had proved to his government that the discontent of the enslaved Lombards arose, not from Sardinian intrigue, but from grinding oppression, and the unfavorable comparison which they were hourly forced to make between their own wretched condition and the prosperity of their emancipated neighbors, yet the Ministry persisted in charging the whole responsibility of Italian disaffection upon the Sardinian government, and made it a crime that she was arming in her own defence, while her enemy was gathering hundreds of thousands upon her defenceless frontier to crush her at a blow. Austria knew, too, that the personal sympathies of the British oligarchy were with her and her cause; and knowing that the British people, with a culpable indifference to their duties as a free and self-governing nation, habitually leave the management of their foreign affairs in the hands of that oligarchy, she was fully warranted in expecting, in spite of formal remonstrances faintly urged by the Derby Ministry, for the obvious purpose of soothing the torpid political conscience of the nation, that she should have the moral support, and probably the material aid, of the British empire in her meditated conquest of Sardinia. She had even stronger reasons for relying with entire confidence on prompt and efficient support, not from Prussia only, but from all Germany. All the arbitrary and violent interferences of the Empire in the affairs of the minor German states, within the last forty years, had been encouraged, or at least winked at, by the leading powers of that nation; every evidence of increasing Austrian strength, and every exercise of yet more galling tyranny in its non-German territory, had been hailed with exultation as a fresh manifestation of that "German nationality" which was so prominent an object in the maudlin dreams of the king of Prussia, though he wanted the courage to clutch its sceptre when it hovered within his grasp; the feeble protests of Prussia against the commencement of an offensive war by Austria were more than neutralized by direct and unqualified assurances, that Prussia would not see her "weakened" by changes in her "territorial circumscription": and when Francis Joseph began his preparations for the subjugation of Sardinia, there rung out a savage war-whoop, wherever "die Deutsche Zunge klingt," and every Teuton, from the Baltic to the Alps, from the prince on the throne to the cobbler on his bench, was burning to join in the infamous Knechtschaftskrieg about to be waged by a remorseless tyrant, for the sole purpose of extinguishing the only spark of liberty that yet glimmered in the Italian peninsula. While, therefore, the honor, the duty, the most sacred interests of England and Prussia, gave to Napoleon a right to require their aid in the accomplishment of the great and beneficent objects which he solemnly declared to be his only aim, it is plain that the conduct and the professions of both entitle Austria to expect their support in defeating the realization of those objects. Voltaire satirized, a century since, the strange indifference of European monarchs to the interests and the liberties of their co-religionists in the territories of each other. A Catholic prince, who tolerated no schism among his own subjects, was often ready to foster a Protestant insurrection in an adjacent state, of his own religious faith, because it might weaken a too powerful rival; and a Protestant monarch might find sufficient reasons for discouraging that same insurrection, in the fear that the native government would exhaust its strength in suppressing it, instead of spending its energies in annoying a more obnoxious or a more dangerous neighbor. England and Prussia have not precisely the same motives for the disgraceful part they have played in refusing the slightest encouragement to measures, which, if countenanced and supported by them, would most certainly have resulted in the religious as well as the political emancipation of the European continent. The English nobility look upon Austria as the great enemy of republicanism, and the champion of *This mawkish diplomatic galimatias, from the circular of Count Schleinitz, means, of course, that Prussia would help her to defend anything she thought worth keeping. 23 VOL. LXVII. 5TH S. VOL. V. NO. II. |