ESTRANGEMENT BETWEEN U. S. AND GREAT BRITAIN. 329

Victoria. This, however, it was not now convenient to remember. It was resolved that the Union should be broken up; it was necessary for this end that the South should be encouraged and the North brought into odium; and accordingly the papers which were selected and placed before the English people as the true exponents of Northern views were the New York Herald and the Journal of Commerce. Worse than this—| putting out of sight the fact that the previous Governments of the United States were composed for a long series of years of Southern men, those who favor the slave party in this country have endeavored (and they have succeeded in their endeavor) to make capital for the South out of the very repugnance and soreness which its own prolonged insolence towards this country had excited, turning against the North that feeling on which it had naturally counted as a bond of amity. For these reasons I think the comments of the Mercury essentially unfair, but I also think them superficial; for does the writer really think that the feeling which prevails in this country on the American contest is sufficiently accounted for by exasperation produced by the sarcasms of the New York Herald and a few more papers? Had I no knowledge whatever of the facts, my opinion of English sense and temper would prevent me for a moment from giving credit to such a notion. If the writer in the Mercury would only read carefully a few of the diatribes in the Times, the Morning Post, the Saturday Review, and, above all, those of the Tory press, I can hardly doubt that he will discover a far deeper chord of sympathy with Southern aims than that which a common hatred could furnish. Mere exasperation at low ribaldry never produced such unflagging energy of captious and trenchant criticism, such a sustained torrent of fierce, unsparing denunciation, as those papers have now for more than a twelvemonth poured forth.

ous (though, as I believe, quite unnecessary) apprehension of the growing might of the gigantic Federation; and, lastly, it is (I fear to no inconsiderable extent) to be found in real liking for the social system of the South, or, if this be too strong a statement, at least in preference for it as an alternative to that of the Northern States; for I am by no means of the opinion of the writer in the Mercury, that the sympathy manifested in this country for the South is free from all taint of pro-slavery feeling. If the writer thinks so, let him look to the speeches and publications of Mr. Beresford Hope, to the articles in the Times (and if he wishes for an example, I would refer him to the leader of Friday last denouncing a policy of emancipation), or, still better, to the work of Mr. Spence, a work which has gone through four editions, and has been received with extraordinary approbation. He will find that Mr. Spence, while, in deference to the conventionalities of English society, he pronounces slavery to be wrong, is yet in perfect accord with the most advanced slaveholders as to the grounds on which slavery is maintained. Mr. Spence, for example, holds that white labor is unsuited to Southern climes, that negroes will not work without compulsion, and that as a race they are so essentially inferior to the whites as to be incapable of taking an equal part with them in the business of civil life.

These are the premises of slaveholders all the world over, and if Mr. Spence does not draw from them the slaveholders' conclusion, it is simply because he lives in Liverpool and not in Charleston. These are the views of Mr. Spence, and these views have been accepted, assimilated, and enforced by the leading organs of public opinion in England, with a few noble exceptions. With these facts before me, I am quite unable to concur in the Mercury's absolute acquittal of the English people of any complicity with pro-slavery No, the real cause lies deeper than this. feeling. The mass of the people are, I beIt is to be found in the distaste for American lieve, still free from it, but the leaders are institutions which has always inspired an in-not, and it is the leaders which determine fluential portion of English society, but which our policy.

Mr. Bright's unmerited abuse of the Eng- Great as is the length to which my letter lish aristocracy, and equally unmerited has run, I must say a few words more. eulogy of the model republic, had, just be-"The great principle that slavery is per se fore the American civil war broke out, an evil," says the Mercury, "is with the brought to the point of positive disgust and North, subordinate to the political compact hatred. It is to be found, again, in the seri- of the Union; " he infers this, and very just

ly, from the conduct of Mr. Lincoln; and |nance a slave confederacy till a nation can concludes that "the last claim which the be formed which is prepared to put down North could fairly urge on the sympathies slavery on principles of pure philanthropy? of England-its firm resolve to do justice to If so, and if this is what abolitionism the colored men and favor emancipation-it means, the Confederacy may look forward has officially removed." Yet the writer com- to a long tenure of power. The truth is, menced his article by saying that "the elec- the world has not yet reached that point at tion of Mr. Lincoln gave genuine satisfac- which devotion to a high principle is to be tion to this country," because we regarded expected from great masses of men. Engthe event as an indication that a limit was lishmen once, no doubt, paid twenty milto be placed on the further extension of lions down to be rid of slavery; that they slavery. Now, if this was a just ground of would incur a like sacrifice now for the same satisfaction (as the writer seems to hold) I object is what I desire to believe; but there think Mr. Lincoln and the North may fairly is a wide difference between twenty millions ask him what has since occurred in the con- sterling, and a war a l'outrance against the duct of the Federal Government to diminish slave power. To this result the North has the satisfaction which was then felt? Is it been led by industrial, social, and political the abolition of slavery in Columbia, or the causes, and why should we not wish it sucmeasure for its exclusion from the territories, cess? Grant that it is not inspired by phior the slave trade treaty with Great Britain ?lanthropic motives,-it is doing the work of Has anything occurred to show that the philanthropy: it is fighting the battle of civRepublican party are prepared to sanction ilization. At all events, even though it the extension of slavery, and, if not, why should have no higher end in view than the should England withdraw her sympathies restoration of the national integrity, will from the party to which, on the ground as- it be said that this is not a better ground for signed, she gave them? But we are told our sympathy than the attempt to establish Mr. Lincoln will not declare that" slavery is an empire on the corner-stone of slavery? per se an evil," and proceed at once to legislate on this basis. But the Republican party never made this declaration, never proposed to interfere with slavery in the existing Slave States. They proposed merely to limit slavery-to put down slavery so far as that could be done consistently with maintaining the existing Constitution; that was their position from the start; and if that was a sufficient reason for giving them our moral support at the presidential election, surely, the reasons for this are not diminished when a firm adherence to their principle has drawn upon them the terrible calamity of civil war. In short, it comes to this is the Mercury prepared to counte

I agree with the writer that "England as well as America is on her trial," and, as one proud of his connection with England proud of her history, proud of her literature, proud of her generous and ennobling traditions, proud above all of that purest ray of her glory-that she has been known as the champion of the slave and the terror of the oppressor to the farthest ends of the earth, I deplore in my deepest heart the course which she is now following-a course which I cannot but think must degrade her from the high and conspicuous place among the benefactors of the human race which she has hitherto maintained.

Ever yours,

From The Spectator. I could wish it; but God knows I did not do it out of vanity." And then he concludes by saying, "I was on the point of throwing the whole into the fire; but, as I hope, if God gives me life, to arrange this history in such guise that he shall not find himself ill served therein, I send it to you, that it may not run the risk of being lost." To whom, moreover, do we owe the second title, with its ostentatious air of antiquity and its portentous blunder, assigning the death of King Philip, the father of Charles, "whom God have in his glory," to the year 1516, instead

"The history," he says, "is that which I composed in French when we were travelling on the Rhine, and which I finished at Augsberg." "It is not," he adds, "such as

*The Autobiography of the Emperor Charles V., recently discovered in the Portuguese Language by Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove. Translated by L. F. Simpson, M.R.S.L.

career of Charles V., it will be necessary to that age had better opportunities than he study his own judgment of it, at a moment for writing an autobiography which would when, the better to interrogate his con- have been profoundly interesting. Even the science, he was preparing voluntarily to re- careless overflowings of his own experience, linquish the most vast power that ever was however hasty or tumultuous, would have known." So far as we can make it out, we made a volume incomparably more enchantdemur as much to the ethics as we do to the ing than any which that or almost any other grammar of this magniloquent sentence. age could have placed before us. No prince, We do not see that history is necessarily past or present, was ever thrust by the force bound to take up the judgment of Charles of circumstances or the advantages of posiV. on his own political doings and misdo- tion into more chequered scenes, or brought ings, or that she would by such a course into contact with men of greater mark and resume her rights," which Baron de Let- force of character than Charles V.; and that tenhove and his translator, Mr. Simpson, not in a time when the passions of men had seem to imagine have been hitherto unjus- little means of displaying themselves in their tifiably withheld. But even if the historian full vigor, but when every influence was at were so bound, he need be under no great work for good or evil, and all the civilized apprehension on that head, so far as this world, like the minds of men, was convulsed assumed autobiography is concerned. We from one end of it to the other. The last defy the most willing or deferential inquirer of that imperial line, the inheritor of those to find out what that judgment was, or to great traditions which connected him with point out a single new fact in this book, his namesake of the ninth century, and written at the moment when the great em- through him with imperial Rome, gathering peror was preparing "to interrogate his up in himself the lines of kings and queens conscience," which can arrest, reverse, or who had been famous for centuries in Chriseven modify, the judgment which history tendom, connected by blood and alliance has passed already on the political career with every monarch of his time, the chamof Charles V. In this dreary, desolate, pion of the Church against the heretic on drowthy," uninviting narrative of one hun- one hand and the Turk on the other, imagdred and fifty pages, unilluminated by a sin-ination cannot realize a grander position gle ray of enthusiasm, unrelieved by a passing thought of the matchless revolutions of men and times to which its author had been instrumental, with not one single trait of individual character, not one poor anecdote, not one reminiscence of love, friendship, hatred, | pleasure or pain-except it be an exact enumeration of fits of the gout-what is there in all these pages, we should be glad to know, that can add any fresh halo to the memory of Charles, which ignorance and detraction have hitherto unjustly eclipsed ? History will resume her rights forsooth! Well, if it should, it will be to pronounce Charles V. one of the dullest and dreariest of mankind; not a monarch of brass or bronze, but a monarch of lead, a king of more than Boeotian capacity for imposing on the imagination of posterity.

66

We admit that we hope, for his credit's sake, that this autobiography is not authentic; that it is nothing more than a few hasty notes or memorials, intended by the emperor, had God given him life, to serve for a larger and juster volume. No man of

than that in which Charles found himself, or one which necessarily brought him into more immediate contact with all the moving incidents of that most moving age. Historians may have confounded the man with his environments, and taken his measure from his accidents; they may have too readily thought that he had achieved a greatness which was, in truth, rather thrust upon him than achieved; still, if not a great actor, he was an actor, often the prime and sole actor, in great things; and his correspondence, published and unpublished, shows he was an actor in more things than even written history gives him credit for. No king had ever seen so much as he. Twice in England, frequently in Spain, Germany, France, and Italy, more than once in Rome, in Africa against the Moors, closeted with Wolsey at Bruges, conferring with Francis I. in his prison at Madrid, debating with Luther at Worms, the sole depositary of all Queen Katharine's secrets at the unhappy period of her divorce, the prime adviser of her daughter Mary in her marriage with Philip,

as may still be seen in his correspondence | struck all Christendom with consternation, preserved at Simancas, what revelations and the battle of Mohacz, which sealed the could he not have made of events and per- fate of Hungary and his own sister Mary, sons had he been so minded? or what auto- are not even mentioned. Not a single trait biography so rich, when retired from the of the character or personal appearance of world he dictated to his secretary, Van any one of his contemporaries, great or Male, at Yuste, the rich lessons of his long small, seems to have fastened on his imagand varied experience ? Surely, a man of ination or his memory. He is, indeed, the less busy life and less stirring ambition than central figure of his own narrative, and the' Charles V., in his sombre solitude, as he most important, but that is by wiping out of looked back upon the breathing world which his canvas all others, and throwing them he had left, amidst "his gardens of lemon into such an immeasurable distance, that no and orange trees, and sparkling fountains distinct impression of them is made upon and basins," could not have failed to have the spectator. In fact, from beginning to left some impressions in his memoirs of end, the book is full of the emperor's marches those noble scenes" sad, high, and work- and countermarches, of what he might have ing full of state and woe," in which he had done and didn't do; how he got into a wood once played so important a part. If, how- and got out again, marched up a hill and ever, in the work now before us, which pro- marched down; and the marvellous minutefesses to contain his autobiography, the ness with which these points are insisted on, reader expects to meet with any such reve- bears a ludicrous disproportion to their want lations, he will find himself miserably mis- of importance. We know of no parallel to taken. If these are the incidents he would it in reality or romance, except it be in naturally look out for in the life of Charles Foote's farce of "The Mayor of Garratt: V., he will look in vain for them here."Oh! such marchings and countermarchKatharine and her divorce, and all its mo-ings! From Brentford to Ealing; from mentous consequences cannot draw from the imperial narrator a single passing expression of regret. Luther and Wolsey may as well have never been, for any notice they receive in his pages. The fall of Rhodes, which

Ealing to Acton; from Acton to Uxbridge ! The dust flying, sun scorching, men sweating!" Such a chronicle of flocci, nihili, parvi, is this Autobiography of Charles V., only not one-half so amusing.

A NUMBER of operatives, trained in the different branches of flax manufacture and the power-loom weaving of linen, have been engaged at Belfast to work in mills in Prussia and Belgium. They are chiefly women, and have entered into arrangements to work for stipulated periods.

GARIBALDI has written a rapturous political | for freedom, and treats as a question of epilove-letter to Britannia; and Britannia, much demic emotion what we look upon as one too as she admires the man, feels a little bashful sacred and solemn for the proffer of foreign and awkward in the unexpected situation. She sympathy and counsel.-Spectator, 4 Oct. is to arise with "uplifted brow," and point to her sister France the road of happy revolutionary freedom. She is to call to Helvetia-the Vestal Virgin of the Alps-to aid America, her daughter, who has so recently gone forth from her bosom and is engaged in struggling against the traders in human flesh; and when she has aided that daughter to conquer them, to call her back to her side to aid in the great Congress of liberated nations, whose judgments are to supersede war over the whole earth. Britannia is really embarrassed how to reply, and feels a little inclined to answer General Garibaldi like the fascinating child when told by its father to kiss the kind lady,-" You do it, pa; I so shy." The letter is couched in that peculiar tone of noble but hectic sentiment which scarcely realizes the heavy weight of personal responsibility attaching to national efforts

STREET railways are to be immediately introduced in the cities of Hamburg and Altona. Herr Muller, a civil engineer, has also devised a system of city railroads for Berlin and Vienna, and it is considered likely that the lattor will accept the proposition.