SIR,—I should not have
discovered that your correspondent "Sigma" was aiming at me (for I could
agree with almost all he says, excepting what I consider the bitterness
of his tone), had he not quoted one clause from my letter. I said that
the King of Sardinia was "fighting for fighting's sake" in the Crimea. I
continue: "Perhaps, in consideration of the antiquity of his house, he
was tolerated as a knight-errant of the nineteenth century." On this he
remarks: "Few things had less to do than chivalry or religion
with the presence of the Piedmontese troops in the Crimea. Count Cavour
at least never doubted that the French alliance was sure of its
consummation on the plains of Lombardy. There was no 'fighting
for fighting's sake.'" Strange that so able a writer should not have
recollected when he wrote (for he must have observed it when he read),
that my argument implied that Victor Ermmanuel did not fight for
fighting's sake; and that I was arguing against the blindness of
Englishmen, who acted as if he was, and as if he had no thought
of a quid pro quo; and who were angry
with him now that he was fighting with a professed object, when
they could allow him to fight when the best that could be said of him
was, that he was fighting with no object at all.
However, I have not taken up my pen to answer an
attack, which scarcely any one will have observed, and in which no one
will have been able to concur. I write to protest against your
correspondent's severe language on the subject of Louis Napoleon.
Speaking of the Lombard war, he says: "France has gathered up her
strength to wrestle with the Conservative force of Europe. This is not a
mere contest about the boundary of empires, or the faith of treaties, or
the mutual antipathy of long-estranged and hostile races. Once more the
first-born of democracy has gone forth on her impious apostolate;" her
impious apostles being Napoleons I. and III. There is no doubt that such
is his meaning, for he proceeds to speak of "Napoleonism." Such
language, almost fanatical, as I think, might still stand as a
mere matter of opinion, even though it has been any thing but born out
by the event. Louis Napoleon has not been carried away by the
Revolution; on the contrary, the apprehension of being involved in it
has been one of his reasons, as he gives them, for closing the war. He
has again and again disowned any purpose of touching the Pope's temporal power;
and even in his Milan proclamation, which was more open to exception
than any of his speeches or writings, he says that he came with no "prearranged
{379} plan to dispossess sovereigns." We know, on the contrary, what
Revolution or Red-republicanism means.
What I protest against, then, is not your
correspondent's extravagant language, as I consider it, nor his running
against facts, but his thinking it allowable to slander a remarkable
man, merely because he does not understand him. I was far too cautious
in my former letter, and am in this, to take Louis Napoleon's part; but
it is another thing altogether to indulge in invectives, nay slanderous
invectives, against him. Public men have characters, as other men; and
their characters are as dear to them. We should do as we would be done
by. We may fairly criticise what they have done; we cannot fairly impute
what they have not done as yet, and what they disown.