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Leader (1850-1860), 24th November 1855, Edition 1 of 2, Page 1129

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      derate . No convention can prohibit a great empire from becoming greater : the Third Point would not do it . But the reason why the idea of an European counterpoise was inadmissible was this : that it submerged Turkey , and ignored the original object of the war . What independence would remain to the Sultan , with the armed squadrons of three empires in the Euadne ? Turkey , no doubt , is condemned to political dissolution . The present contest must accelerate that result ; but while good faith is respected in public transactions , Great Britain cannot attain peace by decreeing the extinction of her ally . Already it is a common joke in Constantinople , that the next Sultan will be a Frenchman .

      The war , up to this point , has followed the lines of diplomacy . There are two other forms which it might assume . It might be a war of Liberalism , to create a natural security against the military system of Russia— -and not of Russia only . It might also be a dynastic war , with all its forces wielded for purposes of selfaggrandisement by the crowned families of Europe . It would not be difficult to show

      whose interests would be served by such a struggle . If the policy of the Allied Governments be not materially altered , and if the public cease to bluster and begins to think , Russia will be responsible for prolonging the war . A pacific proposition on her part is not to be contumeliously treated ; but if the war is to continue , whither shall it tend ? A new campaign will take place . The Allies will sacrifice another hundred thousand men , and

      millions of treasure . The unexhausted despotisms of Germany will have the game in their hands ; unless—and this it is which the public dares not believe or say—we take our stand upon a principle , and place the Europe of Nations in opposition to the Europe of Dynasties . Is it possible to do anything so courageous or so wise with a German monarchy and a feudal aristocracy supreme ?

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      M . THIERS UN THE JUGGERNAUT OF FRANCE . As for the personal position of M . Thiers , which , . , the preface to the twelfth volume of his " History of the Consulate and Empire , " he encourages the world to discuss , we prefer to adjourn the consideration of it till we have occasion to analyze the causes which lead to the fall of republics . At present we will only congratulate him on his greatness of soul ia being consoled for his own nothingness at home by the feeling that his country is everything she can be abroad . We do not impute to

      sycophancy , but to a perfectly genuine idiosj'ncracy the avowal that ajcountry can be everything it is possible for her to be without being the source of the slightest moral veneration . Success in war , without honour , virtue , or liberty , is everything , we can well believe it , to the Jlamen of Napoleon the Fikst . We rejoice also in the spectacle which M . Tin Ens affords us in his preface , of a great mind forming its principles , and choosing the objects of its panegyric , independently of transient circumstances or personal motives , and holding on its sublime way unswayed by passion and unchanged by fate .

      As for the historical conscientiousness of the author of the " Consulate and the Empire , " it will make his woi'k for ever great and memorable as a monument of perfect truth . It is such as almost to drive common writers to despair . The detection of the slightest inaccuracy covers him with confusion . Hence it was that when Sm William Napiku convicted him by reference to the imperial archives , of repeatedly falsifying figures , he could make no other answer than that to confute the accusation , would be a loss of his invaluable time . Let us trust that it will not bo long before

      such a phoenix of truth ceases to be nothing in his own country . Is M . Thiers then the popular historian , and is his hero the heio of France ? If so , one must sorrowfully admit that the despotism of Napoleon III . is not only a calamity , but in part also a retribution . A nation which can worship such a colossus of meanness and immorality as Napoleon I ., which can actually hug with pride as foul a yoke as ever was laid on man must accuse itself rather than destiny , if that yoke is laid on it again . Heaven makes scourges for us of our pleasant vices . The pleasant vice of France has been military glory . To trample on the honour , liberty , and happiness of other nations is the noble end for which she has been ready to immolate everything at the feet of a man without honour , without virtue , without truth , without love of his kind , without fear of God . The betrayal of Italy and Poland , the plunder and humiliation of the German people , the piratical invasion of Spain and Portugal—these are the acts which , because they were accompanied by great glitter of arms , and great effusion of blood , France has rewarded with splendid mausoleums and liturgies of praise . Heaven has willed that she should add to those mausoleums and those praises the sacrifice of her own honour , her own liberty , her own happiness . M . Thiers is well qualified to reveal Napoleon . Believing himself that militaxy glory is everything , he is not afraid to display by the side of military glory the trivial defects of abject selfishness , meanness , perfidy , lying , foul passion , uncontrolled by any noble aim or sentiment . Take the divinity as he is painted by his most slavish worshipper ; place yourself fora moment at the height of that morality to whose eye the difference between the strength of one mortal and another is less than microscopic , and judge what the nation which adored Napoleon deserves to be . To say that the soldier of the republic was corrupted by arbitrary power is a mere subterfuge . The aims and morality of Napoleon were the same throughout . He was a selfish , lying , and thievish adventurer from the first . From the first he looked upon the agony of France and Europe and sought how he might turn it to his own account . He was not a Frenchman , nor did he share French chivalry or French enthusiasm ; he was a Corsican , with all the fiery imagination indeed , but also with all the moral meanness of the South . A throne enlarged his power , but did not alter his heart , into which no divine thought , no noble impulse ever found its way . The revolution gave him an army of heroes ; he turned them against the cause for which they had fought ; he lavished their blood as though it had been the blood b £ slaves to win him an empire and an arch-duchess ; and France blessed him and licked his feet . The victories of soldiers who had sprung from the republic overthrew the old dynasties , and gave their general the power of making Europe free ; sind he used that power to canton out Europe into kingdoms for a family of fools and demireps . France might have been the mother of European liberty ; the glory of her arms might have been lost in the light of her beneficence . She became a slave at home , an odious tyrant abroad ; a tyrant compared with whom the kings of the earth became to the very people whom they had oppressed , the ' representatives of nationality and freedom . No , absolute power , dangerous as it is , though never sought by noble natures , has sometimes been vised by noble natures for noble ends . Hereditary monarchs have sometimes been men ; a crowned swindler is twice a king .

      And after all , that success ^ winch the eyes of France sanctified gigantic immorality fell by the hand of Providence , raising against the oppressor the indignation of the world . Defeat and failure hurrying after crime ^ a great cause and millions of noble lives sacrificed to bring an army of occupation on France—such was the issue of the Empire . But the France of M . Thiers still worships the divinity of the Place Vendfone .

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      RECRUITS FOR 1856 . The war extends and continues . At the termination of the season of 1855 , it occupies a much larger field than it djd at the close of last season ; and it is the intention , if not to carry it to a yet wider field , at least to convert some of the points of occupation this year into fields of very active operations * We do not at the present moment allude only to the speech with which the French Emperor suggested that if the German Governments do not assist in securing an honourable peace by

      taking one side or the other , he should appeal to the people ; but we refer to a manifest ; intention of rendering next year ' s campaign in the Baltic much more like a counterpart of that in the Black Sea than that we have yet thought probable . Whether Sweden has incidentally committed herself to a closer alliance with France , or done so intentionally , it appears highly probable that the amount of force thrown by the Western Powers into the Baltic will obviate many sources of apprehension for the Swedish Government , at the same time

      that it will in a manner compel that Government to rise from its inactive position . The slight degree of resistance met by our forces on shore in various parts of the Gulf of Finland , the degree of trade permitted by the Russian authorities , would appear to show the pressure which is felt by the resident population , and the necessity perceived by the Government of St . Petersburg , of allowing some precarious compensation in the form of a trade with the enemy . The Russian capital has been viewed from the masts of our vessels ,

      the island of Nargen has been occupied , and it would be quite possible to station a considerable land force upon that island ; which , if it had no other effect , would compel the Russians to maintain a much larger force on the whole of the surrounding shore , to prevent the landing at any one part . The Gulf of Finland , in fact , presents the exact converse of a siege . By being able to take a centrical position , the invading force would be able to keep employed an enemy much stronger in numbers than itself .

      Expectation , however , points to fur more active measures ; to a far greater pressure of the screw , to a far more rapid forcing of the Russian barriers . In case the war were literally carried home to Russia in that sea , the neutrality of other states besides Sweden must be held upon a very precarious tenure , and the German Powers might at least be compelled to take sides . From the obvious relations that have subsisted , and have , perhaps , been strengthened between Russia and Vienna —from the reactionary spirit manifested in the

      recently published Concordat at Rome , —we cannot presume that the German Powers would go with us ; and independently therefore of the appear which the French Emperor has threatened to make to the German population , it becomes more probable every day that the war may be extended further than the movements of our own troops . The Western Powers stand pledged by all their declarations , by the vast machinery which they are collecting , by the manifest necessity of extracting some kind of submission from Russia , to persevere until the Czab offers direct nego-

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  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 24, 1855, page 1129, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2116/page/13/