Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/265

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Lord Palmerston, England, and the Continent.
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spect for the protection of the law. The Anglo-Indian army is thus not merely an armed force that keeps an empire in subjection, it is also a great institution, constituting, by its nature, a portion of the populace, contributing to its civilisation, and to infuse into it European manners and ideas by the example which it presents in its daily life, of order, discipline, and moral qualities. But does the condition of Italian and Hungarian society present anything analogous with that of prostrate Scindian or predatory Sikh, or do the mixed elements of the Austrian army, German and Slavonian, present so great a contrast to the nations that rebelled against her supremacy or her despotism?

Austria was attacked upon the double basis of the sovereignty of the people and national rights; but what was Piedmont, asks M. Ficquelmont, that marched to the aid of the Lombard populations in revolt, and ventured to attack, arms in its hand, an empire like that of Austria? It is composed of elements as heterogeneous as Austria itself; but, unlike Austria, all are upon a small scale. Savoy is French. The Novarais is a province of Lombardy, ceded by Maria Theresa to the King of Sardinia, to purchase his neutrality on the occasion of that empress’s war with the King of Prussia. The state of Genoa has never ceased to sigh after its ancient sovereignty and independence. Sardinia added a title, without giving any additional power, to the prince of this incongruous kingdom. In the distribution of parts, the Pope was to have been the soul of the enterprise, and Charles Albert the sword. Then was seen what never happened before. Scarcely had the struggle commenced, than that sovereign proclaimed the incorporation of the Lombardo-Venitian kingdom, and of the duchies of Modena, Parma, and Placentia, into the kingdom of Piedmont. The "convention" never went so far, for it only decreed the incorporation of Belgium and of the left bank of the Rhine with France when it had conquered them. In the face of such an enormity France and England remained silent. "The silence of France," says M. Ficquelmont, "can be understood. Invaded by a revolution which it knew not how to restrain, it could not interfere in that which took place without. But how can that of England, proud as she is in having been out of the sphere of revolutionary contagion, be explained? Is it not to undergo oneself a moral revolution, to thus allow all the laws of international right to be trampled under foot?" We must leave the supporters of the doctrines of non-intervention to answer M. Ficquelmont. It is well known in England whence this silence proceeded, and whence came the Polish general who, according to the Piedmontese, sold the battle of Novara—a mere calumny, invented to shield a disgrace.

"England," adds M. Ficquelmont, further on, "could exercise no influence in Austria, except through Italy. It did not suit the character of her then policy to remain neutral. For some time back she had withdrawn from alliance with Austria; so she now became hostile to that country—hostile as she knows how to be, when she wishes to be so, without going actually to war."

That is to say, by the application of what the Austrian minister calls industrial, or monied and commercial hostility, in contradistinction to armed hostility. M. Ficquelmont is not only a disbeliever in the pacific intentions of the British government and people, but he actually derides the pretensions of the peace party par excellence—the industrial peace