ice to refuse-you believe me guilty! Uncle, have a care: this farce may turn to your shame." 66 6 Come,' cried Welmoth, anxiously, 'let us go;' and Sanson moved forward as if to leave the room. "We have other witnesses,' said Madame de Cambasse bring in the prisoner.' At the sight of Idomenée, Welmoth's countenance fell. You know Monsieur Welmoth?' said Mon-caused every one to pause. sieur Sanson. "At this moment the mulatto staggered, and uttered a loud, horrible cry. 'Stop! screamed he, 'stop, Monsieur Sanson;' and these words 66 6 "'No.' "I remember, now,' said the mulatto, groaning and writhing in pain; it was the rum he gave me in the wood. It was-it was-' "What?' cried every one. "It was poisoned--oh! poisoned! I was to go when I heard his pistol, and to die like a dog in the wood. That's the villain who made me "I knew it!' cried Jean. "What!' cried Jean, you were not in the "These are all lies,' said Idomenée. "Monsieur Sanson held down his head and said, after a moment's silence, Pardon me, Edward, for having believed you guilty, but this comedy has been so cleverly arranged that I was deceived for a moment. As, however, it was one of my slaves who injured the property of Madame de Cambasse, and as I have no desire she should be injured by me or mine, I am quite ready to pay her an indemnity.' "I wish for nothing but what the law awards,' said the lady. My only wish was to expose to you the infamous machinations of a villain.' "She then sat down to write, while Edward preserved a perfectly unmoved countenance. Her note finished- Mr. Owen,' said she, 'have the goodness to carry this immediately to the Procureur du Roi; if the principal criminal escape, here is one, at any rate, whom nothing can save. This mulatto forced an entry into my house with arms in his hands. He wounded me with his knife-this, at least, is no comedy.' "Idomenée, in spite of himself, could not help giving a look at Sir Edward. He was perfectly unmoved. "Let those who hired this villain save themselves as they can;' continued Madame de Cambasse. Welmoth showed not the least concern at this insinuation. Had we not better leave Madame to her part of Grand Justiciary,' said he to M. Sanson, laughing. "I am at your orders, and was sure, Edward, you could never have lent yourself to this infamous conspiracy,' said M. Sanson. As for this unhappy man, the only chance remaining for him is to name his accomplices.' "It is what he had best do,' said Welmoth, calmly; and I advise him to do so. But it is to his judges, and not to us that he must confess.' As he spoke thus, Welmoth looked with some agitation towards Idomenée. Monsieur Sanson seemed quite confounded by the latter's silence. "That's-that's he who'-the wretch could say no more, he staggered and fell-but as he fel! he made a bound towards Sir Edward as if he would have killed him, and fell dead at his feet. The Englishman looked at his victim in silence, and with a ferocious joy. "Monster!' cried Monsieur Sanson at length, and after a pause of horror, and will you still deny?' "What! do you join them, too?' said Sir Edward. Is this the way in which you pay me back the gold guineas I lent you?' "The money is ready, sir; and the cause of my interview with Madame de Cambasse, whose fair fame you have calumniated, was to arrange the payment of this very sum, and to rescue Monsieur Sanson from the ruin you had prepared for him.' 'Enough!' cried Sir Edward. 'I will answer no more questions of lackeys, knaves, and strumpets, and their silly dupes.' "Monsieur l'Anglais!' said Jean, shall I make you a present before you go? Here it isthe caps for your pistols; they'll serve you to blow your brains out with.' "I take them,' said Sir Edward, grinding his teeth, in order to send into your master's head the bullet I owe him.' "He was about to put them on, but ere he could do so, Jean rushed at him and felled him to the ground: those present rushed forward to rescue Sir Edward, thinking Jean was strangling him. "Stop, stop,' shouted the domestic, 'I want to see this gentleman's flannel-waistcoat. John told me when I made him drunk, that his master carried some curious papers there. Ah! here they are! As he spoke, John seized the papers, and springing up, gave them to Monsieur Sanson. "But Sanson had scarcely begun to read them, when Welmoth was up too; he had taken the pistols from the ground where he flung them, and had armed them with the caps, which he still held in his hand. Mon "Now it's my turn,' said he, turning on the astonished and unarmed group who were gathered round the papers; listen to me. sieur Sanson, I caused Clémenceau to be shot, because he interfered with the projects of which I am pursuing the execution, and which shall ruin you one day. France must lose her colonies. England has decided it, and our decision is like that of Heaven, implacable and inevita-ble. I own it all; I was sent to ruin you—to, ruin this woman's reputation; I organized the | is no better proof of the intense hatred with fire this night. There, you have my confession, which the nation regards us: of the rankling and the proofs of my mission in the papers in humiliation which for ever and ever seems your hand. What will be my fate?' "The scaffold, wretch!' said Monsieur Sanson. to keep possession of a clever, gallant, vain, domineering, defeated people. "Well, then, if I die for one crime or for ten what matters? And now hark you: I have two more to commit, which two victims shall I choose here ?' 66 6 • Mouster!' cried Monsieur Sanson. "No, I will not hurt you; but this woman here, and this young dandy who would marry your daughter'-Madame de Cambasse turned pale, and Jean flung himself before her. "Not a movement,' said Welmoth, or she is dead! But I make one bargain with you. There is a candle near you, M. Sanson; burn in it, one after another, the papers you have been reading, and I withdraw.' "Never-never;' said M. Sanson. "Be it as you will,' said Welmoth; and aimed at Madame de Cambasse, who fell on her knees almost dead with terror. “Yield, in the name of heaven,' said Clé menceau. The contrast to this spirit in England is quite curious. Say to the English-the French hate you; night and day they hate you; the government that should find a pretext of war with you would be hailed with such shouts of exultation from one end of the country to the other, as never were heard since the days when the Patrie was in danger; till they can meet you in war they pursue you with untiring calumnysay this, and an Englishman, yawning, answers, It is impossible,' and declares that person who so speaks is actuated by a very bad spirit, and wishes to set the two countries quarrelling. If an English newspaper were to take the pains to collect and publish the lies against England which ap the 6 You are afraid for yourself,' said Wel-peared in the Paris journals of any given moth; on which Clémenceau was about to rush forward, but John held him back, saying, 'Stand back, sir, the rascal will do what he says, else.' Enough, enough;' said M. Sanson; and put the papers to the flame. Welmoth saw him burn them, one after another; and when the last was consumed, he walked to the window, fired his two pistols in the air, and said, The honour of England is saved; now, gentlemen, I am at your disposition.' This act of ferocious heroism struck Clémenceau and M. Sanson with a strange admiration. Go,' said the latter; 'the day is before you.' 66 6 'Thank you,' said Sir Edward; and left the room." month (the month of her Majesty's visit to France would hardly be a fair criterion, it was an extraordinary event, and afforded, therefore, scope for extraordinary lying)— there would be such a catalogue as would astonish readers here. Abuse of England is the daily bread of the French journalist. He writes to supply his market. If his customers were tired of the article, would he give it to them? No; he would abuse the Turks, or praise the English, or abuse or praise the Russians, or write in praise or abuse of any other country or subject, that his readers might have a fancy to admire or hate. All other fashious, however, seem to have their day in France but this, and this is of all days. They never tire of abusing this country. The Carlist turns on the government-man, and says, 'You truckle to the English.' The government-man retorts, Who ever truckled to the English so much as you did, who came into power with his bayonet, and thanked him, under God, for your restoration?' The republican reviles them both with all his might, and says that one courts the foreigner as much as the other. It is strange that the writer of the tale, a good man of business, no doubt, as the present literary system in France will cause most writers to be, has not turned the above invention to still further profit, and adapted it for stage representation. The perfidious Englishman is a character drawn as if expressly for the actor of the villains of the Porte St. Martin Theatre, and the imitations of Jean the Frenchman as John the Goddam would convulse audiences with laughter. Nor is it necessary, in order to amuse these merry folks, that the imitations should be like; it is only requisite that the imitations should be like what they are accustomed to hear; and were a real English-had his brief given to him, and was instructman to be produced on the stage, they would ed to write in a particular vein. His facts, give the palm to the sham one. They have an such as they are, have been supplied to Englishman for their politics as well as for him; for there are evidences that the writer their theatre; an Englishman of their own has some sort of information upon the subdressing up, a monstrous compound of ridi-jects on which he writes, and there are cule and crime, grotesque, vulgar, selfish, proofs of wilful perversions from some wicked; and they will allow their political quarter or other. Take, for instance, the writers to submit to them no other. There description of a treadmill. This punish If we speak in this manner, apropos of a mere novel of a few hundred pages, it is because we believe that Monsieur Soulié are called hommes graves in France, the sages of the war newspapers. ment of the treadmill consists in hanging, these harmless cruelties and ultimate trislaves by the wrists, in such a manner that umphs, are the undoubted property of the their feet are placed upon the wings of a novelist, and we receive them as perfectly wheel. The wheel always yields under fair warfare. But let him not deal in spetheir feet, and thus obliges the patient to cific calumnies, and inculcate, by means of seek a footing upon the upper wing. The lies, hatred of actual breathing flesh and wheel serves likewise to grind the prison-blood. This task should be left to what ers' corn. An executioner (bourreau) armed with a hammer (martinet)—the whip appeared too mild to these worthy protectors of the negro race-an executioner, I say, placed by the side of the mill, is employed to excite the indolence of those who do not move quick enough on the wheel: and a physician from time to time feels the pulse of the person under punishment, in order to see how long he can bear the torture. Now this is written with evident bad faith, very likely not on the writer's part, but on the part of some one who has seen this instrument of torture, a treadmill, and whose interest it is to maintain the slave trade in the French colonies, and who knows that, in order to enlist the mother-country in his favour, he has no surer means than to excite its prejudices by stories of the cruelties and conspiracies of England. Statements are proved in different modes, arguments are conducted in all sorts of ways; and this novel is an argument for the slave trade, proved by pure lying. Its proofs are lies, and its conclusion is a lie. It stands thus: The English have fomented a demoniacal conspiracy against the slave trade in the French colonies. The English are our wicked, false, dastardly, natural enemies, and we are bound to hate them. Therefore slavery is a praiseworthy institution, and ought to be maintained in the French colonies.' It is to this argument that Monsiur Soulié has devoted three volumes which are signed by his celebrated name. A romancer is not called upon to be very careful in his logic, it is true; fiction is his calling; but surely not fictions of this nature. Let this sort of argumentation be left to the writers of the leading articles; it has an ill look in the feuilleton, which ought to be neutral ground, and where peaceable readers are in the habit of taking refuge from national quarrels and abuse; from the envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, that inflame the patriots of the Premier Paris. All the villains whom the romancer is called upon to slay, are those whom he has created first, and over whom he may exercise the utmost severities of his imagination. Let the count go mad, or the heroine swallow poison, or Don Alphonso run his rival through the body, or the French ship or army at the end of the tale blow up the English and obtain its victory; As to these latter, which are daily exposing the deep-laid schemes and hypermachiavellian craft of England, we wonder they have not noticed as yet another sordid and monstrous conspiracy of which this country is undoubtedly the centre. If this audacious plot be allowed to succeed, the nationalities of Europe will gradually, but certainly disappear; the glorious recollections of feats of arms, and the noble emulation to which they give rise, will be effaced by a gross, merchant despotism; the spirit of patriotism will infallibly die away, and, to meet the aggressions of the enemy, the frontier shall be lined with warriors, and the tribune resound with oratory no more. The public press, the guardian of liberty, the father of manly thought, shall be as it were dumb: the 'Siècle' may cry woe to perfidious Albion, and the public, stricken with a fatal indifference, shall be too stupid to tremble; the National' may shout murder and treason against England, and a degenerate nation only yawn in reply. A conspiracy tending to produce this state of things,' we can imagine one of those patriotic journals to say, 'exists, spreads daily, its progress may be calculated foot by foot all over Europe. The villains engaged in it are leagued against some of the most precious and ancient institutions of the world. What can be more patriotic than to protect a national industry? their aim is to abolish trade-protection, and to sweep custom-houses from the face of the earth. What can be more noble than love of country and national spirit? these conspirators would strike at the root of the civic virtues. What can be more heroic than the ardour which inspires our armies, and fills our youth with the generous desire of distinction in war? these conspirators,' if they have their way, will not have an army standing; they will make a mockery and falsehood of glory, the noble aim of gallant spirits; they will smother, with the bales of their coarse commerce, the laurels of our former achievements; the swords of Marengo and Austerlitz will be left to rust on the walls of our children; and they will clap corks upon the bayonets with which we drove Europe before us.' The RAILROAD, we need not say, is the infernal Eng 134 Espartero. Oct. ESPARTERO. Paris. 1843. lish conspiracy to which we suppose the ART. XIII.-Biographie des Cotemporains: French prophet to allude. It has been carried over to France by Englishmen. It has crept from Rouen to the gates of Paris; from Rouen it is striding towards the sea at Southampton; from Paris it is rushing to the Belgian frontier and the channel. It is an English present. Timete Danaos: there is danger in the gift. For when the frontier is in a manner destroyed, how will the French youth be able road. French to rush to it? Once have railroads all over Europe, and there is no more use for valour than for post-chaises now on the north Both will be exploded institutions. The one expires, because nobody will ride; the other dies, because nobody will fight; it is cheaper, easier, quicker, more comfortable to take the new method of travelling. And as a post-chaise keeper is ruined by a railroad, and as a smuggler is ruined by free trade; those concerned in the maintenance of numberless other ancient usages, interests, prejudices, must look to suffer by coming changes. Have London at twelve hours' journey from Paris, and even The readers of men will begin to travel. the National' and the Commerce' will have an opportunity of judging for themselves of that monstrous artful island, which their newspapers describe to them as so odious. They will begin to see that hatred of the French nation is not the sole object of the Englishman's thoughts, as their present instructor would have them believe; that the grocer of Bond-street has no more wish to assassinate his neighbour of the Rue St. Honoré, than the latter has to murder his rival of the Rue St. Denis; that the ironmonger is not thinking about humiliating France, but only of the best means of selling his kettles and fenders. Seeing which peaceful and harmless disposition on our part, the wrath of Frenchmen will melt and give way or rather let us say, as our island is but a small place, and France a great one-as we are but dull shopkeepers without ideas, and France the spring from which all the Light and Truth of the world issues-that when we are drawn so near to it, we shall sink into it and mingle with it as naturally as a drop of rain into the ocean (or into a pail), and at once and for ever be absorbed in the flood of French Civilisation. If THE military and political events which Moreover, there is no people so little inclined to allow, to form, or to idolize superiority, as the Spaniards. They have the jealous sentiment of universal equality, implanted into them as deeply as it is into the French. But to counteract it, the French have a national vanity, which is for ever comparing their own country with others. And hence every character of eminence is dear to them; for, though an infringement on individual equality, it exalts them above other nations. The Spaniard, on the contrary, does not deign to enter into the minutie of comparison. His country was, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the first in Europe; its nobles the most wealthy, the most magnificent, the most punctilious, the most truly aristocratic; its citizens the most advanced in arts and manufactures, and comfort and municipal freedom; its soldiers were allowed the first rank, the sailors the same. The Spaniards taught the existence of this, their universal superiority, to their sons; and these again to their offspring, down to the present day. And the Spaniards implicitly believe the tradition of their forefathers, not merely as applied to the past, but as a judgment of the present. They believe themselves to be precisely what their fathers were three hundred years ago. They take not the least count of all that has happened in that period: the revolutions, the changes, the forward strides of other nations, the backward ones of their own. A great man, more or less, is consequently to them of little importance. They are too proud to be vain. This part of the Spanish character ex plains not a few of the political events of the countries inhabited by the race. In all those countries, individual eminence is a thing not to be tolerated. It constitutes in itself a crime, and the least pretension to it remains unpardoned. Even Bolivar, notwithstanding his immense claims, and notwithstanding the general admission that nothing but a strong hand could keep the unadhesive materials of Spanish American republics together, even he was the object of such hatred, suspicion, jealousy, and mistrust, that his life was a martyrdom to himself, and his salutary influence a tyranny to those whom he had liberated. There did exist in Spain, up to the commencement of the present century, a grand exception to this universal love of equality, which is a characteristic of the Latin races. And that was the veneration for royalty, which partook of the oriental and fabulous extreme of respect. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the popular drama of the country in which the Spanish monarch precisely resembles the Sultan of the Arabian Nights, as the vicegerent of Providence, the universal righter of wrongs, endowed with ubiquity, omnipotence, and all-wisdom. Two centuries' succession of the most imbecile monarchs greatly impaired, if not effaced, this sentiment. The conduct of Ferdinand to the men and the classes engaged in the war of independence, disgusted all that was spirited and enlightened in the nation. A few remote provinces and gentry thought, indeed, that the principle of legitimacy and loyalty was strong as ever, and they rose to invoke it in favour of Don Carlos. Their failure has taught them and all Spain, that loyalty, in its old, and extreme, and chevalier sense, is extinct; and that in the peninsula, as in other western countries, it has ceased to be fanaticism, and survives merely as a rational feeling. The &c., are not extinct; neither are the wearers of these titles exiled or proscribed'; nor have their estates been confiscated or curtailed. But they have no influence; they have taken no part in political events; and are scarcely counted even as pawns on the chess-board of Spanish politics. Spaniards respect superiority of birth, but their respect is empty. It is rather the respect of an antiquary for what is curious, than the worldly and sensible respect for whatever is truly valuable. The greatest efforts have been made by almost all Spanish legislators and politicians, to make use of the aristocracy as a weight in the political balance, and as a support of throne and constitution. But as Lord Eldon compared certain British peers to the pillars of the East London Theatre, which hung from the roof instead of supporting it, such has been the condition of all Spanish peers or proceres in any and every constitution. They supported the government of the time being; were infallibly of the opinions diametrically opposite to those of the deputies; and increased the odium of the ministry, whether moderado or exaltado, without giving it the least support. The rendering the upper chamber elective, as was done by the constitution of 1837, has not reme-, died this. When Christina fell, the upper. chamber was, to a man, in her favour; so did the whole upper chamber support Espartero, when he fell. In short, the attachment of the peers in Spain is ominous; it betokens downfall. The crown and the clergy, in fact, had laboured in unison to destroy and humble the power of the aristocracy, as well as of the middle classes. They succeeded but too well; and in succeeding, they also strengthened that democratic principle of equality which is a monkish principle. But the crown and the monasteries, and the aristocracy, have all gone down together, whilst the middle classes survive, and have become regenerated with a second youth. It is only they who have any force in Spain. It is the cities which take the initiative in all changes and all revolutions. For any government to incur their displeasure, is at once to fall; none has been able to struggle against them. These juntas raised the war of independence, and performed the Another Spanish characteristic, arising Spanish part of their self-liberation. They from the same principle or making part of again it was who enabled Christina to estait, is the utter want of any influence on the blish at once her daughter's rights and the side of the aristocracy. For a Spanish name of a constitution. They afterwards aristocracy does survive: an aristocracy compelled her to give the reality, as well of historic name, great antiquity, monied as the name And it was they, too, who wealth, and territorial possession. The drove Don Carlos out of the country, in dukedoms of Infantado, Ossune, Montilles, despite of the tenacity and courage of his Royalty is however the only superiority that the Spaniards will admit; and their jealousy of any other power which apes, or affects, or replaces royalty, is irrepressible. A president of a Spanish republic would not be tolerated for a month, nor would a regent. The great and unpardonable fault of Espartero was, that he bore this name. |