The Press. — London, England, 1857-01-31 00:00:00

112 dorsing all the opinions of this writer, wo must say that it is impossible to read the narrative thus mainly composed of extracts from the Emperor's writings when in retirement, when in action, when defeated, when in prison, when apparently most hopeless of success, without conceiving a higher opinion of his wonderful sagacity and firmness of purpose. His conviction, very early formed, that the empire of Napoleon must be restored in France, never for an instant wavered. We are compelled to acknowledge that he has reason for his belief in his star, when we see through what perils he has passed to his splendid elevation. In no career of ancient or modern times are the characters of Destiny or Provi dence more clearly traced. His first public peril was in 1831, when, with his elder brother, he endeavoured to organise the rev olu tionary forces of Italy. His brother fell sick and died at Faenza. The nosition of the Prince, hemmed in by enemies, was full of peril, but he succeededded in escaping in the dis guise of a servant. At this period he had no thought of his own personal elevation. He constantly referred to the young Duke of Reichstadt as the head of the Imperial Family. In his " Reveries Politives " (1832) he expressed his conviction that k ranee would never be content with less than the restora tion of the Empire, when " glory will crown " liberty " : For my own part, I think we can only arrive at the desired result by a recombination of the two popular causes of the day—that of Napoleon the Second, and that of the Republic. The son of the great man, of the first Napoleon, is the sole representative of the highest amount of glory, as the Republic is the embodiment of the greatest amount of national liberty. _ _ When it was supposed that he might have married the young Queen of Portugal, Dona Maria, he published a declaration that he would never separate himself from France:— It is due to myself to add that, in spite of the lively interest which attaches to the destines of a people who have but recently acquired their rights, I should refuse the honour of sharing the throne of Portugal, shoall it perchance happen that any persons should direct their eyes to me with that view. . . . Persuaded as lam that the great name which I bear will not always be regarded by my fellow•countrymen as a ground of excln sioa, since that name recals to them fifteen years of glory, I wait with composure in a hospitable and free country until the time shall come when the nation shall recal to its bosom those who in 1813 were expatriated by the will of two hundred thousand strangers. This hope of one day serving France, as a citizen and as a soldier, fortifies my soul, and is worth, in my estimation, all the thrones in the world. He narrowly escaped with life from the Stras burg affair in 1836. After showing how near he was to success, he relates : In a minute I was surrounded by a triple row of bayonets, and forced to draw my sabre to parry off the blows aimed at me from every side. In another instant I should have perished by French hands, when the cannoneers perceiving my danger, charged, and carrying me off, placed me in their ranks. When taken prisoner, he desired that, as the enterprise was his own, all the rigour of the law should fall on him alone. Ile refused to obtain his liberty by entering into any engage ment with the reigning dynasty. When he wrote of his attempt a year later, he said : Successful, I should have spared France the conflicts, the troubles, the disorders, attendant upon a state of general confusion, which I think must occur sooner or later. When in America, his mother, the Queen Hortense, wrote to him in her fatal illness : You will believe that in quittine , this world, I regret only leaving yourself, and your fond affectionate disposition, which alone has given any charm to my existence. In 1838, when the power of Louis Philippe seemed most firmly established, he replied to the question, Where is the Napoleonite party ? The party is ncwhere, because my friends have not mustered ; but the cause has partisans everywhere, from the workshop of the artisan to the council•chamber of the king, from the barrack of the soldier to the palace of the marshal of France. . . . If one day the movements of parties should overthrow the existing powers (and the experience of the past fifty years authorises us in the belief), and if accustomed as they have been for the last thirty-three years to despise authority, they should under mine all the foundations of the social empire, then, perhaps, the name of Napoleon may prove an anchor of safety for all that is noble and truly useful in France. This conception found fuller expression in the celebrated " Idees Napoleoniennes," pub lished while ho was residing in England in 1839. He proved the sincerity of his convic• THE PRESS: tions by the Boulogne expedition in 1840 His defence on his trial was a noble intellec tual effort. He concluded : Representing a political cause, T cannot accept a political tribunal as the judge of my intentions and my acts. Nobody will be imposed on by your forms. In the struggle which is taking place there will be but one conqueror; one vanquished. It you are in the ranks of the conqueror, I cannot expect justice at your hands, and I will not accept your generosity. His six years' imprisonment in the fortress of Ham were borne without repining. He wrote to a lady in England, "With the name " I bear, I must either be in the seclusion of " the dungeon, or the brightness of power " Not even his desire to see his dying father could tempt him to give a pledge of submis sion to the reigning Government. " The path " of honour," he said, " is narrow and slippery, " and there is but a hair's breadth between " the firm ground and the abyss." A quota tation from a French writer effectively con trasts the escape from Ham of Louis Na poleon, and from the Tuileries of Louis Philippe:— . - On the 26th of May, 1846, a man of marked features, with a clouded and melancholy brow, with a deep and thoughtful look, with a stiff gait, and attired like a labourer, descended the staircase of the fortress, crossed the prison yard with a steady step, passed through the ranks of sol diery, went by the sentinels, and in an instant reached the country adjacent to St. Quentin. This man was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor. On the 24th of February, 1848, another personage escaped clandestinely, not from a prison but from a palace, and entered a hackney-coach on the Place de la Revolution, the spot where Louis XVI. had perished on the scaffold. He hastened away, a fugitive wanderer, in a disguise not much unlike that put on by the prisoner of Ham, to find a small vessel to convey him to England. This man was Louie Philippe d'Orleana, King of the French. His conviction of the great part reserved for him was strengthened by the perils he had escaped : A few days after his arrival in England he went to see his cousin, Lady Douglas (a princess of Baden). " Well," said the young princess to him, "at last you are free. Will you now be quiet? Will yon lay aside those fallacies which have cost you so dear, and the cruel delusions of those dreams which have brought such misery on those who love you." "My dear cousin," replied the late pri- soner of 11am, "1 do not belong to myself—l belong to my name and to my country. It is because my fortune has twice betrayed me that my destiny is nearer its accom plishment. I bide my time." To the same lady (now Duchess of Hamilton) he said, in the first days of the revolution of 1848, when the name of Bonaparte was re ceived with taunts and obloquy— Before the year is out I shall direct the Government of France. On the 10th of December his prediction was fulfilled. Some space is devoted in this volume to an examination of the Emperor's conduct in relation to the coup-d'etat. It is justified on account of the necessities of the time. The author says : I have conversed with many of our countrymen who were residing in Paris at that critical period; and the over• whelming preponderance of their opinion is to the effect that, but for the conception ani success of the masterly stroke of statesmanship which received the name of the conp-d'etat, order, society, property, would within a few weeks have bean overthrown. We find some just reflections on the diffi culties which the Emperor experienced in steadily carrying out his policy of an English alliance : It is scarcely possible to grasp an adequate conception of the difficulties wherewith the Emperor had to contend in consummating the policy which he has laid down as the rule of his government, including as one of its prominent features the interchange of good sill and good offices be• tween England and France. In preceding sections the reader has seen how pertinacious') the former prejudices of the Parisian populace have been fanned by the leaders and organs of a party which stiles itself the supporter of order, but which has not scrupled to lend itself to the ex• citement of disorder—to every incendiary device by which it was imagined that the position of the President, and afterwards that of the Emperor, could be shaken—to every stratagem that held out the possibility of damaging him in the regards of the people of France. Amongst these devices the appeal to anti• British passions has been a favourite card, and been played through all the moods and tenses of unscrupulous dexterity ; but vigilance and firm• ness, supported by public approbation, made the game a losing one, and each move of the ingenious agitators left them in a worse position. The literary merit of the volume is but slight. The author's faculty of admiration is so great as to allow little room for the exercise of his judgment. But the volume has value for the citations strung together from the Emperor's owu writings, and for the anec- SATURDAY, dotes collected concerning him. It is in the speeches, and letters, and works of the Em peror that his character can be best read. It is impossible to consider them, however curso rily, without being impressed with the eleva tion of soul and prophetic spirit they evince. Bermuda ; a Colony, a Fortress, and a Prison. By a Field Officer. London : Longmans. THERE is much pleasant reading in this volume. It gives a complete account of the physical features of the Bermuda group, traces their history, exhibits their present state, and discusses the literary questions associated with them. It is shown conclu sively that Shakespeare never could have meant to make Bermuda the scene of his Tempest ; but it is probable that he was struck with the accounts of this region and its tem. pests, and imagined such an island to be situated in the Mediterranean, between Naples and Tunis. The question whether Waller ever visited Bermuda is minutely examined, the author deciding the question in the nega tive. He reports, however, that a ring has lately been found which is popularly believed to be Waller's ring:— It is a gold circle (which appears to have once con tained hair), terminating in two hands clasping a heart. It is an ordinary and not very antique•looking ring. Inside of it are roughly scratched the words, " Whose hair I wear I loved dear." It is said, I know not how truly, that the ring displays the arms of the Otway family, and that Waller was connected with the latter. But I could not learn why the son of a Waller and of a Hampden should use the arms of the Otways. An engraving of the ring would have been in teresting to many readers. The population of Bermuda is increasing. It was 8,824 in 1841, and 11,092 in 1851. The details of the Govern. ment and of society are amusing. We notice the volume chiefly, however, for the information it affords on our convict sys tem. Bermuda is a prison, as well as a fortress and a colony. Felons are transported thither, are kept in confinement, and are brought back to England to be set loose when their terms of transportation (usually much shortened) have expired. We read : Transportation for life became limited usually to ten years. Fourteen years meant, perhaps, six; ten meant four; and seven three. By far the greater part of the prisoners at Bermuda are still upon this footing. We are told that Garrett, the perpetrator of the famous gold-dust robbery, obtained his liberty in 1853, his term of imprisonment having been materially shortened by his appearance of good conduct. He went to Melbourne, was convicted of participating in a great bank robbery, and sentenced to penal servitude for ten years. This man was at Bermuda when Kirwan, convicted of the murder of his wife in Ireland, arrived a prisoner. Garrett, who had formerly held the position in Bermuda which Mr. Dorrit occu pied in Whitecross-street, waited on Kirwan to say that he had been considered chief of the convicts hitherto, but that he now yielded his supremacy to the new visitor, as a criminal of a much higher class. "It is said," writes the author, " that Kirwan was highly indignant at " this extraordinary compliment." That the reader may judge of the number of convicts annually returned to England from Bermuda, we quote some of the author's figures : The Pearl, a Bermudian barque, carried to England in her second voyage, December, 1855, upwards of 210 returned convicts. For this her owners received 1,0001. The Castle Eden, an English vessel, brought out early last year 846 convicts. She took home again 176 convicts in January, 1856. For this her owners were paid 5,0001. sterling. On the Bth September, 1856, the Bermudian barque, Sir George Seymour, started for England, with 160 more convicts. Thus it appears that in the coarse of last year no less than 550 convicts returned from Bermuda alone, to be let loose in England a few months after their arrival. Probably not one of these men, however ill behaved, had completed the full sentence passed upon him by his judge, and the far greater part bad had their sen tences shortened by more then one•half. Many of these liberated convicts would of course return to their old haunts and practices, and others, especiall• the aged, would throw themselves on their parishes. This system of sending out convicts, and bringing them back, is evidently absurd. Transportation should only be resorted to as a means of getting rid of convicts altogether, which can never be done by sending them to Bermuda, as the territory is too small to absorb them. The lik,