The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-06-09 00:00:00

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 1856

ON Friday we directed the attention of the
readers of the NORTHERN TIMES to the havoc
caused in France by the recent inundations, and
we ventured, at the same time, to suggest the
propriety of the public's taking steps towards
affording some relief to the sufferers by that
calamity. That any such work of Christian charity,
or earnest of our sincerity towards a great and
allied nation, should be left to our lowly and
feeble advocacy, must appear strange to those who
have watched the movements of the two countries
for the last two years and a-half. We have enter-
tained the French Court, Imperial statesmen,
Generals, and all those who ranked as the repre-
sentatives of France, with becoming attention and
enthusiasm. And now that an opportunity presents
itself, when we may, nay, are called on to show
our regard and respect for her people, there
is no responce made to the calls of humanity
Politics cannot surely be suffered to enter

into such matters. Diplomacy would not
forbid us doing a generous act, or dilcharging
a sacred duty. Be this as it may, we should
do for the people of France, what they would
do f 7,1. 119 ITer sons have stood by us in a deluge

1.1

e should help them to repair the

rava&,6 of the waters of their rivers. Those who
had had nothing more than a traditional idea of
the universal flood, the Ark, and the desolation the
retiring waters left after them, had all the terrors
felt at the world's destruction, brought home to
them by the inundation of their towns, villages,
and homesteads.

Wives, in a frenzy of despair, were seen to throw
themselves into the turbulent streams after their
husbands, mothers to throw their infants from
windows to bystanders, as they were about to fall
with the walls of their dwellings, which buried
them in their ruins ; whilst hundreds are known to
have been washed out of their beds, and swept
away by the torrents, never to be seen or probably
heard of again. The survivors have not only to
mourn over these afflictions. With their friends,
of whom they hare thus suddenly been
bereft, their houses, furniture, cattle, sheep,
and growing crops, have disappeared, or have
been destroyed. The destruction was so wide
spread that it was found necessary to throw open
the churches and other public buildings to receive
the houseless, and have immediate recourse to
Government aid to preserve thousands from death
by starvation. Such a scene of devastation has
not, in fact, been witnessed in any part of Europe
for many generations. And yet England offers
no aid to the sufferers ! If we must be commercial
in all we do, think, and say, we need not be at a
loss in Liverpool for sound mercantile grounds on
which to sanctify an appeal to our Merchant Princes
•n behalf of that particular portion of France

red in this instance

Lyons is

essentially a manufacturing town, and its looms
consume a large share of our cotton. , ktd,rtlong
the whole course of the Rhone our coals and iron
are largely used. Orleans and Tours are good
markets for our manufactures. We might say
more on this subject, but we forbear in considera-
tion of the generous French nation. If further
Sordid inducements be wanted to set the philan-
trophy of the rich Burgesses of Liverpool in
to say that France is " one

accusers

THE NORTHERN TIMES.---LIVERPOOL, MONDAY.

it will be on Saturday next. The culprit may save

his life by proving that COOK did not die of poison,
and failing in this, an ignominous death on the

scaffold will lose none of its punishment
over, there are two sides to the question of
public safety. Suppose PALMER should be hanged
on Saturday next, that after his execution his
innocence should be proved by the same weight
of " moral" evidence which has been used to
establish his guilt, what excuse will the adminis-
trators of the law have to offer to GOD and man?
Again, suppose PALMER is put to death without
further enquiry, and we admit the principle in
criminal law, that the presence of poison in a body

I\fore-

is not necessary—that it is sufficient for the pur-
pose of securing a conviction, that the symptoms
at and after the time of death were similar to those
in a case in which poison had been used, what
man would be sale, who was found at the bed
side of a friend at the moment of his demise ?
PALMER'S case will be resorted to as a precedent,
to justify proceedings against any man who may
be ever so remotely connected with another, so
long as the symptoms resemble the sufferings
that poison would produce. Setting aside,
therefore, all thoughts of the magnitude of
the crimes alleged against PALMER—passing
over all prejudices as the best and holiest
mode of punishing murder, leaving out of
sight the question of guilt or innocence in any
individual case,—we call on the public to ponder
well over the change the acceptation of the new
principle relied on inCoox's case will bring about—
the door which the sanctioning of such a precedent
will throw open for the prosecution and conviction
of those who may not have the same means
PALMER had of defending their lives against their

THE ITALIAN QUESTION

Christian world, which, despite protest and prayer,

has remained, by one " providence" or another,
at his mercy ever since. Seven years ago
he went there with his army " against his
will," but he is there with his army still,
just as he is at Athens and Constantinople,
and likely to continue there. And so also it happens
that while anxiously, nay, piously, disclaiming all
views of dynastic aggrandizement or foreign
conquest—presenting himself as the very Joseph
of political continency—he permits, strangely
enough, his cousins, the Murats, to expect at his
hands a new Neapolitan kingdom, while the
Italians, just as strangely, are allowed to get it into
their beads that he is to bestow on them a Republi-
can nationality. By an adroitness, which carries
into diplomacy the whole art of legerdemain, he
stands well with parties the most conflicting,
making himself the stay of every project, con-
servative or revolutionary, and the friend of every
principle, Socialist or Jesuitic. While the Imperial
oppressor of Lombardy is his very good brother
and dearest ally, and the Pope the godfather of
his son, all through Italy the popular mind is
personating him as the saviour of her liberties, and
the restorer of her nationality. The " juggling
fiend" of Macbeth might usefully go to him for
lessons, if only to deceive " hopes" as well as
ears.

(PROM A CORRESPONDENT.)

What means this 'quickening recurrence to the
Italian question ? How happens it that statesmen
in their policies, if not their treaties, politicians in
their harangues, and every class of public writers, as
though bitten by some political tarantula of the
country, are all dancing to the tune of an Italian
revolution ? Is the " Niobe of the nations," then,
on the eve of some new career of eventualities ? Are
we in another 1847? And is the second, but true
'4B of revived nationalities already looming up to
eyes learned in that " mystical lore" which enables
men to descry " coming events" in the shadows
they project ?
It would seem so. The whole peninsula is in
agitation. From the Alps to the lowest point of the
Abruzzi the spirit of change sits brooding over the
land, we will not say " dove-like," for over the
incubation lower clouds and shadows which pre-
elude more than a conjecture on its true character.
But whatever may be the value of the phe-
nomenon, it is felt to be alarming by those
best fitted to adjudge its importance. Austria
tells the tale of her anxiety in her pro
mise of taking up herself that role of reform
which, in the hands of her subjects, she has so
long made the equivalent of exile and imprison-
ment. Perplexed equally by the state of public
opinion, and the counsels of an ally, whose faith
lessness just now must be her trust in the want of
any other—for Russia may soon show, on Italian
ground perhaps, that she has not been sold for
nothing—she enters, or thinks of entering, on
ne.v paths of government with no higher en
couragement than the conviction that the old
ones are grown unsafe.
The Papal government, the echo of Austrian fears
in the proportion that it has been the partner
ufAutrian policies, shakes with sympathetic weak-
ness as it hears the first blast of the approaching
hurricane. Unable to be consistent, and unwilling
to appear the contrary, it becomes a house divided
against itself the moment it is visited by a doubt
on the infallibility of the repressive system, and,
taking refuge in that old resource of conscious
weakness—the doing its work by contradictory
halves, seeks to compensate the follies of force on
one side by the follies of weakness on the other—
the system of systems for coaxing the timidity of
sedition into the full-blown glories of revolution.
The Sardinian Government, ambitious by the
very necessity of its position, yet unsafe whether
it be popular liberty or princely despotism which
triumphs, is so divided between Italian Sove-
reignty, the aim of some of its members, and
Italian nationality, the object of the rest, that it
agitates, and is agitated without any distinct
♦iews of policy or its means, and shrinking
from nothing so much as a decided act, is like the
cat in the pan, intensely greedy of the rich morsel
before it, yet for ever " letting I dare not wait or
I would."

In fact, throughout all this land of the Syllas and
the Caesars, nobody seems to make show of manhood
but one whose fellowship might be disdained
by brutes, the miscreant, at the head of
the Italian Lazzeroni, and who, with all his
faults, or rather by them, stands forth in this
crisis as in the last, " every inch a king," in
the resoluteness with which he clings to the
high-handed ferocity which had been once before
his safety.

Happily, whatever be the results—and we
suppose it is not given to man to foresee all
the consequences of this royal re-entry on the cycle
of revolutions—we may feel certain that they will
not rest so wholly in the hands of Louis Napoleon,
as he probably surmises. The most astute of di-
plomatists, will count for little in the coming day of
restored nationalities, unless assured of the
sympathies of the secret societies ; and even
Imperial heads, aspiring to be the custodians of
Italian independence, may well be troubled, as,
looking homewards, they hear the pregnant
enquiry—Buis custodiet custodes Who shall
keep the keepers? The classic land, it is true,
groans under the load of its armed men, for the
most part foreign to the soil, but it has its ven-
geance in the fact, that the armies of Austria,
France, and Sardinia menace each other, at least
as much as they menace filo inhabitants, and that
the first hostile clash of their arms may be re-
echoed in countries as enslaved, if not as unhappy,
where the oppressor is not the stranger, nor the
conqueror an alien.

But though this aspect of concession or resist-
ance, whatever it be, is but a symptom of
the impatience of public opinion and the im-
mirli?nce of the crisis, we confess we should study
it with more satisfaction had " our foreign
corresponaents" initiated us a little further into
the secret causes of the movement, or the
ends to which it is conducting us. The writing is
on
.the wall, flaming out the passing of the
present thing ; but, as we can neither recog-
nise the hand, nor are told who shall " possess the
kingdom," we ask ourselves in an anxiety
proportioned to our ignorance, for whose benefit
these unfortunate States are again lending them-
selves to the risks of revolution ? For fifteen cen-
turies Italy has been the house of the proverb,
burned ever and anon to roast the eggs, now of
foreign, now of domestic usurpers ; and, if we may
continue Sancho-Panza's style of illustration, it
would be quite as well to know, if the people
who are now beating the bush will be those
to catch the hare. All we can see is, that if
the Italians are excited and agitated to the last
excess short of actual insurrection, it is impossible
to conceive anybody in a cooler condition for
turning their activity to profit than the present
occupant of the Tuilleries Though nobody
of late has more successfully taken up that
decent position in political, which Mr. Joseph
Surface has long olcupied in dramatic society,
he is charged by those who know him best
with a sly liking for the great Machiavellian
practice of withdrawing his neighbour's attention
from himself, by occupying it on troubles of their
own. He has certainly given in his life more than
one practical proof that Italy is not as indifferent
to him as his language would let Europe
suppose. The chosen scene of his earliest
buccaneering exploit now a quarter of a century
since—his very first act as President of the
French Republic, was to possess himself of the
sister Republic's capital—the capital of the