Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1859-01-24 00:00:00

THE WAR QUESTION

THE political atmosphere of Continental Europe
already looks somewhat less stormy than it did
even a week ago. France and Austria have each
"made a sign" of Peace,—France in the shape 'of
a semi-official article in one of the Government

organs of the press, intimating the termination of
the diplomatic difficulty with Austria ; and Austria
by a communication of the relinquishment of her
project in Servia, which has occasioned that
difficulty. And thus, as another of the Paris
papers has remarked, " the solution of this
question, at which we rejoice, deprives the smaller
number of French journals, which are so anxious
for war, of a subject, and compels them to seek for
some other diplomatic difference sufficiently
important and ripe to allow them to hope for a
speedy rupture. Italy remains to them, also the
agitation in the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, the
desires attributed to Piedmont, and the various
manifestations of the Piedmontese Government."
The only warlike notes now heard, therefore, are
those of Sardinia ; and they are no sooner sounded
from the Throne, than they are, even more loudly,
echoed back by the Chamber. Their Sovereign's
voice, they declare to him, is " influential and
respected among all civilised nations, magnani-
mously expressing pity for the woes of Italy, and
will certainly revive the memory of the solemn
promises which have as yet remained without
fulfilment ; and at the same time will tend to calm
down blind impatience, and will uphold among
the populations a firm confidence in the irresistible
force of civilisation and the power of public
opinion. If these conciliatory thoughts and this
appeal to public reason," they add, " were to
draw down perils or menaces on your sacred head,
the nation—which venerates in you its sincere and
straightforward prince, and looks on you as the
powerful interceder with the various European
Cabinets for the cause of liberty—which beholds
all the anger of factions give way before the great
example of your fidelity—which knows that in
you and by you at last has been found the secret,
lost for so many centuries, of Italian concord—the
nation, we say, will to a man range themselves'
round your person, and show that they have again
learned the art of uniting the obedience of the
soldier with the liberty of the citizen." Now this
language certainly smells of gunpowder. They
could not suppose a necessity to "range them-
selves round his person," with any thoughts but
those of hostile resistance to his adversaries--
when he has any ; nor would there be any
occasion to " learn the art of uniting the obedience
of the soldier with the liberty of the citizen," but
for warlike objects. And the case is peculiar. It
is not the ordinary one of a ruler dragging his
subjects into the conflict, but the unusual one of
the subjects inciting their ruler to call them to
arms,—and to do so, not for their own protection,
but in defence of " the cause of liberty " generally
among the neighbouring nations.

But then, in such a case, the why and the
wherefore must be carefully sought and considered.
What is it that has thus excited so warlike a
spirit in Sardinia ? Now, there is a great deal
more in all this echo of hostile protestations than
meets the eye. "No special information is
needed," observes a well-informed contemporary,
"to assure us that the speech of the King of
SARDINIA was revised at Paris. Nowhere but in
the country of TALLEYRAND do people represent
themselves as ' awaiting with firmness the decrees
of Providence,' when they are actively preparing
to make an unprovoked attack upon their neigh-
bours. We know too well that, when modern
manifestos talk of Providence, we are to expect
some great stroke of violence or fraud. Prince
NAPOLEON is also awaiting the decrees of Provi-
dence, which ordain that he shall marry a Sardi-
nian Princess as a pledge, at this crisis, of the
moderate and pacific intentions of France." Here,
then, we begin to get enlightened as to all the
bluster in the Sardinian Chamber. It is France
blowing its ominous blast through the Sardinian

trumpet

Now there is no doubt that, to use the words of
the writer we have just quoted, " the King of
SARDINIA might well appeal, on any other occa-
sion, to the sympathies which his country excites.
The sympathies of England, at least, she has had,
and has, in unstinted measure. Rising, as it were,
from the grave of European freedom to prove the
undying energy of the constitutional principle,
how could she fail to be an object of enthusiastic
interest to all to whom that principle is dear ?
Any attack upon the liberties of Sardinia would
have been resented by Englishmen as an attack
upon their own ; nor is it so long since Sardinian
statesmen acknowledged their moral alliance with
a great constitutional country by assiduously
cultivating the English connexion. But the case
is totally changed when Sardinia abandons the
task of internal development to make herself the
instrument and accomplice of a great military
despotism in the path of conquest, and threatens
to involve the European community in the worst
of calamities—not in self-defence, but from ambi-
tion." This is, we are inclined to believe, the
solution of the question that is at present at issue.
NAPOLEON may find it answer his purpose to

make a cat's-paw of Sardinia ; and Sardinia may
be glad of the job, if only in the hope of, by a
popular foreign war, repressing dangerous demo-
cratic movements at home. But the sympathy of
England will never go along with any such
reckless projects of a vaulting ambition on the one
hand, and a desperate perplexity on the other.
For the present, however, as we have said, the
spirit that is prompting them seems somewhat
allayed. Should it revive, England must watch,
but she cannot encourage it.