The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-01 00:00:00

would have liked to have he
.ld Flanders and Pore
tugal, but he never pretended that he edd this bee
cause he had a special regale d for the Flemish or
the Portuguese people; his rii Tht, he 'would have
told you, lay in the power of the ewe ird and pre-
scription ; in his days of supreer, acy he) was not an
assimilator, but a conqueror. A Fre nehmen, con,
sequently, may expect far more sy.mp a thy from tho
quick-witted Italian than from dee graver inhabi-
tant of the Peninsula. But it must r Lot be thought
that this is owing to inferiority of int e lligence upon
the part of the Spaniard ; on the cent 'eery, if humour
is to be placed above wit—end the firet place will
always be assigned to it by delicacy of tante—there
is nothing more truly humourous t ,han the best;
productions of Spanish literature. IN lot on ly are the
charactersof the French and Spaniel i nations essen e
tially different—one representing 1 Lttic s.martness,
the other Spartan gravity—but the events of hist,
tory have also established between them a distietee
tion that seems to be ineffeceah le, an toienatioa
which threatens to be permanent. M. Nillemot hems
the candour to acknowledge that th 3 une lying hatred
of the Spanish people is inspired by recollections
of the first French Empire. This is un questionably
true, but we may go a little deeper. 1 Ye may look
upon the circumstance that the crow us of France
and Spain are at present worn by S overeigus of
rival dynasties as purely fortuitous. Certainly
this accident of itself would not ten dto promote
good feeling between the respective ( iovernmente,
but for the purposes of admiuistratis ,n, and from
motives of policy, this sort of diflic ulties is not
formidable. That which arises fr( ,m the in-
herent and mutual dislike of the VI vo nations is
more serious. Both of them are bre , aches of the
Latin family, and for a long time the contest
between them for pre-eminence wet I scarcely de.
cided. An epoch arrived in which r ,ctory wee un-
mistakably upon the side of Spain, b at her triumph
was short-lived, as sovereignty soon passed over to
her detested rival. We have here at c ince an element
of Peninsular hatred, quickened no turally by the
gross excesses of the first Napoleon'
a marshals and
the armies under their command. It was not merely
that the victors of Pavia and St. (1 ,uentin had lea
the supremacy of the Latin name , although that
reflection must to Castilian pride b ave been almost
insupportable, but that those to shorn they had
once given law now trampled then a into the dust.
Instead of peace being dictated ur ider the walls of
Paris, Madrid had become a Fren( :h city. It is a
well-attested fact in history that ti te nearer in blood
two nations are the more bitter is I heir conflict. We
have not to go back to ancient h: istory to find ex-
amples of this : the relations that existed between
Athens and the lonians existed t also between the
rival chieftains of Ireland and the 2 cotch Highlands.
exist now between the contort ding sections of
America. Thus, the very fact that both the French.
man and the Spaniard claimed a Latin parentage
was a sure omen that their strugE de would be the
more deadly; it in some degree accounts for the
cruelties perpetrated by the Frent :h soldiery. For
it must be remembered that the E treat Revolution,
when it inverted the face of Frenct t society, brought
the Latin element of the nation up wards, whilst the
Norman. Frank was comparatively depressed. Asa
suredly much of the outrage co mmitted by the
French armies in Spain is to be E scribed to their
unbounded habits of licence; but t even this reason
does not satisfactorily explain w by English and
Spanish prisoners were treated w ith so marked a
distinction by a French captor. Having already
this cause of hatred existing, we n lay guess if the
Spanish people would be pleased b; y the part which
France took in the revivification of Italy, a third
member of the Latin family. I teligion, indeed.
would make a Spaniard regard with horror the
spoliation of the Papal dominions ; but independ-
ently of this, political feeling would have its weight
With him. It is not enough, hen ould think, that
I am no longer the leader of the Latin name, but
there is also to be raised up a third Power, whom I
used to treat as a makeweight in the family, and
that Power likely to bE a naval one, menacing both
my imperial and commercial interests. It is as ream
sonable to expect that Spain can ever entertain core
dial sympathy for either France or Italy, as they
arc at present constituted, as it would be to imagine
that an old Argive would under any circumstances
have consented without the most envenomed jeal-
ousy and hostility to the transfer of the Dorian
sceptre from Argos to Laceduemon. We have not
dwelt upon this subject because we rejoice in the
division of the various members composing the. great
Latin family, but because it expresses a historical
truth which the modern nationalist would do well
to study. There can be no question that M. Ville-
mot is jestified in admitting without dispute the
dislike borae by the Spanish people towards France.
We have followed him the more readily in discuses
ing the question because this dislike does not seem
to us to ho founded upon special grounds only, but,
like most other problems of history, to be capable of
generalisation.