The Sun.
London, England, 1848-09-30 00:00:00

NAPLES AND SICILY.

The Patriot of Florence, of the 21st, has intelli-
gence from Naples of the 16th, to the effect that
the Neapolitan troops had had an encounter with
the Sicilians at Aci-Reale, ten miles from Catania,
and though no details are given, it is summa-
rily stated that the loss on both sides was great,
and that Aci-Reale had not been occupied by the
Neapolitans. The submission of Catania announced
a few days ago is not confirmed. A steamer ar-
rived at Civita-Vecchia brought the intelligence of
an armistice agreed to between Sicily and Naples by
the mediation of England and France. On the 16th
a new collision took place between the two popular
parties at Naples, and another was expected to take
place on St. Januarius's day.

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—One single event was required to com-
plete the great drama of this unparalleled year. The
dream for which Louis Philippe sacrificed the respect
and friendship of this country has been realised, and
the Duke de Montpensier is father of an heiress
presumptive to the throne of Spain. A French
Prince, the member of a family remarkable for its
talents and ambition, may now reasonably look on
himself as the founder of a new Spanish dynasty.
The progress of constitutional principles, and the
balance which has been long Land happily preserved
between the European Powers, seemed to have dis-
solved that intimate and injurious connexion which
fostered the pride of France and the weakness of
Spain. The Pyrenees, effaced by Louis XIV. from
the map, again raised their heads, and the day of
Spanish independence seemed to be at hand. In an
evil hour, a King of the French, himself the sup-
planter of a dynasty and the nominee of a sovereign
people, sought to reign by dynastic influ-
ence over the people of Spain. As he passed
through palaces not his own, he saw painted
or embroidered on the walls, chronicled
on the shelves, schemed in the secretaires, and depo-
sited in the archives, the numerous monuments of
that aggressive policy which cost a• Grand Monarque
his peace, and an Emperor his throne. Yet he could
not help grasping at the prize against which all
history warned him. He was only too sucessful, and
the event which we this day record is the fulfilment
of his fondest desires. But never were hope and fear
so signally disappointed. If a mere place in the
Spanish line he an object of ambition, the Count de
Neuilly has secured that genealogical honour. As a
father, too, he is gratified by the successful establish-
ment of one worthy son. But for the shadow the
substance has been sacrificed. Nay, more, the very
link that was to unite the policies of France and
Spain now constitutes their chief bar of separation.
To the other disqualifications of the Orleans family
in the eyes of France will now be added that they
rule in Spain. The prayer is granted, but its condi-
tions are fatal. A literal success is associated with
substantial reverses such as the gloomiest fore-
bodings could not have anticipated. On the other
hand, the result we so feared might now pass un-
noticed and insignificant in the crowd of events.
It means nothing. It is but a drop in the storm
of revolutionary changes. No statesman will now
give a thought to the possible subservience of Spain
to France through the daughter of the Duchess de
Montpensier. Infantas have lost all their terror.
Principles, races, nationalities, constitutions, and
theories are the powers, the pretences, or the bug-
bears of this day. If we could believe that the
counsel or patronage of an Orleans could afford any
additional security to the throne of Spain against
the dangers which menace it from without, and the
follies which impair it within, we might well re-
joice in the success of the Gallo-Spanish intrigue.
When two short years have just changed the whole
aspect of Europe, and carried us back to the convul-
sions and dismemberments of the revolutionary war,
or perhaps to the endless fluctuations of medieval
history, it would be presumptuous to hazard any
conjectures as to the fate of Spain and the for-
tunes of the new-born Infanta. Of three Bourbon
thrones one lies in the dul,t, another is menaced by
the rebellion of half its subjects, and the third is
1 that which now for half a century has exhibited a

continual series of follies and misfortunes in, the
Spanish peninsula. After a thousand years
of uninterrupted power, it is difficult to sup-
pose that the virtue of a race and the spell of a name
is utterly extinguished ; yet it must be said that ci-
vilized Europe has a quarrel with the Bourbons, and
will not easily be reconciled. If they have survived
rebellions and invasions, a republic and an empire, it
has only been by timely homage to the principles of
freedom, and by alliance with the popular powers.
Like the inheritors of dominion, of glory, and of
shame in the ancient drama, they are doomed as
tyrants, and preserved as citizens. No sooner do
they appear on the stage than they are greeted by
messengers of calamity, and assailed by the clamours
of a discontented people. A Tiresias warns them,
and a Chorus sings their doom. Crimes, divisions,
exile, death, crowd their brief annals. They pass
from the tragic scene, but their children appear again
in history; and from the very grave of despotism
rises an heroic age of free states, patrician senates, and
constitutional kings. The Duke de Montpensier is
the link between a new and an old dynasty, between
the curses of the past and the blessings of a future
as yet guiltless of tyranny. It is for him to make a
timely election whether he will belong to the new or
the old state of things—whether he will write life or
death on the throne which Providence may commit
to his care.

HERALD.—Our readers are well aware that we
have always drawn a broad distinction between La-
martine and Ledru Rollin. While the enemies of
the former, to serve their own base purposes, and to
nourish the venom of their disappointment, have for
the last seven months represented their opinions as
identical, we have always contended that neither in
the character—nor in the antecedents—nor in the
conduct of the two men, was there any one point of
resemblance. M. de Lamartine—a gentleman by
birth—a soldier and diplomatist by profession--a
poet by nature and by choice—a politician only by
necessity and the force of circumstances—is endowed
with one of those happy natures which it is impossi-
ble not to admire and to love. Born to, in any country
a competent, and in France to a large fortune, he
never prided himself on his wealth, nor turned it
in his youth to the ignoble uses of mere personal
gratification. Even in his earlier manhood his ex-
penditure was not in feasts and follies, at the gaming
table or in the co:dimes; but in the improving pur-
suit of travel, or in the acquisition of the treasures of
literature and art. Returned to the Chamber, be
sought not office, ;or emolument, or personal aggran-
disement of any kind. On the contrary, he is well
known to have bad three interviews with the Count of
Neuilly (when Louis Philippe, King of the French),
and to have more than once declined the perilous
honours of a French Portfolio. Pursuing an inde-
pendent, and, as he believed, a national course, M. de
Lamartine continued as a private member till the
days of February, and then, noleits volens, was raised
by the public voice to nearly the highest, and cer-
tainly the most popular, eminence in France. As
Minister for Foreign Affairs he on every occasion
proclaimed peace ; and it cannot be too well remem-
bered by Englishmen, that when the unhappy man
now on his trial at Clonmel proceeded to Paris, the
reception of 11 Ir. Smith O'Brien by the Minister for
Foreign Affairs was of {the most glacial description.
Nothing at the time would have rendered Lamar-
tine more popular with his countrymen than the
holding out some expressions of hope to the Irish
rebel delegates—but, true to honour and to the sanc-
tions of international law, he maintained a dignified
reserve, and refused to play the traitor to an ally. So
great was then his popularity, that this honest act in
no degree injured him, and it was not until he
covered Ledru Rollin with the aegis of his name that
the bourgeoisie and capitalists of Paris began to look
on him with disrelish. From generous motives, and
from generous motives alone, Lamartine did not wish
to see a colleague run down because of his impru-
dence in one act ; but now that it has become ap-
parent that Ledru Rollin wishes to revive the scenes
of 1793, and to act, on a smaller scale the part of a
Denton, he receives no encouragement from the
Member for Macon. It has been said and insinuated
by interested slanderers in England•—foreign and
domestic—that the reason of the temporary agree-
ment and accordance of view between M. Ledru
Rollin and Lamartine might be founded
in their common peculations, of which both
were cognisant. But it is a sufficient answer
to this to say, that Lamartine is a much poorer man
now than he was eight months ago—that the accord-
ance of view between the parties no longer exists—
and that while the one sits in the National Assembly
among the Montagnards, the other takes his place on
a level with the Ministerial bench. These circum-
stances, joined to the moderation of M. Lamartine—
to his rare disinterestedness—to his gentle and win-
ning manners—and, above all, to the publication of
the Trois 'this au Pouvoir—have caused the public
feeling again to flow in his favour—a feeling which
every day gains strength. Ledru Rollin, on the con-
trary, though a man of unquestionable talents, and
of admitted,3 power and effect as a tribune, has been
losing ground with every class excepting the Red
I Republicans, and if anything could render him more
unpopular with the bourgeoisie and wealthy classes, it
would be his speech on Saturday last, at Chalet, in
commemoration of the 22d of September, 1792.
That he is in earnest—that he glows and burns with
the spirit of the old revolution—is evident ; and this
only renders him the more dangerous. Among the
900 men returned to the Assembly, he is perhaps the
only one who has revealed to an astonished public
first-rate demagogical powers. lie possesses the
voice, the gesture, and the pose of a tribune of the
people, and neither his courage nor his sincerity is
doubted by those who know him best. Fortunately,
however, there is a straightforward soldier at the
head of the Government, and the few plain words
spoken by General Cavaignac on Monday, in follow-
ing M. Goudchaux, the Minister of Finance, suffi-
ciently indicate that the head of the French Execu-
tive is prepared not only to maintain order, but to
protect property. No laws of confiscation, professing
to be just to the poor, but really and in effect spolia-
tory of property, will be allowed under the reign of
Cavaignac, or sanctioned by the majority of the As-
sembly that supports him; and if M. Ledru Rollin,
joining his forces to the partisans of Louis Napoleon,
descends into the streets to call for such laws and to
overturn opinion, he will find himself vanquished,
like the insurgents of June, by the strong hands of
power, and not merely become more unpopular, but
odious and hateful to the great body of his country-
men.

CHRONICLE.—The avowed idol of M. Ledru
Rollin is Maximilian Robespierre. But, by the most
unhappy of inversions, he has so contrived that
while he copies and exaggerates the financial absur-
dities and grotesque economy of that mysterious
tribune, he contradicts his examples in those qualities
which all men unite in attributing, not without
honour, to his memory. No public man, perhaps,
out of the very excess of his administrative errors,
was so hostile to a system of external propaganda as
was Robespierre. The paternal principle of Govern-
ment he understood in the same narrow and ex-
clusive sense in which it was interpreted in
Paraguay by Francis, and as Rosas seems inclined
to apply it now in the Argentine Republic. All
intermeddling with foreign countries was to him
anathema maranatha ; and the way he treated those
who preached " the crusade of ideas " is best illus-
trated in the fate of Anacharsis Clootz and his
disciples. Yet M. Ledru Rollin, in the name of
'92 and the Mountain, has the effrontery to profess
opinions, for which, if he had lived at that time,
he would assuredly have been denounced at the
Jacobins, and transferred to La Force or St. Lazare.
Nor is he less inconsistent in another and the most
salient point of his harangue. Like Lord Byron's
Genius of War, he " stamps his red foot," and swears
that Lombardy, Tuscany, Naples, Sicily, and Ger-
many should be free. " Our troops," he exclaimed
amidst "frenetic applause," "should cross the Alps."
Yet, if there was one thing, above all others, for which
Robespierre desired to be distinguished, it was for
his constant and sustained resistance to the war po-
licy. of the Girondists, and for the theophilanthropic
projects, worthy of the Brussels Congress, in the
furtherance of peace. No victims felt the deadly
edge of his displeasure more keenly than victorious
generals, and few of them escaped the particular ri-
gour of his direct proscription. If M. Ledru Rollin
had uttered the bellicose peroration of his discourse
in 1792, he would have been vehemently applauded
by men whom he despises for their moderation, by
Vergniaud, Brissot,:Guadet, Gensonne ; but Robes-
pierre would have turned away from the adulation of
so bad a citizen, and St. Just, beneath the inspiration
of his master's cold eye, would have broadly told him,
in the classic jargon of the time, that he was an
incendiary and braggart Ilyperbolus whom an Alci-
biades would not -be wanting to destroy. M. Ledru
Rollin—if his meagre parody thus fails in its essen-
tials, suggesting dissonance rather than harmony with
its originals—may, however, console himself with the
reflection that he has been the foremost to sound the
first note, and raise the maiden alarm of a war agita-
tion. He is now irretrievably pledged to this
movement. Separated by the rubicon which he has
leaped, from that ostensible policy of peace which was
the boast of the Provisional Government; severed
from M. de Lamartine, whose organ, the Bien Public,
avows and proclaims the schism, and at the head of
the hundred representatives who heard him,
he seems determined to risk his political
fortunes in creating, at all hazards, a Euro-
pean war. The mischief of this course must
not be rated by the insignificance of the man.
While we are of opinion that this holiday orator
missed the sting of his invective against England,
we are inclined 1.) think him right in the main fact
which he denounced. It would have been singular it
General Cavaignac had not felt grateful to Lord
Palmerston for having waited until the state of seige
to record that recognition of the French Republic
. which he withheld from the more liberal Government

of M. Lamartine. We have heard imprudent ad-
mirers of our Foreign Secretary vaunt, as a great
stroke of policy, his present predominance in the
Rue de Capucines. So far as our imperfect lights
enable us to judge, we see the ascendancy, but we
regret it; for we fear the reaction of a nation whose
natural policy we have thwarted, to make only its
Cabinet our tool and creature. It is not to Lord
Palmerston, in particular, that our observations
apply ; whether it was Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Fox,
Lord Bolingbroke himself (the most Gallican of Se-
cretaries), we should equally have deplored an ascen-
dancy which they were toolwise:to dream of venturing
upon. France is too great a country to be governed
from Downing-street. And we cannot help lament-
ing of General Cavaignac, that while the world was
looking for a Washington, he should have con-
descended to the part of an Espartero.