The Sun.
London, England, 1856-09-03 00:00:00

THE SICILIAN MANIFESTO.

NAPLES, Aug. 28.—The following address has
been issued by the Sicilians to the Neapolitans
ECHE SICILIANS TO THEIR BROTHERS OF NAPLES.

In this solemn moment—when, bound to the same
yoke, the iron cowardly hand of the common executioner
weighs upon us, opening old wounds and deriding us—
let us leek one another steadfastly in the face, brothers,
and with the sublime truthfulness of free men purified
by martyrdom, le. us confess in the sight of Europe the
mutual wounds whence our slavery has sprung, in order
to destroy it for ever ; let us likewise unveil the sanc-
tuary of our hopes, fruit of a long experience, of detected
illusions and misfortunes, and of a profound knowledge
of the abject, calculating, and perjured genius of our
tyrants. We people of Sicily have been for many cen-
turies divided among ourselves, from the days of the
divine vengeance of the Vespers, to the immortal year
which initiated the Italian resurrection. Messina and
Palermo surveyed one another eagerly and suspiciously,
envying one another the miserable display of the
lascivious pomp of despotism ; but as in the time of the
Vespers, and iu 1848, Palermo first rose and conqUered,
Messina redeemed the island once by offering herself a
terrible holocaust to the brutal fury of the Angiovin,
and, in the la3t fatal disasters, by immolating herself a
spontaneous and silent victim. If she did not save
liberty, she sanctified the name of Sicily by her mar-
tyrdom. Europe now knows that one harmonious
thought dominates the whole island, which palpitates as
with one heart, for deeds sealed with blood are indelible
and sacred. Up to this time, however, Europe has not
the same faith in the peoples of Naples and of Sicily ;
and what is worse, in the very midst of ourselves,
amongst the deluded and the ignorant, cowers a gloomy
suspicion, which is awakened and kept alive by the
poisoned breath of our oppressors. Unfortunately the
one people have long permitted themselves to be made
the instrument of death to the other, and the thought-
less multitude look upon and curse the axe which
flashes and is bathed with blood, and not the band of
the unjust judge who signs without seeing the homi-
cidal sentence. Our only real executioners Fe all these
from Charles of Anjou to Ferdinand 11. • Forgetting
our mutual wrongs, brothers, under the various domi-
nations which have urged us on to the slaughter of one
another, and to uniform slavery, it is well to call to
mind the faults committed by us under the dynasty of the
Bourbons, that they may never again be renewed. This
ingenuous confession, made with a loud voice, with our
hands in yours, bound by the same chain along which
our hearts transmit the electric flame of love, of hope
and of vengeance, will produce infamy and extermina-
tion to the monster who crushes us, to us the redemp-
tion of repentance. Our fathers sinned when they re-
ceived Ferdinand 111. and Caroline of Austria flying
from Naples laden with your curses, with open arras and
joyous cries of mad exultation. Unhappy men, they
did not know that the experience of misfortune, if it
chasteus the people, makes the tyrant worse, and re-
doubles with his scar the fury of his crimes ; hence
every sign of life in the people, even though it be of
the joy of adulatioa, awakens in them a thirst for
blood. Accustomed to exult in the contemplation of
man as a lifeless body, after having galvanised him,
they throw themselves upon him with a dagger, to
transfix .a senseless moving piece of mechanism ; and
doubly did they sin when followed by the blood they
had shed they received them a second time on the island,
whilst the monsters had left behind them the body of
Carracciolo dangling from the yardarm, the heads of
Cerillo and Pagano, consecrated by geniuis and grey hair',
hanging by a rope like the skulls of assassins, and whilst
they dragged along with them the beautiful person of
San Felice in order to expose it on a scaffold whilst he
murmured the names of country and •f love. But equal
to the crime was the terrible repentance ; too quickly
those deluded men discovered that the touch of tyrants
is consuming, in the lascivious ambition of Caroline and
in the coarse superstitions and cowardly nature of the
beastly husband; the fruits of hospitality awarded to
them were a fratricidal war, the destruction of liberty,
the sanctification of espionage and assassination, and
shame that Ferdinand 11., the parricide, was born at
Palermo. In 1820, when Sicily was panting to re-
lease herself from the chains of the Bourbon 'dynasty,
and the plains of Palermo were hot with brothers'
blood, liberty was entrusted by you to the oath of
au impious King, who returned surrounded by
Croats, to break his vows on the altar of a ruined
country, and to join together Naples and Sicily in th
common shame of the same slavery. Taught by fatal
experience, it is well known to you that in 1848 Sicily,
anticipating the movements of Naples, offered herself a
voluntary victim to the ferocious and implacable anger
of the tyrant, and to the cunning arts of his sly and fox-
like mind. Nevertheless, she confronted the martyrdom,
hoping that the savage destroyer of Calabria, of Syra-
cuse, and of Catania, the executioner of the brothers
Bandiers, livid still with the recent crimes consummated
in Messina and in Reggio, could not assume the mask
of liberty without branding his face, and without caus-
ing the world to shudder at the sacrilege. But you,
brothers—and this is your error—you trusted rather in
the grandson of a perjured king, who inherited even the
infamy of his name in the man who offered you an omi-
eons charter as the profaned gospel, rather than in your
brothers, who were the first to raise the tricolored
flag, the emblem of Italian nationality, who had bathed
in their blood, crying out, in the agony of their
heart, " That man, 0 brothers, dissevers us ; here is on
hand ; but first drive away the phantom which betrays
you." If, on the 29th of January, instead of being re-
ceived by you with acclamation s as the Kingßenefactor, he
had been stigmatised as the King Judas, we should not
have wept together, either on the 15th of May over
Naples burned and stormed, or over the sacred ashes of
Messina and Catania, or over Italy contaminated and
sold by him. The bandage has now fallen. For the
idols of clay, under the forms of Pins IX., of Ferdi-
nand 11., of Leopold of Lorraine, now is substituted the
holy image of Italy. The satellites of our oppressors,
whether born in Sicily, in Naples, or in Lombardy, are
our common enemies. Whoever shall rise first shall
run to the assistance of his fallen brother, to raise him,
and unite himself with him, in order to combat together
the execrated stranger. When our country shall be
liberated from every tyrant, then, but then only, under
the standard of liberty, we will discuss, brothers, with
love the conditions of common family.

AT LAST !—On Monday, by command of Colonel Lord
Enfield, the volunteers to the 2d Middlesex, or Edmon-
ton Rifle Militia, were summoned to muatur for training
at Barnet on the 9th. All who absent themselves are
to be treated as deserters.