The Sun.
London, England, 1859-07-23 00:00:00

has come to such an unexpected end was not of the
Emperor's making; it had his hearty wishes for
success, and he is evidently anxious to go into a
Congress to rescue the Emperor Napoleon from the
innumerable difficulties and dangers which a war
begun and a peace concluded in defiance of the en-
lightened opinion of England and France and Italy
and Germany have brought upon him. Lord Pal-
merston may follow out his objects, but let him not
expect that we shall promote their attainment by
a wilful mystification of facts, or that the people
which once hurled him from office becausr; he con-
sulted the wishes of the Emperor Napoleon rather •
than the dignity of his couutry, will pr-rmit him tc
pledge his name to the fulfilment of tie stipulation: ;
made at Villafranca, or send 1,00, John Russell at ;
a plenipotentiary to repeat at 'Zurich his vagaries ;
at Vienna.

Another article refers to the same subject au
follows

111•110 h of the advice that one hears lavished (n
all silks is so totally irrespective of its object, an. d
to surely for the convenience of the giver, or an r-
body but the person most concerned, that one es .n

only class it with the common forms of impreca-
tion. One understands what a man means whet',
with various Saxon expletives, he recommends any -
body to be gone anywhere or nowhere, to cease to
exist, and be forgotten. The adviser in this cage
does not profess to care for anybody or anything
but himself and his own immediate occupation m:
amusement. Of course, he wishes you to hang'
yourself, or dispose of yourself in any way you.
please, so as you never stand in his way again or
interfere with his pleasure. If wishes of this sort
_ _

had their way, halt the world would disappear be-
fore to-night, and half the remainder to-morrow.
We really cannot place under any other category
the frequently-expressed wish that we would say
nothing about Napoleon 111. and France and their
doings. It is our vocation and our very being ',to
speak truly and freely about all public characters

and affairs-. If we cannot follow our vocation, we

cease to be altogether. Were we to say that vie
cannot imagine a newspaper containing no person al
reflection whatever, we should stand corrected, For
some foreign journals lie before us, and we see what
we might come to. But we are a Frf2e Press, which
is' about as distinct a thing from Continent:ll
journalism as a living man is from a skeleton, or
a forest from a timber-yard. The day may clone
when Mr. Bright, surrounded by the carcases of
the London press, permitted to appear under an
imperial imprimatur, will deliver himself with his
own accustomed energy P.nd freedom' against the,
British Court and all the old Estates of this realm.
He will affront nobody whose anger can do him any
harm, and will certainly please those whom it is de-
sirable to propitiate. But the moral aspect of political
affairs will be a thing of the past. Convenient abuse
will then be the order of the day. The unfortunates
journalist guilty of an opinion not founded on the
justest calculation of prompt advantage, or safety,
will hear his doom pronounced by a cautious legis-
lator, who can equally ascribe the vilest motives to
a fellow Englishman and the purest to a foreign
autocrat. Censure will then be reserved for its rinly
legitimate objects,—the honest or the weak ; and,
when Emperors and legions have done their fell
work, the thunder-cloud of pent-up indignation will
burst on the head of some poor moralist who has
ventured to reproduce some trite old truism about
wrongful and unprofitable wars.
If we have said what is not true, that is another
question ; but if our crime is that we have some-
times said that which may hurt the feelings of an
Emperor or his soldiers, then we beg to state bur
case. We existed before either Napoleon 111. or
Napoleon I. We are as much an essential insti-
tution of this country as they of theirs. We are
precisely what we were not only when Louis
Napoleon lodged in St. James's, but when his
uncle was a sub-officer of artillery. We are what
we were before either Mr. Bright or Lord John
Russell was born. The era which gave France
its Revolution gave England its Free Press. •
That Press has preserved its freedom by act-
ing up to itself, and speaking the truth, to
the best of its ability and judgment, of every- ,
thingland everybody. No one can over-estimate
its weight as the auxiliary and mouthpiece of a
free Legislature and open justice. But here it I
exists, one of the chief forces of the country,
now also a heritage from our forefathers, to be
bequeathed to our children. The Emperor of the'
French has had it before his eyes, as one of the
great facts of European politics, before he ever fired
a gun, made a spech, or solicited a suffrage. What
good or what harm we have done him is a matter
beyond calculation or conjecture ; but he is novr,
as we are assured, a cordial,ally, and, as all feel, a
powerful neighbour. We are spending, Mr. Glad'.
stone tells us, eight millions a-year more than usual
in our armaments, against a certain contingener
which, there is no disguising it, is the possibility
of either an invasion by our ally or some outrage 00
his part beyond all endurance. Our words hose
certainly not weakened the French Emperor,
either for good or for evil. He can still make a
terrible war and a magnanimous peace. He eel
still punish and propitiate one great neighbour and
be immediately formidable to another. If there le
one point on which we may venture to expresses
personal opinion, it is that Napoleon 111. is a mall
of singularly fixed ideas and unalterable Ben*
ments. This is the opinion of his friends, and the
very boast of his life. But Mr. Bright affects t°, •
believe that he is as irritable as himself, and, that
we, by occasional criticisms of his conduct, hale
estranged his friendship and imperilled the alliance'
We take this to be a pure imagination, founded on
a very superficial knowledge of facts and a mot
less respectful opinion of Napoleon 111. than ow'
Own.
Mr. Bright has undertaken a client who carte
,i
little for his advocacy. The Emperor knows us and
our country too well to underrate that love al ,
truth and that plain speaking which are to be
found nowhere else. In proof of this we can
adduce a recent and most creditable
71example:
Much wiser than the people about him, he saw t!„":
interest which he, his army, and France had ill
authentic and impartial history of the war ;
he therefore approved the presence of our corre-:
spondent with the French army in Italy. Fraa,_eo
has to thank the Emperor, rather than his advised
that a scientific soldier has described to the wort
some of the most brilliant exploits of the Free°it
00
army, its admirable organisation, its impett
spirit, and the cool courage and good general-sr
of the Emperor. The few French corresponden 0
who set out to describe the campaign went 110(
further than Alessandria, but the representative
this journal witnessed the first encounter at We'd
belle, the attack on Palestro, the bloody combate,,
Magenta, and Malegnano, and the crowning glo:,
of Solferino. France knows her own victorin
principally through his pen and through the jourt7,
which is described as her worst enemy. But h°?
has this alleged enmity been otherwise showt_
We clung to peace as long as peace was possibfi
and, indeed, when it was desperate, because, gre:t
as were the-wrongs of Italy, we had to set againh.
them the cost of a war, the sacrifices of wilt!:
would be terrible, the results uncertain.
desired that Austria should be induced, one Wel
or another, to ,quit the soil where national antic
e; cbuurtsewaendeouhldadnobtrosubti,
of unsheathing the sword. Wise'
a re.
dishonourPtresponsibilityhaethYhad onm ah deer
the Austrians were so infatuated as to cross °._a
Ticino it was clear that peace was impossible, ate
their utter expulsion across the Alps seemed
least prize of the now inevitable war. The .0;
peror himself proclaimed this—we accepted 1i
programme—" Italy shall be free from the Alpe,,e
the Adriatic ;" his march from the Ticino to tuf
Mincio was one unbroken triumph • the victory
eo
Solferino cost enough to ply for the indepen,detilhe,
of all Italy ; Venice was ready to yield ; an°,"bt
Great Quadrangle, attacked on, all sides, 71140,
soon have been reduced, when, on a sudden, 0,1,0
out even consulting his ally in the next tent, 110
Emperor concludes a peace which leaves Aust'ag
still supreme in Italy. We may not yet kilo/ 011
that weighed upon him, but we cannot forget
we had said at his own instigation only a men be
before. We share the regret of all Italy, of 0g
French army, and of France herself, that, hosna
paid the price most lavishly both in blood ace,
treasure, he did not win all Italy to independeff
He feels this regret himself so strongly that 070
day he explains and apologises. Europe, he teo
the Papal Nuncio, was in general so unjust to
at the beginning of the war that he was haPP/ta
conclude peace as soon as the honour and inte: foil
of France were satisfied. Here alone in the /3,1'701
Parliament it is held all but treason to feel vial
express the regret that every party to the the
avows to the whole world. But is it true than
Emperor himself cares for our criticism ? flog)
should he ? Napoleon 111. is the foremost -00
of his time ; the most prominent actor upon no
great stage of the world. He likes prasse',oo
doubt ; but he takes his chance of blame. oci
one thing he would not like is to be unnoticed, 00
that is the treatment prescribed for him 11„,•00
Parliamentary censors. He can shut out the -11/.0,50
from all France whenever be likes,—his under,
sometimes do so; but he as often overrules t, aotsrthes'
He knows better than his officious servants, elbotls
here or at Paris, that we are the friend Of
eOtP
nations. 'We deplore our own immense arinaol 1,01
but they are as nothing compared with those scboco
the Emperor declares to be itone at all. -We o
b e
ftli
reason to protest against his estimate of a Pea
security. It compels on us no small part of t
enso
conveniences of' war; we suffer, and, with tb oar
of our tongues and pens, it is impossible not 0.,000
plain of a burden which weighs heavily
France as well as upon England.