The Sun.
London, England, 1861-01-10 00:00:00

should have been sent. there at all ? Here is a
great nation that not so very long since despatched
a couple of hundred thousand men into Nor' hern
Italy for the purpose of fighting a succession of
pitched battles in behalf of the very cause that that
nation has latterly been impeding so perversely in
Southern Italy—namely, through the presence of
those war vessels off Gaeta, under the command of
Admiral LE BABBLER DE TINAN. Never was anything
more outrageously inconsistent. No wonder can
it possibly be to any one, that a policy resulting in a
course so flagrantly tortuous and anomalous, should
be regarded far and wide, as it has been regarded,
as it is still regarded, with ineradicable suspicion !
No wonder that the old doubts as to the sincerity
of the professed Liberator of Italy should still keep
alive. Until a simpler, plainer, manlier, and in
every way more comprehensible policy than that
applied by the Government of France to the affairs
of Italy has been adopted, it is the merest farce and
the merest folly to talk of the ruler of France as
the Liberator of Italy—of Italy from the Alps to the
Adriatic—of Italy for the Italians throughout the
whole length and breadth of the Roman Peninsula.
Liberator of Lombardy NAPOLEON 111. may
assume to be and -certainly was. The victories of
Montebello, of Magenta, of Solferino attest it upon
the page of history in characters sufficiently
"resplen-
dent. But—Liberator of Italy ! The mere pre-
tentien sounds ludicrously. To " point the
moral"—alas! by nomeans to " adorn the tale"—of
the Italian war of Liberation, one has only to
remember the Imperial interview and subsequent
pacification at Villafranca. That startling compro-
mise 'that came as so egregious an entire climax
after the magnificent Milan Proclamation ! There it
was that that redoubtable champion of the Italians
not less conspicuously than the ideal of Fear, in
COLLINS'S Ode to the Passions—

"BACK RECOILED-11E X.NZNY NOT WIIT--

Ei AT THE SOUND HIMSELF HAD MADE 1"

Since when—the Italians (in whose cause France
under the guidance of NAPOLEON 111. had taken up
arms with such apparently chivalrous magnanimity)
the Italians (heartened to the combat by the tem-
porary co-operation of the French armies) were
abandoned to fight it out as best they could,
were left wholly and entirely to themselves. Nay,
not only was the aid of France withdrawn alto-
gether from the very cause that the French soldiers
had at the outset of the war so vigorously and
triumphantly championed, but eventually—when
the game seemed to have fallen too entirely into the
hands of GARIBALDI and VICTOR EMMANUEL—
when the soldiers of FRANCIS 11. of Naples had
been swept en masse from the Sicilian soil—when
Naples itself had been entered in triumph by the
Great Adventurer—when the fugitive King had
been driven to bay in the last corner of his lost
dominions, then—forsooth, France, of all the
Powers of Europe, France ! must interpose for
the prevention of the completion of the victories
won first of all separately, and then together
and in unison, by the Sardinians and the Gari-
balians ! The inconsistency of all which proceed-
ings, on the part of the Government of NAPOLEON
111., it requires not one word to demonstrate. The
facts speak for themselves. Either the French
ought never to have crossed the Ticino and
advanced upon Milan, and torn Lombardy from
Austria, and handed it over to Piedmont—or,
having done all this, the French Fleet, under
Admiral LE BARBIER DE TINAN, ought never to
have permitted the interruption of the consequent
and companion victories won in the South of
Italy by the Italians themselves—by appear-
' ing off the beleagured town of Gaeta.
Nothing whatever can reconcile those two
wholly incongruous proceedings. They are antago-
nistic in principle—they are as diametrically op-
posed to each other, as black is opposed to white,
as night to day, as light to darkness.
And beholding these anomalous issues of the French
poliey in Italy, the other nations of Europe who
are looking on at the progress of these events as
dispassionate, but at the same time as profoundly
interested spectators, cannot but put their own con-
struction upon the spectacle. It cannot but be
remembered by them, for instance, that even
when the power of the Government at Turin
had been enhanced merely by the absorption
into the expanding Kingdom of Northern
Italy, of Lombardy, of Parma, of Modena,
and -of Tuscany, that even then France
had become so jealous of the neighbour she herself
had helped to this early development, that Savoy
and Nice were extorted, were taken from Piedmont
and added to France, by way of compensation !
Again—it cannot but be borne also in vivid recollec-
tion, that there was, and is still, the EMPEROR'S
cousin, the Prince NAPOLEON, wholly unprovided
for ! That most uncomfortable of imperial mortals
—A Prince At Large! This same Prince NAPO-
LEON, cousin of the Emperor NAPOLEON, having,
moreover, had the mortification of passing
through the war of 1859 rather under a cloud,
to say the least of it, as the subject of a
somewhat painful and partially ludicrous disap-
pointment!! For during the brilliant campaign
conducted by his cousin, the EMPEROR—while
GARIBALDI with a mere handful of men was
winning glory to himself by his: feats of arms
in the far north of Lombardy (feats of arms
disingenuously unnoticed by the Imperial Com-
mander-in-Chief)—was not Prince NAPOLEON
(don't we recollect the ridiculous incident ?) dawdling
slowly up from the direction of Leghorn and
Florence, just in time to be too late ! When the
EMPERORS had met in that little roadside-house
at Villafranca, and had chatted together so agree-
ably across the green baize table, FRANCIS JOSEPH
pulling the flowers to pieces, and NAPOLEON 111.
smoking his cigarettes, while they conversed !
These things are not forgotten. The remem-
brance of them helps to throw a light upon the
recent position of things off Gaeta. As also
by the way does the remembrance of yet another
of the cousins of the reigning Emperor of the
FRENCH—meaning that Prince Joienim MURAT,
who, for want of something else to do (for he, too,
is another specimen of that most uncomfortable of
mortals A Prince At Large) has but just now
gone to Berlin to condole with, and felicitate,
the new King of PRUSSIA that Prince
JOACHIM MURAT who may not unreasonably
be presumed to have a covetous eye askance
at the Kingdom of Naples, to the detriment
(if he could but accomplish his wishes !) of the
hopes and the ambition in that direction of the
" King of Italy," VICTOR EMMANUEL Il Re
Galantuomo Ah, there are many tempting
morsels there in that fair land of Italy ! And
NAPOLEON 111. has tasted the sweets of annexation
in Savoy and Nice. And he has his army firmly
established there, in the central point of all, in the
Eternal City itself. And Prince MURAT has (as
we have said) an eye to Naples. And Prince
NAPOLEON has his eye to Tuscany. And so, among
other kindred reasons, has it come to pass that the
French fleet has been loitering all this while off
Gaeta !

Lessons to Legislators are the order of the day.
First, Messrs. MONCRIEFF and BLACK had theirs
at Edinburgh, Which they did not take very
meekly at the time, and since then a pamphlet in