The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1868-11-26
A POLITICAL .ANAcHRONIsM.

An ASSOCIATION OF european repuDucans,
representing all nationalities, have commit
ted the melancholy anachronism of address
sing memorial to the "People and Congress
of the United States, praying for American
Intervention against the slave masters Of
Europe, in favor of the crushed or insurgent
peoples who admire and envy you, and can
only be saved by copying you" Such doc
ument in the time of Monroe, or of Jackson,
or of Polk, when popular sympathy and ma
tional policy in the United States were un-
mistakably on the side of the victims of usur-
pers and despots everywhere, would not have
been wholly out of season, and wholly out of
the line OF logical speculation. But as an
appeal to the power ascendent for some years
past in the United States it is piteously alb
surd. 1t is also grim but unconscious
satire; satire with double edge; and it is
difficult to say whether it has more piercing
sharpness for the republican petitioners or
for the republic, so-called, which they invoke.
In nothing does the cause of European repub-
licanism wear an aspect SO gloomy and unas-
surfing as in the inability of most of its leaders
to discover that Congress and the dominant
party in the United States have been doing
their utmost to establish, on the ruins of re-
publican liberty, centralized despotism as
remorseless and crushing as that of Russia.
That the men who have controlled the gov
eminent Of this country during eight years
past should have lavished adulation upon the
Russian car while they uttered no word and
gave no token of sympathy for Poland which
he was subjecting to the horrors of military ex-
ecution, and for the long and dreary procession
of political exiles, martyrs of liberty, whom
he condemned to the living death of Siberia,
was fact whose significance could not be
misconstrued by vigilant and sagacious friends
of free government in any part of the world.
fact of similar import, the indifference
bordering on positive antipathy exhibited
by Radical papers in the United States to-
wards the republican element of the recent
Spanish revolution, has been noted by the
principal journals of England and France.
Yet the European republicans cling to the
stupid belief that the Congress of the United
States burns with an inextinguishable desire
to establish the principles of free government
throughout the world. They are simply
blind not to see that by this same power the
principles of free government have been up
rooted from one half of the territory of the
United States. They prate about the great
principle of equality (Which stirred the
North against the South, one half of the re-
public against the other half, for the negroes"
But they are the stupidest charlatans that ever
roared for liberty, and faster bound the
tyrant's power, not to have learned that the
emancipation of three millions of black slaves
was not inspired by disinterested zeal for
their freedom, but that it was intended, and
has been used, as means of at once enslav-
ing eight millions of whites, and of ultimately
reducing to a similar condition every COM
munity within the sweep of an unlicensed
central power. Why, it is the very madness
of the moon to suppose that the men who
have been only intent upon forging
chains for white freemen in this country
would feel it bounden duty to undertake
the mission, to which they are called by the
address of the European republicans, of free
ing the white slaves of Europe. "The mas
tiers of the whites" says that address, care
not better masters for being kings and popes'
Which is truth as sad as indisputable. But
still more sad, and not less indisputable is it,
that the masters of whites are not better
masters for having been the treacherous guar
dams of liberty, and for having borrowed the
name and the insignia of a republic to play
the part of despots in. And to political
conspiracy practicing this sort of tyranny the
European republicans turn for succor. Let
us hope that the true friends of political pro-
gress in Europe will not always have cause to
despair of effectual manifestations of SYM
pathy on the part of the governing power in
the United States. But first the United States
must be restored to all the conditions of a
free country, and its government must be in
stinct with the spirit of a people in the actual
enjoyment of liberty, and filed with an I'M
conquerable resolve to maintain it.