Francs.

Colonist, Issue 77, 16 July 1858, Page 4

Francs.

JOSEPH MAZZLNI TO LpUIS NAPOLEON. A powerfully written letter from the pen of Mazzini, has been addressed to the Emperor of the French. Copious extracts have appeared -in most of the London papers. We print underneath some of the most withering passages. He says:— The " Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King " —the Pretender, President, and Usurped—are doomed. The spell is broken. The conscience of mankind is . aroused: it gazes sternly on you ; it confronts yon ; it sifts your acts and calls to account your promises. From this moment your fate .is sealed. The conscience of mankind will soon detect that you are nothino* but a living Lie; an abortive rehearsal of a Past long and for ever gone by; a pale shadow, having glided out from the grave of St. Helena; uncrowned by the undying glory and the fatal mission of the Mighty one resting there; a sham power, able to deny, dissolve, and crush for a while, unable to assert, to organise, to edify something which the future can take shelter in. ' Mankind wants realities, not phantoms ; evolutions ofthe educational principle which God has ordained to be its life-law, not mere parentless, arbitrary, abnormal facts of one hour. At such, it looks, a short while, in wonder,' and passes by, I bidding the untoward apparition back to its grave. And you, Sir, are hastening there. You promised, when you unlawfully conquered "power, and as an atonement for its origin, that you would rule restless, perturbed, perturbing France to peace. Is imprisoning, gagging, transporting, ruling f Is the gendarmea teacher? Is the spy an apo3tle of morality and mutual trust ? Y rou told the French uneducated peasant that a new era was, with your Empire, dawning for him, and that the burdens under which he groans would all one by one disappear. Has any disappeared ? Can you point out a single amelioration to his fate, and a single element of taxation removed ? Can you explain how it is that the peasant is now enlisting in the Marianne f Can you deny that the absorption of the funds, once naturally devoted to the agricultural element, into'the channels of industrial speculation, opened by you, has deprived the. laborer of the possibility of finding advances for the purchase of work implements and the improvement ofthe land ? You allured the misguided working-man by declaring that you would be Empermr dv Peuple, a sort of re-modelled Henry the Fourth, and procure to him perennial work, high wages, and la poule au pot. Is not la poule au pot somewhat dear just now in France? Is not house-rent, are not some of the first necessities of life, still dearer ? Yoa have opened new streets; drawn, for your strategic purposes, new lines of communication; destroyed and rebuilt. But is the bulk of the working' classes belonging to the building branch benefitted ? Can you overturn Paris and the main provincial towns, indefinitely, for the sake of creating to the proletaire a source of work and earnings ? Can you ever dream of makingof such a factious temporary remedy, a substitute for regular, normally progressing, and required production? Is the demand for production now in a satisfactory state? Are not three-fifths of the cabinet-makers, of the carpenters, of the mechanicians, out of employment now in Paris? You whispered to the easily-frightened, easilyfascinated bourgeoisie fantastic dreams, hopes of a redoubled industrial activity, new sources of profits, el dorados of stimulated exportation and international intercourse. Where are they? Stagnation hovers upon French productive life; orders to commerce are diminishing; capital is beginning to retreat. You have, like the barbarian, cut the tree to pluck the fruit. You have artificially over-stimulated wild, immoral, all-promising, and never-keeping speculation; you have, hy self-puffing, gigantic-swollen schemes, attracted the economies of the small capitalists, from the four, corners of France to Paris, and deviated them from the only true permanent sources of national wealth, agriculture, trade, and industry. These economies have been engulplied and disappeared into the hands of some dozens of leading speculators ; they have been squandered in boundless unproductive luxuries; or they are quietly and prudently—l might quote members of your family—transferred to safe foreign countries. The half of the schemes have sunk into oblivious nonentity. Some of their inventors are travelling, as a precautionary measure, a V etranger. You find yourself before a dissatisfied bourgeoisie, with all normal resources dried up, with the incubu3 of some five hundred millions of francs spent, throughout the principal towns of France, in unproductive public works, with a deficit of three hundred millions visible in your last budget, with an extensively indebted ville de .Paris, with no remedy to propose except a new loan of one hundred and sixty millions, to be opened—not in your name, it would not succeed—but in the name of the town council itself, and, to front the interest-bur r den, a widening of barriers, therefore of the haled octroi, to the enciente of the outward fortifications. The. remedy will weigh heavy on the working class and embitter against you the hitherto devoted banlieue. Your artificial contrivances are at an end; henceforth everything you do to front the financial difficult of your position will mark a step on the fatal descent. You have hitherto lived on an indefinite series of loans, on credit; but where is your guarantee for prolonged credit ? Rome and Napoleon were ransacking a world; you have only Ftance to ransack. Their armies lived on conquest; yours cannot. You may dream of conquest; you cannot, do not dare to venture on it. The Roman Dictators and your .uncle, were leading the conquering armies; however fond of gilt parade uniforms, I doubt your being able to lead a few combined battalions.

You boasted to Europe, only a short while ago, that the heart of France was yours, haiKng you as her saviour, calm,

happy, undisturbed. A few months have elapsed, a crash has been heard in the Rue Lepelliter; and through your wild, alarming, repressive measures, through your half-threatening, half-imploring appeals to Europe, through your military division of the country, with a sabre at the top of the Interieur, you declare now, after seven years of unlimited . sway, with an overwhelming concentrated army, with the national ranks cleared of all the dreaded leading men, that you cannot live and rule, unless France is converted into a huge bastile, and Europe into a wide imperial policeoffice. Crushed as it may be, France -cannot be made into one bastile: Europe will not be converted for your sake into a branch office of your Corsican police. Therefore, sir, resign yourself and sink. Your empire has proved a lie, and lies are there only to be extinguished. You have turned the economical life of France into a, speculation; its religious life into a Catholic hypocrisy; its political life into a despotic negation of right and freedom; its social life into a spy and gendarme concern; its intellectual life into a blank. Yours, sir, is not a government —a government is a sacred thing ; it implies the soul of a free nation represented, improved by the best and ablest; yours is the unholy momentary fact of an individual, a small nucleus of adventurers, a few priests, and a Prsetorian army, suppressing pro tempore soul, virtue, and intellect in their, own country. And the adventurers are now investing the. results, of their plunder in American "Bonds or British Consols; the priests are outruling you, and ready to forsake you at your first hesitation on their retrograde career; the Prakorians are hurrying to the Prefecture to learn there what the telegraphic thermometer states about Paris before putting down the Chalons outbreak. Sad symptoms these. Do you not feel the ground shaking ominously under your feet ? Yes, the Empire has proved a lie. You shaped it, Sir, to your own image. No man, during the past half century, has lied in Europe, Talleyrand excepted, as much as you have; and that is the secret of your temporary power. In this unsettled sceptical age of ours, lies are. easily believed in; only they do not endure. . . . And you hoped tjiat on such a systematic lie, on such an edifice of mire and blood, a dynasty would be raised! You believed that the transient, ephemeral idolatry of all actually ruling powers to success, would prevail against the Cain's mark which God and Justice have branded on your brow !

Sir, there is something above success; God: something stronger than fact; Right: something higher and more enduring than idolatry; Time. Can you dethrone God ? Can you cancel Right ? Can you abolish Time? For, whilst there is God in heaven, the notion of right in the heart oftnan, and time allowed, no real or sham Emperor, no genius-endowed Uncle, or satanically clever Nephew, is allowed to substitute, in the nineteenth century, his own selfishness tcr.the providential marching on of mankind; no individual, however supported by priests and bayonets^ is allowed to step forward and say: lam the uncontrollable, irresponsible mind of thirty-five millions of men, without his being doomed to fall, an example to masters, a deep teaching to subjects. After the crossing of the Rubicon, the avenging dagger of Brutus; after the Tuilleries, St. Helena; and between the two, a short, restless, hateful, remorseful career; and after the two, History, the universal conscience of mankind, which brands the tyrant for ever. It is the law: stern, unconquerable, unavoidable. You have speculated on vice and weakness; reckoned on terror and cowardice; fathomed deep, with the piercing eye of the Dissolving One, the crust of corruption which the materialism of the first empire, fifteen years of Jesuitical monarchial opposition, egotism enthroned during the reign of Louis Philippe, and the anarchial dreams of sectarian Socialism, have spread on the heart of your countrymen; and you have said to yourself: They are mine. You forgot that under the superficial alluvial layer was remaining unconquered, untouched, the noble solid parent earth of France, which gave growth to Joan of Arc and to the giant men of the Revolution. You forgot that Europe, even official, fact-worshipping, godless Europe, would bend before you only as long as the strength of the fact you seek to represent would peacefully and jprogressively increase, whilst it is more and more visibly contested and threatened. And you forgot that between you and materialist Europe stand men whom you can neither bend nor break, whose life is the embodiment of a principle at work, since Marathon, through the European race, arid who must prove in the end stronger than you, because they never have broken their oaths, and they, do not fight like you, for selfish and atheislical purposes. We, the. men of Right and Freedom, have conquered the Inquisition arid the Great Empire; depend upon it, Sir, we shall conquer you. We should have conquered you already had it not been for England. ... It is not mine to' discuss with what you urge England to do concerning the exiles. lam an exile and your enemy. I cannot stoop to argue with a tyrannical power about what I conceive to be my right and my duty $ I overthrow it if I can. My I words might be misinterpreted as a pleadI ing for ourselves, and I shrink from that | possibility. Any law that may be enacted affecting our position is perfectly indifferent to me; just, I accept it; unjust, I pledge myself to violate it, whatever the results may be. Ours is a state of war. We have not chosen it; it has been, it is still forced upon us. Tyranny has robbed us of our couritry; we have none; we have no power protecting us, no passport, no law to which we can appeal, no justice on earth except when we ourselves can enforce it. Throughout all the Continent we are, merely because we are republicans, or upholders of our national flags, declared " suspects," and as such imprisoned, deprived of any possibility of secure settlement, persecuted, treated as

pariahs, hunted as helots. I accept, _ for my part, the consequence of my position, and'l hay an exile—no account to give of my opinions, or of my doings to a man, now a persecuting Emperor, once an exile. But, doubtless, any British-born subject has a right to answer your complaints and claims, in something like the following terms: — " You have been, sir, an exile in England ; from this land you incessantly plotted against a constitutional king, to whom you pledged your honor to conspire no more; and you finally organized an armed descent on the shores of France. ■ We took no notice of it; why should we alter now our laws for the sake of watching over and persecuting meu who are in their turn attempting to overthrow their despotic power? Why should we, for your sake, desert the old traditions of an individual liberty, which has proved a blessing to our land by enacting measures implying, if they are to be enforced at all, a wholesale system of espionage, secret police doings, and arbitrary interpretations? Why should we abandon our honest, clear, precise method of legal definitions, and resort to those vague formulas of excitation and instigation, which gave rise in your own country to process de tendance, so often branded by you when you were still an uncrowned conspirator ? Why should we, in fact, undertake to protect you at all? And how is it that you want protection ? Does our Queen ask you for help against plotters and murderers ? You chose to put yourself above the law—out of the law—is that a reason for England to legislate for you? You rose to power on corpses: can we prevent the living recollection of the victims to summon forth avengers? You sent, you still send, thousands of untried men to. linger and die in the swamps of Cayenne. Can we eradicate hatred and its consequences from the hearts of their friends and relations? You have chosen to suppress liberty in all its forms—Press, meetings, associations, speaking; you have hermetically closed all safety-valves to the powerful breath of a nation peculiarly fond of external life; we are to bid the compressed power not to burst out through some unforseen, irregular outlet. You, a republican, still sent an army to bombard, enslave, kill, crush republican Rome ; that army of unlawful invaders is still there.Can we suppress Roman revenge? Are we to turn our free island into a police office for the sake of insuring the days of all men who chose to make themselves tyrants, for the King of Naples, for the Pope, for the Czar, you, or Soulouque? The dagger never gleams when the vote can speak out the thought of the man; grenades are never thrown at royal or presidential carriages in England, in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Piedmont, in America. We have no demands for anti-conspiracy bills from these countries; we have from you. Does it not clearly shew that * something is rotten in the state' of France ? And are we to legislate, at your bidding, for the sake of keeping up ' rottenness V The plotters, you say, are living in England; the avengers como to you from England. You send them here.. Where else can they live? Whence else can they start ? Every year, every six months, your gendarmes convey to us, par etapes, all the disaffected, or those believed to be so. Can we undertake to organise a close, secret watching, an espionage, round each of them? Can we prevent some from retracing, with whatever intentions, their steps to France? Are we to be answerable Nif Kelch or Deron, supposing all that you state in your pamphlet to be true, find their way to Paris, answerable because Mazzini chooses to cross now and then your guarded, spied, camp-like, organised France? You have now three millions of francs, two more than ynder Louis Philippe, openly allotted to espionage. We have none. Cannot you guard yourself without harassing, calumniating, and threatening your peaceful, unconcerned neighbours? You quote apologies of tyrannicide printed in England. What of that! Are we to eliminate from our schools the old history of Rome and Greece? To suppress the translations of Schiller's •" William Tell ?" To issue a warrant against any re-edition of .Milton ? The Press is free in our country. It is not in France. You keep under your thraldom all manifestations of.the mind of your nation. But we do not ask you to suppress the apology ofthe murder of the Hugenots, or the reprinting of your uncle's legacy to Cantillon/ Depend upon it, Sir, tyrannicide is the offspring, not of a few theoretic pages," but of the hateful fact of tyranny. Suppress that, you will have suppressed the danger against which you seek in vain for a help abroad." '*' * ■■*~' *

- Such, Sir, is the answer which England has virtually given, and will always give, I trust, by the voice of her people, to your illiberal, unwarrantable demands. Through these ' demands, meanwhile, and through the indirect threatenings with which you coupled them, you have descended one step more on your down-falling career. You have aroused the old independent Saxon blood within the hearts of millions. You have unveiled the shameful price which you would fain set on a barren, when not a fatal alliance. You have once more awakened the hitherto dormant- sense of self-dignity in the conscience of men, and given rise to a resistance which will soon become an European one. You have caused the only prestige which still hovered around you—the approval and friendship of a free people—to vanish. You stand now, Sir, whatever self-mouthed, self-dis-guising diplomacy may talk, alone in Europe. The fulness of time approaches ; the imperial tide is fast and visibly rolling back. You do feel it.

When Gsesar, who, believing that there were Romans no more, had effaced the name ofthe republic, saw, by the flash of a shining dagger, that there was one still in existence, he wrapped himself in his cloak, bent his head to fate, and died in silence. For the sake of the name yo* bear, do like Csesar.

Bend your head before the "invisible dagger" of public opinion, with which aroused France and Europe are dooming to perdition your usurped power,, and die like Orsini, collected and resigned. , ... '