London.—I came here
yesterday for the levee to-day. I found a letter from Naples from Lady Holland
written before the fall of Gaeta, giving a satisfactory account of the state of
affairs there. They are beginning public works and various improvements to the
town.
From Paris they
write that the King of Naples excites the warmest interest there in all
classes, and that the army and navy are all in his favour, and he is looked
upon as ‘le digne petit fils de Henri IV.,’ and it is fervently hoped that
Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi may go together to the infernal regions—so
differently do people look on things on opposite sides of the Channel.
The Italian
Parliament was opened by Victor Emmanuel in person on Monday. His speech was
very adroit, and in
some degree reassuring to the friends of peace.
The American
Secession seems to be almost accomplished, and any compromise to be more and
more hopeless. A letter received from Fanny Kemble a short time ago (January
17) says:
I think the
secesssion of the Southern States sooner or later inevitable, and I devoutly
hope that the cowards on all sides will not be able to poultice up the
festering sore which must break out again, and will only have gangrened the
whole body of this nation still deeper. Matters have gone so far with South
Carolina, that she has seceded-firing upon United States vessels entering
Charlestown Harbour is a very pretty intimation of their animus, and it is,
moreover, the avowed object of the Southern politicians to embroil some portion
of the Slave States so thoroughly with the Federal Government, that all
compromise shall be impossible, and that the Southern States least inclined to
secede (and there are many, all the border ones, whose interest is decidedly
opposed to secession), shall be compelled, as a point of honour, to throw in
their lot with the seceders against the North. The election of Lincoln is
really and truly a mere pretext; the match that has fired the train long ago
prepared for exploding. When I first came to this country, it was convulsed
with the threatened secession of South Carolina on the tariff question. Old
Andrew Jackson was President then, and compelled her to adhere to her
allegiance; but in a letter to a friend he wrote that the South was bent upon a
separation, and sooner or later would accomplish it upon one pretext or
another; he even foretold it would be on that of the slavery question.
‘The fact is, the
Southern States see and feel very bitterly the immense preponderance of wealth,
activity, industry, intelligence, and prosperity of the North. They neither see
nor believe what is the truth, that slavery, and nothing else, is the cause of
their inferiority in all these particulars, and are now acting upon the insane
belief that separation from the bond (which alone preserves them in their
present state of comparative safety and prosperity) of the Union will turn the
scale of national importance in their favour. Meantime they are rushing into an
abyss of danger and difficulty—they are on the very verge of civil war. All
good men throughout the country look with grief and horror upon the mad career
on which they are entering. In the North, many would give up almost everything
to avert the horrors of bloodshed on the land, by the hands of Americans
fighting against each other. In the South, a majority would willingly endure
anything rather than such a result, but they are panic-stricken under a fierce
and inexorable reign of terror by which the infatuated men bent upon dividing
the country compel them to join the Southern movement. It is hideous and
piteous to see the gulf of ruin dug by their own folly and wickedness under the
towering fabric of that material prosperity with which, even as it were
yesterday, they amazed the world! For my own part, I believe it is not only
inevitable, but desirable, that the South should separate from the North.
Slave-holding produces a peculiar character which has nothing in common with a
Christian republic founded by Englishmen of the eighteenth century.
The Southerners are
fond of calling themselves the Chivalry of the South, and verily they are as
ignorant, insolent, barbarous, and brutal as any ironclad robbers of the middle
ages. They are, in fact, a remnant of feudalism and barbarism, maintaining
itself with infinite difficulty by the side of the talent and most powerful
development of commercial civilisation. I believe the fellowship to be
henceforth impossible; I hope to God it will prove so, for then the Slave
States will hasten down into a state of social and political degradation, such
that the whole population will abandon them; they will become a wilderness of
fertile land, peopled with black savages; the northern men will then reconquer
them, and for ever abolish slavery on the continent! This is my theory.'
SOURCE: Alice
Countess of Stratford, Leaves from the
Diary of Henry Greville: 1857-1861, p. 350-3
