From the Examiner. 2 Dec.
M. KOSSUTH ON THE WAR.

at least seem to be tolerably certain. If we are to appeal to nationalities and arouse populations, a continual cordial alliance with the M. KOSSUTH has made certainly a power-present government of France is scarcely to ful and telling speech upon the war. We be hoped for, and the alliance of such a govshould have been greatly surprised if he had ernment as that of Austria is certainly unatnot. No man possesses so many advantages, tainable. It is easy to say, Set aside such or occupies so independent an attitude, for alliances as unworthy, set at nought the decriticism. Like the Irishman at the fair, he mands and the prejudices of all powers and has but to hit all around him. He has no one governments that are despotic. Such powers, to conciliate or respect. He need not fear to however, being essentially military, and comdiscourage a general in command by too se-pelled to have some hand in what is going on vere disparagement, or to shake a minister in if they would in any degree maintain respect power by too rudely exposing his policy. No and influence, must ultimately be against us, such difficulties or obstacles stand in M. Kos- if they are not with us; and we best provide suth's way. It is pretty clear to most people against the former contingency by sacrificing that our great hope of success in humbling no fair means of honestly averting it. WithRussia consists in firmly maintaining our close out scruple we have all along freely blamed alliance with France, and that honestly to in this journal the policy adopted towards maintain and rivet this alliance we must as- Austria, because it has obstructed our own sent without cavil or reserve to the form of game and played hers exclusively; because government and conditions of rule under we have felt that in waiting for her promised which the French people themselves consent assistance we were wasting time, than which to live. But what is all that to M. Kossuth there is nothing so valuable in war; but we He may consent, in decency, to keep a civil have as little been disposed to undervalue the tongue in his head, but the tendency of his importance of her help, if it could be worthily reasoning is not to be suppressed or covered obtained, as to feel any undue dread of her up. If we have really at heart the great ob- antagonism, once openly declared. Our antiject of liberating Europe, he would have us cipations have unfortunately been hitherto straightway drop the alliance of Louis Napo- realized to the letter. Still we believe that leon, and hold the hand out to Ledru Rollin the country would not have been satisfied if as the preferable ruler of France. For this the attempt to conciliate Austria had not been we are not quite prepared. made. There was a belief prevalent (how Of course we know, and every one knows, produced it is not now the moment to inquire), that there were two ways of carrying on the that the young Emperor, notwithstanding his present war, the one by means of the regular ambiguous conduct towards the Hungarians, armies of the reigning dynasties, and the other had the soul of chivalry and honor. A sounder by encouraging and subsidizing revolutionary opinion is now entertained. The monarch outbreaks throughout Europe, especially in who has looked quietly on whilst such a contest those portions of it adjoining the Russian em- was raging in the Crimea, must be content pire, or already absorbed therein. There is a for the future to resign all claims to military great deal to be said, no doubt, in favor of this distinction. And Englishmen are beginning latter method of carrying on the war, and no one can say it with such eloquence and force as M. Kossuth; though even here, we think, he prefers to promulgate his views in the form that is least practical. While men of all par- Not sharing M. Kossuth's opinions generally, ties, for example, are beginning to regard the we should have the less hesitation in declaring question of the reconstruction of Poland as in what particular respect we can agree and one of sober and well-considered statesman- sympathize with him. We entertain, then, as ship, M. Kossuth does his best, by the con- matters stand, pretty much the same opinion ditions with which he would surround it, to as he does of the good faith of Austria and drive it back into the limbo of mere wild the high spirit of Prussia, and to about the revolutionary projects. The question is not same extent we are inclined to acquiesce in one of democracy, but of international law; the policy and the principles of MM. Buol and M. Kossuth will be doing the work of the and Manteuffel. If we would hesitate before Emperor Nicholas if he persuades the Euro- joining in any such attempt to arouse the pean public that it is the form of government down-trodden nationalities as would engage us to be established in Poland, and not its na- in honor not to lay down arms till we had tional existence, which is the point in dispute. completely revolutionized Europe, with yet But to whichever of the two modes of wag- more reluctance would we join the despotic ing war with Russia men may incline, the im- governments in any stipulations to abet the possibility of adopting both ways at once would tyrannical coercion of their subjects, or to

to ask themselves the question whether the chance of receiving, at some indefinite future period, Austrian assistance, is really worth the mighty price that we have paid for it.

assist in the more effectual oppression of half-day of heroic resistance. When we see the subdued and irreconciled provinces. What- Russian Court thus suddenly demanding peace ever may be her own straits or necessities, even upon a pretence of the conditions which England cannot now form one in any resus- it formerly spurned, we are less disposed to citated Holy Alliance, or join or become admit with M. Kossuth that the originators and party to any leagues, open or secret, entered commanders of the Crimean expedition have into by kings against peoples. We may not ill deserved of their country. The going to favor, nay, we may strongly discountenance, Sebastopol so late. and with insufficient forces, any attempted risings in Hungary or in Lom- may be justly open to criticism; but it is now bardy, as likely to be just now fatal to freedom clear that if anything important was to be itself; but we can make no fresh guarantee achieved in the campaign, it was this excluof Lombardy to the Emperor Ferdinand, or sively, for Omar Pasha was not prepared for of Hungary to the House of Hapsburg. Yet an advance on Bessarabia, neither had we the no less than this, it is reported, is what Austria cavalry, or the means of transport, necessary now demands as the price of continuing true to give other immediate direction to the war. to the Western alliance. Russia offered such The question, therefore, lay between the a guarantee, it is asserted, when through expedition to the Crimea, or continuing mere Count Orloff she made the demand of Aus-inactive victims of disease at Varna; and nottrian neutrality, and Austria can be satisfied withstanding our losses, no one will hesitate with no less a recompense for her alliance as to which was preferable. Apart from the with the Western powers. The demand is expediency of the enterprise, however, M. hardly credible excepting as a fresh proof of Kossuth criticises the conduct of it. He makes bad faith. For what British Minister in his senses could be expected to consent to a guarantee, which, once made known throughout England, would raise such a storm both in and out of Parliament that there is no conceivable administration which would not at once founder amidst its violence?

it a reproach to Marshal St. Arnaud and Lord Raglan, that they did not attack the northern forts. Now to this the answer is, that without the active co-operation of the shipping, which was rendered impossible by sinking the vessels across the harbor, the siege of the northern forts would have occupied some Certain it is, however, whether or not by weeks; and at the close we should have found way of encouraging Austria to make unreason- 60,000 Russians not at Inkermann or behind able demands, that Russia has chosen this mo- the earthworks of Sebastopol, but entrenched ment to come forward with a preposterous on the very positions which we now hold, and show of moderation, with a new colorable offer which we could not then have taken. In such to accept the Four Points, with a fresh propo- circumstances we could not ever have hoped sal to negotiate upon them! Of course we to lay siege to the place. To have cannonaded need not say that not one even of the four it from the north would have been idle, and points is really or sincerely accepted. One nothing would have been left for us but to of them stipulated for No Protectorate, and embark re infecta. Who will doubt, then, Russia substitutes a joint protectorate. Anoth- that we have managed matters at least much er provided for the independence of the better than if we had entrusted them to M. Principalities, with the withdrawal of the Kossuth? We have achieved great moral as Treaty of Balta-Liman, yet Russia claims to well as military victories, we have established maintain that treaty. A third was the throw-British and French prowess not simply in a ing open of the Black Sea, and the abrogation glorious, but in a powerful and useful preof the convention which closes it, in place of which Russia merely offers a revision of the Treaty of 1841. The trick is transparent; and though it may suit Prussia and Austria to be deceived by it, England and France continue happily in the firm belief that the solution of the great matter now in hand, to be honorable and lasting, must be wrought out by arms, and not by diplomacy.

eminence. We have committed some mistakes both of policy and of strategy, but we are assuredly wiser as well as greater than when we entered upon this war; and the Czar himself has just given a potent and significant sign how formidable he believes us at this moment to be.

The Battle of Alma, and its Incidents. By an

Officer.

In this view it is satisfactory to observe that the new offers were not despatched from St. Verses which owe any interest they may posPetersburg until the particulars of the grand attack of Inkermann were known to the Czar, There is some novelty of treatment arising from sess to their theme rather than to themselves. and his sons had closed their brief campaign the manner in which the "Officer" distributes in the Crimea, hopeless of any further harvest the subject into features,-the advance, the poof glory. An army does not risk a second sition, the battle, the retreat. There are copitime the loss of 15,000 men; and the fall of ous notes, and returns of the killed and woundSebastopol, sooner or later, was sealed on that ed.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE-No. 559.-10 FEB., 1855.

sions spills innocent blood, curtails the production and supply of food: no doubt there can be no war where there is no resistance: ought we, therefore, to let every robber, every conqueror, every pirate have his way? Why is it that Mr. Bright and Mr. Sturge persist in writing as if we, and not Nicholas, had caused the war? Why do they so carefully keep out of sight the fact that if we are wrong in incurring bloodshed by defending Turkey, the Czar must be tenfold more wrong in having provoked bloodshed by attacking Turkey? Why do they deal in those false weights and varying measures? Why do they reserve all their mercy for the criminal, and lavish all their indignation on the sufferer ? Whence comes that strange perversion of sense and sympathy which has made the Apostles of Peace the tools and sycophants of the Great Disturber of the peace of Europe? What do they design by language which, if it means anything at all, means that we ought to have allowed the Emperor of Russia to have his way and to do his will, whatever that will and way may have been?

was revolting to Englishmen, and ought to have been gratifying to the Czar, it was the marked difference of the tone and language employed in dealing with the aggressor and his victims. Of the guilt of the former-where it was impossible even for Mr. Bright to deny that he had sinned -he spoke in the gentlest terms, as of the failings of a favorite son;-" he could not indeed approve" of the invasion of the Principalitiesit was a sort of venial indiscretion-an act of youthful impetuosity,-not perhaps defensible, but natural and excusable enough. But when he turned to his own countrymen and their allies, who merely sought to stay the course of this reckless violence and insatiable ambition, he could scarcely find words harsh enough to do justice to his sense of their brutal and bloodthirsty dispositions. The impatient heir-presumptive to the coveted dominions, who could not wait till the breath was out of "the sick man's" body, but must needs pluck the pillow from his fainting head and poison his last cup of gruel, is treated with respectful tenderness-a tear is dropped upon his "error," and it is forgotten and blotted out for ever. But we have Do they know what sort of a man their pet committed the sin for which there is no forgive-lamb really is? Do they know that this war is ness. We have "resisted evil." And, worse than his own special doing, and is nearly as much all, while our soldiers are savages, slaughtering blamed in Russia as by ourselves-that among those who never did them harm, the Russian troops, who murder our wounded as they lie helpless on the ground, who entreat our men for a draught of water to assuage their sufferings, and then basely shoot in the back the benefactors who have just relieved them, do it out of mere unconquerable nervousness" in their frenzy or their terror"—and are to be pitied for their halfinvoluntary act! And lastly, we have Mr. Joseph Sturge affirming that the war is the cause of the high price of wheat, and that the frightful car-vation: Nicholas has reversed all this, and ever nage of our troops in the Crimea is the chastisement of God upon our warlike crimes.

And these men call themselves moralists, and dare to denounce upon us the vengeance of Heaven, because we have endeavored to stand between the conception and consummation of an enormous wrong,-because we have acted in the spirit of the Golden Rule,—because we have believed the maxim that

He who allows oppression shares the crime.

all classes, except the old Muscovite or Tory party, his ambition is hated and denounced with "curses not loud but deep?" Nesselrode, Woronzow, Orloff, all the party of enlightenment and civilization, see his course with regret and shame. This was what Metternich meant when he told Lord Carlisle that the war would be decided not at St. Petersburg but at Moscow. The truth is that Alexander labored to inoculate Russia with European ideas and European culti

since his accession has thrown himself into the arms of the oriental, legitimist, backward party in the State; and has wasted in Circassian wars and external aggressions the years and the funds which his predecessor would have employed in canals and railroads. The conscripts who fight his battles are not as ours, volunteer defenders of their country: they are torn from their homes, and carried, chained two and two like a gang of negro slaves, to the depot of the regiment whose ranks they are to fill up ;-they are sent to shed their lives in an unholy and distasteful cause; they never see their families again for twenty years,

How is it that these self-constituted censors, like even if they survive;-every drop of their blood

most of their tribe

Dant veniam corvis, vexant censura Columbas? How is it that they-preachers and professors of the moral law-should so utterly have forgotten who first broke that law? Granting that war is a horrible evil and a heinous sin-a thing to be avoided a thing to be denounced,-where does the guilt lie-against whom ought the thunders of the honest prophet to be hurled? Against the man who struck the blow, or against the man who simply warded it off? Who creates a war? He who inflicts a wrong, or he who merely refuses to submit to it? No doubt war rouses bad pas

or of our blood or of Turkish blood shed on the Danube or in the Crimea, Nicholas has upon his head beyond dispute and without denial; we have it on our consciences merely in as far as we refused the consummation of a gigantic iniquity which cowards and calculators would have induced us to connive at ;-yet this is the man in whose behalf Mr. Bright and Mr. Sturge are not ashamed to soil their fame and their pen. In the name of morality and compassion they declaim against the war: in the name of a higher morality and a truer mercy we denounce that false statesmanship and that hollow Christianity which would gloss over the atrocities of the mighty, and calumniate the efforts of the injured.

From the Westminster Review.
CARDINAL WOLSEY.

Life of Cardinal Wolsey. By John Galt.
Third Edition, with additional Illustrations
from Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, and other
sources. London: David Bogue. 1846.

may be said for Cranmer; and Gardiner and Bonner, Dr. Maitland tells us, were no such bad fellows after all. So, too, a fresh edition of Galt's "Life of Wolsey," is a witness that there are readers who can tolerate an approv ing word, even of the great Cardinal; a witness, indeed, more than usually credible, since, of all honest books of history, this of Mr. IF it be a misfortune to be overpraised, Galt's is the most difficult to read; and only neither the men nor the women who played the obvious integrity of the writer, and a very prominent parts in English history during the strong interest in the subject, enables us, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will have though the volume is a short one, to labor to reason to complain of the manner in which the end of it. It is satisfactory, indeed, that their reputations have been dealt with by this book continues to be read; but Wolsey their countrymen. To have accomplished has certainly not been fortunate in his chamanything remarkable, throughout this period, pion; and in the various histories of England appears to be a ground rather for suspicion which swarm out, year after year, there are than for admiration; and a certain uniformity no traces of any change of opinion produced of failure, like that which marks the career by it. He remains where fortune flung him, of Mary Queen of Scotts, alone commands a to point a moral of fallen ambition; in fact, as general interest. It is not enough to have Shakspeare left him. a vulgar, unlovely died tragically; the wise and the unwise came figure, arrogant in prosperity, and mean in his too often to a common end at the stake or on ruin-a person in whose elevation no one the scaffold we have but to run over in our takes pleasure, and whom no one pities in his own minds the most conspicuous names of disgrace; and such, notwithstanding Mr. Galt's those centuries, and to consider the position well-meant effort, he is likely to remain forwhich they occupy in the popular estimation, ever. The impression of such a portrait, to be at once aware, that only those among drawn by such a hand, whether it be or be them who have effected nothing, who have not a representation of the man as he really been sufferers merely, are regarded with tend- lived and was, will not again be effaced from erness; the actors are held to have been suf- the imagination of mankind; and wherever ficiently rewarded with success, and at our English history is read, the name of Wolsey hands deserve only to be restored to their will still continue shadowed over with pride, proper place by a judicious scrutiny of their injustice, falsehood, and profligacy; with a faults. We are not lenient to Henry the character from end to end essentially odious, Eighth, or to Mary Tudor, or to Elizabeth. which not all the pathos of his fall, nor the Oliver Cromwell's reputation has the taint tender "Chronicling" of Griffith can induce still of the Tyburn gallows upon it. Wolsey, one to forgive, or even to pity. Thomas Cromwell, Gardiner, the Seymours, And yet it is singular, that not any one of the Dudleys, the Cecils, Sir Francis Walsing- the accusations most offensive in Shakspeare's ham, or Francis Bacon-these names once description will bear examination. Some are illustrious, are now tarnished over with every unquestionably false: and the evidence of the most unworthy imputation; and Sir Thomas More is, perhaps, the only really remarkable man who still remains a favorite with us; rather, probably, because he was the greatest of the victims of a falling side, than because we essentially value either his character or his

actions.

rest is so slight, that it would not cloud the reputation of a living man. Shakspeare followed Hall and Cavendish (as, indeed, he might fairly have thought himself safe in following them) without hesitation: yet it is quite certain, from recent discoveries, however the fact be explained, that not Hall only, but This unprosperous condition of public opin- Cavendish also, whenever he is speaking of ion, however, is not maintained without partial anything which lay beyond his own personal remonstrance: people who have cared to ex- observation, is, in many instances, glaringly amine the authentic accounts of the times, wrong and unjust. Authentic records have having perceived very clearly on how slight a come to light, of the Duke of Buckingham's foundation the popular judgments of them are trial; and no one who carefully reads them, based, and raising their voices, with more if he is in the least acquainted with the temeffect or less, in behalf of this person or that, per of the times, can doubt either the reality as their knowledge or their sympathies lead. of his treason, or the necessity of his punishSharon Turner finds virtue in Henry VIII.; ment. He was tried by his peers, fairly and Oliver Cromwell is a hero to Carlyle; and honorably; his guilt, not a thing of the moMiss Strickland pleads well and wisely for ment, but carefully premeditated for years, Mary Tudor. There are still persons who, in was proved beyond possibility of question: spite of Mr. Macaulay, believe that something and, under the existing circumstances of the