TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ITALIAN DEBATE.
George Bowyer is an unconscious Christian. He doubtless thought last Friday night that he was exalt- ing priestly power, helping despots back to their thrones, preparing tortures for those who think in their criminal breadth of vision that the universe is a loftier cathedral than St. Peter's. But Providence is kind to the honest, - and instead of doing his own evil will he was obeying the Gospel law, "Do good unto them that despitefully use you." Italy and the Whigs despise him almost alike, and he has bestowed an inestimable benefit on Italy and the Whigs. Like Balsam, he went forth to curse, and he blessed them, unconsciously, altogether. Never was service so great rendered by foe so bitter. The incessant calumnies of the Tory press, the gossip of absolutist Chancelleries, and the mischievous diatribes of Mazzinians, were begin- ning to have their effect even in England. Strong liberals doubted whether the Italian cause had not fallen into bad hands. Philanthropists began to inveigh against the cruelty with which it was said brigandage was suppressed. That immense class of men who can only keep step up hill, and who begin to straggle as soon as they reach the top, were turning to objects which still retained the charm of impracticability. The mass of the educated, satisfied that Italy was safe, and the Liberal Government honest, were dropping back into their accustomed silence, and the field was left to the noisy and unscrupulous, to the Peer who loves little Courts as aristocrats do not, but as Phippses may, and to the Italian spy who in his own book relates as his first claim to confidence how be became a pimp. Debate on Italy was confined to the Lords, and history almost left to the Standard, till even in„England men began to believe that there existed somewhere a party opposed to the Italian cause. On the Continent the im- pression was even stronger. Nobody there can quite under- stand that the Lord Derby who called the Italians dogs would send priests to the scaffold sooner than they should govern him as they govern the nobles of Rome, and fight against rulers like Francis the Second as bravely as ever his fathers contended against kings who, in the presence of the Bourbon, would seem almost angels. Nobody there quite sees that the ladies who sent a crown to the Queen of Naples do not govern England, and in nooks and corners of Italy priests taught the people that only a class in Britain sym- pathized with their cause. Even the Camarilla made this mistake, and Pio Nono thinks all is won if the Irish will but obey his orders, and turn out the Premier who believes that the Roman position cannot be eternal. The delusion was most disastrous, and it has been dispelled by Sir George Bowyer. A victory costing millions could not have brought so bitter a discouragement to the reactionaries as the dis- covery that England is still, now as for three centuries past, the unswerving foe of Rome.
Yet there was no mistaking the lesson read by the debate. We say nothing of the arguments advanced, though never was man more intellectually dead than Sir G. Bowyer as Mr. Gladstone sat down. He had talked of cruelty, and it was admitted and demonstrated—as perpetrated by the reactionaries. He had spoken of the hatred in Naples, and was asked whether the Pope dare arm a National Guard. He had denounced the suppression of opinions, and was told that his only proofs were the unpunished journals published to insult Victor Emanuel. He had grown loud on the charge of conquest, but admitted that there was not a soldier in the Romagna, and brought up once more to men's minds that Garibaldi took Naples with a first-class railway ticket. Finally, he enunciated the new Ultramontane faith, that the temporal power would survive all human attack, and Mr. Gladstone coolly retorted that he could not refute a pro- phecy, but he had the resource of disbelieving it. These re- torts are instructive as well as pleasant to Englishmen, but the Italians know all these things, and can state them in epi- grams as pungent, and to them the great fact of the debate was this. In this Parliament, which they feared was dubi- ous, men of every opinion rose to declare their hearty belief in Italy, their sympathy with her objects, and their eager- ness that her capital should be restored. Mr. Layard, the representative of the Foreign Office replied to every charge as fully and as minutely as an Italian Minister could have done, making the while by far the best speech he has deli- vered since he accepted office. Mr. Gladstone, for the edu- cated classes, answered the general accusation, mere heartily than ever he answered charges against his financial schemes, and with a point and vigour which makes his speech a luxury to read. Lord Palmerston always on foreign politics speaks the views of average Englishmen, and be declared that he believed Italy yet would have Rome, and that Rome would rise to a third long reign over European intelligence. Finally, Mr. Stansfeld, the only man in the House who has, while de- fending Italy, the courage to shield Mazzini, denounced the temporal power. Every point of the controversy was met by representatives of all shades of English opinion. The stronger the Italian sentiment expressed the louder became the cheering, and even the almost imprudent sen- tences in which Lord Palmerston declared the occupation of Rome at variance with all the declarations of France, were received with decided applause. The feeling of the House was, perhaps, most strongly evinced in the absence of all reply. The Catholic Irish of course abused the foes of the Pope, as they are expected by bishops and others always to do, but they represent nothing except the power which is the foe of Italian unity. Not one political leader spoke in defence of Rome. The Tories sat quiet and sad. It matters little in this view whether the Opposition do or do not sympathize with the freedom of Italy. If they do, then England is for once almost unanimous. If they do 'hot, their silence proves that they are cowed by an opinion so strong and so widely-spread, that resistance would be political sui- cide. Their party action is paralyzed, and the Continent may be convinced that England, however true to her doctrine of non-interference, still heartily desires the unity of Italy and the evacuation of Rome.
The opinion thus clearly expressed has an almost executive force. There are among us, we believe, men who deride opinion, who argue that sympathy lends no strength, that nations are freed or enslaved only in the field, and that a debate like Ulla of Friday is, as Carlyle would say, simply popular wind. These worshippers of force should take a lesson from their idol, who "understands his epoch." If moral opinion be not a force, on what does the Pope rely ? No State threatens to face the revolution in his behalf, and though the brigands he blesses may be formidable to the citizens and women of Naples, it is not surely with them that he hopes to coerce a Bonaparte on a throne. His defence is opinion manured by his priests, and the fairly expressed opinion of England, if it effects nothing more, neutralizes the half-expressed opinion of the Catholic world. But it does effect more. It keeps Austria from unsheathing her sword. She might, supported by Catholic opinion, face Italy and the Emperor, but she cannot face those two Powers with England standing behind. She knows only too well that opinion always in the end transmutes itself into action, and that were Italy defeated and the Emperor driven back, she would still have to reckon with an unexhausted power, which, once fairly stirred to action, is stronger than both. Strength, too, even in battle, resides in the hearts of men. New spirit is equivalent to new armies, and as Sir G. Bowyer's debate flies over Italy it brings to the men who read it the confi- dence and the energy which convert masses who had else been inert into members of the party of action.
The benefit to Italy, however, great as it was, was less than the benefit to the Whigs. Nothing could have oc- curred so fortunate for the Liberal Cabinet. The debate brought into view once more the true basis of Lord Palmer- ston's Government, its sound and liberal foreign policy, while it exposed unmercifully the weak place in the Tory armour. It revived in the hearts of the waverers the belief that on the object which Englishmen have for the moment most keenly at heart the Tories are not to be trusted. It reminded the country clergy that the friends of the church rates are also the friends of the Pope, and look to power through the support of the men whose pastors are also their masters, and take their ordre du jour from militant Monsignor Merode. It aroused once more that just and instinctive jealousy of Papal in- tri,gue which is the permanent passion of English ten-pound- ers, and which no Government has for two hundred years been able to do more than evade. The Tories sat silent in the debate, and all over the country their silence has been inter- preted into a sympathy with the anti-Italian cause. That is not, we believe, altogether the case. True, the newspapers of the party—and it is a real misfortune to England that a party so great should be always so wretchedly represented in the press— publish calumnies daily of which New York papers would be ashamed. But the party, we strongly suspect, was not reduced to silence only by dislike of Italy. It has orators enough who could have made its dislike seem reasonable, and who, by raising it out of the wretched atmosphere of fiction with which inferior agents surround it, and basing it once more on something approaching to prin■- ciple, might have attracted new support. The position is worse than that. The leaders knew that them was a &vision in camp, which on this Italian point made their foreign policy null. The Tories cannot break with their friends abroad, or deny their own faith that Austria is a necessity, and Venice essential to Austria. But neither can they break with their friends at home by supporting the tem- poral power. The Irish Tories dislike the Whigs, but they detest 17Itramontanes. The Conservatives in England catb never advance without the support of the country clergy, but the clergy, though they dread Mr. Bright, dread the Cardinals even more. If church rates are abolished they suffer a wrong, but if Rome is protected by their agency they act one, and the clergy, true in this to their function, prefer suffering rather than sin. Once placed straight before them the alternative leaves them no option, and had Mr. Disraeli spoken, it must have been so placed. He must have declared for the independence of Rome, and one of two consequences- must have followed. His own party would either have repu- diated him, in which case it would have been discredited, or- have followed him, in which case Lord Palmerston could have appealed to the country with a cry before which reaction would have disappeared like flax before fire. We ask for the Whigs no better fortune than a Parliamentary de- feat upon this question of Rome. It was not because- the chiefs of the Tories had a policy at variance with opinion that they remained silent, but because they had none at all, because the chiefs and their followers had two lines of action, and a Tory Cabinet could move neither way without. losing half its support. We have no dread of the Tories interfering to dismember Italy once more, or even to coerce the people of Rome. All they could do would be to whisper encouragement to Austria, to throw Italy violently into the arms of France, and by releasing the Catholic world from the chain of English opinion, to compel Napoleon to keep on little longer the status quo, that is, a tottering Pope, aided by a Voltairean soldiery to crush the life out of a despairing people. It is because the debate revealed that situation that we hold Sir George Bowyer to have benefited all whom he went out to destroy. To have proved that England as iv whole is the strenuous friend of Italy, to have drawn from the Ministry crushing remonstrances on the French occu- pation of Rome, to have thrown a shell which divides the Tories from all the country clergy—these are surely achieve- ments for which Whigs and Italians equally may bless au honest Illtramontane.
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