Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXVI, July 1852, Vol. V

Some further developments have been made of the sentiments of the three allied powers, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, concerning the re-establishment of the Empire in France. It is represented that the late Minister of Austria was in favor of encouraging such a step, but that both the other powers concurred in saying that the accomplishment of it would be a "violation of the treaties of 1814 and 1815, inasmuch as those treaties have excluded for ever the family of Bonaparte from the government of France." Now, those treaties form the basis of the whole policy of Europe; and it is the duty of the powers to demand that they shall be respected by the President of the Republic himself in all their provisions, and particularly not to permit any infraction of them as to the point in question, which has reference to him personally. Nevertheless, the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia would not perhaps be disposed to refuse to recognize Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor of the French Republic – if that title were conferred on him by a new plébiscite – as had been spoken of but they should only recognize him as an elective Emperor, and for life, with only a status analogous to that of the former kings of Poland. If the two cabinets of St. Petersburg and Berlin consented to such a recognition, it was the utmost that it was possible to do; but, most certainly, beyond that point they should never go. At the same time, the cabinets formally declare, that they would only recognize the Emperor of the French Republic on the condition of his election being the result of the mode already announced (the plébiscite). They will not admit any other manner of re-establishing in France an imperial throne, even were it but for life; the two sovereigns being firmly resolved never to accept in the person of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, any other than the supreme elective chief of the Republic, and to oppose by all the means in their power the pretension of establishing the actual President of the French Republic as Emperor, in the sense of an hereditary transmitter or founder of a Napoleonian dynasty. They add, that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte not being the issue of a sovereign or reigning family, can not become a real sovereign, or assimilate himself to reigning houses. – The pictures belonging to the late Marshal Soult were sold at auction on the 19th. The collection consisted of 157 paintings, and among them were many of the master-pieces of the old masters. The most celebrated was Murillo's 'Conception of the Virgin,' for which the chief competitors were the Emperor of Russia, the Queen of Spain, and the Director of the Louvre. It was bought by the latter at the enormous price of 586,000 francs, – or about $117,200.

EASTERN AND SOUTHERN EUROPE

In Prussia, a communication was made on the 28th of April by the King to the Chambers, transmitting a bill to abolish the articles of the Constitution and regulate the organization of the peerage. In the First Chamber it was referred to the existing committee on the constitution of the body concerned. In the Second Chamber a committee was appointed to consider the measure. The minister desired that the matter might be quickly dispatched. In the same sitting of the 28th, the Second Chamber came to two other important votes. It rejected, by a majority of 186 to 82, the resolution of the First Chamber, and which, dividing the budget of ordinary and extraordinary expenses, decided that the first should be no longer fixed annually, but once for all, and that no future modification should take place, except by a law. It also rejected, by 225 to 57, another decision of the First Chamber, by which it had declared, in opposition to the Constitution, that it could vote the budget, article by article, like the Second Chamber.

In Tuscany a decree of the Grand Duke has abolished the Constitution and Civic Guard, and constituted the government on the same basis as before 1848. The ministers are henceforward responsible to the Grand Duke; the Council of State is separated from that of the Ministers; the communal law of 1849 and the law on the press are to be revised.

The Danish question has been settled in London, by conferences of the representatives of the several powers concerned. Prince Christian of Glucksberg is to succeed to the crown on the death of the present King and his brother, both of whom are childless.

In Turkey all differences with Egypt have been adjusted. Fuad-Effendi, it is announced by the Paris Presse, justifying all the hopes which his mission had given birth to, has come to a complete understanding with the Egyptian government, whose good intentions and perfect fair dealing he admits. The Viceroy accepts the code with the modifications called for by the state of the country, and which the Turco-Egyptian Commissioners had already fixed in their conferences at Constantinople. On its side, the Porte accords to the Viceroy the right of applying the punishment of death during seven years, without reference to the divan.

Editor's Table

The birth-day of a nation is not merely a figurative expression. Nations are born as well as men. The very etymology of the word implies as much. Social compacts may be declarative of their independence, or definitive of their existence, but do not create them. In truth, all such compacts and conventions do in themselves imply a previous natural growth or organization lying necessarily still farther back, as the ground of any legitimacy they may possess. There can be no con-vening unless there is something to determine, a priori, who shall come together, and how they shall come together – as representatives of what principals– as parts of what ascertained whole– with what powers, on what terms, and for what ends. There can no more be an artificial nation than an artificial language. Aside from other influences, all attempts of the kind must be as abortive in politics as they have ever been in philology. Nations are not manufactured, either to order or otherwise, but born – born of other nations, and nurtured in those peculiar arrangements of God's providence which are expressly adapted to such a result. The analogy between them and individuals may be traced to almost any extent. They have, in general, some one event in which there may be discovered the conceptive principle, or principium, of their national life. They have their embryo or formative period. They have their birth, or the time of their complete separation from the maternal nationality to which they were most nearly and dependently united. They have their struggling infancy – their youth – their growth —their heroic period– their iron age of hardship and utility – their manhood – their silver age of luxury and refinement – their golden age of art and science and literature – their acme – their decline – their decay – their final extinction, or else their dissolution into those fragmentary organisms from which spring up again the elements or seeds of future nationalities.

We need not trace our own history through each of these periods. The incipient stages have all been ours, although, in consequence of a more healthy and vigorous maternity, we have passed through them with a rapidity of which the previous annals of the world present no examples. Less than a century has elapsed since that birth, whose festive natal day is presented in the calendar of the present month, and yet we are already approaching the season of manhood. We have passed that proud period which never comes but once in a nation's life, although it may be succeeded by others far surpassing it in what may be esteemed the more substantial elements of national wealth and national prosperity. Almost every state has had its heroic age. We too have had ours, and we may justly boast of it as one equaling in interest and grandeur any similar period in the annals of Greece and Rome – as one which would not shrink from a comparison with the chivalrous youth of any of the nations of modern Europe. It is the unselfish age, or rather, the time when the self-consciousness, both individual and national, is lost in some strong and all-absorbing emotion – when a strange elevation of feeling and dignity of action are imparted to human nature, and men act from motives which seem unnatural and incredible to the more calculating and selfish temperaments of succeeding times. It is a period which seems designed by Providence, not for itself only, or the great effects of which it is the immediate cause, but for its influence upon the whole after-current of the national existence. The strong remembrance of it becomes a part of the national life; it enters into its most common and constant thinking, gives a peculiar direction to its feeling; it imparts a peculiar character to its subsequent action; it makes its whole historical being very different from what it would have been had there been no such epic commencement, no such superhuman or heroic birth. It furnishes a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to reinvigorate from time to time the national virtue when impaired, as it ever is, by the factious, and selfish, and unheroic temper produced by subsequent days of merely economical or utilitarian prosperity.

This heroic age must pass away. It is sustained, while it lasts, by special influences which can not have place in the common life and ordinary work of humanity. Its continuance, therefore, would be inconsistent with other benefits and other improvements of a more sober or less exciting kind, but which, nevertheless, belong to the proper development of the state. The deep effects, however, still remain. It inspires the poet and the orator. It furnishes the historian with his richest page. It tinges the whole current of the national literature. In fact, there can be no such thing as a national literature, in its truest sense – there can be no national poetry, no true national art, no national music, except as more or less intimately connected with the spirit of such a period.

It was not the genius of democracy simply, as Grote and some other historians maintain, but the heroic remembrances of the Persian invasion, that roused the Grecian mind, and created the brilliant period of the Grecian civilization. The new energy that came from this period was felt in every department – of song, of eloquence, of art, and even of philosophy. Marathon and Salamis still sustained the national life when it was waning under the mere political wisdom of Pericles, the factious recklessness of Alcibiades, and the still more debasing influence of the venal demagogues of later times. When this old spirit had gone out, there was nothing in the mere forms of her free institutions that could prevent Athens from sinking down into insignificance, or from being absorbed in the growth of new and rising powers.

Rome would never have been the mistress of the world, had it not been for the heroic impetus generated in the events which marked her earliest annals. Even if we are driven to regard these as in a great measure mythical, they still, in the highest and most valid sense, belong to Roman history, and all the efforts of Niebuhr and of Arnold have failed, and ever will fail, to divest them of the rank they have heretofore maintained among the formative influences in the Roman character. They entered into the national memory. They formed for ages the richest and most suggestive part of the national thinking. They became thus more really and vitally incorporated into the national being than many events whose historical authenticity no critic has ever called in question. But we can not believe them wholly or even mainly mythical. Some of the more modern theories on this subject will have to be re-examined. With all their plausibility they are open to the objection of presenting the mightiest effects without adequate or corresponding causes. Twelve hundred years of empire, such as that of Rome, could not well have had its origin in any period marked by events less strangely grand and chivalrous than those that Livy has recorded. Brutus, and Cincinnatus, and Fabricius, must have been as real as the splendid reality which could only have grown out of so heroic an ancestry. The spirit of Numa more truly ruled, even in the later Roman empire, than did ever that of Augustus. It was yet powerful in the days of Constantine. It was still present in that desperate struggle which made it difficult, even for a Christian senate, to cast out the last vestiges of the old religion, and to banish the Goddess of Victory from the altars and temples she had so long occupied.

A similar view, drawn from the Jewish history, must commend itself to every one who has even an ordinary knowledge of the Scriptures. The glorious deliverances from Egyptian bondage, the sublime reminiscences of Sinai, the heroic, as exhibited in Moses, and Joshua, and Jephthah, and Gideon, are ever reappearing in the Hebrew prophetic and lyrical poetry. These proud recollections cheer them in the long years of the captivity. Even in the latest and most debasing periods of their history, they impart an almost superhuman energy to their struggle with Rome; and what is more than all, after having sustained the Jewish song, and the Jewish eloquence, during ages of depressing conflict, their influence is still felt in all the noblest departments of Christian art and Christian literature.

No, we may almost say it, there can not truly be a nation without something that may be called its heroic age; or if there have been such, the want of this necessary fountain of political vitality has been the very reason why they have perished from the pages of history. We, too, have had such a period in our annals, and we are all the better for it, and shall be all the better for it, as long as our political existence shall endure. Some such chapter in our history seems necessary to legitimate our claim to the appellation; and however extravagant it may seem, the assertion may, nevertheless, be hazarded, that one borrowed from the maternal nationality, or from a foreign source, or even altogether mythical, would be better than none at all. If we had not had our Pilgrim Fathers, our Mayflower band, our Plymouth Rock, our Bunker Hill, our Saratoga, our Washingtons, our Warrens, our Putnams, our Montgomerys, our heroic martyr-Congresses, voting with the executioner and the ax before their eyes, we might better have drawn upon the epic imagination for some such introduction to our political existence, than regard it as commencing merely with prosaic paper compacts, or such artificial gatherings as are presented in your unheroic, though very respectable Baltimore and Harrisburg Conventions.

Some such chivalrous commencement is, moreover, absolutely essential to that great idea of national continuity, so necessary for the highest ends of political organization; and yet so liable to be impaired or wholly lost in the strife of those ephemeral parties, those ever-gathering, ever-dissolving factions, which, ignoring both the future and the past, are absorbed solely in the magnified interests of the present hour. For this purpose, we want an antiquity of some kind – even though it may not be a distant one – something parted from us by events so grand, so unselfish, so unlike the common, every-day acts of the current years, as to have the appearance at least of a sacred and memory-hallowed remoteness. We need to have our store of glorious olden chronicles, over which time has thrown his robe of reverence – a reverence which no profane criticism of after days shall be allowed to call in question, no subsequent statistics be permitted to impair. We need to have our proud remembrances for all parties, for all interests, for all ages – our common fund of heroic thought, affording a constant supply for the common mind of the state, thus ever living in the national history, connecting each present not only with such a heroic commencement, but, through it, with all the past that intervenes, and in this way furnishing a historical bond of union stronger than can be found in any amount of compromises or paper constitutions.

If we would be truly a State, we must have "the Fathers," and the revered "olden time." It is in some such veneration for a common glorious ancestry that a political organization finds its deepest root. Instead of being absurd, it is the most rational, as well as the most conservative of all feelings in which we can indulge. The more we are under its influence, the higher do we rise in the scale of being above the mere animal state, and that individualism which is its chief characteristic. It is a "good and holy thought" thus to regard the dead as still present with us, and past generations as still having an interest in our history – still justly claiming some voice in the administration of that inheritance they have transmitted to us, and in respect to which our influence over the ages to come will be in proportion to our reverential remembrance of those that have preceded. Such a feeling is the opposite of that banefully radical and disorganizing view which regards the state as a mere aggregation of individual local fragments in space, and a succession of separately-flowing drops in time – which looks upon the present majority of the present generation as representing the whole national existence, and which is, of course, not only inconsistent with any true historical life, but with any thing which is really entitled to the name of fundamental or constitutional law. It is the opposite, both in its nature and its effects, of that contemptible cant now so common in both political parties, and which is ever talking of "Young America" as some new development, unconnected with any thing that has ever gone before it. The heroic men of our revolution, they were "Young America;" the gambling managers of modern political caucuses, to whatever party they may belong, or whatever may be their age or standing, are the real and veritable "old fogies."

We can not attach too much importance to this idea of inheritance, so deeply grounded in the human mind. The Sancti Patres are indispensable to a true historical nationality. Hence the classical name for country —Patria a patribus—The Father-land. We love it, not simply for its present enjoyments and present associations, but for its past recollections —

Land of the Pilgrims' pride,Land where our fathers died.

Without some such thought of transmitted interest continually carrying the past into the present, and both into the future, patriotism is but the cant of the demagogue. Our country is our country, not only in space, but in time – not only territorially, but historically; and it is in this latter aspect it must ever present its most intense and vital interest. Where such an interest is excluded, or unappreciated, there is nothing elevated, nothing heroic, to which the name of patriotism can be given. There is nothing but the most momentary selfishness which can bind our affections to one spot on earth more than to any other.

Opposed to this is a species of cosmopolitanism, which sometimes claims the Scriptures as being on its side. The opinion, however, will not stand the test of fair interpretation. The Bible, it is true, enjoins love to all mankind, but not as a blind and abstract philanthropy which would pass over all the intermediate gradations that Infinite Wisdom has appointed. Love of "the fathers," love of family, love of kindred, love of "our own people" – "our own, our native land" – our "own Zion," nationally, as well as ecclesiastically, are commended, not only as good in themselves, but as the foundation of all the other social virtues, as the appointed means, in fact, by which the circle of the affections is legitimately expanded, and, at the same time, with a preservation of that intensity of feeling which is never found in any inflating abstract cosmopolitan benevolence.

In no book, too, do we find more distinctly set forth that idea which we have styled the root of all true patriotism – the idea of the national continuance from generation to generation, as a living, responsible whole – as one ever-flowing stream, in which the individual parts are passing away, it is true but evermore passing to that "congregation of the fathers" which still lives in the present organic life. It is presented, too, not as any difficult or transcendental or mystical conception, but as a thought belonging everywhere to the common mind, and necessarily underlying all those dread views the Scripture so often give us of national accountability and national retribution.

Every country distinguished for great deeds has ever been proud of its ancestors; has ever gloried in the facts of its early history; has ever connected them with whatever was glorious in its later annals has ever made them the boast of its eloquence, the themes of its poetry, and the subjects of festal rejoicings. In the preservation of such feelings and such ideas, our annual Fourth of July celebrations instead of being useless, and worse than useless periods of noisy declamation, as some would contend, are, in fact, doing more to preserve our union than the strongest legislative acts. This may hold when every other cable in the vessel has parted. The bare thought that our glorious old Fourth of July could never more be celebrated in its true spirit (and it would be equally gone for each and every sundered fragment) is enough to check the wildest faction, and to stay the hand of the most reckless disunionist.

It was in view of such an effect, that one of our wisest statesmen, one the farthest removed from the demagogue, and himself a participator in our heroic struggle, is represented as so enthusiastically commending this annual festival to the perpetual observation of posterity, "Through the thick gloom of the present," he exclaims, "I see the brightness of the future as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires, and illuminations. On its annual return, they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears of exultation of gratitude, and of joy." "And so that day shall be honored," continues his eloquent eulogist – "And so that day shall be honored, illustrious prophet and patriot! so that day shall be honored, and as often as it returns thy renown shall come along with it, and the glory of thy life, like the day of thy death, shall not fail from the remembrance of men!"

The highest reason, then, as well as the purest feeling, bid us not be ashamed of glorying in our forefathers. Scripture is in unison here with patriotism in commending the sacred sentiment. There is a religious element in the true love of race and country. "The God of our Fathers" becomes a prime article of the national as well as of the ecclesiastical creed, and without the feeling inspired by it, nationality may turn out to be a mere figment, which all political bandages will fail to sustain against the disorganizing influence of factious or sectional interests. It is not absurd, too, to cherish the belief that our ancestors were better men than ourselves, if we ourselves are truly made better by thus believing.

As we have remarked before, there may be mythical exaggeration attending such tradition, but if so, this very exaggeration must have had its ground in something really transcending what takes place in the ordinary course of a nation's life. Some late German scholars have been hunting out depreciating charges against the hero of Marathon, and, for this purpose, have subjected his very ashes to the most searching critical analysis. Truth, it may be said, is always sacred. We would not wish to undervalue the importance of the sentiment. But Miltiades the patriot is the real element that exerted so heroic an effect upon the subsequent Grecian history. Miltiades charged with political offenses lives only as the subject of antiquarian research, or a humiliating example of the common depravity appearing among the most lauded of mankind. And so, in our own case, what political utility can there be in discovering, even if it were so, that Washington was not so wise, or Warren so brave, or Putnam so adventurous, or Bunker Hill so heroically contested, as has been believed? Away with such skepticism, we say, and the mousing criticism by which it is sometimes attempted to be supported. Such beliefs have at all events become real for us by entering into the very soul of our history, and forming the staple of our national thought. To take them away would now be a baneful disorganizing of the national mind. Their influence has been felt in every subsequent event. Saratoga and Monmouth have reappeared in Chippewa, and New Orleans, and Buena Vista. May it not be hoped, too, that something of the men who convened in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776, or of that earlier band on whom Burke pronounced his splendid eulogy, may still live, even in the worst and poorest of our modern Congresses!