The claim for recognition, when brought to the touchstone of these principles, is easily disposed of.
Urge not the Practice of Nations in its behalf. Never before in history has a candidacy been put forward in the name of Slavery, and the terrible outrage is aggravated by the Christian light which surrounds it. This is not an age of darkness. But even in the Dark Ages, when the Slavemongers of the Barbary coast had gathered into cities, the saintly Louis the Ninth was fired to treat one of these communities as a “nest of wasps.”[124] Afterwards, but slowly, they obtained “the right of legation” and “the reputation of a government”; when at last, weary of their criminal pretensions, the aroused vengeance of Great Britain and France blotted out this power from the list of nations. Louis the Eleventh, who has been described as the sovereign “who best understood his interest,” indignant at Richard the Third of England, who had murdered two infants in the Tower and usurped the crown, sent back his ambassadors without holding intercourse with them. This is a suggestive precedent, which I give on venerable authority in diplomatic history;[125] but the parricide usurper of England had never murdered so many infants or usurped so much as the pretended Slave Power, strangely tolerated by the sagacious sovereign who sits on the throne of Louis the Eleventh.
It is not necessary, however, to go so far in history, nor to dwell on the practice of nations in withholding or conceding recognition. The whole matter is stated by Burke, with his customary power.
“In the case of a divided kingdom, by the Law of Nations, Great Britain, like every other power, is free to take any part she pleases. She may decline, with more or less formality, according to her discretion, to acknowledge this new system; or she may recognize it as a government de facto, setting aside all discussion of its original legality, and considering the ancient monarchy as at an end. The Law of Nations leaves our court open to its choice.… The declaration of a new species of government on new principles is a real crisis in the politics of Europe.”[126]
This same rule Burke declared in Parliament, saying, “that the French Republic was sui generis, and bore no analogy to any other that ever existed in the world. It, therefore, did not follow that we ought to recognize it, merely because different powers in Europe had recognized the Republic of England under Oliver Cromwell.”[127] And in his famous “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” this illustrious authority proclaimed the new French Government “so fundamentally wrong as to be utterly incapable of correcting itself by any length of time, or of being formed into any mode of polity of which a member of the House of Commons could publicly declare his approbation.”[128]
Another eloquent publicist, Sir James Mackintosh, while pressing on Parliament the recognition of Spanish America, says: “The reception of a new state into the society of civilized nations by those acts which amount to recognition is a proceeding which has no legal character, and is purely of a moral nature”; and he proceeds to argue, that, since England “is the only anciently free state in the world, for her to refuse her moral aid to communities struggling for liberty is an act of unnatural harshness.”[129] Thus does he vindicate recognition for the sake of Freedom. How truly he would have repelled any recognition for the sake of Slavery let his life testify.
At the Congress of Verona, Chateaubriand, as representative of France, replied to a proposition from the Duke of Wellington on this subject:—
“France is influenced by considerations of more general importance with regard to the governments de facto. She conceives that the principles of justice on which society is founded must not be lightly sacrificed to secondary interests, and it appears to her that those principles increase in importance when the matter in question is that of recognizing a political order of things virtually hostile to that which exists in Europe.”[130]