"Hoping you are all well, I am,
"Ever yours affectionately,
"F. W. Newman."
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LETTER FROM KOSSUTH TO MESSRS. SIEVEKING
JANUARY, 1854]
"Hungary and Poland are nations; so in fact is Italy: but Austria is only a Court and Army, not a nation." Here is practically the gist of the whole matter, as far as Francis Newman is concerned. Throughout all his writings one comes again and again upon this note. "The People! The People!" is his ever-recurring thought. What are "the People" suffering; what are their needs, their wrongs which call for justice? The People is the living nation; the Court and the Army may be inevitable adjuncts of a nation's being, as things at present are constituted; but they are artificial adjuncts; the People are the very life essence of the Nation, its real motive power. Let their voice be heard, and the soul of empire at once springs into being.
In the next letter from Newman to Martineau, 9th June, 1856, from which I shall quote, it is shown that our Colonial Office was enraged against Kossuth because he had "mischievously hindered the Austrian Government from getting troops to put down Italian insurrection." Newman goes on to show how the treachery of Austria in her dealing with other nations was a potent fact, and he adds, "Hungary was bound" (according to Kossuth's views) "to assist Austria against foreign attack, and therefore against the King of Sardinia; but in the interval, before this could come to any practical result, the intrigues of the Austrian Court with the Serbs were brought to light; Austrian officers with the Emperor-King's commission in their pockets were made prisoners from among the Serb ranks, and the internal danger of Hungary, as well as the treachery of the Court, made it simply impossible to carry out, or wish to carry out, the Protocol. But Kossuth was still the King's Minister, and could not say this openly. Unless he would have taken the first step to civil war, he was bound to throw a thin veil over it in public speech and action. The measure which he then promoted was … that no Hungarian soldier should leave the country until the internal rebellion was thoroughly subdued. That no Hungarian regiments should fight against Italians until the Italians had had from Austria the offer of national institutions and freedom under the Austrian Crown, putting them on a par with the Hungarians."
Nothing could have been fairer than these conditions, and this was very shortly recognized when it became known that Latour and the Court were employing all their energies for long after this date in stirring up the Serb rebellion. Yet they were shameless enough to complain of Kossuth having incited the Hungarians to revolt. Writing the next day to Dr. Martineau, Newman openly avows his belief that "every nation in the world is grasping and unjust in its foreign policy in exact proportion to its power, England not being at all an exception." The italics are my own. Have we not proof positive of this before our very eyes to-day? We cannot look at India and say "no," for by our charter of 1833 we bound ourselves over to hold India only until the education, which we had made possible for them, should enable the Indians to take a share in the government of their own country. But when we look at the India of to-day, we cannot but plead guilty to not having kept that charter honestly before our eyes. There is but one office to which natives are admitted on equal terms with Englishmen to-day!
To go back to the letter:—
"England has no great European army, and cannot covet and subdue any portion of the European continent. That is no great credit; but in Asia, where she is strong and her neighbours weak, she is as grasping and unjust as Russia, Austria, France, or the U.S…. Lord Palmerston had never heard (or pretended never to have heard) of the peace of Satmar, and that England was mediator of it between Austria and Hungary. I think it is not mere knowledge, but higher morality, which is the first need of policy on both sides the Atlantic."
It is now that Louis Napoleon comes on the scene as regards the beginnings of his connection with Kossuth. Newman says that it was in 1856 that the closer friendship between Napoleon and Cavour (Sardinian Minister) had begun. Not very long after it was borne in on the mind of Cavour that Kossuth would be an invaluable ally in the plans of future conquest which they were then preparing.