I can perfectly understand the reserve which was imposed upon you, and
which you were forced to impose on yourself.
I confess that I saw with great grief the sudden change in the
expressions of the majority of the English, a year ago, respecting our
Government. It was then ill consolidated, and in want of the splendid
alliance which you offered to it. It was unnecessary that you should
praise it, in order to keep it your friend. By doing so you sacrificed
honourable opinions and tastes without a motive.
Now things are changed. After you have lost your only army, and our
master has made an alliance with Austria, which suits his feelings much
better than yours did, he does not depend on you; you, to a certain
extent, depend on him. Such being now the case, I can understand the
English thinking it their duty to their country to say nothing that can
offend the master of France. I can understand even their praising him; I
reproach them only for having done so too soon, before it was necessary.
I agree with you that England ought to be satisfied with being the
greatest maritime Power, and ought not to aim at being also one of the
greatest military Powers.
But the feelings which I described to you as prevalent in France and in
Germany, arose not from your want of an army of 500,000 men. They were
excited by these two facts.
First, by what was supposed (perhaps falsely) to be the bad military
administration of your only army. Secondly, and much more, by your
apparent inability to raise another army.
According to continental notions, a nation which cannot raise as many
troops as its wants require, loses our respect. It ceases, according to
our notions, to be great or even to be patriotic. And I must confess
that, considering how difficult it is to procure soldiers by voluntary
enlistment, and how easily every nation can obtain them by other means, I
do not see how you will be able to hold your high rank, unless your
people will consent to something resembling a conscription.
Dangerous as it is to speak of a foreign country, I venture to say that
England is mistaken if she thinks that she can continue separated from
the rest of the world, and preserve all her peculiar institutions
uninfluenced by those which prevail over the whole of the Continent.
In the period in which we live, and, still more, in the period which is
approaching, no European nation can long remain absolutely dissimilar to
all the others. I believe that a law existing over the whole Continent
must in time influence the laws of Great Britain, notwithstanding the
sea, and notwithstanding the habits and institutions, which, still more
than the sea, have separated you from us, up to the present time.
My prophecies may not be accomplished in our time; but I should not be
sorry to deposit this letter with a notary, to be opened, and their truth
or falsehood proved, fifty years hence.
Compiègne, February 23, 1855.
... My object in my last letter was not by any means, as you seem to
think, to accuse _your aristocracy_ of having mismanaged the Crimean war.
It has certainly been mismanaged, but who has been in fault?
Indeed I know not, and if I did I should think at the same time that it
would not be becoming in a foreigner to set himself up as a judge of the
blunders of any other Government than his own.
I thought that I had expressed myself clearly. At any rate what I wanted
to say, if I did not say it, is, that the present events created in my
opinion a new and great danger for your aristocracy, and that it will
suffer severely from the rebound, if it does not make enormous efforts to
show itself capable of repairing the past; and that it would be wrong to
suppose that by fighting bravely on the field of battle it could retain
the direction of the Government.