Lord Aberdeen the wrong of setting his name at the head of a detestable
libel. The illustrious Guizot wrote Mr. Gladstone a long letter
expressing, with much courtesy and kindness, his regret at the
publication. Nothing is left in Italy, said Guizot, between the terrors
of governments attacked in their very existence and the fury of the
beaten revolutionists with hopes more alert than ever for destruction
and chaos. The King of Naples on one side, Mazzini on the other; such,
said Guizot, is Italy. Between the King of Naples and Mazzini, he for
one did not hesitate. This was Mr. Gladstone's first contact with the
European party of order in the middle of the century. Guizot was a great
man, but '48 had perverted his generalising intellect, and everywhere
his jaundiced vision perceived in progress a struggle for life and death
with 'the revolutionary spirit, blind, chimerical, insatiate,
impracticable.' He avowed his own failure when he was at the head of the
French government, to induce the rulers of Italy to make reforms; and
now the answer of Schwarzenberg to Lord Aberdeen, as well as the
official communications from Naples, showed that like Guizot's French
policy the Austrian remedy was moonshine.

Perhaps discomposed by the reproaches of reactionary friends abroad,
Lord Aberdeen thought he had some reason to complain of the publication.
It is not easy to see why. Mr. Gladstone from the first insisted that if
private remonstrance did not work 'without elusion or delay,' he would
make a public appeal. In transmitting the first letter, he described in
very specific terms his idea that a short time would suffice to show
whether the private method could be relied upon.[245] The attitude of
the minister at Vienna, of Fortunato at Naples, and of Castelcicala in
London, discovered even to Aberdeen himself how little reasonable hope
there was of anything being done; elusion and delay was all that he
could expect. He was forced to give entire credit to Mr. Gladstone's
horrible story, and was as far as possible from thinking it a detestable
libel. He never denied the foundation of the case, or the actual state
of the abominable facts. Schwarzenberg never consented to comply with
his wishes even when writing before the publication. How then could
Aberdeen expect that Mr. Gladstone should abandon the set and avowed
purpose with which he had come flaming and resolved to England?

SENSATION IN EUROPE

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