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germs of prosperity, and reduced one of the most fertile islands in the world to the necessity of importing the productions in which it was once eminently rich, and even much of the food required for the subsistence of its inhabitants. Marshal O'Donnell has assured Mr. Edwardes, our Chargé d'Affaires, that the Dominican Republic had made repeated overtures to be taken under the protection of Spain, or to be annexed, but that he had invariably rejected them, saying he did not consider such a step to be for the interest of either of the two countries; and that at the time the Spanish dominion was proclaimed in San Domingo, there was not a Spanish vessel in any of the harbours, or even off the coast, and that the intelligence had to be conveyed to Cuba in a small coasting vessel. In the course of the last month,' wrote Mr. Edwardes from Madrid, 'the Spanish Consul at Santo Domingo presented himself to the Governor-General of Cuba, and stated that the Dominican Republic had decided upon annexing itself to Spain, requesting his Excellency to accept this spontaneous offer, and to send officers and troops to incorporate it with the Spanish dominions. Shortly afterwards an envoy of the President of the Republic appeared and repeated the offer in the same terms. Marshal Serrano declined taking any decision until he should be fully convinced that such was the free and express desire of the whole of the Dominican population; and the envoy having assured him that such was the irrevocable determination of the Republic, he consented to send to Santo Domingo the ships and troops that they asked for; but upon condition that not a single Spanish soldier should put foot on shore until, by means of the municipalities, by universal suffrage, or by some other clear and distinct manner, a "plébiscite," or something equivalent, decreeing the annexation, should have been voted; and that even in that case he would not accept it otherwise than ad interim and ad referendum to the decision of Her Catholic Majesty. After this declaration he despatched the ships with 3000 men on board to lie off the coast of Santo Domingo.'* The Dominicans are described in a despatch from the Captain-General of Cuba to the Spanish Government as raising the flag of Castile from one end of the country to the other with the enthusiasm of a people which, after long suffering and with a gloomy future before it, resolutely sought for relief, tranquillity, and security in a long cherished measure. It appears that not only all the towns of Santo Domingo spontaneously declared their renewed allegiance to Spain, but some places on the frontier of the Republic of Hayti followed the example.

* Despatch of Mr. Edwardes to Lord J. Russell, April 17, 1861.

Every interest in San Domingo had, on the testimony of the British consul, fallen into complete decay; and on the acceptance by Spain of the proffered allegiance of the settlement, its paper money immediately rose in value 30 per cent. The Spanish Government has given the most satisfactory pledges that slavery shall not be reintroduced. Indeed, the reintroduction of slavery into the recent acquisition of the Spanish Crown is morally impossible. A special enactment of the Cortes would be necessary to legalise it, and opinion in Spain would not sanction the act. The Prime Minister emphatically declared on a recent occasion that the public opinion of his country had been pronounced decidedly against the slave trade, and that his Government was using its best endeavours to put an end to it; but that its total suppression could not be effected in a day, or before measures for substituting other labour were matured.* It will be for the Spanish Government now to prove the sincerity of its pledges, and to develope the riches of this noble island. A great experiment will soon be in progress in the attempt to raise tropical produce by free labour. We believe it will be a successful one. It must, should it so prove, effect an entire revolution in the present colonial economy of Spain. There will no longer be even a pretext for conniving at the slave trade, and the gradual extinction of slavery within the Spanish dominions will be assured. No one can desire a sudden emancipation of the Negro race in Cuba, Porto Rico, or in any other portion of the world, but a policy of progressive amelioration and ultimate freedom must and will be the necessary result. We believe such a consummation to be the sincere wish of the Spanish people.

Spain, while retaining her originality of character, is far from being so much in the rear of modern nations as is sometimes supposed.† Much that may yet be objectionable in her government she owes to the principles on which she was long ruled. From the time of the Arab invasion down to the conquest of Granada this high-minded people had scarcely any political intercourse with the rest of Europe. They had little knowledge of anything beyond their mountain barrier; and their isolation, combined with their strong religious temperament, made them the willing victims of ecclesiastical ambition. Spain long tried to impose her yoke and her faith upon Europe. It was a rash and hopeless struggle against the laws of society; and, baffled in the enterprise, she sank into profound and apparently hopeless exhaustion. It is but a corpse that I have reanimated,'

*Despatch of Mr. Edwardes to Lord J. Russell, July 7, 1861.

† Such, at least, is the opinion of a recent French writer of great intelligence. See 'L'Espagne en 1860,' par Vidal.

said Alberoni, the minister of Philip V., when contemplating the results of the temporary energy he had infused into the State; and when I die, it will again quietly lay itself down in its tomb.' But the nation never lost its vitality, and the national character survived the national humiliation. The royal authority has stood unshaken amidst all the political tempests that have desolated the Spanish peninsula. Indeed the people can appreciate no government of which monarchy is not the presiding principle, and they are but too prone to consider it as the only substantial power of the State. Loyalty is an inextinguishable passion, and the throne is based on ancient traditions, although surrounded and supported by modern institutions.

The feeling of the Spanish people on the return of prosperity, and their just confidence in the future, found a suitable expression in the address of the Queen's ministers to their Sovereign on the restoration of San Domingo to the Crown. "God,' they say, 'who during a period the memory of which is imperishable exalted this monarchy, and who has preserved the purity of its reputation in the midst of long and terrible trials, has permitted it to recover from its past weakness, and to be able to embrace a people who were separated from its bosom in days of perturbation and debility which will never return.' The revival of Spain can excite in this country no feeling but one of unqualified satisfaction. Great Britain and Spain,' in the words of Lord Russell, have for long periods of time, and in circumstances of high moment to each, been faithful and active allies, and their alliance has been greatly useful and highly honourable to both. It is a fundamental maxim of British policy to wish well to Spain, and earnestly to desire her welfare and prosperity.' * While endeavouring to bring prominently forward the very strong grounds which exist for believing that she is at length arousing herself and taking the right course of industry and enterprise, we have left ourselves no room to notice the many attractions of the country which are pleasantly set forth in the Letters from Spain,' the work of a very accomplished man. Neither have we entered at length upon the history of the court or the conduct of the political leaders of Spain; and in particular we have with some difficulty abstained from adverting at present to certain financial shortcomings of the Spanish Government, because we are persuaded that the time cannot be far distant when it will proudly redeem the honour of the country, and efface from its escutcheon a great and lamentable blot.

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* Despatch from Lord J. Russell to Mr. Edwardes, May 14, 1861.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Addresses delivered on different Public Occasions by His Royal Highness the Prince Albert. 1857.

2. Prince Albert's Speeches. People's Edition.

TH

HERE are events-the paralysing nature of which seems to arrest the hand of Time himself, causing a recoil, equally from the Past and the Future, in which the mind of an individual or of a nation stands for awhile giddily still, like a ship struck between two seas.

Of this character is the event under which the country is still stunned the death of the Prince Consort. We were all at the busy work or idle play of life, adding house to house and field to field, preparing for a great mart of the inventions and productions of the civilized world, and seeing no cloud, except one, which we made equally sure to repel or disperse; when suddenly, and to many without the slightest preparation, there appeared a handwriting on the wall, and the millions of the land gazed upon it with sorrowful anxiety. The metaphor goes no further. For whom did that writing concern? Not the tyrant swelling with pride, or the Sybarite revelling in excess; not one who, in any sense, was using the sacred things of the Lord's temple for unhallowed purposes, but a Prince, gentle, pure, and upright, wise and good. Let us not, however, act or speak as if the death of the righteous, even in the vigour of his days and the zenith of his usefulness, were a strange, or, in every sense, an evil thing, in this imperfect world. Much mercy has been shown by the Dispenser of events. He has been cut off by no accident harrowing the soul with second causes-by no assassin sullying our resignation with feelings of resentment. He has died with his own beloved ones about him, cared for and tended by the highest skill in the land; with the prayers of multitudes of the subjects of that agonized Lady besieging Heaven, all importunate for his life, and the wail of a great nation rising muffled about his couch. It is sufficient that in the hands of the Lord are the issues of life and death, and that without His knowledge not a sparrow falls to the ground.

In

Nor let it either ungratefully and untruly be said that we have utterly lost him whom we so deeply lament. A life spent among us for above twenty years in one ceaseless stream of good and wise works, no death of the body can be said to sweep away. the light of a glorious example, long watched by the good with ever-increasing admiration, that life is ours still. Let us, therefore, endeavour, in all humility, to trace something of the character and habits of a mind which has left as a legacy a standard of conduct so far raised above all former precedent; enlisting the

help

help of his own honoured words in our task, by referring, as we proceed, to that small volume of his 'Speeches' on various public occasions, wherein the mind may be said to have traced an unassailable record of itself.

There are two classes of character to which the term greatness is applied. The one possessing gorgeous powers, unsustained by any corresponding elevation of the whole man, which crosses our path in this world like a meteor, attracting notice as much by its irregularity as its light. The other, endowed with that perfect balance of mental powers and moral qualities-the totus tereswhich needs to be known as a whole before it can be appreciated in its parts; appealing not to our love of the marvellous, or thirst for excitement, but to our deeper sympathies and nobler aspirations, and therefore slow to find favour in a world more quickly caught by dazzling eccentricities than by the steady light of a general superiority of being. Of this last class of character, and from the station he occupied and the opportunities he enjoyed, one of the most perfect examples which history will, perhaps, ever record, was that illustrious man whose career is thus early closed.

Looking back now at the time when the Prince first came to this country, a young and untried foreigner, to whom we gave so much, and from whom we expected so little, the nation seems to have been strangely blind to the promise which we now feel always beamed from that firm and serene brow. There was no outburst of congratulation that a lot so brilliant should have fallen, to all appearances, so auspiciously. We waited and watched, with no very eager interest, prepared rather to discover those errors and shortcomings known to be inseparable from youth and not youth only—and royalty, than to hail any dawning signs of a great and exceptional career. Nor was our blindness intentional or malicious. Behind the constitutional restraints imposed on all English monarchs, to which the other Self of a reigning Queen was necessarily subject,-restraints imposed purposely to neutralize the personal propensities of the individual, and to level each in succession to the same safe and just medium, -from behind these limits royalty assumes but a colourless, however imposing, character to the great mass of the people. If the private life be outwardly decorous, little is said, and that little

often not true.

But to say nothing of this incapacity of judging, what right had we to raise any hopes beyond that same measure of respectability and decorum? What precedent had we for a Prince leading a life, setting an example, and creating for himself a career, for the good of a country, such as we now proudly, Vol. 111.-No. 221.

N

fondly,

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