London, June 14
Humanity in England, like liberty in France, has now become an export article for the traders in politics.3 We recollect the time when Tsar Nicholas had Polish ladies flogged by soldiers and when Lord Palmerston found the moral indignation of some parliamentarians over the event "impolitic". We recollect that about a decade ago a revolt took place on the Ionian Islands[220]
which gave the English governorb there occasion to have a fairly considerable number of Grecian women flogged. Probatum est,c
said Palmerston and his Whig colleagues who at that time were in office. Just a few years ago proof was furnished to Parliament from official documents that the tax collectors in India employed means of coercion against the wives of the ryots,[221] the infamy of which forbids giving further details. Palmerston and his colleagues did not, it is true, dare to justify these atrocities, but what an outcry they would have raised, had a foreign government dared to publicly proclaim its indignation over these English infamies and distinctly indicate that it would step in if Palmerston and colleagues did not at once disavow the Indian tax officials. But Cato the Censor himself could not watch over the morals of the Roman citizens more anxiously than the English aristocrats and their ministers over the "humanity" of the war-waging Yankees!
The ladies of New Orleans, yellow beauties, tastelessly bedecked with jewels and comparable, perhaps, to the women of the old Mexicans, save that they do not devour their slaves in natura? are this time — previously it was the harbours of Charleston — the occasions for the British aristocrats' display of humanity. The English women who are starving in Lancashire (they are, however, not ladies, nor do the^possess any slaves), have inspired no parliamentary utterance hitherto; the cry of distress from the Irish women, who, with the progressive eviction of the small tenant farmers in green Erin,(1) are flung half naked on the street and driven from house and home quite as if the Tartars had descended upon them, has hitherto called forth only one echo from the Lords, the Commons, and Her Majesty's government(2)— homilies on the absolute rights of landed property.[222] But the ladies of New Orleans! That, to be sure, is another matter. These ladies were far too enlightened to participate in the tumult of war, like the goddesses of Olympus, or to cast themselves into the flames, like the women of Saguntum.[223] They have invented a new and safe mode of heroism, a mode that could have been invented only by female slaveholders and, what is more, only by female slaveholders in a land where the free part of the population consists of shopkeepers by vocation, tradesmen in cotton or sugar or tobacco, and does not keep slaves, like the cives(3) of the ancient world. After their men had run away from New Orleans or had crept into their back closets, these ladies rushed into the streets in order to spit in the faces of the victorious Union troops or to stick out their tongues at them or, like Mephistopheles, to make in general "an unseemly gesture",*(4) accompanied by insulting words. These Magaeras imagined they could be ill-mannered "with impunity".
This was their heroism. General Butler issued a proclamation(5) in which he notified them that they should be treated as street-walkers, if they continued to act as street-walkers. Butler has, indeed, the makings of a lawyer, but does not seem to have undertaken the requisite study of English statute law.[224] Otherwise, by analogy with the laws imposed on Ireland under Castlereagh,[225]
he would have prohibited them from setting foot on the streets at all. Butler's warning to the "ladies" of New Orleans has aroused such moral indignation in Earl Carnarvon, Sir. J. Walsh (who played so ridiculous and odious a role in Ireland) and Mr. Gregory, who was already demanding recognition of the Confederacy a year ago,(6) that the Earl in the Upper House, the knight and the man "without a handle to his name" (7) in the Lower House, interrogated the Ministry to learn what steps it intended to take in the name of outraged "humanity". Russell and Palmerston both castigated Butler, both expected that the government at Washington would disavow him; and the so very tender-hearted Palmerston, who behind the Queen's(8) back and without the foreknowledge of his colleagues recognised the coup d'état of December 1851 [226] (on which occasion "ladies" were actually shot dead, whilst others were violated by Zouaves[227]) merely out of "human admiration"—the same tender-hearted Viscount declared Butler's warning to be an "infamy".(9) Ladies, indeed, who actually own slaves — such ladies were not even to be able to vent their anger and their malice on common Union troops, peasants, artisans and other, rabble with impunity! It is "infamous".
Among the public here, no one is deceived by this humanity farce. It is meant partly to call forth, partly to fortify the feeling in favour of intervention, in the first place on the part of France. After the first melodramatic outbursts, the knights of humanity in the Upper and Lower House, as if by word of command, discarded their emotional mask. Their declamation served merely as a prologue to the question whether the Emperor of the French(10) had communicated with the English government in the matter of mediating, and whether the latter, as they hoped, had received such an offer favourably. Russell and Palmerston both declared they did not know of the offer. Russell declared the present moment extremely unfavourable for any mediation. Palmerston, more guarded and reserved, contented himself with saying that at the present moment the English government had no intention of mediating.
The plan is that during the recess of the English Parliament France should play her role of mediator and, in the autumn, if Mexico is secure, should open her intervention. The lull in the American theater of war has resuscitated the intervention speculators in St. James and the Tuileries from their marasmus. This lull is itself due to a strategic error on the part of the North. If, after its victory in Tennessee, the Kentucky army had rapidly advanced on the railway junctions in Georgia, instead of letting itself be drawn South down the Mississippi on a side track, Reuter and Co. would have been cheated of their business in "intervention" and "mediation" rumours. However that may be, Europe can wish nothing more fervently than that the coup d'état[3] should attempt "to restore order in the United States" and "to save civilisation" there too.
Published according to the newspaper
Endnotes
[219] First published in English in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, New York, 1937, London, 1937, pp. 191-94.
[220] T h e Ionian Islands had been a British protectorate from 1815. The 1848-49 revolt of the islands' Greek population, to which Marx refers, aimed at union with Greece. It was brutally crushed by the British.
[221] Ryots—hereditary lessees of state-owned lands in India. Here Indian peasants.
[222] The various Landlord and Tenant Bills envisaging easier terms for the tenants, first submitted to the British Parliament in the 1850s, were stubbornly resisted by the big landowners. In 1860 a half-hearted Landlord and Tenant Act was adopted which failed to solve the problem. Marx discussed the Act in his articles "From the Houses of Parliament.— Bulwer's Motion.— The Irish Question" and "General Simpson's Resignation.— From Parliament" (see present edition, Vol. 14, pp. 340-43 and 470-71).
[223] Saguntum was a town in ancient Spain. Allied with Rome, it was attacked and seized after an eight-month siege by Hannibal's troops in 219 B.C. The people of the town rejected all proposals for surrender and immolated themselves.
[224] Statute law—a system of legal regulations based on the statutes, or Acts, of the British Parliament.
[225] l n the wake of the Irish national liberation uprising of 1798 the British Parliament, on Castlereagh's initiative, passed a series of acts in 1801 placing Ireland in a state of siege and suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, under which persons under arrest had to be brought before a court and presented with formal charges.
[226] Shortly after the December 2, 1851 coup d'état in France Palmerston, then British Foreign Secretary, approved of Louis Bonaparte's usurpation of power in a conversation with the French Ambassador to London. He did so without previously notifying the Cabinet, which led to his resignation in December 1851, although in principle the British government took a view identical to Palmerston's and was the first in Europe to recognise the Bonapartist regime.
[227] Zouaves was the name given to some French infantry regiments originally recruited from among the Berber tribe of the Zouaves in Algeria.
[3] Construction of the Suez Canal was begun in 1859 and completed in 1869. The Fortress of Gae'ta, the last stronghold of Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies (the Kingdom of Naples), was seized by the Piedmont troops on February 12, 1861, as a result of which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies became part of the united Kingdom of Italy.