We took occasion a short time since to compare the Baboon at
Washington to the two Neapolitan tyrants, father and son, who earned the execrations of the world and of all future ages, by the reign of terror which they deliberately organized and carried out within their dominions.
The charge which was made against the younger Bomba in the British Parliament, and which contributed more than anything else to deprive him of all sympathy when he fell, was that he governed by means of the police.
Our American Bomba copies his example most sedulously in this respect.
We are told by his organ, the New York
Herald, that his Prime
Minister Seward, having, we presume, nothing else to do, is engaged at this moment in organizing a system of
espionage on the
French plan; that is on the plan adopted by Fouche in the days of the consulate and Empire, which filled every house with spies, planted distrust in every social circle, and banished peace, security and confidence from every household in
France.
The most confidential conversations were not sacred from the prying malice of this terrible system.
The nearest relatives knew not how to trust each other.
The father knew not that his son might not be a spy upon his actions; the mother knew not that she might not be denounced by her own daughter.
Ineradicable suspicion was sown between husband and wife, brother and sister, master and servant.
Each felt that the other held his life in his hands.
Such was the system which
Mr. Seward is employed in imitating, and such were its results.
It was copied with improvements by the two Bombas, and the younger of them lost his crown for the offence.
When
Garibaldi came to try conclusions with him, he found scarcely anybody among his nine millions of subjects to stand at his back.
The invader walked through his territories, as though he were leading a holiday procession.
Yet it was not either their chains or their dungeons, their police or their spies, that formed the most damning accusation against the Bombas. The crowning act of outrage in the case of each was the bombardment of his own cities.
Bomba the older bombarded
Naples, and Bomba the younger bombarded
Palermo.--Outraged humanity, all over the world, rose up against these atrocious deeds.
There is nothing to justify it in any military code known to the whole world.
Yet our Bomba at
Washington proposes to imitate the example.
We are told by his miserable tool, the Baltimore
American, that he is erecting batteries
to command the city, upon
Federal Hill, and we are given to understand that, upon the approach of a Confederate force, he means to burn it to the ground.
We hardly know how to believe that he can be meditating a crime so horrible, and we should not believe it, had he not taken pains to render us incapable of surprise at anything he may do. Were he not capable of entertaining thoughts at least as bad, he never would have sanctioned the proclamation of that ‘"bastard brat of a vagabond fiddler,"’
Fremont, in
Missouri.
We need not picture to our readers the horror of a bombardment in such a city as
Baltimore, where the population is 230,000.
We have but one hope in the case.
We can hardly believe that a Government which needs, more than any other, the good opinion of foreign powers, would forfeit it by an act of such unparalleled atrocity.
We say unparalleled, for the
Neapolitan Bomba was anointed
King, and considered his power to be derived immediately from above.
But this man was elected to preside for only four years, and professes to hold his authority from the people.
While we should deprecate the destruction of
Baltimore as a deed of unalloyed and unapproachable wickedness, and deplore it for the sake of those among its noble inhabitants who are embarked in the same cause with our selves, and execrate the authors as enemies of God and the human race, we are convinced that it would add tenfold strength to the
Confederate cause.
All earth would rise up as one man to curse the perpetrators of such an atrocity.
The very stones in the fields — the very bricks in the cities, would rise up against them.
They would soon have cause to rue the hour in which they first dreamed of such a crime.
The civilized nations of the earth would make common cause against men thus proving themselves worse than barbarians.--It would be no violation of international law to hang up like dogs, wherever caught, the authors and instigators, from the
President in the
White House to the officers directing the conflagration.
