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"VERSAILLES, 11th JULY. Extraordinary Council of State; Belleisle being there, home from Frankfurt, to take final orders, and get official fiat put upon his schemes. 'All the Princes of the Blood and all the Marechals of France attend; question is, How the War is to be, nay, Whether War is to be at all, so contingent is the French-Prussian Bargain, signed five weeks ago.
"FREDERIC, P. R. of Prussia." By what route or conveyance this Letter went, I cannot say. In general, it is to be observed, these Friedrich-Voltaire Letters liable perhaps to be considered contraband at BOTH ends of their course do not go by the Post; but by French-Prussian Ministers, by Hamburg Merchants, and other safe subterranean channels.
The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked.
The forces of soldiers have never been sustained on a fatiguing march, nor can they be incited to a battle, by plentiful libations of beer. During the late French-Prussian war nearly every provision train which left Bavaria carried supplies of beer to the Bavarian troops.
Here, in December, 1872, twenty-one natives of the Belezma were tried at a court of assizes for the massacre, last April, of twelve French colonists. The affair was a sequel of the French-Prussian war. The natives, for a long time past on good terms with strangers, became insolent, boasting that France was ruined, and that all the French would soon disappear from Algeria.
Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of Friendship's Garland.
It must be owned, these Friedrich-Hyndford Negotiations, following on an express French-Prussian Treaty of June 5th, which have to proceed in such threefold mystery now and afterwards, are of questionable distressing nature: nor can the fact that they are escorted copiously enough by a correspondent sort on the French side, and indeed on the Austrian and on all sides, be a complete consolation, far otherwise, to the ingenuous reader.
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