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By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread over the land!
Certainly, ambit fortunam Caesaris: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity." Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a technical casus belli. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention.
The hero sailed for Sicily, and there, assured of non-intervention by the presence of the flags of France, England and Sardinia, he made an easy conquest of the defenceless island. As soon as he got possession of Palermo, and had assumed the title and powers of dictator, he commenced, like a true revolutionist, the work of subversion.
In this short "stump speech in the belly of the bill," as Thomas H. Benton and Republican orators after him have, by way of ridicule, been pleased to call it, is the key to the law which must ever govern its true interpretation, and it puts to the rout all the arguments that have been made to prove that non-intervention and popular or territorial sovereignty are not in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, except in small fractions.
Tenth, That in the recent vetoes, by their Federal Governors, of the acts of the Legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, prohibiting Slavery in those Territories, we find a practical illustration of the boasted Democratic principle of Non-Intervention and Popular Sovereignty embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and a demonstration of the deception and fraud involved therein.
Douglas announced that, in reporting it, "The object of the Committee was neither to legislate Slavery in or out of the Territories; neither to introduce nor exclude it; but to remove whatever obstacle Congress had put there, and apply the doctrine of Congressional Non-intervention in accordance with the principles of the Compromise Measures of 1850, and allow the people to do as they pleased upon this as well as all other matters affecting their interests."
Firmly convinced of the correctness of my opinions on the question dividing the nation, I appeal in all kindness to the Whigs and Democrats, now ranging under Republican banners, and perhaps under the uniform of Republican wide-awakes, and I ask them, Whigs and Democrats, who alike in 1852 and in 1856 sustained the compromise principle of Congressional non-intervention with slavery: why have they changed their ground?
He called attention to the fact that the United States had acknowledged the right of France to make war on Mexico, and continued: "On the other part, we admit, as they do, the principle of non-intervention; this double postulate includes, as it seems to me, the elements of an agreement."
On the whole, we are inclined to come to the conclusion that if Walpole knew anything about the compact and we think he did know something about it he was quite right in not allowing it to disturb his policy of non-intervention, but that he was not quite sound in his judgment if he held his peaceful course only because he did not believe that such a family bond between members of such a family would hold good.
He seems never to have understood that in Philip Augustus he had to deal with a different man from Louis VII. That he continued steadily under the changed circumstances his old policy of non-intervention outside his own frontiers, of preserving peace to the latest possible moment, and of devoting himself to the maintenance and perfection of a strong government wherever he had direct rule, is more creditable to the character of Henry II than to the insight of a statesman responsible for the continuance of a great empire, and offered the realization of a great possibility.
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