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Reminiscences of Two Exiles and Two Wars (1888)
Reminiscences of Two Exiles and Two Wars - 1888 Author:Francis William Newman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: REMINISCENCES, Any one who reads the title of this work may naturally ask, What peculiar knowledge of such topics can this author have had ? and, What connect... more »ion with Hungary had these two wars ? To both questions the following pages will give reply; but I at once state, as a general augury of my knowing something, that when the two Hungarian celebrities, Kossuth and Pulszky, quitted England in 1860, Pulszky told me they were glad to leave behind in ME one Englishman who knew all their secrets and could be trusted to expound them. At that time I knew what part Kossuth had taken in encouraging the Turks to accept the 2 1849, ERA OF ROYALIST REACTION. war forced on them by the Czar Nicolas ; but near a quarter of a century had to pass before her Majesty Queen Victoria revealed to us the signal impetus given to the Western Powers against Russia, of which to this day the Right Honourable John Bright seems ignorant. I find middle-aged men hardly to know who and what Kossuth was, and to have no other notion of the Crimean war than that which the Quakers have diligently inculcated for thirty years. No one for a moment denies that the war was dreadful, and I knew, before Mr. Gladstone told us in 1880, that the Aberdeen ministry were intensely reluctant to enter it; but that it has been useless, I cannot agree. To Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, it has been eminently beneficial ; but Kossuth truly said we brought it on ourselves, by unrighteously evading our duty of mediating for Hungary. If England and France had not fought it, nothing short of an equivalent war must have been fought against Russia by other powers. The instinct of England and of the Prince Consort urged it,JOSHUA TOULMIN SMITH. 3 not unwisely, as I judge, but upon an unwilling ministry. I must m...« less