"AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM."

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2359, 24 October 1870, Page 2

"AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM."

A WORD FOR FRANCE. (From the Oamara Times, October 21.) “ An Englishman ” writing to an Australian exchange says:—“ A strong disposition seems to be abroad among your contemporaries, English and Colonial, for representing Napoleon as a fiend, and the present victorious monarch of Prussia as a saint; whilst the Prince Imperial and the French people, the Crown Prince and the German population, are respectively spoken of as an unfeeling boy, a collection of reprobates, a modi I of conjugal devot on, and patterns of chastity. The London Spectator, referring to the ‘ baptism of fire,’ gives certain bitter lines relative to the young Prince, who if aught can be gathered from the accounts of tin t baptism, betrayed anything but an indifference to the sufferings of the wounded, shedding tears as he did when witnessing the first death. By what course of ratiocinate n has the English Press arrived at' this frame of mind, so hostile to France and so laudatory of the victors in a few battles, wherein they numbered with, respect to the foe, as three to one ? Have the English peop’e already forgotten when, almost to a man, her population denounced the invasion i f poor little Denmark by the joint forces of Prussia and Austria when an English House of Commons rushed into the lobbr s cheering like madmen on the news that the gollant forces of King Christian had gained a naval victory over the suuerior forces < f his German enemies ? or when this paragraph and lines appeared in the Londi n Punch, to be applandcl from Laud’s End fo John o’ Groats :—* The King of Prussia bts dared to insult the English ! cople by decorating Prince Alfred with the Order of the Prussian Eagle.’ Take back, and in thy dastard_face, As hard as B-itaiu’s might can fling The badge that would a dog disgrace, Thou caitiff, that art named a king. Thy brow is redder than the hand of Caiuj Shalt thou —He slew but one— Murderer of the infant and the Dane Presume to deck Victoria’s son. &c. &c. &c. Or if the Prussians generaliy are so devoted to their better halves, and hold that the marriage vow should be kept as inviolably as was stated in the Telegraph of this morning, what excuse is there for certain scions of royalty iu Prussia, of whom newspaper paragraphs related some weeks ago that not one of them had escaped a whipping, as a result of intrigues with other men’s wives ? I have no wish whatever, Sir, to fan the flame iu this unhappy quarrel, only let us look matters in the face as they are, and not as mere prejudice or interest conceives them to bo, and above all lot us give even the vanquished that fair play t) adhere to which rs a principle is the pride and the boast of an Englishman. ”