(10.): To William Hargreaves

Annexation of Savoy

“I should like to know what practical result is likely to follow from our Foreign Minister persevering in borrowing the tone of Mr. Kinglake and Sir Robert Peel in his dispatches to the French Government. The annexation of Savoy to France is a ‘fait accompli.’ The bargain has pleased Piedmont, the Savoyards, and the French people, the only parties really interested; and why, instead of the snarling, dissatisfied tone in which our Foreign Minister persists in treating the matter, cannot he dismiss it with a little of the dignity with which the Russian or Austrian Government has got rid of the disagreeable affair. There is nothing so unworthy of a nation, or even of a man, as a tone of dissatisfied criticism which leaves no after resource but a fit of pouting and sulking. It is a style of controversy fit only for the nursery. I should like to know whether the correspondence now going on between our Foreign office and the American Government upon the subject of the island of St. Juan, is conducted in the same captious, irritating tone as that which has characterized some of our recent dispatches to France, Austria, and Naples. If so, the train is being laid for either a war or a great humiliation.”