Page:History of Freedom.djvu/487

 CARDINAL WISEl\1AN

443

be historically true; (2) that the falsehood consists in the statement that only two addresses were proposed in the COlnmission-one violent, the other very moderate,- and that the address finally adopted was a compromise between these t\vo; (3) that \ve insinuated that the Cardinal himself was the author of the violent address; (4) that we cast, by implication, a severe censure on that address and its author; and (5) that our narrative \vas derived from the same sources, and inspired by the same motives, as that given in The Patrie,-for the Cardinal distinctly connects the two accounts, and quotes passages indifferently from both, in such a \vay that words which we never used might by a superficial reader be supposed to be ours. To these charges our reply is as follows: (I) We gave the statement of which the Cardinal complains as a mere rumour current on any good authority at the time of our publication, and \ve employed every means in our power to test its accuracy, though the only other narratives which had then reached England \vere, as the Cardinal says (p. 9), too" partial and perverted" to enable us to sift it to the bottom. We stated that a rumour was current, not that its purport was true. (2) We did not speak of "only t\VO addresses" actually submitted to the Commission. We supposed the report to mean, that of the three possible forms of address, hvo extreme and one mean, each of which actually had partisans in the Com- mission, the middle or moderate form \vas the one finally adopted. (3) We had no suspicion that the Cardinal had proposed any violent address at all; \ve did not know that such a proposal had been, or \vas about to be, attributed to him; and there was no connection whatever between him and it either in our mind or in our language. (4) \Ve implied no censure either on the course proposed or on its proposer, still less on the Cardinal personally. (5) The articles in The Patrie first appeared-and that in France-some days after our Review was in the hands of the public; we know nothing of the authority on which their statements were founded, and we have not