Alexandre DUMAS père (1802-1870). Autograph manuscript signed, Les vœux de Lord Palmerston pour l'Italie et la Pologne, [1863]; 4 1/2 pages in-4 on blue paper (1st leaf slightly frayed on one edge). Article published in Italian (I Voti di Lord Palmerston) in Dumas's Neapolitan newspaper, L'Indipendente, on April 8, 1863. Dumas addressed Lord Palmerston, criticizing his lack of support for Italy, in contrast to France, which had sent men and money as early as 1859: "France is not a country which, like England, consults its interests. It's a country that gives in to its passions. It may indeed not be in France's interests to make revolutions every fifteen or twenty years, but it nonetheless makes these revolutions, and by ruining itself, endows the world sometimes with the progressive constitutional system, sometimes with the universal vote which is the last word in popular liberty. Was it England that called for universal suffrage for the army, the servants and even the negroes? No, it's France"... With regard to Poland: "We can only hope that the influence of the European powers will lead Russia to be liberal and magnanimous towards Poland [...] Has Your Grace understood the value of these words, and do you believe that the last of the Poles is not exposed to rejecting Russia's Liberality and Magnanimity far from him? The Russians have taken a nation and delivered it to them garrotted. With a single bite, Empress Catherine bitten from Chernogow to Posen, five million men were crushed under the unhealthy teeth of the Semiramis of the North". Since then, the Poles have regularly risen up without success, and England believes, just by giving them moral support, that Russia will give in to their demands. "Oh the admirable joke. Never has diplomacy, which has taken on so many masks, applied to its pale and mobile face one more shameless, one more lying, one more hypocritical." Peoples can count on each other, but have not yet understood that "their cause is the same, and that each one of them that falls takes away an athlete from [the] struggle of the future"...