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HISTORY OF THE MONTH.

1851 begins with the putting down of HESSE-CASSEL: the moral resistance of a noble People overborne by brute force. How could it be otherwise? SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN has yielded to the menaces of the Combined Powersincluding England. So the last spark of European freedom is trampled-not out. In FRANCE there has been a 'change' of Ministry; and a widening of the breach between the Legislative and the Executive, which may bring forth more serious results than the mere depriving of Changarnier (the General Monk of the Assembly) of his command of the army.-In SPAIN Narvaez has at last retired from power.

In IRELAND the Tenant-League meets in Conference, to provide for the coming war, and to raise a force in England. In SCOTLAND the beginning (not too soon, when Landlordism is depopulating the Hebrides) is announced in the formation of a Tenant Protection Society' in Elgin.

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In ENGLAND the ground lies fallow. The agitation against the Taxes on Knowledge is, however, making way. Meetings have been held, at the London Tavern on the 2nd instant, of the Birmingham Town Council on the 7th, and elsewhere. The Clergy are joining the education movement; had a meeting to propose plans of their own, at Manchester, on the 6th. Is it a good omen?-The Leeds Redemption Society' reported favourably at their annual Soirée on the 13th.The Parliamentary and Financial Reformers' have issued their second yearly report. Their appeal for £10,000 has only procured £3060. 223 meetings have been held and 150,000 tracts and addresses issued, without persuading the better half of the people to stir themselves for an increase of the garrison of privilege. Mr. Hume, Mr. W. J. Fox, Mr. George Thompson, Mr. Henry Vincent, and other such like men of principle, are to be the persuaders for 1851, at monthly soirées at the London Tavern.-The new Chartist Executive held their first public meeting, at the John St. Institution, London, on the 14th. Agrarian murders in Ireland, incendiary fires in England, frequent robberies, and shocking cases of brutality towards the poor, continue to testify to the worth of the 'government' at home; and from Australia come tidings of a great League forming there, to carry out the example of the sturdy settlers at the Cape, in repudiation of our intolerable convict system. The colonists shame their fellow subjects at home.

We are glad to see announced a plan (proposed by Thomas Cooper,_the Chartist) for obtaining a People's Hall in London, to hold 3000 persons. How soon shall we be able to fill it with the associated Republicans ?

January 27th.

THE POPE OR THE REPUBLIC:

'RUSSIAN OR DEMOCRATIC.'

POWARDS make compromises. Cowards and liars: or say Whigs,-a generic term for the two. The Whig may be characterized as a deliberate untruth: his untruth being the only thing in which he is consistent. He is a political jesuit, without even the poor excuse of fanaticism; a degenerate Tory, base-born and more basely living. Your Tory proper-a race fast dying outhas a leaven of sincerity in him. Although whenever he may look into the slow stream of Time, he may find himself somewhat more monstrous than any 'strange fowl' in the Heralds' Office, he yet believes his monstrosity to be of divine origin, prides himself upon his ugliness, esteems it as a privilege, and calls God and man to witness his peculiar gifts. But the poor Whig is ashamed of himself at the best of times: well he may be, you'll say. But it is not ingenuously; not because he has a conscience which doubts the divinity of pettiness; but because he has not capacity to believe even in the meanest of things. He has only a belly and a villainous brain. The best of the kind (if such a term of comparison may be used) are well described by Carlyle, who speaks of them as being without 'even a conviction,' having nothing in the place of conscience but 'a conjecture and dim puzzle.' 'How many poor Girondins' (anglice Whigs), says he, are sure of but one thing: That a man and Girondin ought to have footing somewhere, and to stand firmly '-or, we will say, wriggle-' on it; keeping well with the Respectable Classes. This is what conviction and assurance of faith they have. They must wriggle painfully between their dilemma-horns.' The Girondins, however, had many noble qualities. Our English mongrel is a far inferior animal.

The real difference between the Tory and the Tory-Whig is this:-The Tory simple, through some mental obliquity, is a bigot in evil, and works accordingly; the other knows what is good, but will not do it,-and at the same time desires evil and dares not be a bold wrong-doer. The height of his ambition is to establish a convention, a mutual agreement between God and the Devil, providing that the Devil shall be constitutional king of the world, and the Whig his prime-minister; and that God, in return for some small liberal allowance, shall be well-behaved and no more troublesome. Not but what he is always on the side of Freedom; and, if he sees it triumphing, will contrive to trip it up while caring for fair play, for fear it should go too far; or if on the other hand Freedom falls among thieves, he will-when men begin to cry shame on him for standing idly by-pick up the All this he falling, secretly stabbing it in the back, that it may not recover. renders yet more rascally by pretending that his real principle is non-intervention. Nothing but a Whig Government could have played the foul part which has so disgraced England in all honest eyes, for the last three years. with all his divine lions and unicorns could not have dragged us through so much

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Aberdeen

dirt. Instead of betraying the Sicilians, Aberdeen would have told them from the first that they had no business to rebel against their good king of lazzaroni, He would not have patted the back of that strange hybrid, an unhappy 'reforming' Pope, till he had compromised the poor thing so far that it could not decently escape from liberalism. Nor would Aberdeen have hired French bravos or Cossacks to do his work in Rome and Hungary, and then have come down to an 'honourable House' with a lie in his mouth, exclaiming-How very deplorable but indeed I knew nothing about it, had no means of preventing it.' Aberdeen and his gang would have shown us Tyranny as it is, not dressed blasphemously à la Saviour; and so perhaps would have roused even the comfortable atheists on 'Change to take the part of Justice. At the worst we should not have been humbugged. We might have had to shoot our rulers, on finding them (to wit, the aforesaid lions and unicorns) to be veritable wild beasts; or we might have been overrun by them; but one consolation would have remained to us :that of not being tricked by cowards, of not having to loathe our tyrants as treacherous, which is far worse than brutal.

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The English and continental peoples should fully understand that the defeat of Liberty in this last campaign is owing-next to their own disunion-to the meddling of the English Whigs, the 'non-interventionists.' An open Tory Government must have stirred what little spirit yet lurks in English hearts; and even if we had been overcome, the attempt had kept their hands full, and given that advantage to our friends abroad. But we left the Whigs to do their best, which means always their worst; and so they kissed Liberty with their poisoned mouths, and sent out their secret agents to plot against the peoples. From the commencement of the Lombard war they sought how best they could serve Austria, sacrificing Italy to their dread of French republican intervention. And when, despite their intrigues, the Republic was proclaimed at Rome, they agreed for French intervention (no longer republican) to bring back the Pope. They forbad the Sardinian and Neapolitan fleets to raise the Austrian blockade of Venice; but they left free passage for the French fleet to Civita-Vecchia. Everywhere else their conduct was the same. The Russians were let into Hungary; and when a British fleet passed the Dardanelles, to aid the 'hospitable' Turk, it was but to secure the safe custody of Kossuth in an Asian prison, because they feared to have him slain. And now they have helped the Czar to put down the last remains of German freedom in Schleswig-Holstein.

What have they gained by thus making the English name abominable in Europe? What they sought. They have put off some little while the inevitable advent of Republicanism. And wherever they have seemed to work for Freedom, they have acted on the principle of the cowardly animal who bites off the part

How friendly their position with the Gallician murderers we may understand from an Austrian ambassador daring to propose to Lord Palmerston an union of Austria, Piedmont and England, to betray Italy, and oppose republican France. (See Baron Hummelauer's note to Lord Palmerston, London, 23rd of May, 1847,-published by the House of Commons.) And what will Englishmen think of their Minister at Turin writing home that the cabinet of Vienna had unhappily lost an opportunity against Italy'? (Abercromby to Palmerston, March 25, 1848.) Heaps of similar evidence might be added from the same source. And how much has never come to light?

which the hunters want, in order to escape with its miserable life. But the Whigs never bite boldly; they nibble bit by bit, hoping to trick their adversary. They have done something more, but without intending it. They have made any middle course for the future impossible: for they have proved that the 'Moderates' are never to be trusted. So much the better: but no thanks to them. From end to end of Europe there is now no corner where men will trust to English Whiggism or its like, or to the pretence of compromise in which Whiggism so much delights. The Whigs and their 'constitutional' allies, Prussian, Piedmontese, and French, are now known. The trench is at last dug between the Anarchs and the Republicans. It is no more to be filled up or bridged with the promises of traitors. France, Germany, and Italy, know at length that their worst enemies are the half-friends at home; and the struggle recommences with no further opportunity for the part of the bats in the fable. There is no alternative now but to be Cossack or Republican. So much the better.

But here in England well-meaning people of little wisdom would fain persuade us that things may be different. Here the Whig dodge may still override our salvation,-why not for ever? Republicanism does not tempt me,'-writes a very sincere person and a fair representative of this class;-if I were French, or German, or Italian, it might; but we English may, I think, whenever we have made up our minds, obtain all we want without turning Republican.' The position is worth reconnoitring, for it is the stronghold of all those who, acknowledging the evil of misgovernment, will yet make no endeavour to get a real government: the great and peculiarly English party of political tinkers and darners.

We may get all we want when we have made up our minds to display that amount of combined strength which will terrify the Government, or the governing class, into giving it to us. There can be no doubt of it: their fears will yield us anything. But think well if it is a healthy state of things for a nation to be not organized under a good government to do its work, but in a continual whirl of agitation in order to get from day to day even leave to begin the day's work. Is this increasing fashion of political strife (two hundred and twentythree meetings in one year for the single matter of financial reform) to become the normal condition of English life? Will some of our quiet friends think of this. Is the work of English reformation and regeneration so light that we can afford time for all this preliminary speech-making, agitation, and hubbub of strangely discordant sound? Must we give up all hope of ever being able to set our house in order, to go about our daily work quietly, like sensible men; and are we to be for ever doomed to waste our best energies in 'moving for leave' to begin. At this present time we have Chartist meetings, Socialist meetings, Financial-Reform meetings, Church-Reform meetings, Tenant-League meetings, Education meetings, and how many more? and this perennial babeldom is the very heaven on earth of those who are not to be tempted by Republicanism. Try to form some idea of the amount of time and real energy spent upon all these partial endeavours to get leave from 'Government' to begin to work; and then say if you ought to be satisfied with such a state of confused life-wasting, when one combined effort might supersede the necessity of any more leave-asking, by

enthroning, in the place of the present hinderers, the people's own servants, to organize the people's work.

Look again at this education question. The whole nation (saving a few bigots not worth counting) is convinced of the want here. The Government alone is in the way. If there was a republican Government, the wish of the People once uttered would be enough. A session could not pass without a measure of education. There would then also be an organization for ascertaining the most popular view as to the methods of education. But now, till the whole country can be called from its occupations, to crowd round platforms, to pass resolutions, to waste no end of time and energy in vain endeavours to convince an unwilling Ministry, and till at last men lose temper and threaten the Ministry with consequences, no education shall be commenced. Then the same system of turmoil has to be repeated for the next move. Again and again to the end of the chapter. And this is called orderly government; and we pride ourselves upon our English methods of governmental and popular procedure, Is it because Englishmen are so combative, that their best ideal of a Government is one that like the 'dull ass' will hardly mend its pace for beating? It is as if a man might have his choice of two servants,-one incompetent, perverse, and faithless, and another who would work like himself-and he chose the first for the mere pleasure of being badly served at the cost of much painstaking and bullying. But to expect figs from thistles is the one article of belief ever fondly cherished by the constitutional Englishman who is not to be tempted by Republicanism. Let him hug his impracticable creed. And yet, even though some miraculous interposition could make the impossible possible, it would not avail him: for whether he like it or not, some form of the Republic is inevitable in England. Inevitable, spite of any amount of sceptical laughter. The deathblow to Monarchy (only struck down by Cromwell) was given when your constitution' declared that the monarch could do no wrong, so rendering him equally powerless for good. We have now only the pageantry, without the reality: and reality is royalty. The part of Hamlet is left out, and we have only the accessories— after the fact. It is all as false as the sham hind-quarters of the Pope in the procession. 'When the assembled crows can pluck up their scarecrow, and say to it, Here shalt thou stand and not there; and can treat with it, and make it, from an infinite, a quite finite Constitutional Scarecrow,-what is to be looked for?' The only purposes for which the remains of the said Scarecrow have been galvanized are to sign state-papers and to spend a certain amount of our hardearned money, The first-it was found during the last illness of George the fourth of offensive memory-could be done just as well by a common stamp: and the writing was only the more legible. The last the tax-eating purpose-is already pronounced intolerable by that influential section, the Financial Reformers. When Mr. Cobden talks of 'garrisoning our present institutions,' be sure he is not pledging himself to maintain an expensive Scarecrow, Mr. Carlyle calls it. Let the Manchester men come into power, and they will soon

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b I think it is Carlyle who gives the story of the Pope, who, having on certain days to be carried in procession, in a kneeling posture, to bless the people, had a pair of false legs, etc., made to do the reverential half of the ceremony, while he sat comfortably in front.

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