Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848

It is impossible to exaggerate the moral guilt of the movement thus happily defeated by the firmness of the Government and the loyalty of the immense majority of the people. Situated as the Continent now is – with capital destroyed and credit ruined in France; war imminent, and commerce paralysed in Germany; and hostilities actually raging in Italy, it is evident that Great Britain, if secure of internal tranquillity, may again, as during the war, become the workshop and emporium of the world. Secure within her sea-girt shores, protected alike by her fleets, her armies, her past renown and present spirit, she, has advantages during such a strife which no other country possesses, provided she does not throw them away by her own insanity. But this the proceedings of the Chartists and Repealers are precisely calculated to do. Had the London demonstration turned out successful, these prospects would have been utterly ruined, credit destroyed here as it has been in France, and the misery of the people augmented to a degree never, perhaps, before witnessed in modern Europe. Every Chartist meeting, by prolonging the period of distrust, by checking the return of confidence, by preventing the outlay of capital, postpones the restoration of prosperity by a certain period. As long as they continue, trade never can revive, industry must continue to languish, poverty to increase, suffering to be prolonged, woe to be augmented. What, then, is the guilt of those who, for their own selfish purposes, or to gratify a senseless vanity, prolong an agitation fraught with such disastrous consequences – retain the people, in whom they profess to be interested, steeped in such misery – and avert, when about to set in, the returning flood of prosperity to their country?

The French journalists, in the interest of revolution, are loud in their condemnation of the apathy, as they call it, of the great bulk of the English nation on this occasion, and express their astonishment that the Chartists, for some reason they cannot understand, shrank from a contest with the Government, under circumstances which gave them, as they think, every prospect of success. We will tell them the reason – which is not the less true, that it may not be altogether pleasing to their vanity: The English are major and they are minor; the English are men and they are schoolboys. We, too, have had our dreams of communism, but they were brought forward by Jack Cade in the days of Richard II.; we, too, have indulged in social aspirations, but it was in the days of the Fifth-Monarchy Men, and they ended in the despotism of Cromwell. It is very well for schoolboys and juvenile academicians to indulge in extravagant freaks suited to their years; but they do not become bearded veterans. When England became a man, she put away childish things. France, by the spoliations and destruction of the first Revolution, has lost the elements of freedom. But Germany yet possesses them; and if she does not abuse her advantages, in two hundred years she may possess the mingled freedom and stability which now constitute at once the glory and happiness of England. It requires that time to be free of the craft of liberty; there is no royal road to freedom any more than geometry. England has preceded other nations by two centuries in this glorious path; it would ill suit the masters to recede, and imitate the follies of such as are only becoming tyros in the attempt to follow it. Those who have long ago reached the summit, and know with what difficulty it was attained, can afford to smile at the young aspirants who invite them to descend and renew the toil of the ascent. Those who have spread political power with safety over a million of pacific electors diffused over a whole empire, have no occasion to imitate the example of those who would establish despotic power in the hands of two hundred thousand armed Janissaries of a single capital.

notes

1

"We talked sad rubbish when we first began," says Mr Cobden in one of his speeches.

2

Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, appointed by the Committee of Council on Education. Parts I. II. III. 1847.

3

This, it will be understood, does not apply to Scotland, – where education has been a very popular interest for nearly two centuries back.

4

This sketch is derived partly from the note-book, and partly from the conversation, of a young German, now living upon a small estate near Barèges in the Upper Pyrenees.

5

Histoire de la Conquête de Naples par Charles d'Anjou, frère de St Louis. Par le Comte Alexis de St Priest, Pair de France. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1848. Vol. iv.

6

"Is it true that virgins, torn from their mothers' arms, were the habitual victims of the conqueror's brutality?.. Is it true that, when a Frenchman met a Sicilian on horseback, he made him dismount, and forced him to follow upon foot, however long the road? Is it true, that the foreigners could not find themselves with the people of the country without insulting them with the odious name of Patarins, an insult which the Sicilians repaid with usury, by styling them Ferracani?" —St Priest, vol. iv. pp. 23, 24.

7

Since augmented into the Latin line —

"Quod placuit Siculis, sola Sperlinga negavit."

8

The death of Cardinal Richelieu offers a singular resemblance with that of Charles of Anjou. Having demanded the Viaticum: "Here is my Lord and my God," he exclaimed; "before him I protest that in all I have undertaken, I have had nothing in view but the good of religion and of the state." – St Priest, vol. iv. p. 165.

9

Procida died at an advanced old age, in his native province of Salerno, reconciled with the Pope and with the King of Naples, at enmity with Sicily, and re-established in his possessions by Charles II. – St Priest, vol. iv. p. 172.

10

"It is at this time (the moment when Charles of Anjou raised the siege of Messina) that estimable, but second-rate historians place the pretended adventure of a French chevalier of the name of Clermont, to whose wife, they say, Charles of Anjou had offered violence. They add, that, after revenging himself by a similar outrage to one of the king's daughters, this French knight fled to Sicily, where he founded the powerful house of Chiaromonte, Counts of Modica." (St Priest, vol. iv. p. 104.) M. de St Priest disbelieves this anecdote, which is certainly inconsistent with the character for rigid morality and chastity he assigns to his hero.

11

Raymond's Reports, 474.

12

Pitcairn, ii. 428.

13

Forbes's Journal of the Session, preface, p. xviii.

14

Balfour's Brieffe Memorials of Church and State, 18.

15

Balfour's Brieffe Memorials of Church and State, 18.

16

Culloden Papers, 118.

17

Burt's Letters from the North of Scotland, 5th Edit., i. 50.

18

New Statistical Account, Aberdeen, 1054.

19

Life and various Vicissitudes of Peter Williamson.

20

Book of Bon Accord, 90.

21

Kennedy's Annals of Aberdeen, i. 296.

22

A representation of it will be found in the Scots Magazine for 1762, p. 404.

23

This advertisement, with other curious newspaper-scraps regarding Williamson, is preserved in the biographical notices of Kay's Portraits, i. 137.