consequences which must instantly follow on a crash of the national
credit—not because we consider it in any degree overcharged, but because
we are now satisfied that the country is alive to its danger. We are too
well accustomed to the braggadocio of modern journalism to attach much
weight to the expiring vociferations of men who have done their utmost
to lead us into the present dilemma; and who now, finding themselves
powerless to advise, are vainly attempting to keep up a delusion which
the experience of each succeeding week is dissipating with extraordinary
rapidity. The most talented of the Free-trading journals virtually
confess that the experiment has altogether failed. They are not able to
point out one single iota of advantage which has resulted from it,
beyond the purely supposititious one that, for a time, it secured the
tranquillity of Great Britain. This is at best an ignoble argument in
behalf of a bad measure; but we believe it to be utterly without
foundation, inasmuch as there probably never was a great question
agitated in which less interest was evinced by the masses of the nation
than in that of the Corn Laws. But we should be sorry, indeed, to rank
the loyalty of the British people so low, or to suppose that the crown
of these realms rested upon so weak a foundation, as the adoption of
such a view as this must necessarily infer. The journals to which we
allude are by no means unconscious of the loss which we have incurred,
or of the danger in which we presently stand. The insane boast of Mr
Villiers, at the opening of the session, that a depreciation of
ninety-one millions had taken place in the annual produce of British
labour, found no echo in the columns of our more sharp-sighted
contemporaries. They are now attempting to show that this calculation
was an utter mistake; that importations are gradually diminishing; and
that prices must necessarily rise. Most glad should we be if their views
upon this subject were sound; but, unfortunately, stern experience
points to a different result. We complain, and that with perfect
justice, that they will not face the difficulty, and tell us what is to
be done, supposing prices remain as they are. Agricultural quackery has
done its utmost, and has been extinguished by the shout of general
derision. No man in his senses believes that production can be
artificially stimulated, or the earth so manured as to yield double
crops to supply the frightful deficiency in the annual balance-sheet of
the farmer. Both arms of husbandry are shattered. Cattle-feeding has
been made, by Sir Robert Peel’s tariff, as profitless as tillage; and
all countries have been invited, and are availing themselves of the
invitation, to inundate our markets with their produce. Under such a
state of things, what hope is there of recovery—what chance of
manufactures reviving, so long as the best customers for manufactures
are borne down? Are they not borne down? Let us see. The depreciation of
food was stated by Mr Villiers at £91,000,000. The whole land rental of
the United Kingdom is, according to a late statistical authority,
£58,753,615. Let us suppose that rents are reduced by one-third—a
reduction which, considering that mortgages and public burdens still
remain undiminished, will cripple the means of most of the proprietors
in the kingdom—and the rental will fall to about £39,169,000. Still
there will remain a loss of nearly £52,000,000 annually, to be borne by
the tenantry; in other words, low prices will have to that extent
affected their power of purchase. The real case is even stronger than
the hypothetical one, because the farmers, who constitute the larger
consuming body, are at present receiving no such remission of rent. Of
£178,000,000, the estimated amount of British manufactures, we export
£58,000,000, and there remain for home consumption goods to the value of
£120,000,000. Upon the sale of these depends not only the prosperity,
but the existence of the manufacturers; and yet people are astonished
that their wares do not go off as formerly! How, in the name of common
sense, can they be expected to go off, when no margin of profit is left,
in his own trade, to the great consumer? What these reasonable gentlemen
anticipate is this—that the proprietor shall have no surplus from his
rent, or the farmer any remuneration from his toil and capital; and yet
that they shall continue to purchase all articles of manufacture as
before!
We observe that a contemporary journal, which naturally feels rather
sore on the subject of the Corn Laws, has twitted Mr Alison with a
failure of prophecy, in not having allowed for a sufficient lapse
between the passing of the Reform Bill and the notable era when the lion
and the lamb coalesced—when Sir Robert Peel finally became a convert to
the dazzling discoveries of Mr Cobden. Our respected brother seems to
think that Mr Alison must feel disappointed that the march of democracy
has been so slow; that the avatar of Free-trade was so long in coming;
and that our fields were not, several years ago, abandoned by the
disappointed husbandman. For the satisfaction of the kindly critic, we
shall quote the following passage, penned in 1832, immediately after the
passing of the Reform Bill, and then, perhaps, refresh his memory as to
the manner in which the later measure was carried:—
“Dark and disastrous, however, as is the future prospect of the
British empire, we do not think its case hopeless, or that, after
having gone through the degradation, distraction, and suffering which
must follow the destruction of the Constitution, it may not yet
witness in the decline of its days some gleams of sunshine and
prosperity. The laws of nature have now come to aid the cause of
order; its usual suffering will attend the march of revolution;
experience will soon dispel the fumes of democracy; the reign of
Political Unions, of Jacobin Clubs, and tricolor flags, must ere long
come to an end; the suffering, anxiety, and distress consequent on
their despotic rule, the suspension of all confidence, and the ruin of
all credit, must consign them to the dust, amidst the execrations of
their country, if they are not subverted by the ruder shock of civil
warfare and military power. The distress, misery, and stagnation, in
every branch of industry, already consequent on the Reform Bill, have
been so extreme, that they must long ago have led to its overthrow,
not only without the resistance, but with the concurrence, of all the
Reformers who are not revolutionists, had it not been for the delusion
universally spread by the revolutionary journals, that the existing
distress was not owing to Reform, but to the resistance which it had
experienced, and that the danger of revolution, great in the event of
the measure being thrown out, was absolutely nugatory in the event of
its being passed. These two sophisms have alone carried the bill
through the resistance it experienced from the property, education,
and talent of the country, and blinded men’s eyes to the enormous
evils which not only threatened to follow its triumph, but attended
its progress. But these delusions cannot much longer be maintained.
Reform is now victorious: the bill is passed unmutilated and
unimpaired; and its whole consequences _now rest on the heads of its
authors, and its authors alone_. When it is discovered that all the
benefits promised from it are a mere delusion; that stagnation,
distress, and misery have signalised its triumph; that trade does not
revive with the contracted expenditure of the rich, nor confidence
return with the increased audacity of the poor; that the ancient and
kindly relations of life have been torn asunder in the struggle, and
the vehemence of democracy has provided no substitute in their stead;
that interest after interest, class after class, is successively
exposed to the attacks of the revolutionists, and the ancient barrier
which restrained them is removed: the eyes of the nation must be
opened to the gross fraud which has been practised upon it. Then it
will be discovered that the aristocratic interest, and the nomination
boroughs, which supported their influence in the Lower House, were the
real bulwark which protected all the varied interests of the country
from the revolutionary tempest, and that every branch of industry is
less secure, every species of property is less valuable, every
enterprise is more hazardous, every disaster is more irretrievable,
when its surges roll unbroken and unresisted into the legislature.
“It is upon this very circumstance, however, that our chief, and
indeed our only hope of the country is founded. Hitherto the great
body of the middle classes have stood aloof from the contest, or they
have openly joined the reforming party. They were carried away by the
prospect of the importance which they would acquire under the new
Constitution, and did not perceive that it was their own interests
which were defended, their own battle which was fought, their own
existence which was at stake, in the contest maintained by the
Conservative party. Now the case is changed. The old rampart is
demolished, and, unless these middle ranks can create a new one, they
must be speedily themselves destroyed. From the sole of their feet to
the crown of their head, the middle classes of England at present
stand exposed to the revolutionary fire; every shot will now carry
away flesh and blood. Deeply as we deplore the misery and suffering
which the exposure of these unprotected classes to the attacks of
revolution must produce, it is in the intensity of that suffering, in
the poignancy of that distress, that the only chance of ultimate
deliverance is to be found. Periods of suffering are seldom, in the
end, lost to nations, any more than to individuals; and it is years of
anguish that expiate the sin, and tame the passions, of days of riot
and licentiousness.
“The Constitution, indeed, is destroyed, but the men whom the
Constitution formed are not destroyed. The institutions which
protected all the classes of the state, the permanent interests which
coerced the feverish throes of democracy, the conservative weight
which steadied all the movements of the people, are at an end; the
peril arising from this sudden removal of the pressure which hitherto
regulated all the movements of the machine is extreme, but the case is
not utterly hopeless. It is impossible at once to change the habits of
many hundred years’ growth; it is difficult in a few years to root out
the affections and interests which have sprung from centuries of
obligation; it is not in a single generation that the virtues and
happiness, fostered by ages of prosperity, are to be destroyed. As
long as the British character remains unchanged; as long as religion
and moral virtue sway the feelings of the majority of the people; as
long as tranquil industry forms the employment of her inhabitants, and
domestic enjoyments constitute the reward of their exertion,—the cause
of order and civilisation is not hopeless. Revolutions, it is true,
are always effected by reckless and desperate minorities in opposition
to opulent and indolent majorities; but it is the ennobling effect of
civil liberty to nourish a spirit of resistance to oppression, which
outstrips all the calculations of those who ground their views upon
what has occurred in despotic monarchies.”
And so it happened. The reaction throughout the country was complete.
The Conservative party rallied; and rallied so effectively, that, with
many converts in its ranks, and the rising youth of the new generation
to back it, a great majority in the House of Commons was secured, and
the leadership intrusted to the hands of one who, in despite of previous
lapses, appeared at that time to have earned the distinction by his
zeal, and who gained it by the force of his protestations. Had the
leader been true to the cause which he then professed, we should have
been spared the ungracious duty of commenting upon a solemn treachery,
to which history affords no parallel, and the memory of which will live
long after the grave has closed above the head of the principal
delinquent. How was it possible that such an event could fail again, for
a time, to disunite a party, formed out of the ruins of the old one by a
rapid and indiscriminate conscription? That dependence and faith which
high and chivalrous spirits are so ready to place in one beneath whose
colours they have fought—the ready trustingness of youth—the great
prestige which surrounds the name of a veteran and successful
statesman—the belief in his superior sagacity—the recollection of
blandishments and flattery, so prized by the young when proceeding from
the lips of honoured age,—all these things combined to break up the
Conservative party, and to place the reins of government once more in
the hands of the eager Whigs. Perhaps it is better so. There is no risk
now of a second betrayal, whatever may be the future fortunes of the
Country Party; and on the head of him who caused the social change let
the whole consequences rest. England’s political annals have at least
gained one character more by the act. The future historian who shall
chronicle the transactions of the last five years, whatever be his creed
or his politics, will speak with veneration and honour of LORD GEORGE
BENTINCK, for whose early fate more honest tears were shed, than have
often been paid as a tribute to the patriot who has fallen in battle,
the defender of his country’s cause.
We have not left ourselves much room to glance at the three interesting
papers in this volume, on the subject of the two French Revolutions of
1830 and 1848. They will be read with profound attention by thousands
who may have passed them over cursorily in their anonymous original
form; because Mr Alison’s profound and intimate knowledge of the working
of French diplomacy, of the turbulent and dangerous element which lies,
like molten lava, beneath the surface of French society, and of the
secret causes of those outrages which, from time to time, have shaken
that unhappy country, must needs give an additional assurance of their
value. It is curious to observe how entirely the speculations of the
author, as to the consequences which might arise from the first of those
sudden revolutions, are borne out by the marvellous issue of the second.
The falsity of the system which made the stability of a government and
the existence of a dynasty mainly depend upon the doubtful adherence,
and still more doubtful valour, of a civic National Guard, was clearly
pointed out and exposed at the time when the Liberal press of England
was loud in its approbation of the citizen soldiers who had violated
their oaths, and the citizen king, who, more fortunate than his
worthless father, had succeeded in supplanting his kinsman and rightful
sovereign.
“Of the numerous delusions,” wrote Mr Alison in 1831, “which have
overspread the world in such profusion during the last nine months,
there is none so extraordinary and so dangerous as the opinion
incessantly inculcated by the revolutionary press, that the noblest
virtue in regular soldiers is to prove themselves traitors to their
oaths; and that a _national guard_ is the only safe and constitutional
force to which arms can be intrusted. The troops of the line, whose
revolt decided the three days in July in favour of the revolutionary
party, have been the subject of the most extravagant eulogium from the
Liberal press throughout Europe; and even in this country, the
Government journals have not hesitated to condemn, in no measured
terms, the Royal Guard, merely because they adhered, amidst a nation’s
treason, to their honour and their oaths.
“Hitherto it has been held the first duty of soldiers to adhere, with
implicit devotion, to that _fidelity_ which is the foundation of
military duties. Treason to his colours has been considered as foul a
blot on the soldier’s scutcheon as cowardice in the field. Even in the
most republican states, this principle of military subordination has
been felt to be the vital principle of national strength. It was
during the rigorous days of Roman discipline, that their legions
conquered the world; and the decline of the empire began at the time
that the Prætorian Guards veered with the mutable populace, and sold
the empire for a gratuity to themselves. Albeit placed in power by the
insurrection of the people, no men knew better than the French
Republican leaders that their salvation depended on crushing the
military insubordination to which they had owed their elevation. When
the Parisian levies began to evince the mutinous spirit in the camp at
St Menehould in Champagne, which they had imbibed during the license
of the capital, Dumourier drew them up in the centre of his
intrenchments, and, showing them a powerful line of cavalry in front,
with their sabres drawn, ready to charge, and a stern array of
artillery and cannoneers in rear, with their matches in their hands,
soon convinced the most licentious that the boasted independence of
the soldier must yield to the dangers of actual warfare. ‘The armed
force,’ said Carnot, ‘is essentially obedient;’ and in all his
commands, that great man incessantly inculcated upon his soldiers the
absolute necessity of implicit submission to the power which employed
them. When the recreant Constable de Bourbon, at the head of a
victorious squadron of Spanish cavalry, approached the spot where the
rearguard, under the Chevalier Bayard, was covering the retreat of the
French army in the valley of Aosta, he found him seated, mortally
wounded, under a tree, with his eyes fixed on the cross which formed
the hilt of his sword. Bourbon began to express pity for his fate.
‘Pity not me,’ said the high-minded Chevalier; ‘pity those who fight
against their king, their country, and their oath!’
“These generous feelings, common alike to republican antiquity and
modern chivalry, have disappeared during the fumes of the French
Revolution. The soldier who is now honoured is not he who keeps, but
he who violates his oath; the rewards of valour are showered, not upon
those who defend, but on those who overturn the government; the
incense of popular applause is offered, not at the altar of fidelity,
but at that of treason. Honours, rewards, promotion, and adulation,
have been lavished on the troops of the line, who overthrew the
government of Charles X. in July last; while the Royal Guard, who
adhered to the fortune of the fallen monarch with exemplary fidelity,
have been reduced to _beg their bread_ from the bounty of strangers in
a foreign land. A subscription has recently been opened in London for
the most destitute of these defenders of royalty; but the Government
journals have stigmatised, as ‘highly dangerous,’ any indication of
sympathy with their fidelity or their misfortunes.
“If these ancient ideas of honour, however, are to be exploded, they
have at least gone out of fashion in good company. The National Guard
who took up arms to overthrow the throne, have not been long of
destroying the altar. During the revolt of February 1831, _the Cross_,
the emblem of salvation, was taken down from all the steeples in Paris
by the citizen soldiers, and the image of our Saviour effaced, by
their orders, from every church within its bounds! The two principles
stand and fall together. The Chevalier ‘without fear and without
reproach’ died in obedience to his oath, with his eyes fixed on the
Cross; the National Guard lived in triumph, while their comrades bore
down the venerated emblem from the towers of Notre Dame.”
Singular was the retribution which awaited France. The “Ulysses” of
Europe, as he has been styled—the old, crafty, insincere, penurious, yet
plausible and half-sagacious man, sate in apparent peace upon his throne
for wellnigh eighteen years, negotiating alliances, maintaining a fair
outward character, pandering to popularity, identifying himself with the
_bourgeoisie_, and identifying his sons with the army—and all this to
fall at last before the worst planned and most poorly contrived
insurrection which was ever attempted in the streets of a European
capital. Surrounded by his citizens, the citizen king went down. We know
now, from the revelations of De la Hodde and others, what was the true
nature and commencement of that beggarly conspiracy. We know that a few
hundred suspected and ill-organised Socialists, along with a handful of
newspaper editors, not two of whom possessed sufficient personal courage
to lay hand on a loaded musket, contrived to overawe Paris, to bully the
redoubted National Guard, and to send poor old Ulysses again upon his
travels, without much chance of finding a second imperial Ithaca. Farce
and tragedy are here so closely interwoven that it is wellnigh
impossible to separate their texture. The dethronement of such a king
may be a grand European disaster, but it militates nothing against the
principle or the sanctity of royalty. It was but a simple Presidency
gone a-begging. The King of the Bourse or the Railway Monarch had about
them nearly as much of that divinity which should surround the royal
character as Louis Philippe, the chosen of the shopkeepers, and the
veteran dabbler in the funds. No true greatness, no high nobility of
soul, elevated him to the throne of France—ignoble beyond all precedent
was the manner in which he was compelled to leave it. The retreat of
Charles X. was a triumph compared with his panic-stricken and unfollowed
flight.
The following are Mr Alison’s remarks upon the last of these
Revolutions. The reader will not fail to observe the extreme similarity
between the two astounding Revolutions, and the precise nature of the
cause which enabled both of them to be successfully carried through by
an otherwise contemptible rabble.
“Who is answerable for this calamitous Revolution, which has thus
arrested the internal prosperity of France, involved its finances in
apparently hopeless embarrassment, thrown back for probably half a
century the progress of real freedom in that country, and perhaps
consigned it to a series of internal convulsions, and Europe to the
horrors of general war for a very long period? We answer without
hesitation, that the responsibility rests with two parties, and two
parties only—the King and the National Guard.
“The King is most of all to blame, for having engaged in a conflict,
and, when victory was within his grasp, allowing it to slip from his
hands from want of resolution at the decisive moment. It is too soon
after these great and astonishing events to be able to form a decided
opinion on the whole details connected with them; but the concurring
statements from all parties go to prove that on the _first_ day the
troops of the line were perfectly steady; and history will record that
the heroic firmness of the Municipal Guard has rivalled all that is
most honourable in French history. The military force was immense; not
less than eighty thousand men, backed by strong forts, and amply
provided with all the muniments of war. Their success on the first day
was unbroken; they had carried above a hundred barricades, and were in
possession of all the military positions of the capital. But at this
moment the indecision of the King ruined everything. Age seems to have
extinguished the vigour for which he was once so celebrated. He shrank
from a contest with the insurgents, paralysed the troops by orders not
to fire on the people, and openly receded before the insurgent
populace, by abandoning Guizot and the firm policy which he himself
had adopted, and striving to conciliate revolution by the _mezzo
termini_ of Count Molé, and a more liberal cabinet. It is with retreat
in the presence of an insurrection, as in the case of an invading
army; the first move towards the rear is a certain step to ruin. The
moment it was seen that the King was giving way, all was paralysed,
because all foresaw to which side the victory would incline. The
soldiers threw away their muskets, the officers broke their swords,
and the vast array, equal to the army which fought at Austerlitz, was
dissolved like a rope of sand. Louis Philippe fell without either the
intrepidity of the royal martyr in 1793, or the dignity of the elder
house of Bourbon in 1830; and if it be true, as is generally said,
that the Queen urged the King to mount on horseback and die as ‘became
a King’ in front of the Tuileries, and he declined, preferring to
escape in disguise to this country, history must record, with shame,
that royalty perished in France without the virtues it was entitled to
expect in the meanest of its supporters.
“The second cause which appears to have occasioned the overthrow of
the monarchy in France, is the general, it may be said universal,
defection of the National Guard. It had been openly announced that
20,000 of that body were to line the Champs Elysées _in their uniform_
on occasion of the banquet; it was perfectly known that that banquet
was a mere pretext for getting the forces of this Revolution together;
and that the intention of the conspirators was to march in a body to
the Tuileries after it was over, and compel the King to accede to
their demands. When they were called out in the afternoon, they
declined to act against the people, and by their treachery occasioned
the defection of the troops of the line, and rendered farther
resistance hopeless. They expected, by this declaration against the
King of their choice, the monarch of the barricades, to secure a
larger share in the government for themselves. They went to the
Chamber of Deputies, intending to put up the Duchess of Orleans as
Regent, and the Count of Paris as King, and to procure a large measure
of reform for the constitution. What was the result? Why, that they
were speedily supplanted by the rabble who followed in their
footsteps, and who, deriding the eloquence of Odillon Barrot, and
insensible to the heroism of the Duchess of Orleans, by force and
violence expelled the majority of the deputies from their seats,
seized on the President’s chair, and, amidst an unparalleled scene of
riot and confusion, subverted the Orleans dynasty, proclaimed a
Republic, and adjourned to the Hotel de Ville to name a Provisional
Government!...
“Here, then, is the whole affair clearly revealed. It was the timidity
of Government, and the defection of the National Guard, which ruined
everything,—which paralysed the troops of the line, encouraged the
insurgents, left the brave Municipal Guards to their fate, and caused
the surrender of the Tuileries. And what has been the result of this
shameful treachery on the part of the sworn defenders of order—this
‘_civic_’ prætorian guard of France? Nothing but this, that they have
destroyed the monarchy, ruined industry, banished capital, rendered
freedom hopeless, and made bankrupt the State! Such are the effects of
armed men forgetting the first of social duties, that of fidelity to
their oaths.”