On this page

• Text (3)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    1160 ®t> * Qtaitt* [Saturday ,

  • 

    THE MANCHESTER FINALITY REFORM It ILL. "...

  • 

    JEWISH RIGHTS AND OFFICAL WRONGS. Oaths ...

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Chambers Of The Elyse'e And Preyed On Th...

    the degrading treacheries of his maturer years Italy is no more his debtor , except for bonds and death . When he attempted to seduce the army from their allegiance at Strasburg , was it to serve his country ' s liberty and glory ? When he let loose the tame eagles at Boulogne , was he fired with patriotic inspirations ? Or was he not rather the mountebank of a name , a mere cutpurse adventurer , bankrupt in all but an inexhaustible exchequer of perjury , on paper , payable at some distant date !

    When , the Republic was proclaimed in February , he rushed to offer his services to the Provisional Government : and when his patriotism was dispensed with , he returned to London to foment and to organize a conspiracy of which we have only now reached the denouement . It is certain that a Bonapartist plot was sowing the seeds of discontent and disaffection in May and June of that year : it was traceable in the attack on the Assembly of the 15 th of May ( which he was aftewards to complete ) , and in the terrible days of June , which he was to renew and to exceed . Before the insurrection of June all who were in Paris may remember the

    Bonapartist agitation that prevailed : there had been even a skirmish at the gates of the Constituent when Lamartine denounced the plotters ; and the streets of the capital were deluged with Bonapartist emblems . Many of his infamous adherents were in Paris at the time ; but the threads of the conspiracy were held at London and Richmond . From June to December he conspired incessantly against the established powers . He has only now thrown off the mask to appear once more in his true character of a debauched conspirator , surrounded by accomplices only less desperate and abandoned than himself . How is it that ever since he has

    obtained the Presidency France has been kept in perpetual apprehension of a coup d ' etat ? Have not all his addresses at Dijon , Chalons , Tours , to his last appearance in the Circus , been those of a conspirator hostile to the Institutions he had sworn to protect ? Has not the National Assembly been ever on the defensive ? Has not civil war been ever trembling in the balance , and the sword of usurpation for ever suspended over the heads of peaceful citizens ? With " peace" " order " and " tranquillity" always on his lips , has he not to b

    troubled the Legislature from day day y seditious appeals to the violence of military chiefs , to be explained away , forsooth ! by stammering Ministerial accomplices ? We do not excuse : we scarcely know how to regret the Assembly , —the insulted , betrayed , abandoned Assembly . It is hard that the crimes and errors of the majority should have destroyed the Tribune from Avhich so many eloquent voices have so often appealed to the sympathies of free Europe against the complicities of the liberticide reaction ; it is grievous to think that not only the Press is

    extinct , but that the National Tribune is dumb . But we cannot shut our eyes to the damning fact that the Assembly was already lost in character ; dead to the People ' s heart , impotent for all but obstruction , vacillating , contemptible : it was identified with increased taxation , with enormous budgets , with every anti-popular and anti-national measure . It was not until the President liad abandoned the law which he himself had presented , proposed , and promulgated , mutilating the suffrage and undermining the basis of the national will , that the Two Powers became irreconcileable . All

    the popularity the one gained was lost by the other of the contending powers : and representative ( Government itself is the victim of an unholy alliance and of a fatal disruption . The majority in their blind hatred of the Republic , refused to maintain the inviolability of representatives outraged in the persona of the Opposition . It was blind to the principle of reciprocal danger and mutual protection . It preferred to be depopularized by the very instrument of its reactionary legislation ; and the consequence is desertion in the hour of peril by the People it had sacrificed and betrayed . What a Nemesis there is in Political history !

    Mark the faults committed since February , MH If Lamartine had not exalted the importance of M . L . Napoleon , and made a martyr of a pretender , he would have taken his place in the Constituent as a simple citizen , where ho would soon have been reduced to insignificance . If Cavaignuc had not abused the doctrine : of State Necessity and Public Safety , by ( suspending journals and maintaining- the state of siege , n most fatal precedent had been avoided . If the majority of the Constituent had not for their own purposes urged dissolution , and brought that Assembly into contempt , a fatal example had been spared !

    If the majority of the Legislature had been more susceptible of the rights of the Opposition , if they had brought forward liberal and popular measures , if they had given up compression , this terrible explosion had been averted . As it is , no warning has been spared them ; but they have had the courage to irisult , and not to strike . Distracted by Royalist intrigues , they have been at Wiesbaden , or ! at Frohsdorf , or at Claremont , when Louis Napoleon was at Satory . They were aiming at a White Dictatorship ; a Monk for the resuscitation « f antediluvian thrones ; and their reward is to be a Bastard Empire , based on a surreptitious popularity , a usurpation strengthened by a quasi return to popular principles .

    But has France indeed fallen so low as to submit to the domination of outlaws and brigands ? Are the traditions of sixty years of struggles and the conquests of three revolutions to be effaced by the stroke of a perjured robber ' s pen ? Is the man who casts all law to the winds to be suffered to attitudinize before Europe as the Saviour of Order and Society ? Will the People forget the injuries , the disappointments , and the 48 ?

    humiliations of France since December ' Will they forget that the last act of this President was to consign to a desolate and deadly island , at four thousand leagues from home and country , and in the depth of winter to send , chained , tortured , and exposed to the rigours of the season , to their port of embarkation three political conspirators J whose cr ime was to have served what they deemed the People ' s cause , at least as faithfully , as disinterestedly , as M . L . N . Bonaparte .

    We conjure all who love peace , law , and order , to consider whether it is not the most frightful of anarchies that this miscreant has set up in the place of institutions , imperfect perhaps , but regular and moderate ? It is the most brutal and savage of anarchies ; the anarchy of the sabre and the musket ; the anarchy of force , destitute of all moral sanction ; the anarchy of drunken Praetorians ; the anarchy of the Lower Empire . For it is to the " Lower Empire " in its most degrading and detestable sense that France is condemned .

    It is this spurious Catiline , this incendiary spendthrift , who , after condemning monarchical hallucinations and " demagogical ideas , " rends his country asunder in the throes of civil war , in order that out of a Chaos of ruins and miseries he may raise a gilded pedestal for an insatiate ambition . Ambition , do we say ? Rather—Spoliation . The debauchery , without the grace and wit of the Regence , the servitude without the genius and glory of the Empire , the miseries without the traditions of the bun plaisir—such is to be the inheritance of the land of noble instincts , cf chivalrous

    impulses , of honour I France is to change her place in History—to be dragged at the heels of we know not what sanguinary despotism . No ! it will not be . Five hundred thousand bayonets are powerless to achieve the ignominy . Louis Napoleon may parody the 18 th of Brumaire , he may parody the perjuries of crowns ; but the People ( whose blood already , as we write , cries out for vengeance —the blood of men slaughtered in the defence of law ) will point the way to the prison of his adoption—Noukahiva . The comparison and the contrast of the Uncle and the Nephew will be complete . But the ocean that moans around Noukahiva may even prove a more incorruptible gaoler than the rock of St . Helena .

    1160 ®T> * Qtaitt* [Saturday ,

    1160 ® t > * Qtaitt * [ Saturday ,

    The Manchester Finality Reform It Ill. "...

    THE MANCHESTER FINALITY REFORM It ILL . " Manchester " has declared itself incompetent to the occasion . We beg pardon of that respectable town for using its name ; but we do so in a conventional , semi-oflieial way , meaning by " Mancheater" those quondam leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law League , who have adopted the name for themselves . Reform Bills being in fashion , they determined to manufacture one ot their own pattern . They , foreshadowed it in a local paper , but were laughed out of the first notion . They have now produced their matured plan . Its staple is a franchise based on the mere fact of being rated to the poor , with a forty-tthilling freehold , copyhold , or leasehold franchise . It ih ( something like the scheme of the Parliamentary Reform Association , only that . the main point is expressed in vaguer language . It is not absolutely bad in ituelf ; but look ait its political relations . We regard it un Himnly un attempt to open a r ival shop . But why ? Possibly out of

    mere competition . More probably for aiTTuW object . Let us suppose a case . The Na £ . Parliamentary Reform Association has a 2 * plan before the country , and it is understood tfi the Association is not prepared to compromise thJ plan . Now , some Manchester di plomatist mavh ambitious of making a market out of that DL . but he cannot obtain possession of it . A counter ' feit is forged , as like the original as possible wiff , " that false Florirnel as many of the faithful as can be deluded are to be drawn off ; and then the fals measure and the deluded followers will probablv be sold in a Whig compromise . On this hvnn

    thesis , with ground thus prepared beforehand " Lord John could determine exactly what he would concede ; fixing that as the middle term , he would then only have to make his outward proposal exactlv as much smaller as the " Manchester" plan is larger and the compromise would give precisel y the result forecalculated . No problem in practical geometry could be more beautifully neat .

    " Sic transit gloria . " The Radicals were the dreadful go-ahead tribeof their day ; the Tories gone the Radicals , having accomplished their destiny in the Reform Bill , have become the effective Conservatives of our day . The Free Traders , called by Peel to the Walhalla of departed heroes , are now but living gravestones proclaiming their own

    virtues when alive ; and this Manchester scene is their political death . They did not perceive what was going on amongst themselves . They did not detect the Manchester Gorgey . It certainly was not Mr . Edward Baines , of Leeds , who most openly and naively deprecated the fargoing of the project , because it would create a feeling hostile to Lord John ' s

    scheme when that should come out in contrast Mr . Bright proposes the plan as one to settle organic questions once for all : he is " Finality John " the Second ! It would be idle to discuss the details of a scheme which has no substantive position , but is a mere piracy from the Parliamentary Reform project , " with a difference . " Otherwise one might ask how it will apply to Scotland ? No doubt , it would be " very easy" to make a separate bill for Scotland ; but then what becomes of your perfect and final comprehensiveness ?

    There was indeed one move open to " Manchester , " which would have made it still the leader of the country—to go for the enfranchisement of the whole People . But Manchester has lost the lead—has left the post vacant .

    Jewish Rights And Offical Wrongs. Oaths ...

    JEWISH RIGHTS AND OFFICAL WRONGS . Oaths and oath-taking areamonst the respectabilities of our island . Unquestionably they are matters of great importance , involving vast questions of polity , and striking their roots deeply into human nature itself . Not lightly , nor with indignant hands , should oaths be altered or plucked up . The substance of an oath and the fashion of it belong to the sacred formula ; of a nation , and may not be touched without great and reverent consideration . But even an oath , a set form ot

    binding the soul , may grow old , become an obstruction and a nuisance in the public ways ot Hie , and demand swift removal ; and this is precisely the case with that oath winch is held to exclude Jews from seats in Parliament . On the mere question of policy , the public lias long made up its mind , and found , for once at least , that justice and policy coincide , ihe put "" - have decided it to be both fit and just that Jews ut

    should be admitted to Parliamentary «» K . * . ' and the Lower House , led on by the First Minis e , has backed the opinion of the public . «»* ""' Upper House , ignoring the decision of the nuwit , has refused its concurrence , and in the Lower House a majority , brandishing certain oUtnm words in the face of the Hebrew members words which are held to be the sanction of 7 ^ ? { 5 J has effectually excluded them from the legislative

    precincts . , : The proceedings in July last will be ^ fij ^ the memory of all our readers . Mr . Al < Salomons , with modest persistence and clV " h () Ut age , took his seat , spoke , and voted , wi having uttered the obnoxious words On Hi , faith of a Christian . " For doing ^ V "; , nonulticfl ; liable to heavy fines and very « evero ^}^ aUicH and to recover those fines and ^*? ££ ZtfK two notices of action were served up " ^" session , the famous proceedings at the . e «« of the ^ () f One of thoHe actions will be tr ecl ** ' () f the course , if this action be decii « . ! inj fovou defendant , Mr . Alderman balomoiw anu

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Dec. 6, 1851, page 12, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_06121851/page/12/