On this page

• Departments (1)
  • 
• Text (6)

  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.

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Cittrnf lire

  • 

    Untitled Article

• 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.

    Untitled Article

    Critics are cue legislators , cne mages ana ponce of literature They do not make laws—they interpret and try to enforce them — Edinburgh Review . ^

    Untitled Article

    We have been burnt at Oxford ! Not publiclythat is a martyrdom to come—but in more than one common room , as we are credibly assured . Servetus was roasted for less ; Giordano Bruno crackled among the fagots for maintaining the existence of an infinity of worlds ; and what could the header expect from these extremely small parodists of the Middle Ages , after proclaiming and acting upon the principle that discussion should he perfectly free , that the beliefs of men were sacred and deserved every respect ? We have spoken

    plainly , fearlessly ; but we have also allowed those who oppose us to speak their differences as plainly . Our object is Truth , and quite naturally we are burnt at Oxford . Happily , Oxford has so completely lost its ancient influence that its anathemas have no longer the effect even of exciting vulgar curiosity . Powerless to create , it is powerless even to destroy . Yet , although Oxford as Oxford is a type of intellectual inefficiency in this age which it so strenuously opposes , Ox ' ord , in spite of herself ,

    sends iorth men of whom England is proud . The Leader should be the last to overlook such a fact , for its pages are too often enriched with the contributions of those who love their Alma Mater , though she regards the career of her sons very much in that spirit of philosophic sagacity with which a hen beholds her foster-brood of ducklings make instantly for their element , the water . What do you think is the private opinion those ducklings entertain of their vicarious parent ?

    Untitled Article

    George Sand is said to be writing her Memoirs . If this be so , we have an explanation of her long silence and an explanation very welcome to all her readers ; for , perhaps , no living woman has had so rich and strange an experience of life , while , certainly , no living writer has such genius to portray it . Curious it has been to trace the progress of opinion in England with regard to George Sand . The hand that traces these lines was among the

    very first , if not the first , to proclaim the sincerity of a writer so shamelessly calumniated , the genius of a writer so ignorantly criticised . Within a few years that opinion has spread from circle to circle , ever widening in influence , till at last , we find the works of George Sand , whom it was infamy to read , now delighting the leisure hours of the highest personage of the realm . We could name the the command

    works specially singled out by royal . We record the fact with pleasure , as honourable to Queen Victoria , who in so many things sweeps out of the narrow limits of bigotry , and as honourable to George Sand , for it is her genius which has made the conquest of prejudice . We trust that English women will no longer turn up eyes of sanctified horror at the mention of an author read by their Queen !

    The last number of La Revue des Deux Mondes contains an article by Philarete Chasles , on America and its Future , full of excellent matter , in which he points clearly enough to the radical inferiority of the French , politically speaking , to the English and Americans , in their deficiency of selfgovernment , and their craving to have every thing done by the state . In a foot note he gives the etymology of Yankee , which is piquant : it is , he says , nothing but the word English transformed by the vicious pronunciation of the inhabitants of Massachusets , viz ., Yenghis , Yanghis , Yankies He does not claim the honour of the discovery , but merely that of first promulgating it in print .

    Untitled Article

    LEDRU ROLLIN ' S FALL OF ENGLAND . Ue la Uecadence de VAngletcrre . Par Ledru Rollin . Tome Premier . A sound critique on British society by an able Yrt-no ) man would be a thing to be received by us as a national boon . The French are good social critics . That very tendency to generalization , that habit of expressing everything in the form of articulate verbal

    propositions , for which , it must be owned , the French are more remarkable than for their conscientiousness in arriving at what they so express—makes any just criticisms that they do pronounce on other nations peculiarly memorable and serviceable . Nor , at the present moment , could the people of England make a better selection of a man to criticise them and their . society than from among the Socialists and Extreme

    Ri public us of Fiance . Setting asidt the ability of these men , their acquired babis of thought , iheii want of all intellectual anchorage in the existing relations of the world , qualify them to propound exactly those terrible and trenchant criticisms respecting the constitution of British society , which , heard and pondered by men amongst ourselves , and reconceived by us according to our insular modes of thinking , are most likely to generate in the midst of us the required spirit of rectification . It was , therefore , with real pleasure that "we saw M . Ledru Rollin step forward as the critic of England . Our single glimpse of this distinguished visitor to our shores since he came amongst us was derived from a friend who said he had seen him smoking a cigar at the top of Sloane-street . Holding by this hint , and hearing also that , of all the exiles amongst us , M . Ledru RolJin was least to be seen in ordinary social circles , we had always pictured him to ourselves as a recluse about Sloane-street , watching moodily the cabs as they passed , and collecting silently out of the

    huge roar of London , and all the more distant hum of English activity that reached his ear , this one sentence , inaudible except to himself : —Mene , Mene , Tekel , TJpharsin ( Mene ; God hath numbered thy kingdom , and finished it : Tekei . ; thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting : Feres ; thy kingdom is divided , and given to the Parisians ) . Hence it was with pleasure that we saw his book advertised ; and even the word Dicadence in the announcements did not surprise us . That we knew to be the foregone conclusion , the hypothesis in whose service and under whose inspiration the materials must necessarily be gathered ; and our only expectation was that by English readers the materials themselves , elaborated in the service of so startling an assertion , might , on that very account , when fairly severed from the assertion , prove the more rich and valuable . We have been wofully disappointed . The book ofM . Ledru Kollin , so far as we can judge from the volume now before the public , is a very shallow performance . We regret to have to say this , not only because we should have been so eager to welcome a good book on England from the party to which M . Ledru Rollin belongs ; but also because our previous conceptions of M . Ledru Rollin himself , especially as derived from his singularly powerful speech in the French Chamber on the Droit au

    Travail , had prepared us to expect good tmngs ma pen . Furnished , as we have now been , by the book before us , with a clearer and more intimate glimpse of M . Ledru Rollin and his views , we shall not be able , while regarding him at any point of his future career , ever to accord him any very high degree of intellectual confidence .

    In M . Ledru Rollin ' s argument in support of his dreadful proposition that England " is on its last legs , " three things are to be individually attended to : —First , the evidence on which he professes to found his belief in that proposition ; second , his interpretation of that evidence , or his particular mode of phrasing it , for the instruction of his French

    readers , and for the purposes of his argument ; and third , his reasoning , properly so called , that is , the logical process whereby , having accumulated his evidence , and phrased it to suit his purpose , he seeks to deduce from it the desired conclusion . It will be found , we think , that there is a regular diminuendo of merit in the contents of the book considered as

    distributed according to the foregoing arrangement : in other words , that by far the most valuable portions of the book are those with , which M . Ledru-Rollin has had least to do—namely , the matter , illustrative of English society , that he has extracted from English reports and documents ; that next , in importance , though at a long interval , follows that part of the work where M . Ledru Rollin endeavours to present the purport of those facts in his own langunge as a Frenchman and a man of Republican opinions ;

    and that , decidedly the most worthless portion of all , is that which ought to have been most elaborated , and the rigorous elaboration of which could alone have justified the ostentatious title given to the book —namely , the reasoning whereby M . Ledru Rollin attempts to create in the minds of his compatriots the expectation that our little island , a subject of such interest to France ever since the days of Ceosar , is now positively about to founder and go down .

    The real materials of the book , the facts and particulars relative to English society , on which , taken as a mass , M . Ledru Rollin professes to ground his conviction that that society is decrepit , are already

    before the English public in a mote oompU * e »» nd striking lorm in the jupti .- > i ' to % vviiKh M . L- dru Rollin has copied them , namely , in the Morning Chronicle Reports on the State of Labour and the Poor in Great Britain . About half of the volume already published ( pp . 185-363 ) consists merely of translations and extracts from Mr . Henry Mayhew ' s admirable and now standard series of letters on the state of the metropolitan poor ; and , as the author will probably proceed in the same way with the manufacturing and agricultural districts in the second volume , it may be said with truth that by far the larger moiety of this French demonstration that England is on the decline has been furnished by the

    columns of a daily English newspaper . Turning , however , from , the materials on which M . Ledru Rollin grounds his foregone conclusion , let us see what are his own statements as to the import of these materials . What is that disease under which England is now labouring—that deadly disease diffused throughout her whole system , of which all these Morning Chronicle revelations about the weavers , the coalheavers , the slopworkers , the pickpockets , &c , are but the superficial symptoms ?

    On this point M . Ledru Rollin may be more detailed and explicit in his second volume . So far , however , as we can gather his answer at present it may be summed up in the words aristocratic rule . The whole design of all that portion of the present volume that is not occupied with the extracts from the Mottling Chronicle , appears to be to illustrate this one proposition regarding England , that it is an aristocratic country . The spirit of England is aristocratic ; the institutions of England are aristocratic ; her dealings with , other nations and with the world at large are

    aristocratic . Such is the sum and substance of our author ' s expositions . No other formula for England does M . Ledru Rollin appear to have in his head than this of " The Aristocratic Nation . " Thus : — " One cannot , in fact , comprehend England by recognizing her , in the sphere of official action , as anything else than an oligarchy , under three different faces—the aristocracy of the Crown , the aristocracy of the land , the aristocracy of the counter ; all three united by one interest , subservient to one another , and interlaced in resistance to the flood that could submerge all .

    Thus , the Crown depends at present on the Lords and the Commons . But , in their turn , the Lords depend on the Crown , which can increase thc-ir number , and which keeps them stretched towards the child ' s coral of its favours , its employmrnts , its pensions ; as the Lords also extend their roots even into the House of Commoni , whither it chances that , out of six hundred and fiftyeight members there have penetrated five hundred and broth

    seventy-one persons that are eithr-r sons , ers , grandsons , uncles , sons-in-law , nephews , or cousins of peeis , or officers , functionaries or advocates dependent on Peers or on the Crown . In all this , where is the people , where are the representatives ? This Government is , therefore , nothing else than an aristocratic trinity , indivisible , as well as peparated into three persons , each having its part and its different attributes for the scene of the world . "

    Illustrating this general proposition in detail , M . Ledru Rollin gives us some superficial disquisitions on the different subdivisions of the aristocratic supremacy in England—the Aristocratie Fonciere , ox Landed Aristocracy , the Aristocratie Commerciale , the Aristocratic Politique , the Aristocratie Clericale , the Aristocratie Universitaire , and the Aristocratie Judiciaire . He also exhibits the workings of the English aristocratic spirit in the past history of the nation , as regards Ireland , America , India , and the revolutionary wars of Europe . In the course of this

    elucidation M . Ledru Rollin offers a good many judicious and , though severe , really true critical remarks on English society . Nay , more ; although we conceive this formula of " The Aristocratic Nation , " as applied to England , to be on the whole a lean and meagre one , by no means so literally or so profoundly descriptive of her real social maladiee as some other formula might have been that a deeper consideration of the phenomena of the case might easily have devised ; yet , believing it , as we of the Leader do , to be after all a iust expression of certain vices of the

    system according to which our national edifice is constructed and our national procedure carried on , we willingly accept it , assert with M . Ledru Rollin that England is under aristocratic rule , and proclaim ourselves as belonging to that great and growing power of native English opinion by which this aristocratic rule is even now dally shaken and chipped , and by which , as sure as Time rolls , it will be at last demolished and overthrown . But while agreeing thus far with M . Ledru Rollin ' s definition of what may be called the mechanism of the English constitution , we would yield to none , not even to the organs of our

    Cittrnf Lire

    literature .

    Untitled Article

    jtiNE i , 1850 . ] Cfte Ueafcer . - ^ i

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), June 1, 1850, page 231, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1841/page/13/