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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.
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Untitled Article
And that there have not been demonstrations yet more strong and general is solely owing to the want of more complete , and authentic , and generally diffused information . To supply that want , the Polish Society has arisen , —spontaneously arisen ; already has it begun to put forth its branches ; and let the exile rest in its shade till he or his children , if they have escaped the Herod of
the North , shall reap the fruits . No measure which the government could have taken ^ short of war , could have failed of popular support . And what has the government done ? What may be the exact nature or extent of Lord Durham's mission it is impossible for us to tell ; but it is somewhat late : and the conflict is alreadv transferred from Poland
to Germany . The deluge has rolled onwards , —onwards towards France , —for thither is its tendency ; and there are the people whom its billows long to swallow , or who shall say to the flood of barbarism , * Hitherto shalt thou come , but no farther , and here shall thy proud waves be stayed . Is it a wise policy to let the warfare come so near us before we show any decided interest in it ? If the embers of representative government , and a free press be trodden out in the states of the German Confederation , where will the
iron hoof be planted next ? Are we quietly to see Belgium again brought under the Dutch yoke , and France , humbled and fettered , cursed with a third Restoration ? Are we then to await that British Restoration which the Quarterly Review predicts as the millennium of Tory faith and hope ? Our foreign policy has been as short-sighted as it is selfish . It is as injurious to ourselves as it is destructive to others . And there is something very childish
in the retort , * What , then , are we to go to war ? Must we become the Don Quixote of nations , and fight for Poland , and Germany , and Ital y > and Belgium , and France ? For anybody and everybody that is oppressed ? ' Nobody says , go to war ; but every man to whom freedom and humanity are dear , says , ' Do not proclaim to all the tyrants in Europe , that whatever atrocities they may perpetrate , you either cannot or will not offer any efficient
resistance . ' Why might not the Russian Autocrat have been made distinctly to understand , at the very outset of the Polish contest , that his friendly relations with this country were contingent on the fulfilment of all the violated promises of 1815 ? Why should he have been allowed the diversion of leading our foreign secretary through the long mazy dance of the Belgian protocols ? Our ambassador might have been instructed indignantly to remonstrate ;
and , if unheeded , to leave a court where his continued presence was only a sanction to perfidy and crime . An individual , and why not a nation , may cut a villain without fighting him ; and should the blow come , why then let * it be repelled . In this case it would scarcely have been struck . A timely and spirited interposition jnight have saved Poland . Now , that horfibly mapgled bod y seerns scarcely capable ev ' en of a insurrection ,
Untitled Article
588 Publications of the Polish Literary Society .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 588, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/12/
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