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Untitled Article
a single despot . Granted ; but , Sir , the subject is not there cheated by tales of his freedom ; the priests do not mock him with homilies on the blessedness of his happy liberation from the galling yoke of tyranny , under which it is the lot of other nations to groan ; hypocrites and sycophants do not call him free-born Englishman , or Turk ,, or Arab , or Tartar , or savage ; greedy devourers of his earnings and fatteners upon his toil do not tell him
to rejoice in his equality of protection and claim to legal justice , then hand him over to the slave-driver , the bastinado or the bowstring , the cat-o ' -nine-tails or the halter . You have vaunted and puffed and swaggered for ages on his equality of protection , and you have lectured and goaded the incorrigible unwashed with words ., of the falsehood of which his every hour ' s existence knocked at his brain and heart with conviction—the 15 th of August , 1833 , Has settled the question .
But , was this legality unknown till now ? Oh , no ! I was aware of it ; thousands knew it ; but it was discontent , it was disloyalty , it was f jacobinism / sedition , to whisper it . Now , as loyalty means something like faith in the law , ( much more nearly than faith in a creed' means religion , ) it is a symptom of loyalty
to proclaim the law ; it is the duty of every loyal subject to make the law seen as much as in him lies . Felt it has long been ; as many a maddened father , famished child , and broken-hearted mother could testify . But it was not to be whispered till the 15 th August , 1833— bless the five wits' of each of the
honourable gentlemen ! We may now proclaim the c legalityin every market-place throughout the kingdom , from every churchsteeple in the empire . Ay , hoist a flag there as regularly on the 15 th August as on his Majesty ' s birth-day ; black be it ^ with the inscripted law in enormity of red letter . On the fifteenth da y of August , eighteen hundred and thirtythree , the brand of infamy was struck on Britannia's forehead
Let the day stand in the colour of shame on the nation ' s calendar to eternity . The 15 th of August , the anniversar y of the birth of England ' s * implacable foe , ' Napoleon . Perhaps this was done as a votive offering to his manes , or in propitiation of his spirit's wrath . Reader , we will , if you please , admit this palliation .
Perhaps , had this kindly thought struck me sooner , I should have spared myself the task of writing the above , and the Editor would have given you something good for your perusal , for I importuned him , with much earnestness , to spare me a corner in the Repository for this , before I wrote a word of it . Pel . Verjuice .
• Note . —In the course of the debate , one Honourable Gentleman said , impressed men made the best man-of-war ' s men . This in the aggregate is a fact ; but the causes pt * it are not such as will dove-tail very well with any theory which Captain Klliott would be likely to adopt . I have already encroached beyond endurance in the columns of this number of the Repository ; therefore must defer these causes till next roorjth . or I may blent ) tbtm in some of my chapters . But there is one point which
Untitled Article
§ 56 Impressment
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 656, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/72/
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