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Untitled Article
And now , in defence of the conduct of Ministers in not remitting the sentence , c < Jmes a speech from Lord Howick , in a more reprehensible and a more dangerous spirit than all that went before . Report characterizes Lord Ho wick as an intelligent and a well-meaning man : we . should not have inferred him to be either from this specimen of his statesmanship . His speech amounts
to a declaration of open hostilities . A member having alluded to the melancholy conflict at Lyons , as an example of the consequences of attempting to coerce Trades' Unions , Lord Howick said that he derived from those occurrences a directly opposite lesson ; that he saw in them the fatal consequences , not of interference , but of being too tardy and backward in interference *
Lord Howick may have any private theory he pleases about the events of Lyon 3 . No person ' s individual absurdities are any concern to the public . But if a government , which , like that of France , absolutely prohibits all combinations among workmen ; which but the other day made a law to put down all societies whatever , not licensed by its own police ; which had just before
condemned some Paris operatives to three years imprisonment for belonging to a Trades' Union ; and which has now brought upon the second city in the empire the horrors of a five days struggle of life and death , by attempting to punish the leaders of a strike , after the strike was terminated ;—if the government which did this , did not , in the opinion of our Ministers , interfere
enough ; if they erred by not taking their measures earlier , of * more vigorously ; if our Ministers have taken warning from them , and are resolved not to be guilty of a like error ; -r-why then it is time for every Englishman , who has the means , to provide himself with a musket : for there is no knowing how soon the consequences of such a policy may leave him destitute of any other
protection . Whoever is to blame for the Lyons' catastrophe , it most deeply concerns the Ministry that no similar one should take place here . Government by the sword will not succeed in this country . England , like France , may , by the imperiousness of power , or the desperation of cowardice , be plunged into civil war , but not , as in France , with impunity .
Our Ministers never , surely , had their equals in the art of converting a small difficulty into a great one . They had only to let the Trades' Unions alone . It was well worth the partial stoppage of two or three branches of trade , to let the experiment be tried fairly , what Unions can do . They have at present no
ulterior designs ; and if they had , would be utterly powerless for carrying those designs into effect . But , give them a grievknce ; let them have cause to believe themselves injured ; let them be bound together by a sense of wrongs , and taught to regard the overthrow of existing institutions as the means of obtaining a
Untitled Article
Govegwient hy Brute Force . 365
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 365, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/53/
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