Were the union between the two countries once repealed, the union
between the two sections, by whose co-operation direct or indirect
it had been effected, would not survive it one single year--the
influence of the protestant and English party in Ireland, would in
such a conjuncture be as effectually annihilated, as had been the
adherents of Holland, in Belgium; and the deluded liberals, by whose
unwise assistance they had been overwhelmed, would find themselves
in the position of the moderate section of the chambers of Brussels,
the conscientious, but inefficient opponents of a despotism, more
formidable than that they had overthrown, inasmuch as the tyranny of
the million exceeds the tyranny of the individual, and infinitely more
galling, inasmuch as they had themselves contributed unwillingly to
impose it upon their country.
In such a state of things, it is easy to imagine the discontent and
disunion, which pervades every department of Belgium; its trade and
manufactures, labouring under wants and pressures, which the government
have not the power, however anxious their inclination, to relieve;
the civil grievances for the abatement of which the revolution was
undertaken, only partially redressed, and in some instances, exchanged
for others, the immediate offspring of the remedy itself,--and to
crown all, the government and the country submitted to a religious
ascendancy, which is as unwisely exercised by the party who have
attained to it, as it is suspected and disliked by their opponents, who
smart under its caprices and suffer from its indiscretion.
Even the very last act of the revolution, and that which might be
regarded as placing the seal to the European bond, for its permanency,
namely the ratification of the final treaty for the partition with
Holland last year, seems to have only added to the existing insecurity;
the leaders of 1830, loudly protesting against the assignment to
Holland of these portions of Luxembourg and Limbourg, which have been
decreed to her, and the mercantile interests, uniting in complaints,
that the government of King Leopold, have been outwitted by the
ministers of the Hague, and have not only submitted to surrender
350,000 of their already reduced population of consumers to Holland,
but have ceded to her demands, which will inflict injury upon the
navigation of the Meuse and the Scheldt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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