Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
adequately acknowledged, afforded a centre and rallying point to the
operations of the English Protectionists; and county after county,
division after division, town after town, came forward to give new
impulse and confidence to the movement. It might have been expected
that a feeling so general, so undeniably powerful in itself, might
have been treated with fair respect by the experimental party and
their organs. The fact was otherwise. The farmers were branded with
falsehood, with fraud, with getting up fictitious cases of distress,
with ignorance in not understanding their own peculiar business.
Last year they had been invited to join the enemy, and to embark
in a crusade the object of which was not explicitly set forth;
but enough was disclosed to indicate that it boded no good to the
maintenance either of the constitution or the public credit, or the
interests of society as these have hitherto been acknowledged. They
were told to let the landlords fight their own battle, and they,
the farmers, would be cared for. Those who held such language had
forgotten that, of all known sins, hypocrisy is the one most odious
to the English mind. True, if familiarity with hypocrisy could have
blunted that finer moral sense, it might have been assumed that the
many public examples to be gathered from the history of the last
few years, might have overcome that extreme repugnance to deceit
which is part of the national character. If so, the Free-traders
little understood the temper of the men with whom they had to deal.
The proposal of an amalgamation with those who had never scrupled
to use the most tortuous and questionable means for the attainment
of their own object, was rejected with consummate scorn; and the
disappointed agitators revenged themselves by discharging against the
agriculturists whole volleys of unmeaning invective.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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