Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Look at it in any light you please, the change is fraught with danger.
We have enlarged somewhat on the score of inconvenience--for we
thoroughly feel and resolutely maintain that the practical
inconvenience is great--but the other results we have referred to are
inevitable and are infinitely worse. Tampering with the laws of nature
is not permitted, even to the most sapient of town councils; and, as
they cannot wash the Ethiopian white, so neither need they try to
control the progress of the sun, and to prove that great luminary a
liar. Surely, they have plenty to do without interfering with the
planetary bodies? We really thought better of their patriotism; nor
could we have expected that they would falsify the host of heaven in
order to take their future time from some distant English clock. So
soon as the whole of the world is ripe for an uniformity of time, and
contented to adopt it, we may then possibly become acclimated to the
change, and rise at midnight, to go about our nightly, not daily
duties, without a murmur. But pray, in this matter, let us at least
secure reciprocity. If we are to be dragged from our beds at
untimeous hours, let the rest of the population of the globe suffer to
a similar extent; for in community of suffering there is always some
kind of dim and indefinite comfort. We are rather partial to bagmen,
and would endure something, though not this, to accelerate their
progress; but why should the whole Scottish nation be made a holocaust
and an offering for our weakness? Falstaff, who, whatever may be said
of his valour, was a remarkably shrewd individual, might give a lesson
to our civic dignitaries. He counted the length and endurance of his
imaginary combat with Percy, by Shrewsbury clock, and did not seek to
extend his renown by superadding to it the benefit which might have
been derived by a reference to Greenwich time. Let us do the like, and
submit to the ordinances of Providence--not try to oppose them by any
vain and extravagant alteration. Without the least irreverence,
because we hold that the whole profanity--though it may be
unintended--is on the other side, let us ask the Town Council of
Edinburgh, whether they consider themselves on a par with the great
leader of Israel, and whether they are entitled to say "Sun, stand
thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon?" And
yet, what is their late move, but something tantamount to this? They
have declared against the order of nature, and such a declaration must
imply a species of gross and unwarrantable presumption.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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