The French journalists, in the interest of revolution, are loud in their condemnation of the apathy, as they call it, of the great bulk of the English nation on this occasion, and express their astonishment that the Chartists, for some reason they cannot understand, shrank from a contest with the Government, under circumstances which gave them, as they think, every prospect of success. We will tell them the reason--which is not the less true, that it may not be altogether pleasing to their vanity: The English are major and they are minor; the English are men and they are schoolboys. We, too, have had our dreams of communism, but they were brought forward by Jack Cade in the days of Richard II.; we, too, have indulged in social aspirations, but it was in the days of the Fifth-Monarchy Men, and they ended in the despotism of Cromwell. It is very well for schoolboys and juvenile academicians to indulge in extravagant freaks suited to their years; but they do not become bearded veterans. When England became a man, she put away childish things. France, by the spoliations and destruction of the first Revolution, has lost the elements of freedom. But Germany yet possesses them; and if she does not abuse her advantages, in two hundred years she may possess the mingled freedom and stability which now constitute at once the glory and happiness of England. It requires that time to be free of the craft of liberty; there is no royal road to freedom any more than geometry. England has preceded other nations by two centuries in this glorious path; it would ill suit the masters to recede, and imitate the follies of such as are only becoming tyros in the attempt to follow it. Those who have long ago reached the summit, and know with what difficulty it was attained, can afford to smile at the young aspirants who invite them to descend and renew the toil of the ascent. Those who have spread political power with safety over a million of pacific electors diffused over a whole empire, have no occasion to imitate the example of those who would establish despotic power in the hands of two hundred thousand armed Janissaries of a single capital. _Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._ * * * * * Transcriber's note: Page 553: The transcriber has divided the large table into two sections. Page 596: No closing quotation mark was provided in the original--'were "the immediate raising of the siege, and return of the army to the Continent; ...' Page 636: "she used a word vernacularly employed to signify the stripping birds of their fathers." 'fathers' has been replaced with 'feathers'. The chapter title "THE CAXTONS" has two consecutive chapters entitled Chapter IX. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848, by Various