Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
that it owes the outrage, the alarm, and the suffering, the ruin
to peace and order, to commerce, to well-being, to fortune, to
that central power which turned a legion of demons upon it, in the
shape of revolutionary emissaries and agents. It forgets still
less the scenes of Limoges, where a mob were turned loose into
the polling-house to destroy the votes, drive out the national
guards, disarm these defenders of order and right, and form a mob
government, to rule and terrorise the town, while Master Commissary
looked on, and told the people that it did well, and laughed in his
sleeve. It forgets still less the fury of the disappointed upon
the result of the elections, their incitements to insurrections,
their preachings of armed resistance for the sake of annulling the
elections, obtained, it must never be forgotten, by _universal
suffrage_, in face of their culpable manœuvres: the emissaries
again sent down from the clubs, and with an apparent connivance
of certain ultra-members of the government, from the charge of
which, now more than ever since the conspiracy of the 15th May,
they will scarcely be able to acquit themselves: the efforts of
these emissaries to make the easily excited and tumultuous lower
classes take up arms, and the bloody conflicts in the streets of
Rouen: the complicity of the very magistrates appointed by these
members of the government--the terror and the bloodshed, and then
the cry of the furious ultras that the people had been treacherously
assassinated--the conspiracies and incendiary projects of the
vanquished at Marseilles, the troubles of Lisle, of Amiens, of
Lyons, of Aubusson, of Rhodez, of Toulouse, of Carcassonne--why
swell the list of names?--of almost every town in France, all with
the same intent of destroying those elections of representatives
which the country had proclaimed in the sense of order and of
moderatism. It forgets still less the dangers of that same 15th
May, when the government was for a few hours overthrown, by the
disorderly, the disappointed, the discontented, the violent ultra
republicans, the conspirators of Paris,--when some of those, who
had been formerly their rulers, were arrested as accomplices, and
others still in power can scarcely yet again avoid the accusation
and conviction of complicity.
All the other troubles of this distracted country, since the
revolution of February, may be passed over--the ruin to commerce,
the poverty, misery, and want, the military revolts excited by
the same emissaries to cause divisions in the army, as likewise
the unhappy troubles of Nismes, where the disturbances took
a religions tendency--as a conflict of creeds between Roman
Catholics and Protestants, rather than a political or even a social
character,--although they still bore evidence of the disorder of
the times and the disturbance of the country. The elections, then,
contributed more powerfully than ever to the fermentation, the
discontent, the mistrust, and the ill-will of the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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