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
waits for the fog to rise, and then thanks God to see the good old
ship coming home, in season, her masts all standing, and her flag
untorn.
I had felt fears, my Basil. What was not imaginable, when Europe
presented the appearance of a table on which empires had fallen
in a day, like card-houses blown down by the breath of children!
I knew that neither France, nor Prussia, nor Austria, nor Italy,
were any thing like England, which is founded on a rock, and knit
together by joints and bands: but I felt that England is no longer
what she was. With a Whig government she is never herself.[5] The
Whigs are more than half Frenchmen. I tell you you seem to me not
half enough afraid of your Whigs; they are worse than your Radicals.
You show some uneasiness under the Jewish Disabilities Bill, but
I wish you could see it as it strikes a looker-on. If time has on
you the effect which distance has on me, you will yet look back on
that measure as you now look back on the great mistake of 1829.
It will haunt you like a nightmare, and you will regard it with
less of anger than of shame and remorse; with the deep conviction
that, if the friends of the constitution had done their duty, it
never would have disgraced a Christian state. True, the Whigs are
responsible for inflicting the blow; but what has been done to avert
it? So far as I know, nothing commensurate with the greatness of
the evil. You seem to give way to it as only one of many inroads
upon old proprieties, which are inevitable, and cannot be withstood.
But is the unchristianising of the state to be spoken of side by
side with even the destruction of colonies, and the discouragement
of agriculture? As it strikes me, it is not a thing of a class, it
stands out a portent, a harbinger, a phenomenon of its own kind. Not
that it surprises me. From Lord John Russell nothing that argues
fatuity and lack of political principle should surprise any one.
To carry out the plans to which he has committed himself, he must
consistently pander to infidels, foster heretics, and subsidise
Jews. To the reforms of the last score of years, there could be no
more fitting sequel than this coalition with a people loaded with
the hereditary burthen of the saving blood of the Crucified. I only
marvel that the bill goes on so slowly. The Baron should have been
long since in his place, and the Easter holidays should have been
disregarded, out of respect to his feelings. It is astonishing
that he is not already an ecclesiastical commissioner. The times
are not now as during a former French revolution, when a British
statesman could say[6]--"the Jews in Change Alley have not yet
dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging
to the see of Canterbury." You are always praising your church,
Basil, but allow me to ask, Why you may not live to see a Jewish
rabbi nominated to a bishopric. As I understand it, the obsequious
chapter would be obliged to perform the election, and close all by
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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