Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849 — John Shaqi
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 399, January 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
"Property, manufactures, and commerce are utterly destroyed in
Paris. Of the population of that great city, the capital of
France, there are 300,000 individuals wanting the necessaries
of life. One half at least of those earned from 3f. to 5f. a
day previous to the revolution, and occupied a number of houses
in the faubourgs. The proprietors of those houses receiving no
rent, and having taxes and other charges to pay, are reduced
to nearly as deep distress as their tenants. In the centre of
Paris, the same distress exists under another form. The large
and sumptuous apartments of the fashionable quarters were
occupied before the revolution by wealthy proprietors, or by
persons holding lucrative employments in the public offices,
or by extensive manufacturers, but nearly all those have
disappeared, and the few who remain have insisted upon such a
reduction of rent that the proprietor does not receive one-half
of the amount to which he is entitled. Should a proprietor of
house property endeavour to raise a sum of money by a first
mortgage, to defray his most urgent expenses, he finds it
impossible to do so, even at a most exorbitant rate of interest.
Those who possess ready money refuse to part with it, either
through fear, or because they expect to purchase house property
when it must be sold at 50 per cent less than the value."--_La
Reforme_, November 17, 1848.
It is certainly a most remarkable thing, in the history of the
aberrations of the human mind, that a system of policy which has
produced, and is producing, such disastrous results--and, above
all, which is inflicting such deadly and irreparable wounds on
the interests of the poor, and the cause of freedom throughout
the world--should have been, during the last eighteen years, the
object of unceasing eulogy by the liberal party on both sides of the
Channel; and that the present disastrous state of affairs, both in
this country and on the Continent, is nothing more than the natural
and inevitable result of the principles that party has everywhere
laboured to establish. The revolution of 1830 was hailed with
enthusiasm in this country by the whole liberal party: the Irish are
not more enamoured now of the revolution of 1848, than the Whigs
were, eighteen years ago, of that of 1830. The liberal government
of England did all in their power to spread far and wide the
glorious example. Flanders was attacked--an English fleet and French
army besieged Antwerp; and, by a coalition of the two powers, a
revolutionary throne was established in Belgium, and the king of the
Netherlands prevented from re-establishing the kingdom guaranteed
to him by all the powers of Europe. The Quadruple Alliance was
formed to revolutionise Spain and Portugal; a sanguinary civil
war was nourished for long in both kingdoms; and at length, after
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