Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 67, No. 411, January 1850 — John Shaqi
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 67, No. 411, January 1850Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 67, No. 411, January 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The ultimate suppression of the revolt in Hungary has been attended
with a most distressing amount of bloodshed on the scaffold, and the
occurrence of several mournful scenes, in which courage and fidelity
have asserted their wonted superiority, in the supreme hour, over
all the storms of fate. God forbid that we should either justify or
approve of such severity, or deprive the heroic Hungarian leaders of
the well-earned praise which some of them deserve, for their noble
constancy in misfortune! But while fully admitting this on the one
hand, we must, in justice to the Austrian government on the other,
recall to recollection the circumstances in which they were placed
at the close of the contest, the dangers they had undergone, and
the dreadful devastation which the Hungarian war had brought upon
their country. When Georgey capitulated and Comorn surrendered,
Austria was wellnigh exhausted by the conflict: she had owed her
salvation in part at least to foreign intervention. She had been
forced to proclaim her weakness in the face of Europe, and to bring
down the hated Muscovite battalions into the heart of the empire. In
judging of the course which her rulers, when victorious, pursued,
we must in justice recall to mind the perils they had escaped, and
the humiliations to which they had been reduced. We must recollect
also the state of civilisation which Hungary has attained, and go
back, in imagination, to what we ourselves did in a similar stage of
national progress. Hungary is hardly more advanced in civilisation
than England was during the Wars of the Roses, when the prisoners on
both sides were put to death without mercy, and eighty princes of
the blood or nobles were massacred in cold blood; or than Scotland
was when the Covenanters murdered all the Irish in Montrose's army,
with their wives and children. What did the English government do
at Carlisle after the advance of the Pretender to Derby, or in
Ireland after the rebellion of 1798? What has she recently done in
the Ionian islands, after the insurrection in Cephalonia? Nay, would
we have been less rigorous than the Austrians, even at this time,
if we had been reduced to similar extremities? It is very easy to
be lenient after an insurrection which has been extinguished in a
cabbage garden, and rendered the insurgents ridiculous in the eyes
of all the world; but what should we have done, and how would we
have felt, if Smith O'Brien at the head of the Irish rebels had
invaded England, taken London, nourished for a year and a half a
frightful civil war in the heart of the empire, and compelled us to
call in the legions of France into the midland counties to save the
nation from ruin? We do not mean, by these observations, to justify
the executions of Haynau and the other Imperial generals: God knows,
we deplore them as much as any one can do, and yield to none in
admiration of the heroism of the Hungarian leaders, who have shown
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