their rents, and the equalisation of their public burdens. We
venture not an opinion whether such promise was ever intended to
be kept. Still it was made; and no effort was left untried to
convince the farmers that their cause was separate and apart from
that of the owners of the land. Their refusal to enter into that
unholy alliance was most honourable to the body of the tenantry,
and entitles them, at the hands of the proprietors, to look not
only for consideration and sympathy, but for the most active and
energetic support. Very ill indeed shall we augur of the spirit and
patriotism of the gentlemen of England, if they longer abstain from
identifying themselves universally with a movement which is not
only a national one, in the strictest sense of the word, but upon
which depends the maintenance of their own interests and order.
Surely they cannot have been so dull or so deaf to what is passing
around them, as not to be aware that they were especially marked out
as the victims of the Manchester confederacy! These are not times
in which any man can afford to be apathetic, nor will any trivial
excuse for languor or indifference be accepted. Exalted position,
high character, the reputation for princely generosity, and the
best of private reputations, will be no apology for inactivity in a
crisis so momentous as this. Organisation, union, and energy are at
all times the chief means for insuring success; and we trust that,
henceforward, there may be less timidity shown by those who ought
to take the foremost rank in a contest of such importance, and who
cannot abstain longer from doing so without forfeiting their claim
to that regard which has hitherto been readily accorded them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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