Popular misgovernment in the United StatesCruikshank, Alfred Byron
History
Popular misgovernment in the United States
Cruikshank, Alfred Byron
Suffrage -- United States; United States -- Politics and government
experience, governed by mere sentiment and passion; others, who
ultimately became the working majority were men of low moral character
and defective reasoning powers; lacking in principle; demagogues and
adventurers; cranks and scoundrels, who, claiming to be the champions of
an ideal democracy, found it to their advantage to spout balderdash with
which to gain the applause of the ignorant and emotional masses. Their
stupidities, antics, vagaries, thefts, and other minor rascalities and
follies; their guillotinings, drownings, arsons, street slaughters and
other butcheries and outrages; their confiscations and banishments are
matters of history, and have to some extent been duplicated by the
Bolsheviki rabble in Russia in our own day. To the tune of crazy cries
for liberty and more liberty, they attacked property, vested rights,
commerce, business, the church and the Christian religion, and plunged
France into chaos. They murdered and outlawed her nobility and her
priests, besides tens of thousands of innocent people who were neither
priests nor nobles, including farmers, artisans, tradesmen, poets,
artists and professional men, the best of the land. Under the first
Republic, it is computed that a million French died of famine and
hardship, the direct result of Radical legislation and Radical tyranny,
and chargeable to a great extent to the operation of manhood suffrage.
Nor is this the total record of their mischief. Their misdeeds produced
a violent reaction which resulted in the placing on the French throne of
Bonaparte, whose ambitions deluged Europe with blood. A generation later
he was followed by another Bonaparte, equally a result (though less
directly) of the Revolution; and he plunged France into a war with
Germany, which in 1871 cost her the loss of Alsace and Lorraine and out
of which the recent great war of 1914 was born.
France therefore has never yet recovered from the injuries she suffered
at the hands of the red radicals in the first Revolution. She may thank
universal suffrage and the extremists of that time not only for the
depopulation and misery inflicted upon her by the so-called republic
from 1789 to 1798, and by the Napoleonic wars from 1798 to 1815, but
also for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, for four invasions of
her soil, for her recent sufferings from 1914 to 1918 and her reduction
from the first rank to the third among the powers of Europe. In short,
she has paid one hundred and thirty years of torment for the privilege
of listening to the rhodomontade and vaporings of crackbrains and
demagogues. Let America take warning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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