The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
This is a true picture of George III., and why it should be supposed
that no descendant of that monarch will ever be able to make himself
potently felt in the government of his Empire we are at a loss to
understand. The exact part of that monarch would not be repeated, the
world having changed so much as to render such repetition impossible;
but the end at which George III. aimed, and which he largely
accomplished for himself, that end being the vindication of the
monarchical element in the British polity, might be undertaken by one
of his great-grandsons with every reason to expect success. The means
employed would have to be different from those which George III. made
use of, but that would prove nothing against the project itself.
The men who followed Cromwell to the Long Parliament and the men who
followed Bonaparte into the Council of Five Hundred were differently
clothed and armed, but the pikemen of the future Protector were
engaged in the same kind of work that was afterward done by the
grenadiers of the future Emperor. The one set of men had never
heard of the bayonet, and the other set had faith in nothing but the
bayonet, believing it to be as "holy" as M. Michelet asserts it to
be. The pikemen were the most pious of men, and could have eaten an
Atheist with relish, after having roasted him. The grenadiers were
Atheists, and cared no more for Christianity than for Mahometanism,
their chief having testified his regard for the latter, and
consequently his contempt for both, only the year before, in Egypt.
Yet both detachments were successfully employed in doing the same
thing, and that was the clearing away of what was regarded as
legislative rubbish, in order that military monarchies might be
erected on the cleared ground. In each instance there was the element
of violence actively at work, and it makes no possible difference that
the English Commons went out because they did not care to come to push
of pike, and that the French Representatives departed rather than risk
the consequence of a bayonet-charge. So if the Prince of Wales should
see fit to tread in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, he would
have very different instruments from those "king's friends" whose
existence and actions were so fatal to ministers in the early part of
those days when George III. was king.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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