But were there no excuses for the mass? Was there no excuse in the spirit
with which the English upper classes regarded the continental revolutions?
No excuse in the undisguised dislike, fear, contempt, which they expressed
for that very sacred name of Liberty, which had been for ages the pride of
England and her laws--
The old laws of England, they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey--
Children of a wiser day--
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo, Liberty!
for which, according to the latest improvements, is now substituted a
bureaucracy of despotic commissions? Shame upon those who sneered at the
very name of her to whom they owed the wealth they idolize! who cry down
liberty because God has given it to them in such priceless abundance,
boundless as the sunshine and the air of heaven, that they are become
unconscious of it as of the elements by which they live! Woe to those who
despise the gift of God! Woe to those who have turned His grace into a
cloak for tyranny; who, like the Jews of old, have trampled under foot His
covenant at the very moment that they were asserting their exclusive right
to it, and denying his all-embracing love!
And were there no excuses, too, in the very arguments which
nineteen-twentieths of the public press used to deter us from following the
example of the Continent? If there had been one word of sympathy with the
deep wrongs of France, Germany, Italy, Hungary--one attempt to discriminate
the righteous and God-inspired desire of freedom, from man's furious and
self-willed perversion of it, we would have listened to them.
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