Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/427

1839.]

has now completed the first term of its apprenticeship, and, become of legal age, is fast ripening into the unbridled manhood of revolution. To the achievement and practical establishment of the ten-pound suffrage has succeeded the theory of the household brigade, propounded à la galopade by the free-and-easy constitution- mongers of the Molesworth manufactory, shored up by the ballot-box of the mild and miscalculating Grote, and both brought up in the rear with the Anti-Church and Anti-Corn cries, in full concert, of the Hume and O'Connell reserves. Below the deep, however, there is even a lower deep; before the blazing oriflamme of Chartism, the cobweb banner of patchwork Liberals less daring but more dishonest, torn into rags and tatters, has been swept away for ever into the chaos of frauds flimsily fabricated, and impostures palpably detected, by the resistless tempest of popular indignation, lashed into raging madness through the mercenary treachery, yearly repeated, of leaders, by whom a confiding people were goaded and cajoled into the outrageous assertion of the wildest extravagances of "right" supposed,—by whom basely sold and abandoned when the hard money-and-place bargain had been wrung from the terrors of a recreant government. Vainly do pretending patriots now whirl with artful aim the well-known lasso; dear-bought experience has warned against the calculated devices of political fortune-hunters and philosophical charlatans; and a people is now no longer entrapped, entangled, and carried unsuspectingly to sacrifice and the shambles, whether of Whig or quasi-Radical venality and ambition.

But, with experience so wholesome in the one sense, the very foundation of national morals has been sapped in another, a larger, and a more vital sense, the dry rot of which is invading, corrupting, and threatening to undermine and disorganize the whole framework of society. Politically, the confidence arising out of the conviction, and the reality of the existence of patriotism and honesty in public men, has been the keystone of public morals; but the people, so often betrayed and basely bartered away, are at length becoming deeply impressed with the disastrous conclusion, that public virtue and patriotism is no more than a dream of the olden time, the modern and wholly opposite reading of which they have become profoundly imbued with, by their more intimate intercourse of late with ostentatiously professing patriots and philanthropists, in whom they have ultimately discovered only sophists, selfish and heartless public plunderers, and time-serving traitors. Is there cause for wonder, then—with proofs so patent, and belief so rooted, in the profligacy of principle, and the egotism, absorbing as unfeeling, of the classes above them; of their disdainful disregard for, their utter want of sympathy, or their scandalous traffic, with the interests of the masses—that popular faith should be staggered, and popular traditions scouted? That the masses, thrust almost without the social pale, like outcast Pariahs of the East, should themselves seek to sever the last remaining bond of relationship—should, justly mistrustful, resolve for the future to concentre their confidence alone in leaders selected from their own condemned caste? The singular spectacle has been presented, in these our times, of an organized Association so vast and comprehensive as to embrace millions in its affiliated ranks, in which the jealousy of an intruder from other classes, thus assumed to be hostile, has been carried to the length of earnest debate and angry discussion, under his eyes and in his presence, whether one of the middle classes could be accepted as a trustworthy member—whether, in fact, goodly raiment and a respectable exterior were not the characteristics indisputable of a possible spy and a prospective Judas. In vain Feargus O'Connor subscribed his hundreds of pounds to the large joint-stock composed of individual pence; the glitter of gold profusely proffered had lost its charm, for the people had before been betrayed by Iscariots for gold, and