Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/191

1845.] did also its share of good, in holding up before de-^pols a mirror in which they might read their own fate, and teaching the world that oppression has a limit, and buried freedom its resurrection day ; and that just so deep as human rights and hopes are sunk, just so high will the tide of vengeance swell at last;

The fate of our own republic, which Mr. Alison reads so prophetically, is by no means yet decided ; and even should we fall, we do not consider the question of the durabilit}' of a republican govern- ment settled. Had our population been suffered to increase, by the natural laws which govern it, and all those who con- trol our interests been educated in the principles of true freedom, and been bound together by the common ties of kindred and country, and the whole glo- rious fabric of our constitution steadily Strengthened as bulwark after bulwark was reared around it by the jealous watchfulness of an intelligent people, had we been left to try out the experi- ment, by ourselves, on our own soil, then we should consider the question of the expediency of a republican form of government lixed for ever.

But now we are compelled not only to struggle with the evils that gather around every new undertaking, but to blend and incorporate into the very heart of our system the ignorance and degradation and crime of the despotisms of Kurope. From such materials as tyranny sends us we are asked to roar o'lr structure, and if it ever sways and totters, from the heterogeneous mass we are compelled to pile so hastily into it, we are taunt- ingly asked — How goes the doctrine of equality .' The tens of thousands of hun- gry, half naked, and miserable beings, that are precipitated yearly upon our bo- som, and enter almost immediately upon the work of reforming our system, come from a government where all their sor- rows have sprung from the oppres.sion of the upper classes. Knowing the " worm- wood and the gall," and retaining the old hatred against the rich that has strengthened with their sufferings, they are easily led, like the mobs of Paris, by unscrupulous leaders, to act against their own permanent interests. So, also, the convicts and famine-struck wretches, that the prisons and almshouses of Europe disgorge yearly on our shores, swell the records of crime and pauperism in our land, while the acts they commit and the sufferings they engender, are charged over to republicanism. " Laissez fmre^^ is a just request ; and could the world but have granted it to us we should have been content.