The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1878-03-09 00:00:00

"Cit 3totttlirige better.

SATURDAY, MARCH 9,1878,

PEACE.

There are not nouly living now who can re-
tain a vivid recollection of the peaco, rejoicings
which succeeded the conclusion of the great
French war. It is sixty-three years ago, and
the child of ten who lived in that day would
have now passed the allotted years of life as
apecifiod in the writings of the Psalmist.
The active newspaper readers of to-day can
only imagine the .relief which pervaded the
nalional mind 44 the close of a struggle which
ti 1 tG:.ed three•aud-twehty years. The dis-
tiaber of the peace of Europe liarl he;:n safely
caged at St. Helena, where. he died, and the
people could look forward to a long period of
freeulota from strife with other nations. Yet,
when the fire!, flush of exultation was over, and
they had to look matters in the face, as the
commonplace waves of every-day life rolled
nack again, the prospect was not a cheerful
one. More than twenty years of war had left
the o with an exliqust,cl exchequer, an
eiiilnio tuV r
ay, b
which had been increased by
country
everdl hundred millions sterling, and au op•
preesive load of taxatioa. So absorbed had the

body politic been in fighting against Bonaparte ,
that the domestic grievances of ages had been
allowed to go untouched. it had been quite
enough to do to protect the land from being
invaded by a ruthless despot. But when the
desolator had been rendered desolate and the
victor overthrown, and the people began to
look about them, they saw ma.ay things re-
quiring redress which had been naturally
enough overlooked in a time of war, and the
existence of which led to discontent, and as ii
the case of " Peterloo," to disastrous riots
Then the Legislature began slowly to p-ty
attention to political and social reforms; and the
carrying out of these, one by one, occupied
more than thirty years, for the repeal ut the
Corn Laws was not effected until 1846, haviog
been preceded by the Reform Act, the Abolition
of Slavery throughout the British dominions,
the admission of the Roman Catholics to Par-
liament, and the repeal of the Test and the
Corporation Acts, as well as the Municipal
Reform Act creating a system of local self
government in the boroughs of England and
Wales.

But although very few can remember the
Peace Rejoicings of 1815, a large proportion of
our population can well recollect those of 1850.
Forty-one years had rolled away, just the
period of Queen Victoria's reign over the
British Empire up to the present time. In
those forty-oue years mighty changes had been
wrought, and the celebration of peace was car-
ried out under very different circumstances.
England and France, no longer antagonistic,
had fought side by side against a Power which
upon the previous oeca:ion had joined this
country in declaring the ruler of France a pub-
lic enemy. In place of an imbecile King, who
was not allowed to stir from the precincts of
his palace, and instead of a profligate Regency,
we had a Sovereign beloved by her subjects,
and happy in her domestic relations. The war
had lasted not three-and-twenty years but two,
and it had cost about eighty millions sterling
instead of the vast sums which had been voted
for the overthrow of Napoleon. But there was
one respect in which the circumstances did not
differ, and that was that England had been
again victorious. And so a day of special
rejoicing was set apart., the Queen joining with
her subjects in expressing the national grati-
tude. for the victory which bad crowned our
arms. Indeed our peace celebrations have
almost invariably possessed this spacial feature,
that we have been on the winning side. it is
true that the conclusion of hostiiitic)s with the
American colonies just over a century ago did
not find the nation in much of a mood for
rejoicing ; but that was an exception. Whether
we had fought with France—for hundreds of
years regarded as our national enemy—or with
Holland, or with any other Continental Power,
the balance of advantage had been on our side.
We had not passed through the bitter ex-
perience of some other nations, of Berlin,
Vienna, and Moscow, when entered in triumph
by Bonaparte, or of Paris when held by the
army of occupatioa under Weilington, or more
than a half century later under the Germans
after the war of 1870.

Although we have been no parties to the
recent struggle between Russia and Turkey,
we have a very lively interest in the conclusion
of peace. The Muscovite has advanced to
within actual sight of Constantinople—to the
city of mosques and minarets whose possession
has for ages been the fond but unfulfilled jiikam
of successive rulers of the great no ern
empire. There, at all events in imagination,
was a capital not constructed upon rafts in the
midst of a vast bog open to the blasts of th
Gulf of Finland, and which historians say vi I
some time disappear like a phantom of the
night. There was a capital resplendent with
brightly-burnished mosque and shrine, free
from the Winning snows of St. Petersburg,
free from the ice yvhich for so many months in
the year impedes the navigation of the Neva—
a capital overlooking the gleaming Bosphorus,
close to the Sea of Manors, and within easy
distance of the, bright 33gean, commanding
the passage betwecn the Black Sea and the
great commercial highway of the Alediterranean
far away from the bleak shores of the tideless
Baltic, sighted by long hours of sunshine, next
to Paris in popuiatiou, and right in view of the
continent of Asia. It was a tempting prize,
such as the Russians of twenty years ago never
expected to behold. The terms of peace, the
Turks complain, are hard ; but it is possible
that as they will have to be ratified by a Con-
ference before they can be accepted as binding,
some modifications may yet be made in accord-
ance with the representations of the other
Powers. But a fatal blow seems to have been
struck at the independence and integrity of the
Ottoman Empire, which for centuries has ex-
ercised such an influence over large bodies of
people on two continents. Welcome as peace
mustie to the belligerents, it will bp celebre:ed
with very different feelings in two capitals.
St. Petersburg may well be a house of mirth,
but there will be manj a house of mourning in
Constantinople.