The Sun.
London, England, 1850-01-01 00:00:00

I

E

MAGA ZIN E _DA Y.

BLACKWOOD.
, -
A graceful and itielegent biography of " Howard"
tie Pifilenthropi,t, -she eritielpel raet len ie the
• op- ning number of illechicood fur the new belt
century. The piper has, of course, been suggested
by the recent contribution of Mr llepworLri Dixon
t. our hioer ipt,ical literature. lit tine first article in
the present histaltre nt, of Me,!, we can tecogiii-e ar
a giatice the Leal of the histerian be•ireg
pendant to him former chewer • f our contemporary
annals, entitled the " Year of l volutions." The
contr. eution before us, bee g commemorative of 1849,
is h ed, on the conirary, the Year of Reaction." It
is, course, throughout couched in language expree-
siV`e of exultation at the temporary defeat of the popular
movement throughout the continent : and although we
sympathise in nore-pest in the sentiments therein
articulated, we cannot but be struck by the vigour
displ eyed in the whole pelitieel synopsis. 'file fol-
lowing is the reference to the war between the dif-
ferent races, commenced in 1848 and terminated in
440, 1849 :
Tee Lombard rose against the German, the Bohe-
mian, against the Imre•rielist, the Hung to sgainst f
Austrian; the Celt arid the Saxon stood in arms egerinst
each other. Naplee eves rout in twain; a revolutienary state
wee esiablsheel in Sicily; the supreme Pontiff wad de-
throned at Rome; Rein:runt joined the innevadng party;
Lombardy rose up against Austria, Bohemia was in
arms against Vienna, the Magyars revived against the
Germans the fierce hostility of five centuries; Prussia
was revolutionised, Baden ravaged, Denmark invaded;
the Poles could with difficulty be restrained amidst the
general effervescence; the Irish openly made prepara-
tions !or rebellion and separation frem Great Britain.
England itself was shaken; the gravity and practical
tendency of the Anglo-Saxon character in part yielded
to the general contagion. London was threatened with
a revolutionary movement; the Chartists in all the ma
nufacturing towns were prepared to follow the example;
treasonable placards, calling on the people to rise, were
to be seen on all sides; and the mighty conqueror who
had struck down Napoleon exerted his consummate skill
in teeffitreg the rebellion of his own countrymen, and won
a victory over anarchy not less momentous than that of
Waterloo, and not the less memorable that it did not
cost a drop of human blood."
The last sentence we cannot but regard as magni•
ficently hyperbolical. After giving this rapid
epitome of the antecedents of reaction, the writer
thus enumerates .11 that had been accomplished
towards the resto Ai° of the Monarchical supremacy
in the subsequen nigh keen months :
" Revolution has Geese crushed without the effusion of
blood in Berlin: law had regained its ascendency; re-
bellion had quailed before the undaunted aspect of the
defenders of order and the throne. Naples had regained
the aominion of Sicily; the arms of France had restored
the Pope of Rome; the Eternal City had yielded to the
assault of the soldiers of Louis Napoleon. Austria had
regained her ascendency in Italy; the perfidious aggres-
sion of Charles Albert had been signally chastised by
the skill and determinaion of the veteran Radetzky ;
Milan was again the seat of imperial government; the
dream of a Venetian republic had passed away, and the
Place of St. Mark again beheld the doubled•headed
eagle of Austria at the summit of its domes. Baden was
conquered, Saxony pacified; the fumes of revolutionary,
aggression in Schleswig had been dissipated by the firm-
ness of Denmark, and the ready, although unexerted,
support of Russia. Poland was overawed by the Co-
lossus of the North; and even the heroic valour of the
Magyars, so often in happier days the bulwark of the
Cross, had yielded to that loyalty and tenacity of pur-
pose which has so long distinguished the Austrian
people, joined and aided by the support which, on this
as on many previous occasions, Russia has afforded to
the cause of order in Europe. Though last, not least,
Great Britain was pacified: the dreams of the socialists,
the treason of the Chartists, had recoiled before the
energy of a people yet on the whole loyal and united.
Ireland, blasted by the triple curse of rebellion, pestilence,
and famine, had ceased to bo an object of disquietude to
England, save from the incessant misery which it exhi-
bited; and its furious patriots, abandoning in multitudes
the land of their birth, were carrying into Transatlantis
regions those principles of anarchy, and deathless hatred
at civilisation, which had so long laid waste their own
country."
One word we must perforce add to what we have
already said in reference to this contribution. It
does strike us as being rather inconsistent with
the previous paneygrics pronounced upon the
Hungarian revolutionists by Blackwood, to find the
same organ, which had so emphatically condemned
the conduct pursued by the Viennese Cabinet towards
the Magyars, saying now in January, 1850—" Win-
dischgratz in Bohemia, Radetzky in Italy, Jellachich
in Austria, stood forth as the saviours of the
monarchy, and with it, of the cause of European
freedom." Two serials
are continued in the current
number—namely, the seventh part of the " Green
Hand" and the third part of "My Penin•
sular Medal." An agreeable criticism, entitled
" American Adventure," directs attention collectively
to books written by Theodore Johnson, Francis
Parkman, and Lieutenant Wise—each of their works
having particular reference to the gold diggings of
California. The concluding stanza, and the con-
eluding stanza alone, of the " Dark Waggon," is
worthy the poetical genius of Delta. Coming as it
does after a prolonged narrative of the hurried pro-
gress of the blinded waggon, surrounded by a troop of
armed cavalry, from one extremity of the island to
the other—from Dumbarton to Westminster—it has a
very grand and solemn effect:—
"Ye guardian angel. that fulfil
Heaven's high in crLes, and work its will—
Ye thunderbolts! launched forth to kill,—
Where was it then ye blew,—
When, foe-bemee:ked, in prison square,
To death fore doomed, with dauntless air,
From out that van,
A shackled man—
Sir William Wallace stept I"
To the laborious but illogical contribution relating to
" 13fitish Agriculture and Foreign Competition,' we
shall take the earliest opportunity of referring else-
where.

Even Fraser, the ultra- Tory and territorial-
aristocracy loving Fraser, has fairly given up the
doctrine of protection, and what is more, has fairly
exposed the motives of those who now attempt, Judas
like, to exploiter the distresses of the poor and the
humanity of the public by wilfully and fraudulently
raising the cry of protection to native industry, as
though the distresses of the poor needlewomen
and tailors had been occasioned by foreign
competition, or could be relieved by doubling
the price of bread, of which these unfor-
tunate persons are the great consumers.
In the course of a very ably written article on Labour
and the Poor,"with which the present number of Fraser
opens, we find the following passage on the subject
of the " protection cry," with which the insolvent
landlords are endeavouring to gull the public. "God
knows," says this writer,
"That if I thought protection would restore the con-
dition of the labouring classes of England, I would
strive for it to-morrow. But I have been unable yet to
see what the restoring of protection could do for tie
purpose. Free-trade is of yesterday; the fall in wages
is constant. Even at Spitalfields, some at least of the
workmen have sewn ern‘uch to tell you that they have
driven e French out of the market; and yet the pi o
pie are starving whilst they are being driven ow. Is it
foreign competition that affects the sempstresscs ? Is it
the French or the Americans who are deluging us with
cheap coats. cheap trousers, cheap greatcoats, cheap
shirts? Was it a Frenchman that brought down the
prices of the staymaking? Was it a French butcher
that took the workhouse•Airls to make cheap embroid,r•
era tf them? So far as the cry fur free trade springs
from the mere idolalry ot cheapness,—so far as it is not
oonnecttd with an earnest desire to break down corn
tnercial barriers, put an end to the deinorahzing practice
of smuggling, and bind the nations of the earth ch aer
and closer into ono family, I am ready to condemn it
with Mr. G. F. Young himself; but who does not see
that the cry for protection is, in the mouth of the
great bulk of its titterers, but a cry for agricultural
from that is to say, for the shutting our of food
the starving millions of a country that does not
produce enough for its own subsistence? Who does not
see that its advocates are full, in foct, of all the worst
elements of selfishness and mammon-worship of the
Opposite party, and are only willing not to buy cheap
I..sitt they should no to-ger be able to sell dear? So
that the difference between the two
parties is only an
is issue of fact as to the better machinery of extortion. It
under
t protection that wages have been ever sinking;
under
pe%csi:fi,n, that profits have got to he wrung from
the very .0
of the workman. Restore protec•
pion to•mor
por •
tion of the who can reckon what homceapathic pro-
Increabe in prices would go into the
arlizan's pocket?
The author of this article does not consider emigra-
tion as a sufficient remedy
for the evil we have to
combat, although he adnlite that it may be an excel-
lent accessory to others, the of whi
he recommends is a sort of orgy an iz till
of labour—a kind of pale
Louis Blancism,
which, inasmuch as it does not go to the root of the
run prove inefficient
evil, must necessarily in the long
state of the
as a remedy. The inquirers into the
labouring. poor have hitherto eontfeated themselves
orratives alone; bu,
with listening to the tales of wo7. told by the wretch-
edly underpaid and starvini:
let them go to the employers of these operatives, and
they will find thut those employers are themselves
screwed down by the usurer and the capitalist, who in
their turn are obliged to charge an exorbitant in
terest to make up for the losses incurred by the
great risks which they run—riskstl
princip illy,
not wholly, occasioned by a vicious system of
legislation, which designedly and avowedly sacrifices
in every instance persons to property, and every other
species of property to landed property, in order to
'maintain the supremacy of a territorial, albeit insol-
vent aristocracy. Have not the clearings of the Duke
of Sutherland and other proprietors in the North, and
of the Irish landlords, tended to be...t down
the tote of %%ages ever) where by driving the
oe,isa•,try into the towns to compete in the
labour rreirket ? Do not our laws of inheritance,
ot primogeniture, and of entail, keep down wages by
e;:king up immense masses of capital which, but for
use laws, would be brought into the market for

THE

profitable einphiyment, aril by competing against the
exiting capital in the labour market raise the
rode wdgc,- ? ").es not partnership
telid to keep down the rate of vi of discouraging
pt r,oni tn.in of their capital in
conntierci4l utideraltings, itia,iniuch as by so doing it
w,,uld render the vi hole of their property

liable for the partnership debts ? These are
some of the causes of the social evils under
which - e lateeir, and those evils in spite of_the
of emigration, association, and all the other
ations which have teen suggested, will be of perpe-
tual recurrence until the causes shall have been re-
moved, and those causes can only be removed save by
cheapening capital ; first, by assimilating the laws re-
gulating the inheritance and the sale of landed pro-
perty to the laws regulating the inheritance and the
-ale of personal property, so that a proprietor of an
estate shall be enabled to dispose of ►sis property with
as little difficulty as the proprietor of a ship ;
2d, by ex!etaling to the vthole of the kingdom the
provisions of the Act for the sale of encumbered
esta.es, at present_ applicable only to Ireland ; 31, by
an extensi•,n of the principle regulating joint stuck
compinies to all commercial p.truterships, or by the
adoptien of the French principle of partnership
en comnwndite; and,
.above all, by a complete and
ther-ough reform of our whole monetary system.
Free trade in land and free trade in money
are the effectual remedies for our social evils. On
the principle of fair ploy, Fraser has this n.onth ad-
mitted a reply to the paper on the negro question
which appeared last month, but the writer of the
reply is no twitch for Thomas Carlyle. It is a reply,
but no answer. We are glad to find that this Tory
periodical is at h ngth compelled to do justice to
the far-sighted views of Lord Palmerston in
emancipating us from the incubus of the
crumbling empire of Austria, now become
a province of Russia, and substituting for that dan-
gerous, and expensive, and useless alliance, an
alliance with Prussia, France, and Piedmont. In
at article on Baron Bulow's recently published
pamphlet on the German question, Fraser thus
repudiates the rotten policy and the stubborn obsti-
nacy of the Earl of Aberdeen and his followers :
Thu faith and the truthful spirit which cling to the
reminiscences of departed worth betoken a noble and a
generous feeling. Not so the stubborn obstinacy which
stands up for the 'vested interests' of rottenness and
decay. We have no friendly feelings towards revolu-
tions. We behel,l the revolutions of 1848 with a feeling
of sorrow, not unmixed with shame. The excesses of
that memorable spring caused us to blush; their
inevitable con& quences filled us with grief. But we
cannot applaud the prudence, or commend the
foresight, of those whose caoutchouc polities yield to
every pressure and contract to their old dimensions. A
revolution with us is a fait accompli. As for the Ger-
mans, there is no doubt that they might have done
better. But the present question is,—How cart they be
prevented from doing worse? Their only choice lies
between Prussia, Russia, and Mr. Heinzen. There
cannot, to our mind, be any doubt which side they
ought to take. Our best wishes are with their choice
whatever it be, but our anticipations of success go with
the Prussian League, and, conditionally, with the Par-
liament of Erfurt."

Want of space compels us to leave unnoticed several
excellent articles in this month's Fraser, but we
cannot close our remarks without directing the
attention of our readers to an admirable critical
notice of the literary career of Sir E. B. Lytton,
which appears under the somewhat whimsical title
of " Sir E. B. Lytton and Mrs. Grundy," and to a
masterly resume of the arguments on the subject of
marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the result of
which is the conviction on the mind of the writer
of the absolute necessity of legalizing such marriages.