Wilmington journal. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1844-1895, 1848-03-31

Practical FREEDOM. had the pleasure
of announcing in our extra OF wednesday d.
ternoon, the grateful fact of the establishment
in France of Republican government, and its
immediate recognition by the leading powers
in Europe. History, it seems, has taught
something to the latter, and we hope too that
ia lessons will not be lost on the former
Much as we would desire to be assured of so
important conclusion to the efforts of the
friends of constitutional liberty everywhere,
our sympathies with the French nation would
particularly induce it in favor of her people
They were our first and earliest friends in the
period of our own Revolution, and our conduct
and progress have ever since exercised a won
derful influence over her destinies. But we
fear that not ali the experience OF former er-
rors, and the horrors to which they gave rlse'
will secure her exemption from another fall
ure, although they may check the growth OF
similar extrayagances. The great mistake IN
French politics arises from their conceptions
of liberty, and their association of its charac-
ter with that splendid abstraction of which
the Greek and Roman poets dreamed and sang.
The French are peculiarly an imaginative,
impulsve people. Liberty, with them, is too
much an ideal form-a creationsof fancy-an
angel that appears with azure and transparent
veis-a thing SO airy, pure, and inapproacha-
BILE, that it seldom survives the coarse light OF
every day truth. To make such thing per-
manent and useful, it must be more practical.
We must strip it of its co,tleur de rose and
clothe it in homespun. This, for France, must
be an affair of time. Freedom, for her, is
neither practicable nor desirable. We mean, OF
course, that freedom which is defined TO be the
unfettered use of all the powers OF Nature;-
nor, if we are not misinformed, is she yet rea-
dy for that we enjoy, which consists merely in
lawful exemption from unlawful restraints.
That ultimate perfection of government to
which we are tending, namely, universal stuff,
rage and citizenship, cannot be reached but by
long education and political habit. Even re-
strained as it is with us, the citizens of Europe
must be content to aspire to it by slow advan.
ces and gradual acclimation. That happy sys.
TEN under which we prosper cannot be reach
ed per salt,tm.
We have described the French notion o.
liberty. We shall conclude with our own
In surveying its aspect, we cannot suppress:
the suspicion that, though also representing
a woman, the drapery conceals the sinews, i
not the person of man. Liberty with us, il
eminently masculne-a flesh and blood an
GEL She is with us everywhere, in our walks
and hotels, our public halls and court houses
as we'll as in our closets and home. Shit
. smokes, and she chews; she eats and drinks
as mortals do; but like immortals, never sleeps
She is seen in the shoes and stockings that
blessed be God, every body wears in the but
ter that is sailed the cheese that is not made
{ with goats milk, and is within the means o
all; in the houses of the poor, which all have
chmneys. She is a travelling angel,-sht
spreads her wings in the papers of our Fret
Press, and floats over a continent she rattlet
on the Rail Road and, like homely angel
is heard in the locomotive that coughs at N
York, snorts at Philadelphia, and sneezes il
Washington. Nor is she wanting in celestia
attributes; for, with an eye like Jove, sh'
? flashes on the wires of Electricity, and pene
trates space; strong as Mars, she ploughs thu
deep with her steamers, and batters dow1
walls with her cannon.