The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1868-11-03
THE ROYAL AND THE RADICAL oL1eARcas.


ment of Spain by the great powers of Europe,
is thing that would have been altogether be.
yond the range of rational anticipation half q
century ago. Aprofound revolution has been
going ON during that period in the policy of
the leading European governments respecting
nationalities and dynasties, local institutions
and social peculiarities. Europe is no longer
a centralized but heterogeneous sort of soli-
darity, subject to the irresponsible and arbi-
trary, the capricious and spasmodic rule of an
olgarchy of crowned heads Had the epoch
of the Holy Alliance continued, the Spanish
revolution, now an acknowledged success,
would have been ere this crushed out by an
armed foreign intervention, and the rule of
the fugitive queen imposed upon an unwill-
ing people. with the Characteristic infatuations
and faults of the Bourbon character intensi-
fed rather than moderated. The Napoleonic
theory that Europe is republic of rationale
ties which can only keep united and at peace
by mutually recognizing their natural diversi-
ties, as well as their natural similarities, has
been steadily indicating itself in the Old
World as philosophical conception. And we
might add that the antagonistic theory on
which the Holy Alliance rested, has been con-
signed, along with other exploded fallacies,
to the tomb of a dead era, there to
sleep forever, did we not see the identi-
cal theory, under different forms, revived in
the pertinacious and desperate attempt
which has been made within the past
four years, to consolidate the differing
sections, States, and populations of the
United States, and to reduce them by pro-
crustean policy to absolute uniformity, under
the dominion of partisan faction resolved
into central oligarchy. The pretense of
divine right" to which the Holy Alliance
appealed for sanction, the men who are en-
deavoring to put this continent under the
heels of still more horrid despotism also
set up, by different name, as superior to
constitutional, natural and all other rights.
Their political expedients and reconstructive
processes are also strikingly similar to those
in vogue with the old oligarchy of crowned
heads, who scoffed at national instincts and
popular aspirations in Italy, Hungary, Ger
many, France, Spain and other countries and
murdered peace, as moral fact, and organ
lied misery both as a physical and moral
fact, throughout Europe. The method of
those royal oligarchs for making all the Euro
pear States wear their livery was to detail for
the local government a branch of one of the
so-called Legitimate dynasties, to be sup
ported whenever threatened with local revolu-
ton by the bayonets of a foreign soldiery
he pa t,, ska 7,sk
have copied this plan with an exaggera-
ting fidelity. The intrusive and obnoxious
princes of the Bourbon and Hapsburg
stocks are initiated, with an aggrava-
ton of every odious feature, in thu
carpet-bag administrations which have
been foisted upon the socalled reconstructed
States ''loyalty" takes the place of ''legiti-
macy" and the Federal army is expected,
when called on, to enforce the authority of
these local despotisms with disciplined fe-
rocity even surprising that exhibited in like
service by the military minions of the Holy
Alliauce
But the whole system is equally unnatural
and abhorrent 1t is hideous anachronism.
At war with the natural conditions of peace
ana harmony al war with the laws Oh social
evolution at war with facts of climate and
geography at war with memorable DEGREES of
science, it must ultimately meet the fate of its
European prototype, and pass away, amid the
derision OF men, and stamped with the scorn
OF history, to be remembered as the latest
and most infamous of detected and baffied |
conspiracies against liberty and civilization.
The various civilized populations of this con- |
tinent may be held together as republic of |
co-equal communities, united for the proper
good of each, and for the welfare and glory |
of the whole. But by the monstrous contri-
vances of tyranny employed by the Unholy
Alliance which has been described, they can
be hsld together, in peace and prosperity II
never