Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

Frenchman, M. Pellet, who visited London in 1815, deposes that he saw a number of sculls on each side of the river Thames, and he was told they were found especially thick at the landing-places among the watermen. But why multiply instances, when the names of those two-legged tigers, Rush, Thistlewood, Thurtell, the Mannings, Colonel Kirke, Claverhouse, Simon de Montfort, Strafford, the Duke of Cumberland, Warren Hastings, and Judge Jeffreys, are household words all over the earth? Johnbullism, through a space of 800 years, is semper idem, unchangeable in evil. One hundred and sixty offences are punishable with death. It is death to live with gipsies for a month; and Lord Hale mentions thirteen persons as having, in his day, suffered death upon it at one assize. It is death to steal a sheep, death to rob a warren, death to steal a letter, death to steal a handkerchief, death to cut down a cherry-tree. And, after all, the excesses of Johnbullism at home are mere child's-play to the oceans of blood it has shed abroad. It has been the origin of all the wars which have desolated Europe; it has fomented national jealousy, and the antipathy of castes in every part of the world; it has plunged flourishing states into the abyss of revolution. The Crusades, the Sicilian Vespers, the wars of the Reformation, the thirty years' war, the war of succession, the seven years' war, the American war, the French Revolution, all are simply owing to John Bull ideas; and, to take one definite instance, in the course of the last war the deaths of two millions of the human race lie at his door; for the Whigs themselves, from first to last, and down to this day, admit and proclaim, without any hesitation or limitation, that that war was simply and entirely the work of Johnbullism, and needed not,

and would not have been, but for its influence, and its alone.

"Such is that absolute perfection, without folly and without weakness,' which, revelling in the blood of man, is still seeking out her victims, and scenting blood all over the earth. It is that woman Jezebel, who fulfils the prophetic vision, and incurs the prophetic denunciation. And, strange to say, a prophet of her own has not scrupled to apply to her that very appellation. Dead to good and evil, the children of Jezebel glory in the name ; and ten years have not passed since, by a sort of infatuation, one of the very highest Tories in the land, a minister, too, of the established religion, hailed the bloodstained Monarchy under the very title of the mystical sorceress. Jezebel surely is her name, and Jezebel is her nature; for, drunk with the spiritual wine-cup of wrath, and given over to believe a lie, at length she has ascended to heights which savour rather of madness than of pride; she babbles absurdities, and she thirsts for impossibilities. Gentlemen, I am speaking the words of sober seriousness; I can prove what I say to the letter; the extravagance is not in me, but in the object of my denunciation. Once more I appeal to the awful volume I hold in my hands. I appeal to it, I open it, I cast it from me. Listen, then, once again; it is a fact; Jezebel has declared her own omnipresence. A consequence of the royal prerogatives,' says the antichristian author, is the legal UBIQUITY of the King!' 'His Majesty is always present in all his courts: his judges are the mirror by which the King's image is reflected;' and further, From this ubiquity' (you see he is far from shrinking from the word), from this ubiquity it follows that the Sovereign can never be NONSUIT!!' Gentle

[ocr errors]

6

men, the sun would set before I told you one hundredth part of the enormity of this child of Moloch and Belial. Inebriated with the cup of insanity, and flung upon the stream of recklessness, she dashes down the cataract of nonsense, and whirls amid the pools of confusion. Like the Roman Emperor, she actually has declared herself immortal! she has declared her eternity! Again, I am obliged to say it, these are no words of mine; the tremendous sentiment confronts me in black and crimson characters in this diabolical book. In the law,' says Blackstone, 'the Sovereign is said never to die!' Again, with still more hideous expressiveness, The law ascribes to the Sovereign an ABSOLUTE IMMORTALITY!!' THE KING NEVER DIES.'

6

"And now, gentlemen, your destiny is in your own hands. If you are willing to succumb to a power which has never been contented with what she was, but has been for centuries extending her conquests in both hemispheres, then the humble individual who has addressed you will submit to the necessary consequence; will resume his military dress, and return to the Caucasus; but if, on the other hand, as I believe, you are resolved to resist unflinchingly this flood of satanical imposture and foul ambition, and force it back into the ocean; if, not from hatred of the English, far from it, -from love to them (for a distinction must ever be drawn between the nation and its dominant Johnbullism); if, I say, from love to them as brothers, from a generous determination to fight their battles, from an intimate consciousness that they are in their secret hearts Russians, that they are champing the bit of their iron lot, and are longing for you as their deliverers; if from these

lofty notions, as well as from a burning patriotism, you will form the high resolve to annihilate this dishonour of humanity; if you loathe its sophisms, De minimis non ' curat lex,' and 'Malitia supplet ætatem,' and 'Tres faciunt collegium,' and 'Impotentia excusat legem,' and 'Possession is nine points of the law,' and 'The greater the truth, the greater the libel,'-principles which sap the very foundations of morals; if you wage war to the knife with its blighting superstitions of primogeniture, gavelkind, mortmain, and contingent remainders; if you detest, abhor, and abjure the tortuous maxims and perfidious provisions of its habeas corpus, quare expedit, and qui tam (hear, hear); if you scorn the mummeries of its wigs, and bands, and coifs, and ermine (vehement cheering); if you trample and spit upon its accursed fee simple and fee tail, villanage, and free soccage, fiefs, heriots, seizins, feuds (a burst of cheers, the whole meeting in commotion); its shares, its premiums, its postobits, its percentages, its tariffs, its broad and narrow gauge."-Here the cheers became frantic, and drowned the speaker's voice, and a most extraordinary scene of enthusiasm followed. One half the meeting was seen embracing the other half; till, as if by the force of a sudden resolution, they all poured out of the square, and proceeded to break the windows of all the British residents. They then formed into procession, and directing their course to the great square before the Kremlin, they dragged through the mud, and then solemnly burnt, an effigy of John Bullism, which had been provided beforehand by the managing committee, a lion and unicorn, and a Queen Victoria. These being fully consumed, they dispersed quietly; and by ten o'clock at night the

streets were profoundly quiet, and the silver moon looked down in untroubled lustre on the city of the Czars.

Now, my Brothers of the Oratory, I protest to you my full conviction that I have not caricatured this parallel at all. Were I, indeed, skilled in legal matters, I could have made it far more natural, plausible, and complete; but, as for its extravagance, I say deliberately, and have means of knowing what I say, having once been a Protestant, and being now a Catholic,-knowing what is said and thought of Catholics, on the one hand, and, on the other, knowing what they really are,-I deliberately assert that no absurdities contained in the above sketch can equal, nay, that no conceivable absurdities can surpass, the absurdities which are firmly believed of Catholics by sensible, kind-hearted, well-intentioned Protestants. Such is the consequence of having looked at things all on one side, and shutting the eyes to the other.

« AnteriorContinua »