BERNE VORORT AND THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT.
" La revolution eRt tracini•ct de Ions ; etoullsee en hn11a sails appui et: Allernagne, treniblante on Belgique, retrograde en Evague, Fa.t.E ItECELE EN SUISSE."—Qvutidieune, 15 rev.
PARIS, 10th March 1835. WHAT is the thing thus hunted like a wild beast—thus smothered, helpless, trembline, retrograde, recoiling before its enemy ? Re- presentatives of the British People, it is the principle of your own political being—the principle whose triumph was the glory of your forefathers ; whose maintenance has been the spring of Eng- land's prosperity ; whose bold developmsnt and irresistible influ- ence distinguish her at this day among the nations of Europe. he Administration of WELLINGTON-PEEL challenges not only your acquiescence, but your support ; for it is about to ask you for supplies in hunting down the principle of your own being wherever it discovers vitality, and reducing the Continent once more to the condition which shall enable the Tory Minister to point to it, and, like the self-executed CASTLEREAGH, to demand of you what prospect there is of further reform in Great Britain? True, thou ill-favoured organ of divine right in exile—sworn brother of the ..e/Non and Poe/—this principle has, for the moment, been quenched in Poland in the blood of its defenders ; true, the German States have been swindled out of their constitutions, and the British-born right of self-taxation is suppressed in central Europe; true, the independence of Belgium is in jeopardy, and cut-throat Cellists are warring on liberty in Spain : but there is yet on the Continent a charmed circle, within which sho breathes free, and which despotism dares not overstep. Whether this barrier of time and nature and hereditary respect and age-con- secrated principle shall continue to be sacred, depends, in the first instance, on those who are most concerned to uphold it ; and in the second, on you, the British Parliament, wounded by every blow dealt on freedom throughout the world, but most of all by the attacks of conspiring despots upon a reformed government, whose date is as recent as your own.
In the centre of civilized Europe is a country built up by the
Maker's hand into mountains, whose summits, accessible only to the foot of the hunter, and whose vales, penetrable only through passes where three men are better than three hundred, were the predestined cradle and fortress of Liberty. 0 fortunatos nine* um, sea si bona ! Switzers, your land is what it was, impreg- nable, if you are unchanged, and if your hearts be as the hearts of the men who smashed the Austrian yoke, and off:red their plaided bosoms to the cheraux de frise of a steel-clad enemy.. Bandy not words and notes with diplomatic spies and conspira- tors; or treat with them only at the point of the bayonet and by the mouth of the musket. If you hang back, they will tread you down, as they tread upon Poland; but they dare not take you by the horns if you offer them; for they know that a cannon fired on the Alps would be the tocsin of Continental liberty. Four cen- turies ago, in your mountain land arose a great example to teach mankind to put down oppression by bearding it, and to fence off despotism by the pike and bayonet. Parley not with these excellencies, ye modern Spartans, but say, like your proto- types, the mountain-pass defenders of old, "You ask satisfaction,
come and take it Such language would become the mouths
of those who still commemorate Morgarten. It was not without a benevolent Providence that your land has been lifted up high to look down upon despots: the same God which severed Britain from the Continent for purposes which the fulness of- time has revealed, planted you in the heart of Europe to be a tower of strength unto freedom and a refuge against oppression. While Mont Blanc rises in a land of liberty, his snow-clad summit, like the broad stone of Edie Ochiltree, is a sign of salvation to the Italian slave, which forbids him to despair. Will you suffer his hoary head to be branded with the mark of' the beast, the print of the Holy Alliance? The Austrian, Bavarian, Sardinian des- potisms—the great whale and the small fry—gather and roar around you, like the breakers around the broad stone of Edie Ochiltree; hold up your head high, and the breakers shall not break over you! Say to them, " Why do the heathen rage and swell, and the tyrants imagine a vain thin:? we are a small people, but a mighty land: number is not ordained to this day's fight,'nor multitude we few, we happy few, are stronger than your mercenaries; our strength is our high home and our higher hearts; our ancestral glory, our unstained repute, the prestige of a great name, and the might of an imperishable cause. Make satisfaction ! submit to a diplomatic note ! quail to a threat ! the charm is broken, the prestige vanished, our hearts sunk, our strength— 'Man but a rush against Othello's breast
And be retires.'
Switzers, when they ask you to give security and to acknow- ledge what they call international law, which is but an under- standing among tyrants for the oppresion of the refugee, to anake Europe once again what it was under the Roman Cmsars,a
at nrison-house, of natiums, they ask you to give up your sword, your courage, your renown, your free action, and moral mayor— all that has made of you a singular people, the Levites of freedom, the fiamens of Dea Libeitas, fit inhabitants of a land which is as Tadruor in the Desert, or the ark of God in the temple of Dagon. They demand of youthus much to-day ; to-marrow they will say, " Berne, thy bourgeoisie is a base thing, put it away ! Imperial houses cannot brook its neighbourhood. Take back thy House of Lends, which thou least audaciously deposed: be aristocratical Berne again, and sweat and groan, as heretofore, under privilege and abuse." And what shall Berne answer thereto, who gave up tl:e exile and the stranger that was within her gates? who sacrificed to velvet caps and flowered dressing-gowns the great name won by her flithers on snail coats and steel crests? Your nut is not the arduous task of the old llelvetians ; you have no bristlieg ramparts of steel to break into naked breasts ; you have only to show an erect front, and the curs which now bay at you will recognize the man and obey the law of nature, which has planted awe of man in the canine heart. Such is the noiseless but deadly strife now waging between Toryism and free government in the centre of Europe. ' Berne in- terferes with none of her neighbours, but is interfered with by all. Under the countenance of the Holy Alliance, every principicule frern Hanover to Sardinia barks at the old weather-beaten rock, and testifias its abhorrence of Reform. Even the great Tory idol at. St. Petersburg affects Maim for his dungeons at Warsaw and Tebolski, and writes notes of displeasure to the citadel of Con- tinental liberty. Haman takes offence at the Jew Mordecai sitting in the king's gate ; but the gallows which Haman has ordered for Mordecai may it serve for Hainan's self! Berne has put down a selfish aristocracy, redressed old wrongs, governs her- self, protects the stranger, encourages industry, lusters equality, offers a bright example to nations that would walk in the paths of freedom and fulfil the end of coatis being and the purpose of the Creator. They say in Berne, as they say in Britain, that " creatures springing from the hands of a God whose goodness governs his power, subject to the same physical destiny, and endowed with the same moral faculties, are thereby invested with the same rights and entitled to the same advantages." Now this is treason, 0 blasphemy ! in the ears of absolutisms; and its hirelings, therefore, have command to calumniate Berne in every European language. Mother MEmartinis opens out in the Augsboutg ; Berne, echoes daughter Quotidienne, is the " quartier-gkhal de Itlitneute ;" sister Albion rejoices that the Great Powers will not suffer themselves to be bearded any longer by an insolent democracy ; aunt Debats, who is the family wit, cries out upon Radical undertakers for European liberty. No doubt, the Governments are the best judges of the danger they incur from an unhappy revolutionary system: "jaloux de favoriser une revolution en Allemagne." Thus, reform is revolution; and to possess equality, freedom, and self-government—God Almighty's own gifts to man—is propagandisme, insolence, emeute, and anarchy I Quis tulerit Gracchos, &c. The Holies, who, by their diplomatists and other instruments, are incessantly troubling the waters in Switzerland, stirring up the Cantons against each other, intriguing with the aristocrats of Berne and the priests of Fri- bons„ and exploring every spot that is unsound or rotten in the Helvetic body, accuse Berne of what they alone are guilty of practising. The complainants stand convicted by the very rela- tion they bear to the object of their complaint ; and when Berne modestly replies," Je ne puis troubler to boiason," their answer is as logical as the wolf's : " Tu la troubles ! reprit Bette bete creak ; Et je anis que de uroi to midis I'au passe." It is a pity that the Chinaman has built a wall and excluded himself from the confraternity of despots ; Pekin would have chimed in well with Petersburg, in this grand chorus of imperial blusterei s. "It is marvellous, Barbarian Eye, that you should still root yourself in devilish perversity, and turn away the ears of your eye's mind, etc.... Tempt not the Celestial chops !" This is the only admonition whose benefit is wanting to Berne. What, in the mean time, is, or should be, the voice of Britain ? What the despots are endeavouring, is as clear as what is their evident interest : "nom populi imperium juxta libertatem: pau- csrum dominatio regim libidini propior est." Taerrus, as the Quotidienne remarks, is grown in these days quite an auteur de circonstance ;" mad what for no ?" Despotism is grown rampant in Europe, and he wrote under one rather more extensive and equally holy. The lust of royalty is about to deliver Berne up to the aristocratical domination of the few, which she has shaken off. Now, even though abuses and privilege cost nothing either to men's persons or their purses, the pride and spirit of a free people are a property appreciated by all but Tories. In Berne the thing is so understood, and they understand it so in Britain ; who is therefore the natural ally of Berne. The diplomatic voice, and what is infinitely more potential, the Parliamentary voice of Britain is due to Berne. Your forefathers of Blenheim days, gentlemen, would have lent her their sword. England, indeed, is on the bosom of the ocean, and Berne in the heart of the Continent ; yet a Parliament of the seventeenth century glowed with fiery .zeal for the Palatinate, which lay as far out of the reach of Eng- land's sword as Berne. But the sword is not just now in question ; your voice is all that is asked or wanted; you cannot deny it to Berne, whose cause is your own, and whose enemy would talk in the same style to you, if his sword was long enough to reach you. Why are you suffered in Europe, but that you are a thing not to be helped—but that the waves roll roundtau—but that you are mighty on the deep—but that you are a dangerous people, who have written what you can do, even by land, on more than one bloody field? Your liberty is indestructible from aught without; and that the world knows. But it knows, and the despots are not the last to remember, that, like Berne, you have your canker- worm. Cut out the cankerworm, gentlemen, and you are a tree of life everlasting, and when you fall the world shall fall. It is good that there should be such strongholds somewhere to break the dreary level of despostism. Berne is another such fortress, only more obnoxious to attack. Let the mountain cry to the mountain, " Stand fast when a sound of liberty is heard on your hills ! there is echo here ; you are not alone in the woild." This is much, and all that Berne asks. A voice of British freedom,. uttered with British frankness, would fall on the ear of a Bom- BELLES like a peal of dumb-hells, and be worth a thousand men to Borne. Will the knight-errant of absolatisme send a man to utter it ? Now here is the crying sin and shame. The Tory thing that will say it represents you at Berne, with the hands of Esau, will speak with the voice of Jacob. The base, unnational Tories, will lend their sweet voices to swell the accents of the blusterers. Gentlemen, is it meet, is it your will, is it the pleasure of the British People, that island liberty should speak to mountain liberty by the mouthpiece of a Tory, who never yet knew what liberty meant till it was attacked in his own individual persoa ? To make him feel its meaning, you must turn out the President of Mag- dalene, or send a bishop to the Tower, and then the creature finds he is an Englishman. At Berne, he will bluster like a diplo- matist from Vienna, and the voice of an Englishman will be known from that of a Muscovite only by its accent. And if you say, " No not so bad as that, the Tory thing will not so utterly for- get what it owes to the country of its birth,"—I say unto you, that the thing has already spoken, and that the paper which prosti- tutes one of England's fair names, and is accepted on the Conti- nent as the quasi organ of the WELLINGTON Administration, has already openly avowed and printed all the baseness of which Tory- ism is capable when a free constitution is to be strangled. Gentle- men, there is soon to be a table of Supplies in your House. The Home Department has its expenses, and the Foreign one its ex- penses,—salaries to ambassadors, salaries to ministers-plenipoten- tiary, salaries to secretaries, salaries to the diplomatic do nothings, paid in inverse proportion to what they do. When these matters. come before you, forget not Berne. The milkiness of your Opposi- tion may be content that do-nothings should be paid exorbitantly at the expense of honest labour. But if you the worse than do- nothingness ? will you pay a Tory to swear away you honour,.
your dignity, your great name, and, more than all that, the prin- ciple of your political being ? You are a Reformed House ; and a Reformed Government, on which despotism is bent on fastening again abuses and privileges, asks your support—will you give it a serpent? "Depend upon it, this business cannot be indifferent to your • fame : it will turn out a matter of great disgrace or great glory to the whole British nation. You are on a conspicuous stage, and the world marks your demeanour."
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