Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, January 21, 1868

THE COMING REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND.

That Great Britain is gradually tending to a social and political revolution is assured by countless indications. The English people are very conservative, and this peculiarity belongs also to the Scotch and the Welsh. The Irish are the extremists, and are the impracticables. The Reform bill of thirty-five years ago arrested the growth of that revolutionary spirit—which in 1867 refused to be appeased by an additional but partial reform in the suffrage. In that thirty-five years liberal ideas have made wonderful progress in Europe. Germany has been emancipated; the millions who have been broken up into small fragments, and ruled by hosts of petty tyrants, are now uniting under one government, and that one founded upon the unity, freedom, and intelligence of the people. The hand of reform has fallen crushingly upon the despotism of Austria. Despised Hungary is now the priceless jewel in the crown of the Emperor. Concordats have lost their value; religious liberty has been established; Church and State have separated; and the popular Legislature has become the law-making power of the empire. It is but natural to suppose that this progress, which has been so universal, should have had some effect even upon the staid, if not sluggish, mind of the British people. Two years ago the House of Commons rejected a bill granting an extension of the suffrage; but within a year the House of Commons has been compelled by an unmistakable demonstration of popular feeling to enact a bill far more liberal than that which was rejected the year before. But the reform has been delayed too long to be accepted as a favor. The people who had waited thirty-five years for the privilege of voting, refuse to regard that as a favor, which is conceded with conditions and restrictions of the most objectionable character.

In discussing the popular tumult and the uneasiness in England occasioned by the Fenian excesses, and the popular policy of the government in relation to the suppression of sedition, the Saturday Review, an extreme Tory organ, has the frankness to say:

“The Irish are not the only discontented portion of our community, nor is discontent confined to the lowest class in either kingdom. There is another class far above this—a class of men not wealthy nor yet very poor, with the education, the tastes and the habits of the highest ranks, a class containing some able and many disappointed men, a class which is equally offended by the presumed insolence of the aristocrat and the vulgar pretensions of the rich parvenu, a class which does not sympathize with the ‘citizen-brothers’ of the friends of the people, but which, on an emergency, would gladly use, and be used by them. From this would come, in a critical time, the leaders of the popular insurrection; men with tongues and pens capable of kindling the passions of a people, even if they were incapable of calming them. These men are quiet or active according to the vigor or weakness of the government. They love comfort and safety too well to throw their lot in with a doomed cause. But their discontent, disaffection, and ambition might make them, for a time, powerful leaders against a vacillating and blundering government.”

The Saturday Review applauds the policy which has been adopted by the government, of arresting, indicting and punishing men for the expression of opinions. That is the very way to swell the ranks of the discontented people of England. The discontents embrace all those Englishmen to whom political standing is denied; they embrace the thousands of artisans who are bereft of the privilege of voting because of the want of a few pennies in their annual rates. It embraces all those men who, having votes, whether workmen or tenants, have to vote openly and not by ballot, and whose representation in Parliament bears no adequate proportion to their numerical strength in the aggregate of population. It embraces every Englishman, rich or poor, who finds that every day the soil of England is passing into the hands of a narrowing circle, and that soon there will be but very few Englishmen who can say that they have any pecuniary interest in the land of the kingdom. The separation of the people from the ownership of the soil, is of all things, the most certain to produce discontent. To tell the people that they shall never own the land upon which they are to toil, and from which they are to earn their bread, is to condemn them to lives of hopeless labor without one relieving thought. These people in all parts of the United Kingdom may be set down as willing to avail themselves of any revolutionary proceeding that may take place; they may not all take part in popular tumults, nor in disorderly proceedings, but their sympathy, their feelings, hopes, desires and interests are all enlisted in the overthrow of that ministry which obstinately stands still and refuses to recognize the happiness and freedom of the people as the objects of all true government.—Chicago Tribune.