PROGRESS OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES IN ENGLAND.
It has been well said that the season of hope and delusion ought now to have been over—that whatever right-hearted and right-headed Englishmen might have thought of the French revolution at the opening of the States-general in May, 1789, they ought not at the close of this year to have regarded it with any other sentiments than those of horror, disgust, and pity. But “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” Although it was as clear as the sun at noon-day, that the events which had taken place in France were but the precursors of some horrible catastrophe—that the French regenerators sought not wholesome and legitimate reformations, but the ruin of their country, yet it is a lamentable fact that their admirers in England were now greatly on the increase. On the very day that the festival of confederation took place in Paris, six hundred gentlemen in England assembled to celebrate the event which it commemorated. The chairman of this assembly was Earl Stanhope, who acted as president of the Revolution Society in London: a society which, after extending its ramifications throughout the country, entered into an active correspondence not only with the National Assembly, but with the societies in all parts of France, instituted for the promotion of revolutionary principles. Among the associates of this society were men of all ranks and professions—men who could lay no claim to a practical acquaintance with politics, or the working of governments, and who knew little or nothing of human nature. Happily for the country, however. Burke and other writers put forth all their strength to show the danger which lurked in the Revolution Societies of England, and government opposed a mighty barrier to the progress of their dangerous principles. These wrought the salvation of the country. The most powerful antagonist to these societies, who worked by means of the press, was Burke, who, toward the end of this year, published his great work on the subject, entitled “Reflections on the Revolution, &c.” a work which sounded the knell of the old Whig confederacy. Some of this party yielded at once to the force of his arguments, while others retreated as they saw the development of the principles against which they were directed. In fact, the result of this work was to make the old appellations of Whig and Tory assume a widely different meaning from that which had hitherto been attached to them: by the term Whig was now understood the favourers of such democratic principles as existed in France; by that of Tory, those who were alarmed at the progress of the French revolution. The bold and uncompromising stand which Burke made against these principles led to a final rupture between him and his old friend Fox, and consequently to the permanent separation of the great Whig party: from this time there was a division in the camp; a breach which could not be healed.