The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 menaced Europe with one of the greatest of all evils—the premature adoption of liberal institutions. Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to found a government by the whole people where the mass of the working population are grossly ignorant and superstitious. The reason is known to all who have had an opportunity of closely observing the workings of such minds. They can only be swayed by arts which honest intelligence can not use, and therefore they will be usually governed by men who have an interest in misleading them. Great Britain was nearer a republic than any other nation in Europe; but England, too, needed another century to get the tap-room reduced, the people's school developed in every parish, and the educated class intensely alive to the "folly of heaping importance upon idiots."
The Dagger Scene in the House of Commons. (Gillray, 1793.)
Edmund Burke was the man who, more than any other, held England back from revolution in 1792. Rational appeals to the rational faculty could not have availed. Appalled at what he saw in France, Burke, after thirty years' advocacy of liberal principles, and assisting to create a republic in America, became a fanatic of conservatism, and terrified England into standing by the monarchy. He was alarmed even at the influx of Frenchmen into England, flying from La Lanterne, and he gave vehement support to the Alien Act, which authorized the summary expulsion from the kingdom of foreigners suspected by the Government. Vehement? Some of his sentences read like lunacy. It was in the course of this debate that the celebrated dagger scene occurred which Gillray has satirized in the picture on the following page. A wild tale reached his ears of the manufacture of daggers at Birmingham for the use of French Jacobins in England, and one of them was given him as a specimen. It was an implement of such undecided form that it might have served as a dagger, a pike-head, or a carving-knife. He dashed it upon the floor of the House of Commons, almost hitting the foot of an honorable member, and proceeded to declaim against the unhappy exiles in the highest style of absurdity. "When they smile," said he, "I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is blood." A pause ensued after the orator had spoken a while in this strain. "You have thrown down a knife," said Sheridan; "where is the fork?" A shout of laughter followed this sally, which relieved the suppressed feelings of the House, but spoiled the "effect" of Mr. Burke's performance.
The Zenith of French Glory—A View in Perspective. (Gillray, London, 1793.)
