The Statesman; A Monthly Review of Home & Foreign Politics, Ed. by R. Knight (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 Excerpt: ...and placed at their head, for the guidance of the nation, men who abhorred the conduct into which it had been betrayed under his temporary and almost accidental ascendency, --what should we reasonably have expected that the new leaders of the nation, men with a deep sense of honour and religion, would do in such circumstances? Should we have thought it possible that while professing with their lips their abhorrence of the crime committed by their predecessors, they would gravely set up a fiction which they called "the principle of continuity," and assure us that we must really submit to the violence and cruelty heaped upon us, because their own prestige as a people would suffer, if they attempted to make reparation or atonement for the crime? We must, they told us, submit, whether we liked it or not, to the exclusion of our royal family from the throne, acquiesce in the loss of the territory that had been wrested from us by our aggressors as "a scientific frontier," and agree that the Scotch nation, and perhaps the Irish and Welsh, should be made independent of us, and placed under new dynasties, to prevent our ever gathering strength again as a people. And there are those who really think that the right way out of Afghanistan is to consolidate the wrong we have done its miserable people, and hold them down with the point of the bayonet until they acquiesce in it Can we persuade ourselves that there is innocency in persevering in a crime where every principle of right-dealing demands that we should undo the crime with all the emphasis we can? England longs for a rule that would show the world what the just guidance of a people means--a rule impregnated with the belief that it is righteousness that exalteth a nation. We have administered ...