United States or Heard Island and McDonald Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Now Roosevelt had been, of course, the negation of Bourbonism. He had led the Republican Party into new fields and set it to do new work, and far off, shining clearly, its goal beckoned it on. His followers were mostly young men; they saw that the world had changed, and would change still further, and they went forward valiantly to meet it and, if possible, to shape its changes.
In these days of political persecution, the Bonapartists had everywhere hidden themselves in obscure places, or concealed their real disposition beneath the mask of Bourbonism.
While such scenes were being enacted in Paris, and while all through France the large class of poor and criminals created by Bourbonism was committing even worse excesses, the assembly was addressing itself to the task of regenerating France by endowing her with a constitution.
And to enliven the scene, a steamer calls every now and then to take passengers to the Tremiti islands. One would like to visit them, if only in memory of those martyrs of Bourbonism, who were sent in hundreds to these rocks and cast into dungeons to perish.
This was perhaps the greatest revelation of the inherent weakness of Bourbonism; the system had, in its decline, become little more than etiquette, and Louis XVI seen hard at work in his shirt-sleeves would have shattered the illusions of centuries.
But if upon the innocent violet is to be heaped the curse of Sedan, then when Bourbonism lifts its abashed head are lilies to be proscribed in the Lyons market as violets were darkly suspected in Marseilles? And if the radicals should make the red poppy their symbol, would it in turn be scorned by the lovers of the lily?
It is based usually upon the notion of an essential incompatibility between American and European political institutions; and the assertion of such an incompatibility at the present time can only be the result of a stupid or willful American democratic Bourbonism. Such an incompatibility did exist when the Holy Alliance dominated Europe. It does not exist to-day, except in one particular.
Unquestionably the noblest figure in this reactionary movement was that of Jose Borjes, a brave man engaged in an unworthy cause. You can read his tragic journal in the pages of M. Monnier or Maffei. It has been calculated that during these last years of Bourbonism the brigands committed seven thousand homicides a year in the kingdom of Naples.
. . . et je porte en mon coeur La liberté gravée et les rois en horreur. The audience was too loyal to Bourbonism to accept these sentiments; there were loud murmurs; and Brutus had to be withdrawn. As late as 1766, a play on the subject of William Tell was given to an empty house; no one would go to see a republican hero. But from the sixties matters changed rapidly.
Those who came to hear a careful explanation of the debt question in Virginia, as it was understood by the Refunders, and to listen to an exposition of the opposition to Bourbonism, of which General Mahone was a leader, went away enlightened, if not fully satisfied.
Word Of The Day