which were popular with the Liberals after 1832,
expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the
Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got
the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth would
slumber, lapt in universal law. I cannot say how I personally loathed
this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it
seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a
thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its
wild elemental forces.' For the first time he was aware of actual war
within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer
force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the
feelings of the great majority of my age and class, and which have ever
since remained in me as strong and as unmixed as they were in 1848. I
feel them now (1887) as keenly as ever, though the world has changed and
thinks and feels, as it seems, quite differently. They were feelings of
fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists;
feelings of the most bitter contempt and indignation against those who
feared them, truckled to them, or failed to fight them whensoever they
could and as long as they could: feelings of zeal against all popular
aspirations and in favour of all established institutions whatever their
various defects or harshnesses (which, however, I wished to alter
slowly and moderately): in a word, the feelings of a scandalised
policeman towards a mob breaking windows in the cause of humanity. I
should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris,
till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those
who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them
all as traitors and cowards. The only event in 1848 which gave me real
pleasure was the days of June, when Cavaignac did what, if he had been a
man or not got into a fright about his soul, or if he had had a real
sense of duty instead of a wretched consciousness of weakness and a
false position, Louis Philippe would have done months before.' He
cannot, he admits, write with calmness to this day of the king's
cowardice; and he never passed the Tuileries in later life without
feeling the sentiment about Louis XVI. and his 'heritage splendid'
expressed by Thackeray's drummer, 'Ah, shame on him, craven and coward,
that had not the heart to defend it!'