FRUITS OF BAD GOVERNMENT. (From the "Watchman.")

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 641, 5 June 1852, Page 4

FRUITS OF BAD GOVERNMENT. (From the " Watchman.")

When imperial tyrants, at Rome or Constantinople used to change their lodging-place each night, to elud, the eye of the assassin, — and when Sultans and Beys used to tremble every hour with terror of the bowstring, — they provided the historian with types of that horror which surrounds the beds and besets the paths of modern despots. To unlearn the absolutism of their fathei'S is impossible. They are members of an order which cannot take another form because of the rigidity of a nature that is still the same ; and the idea of limited or constitutional sovereignty is just as remote from the conceptions of the Monarchs of Austria and France as if they were enthroned at Ispahan. Franz Joseph, for example, is as absolute' at heart as his father ever was ; and, after having accepted a constitution in order to hold fast the hereditary crown, and purchased obedience by submitting to the necessity of the moment, but this being past, having annulled every concession, a consciousness of perfidy haunts him day and night, and his existence becomes burdensome. He tried to amuse himself and his vassals with travel. Finding no comfort at Vienna he went into Lombnrdy and Venetia. An impenetrable guard surrounded his person. Municipal authorities prepared in every town for his reception on peril of disgrace or death. Priests and soldiers drew up the programmes for pubherejoicing. Illuminations were made by force of edict. Garrisons were paraded and masses were sung. Purses of money pui chased the presence of a crowd of beggars in each place, — a train of vagi ants and criminals doomed to the beggary which priests and soldiers have created,— and from their hoarse throats a few sullen vivats assured the imperial wanderer that there was breathing, somewhere, a civil population. Even at the theatre at Milan, where a company of some sort may usually be gathered, no female beating* the name of lady condescended to bo

present, nor any man who did not come by compulsion, unless be bad stolen in to enjoy the spectacle of a living scourge deserted by those who bad smarted under bis inflictions, or who feared to smart. At Venice the wjiteis were forsaken while his barges were paddled through the city, and from the balconies of weed-grown palates few besides soldiers and their followers showed their faces to behold him. Yet Vpnice is said to have been the city " best affected" of all that the Emperor

Being- returned to Vienna, lie finds an empty tieasury with a disheartened and divided ministry, and is troubled with rumours of revolt in Croatia, and threatening^ of outburst in Hungary. Fretful and terror-stricken, he finds that the Turk, unwilling to violate the first principles of humanity, has, at length, set his menaces at nought, and discharged Kossuth from captivity in Natolia, and that the chief leader of the Hungarian revolt breathes free air, and with his wife and children is on his way to England or America, where he may speak with freedom, and has a chance to be respected if he be an honest man, or will dwindle into insignificance if he be not. Betraying the terror of an evil conscience, the Emperor vociferated threateninga towards the Sultan, which he finds himself, the next moment, unable to execute, and is unable to trust his own appointed adviser. Then he closets himself with Metternich, whom he has invited to supply their lack of common prudence, with bis practised and cold sagacity. Meanwhile, a sudden dearth invades Austria, commerce is paralysed, the array goes without pay, the populace renew murmurs long suppressed, and begin to raise again that direful cry for bread which will take no denial, and has made stouter hearts tremble. Another ruler, not less a tyrant because he only bears the name of President, and rules over the wreck of a Republic that created him, — but which can no more subsist than the monarchy it displaced, because neither the one nor the other has had a basis of public viitue on which to rest, — betrays each day an increasingly visible vacillation of purpose and of policy, as the factions of the capital and the discontent of the provinces disturb his rest. Political offenders like hydra-heads spring I up under the very strokes of repression, and one of the last of them is sentenced to a weighty fine and to imprisonment, for the portentous crime of having described, in writing " the end of the Republic." Like the priesthood he has pampered, he still believes in the omnipotence of authority, and as they wave crosses and sing litanies to cheek the progress of an inundation, or to stop the peltmgs of a hail-storm, or to turn aside the lightning, so does he wave the wand of presidential power, and bid the madness of socialism cease, or the reasonable remonstrance of justice and of truth be silent. His lefusal to allow Kossuth to land in France did not arise from any virtuous distrust of the man's private chanter, which, perhaps, may not be the best, but from a consciousness that the very people whom he so often invited to cbaunt " Vive I' Empereur," and the army wbom he regaled, and much more the generals whom he has offended, could none of them be trusted under the exciting presence of a man who would possess, for a moment, the charm, of being a soldier and a liberated captive. His conscience feels that another captive, Abd-el-Kader, has been treated perfidiously, and that the liberty even of that aged and spirit-broken captive might possibly revive the disaffection of the ill-assorted and ill-governed masses in the military colony of Algeria. It is not a dignified preference for monarchy in the Emperor, nor a pure desire for the preservation of order in the President, that urges either the one or the other to do even that which is right, or which, in existing circumstances, might be capable of the fullest justification — as, for example, refusing the request of Kossuth to visit France, or the desire of Magyars ia Paris to meet their former chief in England — but mere panic, the unreasonable, stolid apprehension of an evil conscience. In this judgment there is no political theory involved. Facts have suggested it, and the facts are too palpable for Christian men to overlook them. The truly royal progress of " our own Victoria" — as Her Majesty has been called with a fervent reverential affection — furnishes a triumphant evidence, not only to the soundness of the British constitution, but to the truth that this constitution is not abused; that although the advisers of the Sovereign may sometimes err, or seem to err, in affairs of detail, their counsels are more honest and more safe than those of any other European Cabinet; and that the Queen herself, in the display of .regal aad domestic virtues, and with a conscience unstained by innocent blood, has her body-guard in the hundreds of thousands of loving subjects who present themselves to give her welcome wherever she comes, and that she enjoys, not the masses of a seditious priesthood, but the prayers and the blessings of Christian people.