John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[71] perceive, Dana as well as the public men with whom he came into daily contact, was dealing largely with symptoms rather than with the actual cause of disease — with abstract theories rather than with practical measures of reform.

In this correspondence Dana charges the conservative or bourgeois party with both making the insurrection and putting it down — with refusing to pay the men in the national workshops and yet continuing to pay them in the shop of charity — with abolishing the monarchy and then conspiring to continue its abuses — with establishing an elective presidency and then preparing to convert it into a hereditary one--with promising aid to Italy and then refusing it. He calls attention to the fact that while all Europe has been going through political convulsions, the retrograde party is everywhere gathering strength—everywhere rejoicing in the prospect of returning to power. “The revolutionary forces have only two allies-winter and famine-against which armies are powerless and martial law of no effect.” The discontentment which had spread to England, and was increased by famine in Ireland, shook his confidence in the eternity of British institutions, and led him to declare:

... The majesty of England is after all fragile at the base, the feet of the statue are of clay. Its day will come, sooner or later, whether to-morrow or the next century, no man can foretell. A feudal aristocracy monopolizing the soil, and the moneyed aristocracy monopolizing the materials and implements of industry, are both things that cannot stand before the spirit that is abroad. Nor will they disappear peacefully by a gradual and harmless process. ...

The agitation continued in France, the army was kept constantly on the alert, the streets of Paris were filled with artillery, conspiracy was suspected on every hand, the