Tea at Trianon: The Suffering of Baltimore

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

The Suffering of Baltimore

From The National Review:

Baltimore has seen better days. Established in 1729, it was the first ‘boom town’ in the United States, home to an expansive shipbuilding sector and the nation’s first common-carrier railroad (B&O) connecting Baltimore with cities as far-flung as St. Louis and Chicago. Today it is known to Americans via “The Wire,” HBO’s 2002–2008 television series that viscerally captured the hopelessness of the city’s drug-infested streets, failing schools, corrupt police department and power-hungry City Hall.

Crime is so pervasive today that Johns Hopkins University, the city’s largest private-sector employer, won approval this year from the state legislature to create its own armed police force to protect students, faculty, and its medical campus. The rate of violent crime has been terrible for years and last year Baltimore topped the FBI’s homicide list at a time when violent crime has been decreasing nationally. Security company ADT just ranked Baltimore’s residents the “most robbed” in the United States. This, four years after former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Democrat like every Baltimore mayor since 1967, told residents they needed to give looters “space” to “destroy” during riots following the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died in police custody in 2015, and earlier told residents who complained about spiking crime during her tenure that they were “part of the problem.” (She decided not to run for a second term, by the way.) (Read more.)