the highest rank, of great and hereditary landed estates, advantages in short, to which men must be born, and which the exertions of a life, however meritorious, however successful, could never attain." Such, when the new system has settled, will, he thinks, be the inevitable is sues; and so do we-but, we add, subject still to confusion, disturb ance, and occasional reversal. Between the democratical and the aristocratic powers to be created by the Bill, what shall maintain the balance? The private gentry of England are extinguished. They have not been weighed in the balance and found wanting-for centuries have they been a race of patriots-but they are excluded from the grand national council. And lo! smiling graciously or loftily on the one side, the Patricians-and on the other, scornfully and grimly, the Plebeians. The one what-do-ye-call-it full of Dukes, Earls, and Lords, kicks the beam-the contents fly first up, heads over heels, in the face of heaven, and then fall down, in one convulsive sprawl, on the bosom of earth. The other what-do-we-call-it, "heaped up full measure, and running over" with Plebeians, sits like a stone on a rock -the Democracy yells ça ira-and there is a Republic. And a very good form of government, too, it is to those who like it, but sadly addicted to sudden change into a military and murderous despotism? But it has been most truly said that now" the fanaticism of democracy is in its full tide of life and vigour." The lower classes in this country-and too many of the middle-are more than dissatisfied and discontented with the existing order of things, both in government and in society-they hate them with a perfect hatred. Never at any other time-spite of all the pretended improvement of the people in know ledge-were they so ignorant of the real sources of the permanent blessings they, as Britons, enjoy, and of the real causes of those not unfrequent hardships under which they suffer. Let us not scruple to say that they have shewn themselves too often, within these two or three years, as blind as brutal, as deaf as dangerous; and that their power now is the power of an irrational and ferocious giant. They are for taking things into their own hands. They must have their own House of Commons; and as for the House of Lords, why the Times, who alternately threatens and truckles to the monster, lately told us, that if the Peers shewed any hesitation about passing the Bill, it would be rescued from their delay by a process as summary as irresistible. Why mince the matter? the populace would put a period to the peerage. Do you doubt? Then think of the Press. One of that power-the Spectator-smiles at us for saying that the Press will return a vast number of members to a "Reformed Parliament." We understand his smile-it is one of the most intense internal satisfaction. Were there more Magas-more Standards -more spirit-union-resolution— among the Tories-we had almost said more plague, pestilence, and famine, battle, murder, and sudden death, to scatter amongst the Whigs and Radicals-we might yet save the constitution. Oh! hood-winked the great goggleeyes that will not see what is in preparation with the populace for the people! and with the people for the King. But we conclude with asking the Ministry one single question. What if their Bill prove indeed to be an Aristocratical Bill? Why a Wild Beast will tear them into pieces. And in tearing them into pieces, that Wild Beast will not only be obeying the instincts of his nature, but in that obedience be likewise acting in strict accordance with the dictates of reason and justice. For the mob believes is allowed-has been taught to believe the Bill to be, in its principles and its details, democratic;-and who will deny that nature, education, time, and opportunity, all unite to make him of principles and details the best of all judges ?-Democratic it is to his heart's no longer insatiable desires-and see ye not how he hobbles-hear ye not how he howls-in long privation impatient of provender, and proving that the Mostodonton is neither a fabled nor an obsolete monster? The Ministry will have something else to carry-by and by-besides the Bill. But the nation-we suspect has no great trust in the 1010 The Lord Advocate on Reform. strength of its back and shoulders. In the midst of all this democratical delirium, they are not popular. Nobody shouts their names-the very mobs seem ignorant of their exist. ence. The cry is still-the Kingthe Bill! But the men of the Three patriotic Pledges and the one blundering Budget are with the populace" strictly anonymous ;" and the foolish Ministers are merged in their wicked measure. Soon will they have to stand a terrible trial. For a strong and stern party, determined on the most radical changes in all institutions, though now, for the furtherance of their own schemes, they are with the Ministers, will, by and by, be against them with a republican and implacable enmity; while the Conservative Party, still strong in numbers, in a common creed, and in their devotion to the cause of freedom and their country, will fall upon them flying in discomfiture from the demagogues. Mercenaries at bestthe Mercenaries of a Faction-they will fly-or fall between two fires poured upon them from the foes as well as friends of the Constitution. That will be a Final Settlement-but the Bill is not one-if you think so, go read the Examiner. You will find no shilly-shallying in his straightforward and vigorous columns. If [June, he had believed the Bill to be aristocratical, he would have torn it into shreds and patches. But he sees in it-not an end-but a beginning; and his eyes are piercers. Till now he never hesitated to scatter his he is but barely civil; nor will his scorn over the Whigs. Even now courtesies continue one moment longer after they begin to shew a returning anxiety for their " Order." By an entire abandonment of the inthe light in which they have conterests of their own class-that is, in sidered them all their lives long, up can they hope to possess the favour to the period of this blessed Billof that formidable section, of which his talents-and we scruple not to add-in our rooted enmity to his principles-his political integrityfor though pernicious, he is honest have made him-as far as the Press is at work for revolution-the Leader? say or sing-that if the Mob smells By way, then, of L'Envoy, let us deceit and delusion in this Bill of cheated, we would not stand in your yours, and finds that he has been shoes-O Ministers!-for a trifle; of you-and your rumps will be in for the shoes will be all that is left a worse predicament than ever a Rump-Parliament. DEAR NORTH, THE LATE ELECTIONS IN ENGLAND. THE decree has gone forth, and been executed-that advice which a peer of the realm, in his place in Parliament, told the King's Ministers could only be given to the Sovereign by men with the heads of fools, or the hearts of traitors, has been given, and acted upon; and the people, under the influence of universal and frantic excitement, have rushed forward to undo themselves. Unwilling as I am to give way to forebodings of gloom and disaster, knowing that cheerful exertion better becomes a man who is anxious to do effectual service in a good cause; yet, when I reflect upon the events of the last four weeks-when I see how all the ties of sense and feeling, which bound men to one another in relation to public affairs, and which have so long given strength, and dignity, and solidity to the British empire, have been torn asunder in order that that may be done, which when done, must for ever prevent these ties from being reunited-when I reflect upon these things, I am oppressed with no dishonourable melancholy, and, with a heart struggling with its own heaviness, sit down to communicate my thoughts upon what has so recently taken place before our eyes. And first-there is a mystery in the matter which has not yet been fathomed, and we have yet to discover the hidden source of the general and active revolt which has taken place against all the principles and feelings which have heretofore appeared to actuate the great body of the English yeomanry. The English elections are now over, all but onethe great and valiant struggle in Northampton-and from one end of the kingdom to the other, from Cornwall to Cumberland, and in no places more conspicuously than in these extremes themselves, a simultaneous burst of disloyalty has taken place to old friends, old feelings, and hereditary attachments; while reasonable gratitude for long services, both in public and in private, both general and local, seems to be utterly erased from the hearts of men, where one would have thought it was fixed as safely and as certainly as the VOL. XXIX. NO. CLXXXI. love of their wives and children. Shall it be said that all this is in consequence of the conviction of their understanding, that the changes proposed to be effected by the Reform Bill ought to be effected? Ridiculous! The yeomanry, who have come forward with such vivacity in favour of the Reform Bill, know no more of its provisions than they do of the Koran. I have myself been among them, and talked with them as they flocked from village and hamlet to range themselves under the banner which they and their fathers before them had, up to this time, always opposed; and when I spoke of certain changes proposed to be made by the Reform Bill, without mentioning that they formed a part of the measure for which they were so clamorous, the mention of such changes was received with indignation, and they were ready to have signed a petition against them. That every weaver occupying a house for which he paid, or promised, a rent of ten pounds ayear, with no more property in the country than his loom and the clothes upon his back, should have as much privilege in returning representatives as they whose families, for generations past, had dwelt upon their own land, seemed to them monstrous; yet still they would go forward and vote for "the King and Reform." That a contracted view of the duty imposed upon them by their personal loyalty to the sovereign, has greatly influenced the English yeomanry in the late election, admits of no doubt; and that it was cunningly taken advantage of by the revolutionary leaders, was from the first apparent; but even this, powerfully influential as it was-and none but those who saw some of the election scenes in England, can well imagine the force and enthusiasm derived from the notion, that the will of the King and the Reform Bill were identical-even this is hardly sufficient to account for the headlong infatuation which bore down every consideration that might have been expected to affect the hearts and minds of Englishmen. Shall we believe, according to the mean and disgusting flattery of the popular candidates upon the hust 3 U ings, that the "diffusion of intelli- enormous tide of vanity and impertinence, leads them to chatter about intelligence, the proper spirit of which they have no capacity for feeling, Witlings-brisk fools, curst with half sense That stimulates their impotence." No-the part which the electors of England have taken with regard to the Reform Bill, is the result of ignorance-ignorance of the Bill itself -ignorance of the effects which it is calculated to produce upon the frame of society, both social and political-and above all, ignorance of the real character of the men who have advised the measure, and of the circumstances under which it was advised. "How piteous, then, that there should be such dearth Of knowledge; that whole myriads should unite To work against themselves such fell despite Should come in frenzy, and in drunken Impatient to put out the only light Never, indeed, was the real liberty of England in more jeopardy, for real civil liberty is to be found in the permanent and protecting power of law, and the change which the madness of the time rages after, is one which must, of necessity, destroy the [June, it be expected to revolutionize hu- the root of all the revolutionary hub- Although there is so much diffito the effect which has been produced culty in assigning a cause adequate upon the yeomanry of England in warping their better feelings, and imbuing them with a taste for revo lution, yet some of the things which have contributed to this state of mind lie upon the surface, and these I shall briefly notice. The most important has been the unremitting exertion of the newspaper press, which, with but very few exceptions, has been devoted to the promotion of revolutionary principles. At the present crisis, nine-tenths of the newspapers read by the people labour daily or weekly to inflame and mislead the minds of their readers, by every species of fraudful and exaggerated statement which considerable skill and habitual perseverance in lying can suggest. It is no wonder that this should have produced a very powerful effect upon a people who are almost all, more or less, readers of newspapers. Even those who do not read are impressed by others who do, and every village alehouse where a newspaper is taken in, becomes a fountain of dangerous and revolutionary principles, which find their way into the house of every farmer and yeoman. This is an evil which cannot be combatted without great exertion; but if not met, it alone would in time be sufficient to destroy the good spirit and the salutary institutions of this country. Every thing must sink before the violence of an industrious and skil fully conducted press, if that press is allowed to be all but unanimous on the side of revolution. But why is it so? First, because the newspapers which flatter the people and their prejudices, and tell them agreeable lies, are the most likely to be preferred by them; and, secondly, so far from an additional exertion being made by the conservative party on that account, to meet the revolutionists upon their own ground, and outwrite them in the newspapers, as they are outwritten in other periodicals, these great engines of political influence have been greatly neglected, and with disgraceful tameness and quiescence the Tory party have looked on, while almost the whole force, both of the metropolitan and provincial newspaper press, has been zealously directed against them. The doctrine on politics, or on any other subject, which at first appears to a man foolish or revolting, if it be continually presented to him day after day, with fresh arguments in its favour, will soon become tolerated, and in the end will probably be adopted by him, unless he use means to counteract the effect of habitual repetition. If, then, the leading newspapers, which every man who mingles in the world, or the world's business, must read, have been gained over to the advocacy of revolutionary principles, there is, and there can be no chance of adequately meeting this evil but by making newspapers as good in every matter of detail as those which are emphatically said to "lead" the public, and which shall direct the minds of the people to sound and sober views of rational liberty, and to the valuableness of the remarkable institutions which have so long preserved the nation powerful and glorious upon the earth, amid the distractions of political conflict, and the crash of revolutions with which Europe has been visited. Again it has been said, and with truth, that the personal habits and deportment of the Tory lords and gentlemen have not been such as to win the affection of the middle classes and yeomanry in the country. They have not mingled with them, nor identified themselves with them as they should have done; and therefore there lurked secretly, in the breasts of a great many, a desire to avail themselves of the first plausible opportunity to evince their sense of the cold, and, as it appeared to them, disdainful conduct of the Tory magnates of the district. This disposition was easily seen, and readily taken advantage of by the Whigs, who have made it their business personally to ingratiate themselves with those very persons whom the Tories had alienated or offended; and thus not only was political support very much withdrawn from Tory candidates, on grounds merely personal, but even where support was given, it was by no means with that heartiness and zeal and lively spirit which distinguished the support of the other side. On the side of the Tories, support was in many cases given as a political duty merely ;-on the other side it was given with that vivacity which accompanies an action that is personally agreeable. The influential Tories have been so long accustomed to high office-have been so habi |