clamour most loudly for independence satisfied with the exercise of it, when it happens to make against themselves. "When my honourable friend's vote happens to be with gentlemen on the opposite side of the House, then his opinions are conclusive, and his authority an infallible guide; but when his sentiments concur with those held on this side of the House, he is stigmatised as a man who does not dare to act upon his own views as equally corrupt and servile with those who have actually enlisted themselves under the banners of the ministry." Ministers had most anxiously considered the distresses of the nation, particularly those which pressed on the agricultural classes of the community; plans had even been devised for relieving them, but unhappily without any satisfactory result. The poor laws formed, no doubt, a most important subject of considera. tion-and he trusted Mr Curwen would renew his motion for a committee upon them; but this was a question which could not properly be mixed up with other matters. Mr Brougham, as might be expected, had qualified the assertion of the original mover of the amendment by which taxation was represented as the only source of public distress, in conformity to a pamphlet (his own published speech) on agricultural distresses, in which he enumerated thirteen causes of the public distress, among which taxation was only one, and where he had also supported the doctrine now held by ministers that the distress would be only temporary. Ministers were most anxious to reduce the establishment as low as possible; their only principle of limitation being safety-Colonies had their price, but the safety of the kingdom had no price-it was inestimable-it must be guarded against all hazards by all exertions. "Sir, for one, I am not disposed to deny that the reductions and dismissals to which we are under the necessity of having recourse,

do, in many instances, go against my feelings. An honourable gentleman, (Mr Lamb,) who never speaks without making a deep impression by his eloquence and ability, truly observed, last night, that retrenchment is not an unmixed good. Such a process necessarily throws upon the world many meritorious and helpless individuals, who are added to the numbers of the distressed, and augment the mass of discontent throughout the country. In truth, those whose duty does not call them immediately to attend to the detailed application of the principles which we are all agreed in recommending, can have but a faint notion of the scenes of sorrow and suffering which result from those very operations by which the public pressure is ultimately to be relieved." Sensible of the necessity of reduction, he yet owned that in cutting deep it was impossible not to feel severely. To this extent he owned he was an unwilling reformer, and trusted he would not suffer, in the estimation of the House, for being guided by no harsher motive than a sense of public duty. He never had been more surprised than to hear the learned gentleman, who spoke last, drawing the most gloomy presages from there being no new taxes. "At the end of the American war," says the honourable and learned gentleman, "taxes to a considerable amount were imposed upon the people-now we could not, we dared not impose taxes." What might be done if necessary, it is happily beside our present purpose to inquire. That there exists no necessity, and that there is therefore no intention of imposing taxes, is the fact. There are circumstances of distress enough, God knows, in our situation; but it seems a most perverse ingenuity that can discover, in the absence of any necessity for new taxes, a symptom of peculiar and aggravated distress. With regard to our employing an influence on

the continent for the promotion of commercial objects, ministers had conceived that a secure peace rather than a profitable one was the object, and that to have excited jealousy and hazarded our good opinion in the great confederacy, by proposing such stipulations, would have been very unwise. The address was most unjustly censured as having branded the people with disloyalty, the distinction between the deluders and the deluded had been most clearly drawn. "The people at large are warmly praised, but not more warmly than justly, for the fortitude with which they have borne all their privations. But is it not notorious that, of their privations, advantage has been taken to endeavour (happily in vain) to excite throughout the country a gene. ral spirit of insurrection? The honour able and learned gentleman has asked, whether those persons who assembled to petition the legislature are to be considered as guilty of insurrection? Certainly not but for the sake of petitioning, is a waggon laden with ammunition a necessary basis? Are fire-arms and tri-coloured flags the indispensible accompaniments of a resolution in favour of parliamentary reform? For myself, I can truly say, that I feel as much compassion for those innocent, but mis-guided persons, whom their distresses expose to be the dupes and tools of every leader that addresses himself to their wants, their prejudices and their passions, as I do of indignation against the perverted heads and hard hearts of those demagogues, who, far from sharing or relieving the sufferings in which they pretend to sympathise, retire to their own comfortable homes, from a drenched and starving auditory, after having irritated them to madness, and stimulated them to outrage, by inculcating rebellion as a duty, and proscribing charity as a crime." The object of these proceed ings, the panacea for all grievances,

which was to feed the hungry, to reform the vicious, to diffuse affluence and contentment through all classes of the community, was parliamentary reform. Mr Canning declared his determination to resist this in every form, observing, "I deny the assumption that the House of Commons, as it stands, is not to all practical purposes an adequate representative of the people. I deny that it requires any amendment or alteration, to enable it fitly to discharge the functions which are legitimately its province. I deny that there is any model, either in the theo. ry or in the practice of the constitution, to be traced in any period of our history, or to be found in our customs or our laws, from which model the House of Commons has degenerated, and according to which it requires to be reformed. I do not deny that theories more splendidly popular may be devised by speculative philosophers, or held up by designing men to inflame the imaginations of the multitude. I admit that, in erecting for the first time in other countries, a system of representative government, other bases might be found more adapted to their wants, habits, and feelings. But I contend that our system, such as it is, has grown up with our freedom and with our power; and that it satisfies the wants, the opinions, and the feelings of the great bulk and body of the nation." He would be sorry, indeed, to see the House of Commons the mere passive organ of popular volition. "Whenever it shall attempt to exchange this its sober and legitimate character, for the wide and wild prerogative which modern politicians claim for it, some new system of government-some strange variety of untried being-some monstrous growth planted in an inauspicious hour, watered with blood, and thriving amidst desolation, may take the place of the British constitutionbut the British constitution will be no

more! The name of England may remain, but it will no longer be that England, the model of rational liberty, the protectress of national independence, venerable in her domestic institutions, powerful in foreign exertion beyond the natural proportions of her physical force,-whose pigmy body' animated and o'er-informed by the spi. rit of her free constitution, was strong enough to deliver Europe from the grasp of the oppressor; and whose greatness and happiness, whose freedom and power, the destruction of the constitution can alone destroy." The reformers in the House, indeed, treated the advocates of universal suffrage and annual parliaments as visionary and fanciful theorists; but he was afraid there was something much more substantial in those theories-that the solid land itself was the object of their desire. He held in his hand a pamphlet written with no inconsiderable ability, (by Evans, Librarian to the Spenceans,) in which it was stated that all the lands, houses, and other property, must return to the people, without which reform was unavailing. The ferment occasioned by these doctrines would not indeed be dangerous if due precautions were taken-but without these the agents of mischief might avail themselves of national distress to produce national confusion. The present was the critical moment of our fate through which if we passed unhurt, a new course of prosperity might open upon us. "I cannot, (said Mr C.) I will not, join with those who despair of the fortunes of their country. Great, I admit, is the exhaustion and severe, I lament it, is the distress. In this moment of exhaustion and distress, the enemies of England again send forth their terrible prophesyings, and pronounce her to be lost to herself and to the world. False prophets may they prove-false prophets they will prove.

The stamina of the nation, I am persuaded, are unbroken-the heart, I am confident, is sound. It is not surely at the eve of dissolution, and as in the moment of lightning before death, that I see visions of future glory! But I cannot, I will not believe that the brilliant destinies of England are closed for ever

'Think you yon sanguine cloud, Raised by war's breath, has quench'd the orb of day?

To-morrow he repairs the golden flood, And warms the nation with redoubled ray.” To wait with patience for the turn of those unprosperous times-to bear and to forbear to endeavour to restore what Lord Clarendon, I think, somewhere calls, the ancient good temper and good humour of the British nation'-to abstain from hazardous innovations and experiments-to probe with a tender hand real grievances, with a view to practical remedy-to cherish the institutions, and to foster the resources of the country; this is the course which parliament has to pursue and which, pursued through this session, painful and laborious as it may be, will, I have no doubt, enable us to look back with self-congratulation at the gloomy phantoms by which we are now discouraged and appalled."

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Mr Tierney contended that the House would not do its duty unless the amendment was adopted, and he had no hesitation in solemnly declaring that the country was in a state of the greatest, the most unexampled, and the most alarming danger. With that view of the question, how was it sible they could agree to an address which passed over that danger as lightly as the speech delivered from the throne? It was not true that a mere committee upon the income and expenditure of the country, which was now promised by the ministers, would meet every consideration which the

present crisis demanded. He saw no prospect of any improvement in our commerce. A diminution of the revenue was inevitable from the general reduction of expenditure. If we reduced our establishment to nineteen millions, there would be a deficiency of three millions, after giving up every particle of the sinking fund. Was it not then a mockery to say that it was the duty of the House merely to echo back the speech from the throne? Would the House lend itself to such a delusion as to say that there would be any excess? Could the deficiency be supplied by legerdemain and hocus pocus? The poor were supported only by subscriptions too extensive to be long continued. Much had been said about reductions; but he wished to be shewn one great man who had been dismissed or even had his salary reduced. From clerks of L.100 a-year, L.30 had been taken, leaving L.70 to keep soul and body together. But last year a grant of L.10,000 had been made in the treasury department. Ministers had cut out a new office in the civil list bill, and had proposed a vice treasurer of Ireland, with a salary of L.3000 a-year. Mr Croker had claimed about L.250 as war salary, on pretence of the expedition to Algiers. The only security against the excesses of the people was by shewing them that we were ready to share their dis

and a reform in parliament. It was ne➡ gatived without a division.

The Commons had scarcely dispatched the preliminary business of the address, when their attention was called to a vast crowd of petitions, presented from various quarters, chiefly by Lord Cochrane and Sir Francis Burdett. Their tenor was uniform, deploring the distresses of the country, calling for economy and retrenchment, and, above all, for radical reform, particularly in the constitution of the House itself. In demonstrating the necessity of this last object, language was apt to be used, in which respect was by no means prominent. There was often, too, so striking an even verbal coincidence, as to give rise to the allegation, that there was a petition-manufactory in London, whence these productions emanated, as from a centre, to the different parts of the kingdom. In consequence of these observations, animated debates arose as to the reception of several of the peti. tions.

The first was presented by Lord Cochrane, and stated to be signed by 15,700 inhabitants of Bristol and its vicinity. The members for Bristol, however, Mr Hart and Mr Protheroe, declared that,, to their certain knowledge, it did not contain the sentiments of any considerable body of their constituents; but the Chancellor of the Exchequer observing that it contained no strikingly disrespectful language, made no objection to its being laid on the table. His lordship then produced one from the township of Penrith, in the parish of Saddleworth, Yorkshire, which was in a different strain. stated, "that the petitioners have a full and immoveable conviction, a conviction which they believe to be universal throughout the kingdom, that the House doth not in any constitutional or rational sense represent the nation; that when the people have ceased to be represented, the constitution is sub

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verted; that as the tremendous tempest of war is not to be staid at the bidding of those in whose mad and wicked counsels it had its origin, so it is probable the authors of the late war did not intend the magnitude and duration it attained, which magnitude and duration, by the portentous calamities now found in their train, are fast opening the eyes of a deluded nation to the evil deeds of its authors; that in such a condition of the country, the petitioners are shocked to behold contending factions alike guilty of their country's wrongs, alike forgetful, mocking the public patience with repeated, protracted, and disgusting debates on questions of refinement in the complicated and abstruse science of taxation, as if in such refinements, and not in a reformed representation, as if in a consolidated corruption, and not in a renovated constitution, relief were to be found; that in the discussions which they had witnessed, the petitioners see nought but what hath a direct tendency to place the English people in a situation, in which the unrelenting lash of unconstitutional taxation may in all times to come be laid on them, to the utmost extent of human endurance." They concluded by invoking, as the only remedy, a free parliament, elected annually by the whole body of the people.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer opposed the reception of the petition, which appeared to him to present direct libel-a gross attack upon the privileges, the conduct, and character of that House. Mr Brougham, Mr Brand, and Mr Lamb, while they censured the language of the petition, and reprobated the principle of universal suffrage, yet did not wish to limit the power of petitioning. Sir S. Romilly did not think the petitioners had any intention of insulting the house; but Mr Canning, though he by no means thought they ought to be nice as to the

language of petitions, could not concur in the reception of one which contained a direct incitement to resistance. Mr Wynn and Mr Bathurst also opposed it, and it was rejected by a majority of 135 to 48. Lord Cochrane then produced another, which, on being read, was found to be verbatim the same with the one just rejected. Upon the representation, therefore, of Mr Vansittart and Mr Canning, he agreed to withdraw it. Another was rejected on the ground that there was no signature upon the sheet of paper on which the petition was written. One was then exhibited from Delph, in Yorkshire, when Lord C. being asked if it was not the very same which had been twice rejected, replied he did not think it was exactly the same; but the Speaker stating that there was no difference whatever, Mr Canning endeavoured to impress upon the noble lord the impropriety of pushing this petition in so many shapes, contrary to the decided opinion of the house. Lord C. however, insisted on the question being put, when it was negatived without a division.

Two days after, (31st January,) Sir W. Lemon presented a petition from the freeholders and inhabitants of Cornwall, which he stated to be couched in such temperate language, that no objection could be made to it. It urged that there could be no hope of freedom or public economy, till the people were adequately represented in the House; that the want of this had produced the ruinous wars, enormous taxation, and overgrown military establishment, under which the nation suffered; that the people were excluded from any substantial influence in the election of the House, and that an oligarchical faction had actually usurped the sovereignty of the country, to the equal danger of King, Lords, and Commons. Mr Brande advised the reception of the petition, to which no opposition was made. Sir