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The Lord Advocate on Reform.

of condition, all absurdly slumped together into one undistinguishable mass of confusion-under the undefinable terms-" middle orders." Why, in some countries, it is said lamentingly, by philanthropists hopeless of revolution, that there are, alas! no middle orders-as in Spain, That is not altogether true; but we shall suppose it so, and what is the meaning of the sigh? Why, that there is a nobility and a mobility; or say rather a few thousand tyrants and a good many million slaves, with no "middle-order" between, no freemen. But the Bill is about Britain, and in Britain-in this sense-there is assuredly a mighty "middle order." As that most poetical of all political economists, James Ramsay MacCulloch, vaccinated the Stot, says of the gradation of rich and poor soils, in his illustration of the Andersonian doctrine of rent, that they run into each other" like the colours of the rainbow," so may we say, that in our favoured land thus blends into one Irislike arch, of which King and Constitution are the key-stones-all classes of the nation. True, that this is but a simile-and that our population is not absolutely a rainbow. But the simile suffices for illustration of a great political truth. Attend now to this, we beseech you ;-between the aristocracy, itself gorgeous with various colours, and the democracy, not without its lights and shadows too, there lies outspread at this moment before our eyes such another living landscape as makes our hearts burn within us, and glory in being British-born. "These"-say we exultingly-" these are the middle orders-let them elect their own representatives-and,' come against her all the world in arms,' no fears have we for the Isle of the Free!"

But stone-blind, or, which is worse, for utter gloom is not so dangerous as imperfect glimmer, rather purblind must those ministers be, who, looking in vain from the distant alti tude of their own station, through a glass that, even to clear eyes, would shew objects distortedly as well as dimly-and in case of a not unlikely blunder by the unscientific, perhaps upside down-think they see the glorious middle orders of England in-the L. 10 householders!—and believe that the great interests of such

[June,

a mighty, multiform, multifarious, and multitudinous society as ours can be wisely consulted, and hapby one arbitrarily-drawn line, which, pily promoted, and sacredly guarded as it sweeps along, cuts off in a thousand places the very best of those whom it was intended to include, and in as many places includes as many persons whom it was intended to cut off!

words on one argument, (argument!) And this brings us to say a few of most illustrious silliness, used by the weakest of the violent reformand safe bill (which all but the weakers, in proof of the bill being a good est of the violent reformers know land. It must be so-one frequentit is not) for the aristocracy of the ly hears the feebles fiizz-" because bility are eager for the bill." And all the most enlightened of the nothe nobility? Why, they who are eager who are all the most enlightened of for the bill-and because they are eager for the bill. A very simple and compendious process it is, whereby to settle a somewhat difficult political question, to assume that a lord is enlightened because he seems to admire a particular plan of Parliamentary reform; and then to assume ary reform must therefore be most that that particular plan of Parliamentadmirable-although, perhaps, the very lord, who is now lost in admiration thereof, a few months before, would, had he dreamed of its existence, have shuddered at it as a monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum, and for a dozen rather squeaking for another bill, no years before had been shouting, or more like it than an albino to a blackamoor. If this be not reasoning in a circle, then never saw we a turnspit in a wheel, nor in a cage a squirrel.

with the eye of a political philosoSir John Walsh looks on this folly pher. "If," says he, "we could find rity of the constitution, in the great an adequate guarantee for the secupersonal stake which the ministers, as individuals, have in its preservation, safely dismiss all anxiety upon the there can be no doubt that we might subject. The list of the cabinet is peculiarly and loftily aristocratic. Of fourteen members who compose it, ten are in the House of Lords. Of the four who are in the House of

Commons, one is the heir-apparent of a wealthy and distinguished peer age, one an Irish peer, and one a baronet of very ancient family, and very extensive landed property. Nor do the other members of government present a less dignified catalogue of noble names. Every consolation which these circumstances can afford us, the 'certainty that, if they do not misconceive the consequences of their own measures, they will pay a fearful penalty for their error, we possess in a supreme degree. But we must take this comfort with some qualifications."

We must indeed. For, set aside the Canning party-whose reputation for ability is higher than for any thing else and who do not appear to have had or to have much to say (interpret that as you will) on these measures-is not this not heavenborn but high-born ministry, as Sir John Walsh says, "totally inexperienced and untried in the management of state affairs ?" Only think of the Budget! The same gentle man finely and truly says-"the qualities of mind, the habits, the description of talent, requisite to form a brilliant rôle in the ranks of an opposition, are very distinct from those necessary to a statesman administering the affairs of a great nation. There is a certain tact of government wholly different from the art of attack in debate. The present ministers have had no opportunity of acquiring this by the education of office, and they have not yet shewn among them that native genius which would enable them to dispense with previous training. We have not, therefore, in addition to the assurance which their own state affords us, that confidence which in times of difficulty and danger we feel in seeing the powers of government wielded by hands of known and practised skill, directed by heads of true and experienced ability. There is often so much of recklessness and temerity in those born to great advantages and fortune, that I should much doubt whether in fact prudence would be most generally found in its possessors." Nothing can be more admirable; and suppose, then, that millions are astonished at what seems to them the

dangerous audacity of reform, can their fears be allayed by any consideration of the hopes of a set of men who, though they have indeed much to lose in revolution, have neither been gifted by nature with any uncommon sagacity or foresight, nor instructed by experience in that high world-wisdom, without which statesmen must not think to lay even the hands of healing on the magnificent fabric of our constitution, even though it should seem to exhibit some few slight symptoms of timeworn decay.

But granting that each "Order" knows best its own interests-and generally speaking we should never dream of denying it-though as little will any rational mind deny that at times the judgment of each "order" is dismally darkened-we have not yet been able to bring ourselves to believe that the majority of those persons belonging to my Lord Grey's "order," who are as devoted as he to the preservation of its privileges, agree with him in seeing security to them in this all-providing Bill. We believe that the great majority of his "order" see in it alarming perilsand that hundreds as wise and as firm as he, in awe of the disastrous signs of great change now lowering on the horizon, fear that they who are now sowing the wind will reap the whirlwind.

Again-is this" order” alone, of all enlightened orders, the best judge of its own well-being? Is it wiser thanthe church? The Church has declared its sense of the "scope and tendency" of this Reform-that it is fraught with the seeds of ruin. But Cambridge and Oxford are dim, dark places, that lie out of the day! Owl-eyed, moping monks alone haunt their cloisters. The universities are sacred to ignorance and superstition-the heads of colleges, in the march of intellect, behind the tails of pot-houses, and the bodies of mechanics' institutions, who lead the van of the age. Such is the insolent slang of the worthless legions of libellers and liars that, among the provisions of their darling Bill, grimly foresee, as they think, the overthrow of our church-establishment-of that "Church-of-Englandism," as it was christened by an old heathen, who, in his delirious dotage,

has been long babbling at the head of the worse than rabble-rout, the radical ring of Reform.

But much more might be said, with effect, on the folly of attributing all the wisdom resident in their "order" to the Seven Wise Men. On getting into office, the Ministers unaskedat least we do not remember that any body asked them-volunteered three pledges, Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. The Lord Advocate, in one of his electioneering speeches, called them banners-and also stars. Retrenchment is a queer star, something like a farthing candle; the star of Reform about as big and bright as an oil-lamp before the use of gasthat of Peace, no doubt, is respectable, and though not much of an original, may pass in a crowd. As to banners, the only one that had any beauty in the eyes of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was, as he thought, the tricolor; whereas it turned out to be but a fancy-flag of some Spittalfields weavers. Retrenchment, it turned out, had been carried to its utmost by the Wellington Ministry; and these Whigs, less scrubby than they were esteemed by themselves and others, forthwith added to the Army and Navy Estimates, and refused to adopt the recommendations of that very committee for retrenchment of the Civil List, whose appointment had been the cause of their accession to power. As to peace, they illustrated the principle of non-intervention by a system of interference as various as unlucky; and an armament was on the very point of being dispatched by them to the Scheldt. We refer those who are not familiar with the Greatest Blunder of the Age, to an article in this number of Maga on their Budget. There they stood on the brink of being over which they were about to be blown by the breath of a nation's ridicule. Their brazen countenances seemed scorn-proof; but their feeble bodies were staggering under the burden of derision. In this pitiable predicament, they clung for life to-the Bill. "In this very critical position," says Sir John Walsh, "they had no power to delay the Question of Reform, until they could procure for themselves and for the House the necessary returns and information; they had no choice between retirement, or pro

ceeding to legislate upon this vital question, with the glimmering and uncertain lights of former documents, and extracted from the cobwebs of official Bureaux. We can make every allowance for the difficulties of their situation; but it was not less a matter of regret for the country, that a subject, involving its national existence, should not have had the good fortune to be brought forward by an Administration strong enough to be gentle, cautious, and deliberate. We are not reassured on entering this dangerous path, because we must tread it in the dark, and follow leaders who advance with the reeling, yet hurried steps of desperate weakness." As for Lord Durham, he may very easily be a wiser man than he was when he framed the plan of Reform that fell under the castigation of the Edinburgh Review; but the plan itself being paper, does not improve in wisdom by age, nor like a winter pear, by lying on the floor of a garret. It is the same crude plan it was, when by the Lord Advocate "with spattering noise rejected;" yet now with avidity is it swallowed piecemeal by all the Ministers. Whatever fruit it be, it is not worth a plum-a green gage it certainly is not-nor yet a Magnum-bonumnor should we be surprised were the Premier himself yet to choke on the stone. The Bill, at least, is not Brougham's Bill. But Brougham's Bill, was to be the delight of gods and men, children and old women; and how then happens it that a Bill, which is not only not Brougham's Bill, but a Bill which some ten years ago had his contempt and derision, should now be the Bill of all Bills, and pregnant with salvation? So much at present-and no more-for the embodied wisdom of the "Order."

Is this, then, an aristocratical or a democratical Bill? And whatever it really be, what do ministers think it?

Let us hear the well-weighed and impartial opinion of Sir John Walsh, a man esteemed by all respectable parties, and allowed by them to be one of the most enlightened men of the age. His opinion may be thus stated partly in his words, and partly

in our own:

The first decided accession to the democratic influence is-the propo

sed destruction of fifty-eight or sixty members. The 168 seats which it is proposed to disfranchise, are filled by a class of members eminently attached to all the existing institutions of the country. And one of the best arguments in favour of close bo roughs, he wisely says, in contradiction to the follies we have quoted above, is, that they afford a field, a noble one, for the fair play of intellect; and that a private gentleman has, through them, an opening to declare his honest convictions, without subserviency to the dictation of one peer, or of twenty thousand operatives. But be this as it may, the men who have filled the seats about to be disfranchised, have always been accused by their opponents of belonging to the conservatives. Well then, since 168 are to be taken away, and 108 or 110 added, there is a reduction of about a tenth of the whole House, and it is accomplished by a deduction to the whole amount of the difference, from the number of those members, who, whether in the ministerial or opposition sides, are, from their class and the tenure of their seats, likely to unite in defending the great institutions of the country.

The next accession to the democratic weight, in his opinion, arises from leaving so many flourishing towns of the second class with only one member, and adding only one member to several great manufacturing towns. He remarks, that that sort of compromise which now takes place very generally throughout the kingdom, between the influence of the upper classes resident in country towns, and the numerical majority of the lower-ending, for the most part, in each returning a member whose opinions assimilate to their own, is an arrangement which will be no longer practicable under the new Bill. For with but one member-in these all party spirit will be more violent, and there will be a struggle everywhere between what he calls, observingly, the aristocracy and democracy of the middle orders; and in the sixty-four boroughs which could, under the new arrangement, return one member only, a great preponderance would be given to the spirit of pure democracy.

The next element of democracy, pointed out by this calm and acute

observer, is the transfer of the franchise to the large towns, chiefly manufacturing, in England, and to the great suburbs of London, in all 44; (recollect the statement respecting those suburbs we gave a few pages back from Lord Wharncliffe, and which we see confirmed by that unconfirmed paper-voter the Courier, whose affection for L.10 householders doth fluctuate to and fro like the soap-suddy waves in a wash-hand basin,) in Scotland and Ireland 14 more; all these returned by electors, voting according to the very low rate of qualification fixed on, (whether it is to be adhered to or not, the Lord Advocate, in his late letter, sayeth not, because he knoweth not, although in a postscript, always the most important part of a letter to or from a lady, he tells the Pensive Public that circumstances had occurred, since he concluded the main body of his epistle, to confirm him in the belief that no alteration is to be made-or, as we should say in his ignorance on the only point on which the Pensive Public required any elucidation of his bill,) and you get another tenth of the House added to the democratic scale, or elected by voters on whom no aristocratic or permanent influence of any kind can be supposed to exist. Add to all this the throwing open the right of voting, from the corporations to the L.10 householders, in towns like Bath, Bury St Edmonds, &c., which is of course another transfer of power to the democracy, exactly equivalent to that of a close borough to large town-and in counties the weight-not inconsiderable-thrown into the popular scale by copyholders and leaseholders; and who, after examining and enumerating all these additions to the democratic influence in the state, direct or indirect, will not agree with Sir John Walsh, that the change in our Government is even more vast and comprehensive than at first view we should have been led to suppose?

Why the Lord Advocate himselfthe man of the people-never dreamed, in his fairest visions of reform, of any such victory as this won by his democratic constituents. first article in a wise plan of reformation, would be, in our opinion, the immediate addition of twenty mem

"The

bers to the House of Commons, to be chosen by the most opulent and populous of the communities which are at present without representation."-(Edinburgh Review, November 1820.)-Nor think, he said, that though, in point of mere numbers, this is but an inconsiderable addition that there are not other circumstances in these cases more important than numbers. For he adds well," twenty members of popular talents and character, representing the most populous districts in England, and depending for their seats on popular favour, would greatly strengthen the democratical principles in the House of Commons," and yet his Lordship tells us-not with a grave, but a bright face-that 'tis an aristocratical Bill! So much for the present for the democratical features of this Bill-now for the aristocratical-as painted by the unexaggerating pencil of Sir John Walsh.

First, on the line of disfranchisement which it has adopted with reference to the population and size of towns, there may, perhaps, be said to be rather a reservation of some portion of the existing influence of the Aristocracy, than any addition to it. It can only, he remarks, add to it, in a few cases, where a numerous body of non-resident freemen are exchanged for a smaller and more manageable set of L.10 householders. Now, a large number of the boroughs will consist of towns containing say-three hundred L.10 householders-or made up to that number by the neighbouring parishes. For the character of such boroughs, see passim Articles on Reform in the Edinburgh Review. They are-as all the world knows-open to all sorts of illegitimate influence; and, we may assert, throughout them all a vast increase of bribery and corruption. In them, would not the Aristocracy seek to establish or confirm their influence? And are Whig-reformers enamoured (we are not) of such disputes and disturbances as those of Newark, Shaftesbury, and Stamford? But by what influence would such boroughs be swayed? That of wealth and high hereditary station. What would be the consequence? Nay-you do not ask for you know-Precarious power in the hands of the richest and highest of the Peerage, or the greatest

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Commoners-the general adoption of means to maintain it, which must always be revolting and unpopular, and which could not fail to weaken the Aristocracy far more than any power so acquired could strengthen them, by exciting against them fierce and permanent feelings of hostility among the lower orders of the people.

But what will be the tendency of the additions to the county representation, or the divisions of the counties into districts? Surely those features are sufficiently aristocratical. Sir John Walsh acknowledges they are-but then too aristocratical to win his admiration. The divisions of the counties into districts will, he thinks, add to the local influence of great estates. Do they need it? No. The large and remote counties are, it is well known, the strongholds of the great landed proprietors. Whereas, in the small counties, estates are more divided, and overpowering influence less known. "I acknowledge then," says he, “ that it is an aristocratic, and a highly aristocratic measure. All that it does not give to pure Democracy, it disposes of in favour of the highest and richest of the Peerage and landed proprietors. The intermediate ground is entirely swept away."

These are large views-and no doubt they require illustration and confirmation, which Sir John Walsh has not been able to give them within the limits of a pamphlet. We hope that the evil will not prove so wide as he fears; for then, what will be a Reformed Parliament? The most independent, and perhaps the most enlightened portion of the British people-the less distinguished gentry

will seldom sit there; for the old straight avenues will be shut upand felled "their old contemporary trees.” To get seats, men must canvass large provincial towns, a pretty and pleasant pastime indeed-not cheap but nasty-and in which will best succeed the rabble-rousing Demagogue with a long red tongue, fiery face, and inflamed liver, or the rabble-buying Nabob with a long yellow purse, sallow face, and no liver at all. So much for the large provincial towns-and who will rule the counties? Sir John Walsh thinks-those who are " strong in the possession of

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