amongst them those plausible sophisms which were current with the philosophical world half a century before, but which the good sense and experience of mankind had elsewhere banished from the direction of affairs. By a curious coincidence, but the operation of the same cause, the English Whigs and the French Royalists at the same time were exposed to the operation of the same narrowing and deluding circumstances; political misfortune, long continued exclusion from power, equally hardened the minds and blinded the eyes of both; in the fastnesses of an exclusive circle, both were alike confirmed in the error of their ways; the celebrated saying of Napoleon," Ils n'ont rien appris, ils n'ont rien oubliés," was equally, and for the same reason, applicable to both; and the one was as thoroughly prepared to convulse the world by a practical trial of the principles of Revolution, when an unparalleled combination of circumstances wafted them to the helm in 1830, as the other were to overturn the kingdom of Clovis by obedience to priestcraft and feudal prejudice, when the bayonets of the Allies seated them on his throne fifteen years before.

The evident shock which these erroneous and absurd principles necessarily gave to all the great in terests of the Empire, when once reduced to practice, would have long ago chased these theoretical pilots from the helm, if they had not fallen upon the expedient of plunging into a monstrous innovation, which at once roused into fearful activity all the revolutionary passions of the Empire, and induced the multitude to support them in the firm and wellfounded belief that they never again to all appearance would find rulers, who from the seat of power would bring forward such a project. Since that great Revolution, there has been, properly speaking, no Government in the country, but a mere Committee of Management to carry into effect the mandates of the Twelve Hundred Thousand Legislators of the British Empire. No one need hesitate in asserting that such is the state of things, when it has been openly proclaimed by Ministers themselves. Lord Durham, the au

thor of the Reform Bill, the sonin-law of the Premier, has publicly declared that the measures of Government are necessarily dependent on public opinion; and that whatever a majority of the Electors firmly and resolutely demand, must sooner or later be conceded.

But admitting all this, the question still recurs, What has changed the character of the English people so much in so short a time, as to induce a vast majority of them to support measures which would have been at once scouted in any former period of English history? That is the important question. Admitting that there are in all ages and countries a certain proportion of hardened Jacobins, irreclaimable democrats, who would gladly catch at revolutionary measures by whomsoever proposed; still the point is, what has occasioned such a prodigious multiplication of their number in the last ten years? Mr Burke, in 1793, calculated that there were 80,000 irreclaimable Jacobins in England; but if he had lived to the present time, he would have estimated their number at several millions. It is in vain to assert that the Reform Bill, and the revolutionary measures which have followed in its train, were carried through by the mob, in opposition to the sense, property, or education of the empire. The highly educated classes, indeed-the Bar, the Church, and those who had been instructed at the Universities, and almost all persons of every description possessed of historical information, were by a great majority opposed to the changes; and the bulk of the holders of any considerable property were of the same way of thinking but a vast proportion of persons who had received merely some degree of education, went heart and hand into the new order of things; and what was still more extraordinary, many respectable individuals, whose fortunes were mainly dependent upon the preservation of a conservative system, were the most loud in their clamour for the Reform Bill, and like the clergy in France, concurred in bringing about a Revolution which has already reduced numbers of themselves to beggary.

In investigating the course of this vast change, and of the progressive

decomposition of the British empire under the solvents which are now so liberally applied to it in all directions, the first feature which must strike every rational observer, is the immense increase which the spirit of innovation has received within the last fifteen years, and the marked disregard, not only of antiquity, but of experience, which distinguishes all the political theorists of the present day. This is the more remarkable, that it is not only an entirely novel feature in the English character, but an entirely new trait in the history of free states. Hitherto the tenacity with which men adhered to old institutions, and the customs of their forefathers, has been nearly in proportion to the share which they possessed in the administration of public affairs. It was greatest in free and democratical states, and least in those of a despotic character. The ideas and customs of the Forest Cantons were as permanent as the mountains in which they were cradled; the slow disposition and methodical habits of the Dutch burghers had passed into a proverb; while the gay and lively French, under their despotic princes, were the most volatile people in Europe. In England, down to the battle of Waterloo, the reverence for antiquity was the great and distinguishing feature of the national character; the customs of the people had descended to them from their Saxon forefathers; the laws of Edward the Confessor, confirmed by Magna Charta, still formed the foundation of British freedom; and the love of liberty, divested of its dangerous ally, the passion for innovation, had for five hundred years preserved un. changed in any essential particular the glorious fabric of the British Constitution.

Now all this is gone. The reverence for antiquity, the horror for innovation, the tenacity of custom, the force of habit, which for a thousand years have been all-powerful with the English people, have melted away. They have passed into history; they are numbered with the things that have been. A character which has withstood the vicissitudes of ten centuries; which remained unchanged through the severities of Norman oppression,

the bondage of feudal slavery, the legends of Catholic superstition; which neither the frenzy of the Crusades, nor the enthusiasm of the Covenant, could shake; which survived the wars of the Roses, the conquests of the Plantagenets, the sword of Cromwell; which appeared more firmly rooted than ever in our own recollection, and preserved this empire safe and inviolate through the perilous contagion of the French Revolution, has suddenly given way under our own eyes, and with it all the ideas and institutions which were looked on as most stable among our people. The demon of innovation had been imprisoned in the strife of former days, and his stronghold sealed by the seal of Solomon; but the entrance has been opened by the madness of a succeeding age; the awful apparition has spread, like the genie of the fable, in mist and darkness along our coasts, and from amidst its clouds the awful form of the giant has emerged.

That this extraordinary and almost incomprehensible change has been owing to some very general cause, operating suddenly and extensively upon all classes of society, must be obvious from the consideration, that it has appeared simultaneously in every department of thought and genius, and has affected more or less all the Administrations which have governed the country since the termination of the war. The Revolution of 1832 indeed has ripened the harvest with extraordinary rapidity; but the seed had been in some degree sown by the well-meant but deluded innovations of former years. The nation had been habituated to innovation, had been taught to deride the wisdom of its ancestors; to look for remedy for suffering, not to experience, but to speculation, long before the fatal era when the Whigs succeeded to the helm. What else but this mania of innovation led to the abandonment of the Navigation Laws, which Adam Smith pronounced to be a model of practical wisdom, and from which the maritime superiority of Great Britain may be dated; or the surrender of the Protestant constitution of 1688, the parent of one hundred and forty years of unparalleled

greatness? The Tories may well pride themselves upon the glorious stand which they have made in defence of the liberties of the country, and the institutions of their fathers, since they retired from office; but like other men, they have been improved in the school of adversity; and they will be fain to tear from the page of history, the vacillation, weakness, and concessions, which distinguished the last ten years of their reign.

We do not blame the individual members of former governments for this conciliatory system, how apparent soever it may be that it first shook the institutions of the empire, and produced that longing after innovation which is the sure precursor of revolutionary convulsion. It is evident that they were swept away by a torrent which no one was capable of resisting; that they maintained themselves deluded by the sophisms which were so lamentably prevalent in the state; that they were driven forward by the weight which was accumulating in their rear, and kept their place in the front rank, only by keeping always ahead of the devouring flame.

That this yielding to innovation was the result of a general change in the temper of the public mind, which no firmness how great soever could resist, and no capacity how great soever direct, must be apparent from the additional circumstance, that the statesmen who yielded to this seducing but perilous system, were among the ablest and the most indomitable who ever held the helm of affairs in this country, No man was ever more largely gifted with eloquence or energy than Mr Canning; none had more completely at his command both a stock of statistical details and a profusion of valuable information than Mr Huskisson; no one ever introduced Reform with a more cautious hand, or tempered innovation with the results of experience more thoroughly, than Sir Robert Peel; in firmness and decision of character, no British statesman ever exceeded, few have equal led, the Duke of Wellington-yet these were the very men by whom the innovating system was first adopted; who tore away the veil from the front of the sanctuary, and were

at length compelled, after exhausting every effort to appease the demon of Revolution, to leave him in the unbridled sovereignty to which he had been elevated by their suc

cessors.

A very short examination of the history of the changes which the Constitution has undergone, must be sufficient to indicate the general cause, (now so fearfully increased,) which has for the last twenty years imprinted so ruinous a character on British Legislation.

The original, broad, and stable foundations of the English Constitution were laid in the agricultural interests. The Barons in Gothic times, who fought and bled for the liberties of their country, and established the now-forgotten edifice of feudal independence, were landed proprietors. They stood forth at the head of the rural tenantry, and supported in the Legislature the rural interests. Even in the days of the Long Parliament, and through all the fervour of the Covenant, it was the landowners of England who maintained the contest; and the most celebrated leaders of the Commons, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Sir Henry Vane, Pym, Hampden, and all their chief supporters in both Houses of Parliament, were the principal landholders of the kingdom. It is observed by Hume, and after him by Guizot, that at the commencement of the civil wars, the landed property in the hands of the Commons was about double that in the possession of the Peers; a striking proof of the preponderance of that great interest in the commonwealth, and the decisive influence which it gave to the popular side, with which the majo rity of it was identified.

When Cromwell formed a new Constitution, the preponderance was still given in the most marked manner to the landed interest. It is stated by Hallam, that the number of Members for counties and the Universities in England and Wales, was fixed at 267; while those for towns was only 132. In other words, the county Members were to the borough as 2 to I nearly. The House so constituted, evinced, as might have been anticipated, so Conservative a spirit, and was so decidedly

opposed to the usurpation of Cromwell, that he never was able to keep them any time together; and all the Sessions of Parliament during the remainder of his reign were brought to an abrupt termination, after a stormy and refractory Session of a few weeks' duration.

On the Restoration, the old Constitution revived, and the representation became vested in the counties and boroughs, with a few exceptions, in whom it has resided from that time down to the Revolution of 1832. The great number of boroughs which, under this system, sent Members to Parliament, amounting to nearly four-fifths of the whole representation of England and Wales, would long ago have overturned the Constitution, were it not that so large a proportion of them were returned for inconsiderable places, which fell under the influence of the great landholders in their neighbourhoods, and under the name of close, nomination, or rotten boroughs, long constituted the avenue by which talent was admitted into the Legislature, and the make weight by which steadiness was secured in the measures of Government. These close boroughs were divided between the agricultural and the commercial interests; and the proportion in which this division took place varied with the increasing wealth of the landowners in some places, and of the manufactu ring or trading interests in others; but, generally speaking, they were on the Conservative side; that is, they were either purchased or acquired by persons connected with the great interests of the State, in commerce, agriculture, or manufactures. In a few populous towns merely, the representation was vested in the mass of the labouring people; and although they returned, in general, noisy, intemperate Members, who advocated the cause of Democracy, their numbers were too inconsiderable to affect in any great degree the measures of Government. England, therefore, came, under the old Constitution, to be governed entirely by the representatives of property; by the great landed, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the State; and hence the remarkable steadiness and wisdom

of its government, and the unparalleled extent to which prosperity spread among its numerous and varied inhabitants.

That the commercial and manufacturing interests had their full share in the Legislature, and that the landowners were by no means possessed of any overwhelming influence in the House of Commons, during the whole course of the last century, is proved by the fact, that by far the greatest part of the public burdens were laid on the agricultural classes. Without mentioning the Church, which is to be viewed rather as a part owner of the soil, than as a burden on its cultivators, it is sufficient to refer to the poor's rates, land tax, and county rates, for decisive evidence of this fact. At a time when a general income, or property tax, was unknown, and the manufacturing and commercial classes paid no direct taxes whatever to Government, (the assessed and income taxes being subsequent inventions,) the landowners were already burdened with a land tax of two shillings in the pound, a heavy poor's rate, and the exclusive payment of the county rates, or taxes for the local administration of justice. The former of these partial taxes now amounts to L.8,000,000, the latter to L.600,000 a-year.

But with the war undertaken for our national existence against revolutionary France, a change of interests and transfer of power has taken place, which at length has given such an extraordinary preponderance to the manufacturing classes, as has overturned the Constitution.

The manufacturing and shipping interests of the empire had been long the object of extreme solicitude on the part of the Legislature, as is evinced by the extraordinary multitude of acts passed to protect almost every branch of their industry. But during the progress of the Revolutionary war, the growth of these classes was unprecedented. Various causes conspired to produce this effect. The energy and skill of our sailors gave our fleets the command of the seas; the insanity of the Constituent Assembly delivered over St Domingo to the flames, and destroyed at once a colony which maintain

ed twenty thousand seamen in the service of France; all the colonies of the world successively fell into our hands, and the British islands became the emporium for Colonial produce and manufactured articles from every quarter of the globe. The vast expenditure of Government, which went on continually increasing, from sixteen. millions in 1792, till it had reached seventy and eighty millions a-year in 1814, encouraged to an extraordinary degree every species of manufacture; until at length the empire was overspread with artisans, and Great Britain came to be considered rather as a great manufactory for the world, than a kingdom feeding itself with its rude produce, and preserving a due balance between its manufacturing and agricultural members.

Another cause at the same period powerfully contributed to produce the same effect. The enormous sums which were borrowed by Government during the war, amounting in all to above L.600,000,000, immense ly extended the numerous and powerful body who had advanced their capital to the State, and lived on the dividends paid on the public debt. By far the greater part of this class resided in towns, or were connected, directly or indirectly, with the commercial classes; and thus their great increase formed a direct and most important addition to the urban interest in the commonwealth. Add to this the prodigious sums, probably amounting to nearly as much as the public debt, which, during the same active and prosperous period, were saved by the industrious or trading classes, and lent out on mortgage, either directly, or through the intervention of banks or some public companies. If the operation of these concurring causes are taken into account, it will probably be deemed no exaggeration to affirm that creditors, living chiefly in towns, to the extent of nearly £1,500,000,000, were constituted during the war, and that the permanent income vested in them on its termination was little short of £50,000,000 a-year.

The important change on the currency introduced under the pressure of overbearing necessity by Mr Pitt, in 1797, contributed in a remarkable

manner to the same effect. The wellknown effect of this measure was in a few years to double the price of all the articles of commerce, and reduce to a half the value of money. Every person possessed of any kind of property found it continually rising in price. Men often became rich, as they now do in Canada, by the mere lapse of time, and constant addition to the value of their possessions, without any exertion of their own. The holders of these commodities, that is, the trading, manufacturing, and industrious classes throughout the State, prospered beyond all precedent, under the combined influence of increasing trade, immense Government expenditure, and a continued rise in the price of commodities. Hence the extraordinary growth of the towns during the war; the triplication of our exports and imports in twenty years; the vast increase of the commercial classes, and the unparalleled degree to which affluence was spread through the middling ranks of society.

These causes had, for long before the battle of Waterloo, produced a very great increase in the urban interests, and an evident preponderance of that class of society over the rural population; but as long as the contest lasted, and for some years after its termination, the influence of this change on the domestic affairs and balance of power in the nation was not felt. The passions excited during the dreadful contest with Napoleon, were so fierce, the patriotism elicited in all ranks so ardent, the peril to civil and national independence so evident, that every feeling was stifled during its continuance, but an unextinguishable desire of resistance; and as long as the generation remained in possession of power, who had grown up under these feelings, the monarchical part of the Constitution felt no want of support. But still the balance was endangered, and the ancient Constitution was tottering from the extraordinary growth of towns and city interests, which had taken place during the continuance of the contest. As the best proof that these statements are not overcharged, we subjoin an account of the progressive increase of the principal manufacturing counties in the