the dreams of enthusiasm, or the wretchedness of infidelity. If they had not been vigorously met and resisted, the repeal of the Corn Laws would have spread distress far and wide through the whole agricultural classes, through them depressed immeasurably the commercial interests, and rendered the ultimate preservation of national faith impossible from the labouring condition of all classes of the people. They would have destroyed the independence of the hereditary Legislature, by the creation of a hundred new Peers, and reduced the Crown to the disgrace of itself revoking the beneficence of past sovereigns; in other words, submitting to the last humiliation of prostrated authority. With all this we have been threatened, and are threatened; from all this we have hitherto made only a narrow escape; and if the empire has been brought to the verge of destruction by the Reforming, it has been snatched from the gulf solely by the efforts of the Conservative, party.

How then has it happened that a nation, seized as this has been with a Revolutionary fever, and that too of the most malignant kind, has hitherto been spared any violent convulsion? that, abandoned by its Government, seduced by too many of its higher orders, left to struggle alone with the malady, it has survived apparently the worst crisis, and exhibits new symptoms of amendment in public thought which the warmest patriot could hardly have hoped for two years ago? The question is of the most interesting kind, not only with reference to our own prospects, but the great cause of truth and freedom throughout the world; and without pretending either to affirm that the danger is over, or that time has sufficiently elucidated the whole causes which have been in operation, there are three circumstances which appear chiefly remarkable, as having distinguished the progress of this country under the political distemper, from that of other States in similar circumstances, and to the combined operation of which the present cheering prospects of amendment are, so far as we can yet see, to be ascribed. I. The first of these is the practical tendency which the Reforming mania

has taken among our people, and its consequent early interference with, and severe encroachment upon, the vested pecuniary interests of the most respectable members of every class of society. This is a circumstance of the very utmost importance with reference to the future progress of political change; and here, as elsewhere, we may perceive, that to be exposed to calamity is not always to be unfortunate, and that true wisdom in political, not less than private life, is often to be learned rather in the storms of adversity than the sunshine of prosperity.

That Revolution will ultimately fall with unmitigated severity upon all classes; that the greatest of all sufferers by the changes it induces will be the lowest; and that the children and children's children of the infatuated people, to the third and fourth generation, will lament with unavailing tears the sins and precipitance of their fathers, is a proposition so clearly deducible from principle, and so uniformly proved by experience, that it may be considered as one of the few axioms of political science. Never was this great truth more clearly illustrated than it now is in France, where, after forty years of revolutionary convulsions, the working classes are driven by suffering into annual revolts of frightful magnitude, and the cries of a suffering population are stifled by a military despotism, so severe, that compared to it the ancient rule of the monarchy, with all its faults, was as an age of freedom. But the great danger is, that this truth is perceived too late to check the progress of the evil; that before suffering has brought wisdom to the mass of the people, irreparable changes have been made-institutions, the bulwarks of freedom, overthrown in the first fervour of innovation-passions of unquenchable violence excited by the mutual infliction of irreparable injury, and interests inconsistent with the ultimate establishment, either of civil liberty or public prosperity, created by the triumph of guilty democratic ambition. Where this has been the case, as it generally is, with a people delivered over for their sins to revolutionary passions, amendment is impossible, hope is extinguished; and the nation is irre

vocably consigned to an old age of slavery and degradation, as the natural but not undeserved punishment of the inordinate indulgence of political extravagance. This was the fate of Athens and Rome; this is the fate of regenerated France.

The great preservative, on the other hand, against this melancholy progress, and the only one which can generally be relied upon, as likely to prove efficacious with the great bulk of the people, is the occurrence of such early and wide-spread suffering or apprehension in consequence of the commencement of revolutionary change, as may undeceive a majority of the influential classes ere it is too late; and reclaim the prodigal by salutary suffering, before he has strayed irrevocably from his father's home. This is the only antidote at all commensurate to the virulence of the poison, this is the one which, there is a reason to hope, the providence of God has permitted to operate in this country. The fervour of innovation, instead of being all concentrated into one vast and impetuous stream to sweep away the remaining bulwarks of order and free dom, has been drawn off into an infinity of lesser rills, to remedy the real or imaginary evils of the different and highly excited classes of society. This has been a circumstance of the very utmost importance. The weight of the torrent, which presses against the general and important institutions of society, has been materially and providentially diminished by the anxiety of every class to apply an early remedy to its own peculiar grievances, or elevate itself upon the ruins of those by which it has hitherto been overshadowed; and thus the great features of the Constitution are still unchanged save by the Reform Bill, while every interest in the State finds itself assailed by some lesser, but to it most formidable antagonist. We lament the individual distress, anxiety, and suffering, which this universal threatening of private pecuniary interests necessarily pro duces; but we know that it is unavoidable; we foresaw and predicted it during the transports of the Reform mania, and discern in its present operation the severe school of ultimate improvement.

This separation of the mighty torrent of Revolution into a vast variety of separate streams, which are now threatening with detached prostration so many of the greatest and most important interests of the State, may be discerned in the condition and prospects of every profession and class of society. Ask the land. owners in what state they now are, and to what extent they find their fortunes improved and prospects brightened by the triumph of the democratic principles, to forward which so many of themselves, both in and out of Parliament, lent their enthusiastic aid: and they will answer, that the dagger is at their throat; that their rents both for corn and grass lands are rapidly and ruinously falling; and that the threatened repeal of the Corn Laws, and reduction of wheat to forty shillings a-quarter, would at once reduce two-thirds of their number to insolvency. Ask the farmers whether they have experienced the benefit which they expected when so vast a majority of their number were swept away by the Reform mania, and they brought in ninety-eight out of the hundred-and-one county members of England and Wales in the reforming interest: and they will almost universally reply, that they have been deceived; that their condition and prospects are infinitely worse than before; that the manufacturing interest has gained a great and undue ascendency by the Reform Bill; that, in the existing state of uncertainty as to the Corn Laws, they can neither enter with spirit into new engagements, nor look forward with hope to the performance of their old ones; that the market is paralysed by the perpetual terror of approaching unlimited foreign importation; that their capital and stock is unceasingly melting away, under the continued fall of prices, and onerous money engagements; and that if they could only turn their effects into money, they would gladly leave the land of their birth, and join their happier brethren on the other side of the Atlantic. Ask the manufacturer in what respect he has experienced benefit from the change: and he will answer, that a spirit of insubordination has seized his workmen, which threatens, if long con

tinued, to destroy the very elements of our manufacturing prosperity; that the plague of Trades' Unions has spread universally, and renders all calculation for the answering of or ders impossible; that at a time when profits are ruinously low, and foreign competition uncommonly severe, he is assailed with imperious demands for a rise of wages from his infatuated operatives, the only effect of which, if granted, would be to drive the British goods from the foreign markets, and extinguish the sales on which they themselves depend for subsistence. Enquire of the workmen, whether the Reform Bill has brought the age of gold which they were promised, and believed they were to obtain: and they will unanimously answer, that they have been grossly and shamefully deceived; that their wages are so low as to afford them barely a subsistence; and that the time has now arrived when they must take their interests into their own hands, and no longer submit to be made the tools of a party who use them for their own political advancement, and, having gained it, turn a deaf ear to their complaints. Enter the dockyards and the shipwrights' workshops, and enquire into the state of the shipping interest, and you will hear universally that they are in a state of unexampled depression; that the last Parliamentary investigation has proved that they are labouring beyond any other class of society; and that the reciprocity system first brought on them a host of evils, which are now rendered perpetual by the permanent ascendency which the Reform Bill has given to an adverse interest in the Legislature. Ask the shopkeeper whether he is thriving in the midst of the general distress, and he will answer that his profits are rapidly falling; that the diminished purchases of the landed interest and farmers are telling most powerfully on his sales; and that a continued and most vexatious competition from cheap venders struggling to rise into business, or the numerous sales of bankrupt stock which are continually going forward, have, to an extraordinary degree, dissipated the business of that numerous class of customers to whom economy has now become an object

of paramount importance. Ask the lawyer whether he is an exception to the general labouring condition of society: and he will at once answer, that the Reform Bill has utterly annihilated the prospects of two-thirds of his body; that the fever of inno vation has introduced, and is introducing, legal changes of the most ruinous kind; that the business on the Circuit is gone, and that of Westminster Hall not a fourth of its former amount; that the independence of the Bar is rapidly giving way under the continued decline of business, and increase of commissions, under the Whig Lord Chancellor ; and that the establishment of local courts, and dissipation of the business among the provincial Bar, will effect a total revolution in the legal practice of England. Enquire of the teachers, whether of the young or the professional classes, what their prospects are since the schoolmaster has been abroad, and you will find universally that they are of the most gloomy kind; that their scholars and students are rapidly diminishing, and the pressure from below telling with serious effect upon their fortunes. Enter the parsonage-house of the rector, the hall of the college, or the palace of the Bishop, and examine into the condition and prospects of that most important class who are intrusted with the instruction of the people in the great duties of religion and morality; and you will hear everywhere the language only of gloom and despondency, and perceive a general anticipation of the time, and that, too, at no distant period, when the ecclesiastical Establishment will be destroyed, and the first of Christian duties, the religious education of the poor, left only to the zeal of the sectarian, or the indifference of the infidel. Even the fundholder, notwithstanding the regularity with which he receives his dividends, and the rise in real amount which it has received from the change in the value of money, is not without his own terrors, as well as his less fortunate brethren; visions of an equitable adjustment disturb his most pleasing reveries, and he is consoled only by the hope, that if the Funds go, every thing will go, and that no investment, in such a general cala

mity, can be so secure as that which has the tax-gatherer for its collec

tor.

The multitude of interests which are in this way assailed, is producing a double effect of the most important description. On the one hand, it has divided the stream which when united was irresistible; while, on the other, it has awakened multitudes to a sense of the dangers of which they never could have been made sensible by any efforts of argument or eloquence. While their eyes were all fixed on the Legislature-while every imagination was intent on the projects of social amelioration which were afloat, the respectable reformers suddenly found themselves assailed by a furious multitude in their rear; and every man in a superior class saw his prospects threatened, or his income reduced to a half, by the pressure from below in his own profession or line of life. This practical result, and experienced inconvenience of disturbing the settled relations of society, has been and is of incalculable importance. Few can discern by argument the force of objections drawn from history against theoretical innovations; but every man can perceive the inconvenience of losing five hundred a-year, or going with an old coat, from the impossibility of obtaining from the united workmen a new one. The more that apprehension, anxiety, and distrust spread through society, from the extravagant efforts of the inferior class in every line of life to better their condition by the ruin of their superiors, the more certain is the reaction against the ulterior march of Revolution, and the greater is the ground for hope that its progress may ultimately be stayed. The Trades' Unions have done immense good by bringing home the anxiety and apprehension consequent on the fever of democracy, in the first instance, to its noisy supporters in the manufacturing towns. If the whole population of the island could be deprived of a single breakfast, dinner, and supper, from the consequences of revolution in its outset, its dangers would be at an end for the lifetime of that generation.

Much, no doubt, of this practical

tendency of the Reform mania is to be ascribed to the effects of a free government long operating upon the people, and the habit which it has conferred upon every class, of looking to their own immediate benefit from the effect of legislative alterations. But much, also, is probably owing to the original character of the mixed race of mankind, of which, fortunately for its inhabitants, the population of the British Islands is now composed. The practical ha. bits and methodical ideas of the English people have been proverbial from the earliest times; they have probably not so much arisen from their long established freedom, as created it. From the infancy of society, even in the days of Edward the Confessor and the Heptarchy, this invaluable feature is to be observed. The laws of Alfred estab lished in the eighth century a system of social organization far superior to what nations infinitely farther advanced in civilisation have been able to produce in the nineteenth. It may reasonably be doubted whether either the Poles or the Irish could be brought, of their own free will, and without external compulsion, to establish rational forms of constitutional government in their countries, even after any degree of public improvement. Certain it is, that, during the thousand years of their political existence, they have made no sort of advances towards the attainment of it. The French, with all their talent and energy, have never directed their efforts towards the acquisition of practical advantages; and, after forty years' convulsions, they are still subject to a propertytax of twenty per cent, a most oppressive standing army, and vexatious police, the great evils which the English would have abolished the moment the Bastile was stormed forty-five years ago. It is in vain to explain these diversities by difference in political history or situation alone; powerful as these agents are, they must have fallen in, in their operation, with some agent still stronger; and that is, probably, the original, orderly, and practical character of the Gothic or German race of mankind. The conclusion to be drawn from this circumstance is,