London, May 10, 1826.

MY DEAR SIR, You are on the eve of being called on to select a new House of Commons, , and circumstances render it of the first importance that your selection should be made with unerring wisdom. Never, sir, did so much depend upon your exercise of the privilege as now depends upon it. Your selection must. determine whether the glorious patrimony which you have inherited from your fathers shall be wasted by quacks and projectors, and whether your prosperity and happiness shall be exchanged for beggary and misery. Some of your best possessions have been already squandered away, and all are in imminent danger. Your rulers take the lead in crying up change and innovation, and attacking what you have hitherto been the most proud of; and you have scarcely anything left in institution, law, or principle, that they do not threaten. Your new Representatives will be called upon, immediately on their being chosen, to finish the work of experiment and innovation; and to give the last blow to the bulwarks of your power, and the sources of your riches and felicity. Your next House of Commons must decide for preservation or destruction ;-and it must be essentially different from the present one; it must in many important points guide, and not be guided by, the Ministry; it must shake off the despotism of leaders, and place party in a minority; it must be such a VOL. XIX.

House of Commons as you can scarcely hope to obtain; or it will decide for the ruin and dismemberment of the British empire.

While this is the case, there is great reason to fear that you are in an exceedingly unfit state for the due exercise of the privilege. You have cast away almost all your old characteristics. From being a jolly, fox-hunting, joke-cracking kind of person, you have become a priggish, snarling Philosopher; from being a mortal enemy of projectors, you have become yourself an infatuated projector. You have thrown off your sober beaver and honest blue coat, and garbed yourself in the fantastic cap and mantle of the Alchymist. Your cudgel is laid aside as too illiterate an appendage, and your hands are now constantly filled with books, mechanics' tools, and philosophical apparatus. You have quarrelled with roast-beef and home-brewed, for giving you too much thickness of limb, rotundity of stomach, and breadth of countenance; and you are labouring to reduce yourself, by a diet of outlandish soups and belly-vengeance, to a kind of fiving skeleton. From being an active, bustling man of business-a shrewd, sagacious man ofthe world, you have become a rank pedant: formerly you were rather a despiser of books, and now you are destroying your eyes with incessant reading; you cannot do the most trifling action-you can neither pick your teeth nor scratch your 4 L

head, without looking into books to discover the learned method of doing it. I listen in vain to hear from you that sober, daring, original, and commanding eloquence, that glorious compound of solid sense, majestic wisdom, hearty benevolence, and glowing, straightforward patriotism, with which you have been wont to delight me instead, I can only hear you lisp, and drawl, and stammer at the fifth hand the stale, puerile, contradictory, and cold-blooded dogmas of the Economists. You have corrupted your language by adopting new-coined words, and changing the meaning of the best old ones, into a barbarous gibberish, which is nearly unintelligible to an Englishman.

As to your patriotism, the only country in the world that you do not love -that you seek to injure and impoverish-is Old England. .You have hitherto been somewhat famous for fickleness in your attachment to your rulers, and unshaken constancy in your attachment to your laws and institutions; if things went wrong, you threw all the blame on the former, and protested the latter to be perfection. But now this is wholly reversed: You think your rulers cannot err; you esteem your laws and institutions to be intolerably faulty, and you wish to change them about as often as you change your linen. Formerly your leaders found you a very obstreperous, boisterous, self-willed person; you would not follow them for more than ten paces together, without making a sudden stop to convince them that you acted from choice, and to ascertain what they were conducting you to; but now you are a smirking, cringing, bowing, servile, spiritless, lacquey-like creature, whom they can lead to anything. Whether they guide you as they ought, or drag you through a horse-pond, it is the same: Whatever absurdities they may make you commit, and whatever evils they may inflict upon you, you submit to all with abject resignation. You have gained the soul of the slave, if you are yet without his fetters. In this state of things, my dear sir, it is the duty of your friends to strain every nerve to bring you back to your old principles and habits. Of these friends, I am one; and I will yield to none in the warmth and disinterestedness of my friendship; I have loved you as a bro

ther, and revered you as a parent. I have studied your heart, treasured up your opinions, imbibed your prejudices, copied your habits-in a word, it has been my pride to take you for my teacher and example in everything. No praise has been so dear to me as that which said I felt like yourself; and the reproach which charged me with being filled with your prejudices, I have valued as a delicious compliment. My efforts to serve you have been my solace in hours of suffering; and I have sacrificed that for you which is commonly the last thing that men can prevail on themselves to sacrifice. These things give me the privilege of dealing plainly with you; and I will exercise it. I am about to speak touching your rulers, your parties, your own conduct, and the general state of your affairs; and I will do it without thinking of panegyric. You are too far gone to be flattered back again, and I shall not attempt it; gentle remedies would be useless, and I will try none. I will treat John Bull after John Bull's own fashion; I will judge him by his former principles; I will appeal to John Bull the Statesman, against John Bull the Philosopher and Apostate. If an unsparing exposure of your folly and frenzy can reclaim you, by me you shall be reclaimed.

I fear you will think my promise of plain speaking an unnecessary one, for there are people in the world who imagine that I at all times speak too plainly. If this be a fault, you at least have no right to quarrel with it, because it is from associating with you that I have contracted it. If it be a fault, I shall never get rid of it; I must write what I feel, or I have no inspiration; those who have what I write, must have what I think. I cannot trim, and soften, and conceal, and suppress; there is an art in it which I cannot master; there is a meanness in it which I cannot stoop to. I cannot, like some people, crawl on my hands and knees; I must be erect, or I cannot make the smallest progress. The penalties which this subjects me to, give me no concern; I have paid them, and I will pay them again, as often as they may be exacted. I seek not general popularity, and I sigh not for universal friendship. I know that, to be worthy of being loved, I must be worthy of being hated; and to gain

warm friends, I am content to have bitter enemies. Your Ministry, my worthy friend, consists in a great degree of able and upright men. Perhaps, as a whole, it will bear comparison with any Ministry you ever had, in respect of ability, experience, and virtue and yet I believe you never had one that displayed more incapacity and quackery than it has done in the last few years. The wisest of men sometimes exhibit the grossest of folly, and the best intentions occasionally produce the most pernicious actions.

When the peace was firmly established, and you had begun to accommodate yourself to the new order of things, your Ministers resolved to revise your laws and systems, and to improve, as far as possible, the general regulation of your domestic affairs. When I look at the resolution in the abstract, I think it worthy of the highest praise; when I lock at what it has yielded, I lament its being taken, as a mighty public calamity. If they had cautiously and strictly confined themselves to reforms and amendments that were obviously necessary-if they had held principle sacred, and had only sought to better the application of it -if they had scrupulously avoided matters of mere opinion and speculation, and had only endeavoured to purify and improve where the evils and defects were placed fully before them by arithmetical calculation and unassailable fact-if they had done this, you might have benefited largely from their labours. Their ambition, however, looked with scorn upon toil of so humble and plodding a character reform was below their notice, and they "soared" into gigantic innovation. They declared in terms, or effect, that your whole system was full of error and evil; they denounced various of your most important laws, and began to destroy them by wholesale. They attacked not only statutes, but principles, and even the structure of society. They extended change and abolition to your creed in trade, politics, philosophy, morals, and religion. Everything was to be "liberalized" you were to have practically, if not in form, a general, new, and liberal system."

All this, my dear sir, you sanctioned. You who have always been re

markable, in the words of the first Genius of the age, for being nervously jealous of innovations in your laws, and for having Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari embroidered on your garments. You were, no doubt, drunk with prosperity, and you were vilely imposed upon; but still, after all that can be said in your favour, you deserved for it a sound horse-whipping. Lay aside for a moment, I beseech you, your philosophy, and I will convince you of the fearful extent of your error.

For once in my life I will quote a Whig authority, and that no mean one. Mr Fox said in the House of Commons, in 1793,-" I have always thought that the best defence of the constitution was, not that it tallied with the theories of speculative men, nor that in its letter there was more appearance of regard to the abstract ideas of liberty-but its best defence is its practical uses-its best character is, that it has produced substantial happiness to man." This, sir, is my opinion, with regard not only to your constitution, but to your laws and systems. Things that are kept for their beauty ought, doubtlessly, to be valued according to their beauty; but things that are kept for use ought to be valued by the benefits which their use produces. Your laws and systems, sir, were made, not to display the perfection of theory, but to yield as much as possible of practical good. You may dissent from this opinion, but I think you cannot refute it.

Ever since I could lisp, I have been taught to think very highly of these laws and systems-I have been taught to regard them as the boast of human wisdom-I have been taught to value them by their working, and not their form-by their products, and not their theoretic perfection. This, I say, I have been taught daily and hourly from my cradle. And who has been my instructor? You, sir-You, who are now assisting to destroy them. You taught me farther, that veneration for them, and jealous resistance to the making of theoretic changes in them, constituted the best bulwark of your liberty and happiness. I ask you, sir, as the tutor who has worked these opinions into my very nature, on what ground you have yourself renounced them? I ask you, why John Bull the Philosopher is warring against

the creed of John Bull the Statesman?

Let me, my dear Friend, place before you the laws and systems which your Ministers doomed to change and abolition, and many of which they have already changed and abolished, with your sanction. The most important of your boasted Navigation Laws -the Laws against Combinationsthe Restrictive System-the Colonial System-the Corn Laws-the Currency Laws-and the Laws against Usury. Most of these you have always proclaimed to be invaluable, and you know as well as myself that their operation upon all your best interests has been incessant, and most sweeping. Were they condemned to destruction upon satisfactory evidence that they worked for evil? Was it clearly established that they contracted your trade, crippled your power, injured your industry, and diminished your riches? The fruits which they had yielded in ages of trial were before you, and did these prove them to be so pernicious, that their annihilation ought to be encompassed at the risk of throwing your whole system into disorder, and filling the land with ruin and misery? Laws and systems, sir, so aged, and of such gigantic operation, could not have injured you without its being matter of PROOF-PROOF, seen by all, admitted by all, and wholly above question. How, then, did PROOF affect the matter? It was demonstrably, and altogether in favour of these laws and systems. Your trade, wealth, power, greatness, and happiness, had risen under them to a height unprecedented-former generations had esteemed them to be most beneficial-your greatest statesmen had been their parents and defenders-and those upon whom they had more directly operated, struggled for their preservation to the last moment. Until they were attacked by inexperienced, theoretic men, who were strangers to their working, they were held by all to be above value. NO PROOF Could be adduced that they yielded evil; it was maintained that they were defective in theory, and that, in consequence, their destruction would be advantageous. A set of literary pretenders formed what was called a system of Political Economy, which was so far from being drawn from experience, that history, from first to

last, covered it with refutation; and because they were at variance with this system, they were sentenced.

If I, my worthy sir, were asked to point out the most difficult work that could be undertaken by human intellect, I should say it would be found in the changing of the laws and systems in question. It requires no common share of talent and experience to conduct a war, manage the foreign affairs of a great empire, levy taxes, and legislate against crime and misdemeanor wisely; but this is mere boy's work compared with the changing of the laws that regulate the trade and agriculture, the capital and industry, of an empire like that of Britain. Your interests are so numerous and unwieldy-the relations between them are so multifarious and complex-the dependence of one upon the other is often so different from what it appears to be, so much entangled with other matters, or so deeply hidden beneath the surface of things-it is so difficult to ascertain the precise operation of a leading commercial law, and to estimate the importance of many trades-the necessary information touching the state of things in other countries is so difficult to obtain-so much is it at the mercy of foreign governments, and so much depends on the continually changing conduct of individuals peace and war differ so widely from each other-nation is so much connected with and influenced by nation -it is so essential for the benefit of trade itself that it should be made subservient to the higher interests of a country-these, and a thousand other things, render the changing of such laws a task too mighty for even the most accomplished statesman. He may calculate and reason, but he cannot obtain true data; or his data may be true in one moment and false in the next, and, in consequence, his calculations and reasonings will prove to be but vague and erring conjectures. When I look, sir, at the list of condemned laws and systems which I have given, I think that the most daring and presumptuous Minister might have trembled at undertaking the abolition of any one of them, except from the commands of imperious public necessity. Yet your Economists speak as though these almost inexplicable mysteries and stupendous difficulties did not exist. "If such a thing be done,

such a thing will happen!" they cry, with as much oracular confidence as though the Deity spoke through them. Your very Denmans, Wilsons, and Palmers, have spoken in Parliament of these changes and abolitions as though they understood their nature, and could foresee their consequences. Your newspaper editors throughout, and even your barbers' apprentices, proclaim themselves to be on these points all-knowing. Such idiotic conceit and nauseous quackery are almost sufficient to make a man despise his species.

I will not, sir, admit that the condemned laws and systems were founded upon false theory. I maintain, that the truth of the theory must be determined by the effects of its application, and that what is beneficial in practice is true in theory. I maintain that the theorist who denounces what is practically good as being theoretically false, is himself a teacher of false theory, or, to speak more truly, is a stranger to theory. It is not for fallible man to say where perfection lies in anything; but I assert that the fruits of these laws and systems abundantly prove that true theory formed their foundation. True theory, sir, is born from effects, and false from speculative opinions. Your rulers, however, seem to think the reverse. They seem to imagine that a thing may be false in theory that yields the best products, and true that yields the worst; they appear to believe that you want laws and systems for show, and not for their "practical uses"-to tally with " the ories of speculation," and not to produce "substantial happiness to man."

Your ministers, my dear sir, made these gigantic changes solely upon theory, and, in making them, they were the servile pupils of the Economists. These Economists, whom they thought good to select as teachers, were in general mere literary menthey were chiefly Cockneys and Scotchmen, who had seen nothing of the general working of English laws and institutions, and who were strangers to the habits and character of English society-they were furious party men, and tainted to the heart with infidelity and republicanismand their system, as a whole, was obviously fashioned with the view of working the destruction of yourChurch, Aristocracy, and Monarchy. Your Mi

nisters, sir, adopted the opinions of these men in making the changes, and their speeches convince me that investigation and study had but a small share in leading to their adoption.

On the one hand, therefore, these condemned laws and systems vitally affected the whole of your trade, property, and industry-most of them had been tried for ages, and had been thought invaluable-your first statesmen had always ascribed to them a large portion of your trade, riches, and power-no PROOF was adduced that they were producing evils of any description-they were thought to be most beneficial by the practical men on whom they more immediately operated-and your affairs were generally flourishing. On the other hand, they were declared to be at variance with a theory which certain theorists had invented-these theorists were, many of them, ignorant of the world, exceedingly shallow, and notoriously disaffected to your constitution and religion-their dogmas were at the best mere suppositions, hostile to each other, and flatly opposed to reason and experience-and they could merely rail against these laws and systems, and say that their theory would make that better which was excellentwould make that more beneficial which was producing no evils, and which was believed to be extremely beneficial. This was the real case, sir, for and against, and you decided with your Ministers in favour of destruction. You declared for quacks, assertion, paradox, and innovation, against your ancestors, proof, common sense, and the sacred maxims of your constitution.

Your early lessons, sir, had effectually disabled me for following you, and I kept the ground on which, in your less romantic days, you had placed me. I have, from the first, struggled against your apostacy, and I now ask you, in the name of your immortal ancestors and hallowed constitution, if the laws and systems of this empire ought to be changed on such grounds as I have stated?

Let us now, my dear Friend, look at the circumstances to which the conduct of your rulers and yourself has brought you. We will first place before us your parties.

The Whigs and Burdettites were naturally disciples of the Economists,