THE King's speech has told us all that we expected, and has told us nothing. A recapitulation of the few topics which have been flung from newspaper to newspaper for the last six months, and the shadowy promise of a few measures to which the Lords gave the death-blow at the close of the last session. But the King's speech is merely the drop-scene of the drama, always the same, always the mere cover for the emptiness of the stage, and always swept aside when the true action begins.

To form a due estimate of the state of Parliament we must look to the condition of parties when the two Houses last finished their labours. First, of the Cabinet. Have they received any accession of ability, of popular force, or personal fame? None. Lord Melbourne, in his nightgown and slippers, Lord John Russell, equally renowned as historian, poet, orator, and statesman, Lord Palmerston, the object of unlimited burlesque, Mr Poulett Thompson, the obscure creature of the counting-house, and Mr Spring Rice, notoriously plunged in financial perplexities every hour, still constitute the Ministry. We may pass by the harmless clamour of the Marquis of Lansdowne, and the senile babbling of old Lord Holland. Brougham has been tried, and has thrown them off. All their efforts to buttress their crazy pile have failed, and they now trust, like the Turks, to the chance which protects idiots and children. And those are the men to hold the government of the British empire: This mixture of the presumptuous and the imbecile, the audacious and the cowardly, the arrogant and the servile, is to shape the destinies of England! This cannot last long. With the indignation of the empire rising against them on one side, and the rage of Radicalism dashing against their mouldering ramparts on the other, they must embrace the only alternative, and either resign, or throw themselves on that furious billow, which will never sink till it carries them on to revolution.

We now come to the Conservatives. Their condition at the close of the last session was triumphant. They had risen almost to a majority in the Commons. They had with them the entire

voice of the Lords. They had, more than both, the voice of all that constitutes the nation. Combining moderation with force, and constitutional knowledge with manly determination, they had baffled, nay, more than baffled, they had crushed every lawless measure of the Cabinet. They governed the Cabinet. The miserable minister dared not stir a step but by permission of the powerful hand that alternately guided and repelled him. Every measure was framed not with a view to its fitness, but to the authority of Opposition. Nothing could be issued without the imprimatur of the Lords. Every flighty attempt to catch the popular gaze was preceded by a pilot balloon to find out the current of opinion from the Lords. All was palliation, adaptation, and emendation. No travelling mountebank ever more anxiously opened his booth with an eye to the magistrate, dispensed his nostrums more in terror of the law, or more suddenly closed the whole establishment, when the hand of the law threatened to extinguish his fraudulent trade.

The leaders of Opposition were the three leading men of the empire, not in the eyes of England alone, but of Europe. While the Ministers were unknown beyond their desks, the names of Wellington, Lyndhurst, and Peel were heard in every council, every court, and every senate of the civilized world.

Have they fallen off since? The fame of Wellington is perennial. It is identified with the noblest era of England, with the proudest memory of British soldiership, and with the most consummate deliverance of Europe. It stands at that height which can neither be increased, nor diminished by human change. An Alp is not more imperishable, more elevated above the common decays of nature, more fixed in the region of perpetual splendour.

The last blow of the session was Lord Lyndhurst's speech. It was a deathblow. The nation instantly recognised its force. It fell like a thunderbolt. Nothing could resist it. No resistance was attempted. While the empire was delighted by its brilliancy, it withered the Cabinet, and withered they have remained.

Sir Robert Peel's labours during

the session were unrelaxing. He never lost sight of the Ministry. Neither sleight nor force could avail them to escape from his powerful hand. Always possessing the highest information on the subject of debate, always enforcing it by the clearest arguments, and adorning it with the manliest eloquence, he pressed hourly on the Cabinet, until their only resource from being extinguished, was the prorogation. Too advanced and too eminent for a conflict with such adversaries, he has before him the struggle with the more furious strength and more envenomed hostility of revolution. He has powers for it. Mox in ovilia,

Nunc in reluctantes dracones. The Hydra, fed in the bottomless marshes and poisoned atmosphere of popular passion, is already lifting up its heads, and to crush it will require the strength of a giant. But it can be crushed, and by the blessing of Providence on a manly people, it will. The speech at the Glasgow dinner was an example of the faculties, and an evidence of their demand for this final conflict. Its merits were, that it was a great British declaration of public principle. It was more than a party speech, it was even more than a Parliamentary one. It looked beyond the legislature, and extended to the empire. Unrestricted by any reference to the impressions of individuals, it spoke the sense of the nation. Embodying the soundest wisdom for the exigencies of the time, it pronounced those maxims of public morals, strength, and sincerity, which are universal and everlasting.

During the recess, a long succession of celebrations of Conservative principle took place throughout England. The character of those meetings was decisive of the comprehensiveness, vigour, and truth of the great change which had been effected in the public mind. It was clear, that the timidity which had suffered the Reform Bill to be passed, and which had equally suffered Parliament to be filled with the creatures of the mob, was no more; that the country had resumed the natural spirit of Englishmen, and that thenceforth the struggle of principle would be maintained with the intrepidity of truth. It was to be observed, that those meetings were not constructed by the leaders of Conservatism in public life, that their chairmen and

speakers were in general persons but little known beyond their own counties, and that their sentiments were utterly untinged with any of that reserve and caution which almost necessarily belong to Parliamentary partisans, but that they were plain, straightforward, often indignant, and always ardent expressions of feeling for the degraded condition of their country, and of disgust for the Whigpapist faction which held it in fetters.

It was equally to be observed, that in those meetings men of every rank joined; yet that there was a peculiarity in their junction. The first who united, on those occasions, were chiefly persons of the better condition of middle life. The landed gentry, barristers, clergy, and respectable men of the other established professions. The original impulse was decidedly of the middle order. That order, in

which it has been so often said that the strength of English opinion and English virtue unequivocally consists. As those meetings acquired force, they invited Peers and Members of Parliament to join them. As they acquired additional force, they opened their doors to the more intelligent among the working classes. Those classes again formed associations among themselves, and the manly, pious, and principled feelings of attachment to the religion and Constitution of England have thus spread large and deep through those very portions of society on which the artifices of rebellion had been most eagerly employed, and which were conceived to be the natural abettors of all revolution.

But if the nature of the change was to be still more powerfully illustrated, it was by the contrast of the Whig dinners. They were in all points the direct reverse. In number not one to fifty. In attendance meagre, vulgar, riotous, and disunited. As to their component parts, utterly abandoned by all the higher and more honourable ranks of the community, by the Peerage, the clergy, the great proprietors of land, by all but a few official adherents of the Cabinet in the several counties, and a few of those Members of Parliament who were notoriously creatures of the Ministry. In another point, the contrast was not less striking. Not one of those meetings appears to have been spontaneous. Some Member of the Government was regularly sent to canvass an invitation for

himself; and, through his personal and political connexions, construct a public dinner. Thus Spring Rice was sent to Limerick to try the temptations of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and make a defence of the Minister. Thus Lord Glenelg was sent to Inverness to play the part of owl in the sunshine, and make a defence of the Ministry. Thus the Attorney-General was sent to Edinburgh to tell his Radical constituents the undiscoverable merits of a Ministry which had done nothing for the last twelve months, and take to himself the merit of having saved the Prime Minister from the clutches of the law in an action for adultery.

In fact, all the demonstrations of public feeling on the Ministerial side were the work of plan, of labour, of stratagem, of the influence of those good things of which a minister supplicating for the popular shout is supposed to be the direct depositary. But let those forced and systematic toils for popularity be taken as they are. Let those fabricated feelings and canvassed celebrations be contrasted, for a moment, with the free and open, the unpremeditated and powerful displays of the true public heart, exhibited in every county of England, pouring upon us till the public journals cannot find words to vary their description, till the language of loyalty seems to be the common language of the realm, and till those noble evidences of the true national mind are rendered almost superfluous by their acknowledged and uncontested superiority. With those evidences before us, what possible doubt can there be that the nation is beginning to feel the necessity for the exertion of its powersthat, like the blind man by the wayside, its quick ear has caught the sound of deliverance, and its only outcry now is, that the last scale may be taken from its cyes?

But a third party has sprung up, bitter, loud-tongued, and utterly unprincipled-Radicalism-the last birth of that low hypocrisy by which the Whigs have so long pampered the vanity of the rabble-Radicalism, the open champion of overthrow, the professed clamourer for revolution, demanding endless change, and, with a precipitate folly, untaught by the old miseries of national convulsion, and with a sanguinary frenzy incurable but by its own pikes and scaffolds, rejoicing in the hope of national evil.

If some great painter of the passions should arise, with what colours of gloom and terror would he embody the time! in what features of conscious guilt and late remorse would he paint the form of that feeble yet criminal Cabinet who have bound themselves in the spell of those masters of evilthe Macbeth of a truer history listening to his fate from the spirits of darkness, evoked with rites of profanation and blood! Can any man who hears the meagre protestations of that Cabinet against faction doubt that they feel themselves already in its power?

It is easy to talk lightly of those things. There are indolent minds which care nothing for the deepest public change, provided it seems not likely to molest their own pillows. There are others who care for no consequences whatever, if they think that they will not occur until they themselves are out of the world. There are still more who will not give themselves the trouble of a second thought upon the subject, or obstinately and foolishly persevere in thinking that nothing evil can occur, because extreme evil has not yet fallen upon the country. Let the reader consider whether he is in any of those classes, and learn that it is to such apathy that the whole menace of national ruin is due at this moment. The vil lany which threatens the Constitution would not have dared to lift its head, if the vigilance of England had been awake to the growth of this reptile adversary. But let apathy itself hear what are the actual declarations of Radicalism, and then ask how would it be possible for laws, religion, or public peace to subsist from the moment when they were realized. the dinner to the representatives of Bath in January, a muster of Radicalism, a leading speaker thus gave the Radicals' confession of faith:-" Our demands are for Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and Vote by Ballot.

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In addition, the House of Lords must be reformed."

Now, nothing can be clearer than that the complete operation of any one of those four measures would be a De. mocracy. The operation of the whole four would go still further than a Democracy, and would be ANARCHY. Let us suppose, for instance, Annual Parliaments to become law. What man of any character, substance, profession, or landed property could be a

candidate after the first few trials? Time, fortune, and talent would be wasted with an ineffectiveness that would rapidly disgust every man of respectability. The return for a county now costs, at the most reduced rate of Reform, about L.4000. The keenest cutting down of those expenses will always leave room for heavy demands on the purse of any candidate who is supposed able to meet them. There will be placards, agents, canvassers, dinners, conveyances, and a multitude of other expenses, while there is any chance of their being paid. And all this for the precarious seat of one year! that year being partly occupied in canvassing, and the Parliament being always sure, if we are to judge from all experience, of being dissolved before the regulated time. The average duration of the actual Parliamentary year would probably not exceed six months. This would soon drive every candidate of respectability out of the field. But other candidates would not be wanting. The characterless, the penniless, the unprincipled, the whole crowd of those who, in default of having any thing else to sell, sell themselves, would be the perpetual hirelings of the mob. Canvassing would be their profession. They would pay nothing, because it was known that they could pay nothing. But pledges to every frantic caprice of the mob would be the price of their admission to the hustings. And the performance of those pledges would be the price of their existence in the House. Every new villain, who hoped to gain in the common division of the spoil, would outbid his villain predecessor, and, with a legislature whose only principle was robbery, what would be the security of a shilling in the pocket of any honest man? Yet annual Parliaments are the open demand of the Radicals, and if we suffer them once to become our masters, annual Parliaments they will have. Even triennial Parliaments, the most moderated demand of their most moderate portion, would rapidly have the same result. Radicalism must be resisted with all our heart and strength, or we shall see civil convulsion, confiscation of property, tyranny over the person, banishment, and loss of life. No human power can sustain England against the direst extremities of ruin, if her indolence shall have once suf

fered Radicalism to have the upper hand.

Or take the instance of Universal Suffrage. What would be the value of property an hour, if every wretch who walks the streets were to be entitled to return members to Parliament ? If the whole vice, vileness, dishonesty, beggary, and corruption of the metropolis and the towns were let loose to elect representatives, the influence of character, property, name, old connexions, old services, all that constitutes the generous, manly, and substantial grounds of popularity, would be trampled down by a countless rabble, exulting in its power of revenge, and roaring for some Hunt or Cobbett. They would inevitably choose men after their own hearts. Highwaymen, pickpockets, forgers, coiners, gaming-housekeepers, the vilest instruments of the vilest sources of existence, the man of fraud, the man of plunder, the man of blood-those would be the electors; the more reputable classes would be instantly swamped at the hustings, and the most profligate, audacious, and promising bargainer would be the man of the day. With 658 men of this class to make the laws of England, to guard its property, and sustain its religion, what must be the result to England?

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Or take the Vote by Ballot. acknowledged and base expedient to allow the voter to promise one thing, and do another; a public privilege of lying, and a private one of corruption. Who can doubt that the whole business of elections would become a mat ter of bribery, while there was any candidate able to bribe? What would the man of the purse have to do, but to send his agent into the clubs of voters, and say to each coterie," If my man is returned, fifty or five hundred pounds will be forthcoming for the club; if he is thrown out, the fault is yours, and you shall not have a shilling." And the ballot would have this peculiar attraction for such a traffic, that there being no presumed possibility of knowing how the individual voted, there would be no actual possibility of examining his vote on a petition, no power of proving bribery against him, and of course all the natural precautions now adopted to prevent excessive corruption would be abandoned as useless. It is true, that bribery itself would at length be abandoned; but it would be only by the