THE national rejoicing at the defeat of the Westminster Radicals shows, to demonstration, what is in the national heart. Within our recollection no choice of a representative ever caused so anxious a suspense for the short time during which it was undecided; certainly no election ever brought out, more eagerly, bitterly, and scandalously, the whole virulence of the revolutionists; and as certainly none ever gave them a more signal overthrow. Radicalism had all the advantage of the ground; Conservatism was wholly taken by surprise. The faction had coolly prepared all their measures; and their demand of Sir Francis Burdett's resignation was merely the result of that preparative. His acquiescence was unexpected by the majority of his old Westminster friends. His principles, excepting in personal points of aversion to the vulgar insolence of the O'Connell tyranny, and his extreme disgust for the mendicant himself, were scarcely known. On the whole, his defiance of the faction whom he had so long led, was regarded as the sure precursor of his downfal.

We have no idea of panegyrizing Sir Francis Burdett. For many a year we have been compelled to resist the hasty and hazardous conceptions which he propagated through the people. Even in his present change, we have no more consideration for the individual than we should have for any other man, merely on the evidence that his eyes were opened at last, that he had abjured his early follies, and been made aware, in his mature understanding, of the public perils which he had laughed at in his youth. If the triumph now gained had been merely the triumph of Sir Francis Burdett we should not have thought it worth more congratulation than that of the accession of any other vigorous mind to the general muster-roll of the national cause.

But we now have Sir Francis Burdett advocating the permanency of the monarchy, the vigour of the laws, the subordination of the populace, and the integrity of the constitution! In his address to his supporters for Westminster he applauds them for their

exertions in the cause of "our wellestablished and long proved institutions, under which," he adds, "we have enjoyed more real liberty, more general prosperity, accumulated more reverence in the world, and advanced further in the progress of civilisation, than ever fell to the lot of any people in former times, or is, as he sincerely believes, the lot of any other nation in the present day!" He loftily pronounces that the grand object of his present struggle is,-" to maintain those advantages unimpaired, though not unimproved;" and concludes by protesting against its being considered in any degree " a personal question." No. "The name or interests of any candidate are of no importance compared with the great cause, which is neither more nor less than the preservation of the laws and the constitution of England."

It was this declaration which conquered for Sir Francis Burdett, and, let our words be marked, in this declaration any man will conquer whom his countrymen believe to have ability enough to fight their battle in Parliament, and sincerity enough to keep his faith to the end. We say that there is a fund of political virtue and political courage in the heart of England which has not been exhausted, however it may have been concealed; we say that there is scarcely a spot of England, however barren to the eye, in which there is not a mine of sterling patriotism underneath. We say that the man who casts a despairing eye upon the people of England sees not, because passion or petulance, timidity or laziness, raise a mist before his eye. The vigcur is there, if he has but the sense to acknowledge it or the heart to glow with it. This is human nature, not merely in England, but in every nation and age of mankind. There never was an instance in history where a confidence in the popular virtue was not repaid by a sudden display of that virtue. In the periods of oppression by an invader, in the reign of despotisms, in the oppression of baronial tyrants, in every casualty of national annals, the moment the avenger exhibited himself a kindred multitude started up around

him. No matter whether the impulse, like the injury, were religious or political, individual wrong or national insult, the power of the human heart expanded itself at once and rose before the eye; the nobility of nature vindicated its origin, the nakedness of the champion was armed by the sacredness of his cause; and thus, clothed in more than triple steel, he went forth to a contest in which principle was victory.

We have thought too little of this great and salutary truth of late years. When Radicalism raised its outcry, and the people were silent in surprise, we were too apt to think that they had lost the faculty of speech. When faction libelled every great establishment of the state, we seemed to think that the nation was incapable of being moved by the most imminent consciousness of danger, or that the Englishman had suddenly lost the common faculties of self-preservation, and had quietly made up his mind to see his Church, his laws, his loyalty, and his freedom trampled into the dust before his face; that he had suddenly become paralyzed in all his senses, and was prepared to see his property and his children's property at the mercy of revolution; that he had lost, among his other departed senses, the sense of ridicule, and could see without scorn the baboon tricks and clownish fopperies of a race of the most vulgar pretenders to public station, the most miserable swindlers of public faith, and the most rapacious, selfish, and indecent graspers at official emolu ment that ever made public life at once laughable and disgusting. Yet all those faculties and feelings were as much in existence as ever, and required only to be called forth for their national display. Our Parliamentary guides have thought too little of this; they have looked to Parliament, and have forgotten the people; half a dozen votes, more or less, have shot them up from despair to triumph, or plunged them down from triumph to despair. They were engrossed by the play and spurting of the little fountain within, while they forgot the quiet expanse and resistless flow of the great river which fed the fountain without. The meeting at Glasgow might have shown them what a response lay in the bosom of the neglected oracle. Was Sir Robert Peel prepared for the effect which his words

VOL. XLI, NO. CCLX.

instantaneously produced there? We say that there is not a province of England in which the same call would not have produced the same answer; we say that the whole circuit of the land is void, that the whole atmosphere is charged, and that the single sound of a patriot's eloquence would be echoed and re-echoed by answering thunders round the whole horizon.

In the immediate example, we regard Sir Francis Burdett's declarations as of the very first importance. He is the convert of necessity. He, indeed, gives his reasons" upon compulsion." And what pre-eminent reasons? The peril of all that we hold dear. On what compulsion? The perfect knowledge that nothing but unmasking the conspirators can save the country. And who is it that thus gives us the benefit of his knowledge? Perhaps the man who knows best the designs, habits, and principles of the conspirators. As an individual, he must have been incapable of descending to conspiracy. But it was utterly impossible for the leader of Radicalism for upwards of a quarter of a century to escape at least the occasional view of its physiognomy. Like the spectators of Catiline in the streets of Rome, he must have marked its ferocity of gesture, and its gloom of countenance, even though he were not admitted into the cavern of the conspiracy, and shared the pledge cemented with blood against the liberties of the land. The distinction between Radicalism as it was and as it is, amounts to this, that always wicked, it was once weaponless; it is now armed, armed by the common enemy of England, Popery-invigorated by the O'Connell faction with a strength not its own, and actually controlling an insulted country through the venality of a time-serving Cabinet. It is the consciousness of this sudden power which has roused the member for Westminster into sudden resistance, and, we trust, will rouse the country into resolution. His error from the beginning was that of disregarding consequences. With the Parliamentary men of his party he continually upheld the rash conception that when evil did not directly break forth it could not exist. With reasoners of this order precaution is a folly. The serpent's eggs are not to be trampled on, because they are not yet hatched; the 3 D

clothes of the plague-stricken are not to be burned because the whole po pulation is not yet in the grave. But these holiday times are past, the feeble dynasty of the Greys has given way before the rougher sincerity of the Republican. If we had a Parliament peopled with such men as the Whalleys, Wakleys, and Leaders, we should have a revolution in a twelvemonth. If Sir Francis Burdett has found out his error at last that the country is in danger; that the democracy which he so long thought to be a mere lapdog, is a tiger; and that the Jesuit faction, which he described as a mere gathering of obscure priests and ragged mendicants, is a daring, desperate, and blood-thirsty conspiracy; and if, upon this conviction, his tongue has been loosed, his faculties have been awakened, and he has made the first use of them to send out to the nation a warning voice against the treason, what shall we pronounce of the act and the doer, but that the one was as essential as the other was honourable.

We take the words of Sir George Sinclair on this subject. Sir George is one of the manliest and most uncompromising of the constitutional members of the House of Commons; a friend to the Church, the King, and the people. In his address, at the head of the Westminster deputation, to Sir Francis the day before the nomination of the candidates, he openly pronounced, and accounted for the Baronet's abandonment of all the wild partisanship which had once marked his career. "There was," said he, "a distinguished man in ancient times, to whom many of his countrymen had no other objection than that he was called The Just,' and there are many persons, Sir Francis, who, on the present occasion, have no other objection to offer against you than that you have preferred the welfare of your country to every consideration of a personal nature. (Great cheering.) You have made sacrifices, of all others the most painful to a generous mind; I mean the sacrifice of at least running the risk of severing the ties of many ancient regards, cemented through a long course of years; because you know that it is impossible for you, consistently with the views you entertained respecting the welfare and hap piness of your country, to support

those individuals whom in former times you deemed it a duty to stand by." (Great cheering.)

Sir Francis Burdett, in his reply, after some general remarks on the election, observed, "Gentlemen, it must be obvious to you that, as far as I am personally concerned, nothing could be more inconvenient, nothing in fact could be more personally distressing, than to come forward on the present occasion. Why, gentlemen, I can have no personal object to induce me to fight this great constitutional battle. (Cheers.) My motives are solely those of a public nature. The present is a crisis in England. The true friends of the constitution are pushed on beyond the limits of rational liberty; they are pushed into a dangerous path by a power which they would, but cannot control, a power dangerous, most dangerous, even to themselves. (Cheers.) The matter which is at stake is the constitution. There are at the present moment many wild schemes to improve the constitution, a constitution of which we all know experimentally the value. Now, I do not approve of those schemes. Gentlemen, there is now behind the Government a party more powerful than the Government itself. Lord Chatham spoke of a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne. But surely we cannot help seeing that, however the fact may be denied by Ministers, there is a power below them-(vehement cheers) -a power which is greater than any they possess; a power which is pressing them on in a course that will lead them to consequences which they will abhor and detest. (Loud cheers.) Gentlemen, I think that we are not only doing our duty in supporting the prerogatives of the King upon the throne, but in maintaining the just rights of the privileged orders; rights which were given for the general be nefit, and which, if they are infringed in any degree, will be followed by the destruction of the very principle upon which our constitution is founded. We are doing what Ministers themselves ought to thank us for doing; that is, we are opposed most determinedly and resolutely to those persons who support Ministers from no regard that they have for them, nor for any respect for their principles or politics; on the contrary, who give them their support

because they know they can take advantage of their weakness, and make use of the Ministers as tools, who imagine they are using those men as tools."

Now in this man, we have the important instance of an individual forced by the strong reason of the thing into total change of his public opinions. By this change he has nothing to gain but a great deal of obloquy, a great deal of trouble, and the certain loss of a popularity which he has sustained for thirty years. With him no object of personal ambition can be in question. He declares himself against the Cabinet in the same breath in which he declares against the rabble ; he has kicked down the ladder by which meaner minds are hourly ascending into popular fame and public emolument; and stands at this moment excluded from both by his voluntary deed. The reason is that danger exists, and he sees the danger -that his place in society gives him the power of calling to the nation to be on its guard, and he has called accordingly. We now take the contrast. There is not a man among the present Ministers who has not in his time pronounced the opinions which Sir Francis Burdett is now vilified for holding. But they have been made Ministers; and from this moment have totally changed their language. Have they changed their minds? No. The parrot that speaks as the old maid or the menial that teaches him, has changed his mind as much as any saint or sinner of the Cabinet, from the somnolent piety of Lord Glenelg to the rampant bacchanalianism of Lord Melbourne. The Premier was a Tory as long as he could get any official nest for the lazy repose of his principles. Lord John Russell was an abhorrer of popular innovation as long as his employers set their faces against national overthrow. The Lords Glenelg and Palmerston having never pretended to any principle beyond that of getting all they could, and keeping all they could get-standing in the market with the dignity of a hackney coach ready for every man's hire, and made by nature and art, like a negro, for drudgery in chains, deprive history of its sting. Of those we shall say nothing; for nothing can be said but that one of them has humbly served seven Cabinets, and the other eight, and would wear the liveries to receive

the wages of as many more, without thinking of any thing deeper than the amount of their pay. In one of his Parliamentary speeches, we have Lord Melbourne thus giving his opinion on the kind of Government into which every hour of his official life is now plunging the empire. "In my view of the matter, Mr Speaker, the Sultan of Constantinople, the Shah of Persia, and the Dey of Algiers are subject to a more efficient responsibility than the leaders of a Democratic Assembly."-Again. "Sir, it is a great maxim in politics, sanctioned by antiquity, that forms of government are often destroyed and changed into those most opposite to them, by measures which wear the appearance of favouring, extending, and confirming the fundamental principles of such Governments. Oligarchies have been overthrown by the attempt to render them more oligarchical, and laws of the most democratical tendency have produced the ruin of democracies. This is an important principle at the present moment. It is founded on the great moral truth, that excess always produces the very evil that it intends to shun. My impression is, that the real consequence of adopting any measure such as is proposed, will be to impair the strength of the popular part of the constitution." So much for the Tory Lord Melbourne's notions on the necessity of a sweeping Reform, exactly the Reform which the Whig Minister Lord Melbourne supports, with all his might and main, every night of the Session.

Now let us hear another authority, Lord John Russell, while he was yet acting in the rear rank of the Whigs, and had no hope of being Minister of the Radicals. "I beg Sir," says the noble weathercock, "to say, that I do not agree with those who oppose all and every system of Reform. I agree in the propriety of disfranchising such boroughs as are notoriously corrupt, and I will give my consent to any measure which will restrict the duration of Parliament to three years. cannot, however, pledge myself to support a measure that goes the length of proposing an enquiry into the general state of the representation; because such an enquiry is calculated to throw a slur upon the representation of the country, and to fill the minds of the public with vague and indefinite

I

alarms. The Hon. Baronet had complained that the Reformers were wild and visionary theorists, and had called on the House to state where those wild and visionary theorists were to be found. If the Hon. Baronet did not know where to find them, he would refer him to those persons who had advised him during the last Session to bring forward his celebrated motions for annual Parliaments and universal suffrage!"

Yet in the teeth of these declarations, we have the Cabinet supporting the wildest visions of those visionaries, and the Premier and Lord John dreaming away, in their revolutionary bed of roses, as heavily as any Barras or Hume of them all.

We have before

our eyes the Treasury battalion marched down, rank and file, to fight for the rankest and most boastful of the democrats themselves - Mr Leader, the elected of Ministers, though the rejected of Westminster. We see Sir Rufane Donkin running down, with his ordnance pen behind his ear, to vote for Mr Leader. Sir Henry Parnell, shutting up his paymaster books, to be just in time for Mr Leader. The Majesty of Cabinet law, Mr Attorney-General Campbell, locking his escrutoir upon his half-finished pamphlet of legal ignorance and official zeal, his second abortion on Church-rates, to give the weight of his plumper to Mr Leader. The introuvable functionary, Lord Palmerston himself, precipitating his toilet, and coming full speed with his mustachios half incomplete, and his reputation as an Adonis hazarded for ever, to show how rigorously a Cabinet Minister can do his duty, and vote for the hero of annual Parliaments, universal suffrage, and universal democracy. Does any man believe, or can any man in his senses believe, that

these personages cared a straw for Mr Leader personally, or that it would have given them half the trouble to know that he was to be hanged? No! They were under orders, their mission was ministerial, they were as much on duty as if they had been rung up from their desks by the bell in Lord Melbourne's closet. The whole matter was one of Cabinet necessity, and, notwithstanding all this aggregate of clerks, the Cabinet was beaten. The triumph was England's. The defeat was not of the late member for Bridgewater; nor of the mere sans-culotte faction, the Canons of Westminster ; it was the defeat of the O'Connell Administration, on their own ground too, with all their official forces mustered, with all their rabble auxiliaries let loose, the cautious Reformer, the headlong Reformer, the weathercock Reformer, and the rotten Reformer, all regimented for the occasion; with Joseph Hume and his gang, not hovering, as of old, on the skirts of the field, with the prudence of that truly selfish waiter on fortune, but for once pressing into the front, and only coming to swell the slaughter. Let the country mark this, and see what can be done by manly resistance. Let Englishmen be awakened by this, and acquire the knowledge that they have only to exert their natural force, and they are free. Let Sir Robert Peel and the other leaders of the national feeling be taught by this to understand at last that the nation are ready to second them, if they will but come forward; that the empire is demanding why they still hesitate; and that the first unfurling of the constitutional flag, with a determination to plant it on the ruins of the O'Connell Cabinet, would be hailed by every honest voice in the empire as the pledge of victory.