contest maintained by the Conservative party. Now the case is changed. The old rampart is demolished, and, unless these middle ranks can create a new one, they must be speedily themselves destroyed. From the sole of their feet to the crown of their head, the middle classes of England at present stand exposed to the revolutionary fire; every shot will now carry away flesh and blood. Deeply as we deplore the misery and suffering which the exposure of these unprotected classes to the attacks of revolution must produce, it is in the intensity of that suffering, in the poignancy of that distress, that the only chance of ultimate deliverance is to be found. Periods of suffering are seldom, in the end, lost to nations, any more than to individuals; and it is years of anguish that expiate the sin, and tame the passions, of days of riot and licentiousness.

The Constitution, indeed, is destroyed, but the men whom the Constitution formed are not destroyed. The institutions which protected all the classes of the state, the permanent interests which coerced the feverish throes of democracy, the conservative weight which steadied all the movements of the people, are at an end; the peril arising from this sudden removal of the pressure which hitherto regulated all the movements of the machine is extreme, but the case is not utterly hopeless. It is impossible at once to change the habits of many hundred years' growth;—it is difficult in a few years to root out the affections and interests which have sprung from centuries of obligation ;it is not in a single generation that the virtues and happiness, fostered by ages of prosperity, are to be destroyed. As long as the British character remains unchanged; as long as religion and moral virtue sway the feelings of the majority of the people; as long as tranquil industry forms the employment of her inhabitants, and domestic enjoyments constitute the reward of their exertion,—the cause of order and civilisation is not hopeless. Revolutions, it is true, are always effected by reckless and desperate minorities in opposition to opulent and indolent majorities; but it is the ennobling effect of civil liberty to nourish a spirit of resistance to oppression, which outstrips all the calculations of those who ground their views upon what has occurred in despotic monarchies. Recent events afford

abundant confirmation of this observation. The Revolutionists of France, in three weeks after the meeting of the States-General, effected the union of the three orders in one Chamber-in other words, the Revolution. In England, the Conservative party, under the most adverse circumstances, kept the revolution at bay for fifteen months, and at length the Peers were prostrated and the Crown overthrown, only by a violent stretch of the prerogative, to crush the undaunted defenders of its own independence.

In revolutions, the period of general reaction invariably comes; but the great danger is, that it comes too late to save the country from the consequences of former intemperance. When England found itself under the despotic tyranny of the Long Parliament, or the iron rule of Cromwell; when the head of the monarch fell on the scaffold, and the liberties of the country expired under the Protector, -with what feelings of agony did the people waken from the fatal delusions of 1642! When Louis and Marie Antoinette perished under the guillotine; when the revolutionary axe was lifted in every village, and suspended over every head in France; when almost every mother wept her son, and every family mourned its flower swept off to the ranks by the Directory,—with what bitter anguish did they look back to the tranquil and prosperous days of the monarchy! Repeatedly, during the progress of the revolution, the reaction was so violent, that it would have stopped the advance of the movement, but for the fearful military force which the Government had arrayed on their side. The factions of Paris, headed by the National Guard, 40,000 strong, rose in open revolt against the revolutionary Government in October 1795, and were only defeated by the cannon of the army, and the military genius of Napoleon. The bayonets of Augereau and the French grenadiers were required to dissolve the Royalist Chambers, which the free elections of the years 1796 and 1797 had produced. France willingly surrendered its freedom in 1800, and submitted for fifteen years to the despotic authority of Napoleon, rather than incur the hazard of any further continuance of those alternations of oppression, which constituted the melancholy history of its democratic

convulsions. And the suffering consequent on the Revolution of July became at last so poignant, that the respectable classes hailed with joy even the arbitrary decrees and total suspension of their liberties by Marshal Soult.

The reaction has come in this country, in all the higher and educated classes, to an extent which the warmest supporter of the Constitution could hardly have hoped for. It has come too late to save the Constitution, because the Government forced on the revolution by the aid of the Commons, who had assembled during the first transport of the Reform passion. It has not come too late, however, let us hope, to give a tolerable security, for a time at least, under the new constitution, to life and property. The whole powers of the state are now centred in the House of Commons; the Crown and the House of Peers are henceforth of hardly any weight in the scale. The last hopes of the nation rest on the character of their next representatives. If a majority of them are conservative, the march of revolution may for a time be stayed, and England preserve the best part of its institutions, till another three glorious days at Paris again intoxicate the public mind, and the vessel of the state, deprived of the ballast which enabled it so long to ride out this gale, is swamped in the waves.

In commemorating the fall of the Constitution, many reflections naturally arise as to the causes by which this vast change has been brought about, the consequences to which it is likely to lead, and the means of escape which still remain to the institutions and property of the country. Such a retrospect will exhibit many faults on both sides; but they are faults of a very different character on the revolutionary and the conservative sides, and we may already anticipate the sober decision of history on many of the steps in this fatal progress.

Powerful as inconsiderable events frequently are on the final issue of change on human affairs, it is never by such causes that the great streams which divide the human race are first put in motion. General, powerful, and long-continued causes are alone adequate to affect the masses of mankind, and produce that dissatisfaction at existing institutions which first calls into activity the energy and guilt

of revolutionary ambition. Ministerial recklessness, party ambition, may at last regulate the direction of the torrent, but it is not such causes which first put it in motion. The ambition of the Whigs, the recklessness of the revolutionists, the fraud of power, the violence of the populace, have in the end precipitated the change; but the Conservative party must look to their own weakness and indiscretion for the first causes which gave it birth. Strange as it may appear, the remote cause of these changes is to be found in the unexampled glory and success with which, under their direction, the nation combated the first French Revolution.

There is a natural tendency in the powers of thought, and the efforts of understanding, to resist the domination of long-established influence, to get free from the bonds of authority, and cut through the fetters of power by the adamantine edge of genius. Nor is it without benevolent designs, and for wise purposes, that this tendency is universal in mankind. It is this reaction of genius against violence, of the powers of the understanding against the force of the passions, of the spirit of freedom against the tyranny of power, which steadies the march of human events, and brings back the oscillations of the political pendulum to the centre of truth and justice. The Conservative party may well recognise the force of a power from which, since the days of popular tyranny began, they have derived such incalculable support.

The long political ascendency of the Tories, and the unexampled triumphs with which the war was closed, naturally drove talent to the side of Opposition. The Whigs always made it their boast that all the talents were on their side; and without admitting the truth of the statement, it may at least be admitted, that in writing and popular declamation they had at that time decidedly the better of their opponents. They early felt the power of the press, and they laboured ably and assiduously to turn it to the best advantage. While their adversaries were acting or combating, they were writing and declaiming; while the whole talent of the Conservative side was engaged in struggling with the might of Napoleon, or directing in all its various departments the immense machine of British power, they were incessantly occupied in getting possession of all the

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varied channels of public thought. Their activity and energy in this department was unbounded, and soon began to produce a marked change on the sentiments of the high and educated classes. While the excitement of the war continued, this alteration was not generally perceived, and the great majority of the nation was carried enthusiastically along with the splendid tide of national glory. But no sooner had the cannon that hailed Wellington's victories ceased to thrill every British heart with exultation, than the incessant and daily influence of the press was perceptible, and it became evident to the most casual observer that the tide was setting rapidly in, in favour of liberal principles.

This tendency was increased, to an extent which has never been sufficiently appreciated, by the influence of foreign travelling upon our young men of all ranks, but especially upon those of the higher and noble classes. Travelling has a natural tendency to increase the liberal principles of every intelligent mind; but this salutary influence was swelled to a dangerous degree, by the excessive admiration which Englishmen everywhere found existing among the most ardent and enthusiastic in the Continental states, for the free institutions of this country, and the aversion to tyranny which they contracted from the example of its operation which so many despotic empires afforded. The dangers of revolution and democracy were past, and matter of history; those of despotism were present, and matter of observation. Hence the one sank deep in the minds of the thinking few, and the other guided the thoughts of the inconsiderate many; in other words, the one affected the tens, the other the thousands. It became a matter of common observation, accordingly, that, whatever the political principles of a young man were when he set out to the Continent, he always returned a Whig or a Liberal; and numbers of the most important men in the country, who stood by the vessel of the state during all the storms of the French Revolution, had the mortification of discovering that the inheritors of their titles and fortunes had abandoned all their political principles amidst the flattery of French liberalism, or the smiles of Italian beauty.

Meanwhile the Tories remained universally, and to an extent which now appears almost inconceivable, negligent,