which fulfilled one-half of them, would have completely revolutionised the country.

From the outset of their career, or rather, since the great change in the constitution by the Reform Bill was completed, the Whigs were placed in a false position, from which no human wisdom could by possibility extricate them, when the strange and unheard-of coalition of parties by which they were wafted into power, become subject to dissolution. The Ultra-Tories, who, in their anguish at Roman Catholic Emancipation being forced upon them, had joined in the outcry against the Duke of Wellington, soon found that, so far from Protestant principles being re-asserted in the Legislature, by the extension of the suffrage under the Reform Bill, the very reverse was the case. A grim and hideous array of Papists, Dissenters, Infidels, Radicals, and Revolutionists, rose up before them; and the Lichfield House contract, with the majority which it gave in Parliament to the Movement party and the Melbourne Ministry, whom it installed in power, seemed to banish all hope of effecting any return to the Protestant constitution of the empire. The insidious attempts which were made to undermine our religious institutions, by introducing generally a system of education, which, professing to detach instruction altogether from sectarian influence, in effect proposed to hand over the sharpened intellects of educated man to the unrestrained dominion of his worst and most selfish passions-at once revealed the magnitude of the danger with which not merely the Protestant institutions of the Empire, but Christianity itself, in these realms, was threatened. The subservience to O'Connell which has characterised the Liberal Administration, ever since the time of the Lichfield House compact; the discreditable dependence upon furious priests and hireling agitators in the sister island; and the open attempt to subject the whole property and education of that country to the dominion of a savage multitude, guided by a disciplined body of zealous and bloodthirsty priests, showed, at the same time, what reliance was to be placed upon the maintenance of the Protestant institutions or the Reformed faith, in these islands, if this coalition of Whigs, Radicals, Papists, Dissenters, and Infidels, continued much longer in power; and at length completely opened the eyes of the real friends of

the Monarchy and the Church of England in Great Britain to the fatal results of that mistaken policy on their part, which, from indignation at a temporary aberration from principle on the part of their friends, had permanently opened the gates to their enemies.

The agitation which, at the same time, under Ministerial auspices, was got up against the agricultural interests of the empire, and the loud clamour which was everywhere raised by the Whig Radicals against the Corn Laws, gradually opened the eyes of the landed proprietors and the rural population to the certain sacrifice which awaited them, from the anxiety of the Liberal Administration, at all hazards, to propitiate the affections and gain the support of the democratic multitude in towns, by holding out to them the delusive prospect of cheap bread and cheap provisions. Although Lord Melbourne declared, in his place as Prime Minister, that the abolition of the Corn Laws would set "man against man, class against class, and would be the most insane project which had ever entered into the heart of man to conceive;" yet it was not the less apparent that Ministers would infallibly adopt this alternative rather than quit their places, and that the expedient of the big and the little loaf was the last trump card which they would play out before surrendering the deal. This conviction, coupled with the intense disgust excited in the rural population of the empire by the Whig-Radical alliance with O'Connell, and the slight openly shown to the religious institutions of the country, and the efforts unceasingly made to undermine them, affords the true explanation of the strong and general reaction against Liberal principles, which has now proclaimed itself in the counties both of Great Britain and Ireland, in language too strong and decisive to be misunderstood.

While the religious and rural classes of the empire thus shrank from all contact with the proclaimed enemies of its national faith and agricultural interests, the manufacturing and commercial interests were not less shaken in their confidence in the Movement Ministry, by the utter incapacity which they evinced in the management of the financial affairs of the nation, and the perilous predicament into which they had brought both our national honour and

colonial interests by their incessant truckling to the democratic multitude in the towns in the British islands, who, blind to all ultimate consequences, clamoured only for an immediate reduction of taxation. While their pampering Papineau and the Canadian traitors at length brought on that noted rebellion in our noble Transatlantic colonies, which all men of sense had seen could not, under such a system of policy, be long averted, their policy in China brought our connexions with the Celestial Empire to such a condition, that the arrogance of the Chinese became insupportable, and we were driven to a war without their having made the smallest preparation for it, which their usual vacillating policy has caused to be hitherto attended with little honour, immense expense, and fearful loss of life. At length, when driven to their last shifts by the decline of their parliamentary majority, and the aroused and general indignation of the country, they openly threw off the mask, and brought forward their famous Sugar Duties and Timber Scheme in their last Budget, which, in the hope of deluding the urban populace by the cry of cheap bread, cheap sugar, and cheap timber, in effect proposed to ruin our West India Colonies, our North American possessions, and British agriculture.

Nor were the colonial and landed interests the only ones which the reckless policy of the Whig-Radical Administration exposed to danger, nor their attachments the only ones which were now rapidly turning into hatred. Still more profound, because based on a sense of ingratitude, and an ulcerated feeling of disappointment, was the indignation with which the Melbourne Administration came ere long to be regarded by the extreme section of its Radical supporters. They, as every person of respectability and intelligence in the country soon saw, looked to the Reform Bill only as the stepping-stone to revolution, and confidently expected that the parading of tricolor flags through the streets, and the shoutings and yells of the revolutionary mob around the hustings, would soon be followed in this country, as it had been in France, by the division of estates, the ruin of the Church, and the sweeping off of two-thirds of the national debt. When they perceived that these effects did not immediately take place, and that the fixed policy of the Whig cabinet

was, to yield as few revolutionary changes as was consistent with the maintenance of their own places; when they saw, in short, that the constitution was not to be sacrificed at a blow, but husbanded and dealt out piecemeal, only as the necessities of Government required its progressive alienation, their indignation knew no bounds. With fierce vituperation, and abuse loud and long, because heartfelt and deserved, they turned upon their former cherished and popular leaders, and reviled them with language not less furious and vituperative than that had been extravagant, with which, in the fulness of revolutionary expectation, they had so recently lauded and bespattered them. The origin of the Chartists and the Socialists; the bloodshed, misery, and anxiety, which the former have brought upon various parts of the realm, and the fearful poison which the latter have instilled into that sacred fountain of all private and public good-the domestic relations of the people have all sprung from the intense feeling of disappointment which has come to pervade the most fiery and corrupted of the working classes, from the failure of the Whig-Radical Ministry to advance with railway speed in the march of revolution. Thus the multitude in towns, upon whose vehement passions and physical violence the Whigs had mainly relied on the popular elections which carried the Reform Bill, became detached from them, simply because the Whigs, who had got possession of power and enjoyed its sweets, were in no hurry to pull down, faster than was necessary to preserve their tenancy, the enchanted palace in which they were so comfortably lodged.

It was in the midst of these combined feelings of patriotic indignation, religious zeal, well-founded apprehension, and revolutionary disappointment, that the late elections took place; and their result has completely demonstrated that, for the time at least, the political sins of the Whig-Radical faction have brought upon them a storm of discontent, against which all the favour of the Crown, and of the Ladies of the Bed-chamber, will be unable to afford any shelter. Out of a million of electors in the united empire, upwards of seven hundred thousand have recorded their votes against them a vast majority in a nation so recently convulsed with revolutionary passion, and then worked upon by a fiendish

effort, of all others the most likely to rouse the revolutionary flame-the cry of cheap bread, acting upon a population in many places suffering under severe distress. The extraordinary and admitted failure of this cry, raised under such circumstances, not only affords decisive evidence of the extremely low ebb to which the Whig-Radical Rump has fallen in the general estimation of the country; but also affords the most gratifying proof, that a practical acquaintance with the evils of democracy, and the incessant efforts of the higher class of our statesmen and writers in the press, to enlighten the people of this country as to its necessary tendency, have not been unattended with the desired result in staying the march of revolution.

In truth, nothing can be clearer to those who consider the matter coolly and dispassionately, than that a government which sets out upon the principle of yielding to the movement, and purchasing a precarious and dishonoured existence by sacrificing, one after another, all the great institutions and most important interests of society to the incessant craving of the revolutionary monster, must shortly either succeed in destroying the empire, or be destroyed itself. The principle of progressively advancing from the destruction of one interest to that of another, in order to keep alive the democratic passion, is so utterly inconsistent with anything like good government, that it is altogether impossible that it can fail either in bringing destruction upon the nation which permits its rulers to advance in such a career, or in creating such a storm of varied discontent throughout the country as must speedily prove fatal to its authors. Such is the eternal law of nature; the just punishment provided in all ages for revolutionary ambition and violence. If persisted in, it must destroy the nation; if checked, the nation may be saved, but its authors must perish.

The present fall of the Whigs, therefore, equally with that of the Tories ten years ago, has been owing to general causes; and it is only by searching with scrutinising eye the circumstances which have produced these extraordinary results, that either the great historical moral of these times is to be revealed, or the errors avoided which have led to such apparently opposite, but in reality consistent, results.