We must pause for a moment to observe upon the consistency and logic of the last extract. If the Lords attempt to have an opinion of their own, they should be reduced to passive obedience by a new creation of peers; and when so reduced they should be altogether abolished for such passive obedience. This is true revolutionary logic and law.

'When the peers, or any portion of them, make the enjoyment of their privileges the most essential object of their political efforts, they forfeit the condition on which those privileges were vested in them.'Times, June 15.

This, again, is admirable. We attack your privileges-if you submit, well and good, they are gone! if you resist-better still, you have forfeited them, and they are gone!-either way, gone! The child's play of head, I win, and tail, you lose,' is the prototype of this!

'Do they (the Tory peers) hope to repeal the Reform Acts, and repossess themselves of their rotten boroughs? Can they blind themselves to the fact, that the aristocratic principle is essentially destroyed in this country? Blind and infatuated must the Tory aristocracy be not to perceive that a regal revolution has been effected!'-Morn. Chron., June 15.

And these are the sentiments promulgated by the general adherents and supporters, if not by the still nearer connexions, of that Mr. Grey who so warmly urged, in 1795, the prosecution of Mr. Reeves, for having in a theoretic Essay on the English Constitution,' assigned to the monarchical branch a character too substantive and predominant, and who on that occasion reproached the existing government

for having suffered this daring breach of privilege and this libel on the constitution to go without punishment.'-Mr. Grey's Speech, Parl. Debates, 23d Nov. 1795.

-Of that Lord Grey who so recently as the 13th June, 1827, on the occasion of some slight and indistinct menaces made by the Liberals of that day against the House of Lords for rejecting a Corn Bill, spoke as follows:

They had been threatened with a worse bill if the present was not carried. He hoped their lordships would not shrink, if a new bill came before them, from examining and scrutinizing it most rigidly, with a firm resolution to alter or amend it if requisite; and if a worse bill were brought forward, he trusted they would meet it with a determination of the most strenuous opposition. He had said so much, in consequence of the observations which had been made respecting what had been described as the formidable consequences likely to be produced by the fate of this measure-consequences, however, with which he had no apprehension of its being attended-but if it did

come

come to that kind of encounter, between the House of Lords and a great part of the population of the country-his (Earl Grey's) part was taken, he was one of an ORDER with which he was resolved to stand or fall, and to the last hour of his existence he would never yield up one jot of those rights and privileges.'-Times, June 14, 1827.

'Wits have short memories, but Whigs have none !'

But this bold proposition for levelling the peerage as a body -which, we must presume, Mr. Grey no longer considers a punishable breach of privilege'-'a libel' on the constitution is helped out by individual slander and personal misrepresentation. In describing the majority in the Peers, the Morning

Chronicle talks of

The hungry and reckless paupers, raised to the peerage by the Pitt and Castlereagh administrations.'-Morn. Chron., June 18.

How can a journal that means to preserve any character venture on assertions which can be easily and so conclusively refuted?

-

We take its own list of the division-(the names of peers, Morning Chronicle, June 5) in that list we find, for the Duke of Wellington's motion, 72; and against it, 63: of the 72, only twenty-six were raised to the peerage in the Pitt and Castlereagh administrations, (as they are somewhat inaccurately called,) and amongst them are some of the wealthiest of their class. Of the 63, no less than twenty-nine have been raised to the peerage in the Pitt, Castlereagh, and Whig administrations; and amongst them happen to be some of the very poorest of the nobility. So that the peers of more modern creation constitute a much larger proportion of the minority than of the majority. Again; what is termed the Pitt and Castlereagh administration' may be said to have lasted from 1782 to 1822, with intervals amounting to about four years that is, about thirty-six years. These thirty-six years supply twenty-six peers to the majority; while the two years and a half of Whig administration have added twelve to the minority.

But these are small and very inconsiderable matters, on whichever side antiquity of creation or individual wealth might preponderate; and still more contemptible were the endeavours of the ministerial press to misrepresent the Duke of Wellington's motion as involving approbation either of Dom Miguel's personal claims, or of the despotic principles on which they allege his government to be founded. Did these writers believe that the public had forgotten his grace's whole course of policy with regard to Portugal, of which, if any reproach can be made to it, it may be said that it insisted too much on the private character of Dom Miguel, and delayed too long a recognition, which (even if he

had

had no other than the de facto claim) it became, after acknowledging King Louis Philippe, alike inconsistent and unjust to refuse? The torrent of libel and calumny which was poured out against the House of Lords on this account has already passed away; the people felt no interest in so monstrous a fiction, and we believe that the press never so signally failed in leading public opinion as it did on this occasion. But the truth is, that it failed because everybody saw that it was neither Miguel nor Portugal, nor even the address of the House of Lords, which were the real objects of clamour. It was not a foreign, but a domestic question that excited the violence.

The Conservative strength of the House of Lords alarmed the revolutionary party for the success of the destructive meatures then in progress; and while they affected to deplore the triumph of Dom Miguel, their real anxiety was about the fate of the bill for the spoliation of the Irish branch of our church. That bill, amongst many objectionable details, and many, we think, dangerous errors, involved one principle so entirely subversive of all justice of all right of property-of the very foundation of our social system-namely, the confiscation of the surplus of church property to the use of the state-that it was confidently and justly anticipated that the House of Lords, the especial guardians of the rights of property, could never be brought to sanction such a principle of spoliation. Now, this principle of spoliation was notoriously, the only part of the bill on which the radical party set any great value; it promised to be the first blow against the two objects which, in all times and circumstances, republicans and levellers have been most anxious to overthrow-the established church, and the rights to landed property; and it was in the vain hope of intimidating the House of Lords into an acquiescence in this and similar measures, that calumnies so groundless and menaces so audacious were directed against it. But, as we have said, the public was not to be deluded, the people were not to be excited, by such a flimsy pretence and so dangerous a design. It became evident that the time was not yet arrived when the House of Lords could be either intimidated from doing its duty, or abolished for having done it.

Then came his Majesty's ministers on the stage, and exhibited such an instance of weakness, folly, and inconsistency, as, with all the examples they had already given of these qualities, has really astonished us. They withdrew the confiscation clause; and withdrew it-on what grounds?

When the bill was first proposed, they had stated that its operation would create, without injury to either the bishops or their tenants, a disposable surplus of 3,000,000l. They never condescended,

*

condescended, indeed, to explain how, if two parties are jointly possessed of the whole of a certain property, and if it is to be divided between them without loss to either, a third party, a stranger, should get 3,000,000l. by the division. This process of Althorp-arithmetic is certainly not to be found in Cocker; though there is something like it in that more venerable authority, which records how an umpire divided an oyster between two parties, by giving each a shell and swallowing the fish as his own perquisite. The temper and strength of the Conservative party in the House of Lords, however, opened the ministers' eyes to this little error; and accordingly, after one hundred and forty-six clauses of the bill had been disposed of, they were obliged to confess that its leading principle and most important promise was a delusion--an arithmetical mistake-for that, in fact, it appeared there would be no surplus at all; they were sorry for it-very-but the fact was so.' They had undertaken to cabbage a coat for my Lord Peter out of a new set of liveries which they were preparing for his brother Martin's servants -but, like the tailor in Laputa, they had made a slight error in the calculation, and it turned out that they had already expended all their cloth. But the theory which promised this surplus-sunbeams to be extracted from cucumbers-was not more absurd than the argument used to justify the proposed appropriation of it, namely, that when a legislative act improves property, the profit accrues not to the owner but to the State-a very palatable doctrine to those who obtain acts of parliament for bridges, railroads, and canals, but not quite so satisfactory to the neighbouring proprietors. How would Mr. Stanley like to see the State appropriating to public uses the increase which the Manchester rail-road may eventually make in the value of the ground at each side of it? But out of that question he escaped, by abandoning the visionary surplus.

Then came another, and, indeed, the only reasonable proposition in the whole discussion-that, as the surplus had vanished, the clause disposing of the surplus might as well vanish also. This was, of course, violently objected to by all the Irish members; they saw no occasion in the world for such a course,-on the contrary, they thought the principle of disposing of something which not only did not belong to them, but which also had no existence in rerum naturâ, was essentially Irish, and should by no means be abandoned.

This proposition the ministers did not venture to deny, but then they said that they were afraid that even Lord Cloncurry might take umbrage at the legislative enactment of a bull instead of a bill, and that there was nothing they dreaded so much as a ' collision

6

collision between the Houses on a question in which no profit was to be obtained.' This seemed a strange reason from men who, the week before, had dragged the House of Commons into direct collision with the House of Lords on the question of the Portuguese neutrality, which was certainly not a much more profitable question than the confiscation of church property; but though the argument was not in their mouths very consistent, it was a very sound one, and by the help of the Conservatives they induced the house to ratify it;-the hundred and forty-seventh clause followed the fate of the three millions of surplus, and

'Agnès et le corps mort s'en sont allés ensemble.'

In the reports of the debates on this subject two incidental circumstances are worth notice. The one is the avowal of Lord John Russell -himself that the Reform Bill was a Revolution,-for we suppose that must have been his meaning when-deprecating a new collision with the House of Lords-he stated that he was not one of those who thought the country could bear a REVOLUTION every year.' A piquant and pregnant expression, which gives us a perfect measure of the discretion and integrity of the great statesman who uttered it. The other remarkable circumstance was, that in the whole of the debate, the ministers-even when they were making a concession to common sense and common justice, did it on the poorest and narrowest grounds-confessed that they were not agreed amongst themselves on the principles of their proceeding, though they managed to concur in the result; and instead of taking an open, honest, and intelligible line against the Annual Revolution, which alarms even Lord John, contrived to leave that revolution more powerful, in our humble opinion, as well as more exasperated, at the close of the debate, than it was at the beginning. They have stimulated appetites already too ravenous, and provoked tempers already too violent, by showing them their prey, and then suddenly snatching it from their jaws. And Mr. Stanley, whose importance and utility as a public man rest chiefly on his professed reluctance to overthrow the church, hasunfortunately for himself, and we fear for the church-forfeited, by this miserable juggle, his best claims to parliamentary influence and public confidence.

The result, we fear, is, that, although the crisis may be postponed, the hostility against the House of Lords, which the ministers began, and with which they have inoculated the House of Commons and the Press, is become more formidable than ever, and only waits the occasion for another, and, perhaps, final, explosion. Towards effecting any object, however odious and unpopular, the first great step is to have it talked of-to familiarize it to the mouths and minds of men. The abolition of the House of Lords