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AN APOLOGUE.

REFORM SPEECHES.

A COUNTRY PROSPEROUS IN SPITE OF POLITICAL EVILS.

THEY tell you, gentlemen, that you have grown rich and powerful with these rotten boroughs, and that it would be madness to part with them, or to alter a constitution which had produced such happy effects. There happens, gentlemen, to live near my parsonage, a labouring man of very superior character and understanding to his fellow-labourers; and who has made such good use of that superiority, that he has saved what is (for his station in life) a very considerable sum of money, and if his existence is extended to the common period, he will die rich. It happens, however, that he is (and long has been) troubled with violent stomachic pains, for which he has hitherto obtained no relief, and which really are the bane and torment of his life. Now, if my excellent labourer were to send for a physician, and to consult him respecting this malady, would it not be very singular language if our doctor were to say to him, "My good friend, you surely will not be so rash as to attempt to get rid of these pains in your stomach. Have you not grown rich with these pains in your stomach? have not you risen under them from poverty to prosperity? has not your situation, since you were first attacked, been improving every year? You surely will not be so foolish and so indiscreet as to part with the pains in your stomach?"—Why, what would be the answer of the rustic to this nonsensical monition? "Monster of rhubarb!" he would say, "I am not rich in consequence of the pains in my stomach, but in spite of the pains in my stomach; and I should have been ten times richer, and fifty times happier, if I had never had any pains in my

*From a speech on the Reform Bill, at Taunton.

stomach at all." Gentlemen, these rotten boroughs are your pains in the stomach-and you would have been a much richer and greater people if you had never had them at all. Your wealth and your power have been owing, not to the debased and corrupted parts of the House of Commons, but to the many independent and honourable members whom it has always contained within its walls. If there had been a few more of these very valuable members for close boroughs, we should, I verily believe, have been by this time about as free as Denmark, Sweden, or the Germanized states of Italy.

SPEECH AT TAUNTON.*

MR. BAILIFF, I have spoken so often on this subject, that I am sure both you and the gentlemen here present will be obliged to me for saying but little, and that favour I am as willing to confer as you can be to receive it. I feel most deeply the event which has taken place, because, by putting the two houses of Parliament in collision with each other, it will impede the public business, and diminish the public prosperity. I feel it as a churchman, because I cannot but blush to see so many dignitaries of the church arrayed against the wishes and happiness of the people. I feel it more than all, because I believe it will sow the seeds of deadly hatred between the aristocracy and the great mass of the people. The loss of the bill I do not feel, and for the best of all possible reasons -because I have not the slightest idea that it is lost. I have no more doubt, before the expiration of the winter, that this bill will pass, than I have that the annual tax bills will pass, and greater certainty than this no man can have, for Franklin tells us there are but two things certain in this world-death and taxes. As for the possibility of the House of Lords preventing, ere long, a reform of Parliament, I hold it to be the most absurd notion that ever entered into human imagination. I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the lords to stop the progress of reform, reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs. Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824, there set in a great flood upon that town-the tide rose to an incredible height-the waves rushed in * Reported in the Taunton Courier, Oct. 12, 1831.

upon the houses, and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house, with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigourously pushing away the Atlantic ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent at a slop, or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest. Gentlemen, be at your ease-be quiet and steady. You will beat Mrs. Partington.*

They tell you, gentlemen, in the debates by which we have been lately occupied, that the bill is not justified by experience. I do not think this true, but if it were true, nations are sometimes compelled to act without experience for their guide, and to trust to their own sagacity for the anticipation of consequences. The instances where this country has been compelled thus to act have been so eminently successful, that I see no cause for fear, even if we were acting in the manner imputed to us by our enemies. What precedents and what experience were there at the Reformation, when the country, with one unanimous effort, pushed out the Pope, and his grasping and ambitious clergy?-What experience, when, at the Revolution, we drove away our ancient race of kings, and

*Did Sydney Smith invent Mrs. Partington? A communication in Notes and Queries (Nov. 16, 1850), may seem to establish Mrs. Partington as a real personage, but the evidence is not conclusive. The writer says, the original Mrs. P. was a respectable old lady, living at Sidmouth, in Devonshire, and her encounter with the ocean, when mop and broom failed, and she was driven to take refuge in the second story of her cottage on the beach, occurred, to the best of his recollection, during an awful storm in November, 1824, when some fifty or sixty ships were lost at Plymouth. He well recollects, he adds, reading in the Devonshire newspapers of the time, an account of Mrs. Partington; but he may have read only Smith's speech, which he wrongly ascribes to Lord Brougham.

Mrs. Partington has acquired additional celebrity by the pleasant sayings in the vein of Mrs. Malaprop, which have been widely scattered over the world, in the newspapers. This peculiar pleasantry, a humourous dislocation of the English language, with grotesque associations of ideas, has had various imitators; but the original American Mrs. Partington owes her graces to Mr. B. P. Shillaber, for several years associated with the Boston Post, in which the genuine sayings are recorded. They were collected into a volume in 1854, with the title, "The Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington, and others of the Family."

IGNORANCE OF THE COUNTRY.

317

And

chose another family more congenial to our free principles?yet to those two events, contrary to experience, and unguided by precedents, we owe all our domestic happiness, and civil and religious freedom-and having got rid of corrupt priests and despotic kings, by our sense and our courage, are we now to be intimidated by the awful danger of extinguishing boroughmongers, and shaking from our necks the ignominious yokė which their baseness has imposed upon it? Go on, they say, as you have done for these hundred years last past. I answer, it is impossible-five hundred people now write and read where one hundred wrote and read fifty years ago. The iniquities and enormities of the borough system are now known to the meanest of the people. You have a different sort of men to deal with-you must change, because the beings whom you govern are changed. After all, and to be short, I must say, that it has always appeared to me to be the most absolute nonsense, that we cannot be a great, or a rich and happy nation, without suffering ourselves to be bought and sold every five years, like a pack of negro-slaves. I hope I am not a very rash man, but I would launch boldly into this experiment without any fear of consequences, and I believe there is not a man here present who would not cheerfully embark with me. As to the enemies of the bill, who pretend to be reformers, I know them, I believe, better than you do, and I earnestly caution you against them. You will have no more of reform than they are compelled to grantyou will have no reform at all, if they can avoid it—you will be hurried into a war to turn your attention from reform. They do not understand you- they will not believe in the improvement you have made-they think the English of the present day are as the English of the times of Queen Anne or George the First. They know no more of the present state of their own country, than of the state of the Esquimaux Indians. Gentlemen, I view the ignorance of the present state of the country with the most serious concern, and I believe they will one day or another waken into conviction with horror and dismay. I will omit no means of rousing them to a sense of their danger; for this object I cheerfully sign the petition proposed by Dr. Kinglake, which I consider to be the wisest and most moderate of the two.

318

THE BOROUGH SYSTEM.

SPEECH ON THE REFORM BILL.

STICK to the Bill-it is your Magna Charta, and your Runnymede. King John made a present to the barons. King William has made a similar present to you. Never mind, common qualities good in common times. If a man does not vote for the Bill, he is unclean the plague-spot is upon him—push him into the Lazaretto of the last century, with Wetherell and Sadler-purify the air before you approach him-bathe your hands in chloride of lime, if you have been contaminated by his touch.

So far from its being a merely theoretical improvement, I put it to any man, who is himself embarked in a profession, or has sons in the same situation, if the unfair influence of boroughmongers has not perpetually thwarted him in his lawful career of ambition, and professional emolument? "I have been in three general engagements at sea," said an old sailor, "have been twice wounded: I commanded the boats when the French frigate, the ASTROLABE, was cut out so gallantly." "Then you are made a post-captain ?” "No; I was very near it, but― Lieutenant Thomson cut me out, as I cut out the French frigate; his father is townclerk of the borough, for which Lord F— is member, and there my chance was finished." In the same manner, all over England, you will find great scholars rotting on curacies-brave captains starving in garretsprofound lawyers decayed and mouldering in the Inns of Court, because the parsons, warriors, and advocates, of boroughmongers, must be crammed to saturation, before there is a morsel of bread for the man who does not sell his votes, and put his country up at auction; and though this is of every-day occurrence, the borough system, we are told, is no practical evil.

Who can bear to walk through a slaughterhouse? blood, garbage, stomachs, entrails, legs, tails, kidneys, horrors-I often walk a mile about to avoid it. What a scene of disgust and horror is an election—the base and infamous traffic of principles—a candidate of high character reduced to such means—the perjury and evasion of agents-the detestable rapacity of voters-the ten days' dominion, of mammon, and Belial. The Bill lessens itbegins the destruction of such practices-affords some chance, and some means of turning public opinion against bribery, and of rendering it infamous.