spectacle of lost place and patronage, frustrated jobs and ruined hopes, in the face; we will and we must at all hazards cling by our places, and clasp them to our bosoms, and give our character and our principles to the winds. This last trick was a desperate one; but it has succeeded for the moment-let us rub on, and hope that when the pinch comes again we may have equal luck. Whoever knew the personal boldness and frank temper of Lord Melbourne must have been astounded to see him give in to such a line of action as he now followed. In public he was silent; in private he never denied the motive which had induced him tor do such things as a few years before he would have shuddered to contemplate. For office he cared somewhat himself; as he once,. with an unexampled candour, declared, he loved the excitement of it. But no man could more easily have given up such an enjoyment; to none would the sacrifice personally have cost less. He was fond of easy society, fond of books, naturally indolent, as highly accomplished and most amiable epicurean: he was by that time very wealthy-he had enough to fall back upon. It was far otherwise when he had to face his friends and followers. Let us at once confess the truth for him, which he not rarely did for himself (peradventure against himself)—he could not stand the loud and furious roar which would have shook not only Brookes's but Whitehall, the instant that his throwing up the Government: should have blasted all their hopes. And let it not be imagined that he did not perfectly understand the pure selfishness of those people-or that he was for a moment deceived as to their real feelings towards himself. He well remembered how they had used to dislike him (but that is a feeble word for the thing); how bitterly they resented his supposed junction with Mr. Canning, bur real abandonment of the Opposition, at a time when it could i afford the loss of such a bright ornament; he well remembered their unmeasured attacks on him, both in Parliament and through the press, for his joining Lord Castlereagh on the Manchester riots, and afterwards for his taking office under the Duke as Irish Secretary. He had not forgotten the bitterness of their hatred, the spite of their vengeance, the ostentatious proclamation of their incurable distrust of him. Nor had he been unaware that such cordial feelings continued up to the formation of the Government in 1830-nay, long after that event; for he was, of al the Grey cabinet, the man in least favour with the Party' during the first three years of its existence. All the advantages they de rived from him; his clever and dexterous administration of the Home Department at a season of grievous intestine disorder(a dexterity including no participation in, no knowledge of certain manœuvres since brought home to some of those acting VOL. LXXXVI. NO. CLXXI. L under under him, and assumed by the poor blind Radicals to have had his personal sanction);—his admirable conduct in debate; his high sense of public and personal honour on almost all occasions; his noble exterior and captivating manners; the tact and the fine sense which shone through every speech he made; the favour he enjoyed of his most estimable colleagues, as well as of the House he adorned;-all were vain as appeals to the Whigs. Their prejudices were deeply rooted; they could never trust one who had left off their colours; they could never bear one whom they could even call a Whig; they could never forgive him their own abuse of him for so many years. But, all at once, another spirit. possessed them, and in June, 1834, he becoming Premier when Lord Grey retired, the man of their hatred became the man of their heart; and a more perfectly submissive crew, nay, a more admiring, confiding, esteeming, respecting, adoring set of followers, no chief of a party ever had than Lord Melbourne had in all good Whigs of either House or of neither House, in Church and in State, in town and in country. This devotion to him continued while he was their chief, that is, while he could keep them in office; but he, aware of its groundwork, estimated the obsequiousness at its just value. If he had allowed himself to be at all blinded, various circumstances attending a certain scene in Westminster Hall, when it was felt that his fate hung on the verdict of a jury, must have removed the bandage—on that day it was clearly shown how little the Whigs cared for the distress of the manhow entirely their thoughts and feelings were engrossed by the peril of the party-whose fate, they saw, hung upon him. Most plainly had it been manifested by how slight a tenure he held their allegiance, how suddenly the bond would be snapped which bound them to him—and he had not courage to snap it. This is, and we believe he never denied it, the true cause of his submitting, in 1839, to remain in office. He durst not face the storm of the Whig indignation which would have burst on his head had he, by acting as he ought, incurred a retirement fatal to them. Having once got into this bad habit of sacrificing strict principle to personal feeling, though of no sordid or even selfish kind, he went on so to the last. Such are uniformly the consequences of departure from the right and the straight path, by whatever selfdeceptions it may be glossed over, by whatever amiable feelings it may be extenuated! In 1841 he never ought to have dissolved the Parliament, because he and his whole Government well knew that he must be left in a minority, and therefore that his dissolution could have but the one unconstitutional object of increasing the force of the opposition to the new Ministers, their successors. But he yielded again, in spite of his better judgment, and and sounder principles, to the clamour and the threats of his followers. One had a job in view, which six weeks would enable him to clutch; another had an honour to obtain which that period of office would give him a fair chance of possessing; all had seats to defend which they could far more easily keep if their party were in office at the general election. So the fear of facing Brookes's and the party indignation once more kept him from discharging his duty both to his sovereign and his country. The furious appetite of the Whigs for place seemed to grow with what it fed on. The bitter taste of opposition seemed to terrify them more, the longer their palates had been trained to the sweets of government. All regard for principle of any kind was now lost in the dread of retiring from place. Nay, there are those who affirm, with a confidence that hardly can result from mere conjecture, that some persons of no mean mark and station, exercising no little influence on their proceedings, were mainly actuated by the calculation, somewhat more accurate than noble, of the difference between their salary for seven or eight weeks when in office and their pensionary allowance when displaced. Such, however, was the result, and such were the feelings of Whigs debauched by so many years of enjoyment of place. Their history since those days is only a repetition of the same scenes. Sir Robert Peel chose to throw away the whole game, and destroy for the present the party of the Conservatives. His fault, in the eyes of the high Tories, was, that he had again taken a leaf out of the Whig book-he had become a Free-trader. The Whigs saw their way to power-they joined their bitter and scornful enemies the high Tories, and joined them in opposing a measure which they themselves approved of and even planned. What of that? The junction would displace Sir Robert Peel. The Tories were against him merely because he had adopted the course most applauded by the Whigs. What of that? His overthrow for adopting Whig measures would bring Whigs into office again-and that was enough for them. A distinguished literary ornament of their party, in his famous letter to the Edinburgh Snuffman a few years ago, said, that nothing could do any good as to Ireland unless the Irish Priests were paid-but that nobody but a madman would dream. of proposing that measure. We have here the materials for a complete Whig definition of insanity. That conduct is sane, whatever else it may be, that tends to keep Whigs in office. That Whig is merely mad who for a moment thinks of seriously proposing any measure, however, in his eyes, clearly beneficial to the British Empire, which might, could, would, or should cost the Whigs a retreat from Downing Street. No conclusion could have been more logical-no avowal more candid. Was this popular oracle somewhat too plain for the taste of the inner conclave of Olympus-the dii majorum gentium? There were other things in the same utterance that could hardly have been very digestible, but on them we should be ashamed to comment. Since their return to their paradise they have become absolutely insignificant. They have lost every vestige of popularity; their adherents are heartily ashamed of them; the country is heartily sick of them; they have not strength to carry a single measure without the help of the men they have by their placehunting intrigues ejected from power; one Secretary is fast ridding us of our Colonies-another has already rid England of her high place and authority as the standing guardian of law and right among Foreign Nations; and they drag out a despicable and, we believe, a wretched existence, only suffered to linger on in official life because the quarrel of the Conservatives among themselves prevents any one from now taking the Government, as no one will consent to take it, like the Whigs, upon the terms of having office without power. ART. V.-1. Speech of Sir Robert Peel, Bart., delivered on Friday, July 6th, 1849, on the State of the Nation. London, 1849. 2. Two Letters to the Right Hon. H. Labouchere, M.P., on the Balance of Trade ascertained from the Market Value of all Articles Imported as compared with the Market Value of all Articles Exported during the last Four Years. By C. N. Newdegate, Esq., M.P. London, 1849. 3. Sophisms of Free Trade and Popular Political Economy Examined. By a Barrister. London, 1849. 4. Report of the Proceedings and Speeches at the Public Meeting of the National Association held at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, on Tuesday the 26th of June, 1849. London, 1849. M. THIERS has atoned for many of his literary and political transgressions by a recent essay, De la Propriété,' in the outset of which he pathetically laments that the spread of false science' should have rendered it necessary, for the security of the social fabric from the assaults of Communism, that even the most self-evident of moral truths should be vindicated by formal demonstration;-a process which he designates as alike difficult and irksome. We have happily in this country not yet advanced quite so far on the road to ruin. But if in France the ascendancy of a shallow philosophy has rendered it necessary that the rights of property should be vindicated against the pretensions of an anarchical democracy, it is scarcely less requisite that in England property itself should be vigorously defended against the insidious approaches of that same 'false science' which is gradually sapping the foundations of national prosperity. In this spirited performance M. Thiers relied for the success which we hope and trust he has achieved, on an appeal to the common sense of his countrymen from the theories of Communism. We too would appeal to the sober sense of our own less volatile countrymen, from the delusive theories advanced under the appellation of 'Free Trade.' And we must begin with saying that, though we shall use this phrase in the following pages, we take it simply as a conventional one, which it would be inconvenient to discard, but consider its employment in conjunction with our present system of commerce as in fact a philological petty larceny. It may serve a party purpose to play on popular ignorance by designating Free Imports as Free Trade,' but the system has no greater affinity to a comprehensive and liberal commercial policy, than have the doctrines of Ledru Rollin to a just and equitable distribution of national wealth. It is as a branch of the science of political economy that Free Trade advances its claims; and it is on the conclusions deduced by legislators from the received dogmas of that science, that the important changes made of late years in our commercial system have been entirely founded. In examining, therefore, the policy of those changes, it is obviously necessary that we should first test the soundness of the assumed principles on which legislation has proceeded-in other words, that we should satisfy ourselves that political economy as propounded by modern authorities affords a safe standard for the guidance of the commercial statesman. If we should find those authorities concurrent on all leading points of the science they profess, great deference will be primâ facie due to their opinions. If the propositions they advance as axioms be, as all real axioms must be, self-evident, natural, incontrovertible, then will our task be restricted to ascertaining whether specific changes have or have not been made in accordance with these obvious truths. But if it should appear that not only are the most eminent professors of the science at issue on some of its elementary and most important propositions, but that on the same question the same writer may frequently be detected in opposite and irreconcileable conclusions-and if it should further appear that many of the dogmas put forward as axioms are merely arbitrary assumptions-then may we unhesitatingly reject the |