and Sir James Graham, of the Duke of Richmond and Lord Ripon, announce in our present convulsions. In all these cases, the break in the once united and powerful Liberal party was occasioned by the same cause, and in all they offered to the nation the same opportunity of salvation. This cause was the law of nature, which in nations, not less than individuals, propels those who yield to sinful passions, from one indulgence to another, till, unless early wisdom checks their career, they fall the victims of their own extravagance; this opportunity is the break-off which the virtuous, but deluded, make from the reckless and ambitious, when the designs of the latter are fairly unveiled, and the peril of their career is clearly manifested. Upon the strength of the patient at this crisis, his future destiny depends. If his constitution is weakened, but not destroyed, he may surmount the malady; if his strength is gone, he will rapidly sink under its violence.

The crisis has arrived here; and we have good reason to hope that it has not arrived too late to enable us to struggle through the disease. Our nobility have not, like the French emigrants, basely fled from their country, and yielded up the land of their birth to guilty demagogues and infidel spoliators. Our landed proprietors have not withdrawn to the Continent, and returned with foreign troops to enthral their native land; they have not given their opponents the enormous advantage of representing them as the enemies of their country. Victorious or vanquished, they have remained at their post; disdaining to invoke foreign aid, they have trusted to their own efforts, and the justice of their cause, ultimately to regain the victory. This is the great, the decisive circumstance, which distinguishes our present convulsion from the French Revolution; and though we alluded to it in our last Number, yet it is of such vital importance, that it must again, and can never be sufficiently enlarged on. If our nobility and gentry had imitated the French noblesse, and abandoned their country at the passing of the Reform Bill, not a shadow of a doubt can now remain, that we should ere this have

been immersed in all the horrors of a Revolution. The motions made in the first Session of the Reform Parliament would have torn the empire in pieces. The Whigs, outnumbered by their allies the Radicals, would have been compelled to go into every revolutionary atrocity, or abandon the helm; the few Conservatives returned to Parliament would have resigned the contest, as the French Royalists did, in despair. Then would have appeared here, as it did in France, the utter inability of any branch of the Movement party to resist the Revolution, or coerce the allies whom they had raised up from the lower ranks of society to supreme power. The cry of treacherythe reproaches of their former allies

the stain of inconsistency, would with us, as it did with them, have paralysed all their efforts. The cry "Grand Trahison du Comte Mirabeau" would have sealed their fate. But the case is widely different in Great Britain. The great and powerful Conservative party have remained at their post, and, though for the time overwhelmed by numbers, they are still unsubdued. Having weathered the first breach of the storm, they are gathering strength every hour. The reaction has come firmly, decidedly, indisputably, in all the higher and really educated classes of the State. No one can doubt this who looks about him in society. The false pseudo-liberality which was so common ten years ago, and which in its ultimate effects has brought the nation to the brink of ruin, has almost disappeared. With the exception of the holders and expectants of office, and their families or dependents, hardly a Whig is now to be seen in the highly educated classes of society. Among the young, the race is almost extinct, as Oxford and Cambridge have sufficiently demonstrated. Revolutionists there are, in small numbers, among such classes, in great numbers among the rabble of cities, and the desperate in fortune; and the Reform mania, though evidently subsiding, is still sufficiently strong to give the majority in numbers to the popular candidate in large towns, or manufacturing districts; but the growth of Conservative principles is so rapid among all the well-educated classes

of society, and the vast majority of the holders of property, as to render them already almost a match for their antagonists, in all but these corrupt fastnesses of democratic power. In the counties, every person must perceive that the tide has already turned. It is probably not going too far to say, that out of the 184 county members of Great Britain, 150 would at another election be returned in the Conservative interest. We do not say in the Tory interest; but in the interest of those who, however formerly divided, are now united in resisting the farther advances of Revolution; in the party of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, of Mr Stanley and Sir James Graham.

burgh even, the nest of Whiggism, the nucleus of the Scotch Liberal party, the fortress from whence the Edinburgh Review, for thirty years, has dealt its fire out in every direc tion, they have reduced the majority from 2500 to 500, and compelled the Attorney-General, the prosecutor of the True Sun, to supplicate the po litical unionists to save him from the disgrace of a second defeat; and the seasonable junction of 500 of their number alone gave him the victory. It is evident, therefore, that a very great change has taken place; and this change is likely to be still farther increased by the recent break-up in the Ministry-by the dissolution of that combination of deluded Conservatism with ambitious Liberalism, which, for the time, gave the Reform party so irresistible a preponderance, and the installation of the RADICAL RUMP in unmitigated sovereignty, over a nation beginning to awaken out of a trance of five years' duration.

It is this circumstance, therefore, of the firm and resolute, the courageous and high-minded Conservative party, remaining at their post, and stemming the torrent of innovation by their example and influence, which distinguishes the English from the French Revolution, and is destined, it is to be hoped, to lead to a very different result of a similar convulsion in the two countries. The deluded Liberals- the hardened Revolutionists, have been the same in both; their language, their intentions, their measures, their hypocrisy, their selfishness, their irreligion, have been identical. If they have hitherto been kept from deeds of atrocity and blood, it is not from any efforts or power of their own to stop the conflagration which they have occasioned, but from the firm coun ́tenance, the resolute resistance, the growing influence of the Conservatives, that the exemption has arisen, No one can estimate the effect of the vigorous and patriotic stand which the enemies of revolution have made, in so many different quarters, since the Reform Parliament was returned. They are up and doing in every direction: hardly ever does a vacancy open, that a vigorous, and, to the Whigs, a most anxious contest, does not occur. The effect of their efforts has been already very great. In Perthshire, they have already won the victory for order and religion; in Cambridge, they have driven the Secretary for the Colonies to so narrow a majority, as clearly indicates, on the next occasion, a decisive defeat. At Edin

The fact of division existing in the Movement party, the natural and inevitable result of the measures of spoliation to which they have been driven by their revolutionary supporters, and of the recoil of all virtuous minds at deeds of acknowledged injustice and obvious peril, is admitted, with loud lamentation, by the Movement journals. Take, for example, the Morning Chronicle of June 9;

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"The Administration of Lord Grey, though it has gained in character, has lost considerable power. Mr Stanley has not only retired from the Cabinet, but thrown himself senselessly into the ranks of the High Church Opposition. The Duke of Richmond, Lord Ripon, and Sir James Graham, it is true, are no great intellectual or political loss to the Government; but it would be absurd to deny that this late section of the Cabinet attached to the Administration of Lord Grey a considerable class in the country of semi-liberal but conservative politics. In the meanwhile, the hostile posture of the House of Lords is transparently obvious. The Tory Peers possess a notoat any moment outvote the Ministry, and rious majority of sixty votes. They can neutralize any legislative act of the House of Commons, when they discern a fitting party occasion. Lord Grey, on Friday, in his excellent and dignified speech, significantly stated his position: declare to your Lordships, that I experi

I can

the career of crime and revolution, in preference to that of order and religion, if they think they can do so with impunity to themselves. The spirit is strong in highwaymen for robbery, and in assassins for the wages of blood; in the brutal for intoxication, in the lustful for pleasure, in the indolent for ease, in the sensual for gratification; and if governments descend to such classes for their supporters or directors, they will find abundant reason to believe that the "spirit of the age" is in favour of the gratification of their passions. But if there is in every age a bad, there is also no less certainly a good spirit. The majority even in number, and a tenfold majority in courage, wisdom, and virtue, are ever to be found who are not inclined to such indulgences, who have struggled with the tempt er, and come off victorious; who look forward to the future, and prefer ultimate good to present enjoyments; the brave, the energetic, the industrious. They form the basis of public prosperity; the pillars on which national honour, and safety, and welfare depend. Catiline declared that the spirit of his age was adverse to the tyranny of the Patricians; and he spoke truly, doubt less, of his companions: but Cicero found the spirit of the age very different in the Senate; and Cæsar at length demonstrated that it was in reality favourable only to military despotism. In truth, the spirit of the times, so far from being an irresistible current, independent of the exertions of human virtue, is liable to the strongest possible modification from the effects of courage or weakness, wisdom or folly, selfishness or magnanimity, firmness or imbecility. Perhaps never did the temper of the times appear more vehement and unanimous than in France at the outset of the Revolution; and yet we have the authority of Dumont, the friend of Mirabeau, and the author of the Rights of Man, for the assertion that its downward progress was chiefly owing to the personal weakness of the King, and that a more resolute monarch would speedily have established, in conformity with the wishes of a vast

majority of the nation, a firm constitutional throne, and utterly extin guished the revolutionary faction. It is success which makes such a faction powerful, because it ranges on their side the great but inert mass of the people, ever ready to range themselves with the stronger side; it is the concessions or weakness of their opponents which constitute their real strength. And if Earl Grey is not disposed to listen to so great an authority even as Dumont on such a subject, perhaps he may feel more deference for his favourite political guide, Napoleon Bonaparte. "If Louis XVI.," said that great man, "had boldly resisted-if he had had the courage, the activity, the ardour of Charles I., he would have triumphed."*

No doubt, if Earl Grey resorts to the corrupted ten-pounders in great towns-to the spirit-dealers, wine vaults, brothels, and alehouses of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Edinburgh-if he takes counsel of the Dissenting interest, or its active and bustling representatives in the London Convocationhe will find abundant reason to believe that the Church is in danger, and that the Government itself would be in danger, if it attempted to uphold it. So also would he find the London Police in danger among the flash-houses and dens of iniquity in the Metropolis-or the wealthy and industrious part of the community in danger, among robbers and vagabonds in every part of the world. But where does he find evidence of there being any general feeling of hostility to the Church, save in that single class, the urban ten-pounders, whom he wakened up to political life by the Reform Bill? Is it in the House of Peers, where, according to his own admission, a great majority is constantly ready to crush him, and, on a recent occasion, so overwhelming a manifestation of attachment to the Establishment was made? Is it in the educated classes of society? Let Cambridge, the centre of Whig property and talent-let Oxford, the long established organ of the Tory interest, answer. Did he find, in the recent enthusiastic installation of the Duke of Welling

ton as chancellor of the latter University, any very decisive evidence that the youth of England, the flower of the State-the future Pitts and Chathams, Peels and Cannings, Eldons and Lyndhursts, Nelsons and Wellingtons, have degenerated from the spirit of their fathers? Is it in Glasgow that he finds it, where so splendid a manifestation of Conservative feeling was recently evinced, on occasion of the great Western meeting? or in Edinburgh and Leith, where the Conservatives so stoutly gave battle to the Attorney-General and Lord Advocate, and at the great dinner to Mr Learmonth, where such a display of patriotic feeling took place? The truth cannot be disguised. The Church never was stronger in the affections, the gratitude, and the virtues of society generally; and it never at any former period was so deserving of their attachment: but unhappily that particular faction, the ten-pounders, to whom the Reform Bill gave such monstrous and undeserved power, is for the most part adverse to it, because it is in great part either depraved and corrupted, or governed by Dissenting jealousy; and it is in them, and THEM ALONE, that Earl Grey finds" the spirit of the times," and the " pressure from without," to which he ascribes the necessity of commencing the work of spoliation.

But let it not be imagined, that because the Church is strong in the affections of the King and the Nobility -the better, if not the larger part of the House of Commons-the Church, the Law, the Army and Navy-because it is enthusiastically loved in Oxford and Cambridge, by the great est and wisest, the noblest and best of the community-because its blessings are widely felt, and generally admitted by the landed proprietors, the tenantry, the rural labourersbecause all the highly educated classes of society are almost unanimous in its support that therefore it is safe from attack, and may securely despise the malice of its enemies. The British Constitution is not now swayed by the people, but a part of the people-not by the wise and the learned, but the vain and the ignorant-not the men of property and industry, but the men of intrigue and desperation. This was the result of the Reform Bill, and we must

work with the elements of power as they are now by law established. The Ministers have declared that the pressure from without is too strong for them-that they must yield to the spirit of the age, (i. e. of the ten-pounders,) or perish; and they have issued a Commission to enquire into the situation of the Irish Church, with the avowed design of acting upon the report which may be anticipated from a body so constituted, and commencing the appropriation of what they deem the surplus property of the Establishment, to national purposes. To avoid misconstruction on so momentous a subject, we subjoin the words of the Commission, from the London Gazette, and a few extracts from the speeches of Ministers on the subject, taken, for the sake of impartiality, from the Times newspaper. The Commission are directed to enquire into "the number of members of, or persons in communion with, the United Church of England and Ireland, in each benefice or parish, distinguishing, in the cases of such benefices as comprise more than one parish, the number belonging to each parish separately, and to the Union collectively, and also to state the distances of the parishes in each union from each other respectively; to state the number and rank of the ministers belonging to or officiating within each benefice, whether rector, vicar, or curate, and whether resident or nonresident, and whether there is a church or glebe-house thereon; to state the periods at which divine service is performed in each parish church or chapel, and the average number of persons usually attending the service in each, and to state generally whether those numbers have been for the last five years increasing, stationary, or diminishing; to ascertain the number of the several other places of worship belonging to Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, and other Protestant Dissenters, and the number of ministers officiating in each, the proportion of the population of each parish belonging to each of such persuasions respectively, the periods at which divine service is performed in each of their chapels, and the average number of persons usually attending the service in each, and to state generally whether those numbers have been for the last five years increasing,