was nominated as regent, with restricted powers. In the other, he was called upon to assume that office with a plenitude of royal authority. And if it had not pleased the Supreme Ruler to remove the malady which incapacitated the king, this discrepancy between two independent legislatures, upon such a vital point, might have grievously compromised the peace of the empire. Lord Mornington made the most energetic remonstrances against a course of proceeding so fraught with evil; and it is very likely that the danger thus threatened first suggested the project of a legisla tive union between Great Britain and Ireland. Two minds in the same body, each contrary the one to the other, could not present a more monstrous anomaly than two conflicting legislatures in the same kingdom.

"But the happy recovery of King George III. solved the question, and averted the dangers of the threatened collision. From this time the Earl of Mornington was admitted more closely into the confidence of the king, who expressed his warm approbation of the young statesman's conduct in the painful emergency which gave rise to these discussions; intimating his majesty's displeasure against those who had supported the antagonist pretensions of the Prince of Wales by the dismissal of the Duke of Queensberry, the Marquess of Lothian, and Lords Carteret and Malmesbury. In the year following, Lord Mornington was re-elected as representative in parliament for the borough of Windsor."

In 1792, we find Lord Mornington strenuously supporting Mr. Wilberforce in his efforts for the abolition of the slave trade. Against the more cautious proceeding of Mr. Dundas, who was a gradual abolitionist, he strongly protested, and thus quaintly expressed, in a mathematical form, his view of the question:-" The force of truth being given, and the hardness of a planter's heart being ascertained, in what space of time will the former be able to penetrate the lutter ?"

It is true, truth, justice, religion, reason, humanity, were all on one side; oppression, self-interest, cupidity, cruelty, upon the other; and no language could be overcharged which denounced the horrors of the system by which tens of thousands of human beings,

with immortal souls, were annually immolated to the demon of avarice. But, alas, for the 'short-sightedness of human legislation! Lord Mornington lived to see the traffic abolished in the British dominions, and its abolition only leading to an increase of its extent and an aggravation of its horrors in other countries; so that, as yet, evil, and not good, to the negro race, has been the result of the philanthropic efforts of Wilberforce and his associates for their amelioration! What

shall we say to this? Can we regret that that great cause was so championed? Can we regret that Great Britain should have taken the lead in that great work of humanity and of mercy, which, to have neglected any longer, would be an impeachment of her faith, and a blot upon her civilization? No. We feel proud of belonging to a country which, by such labours, and through such sacrifices, accomplished such an object; and our hearts' desire is, that she may never cease in the glorious struggle, until she goes on to complete what she so nobly began, and causes other nations so to feel the enormity of the guilt they incur by thus trading in the blood and the souls of their fellowmen, as to make them not only abjure such a practice themselves, but be willing co-operators in chasing it from the world. Never can the comforts or the prosperity of one portion of the human race be solidly or righteously based upon the degradation of another. And slavery will not have received its death-blow until this truth is recognized as an axiom by every community within the precincts of civilization. That such a consummation may be brought to pass, and that speedily, must assuredly be the wish, and should undoubtedly be the aim, of statesmen and governors in every enlightened Christian country upon the earth, who would not, for sordid pelf or hellish gain, sacrifice justice and humanity.

In 1793, Lord Mornington strenuously opposed himself to Mr. (afterwards Lord) Grey's project of parliamentary reform. The following are the words of wisdom in which his disapprobation of it was conveyed :

"The purpose of those who supported the measure then the subject of

debate,' said his lordship, was to change, not the administration only, but the very genius and spirit of the British government; to separate those elementary principles of monarchy, of aristocracy, and of democracy, which are now mixed and blended in the frame of this house, and, by combining them again according to some new and different rule of proportion, to create a system of which we at present know nothing more than that it is to be new in its texture, and wholly different in its effects, upon the existing order of our happy constitution. A project so stated, and of such extent, has not been agitated in parliament during the present century; and it is a duty which we all owe to the present and succeeding times, to pause and to deliberate with the utmost caution before we consent even to take the first step towards a measure of such powerful effect and of such lasting consequences. Before we part with those foundations on which the government has been so long settled, it becomes us to recollect what that is which we are about to destroy, and to ascertain, as far as human foresight can enable us, what is likely to be substituted in its place.'"

His biographer demurs to the cogency of these observations, we need not say we think unwisely; the subsequent reforms to which Lord Wellesley consented being, as he contends, of a still more sweeping nature than those which he then opposed. It remains yet to be seen how far the new constitution will bear a comparison with the old one; and whether democracy, having received such an accession of strength, will be content to live in the same harmony with royalty and aristocracy, in which they lived with democracy when they were supposed to be in the ascendant; or whether it will not be like the Eastern tyrant, who can bear no brother near the throne. In our judgment, a dangerous ascendancy has been given to an element which was already fully as predominant in the councils of the country as it ought to be; and it remains to be seen how far a system of government which is no longer "ponderibus liberata suis," will stand the test of experience amongst the chances and changes of human affairs.

We

are far from bestowing upon the latter part of the life of this distinguished man the praise to which we think him entitled in the beginning; and his

judgment, when his passions and feelings became implicated as a partizan, is not, in our opinion, entitled to the same respect as when it was uninfluenced by prepossessions which may have warped his candour. Men do not always advance in wisdom as they advance in years; and we are still inclined to set more value upon the wariness of Lord Mornington when a young man, than upon the recklessness of the Marquis of Wellesley when an old one, and after his mind had been embittered by disappointed ambition.

But his speech in the following year, in defence of the declaration of war against revolutionary France, was decidedly his greatest senatorial effort, and acknowledged at the time, by those who heard it, to have been quite unrivalled. The opposition leaders (and there were giants upon the opposition benches in those days) were perfectly astounded by the solid array of facts and arguments upon which he based his conclusions; and every cultivated mind was charmed by the chastened brilliancy of an eloquence which reminded them of the proudest periods of Greece and Rome, and seemed to combine all that was captivating in the graces of diction with all that was energetic and forcible in the demonstrations of mind. Even the bril liant declamation and the caustic raillery of Sheridan, failed to produce the slightest effect upon an audience who became spell-bound by the force of truth, and who could not refuse to assent to the justice of the propositions contended for, without being not only traitors to their country, but rebels against the majesty of reason. The hypocrisy of the executive council of France, who affected to be mightily scandalized by being represented as the patrons of insurrections, he thus disposes of:

"Brissot, in his confessions, is pleased to admit that the decree of the 19th of November was absurd and impolitic, and justly excited uneasiness in foreign cabinets.' You shall now hear the wise, politic, and conciliatory exposition of the principles of France, which he opposes to that decree. 'What was the opinion of enlightened men-of men who were republicans before the 10th of August-who desired liberty, not only for their own country, but for all Europe? They thought that liberty might be established every where, by exciting

those for whom government is administered against those who administer it, and by proving to the people the facility and advantages of such insurrections.' This theory of universal liberty," continued Lord Mornington, "founded upon universal insurrection-this system of exciting the people against all regular government, of whatever form, against all authority, of whatever description-this plan for the instruction of the mob in the advantages of disorder, and in the facility of outrage and plunder, is deliberately applauded by Brissot, as the established doctrine of the most moderate men in France; to which no one could object, on account of its absurdity or impolicy, or of its tendency to excite uneasiness in foreign cabinets."

And that the spirit of propagandism thus manifested was universal in its extent, and aimed at the subversion of all legitimate authority which did not derive its origin from the anarchists of France, he proceeds to show, by a detail of acts of interference, which would be incredible if they were not so well authenticated that their denial would be as audacious as their vindication. We must content ourselves with the following brief extract:

"In America, Citizen Genet was appointed president by Brissot and Le Brun: he there commenced his operations by the institution of a Jacobin club; he publicly insulted the magis. trates; disputed the acts of the government; opened what he was pleased to call a Consular Tribunal, under the authority of the French Republic, for the condemnation of prizes within the ter ritory of America; enforced the execution of its sentences by acts of open violence; and at length, the powers and privileges of the consul acting under his orders having been annulled by the president of the United States, and his proceedings having been checked, as be. ing contrary to the law of nations, and to the rules by which the relations of independent states are governed, Citizen Genet presents a remonstrance to the secretary of state, in which he gravely says that he does not recollect what the worm-eaten writings of Grotius, Puffendorff, and Vattel say on these subjects; he thanks God he has forgotten what those hireling civilians have written on the rights of nations, in times of universal slavery; but he knows that his conduct has been agreeable to the spirit of the French constitution, of the American constitution, and of the rights of

man, which are for ever engraven on his heart, and from which he learns that an appeal must be from the president, who is a mere ministerial officer, to the sovereign people of America.' Thus this disciple of Brissot takes upon himself to supersede every maxim of the law of nations, by doctrines drawn from the constitution of France; and, not content with that outrage, he arrogates to himself the right of interpreting the constitution of America by reference to the same polluted source, and affects to depose the president of the United States from his constitutional authority under colour of the sacred rights of man, and the indefeasible sovereignty of the people! Citizen Descorches, employed by the same party at Constantinople, proceeded in the same spirit; he established Jacobin clubs, and held primary assemblies for the propagation of the true faith of liberty among the Janissaries of the Porte. Thus, from Mr. Jefferson to the Reis Effendi, from the president of the United States of America to the grand seignior, from the congress to the divan, from the popular form of a republic to the most unmixed military despotism, every mode and gradation of lawful authority, or of established power, was the object of deliberate, systematic, and uniform attack! There is another feature of this project which I cannot omit, because it so nearly concerns the security of some of the most valuable possessions of the British empire. We are told by Robespierre, that a part of the general scheme of Brissot and his associates was to free and arm all the negroes in the French colonies in the West Indies. Brissot, instead of attempting to refute this charge, takes merit to himself for the ingenuity and simplicity of the invention. He says, that by the simple operation of purifying the colonial system of the French islands, he would have accomplished the destruction of all the British colonies in the West Indies. He adds- This is a secret of which few have any idea.''

The annexation of territory to the republic" one and indivisible," and the pretexts upon which, and the objects for which such annexations were made, the noble lord then holds up to the indignant scorn of the British parliament; and thus concludes this masterly oration (of which we must forewarn our readers no mere extracts can convey even a faint idea) in the following emphatic words :

"You are now to decide whether it best becomes the dignity, the wisdom,

and the spirit of a great nation, to rely for existence on the arbitrary will of a restless and implacable enemy, or on her own sword: you are now to decide, whether you will entrust to the valour and skill of British fleets and British armies, to the approved faith and united strength of your numerous and powerful allies, the defence of the limited monarchy of these realms, of the constitution of parliament, of all the established ranks and orders of society among us, of the sacred rights of property, and of the whole frame of our laws, our liberty, and our religion; or whether you will deliver over the guardianship of all these blessings to the justice of Cambon, the plunderer of the Netherlands, who, to sustain the baseless fabric of his depreciated assignats, defrauds whole nations of their rights of property, and mortgages the aggregate wealth of Europe; to the moderation of Danton, who first promulgated that unknown law of nature, which ordains that the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, and the Rhine, should be the only boundaries of the French dominion; to the religion of Robespierre, whose practice of piety is to murder his own sovereign; who exhorts all mankind to embrace the same faith, and to assassinate their kings for the honour of God; to the friendship of Barrère, who avows in the face of all Europe, that the fundamental articles of the revolutionary government of France are the ruin and annihilation of the British empire; or, finally, to whatever may be the accidental caprice of any new band of malefactors, who, in the last convulsions of their exhausted country, may be destined to drag the present tyrants to their own scaffolds, to seize their lawless power, to emulate the depravity of their example, and to rival the enormity of their crimes!"

It certainly is mortifying to compare the commencement of his life with its close. Such was Lord Mornington when anarchy and revolution were abroad; when the foundations of social order were shaken; when France, rent and torn by a maniac desperation, in which "evil became her good," was sending her missionaries of sedition and of atheism into the surrounding countries, for the purpose of subverting thrones and proscribing creeds: all but the throne which was based upon the ruins of law, and on which sate a demon malignancy, mocking at justice and humanity-and all but the creed which was death to the hopes beyond the grave. Even such was this

distinguished nobleman at that trying period, when England was tempted by the brilliant plausibilities of reformers, by whose empiricism her time-honoured institutions were endangered, and who were in open or secret fraternity with the friends and the patrons of universal disorganization. And nobly did he confront the hosts by whom he was assailed, clothed, as it were, in a panoply divine, until they shrank dismayed from the contest. England was preserved from anarchy. Her constitution floated upon the troubled waters by which many other states and kingdoms were submerged; and when it pleased the Almighty Ruler to give to the agitated nations a period of repose from the strife of arms, she was the only country in Europe whose ancient institutions were unimpaired, and the landmarks of whose polity remained unaltered. But under what aspect do we behold the Marquis of Wellesley then? Alas! "Quantum mutatus !" As the aider and abettor of Lord Grey and Lord John Russell in their crude and profligate reform of the parliamentary representation! Posterity will yet pronounce upon that miserable scheme, which was concocted in fraud and carried by delusion; and deep must have been the humiliation of this gifted man, when he suffered his partizanship to prevail against his principles, and yielded to the sound and fury of a factitious agitation what he refused to surrender to the storm and tempest which had almost upturned society from its foundations. But this is a topic upon which it is painful to dwell; and, instead of mourning over the noble lord when his principles began to relax and his vigour to decline, let us look at him during the most brilliant portion of his career, in his Indian administration.

On the 4th of October, 1797, he was appointed Governor-General of India, having been raised to the dignity of a peer of Great Britain, by the title of Baron Wellesley. He had acquired, while a member of the board of control, a considerable knowledge of the details of Indian government, and had, moreover, an opportunity of receiving information and instruction from the Marquis of Cornwallis, with whom he was upon intimate terms; which must have been of great service in imparting to him a living knowledge of the

various parties and interests with which it concerned him so much to be well acquainted.

Upon his arrival at the Cape of Good Hope it was his good fortune to meet with Lord Macartney, Colonel Hobart, and General Baird-all of them long residents in India, and having filled stations of trust and importance, which stamped a peculiar value upon their communications. From them he learned the perilous state of our Eastern possessions, from a French influence which was at that time making itself felt; and he was thus early warned of the necessity of those precautionary measures, by the wise and vigorous adoption of which our Indian interests were placed out of danger.

The arrival of a ship from Calcutta, with despatches for the secret committee of the Board of Control, was another of the lucky accidents of which the governor-general availed himself. He did not for a moment hesitate to assume the responsibility of breaking the seal, and possessing himself of their contents, upon the ground that he regarded it as "an indispensable part of his duty to obtain as speedily as possible the most authentic account of events so deeply affecting the interests committed to his charge, and of which any false impression might render him less equal to the execution of his public trust.' His brother, Colonel Arthur Wellesley, a name since so re-nowned, had been at that time a year and three months serving with his regiment in India; and we may be well assured that his observations both of men and things were not the least interesting or the least valuable portion of the mass of information with which the new representative of the British government entered upon his important duties. He was thus enabled to write a despatch to Lord Melville, before he touched the soil of India, conveying as full and as masterly an account of the perilous condition of British interests in that country, as if he had been a resident there for many years; and to form plans for its future government, by which the evils he had so much reason to apprehend, and which would otherwise, in all likelihood, have wrested from us our Indian possessions, were effectually prevented.

The Maharatta, the Nizam, and

Tippoo, the Sultan of Mysore, were the principal Indian powers by whom the British possessions were bordered. With the two former we were in alliance; with the latter our relations were of a less satisfactory nature; and it was well known that he waited but for an opportunity of manifesting the deep-rooted hostility which he bore the English, and that he would avail himself of every means of stirring up the native princes to co-operate in a war for their extermination. The fame of the brilliant conqueror at Marengo had penetrated at that time to the remote east, and Tippoo was as ambitious of an alliance by which his means of aggression would be increased, as the French were desirous of an associate among the native powers by whose aid they might obtain a solid footing in India.

The principal military force in the territories of the Nizam consisted of a body oftroops under the command ofa French general named Raymond, and officered chiefly by French jacobins of the worst class, amounting to about ten thousand men, and of which an augmentation was intended which would raise them to fourteen thousand. Upon these the governor-general justly looked with the utmost jealousy, and could but little depend upon the pacific relations of any state in which they were harboured. In India such a body constituted a species of pretorian guard, and were more likely to be the masters than the ministers of the power they professed to serve; and in this particular instance it was clearly ascertained, that no opportunity was neglected of extolling the French, and depreciating the British interest, with a view to prepare the way for the advent of the new settlers, who were to be as dominant in India as they were said to be in Europe. It was not imagined that they were entertained by the Nizam with any view of hostility towards the English; but it was clear, that as long as they subsisted in their present position, our relations with that power must be of the most precarious nature.

To counteract this dangerous influence, Lord Wellesley proposed that we should offer to the Nizam an in. crease of our force, upon terms more liberal than it had been granted before, on condition that the troops under Raymond should be disbanded, and the