flinging themselves on the libertine, and an attorney in sad suit, lashing him with a bill of costs longer than the list of his amours, and cramming him into his bag, and flinging him to the Chancery below. This would be a scene that would touch the feelings of the audience, for it would represent torments of which many have had experience; all, some opportunities of observing. Apropos—a motion has been made to the Court of Chancery to appoint a manager of the Sun-the Sun newspaper we mean-luckily, the other sun is a yard or two out of the reach of Chancery jurisdiction, or it would long since have been swallowed up in the Master's office;-should such an application succeed, the press may become subject to a curious administration, in the event of disputes among partners. Of course, a Chancellor's notions of a proper manager must depend upon his political opinions. A Lord Eldon would be apt to think Theodore Hook the most proper manager of the Times, and would give the Chronicle to Mr. Twiss. Lord Brougham, on the other hand, might see the fitness of giving the conduct of John Bull to Mr. Place, and the Standard to Colonel Jones.

What is there that the Court of Chancery will not affect to direct? from the combing and washing, and nail-paring of Long Wellesley's children, upwards, there is nothing of which it will not take the conduct-provided, of course, there be property. Nothing comes amiss to it that comes with funds for the costs of suit.

LAWS FOR RICH AND POOR.-Mr. Hunt has much moved the mirth of the House of Commons by the proposal to punish peers who interfere in elections, by a fine of 10,000l. and imprisonment for one year. It is not very likely that the Lords would assent to this law; and the idea of it seems derived from the ingenious plan for catching birds, by putting salt on their tails. Much of the derision, however, with which the suggestion was received, was at the magnitude of the fine of 10,000l.; for people who think nothing of imposing penalties of one guinea, or five guineas, on the very poor, are struck by the enormity of levying one of 10,0001. on the rich, though in proportion to the rate of amercement of the poor, and means being considered, it is really a moderate sum.

"PICKPOCKETS AT THE OPENING OF PARLIAMENT.

"No less than seventeen pickpockets were brought up by the new police, before the magistrates of the Queen-square office, charged with picking pockets during the procession of his Majesty to the House of Lords. In some of the cases the aggrieved parties did not attend, and six were discharged; the remainder were committed for trial. A number of the police, it appeared, were on duty in coloured clothes, which system called forth some severe remarks from Mr. White, the magistrate."-Daily Paper.

No doubt of it. Magistrates habituated to the practice of the law, and possessed of its perverted maxims, are horrified at the idea of the apprehension of thieves by any short and informal process. They cannot see that the public interest requires the apprehension of offenders by the means most convenient to the end. It matters not to the public whether the pickpocket is laid hold of by a man in a blue, or a man in a brown coat, so that he is laid hold of. As it matters not to a farmer whether a fox is killed by a man in a red coat, or a man in a smock frock, except, indeed, inasmuch as the man in the red coat kills the fox after he has done as much mischief in the hour's chase as the fox would do in his whole life, and the man in the smock frock knocks the pest on the head instanter. But the magistrate and the squire are for fair play to the crafty thief, and cannot bear the thoughts of putting an end to him without a run. The magistrate has imbibed the lawyer's notions, which are as antagonist to the public interest, as the hunter's preservation of foxes for his sport is adverse to the farmer's economy. The lawyers have made the rules of law, and shaped the practice of law, and invented its maxims, and they all tend to the advantage of the thief. All the tenderness and care of the law is for criminals. The offender is not allowed to commit himself by the betrayal of truth in court; and when pursuing his occupation of plunder in the streets, he is not, without scandal to the magistrate, to be apprehended by officers whose costume does not put him on his guard, and warn him to escape.

IF THE LORDS REJECT THE REFORM BILL, WHAT WILL

FOLLOW?

Les privilèges passeront, mais le peuple est éternel.

"WILL the Lords reject the Bill?" This is the most common question upon the all-absorbing topic of Reform. Were the actions of men governed more by their reason and less by their passions, there would be little hesitation in concluding the negative. But this is not so; and the House of Lords itself exhibited a spectacle of insensate passion at the close of the last Parliament, hence the uncertainty. Instead of answering the question, or calculating the probabilities-which would be matter of curiosity rather than of usefulness-we will propound another question, which may tend to make the scale of reason preponderate.

"If the Lords reject the Bill, what will follow ?"

There are some in that House, who in the desperate intoxication of their misjudged interests, self-conceit, and love of power, are inaccessible to facts, truths, and justice. But a dispassionate pause over the probable consequences of rejection-not to Reform or the people, but to that House itself-may have a salutary effect upon the sober prudence of the Lords spiritual and temporal in the mass. to be hoped their prudence may not be too late.

It is

One striking circumstance cannot have escaped their observation, however removed from the sphere in which popular opinion expresses itself. It is this amid all the variety and uncertainty of speculation which prevail respecting the future vote of that House, no one doubts the success of Reform no one supposes that the negative of the Lords could do more than embarrass or retard its progress; no one fears for the people or their rights; but many look with friendly regret, some with a secret joy, to the probable effect upon the constitutional authority, and estimation of the House of Peers.

It will be well for the Lords if they reflect in time upon the great power, moral and physical, against which they would array themselves, and the force which they are able to wield in opposition to it. They possess, it is true, a great constitutional power as one branch of the legislature; but their negative is a weapon which, if indiscreetly used, instead of doing execution upon the adverse party, may recoil fatally upon themselves. Let them not shut their eyes to the change in the circumstances of time,—above all, in public opinion and popular intelligence. "That great noun of multitude, the Boroughbroker," noble and ignoble, spiritual and temporal, has so long exercised, and has stolen so insidiously into the usurpation of, the essentail powers of government, legislative and executive, that a vicious. prescription is at last supposed to consecrate wrong into right, and an audacious cry of spoliation is set up when the commonalty of the realm simply demand that their first and most sacred right, the House of Commons, should be restored to them. But a great "change has come over the spirit" of the times.

There is no country in which established usage so long survives its

* Grattan-Letter to the Citizens of Dublin.

Aug. 1831.-VOL. XXXII. NO. CXXVIH.

real value, and holds the shield of its protection over abuses, as England. "The wisdom of our ancestors" has been employed as a talisman by the interested to delude the ignorant, and resist reason, ever since, and most probably before, the days of Sir Thomas More. The words of that enlightened and amiable philosopher in his Utopia would seem to be of yesterday. In England, his Utopian traveller says, he found every proposal for improvement met with the remark, "such things pleased our ancestors, and it were well for us if we could but match them, as if (he continues) it should be a mischief that any were wiser than his forefathers." This talisman has at last been stripped of its charm. The phrase is become so hackneyed and detested from being palpably misused, that it has passed into a by-word.

Public opinion never before presented itself so formidably in the undivided unity of its force; there was always, hitherto, some pretence of public danger, or appeal to prejudice, which gave the means of creating a diversion against innovation and in favour of abuse. Vague and absurd alarms for the safety of the House of Hanover, from the opposite extremes of Jacobitism and democracy, were urged against Parliamentary Reform in the time of Chatham and Wilkes, and even of Pitt and Flood. The French revolution supplied the new and more fearful phantom of Jacobinism, with infidelity on the one side and republicanism on the other, threatening to level the constitution in church and state. Those distempered ebullitions among the lower classes, which are inevitable when distress prevails and the nation is free, have more recently been made use of to perpetuate the alarm of popular licence, to throw suspicion and odium upon the cause of Reform, and even to enact some of the vilest laws that have stained the statute-book. The religious prejudices of the people against the Dissenters on the one hand and the Catholics on the other, have been artfully fomented as means of dividing and distracting the public mind.

All these auxiliaries of corrupt jobbing and borough-oligarchy have passed away. He who now proclaimed the approach of Jacobinism would be heard with about as much attention as if he cried fire in a deluge. By a happy revolution of opinion,-not on the part of the Government-not on the part of the Commons House of Parliament,- but on the part of the people,-it is now a resolved principle, and fixed as fate, that the safe way to guard against popular licence is to bestow popular liberty, and that Reform is the best preventive of revolution; in short, necessary to supersede that last resource. As to the religious fears and prejudices of the people, they are entombed with the Test and Corporation Acts and the Penal Laws. The people of England demand Reform as one man, with the unity and energy of a faction, and the strength and right of a nation. They demand not any encroachment upon the prerogatives of the Crown, or the coordinate and coequal attributes of the hereditary branch of the legislature, but simply the parliamentary constitution of the realm, according to its acknowledged principles and the laws of the land; that, as the one House is constituted by hereditary succession, or the prerogative of the Crown, so the other should be constituted by the free choice of the people.

There is another great change upon which the Lords, spiritual and temporal, will do well to ponder. This change, indeed, has been announced by a distinguished person, in the form of one of those pointed and portable phrases which circulate with the stamp of authority upon intrinsic value. If it were not cavilling or overrefining upon the phrase, it might be said that the people are indebted, not to "the schoolmaster," but to themselves. They are not merely educated, but self-educated. Facilities have been afforded and impulses given by individuals of great public and private worth, but the work of self-education had already begun, and was the cause, and not the consequence, of the aids which individuals, either associated or singly, have given to the diffusion of knowledge. The desire of education, therefore, is not a popular mania or fashion of the day, which may subside or vanish, but an enduring principle which will still farther develope itself. The consequence of this great change is, that the relation-using that term in its scientific sense-between the lower and the upper, or, we will say, between the manual-labouring and idle classes, is reversed. The popular intelligence, in its race of selfcultivation, has not only overtaken but passed the classes of society which had heretofore been allowed a sort of monopoly of knowledge. Whilst the latter have been stationary, the former have been making giant-strides in advance. Those may have the advantage in the graces of literature and the elegance of the fine arts; but these have at least an equivalent advantage, in their acquaintance, practical and theoretical, with the useful arts and their ancillary sciences, and with those occupations and interests which are the sources of private wealth, public revenue, and national power,-the constant objects of legislation and government.

It is absurd to suppose that a people thus enlightened as to its rights and interests, and conscious of its strength, will submit to be defeated in its claim of right by the interested adjudication of an oligarchical fraction of the community, which has been stationary in its understanding and progressive in its pretensions. The Borough party labour under one great error, or confusion of ideas. They mistake for the progress of popular or democratic principles the growth of the popular intelligence. To check the latter is impossible. Their only safe way of dealing with it is, to raise their own understanding to a level with that of the people. The same remark applies to their complaints of the public press. The energy and talent with which the press in general has supported Reform, is but another manifestation of the progress of the popular mind.

Let them reflect, for a moment, how this great and resistless force, the popular intelligence, manifested itself in the late elections. In the principal counties, where the labouring population is less enlightened and more dependent, habitual influences were shaken off, direct ties were broken, personal interests were sacrificed, and menaces and persecutions encountered for the public cause. In the metropolis and populous towns,-the great foci of talent, knowledge, industry, and wealth,-Reform triumphed so signally and easily as to astonish its friends; and, throughout the kingdom, the popular cause was unstained in an unusual degree by corruption or excess. There was zeal without animosity, and excitement without violence; superior strength

was characterized by superior moderation. The most sanguine did not calculate upon so easy and complete a success. Perhaps the most decisive proof of the gigantic moral force of Reform is, that it should have exerted itself not only through the present vicious and corrupt system of election, upon the existing House of Commons, but upon the virtual representatives of the late House. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all who vote for Reform are Reformers in their secret hearts. We could, if it were not invidious, name some dozen gentlemen who support the Bill, whilst they loathe it as cordially as the knight of Boroughbridge. But no matter-their votes are good-and obedience is a homage to strength as hypocrisy is to virtue.

What have the Borough party to oppose against this overwhelming power, intellectual and numerical? Only the vote of its majority in the House of Lords. The people will not, for a moment, question the legal validity of that vote-if unhappily it should be given-but they will analyze, without fear or scruple, the motives, the spirit, and the system from which it sprung. The constitutional privileges and powers of the Crown are a trust to be exercised for the benefit of the people. It will surely not be said that those of the House of Peers are more personal, absolute, uncontrolled, or sacred. The legislative powers of that House then, like those of the Crown, are a trust for the people, and, as such, the vote against Reform will be weighed and judged. What is it the people ask? self-taxation-their inalienable and undisputed right. Can it be supposed that the legislative power of the Lords, opposed as a barrier to this demand, will be regarded and acquiesced in as a trust duly and discreetly exercised?

We will suppose, for a moment, that the vote has been givenReform is put off for one session only-to return in the following session with increased demands, multiplied strength, and inflamed passions. In the House of Commons the field is won; the people will fix their eyes upon the House of Peers; they will examine into the constitution of that House, and with an adverse prejudice. They will, perhaps, begin with the Lords spiritual, unless, indeed, those pious and learned persons should remain neutral where their opposi tion would be so invidious. If we ventured to give an opinion, it would be in anticipation of this course; neutrality, on this occasion, would be decorous and prudent, and may, therefore, be expected on the right reverend bench. But, supposing the worst-supposing that they should throw their votes in the scale of the Borough-broker, the people will ask not only whether this be decorous, but whether it be constitutional.

Admitting the right of voting in the Spiritual and Temporal Peers to be co-extensive, still the bishops, by voting against Reform, would place themselves in a light the most equivocal as affecting the Christian religion and national church, and the most discordant to their own estimable characters and virtues. It would be a degrading, corrupting alliance. What is there in common between the sale of boroughs, the prostitution of the franchise, with their attendant train of riot, intemperance, and perjury, and the safety of the Constitution in Church and State? The Union is not strengthening but contaminating. It will not be said that the tithes would be carried away in the