These arguments are irrefutable, and may be thus summarised: Improved machinery lowers the price of production. The cheaper a fabric is, the greater is the demand for it, and it at once undersells the fabric produced without machinery. Where the demand for a certain fabric increases, more hands are of course employed. Younger persons can work at machinery than at handicrafts where strength is required. Suppose machinery abolished in Lancashire: that would not prevent its being employed elsewhere. The wife and children would be thrown out of work by the stopping of the lighter machinery. The husband and father, having to support his family alone, requires higher wages. Prices are raised to meet this drain for more wages. Trade again flows to the cheaper market. The trade in the non-progressive or riotous places dwindles. Fewer workmen are required; down go wages; and Poverty, Famine, and Death, those cruel teachers of political economy, creep into the half-deserted factories, and push the workmen from their seats into the graves that have long been gaping at their feet.

In February, 1812, Mr. Ryder brought in a bill rendering frame-breaking a capital offence. The act passed, and was continued in force till March 1, 1814.

THE ASSASSINATION OF MR. PERCEVAL.

THE session of the year in which Wellington took Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, and in which Napoleon retreated from Moscow, was an eventful one from its very commencement.

In the afternoon of May 19th, 1812, the lobby of the House of Commons was full of noisy politicians, discussing the recent grant of one hundred thousand pounds a year to the new Regent, the probabilities of a war with America, the extravagance of the new Park to which the Prince had given his name, the outrages of the Luddites, the prospects of Lord Castlereagh succeeding the Marquis Wellesley as Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and the more than likelihood of Wellington again retiring to the Portuguese frontier. Old politicians were lamenting the deaths of Pitt and Fox (1805-6); grievance-mongers were button-holding impatient M.P.s; place-hunting constituents were seeking their victims with the pertinacity of harriers that have lost their hare; men with claims, real or imaginary, on government (one among them especially brooding, soured, and malignant) were watching the opening doors. Through the crowd, unnoticed but by habitués of the House, passed Mr. Dundas, Viscount Palmerston, the Earl of Liverpool, Lord Mulgrave, and other members of the cabinet; but the prepossessing, courteous Premier had either not yet appeared or was hidden by the crowd round the door. That shrewd, hard-working, adroit man would soon be there, if he had not already come; and his followers and partisans were waiting, eager for his coming, and ardent for the debate, in which the Premier would calmly oppose the Catholic claims, or resist any more extended prosecution of the Peninsular war.

A slight murmur, at about a quarter-past five, at last announced the long-expected minister. At that very moment

the sharp ringing report of a pistol at the entrance of the lobby startled every one, both in the hall and in the adjacent committee-rooms. There arose a cry of

"Murder---murder!"

"Shut the doors: prevent any one escaping."

Then a person, with his hand pressing his left breast, rushed from the cluster of members standing round the entrance, staggered towards the door of the House, groaned faintly, and fell forward on his face. Mr. Smith, member for Norwich, was the first to approach him. Thinking it some one in a fit, he walked round the fallen man, not at first recognizing his person, or knowing that he was wounded; but finding he did not stir, he instantly stooped to assist him, and on raising his head was horrified to discover that it was the Premier. Requesting the assistance of a bystander, the two men instantly raised Mr. Perceval, carried him between them into the room of the Speaker's secretary, and set him on a table resting in their arms. He was already not only speechless, but senseless, and blood was oozing fast from his mouth.

He felt his heart. In a few minutes the pulsation grew fainter. In ten minutes he was dead.

Mr. Lynn, a surgeon of Great George Street, instantly came and examined the body. He found that a pistol-bullet had struck the Premier on the left side, just over the fourth rib. It had penetrated three inches, and passed obliquely towards the heart, causing almost instant death.

The moment Mr. Perceval fell, several voices had called out:

"That is the fellow."

"That is the man who fired the pistol."

The assassin was sitting, in a state of great agitation, on a bench by the fireplace, with one or two persons to the right of him. General Gascoyne, M.P. for Liverpool, with a soldier's promptitude, instantly sprang on him and clutching him by the breast of his coat and his neck, took the still smoking pistol from him, and told him that it was impossible that he could escape.

The murderer replied:

"I am the person who shot Mr. Perceval, and I surrender myself."

Mr. J. Hume, member for Weymouth, also seized him, and took from his pocket a second pistol, ready primed and loaded with ball. Mr. Burgess, a solicitor of Mayfair, also helped to arrest the man, and to take him into the body of the House and give him into the custody of the messengers.

The murderer's agitation had by this time entirely subsided. He seemed quite sane, grew perfectly calm, and commented on some slight inaccuracy in Mr. Burgess' statement.

General Gascoyne instantly recognized the assassin as John Bellingham, a man who had been a merchant in Liverpool. Three weeks before, he had called on the general and requested his assistance in pressing his claims on parliament for redress for an unjust imprisonment at St. Petersburg, the resident ambassador having been applied to in vain. The general had recommended him to memorialise the Premier.

A great fear fell on the cabinet ministers that night when the news of the desperate and at first unaccountable assassination reached them. The Prince Regent, amid the vulgar and meretricious splendour of his pseudo-Oriental palace at Brighton, shook like a jelly. A massacre of ministers was apprehended; there were the wildest rumours current of Luddite outrages and revolutionary conspiracies. Mr. Perceval had, no doubt, been the first victim. Whose turn was to be next? Where could the sword be best aimed to reach the necks of the assassins? All was fear, gloom, and doubt. The people of England were known to be discontented; it might be necessary to use grape-shot and sabres to keep down their foolish and dangerous impatience for reform; besides, what was the correction of any abuse but an incipient revolution? Scrape one barnacle from the vessel of state, as well stave and sink her at once in the Red Sea of Jacobinism," screamed the political Chinese.

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Many of those grave and eminent men who came with hushed step into the Speaker's drawing-room, where the Premier lay dead, must, as they looked at the pale calm face, and, as the events of the life of the murdered man passed swiftly through their minds, have remembered the peroration of his speech as Attorney-General at the trial of Peltier, the French editor, in London, for his libel against Napoleon: it seemed now almost like a presentiment of his own fate.

Replying to Mackintosh, Mr. Perceval had then said (1802): "There is something so base and disgraceful—there is something so contrary to everything that belongs to the character of an Englishman-there is something so immoral in the idea of assassination, that the exhortation to assassinate this or any other chief magistrate would be a crime against the honourable feelings of the English law."

The biography of Mr. Perceval is brief. He was the second son of the Earl of Egmont, and was born in 1762. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he went to the Bar in 1786, in

spite of great shyness, soon became leader of the Midland Circuit, and in 1796 won his silk gown, became member for Northampton, and a protégé of Pitt. When that minister fought Mr. Tierney, he kindly declared Mr. Perceval competent to be his successor, and even to cope with Fox.

Perceval supported Pitt in all his measures, especially in the mischievous and unnecessary war with France. Under Addington, the busy satellite became Attorney-General. He was legal adviser of the unhappy Princess of Wales, and, under the Duke of Portland, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanding 20007. a year, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, for surrendering his business at the bar. Parliament growing indignant, he reluctantly relinquished the appointment, and his friends trumpeted forth his patriotic disinterestedness. On the death of the Duke of Portland, in 1807, he became Premier.

Palpably a third-rate professional politician, scarcely fit to carry Lord Chatham's crutch, Perceval was glorified by the suddenness of his melancholy death: his smooth ready talk was called eloquence; his quickness at figures, genius for finance; his obstinate and narrow-minded persecution of his Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, intrepidity and energy. Modern historians of his own party still idolise his memory as "a champion of the Protestant faith." It must be allowed that he was a respectable man; sincere, honest, and of unimpeachable integrity. Like Pitt, he died poor, though hundreds of millions had passed through his hands.

On the 15th of May, Bellingham was tried at the Old Bailey, before Sir James Mansfield, Baron Graham, and Mr. Justice Grose. Most of the aldermen were present, besides many noblemen and members of parliament. Mr. Alley (prisoner's counsel) objected to the prisoner being called upon to plead, and applied for postponement of trial, on grounds that he had affidavits to prove prisoner insane. The court deciding that this application should not be granted, the prisoner pleaded Not Guilty.

The witnesses for the prosecution having been examined, Bellingham proposed to leave his defence to his counsel, but was informed that prisoners' counsel were not allowed to address the court in defence. He then addressed the jury in a speech of above an hour's length, interspersed with the reading of several documents. He had, he said, no personal malice against Mr. Perceval. "The unfortunate lot had fallen upon him," as the leading member of the administration which had repeatedly refused any redress for the injuries he (the prisoner) had sustained in Russia. He had been en