bid the people trust to Parliament, they do their best to prevent Paliament from proving itself trustworthy. But when they come to argue upon the safety of the constitution, and attempt to prove the fears of its real friends chimerical, they show a degree of perverseness and self-contradiction, which would be pleasant, were its consequences not so pregnant with mischief, and its success often too melancholy, even with persons of fair under standing.

First, they urge that it is vain to talk of the constitution being in jeopardy, as long as the people are enlightened, and the press free; and they cite the progress of popular information and discussion, as an ample security against any little increase to the power of the Crown. It is incredible, they assert, that, in such a state of things, any considerable invasion of our liberties should be attempted; and impossible that it should succeed. Once more, let the extreme bad faith of this kind of argument be observed, when compared with the language held to the people out of doors. To the people these men say, Be quiet; the constitution is safe in the hands of the Parliament." In the Parliament they hold all idea of danger to the constitution infinitely cheap," because it is safe in the keeping of the people!" When the advocates of the slave trade denied the right of Parliament to abolish it, and said that this measure might safely be left to the colonial legislatures, professing all the while that they were most friendly to it, and only wished to see it undertaken in the right place; some simple persons were extremely surprised to find the same individuals in their places, as colonial representatives, oppose the abolition upon its own merits; and this conduct used to be reckoned the height of bad faith. But it is not quite so intolerable as the mode of proceeding which we are at present considering; for, at any rate, the slave traders did not first tell the mother-country that the question should be left to the islands, and then bid the islands leave it to the mothercountry. This sort of argument, this alibi sophism (as Mr. Bentham would term it, is peculiar to the advocates of abuse and corruption; and it is the weapon they most constantly and most successfully employ. Thus, they tell us perpetually, that the press is free; and therefore any given constitutional question signifies little; that is, we are desired to tolerate an encroachment upon our rights, because we possess, in some other quarter, a means of defending them against encroachment; and, of course, against the one proposed, as well as others. This would be but a sorry argument taken by itself. But how do the same persons treat any encroachment on the liberty of the press? Exactly in the way now described;-they laugh, or affect to laugh, at such fears; and assure us, that while we have trial by jury, all is safe. Then, if we complain that there are abuses in the management of special juries-that the same pannel is constantly recurred to from the small number of names in the freeholders' books-that persons in office, and intimately connected with government, even in the collection of the revenue, are often called upon to try questions respecting the government-that the advantage of being summoned on Exchequer trials operates as a douceur to special juries in their other duties-that the whole system of special juries is criminal, but especially in state trials, is vicious and dangerous to liberty; -we are again treated as enthusiasts and alarmists, and and are asked, if we really think there can be any danger, as long as the Judges are pure, and the Bar jealous? If a political jobber happens to be made a judge, from court favour or ministerial services-if he is seen assiduous at the levee, and observed to treat that very bar according to the cast of its political principles,

still there is no danger, Parliament may impeach him.* And, as soon as a remark upon his conduct is offered in Parliament, we are once more bandied back to the bulwarks of liberty-the inestimable privileges of a free press, and public discussion, and trial by jury.

But the grand topic of the quietists, of whom we are speaking, is Parliament. To think of danger to our liberties, while the business of government is regularly carried on in that great public body, and no minister ever dreams of dispensing with its services, is represented as the extreme of folly. Now, we admit that we have no fear of seeing parliaments disused, and still less of seeing them put down by violent means. He must be a clumsy tyrant who should think, at the present day, of employing his influence or his troops in this way. If, indeed, inroads should be made time after time upon the constitution, and acquicsced in under the vain idea that the stand might be made when it became a matter of the last necessity; if, at length, the Parliament were found steadily to support the privileges of the subject, and its repeated dissolution only identified it the more with the people; it would probably be found, that some violence might safely be attempted against its privileges, by means of those weapons which its long habits of criminal compliance had put into the hands of the Crown. But, for the present, the danger arises from the Parliament itself, identified, as it is too apt to be, with the executive, rather than its constituents. The court party of this country have long since discovered, that by far the easiest and safest means of stretching their power is through the medium of a compliant parliament. To gain this body to their interests, and to prevent every reform which may more closely connect it with the people, is, accordingly, the great secret of acquiring a power dangerous to the constitution. They may, perchance, be now and then thwarted by the House of Commons; but they forget and forgive readily-trusting to an early mark of favour from the representative body, and unwilling to quarrel with it while so much may still be effected by its assistance. Nor will they ever break so useful a correspondence, and quarrel with such an ally, until its services are no longer worth having, and until they may safely be dispensed with. But it is for the people always to bear in mind that the government-that is, the executive-acting in concert with the other branches of the legislature, may attempt measures hostile to their rights; and that it is therefore necessary to keep in their own hands the security for the Parliament always proving a real check upon the Crown.

The uses of parliamentary government-of ruling in concert with the House of Commons-are indeed prodigious to the sovereign. We have noticed the ease and safety of this method of stretching the executive power; but besides these advantages, it confers a kind of authority, and obtains resources from the country, wholly unknown in any other system of polity. No absolute monarch can call forth the means of a nation as our parliament has done. To say nothing of the men raised, and the sums borrowed, we have paid between sixty and seventy millions in twelve months, and this for a length of years together. The utmost feats of finance in despotic countries are a jest, compared with this; and this is only practicable by means of a parliament. The people feel a sort of connexion with that body, how

It is necessary, from the course of the argument, to state, that the case put here (and in other places) is merely one of supposition; and that, so far from having any application to recent proecedings in Parliament, we deem the attempts there made to rescind a judicial determination to have been hurtful to the cause of the constitution.

unequally soever the elective franchise is distributed. They are allowed to see from day to day all the details of its proceedings. They follow every tax proposed, from the first mention to the ultimate decision upon its merits. They petition, and "the door is opened wide" to their representations; their prayers are civilly, even respectfully, treated; many highly palatable things are said on all sides; there is a hope of final success held out; the petition is meanwhile solemnly conveyed to its long home, accompanied by a flattering attendance of friends; the affecting service is performed over it by the proper officers; and it is decently laid upon the table, to repose among its distinguished predecessors, who were equally useful in their generation. Were the House of Commons emptied, or-which would exactly amount to the same thing-were it shut up, so that the people knew nothing of what passed within its walls, and only saw a long ugly building, with many doors and windows, where a manufactory of taxes was carried on, there would very speedily be an end of the vast contributions hitherto paid to the services of the state. It may further be observed, that even parliament, with all its means of taxing, has only been able to raise the revenue now paid by adopting the principle of gradual increase; laying on straw by straw upon the people's backs, until at length they find them breaking without knowing when the burden began to be unbearable: a new illustration, to show the necessity of making an early stand, and never suffering ourselves to be lulled with the phrases, "It is a mere trifle"-"What can it signify?"—"We have borne worse, and survived it”— 'It is not worth the trouble of resisting."

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The struggles which have been recently made, and with signal success, have been almost all against public burdens. The people, by a resolute determination to obtain justice, shook off a load of above seventeen millions a year of war taxes, which the Crown would fain have made perpetual. The succesful issue of this great contest ought for ever to teach them a lesson of their strength. But it would be well if the same vigour were shown in resisting the smaller impositions. Great attempts to pillage the country are not very likely to succeed; but when the government goes on by its favourite rule of gradual and insensible progression, it only takes longer time, and gains ultimately the same end. Had we been awake to our true interests while the burdens were accumulating, we never should have had to fight that arduous battle, and our means would not have been left in their present state of exhaustion. It should be steadily kept in view, that a financier never is so dangerous as when he proposes a tax which seems not to touch any one sensibly-which raises some commodity by a sum almost lower than any known currency; and therefore such taxes ought, if objectionable in themselves, or if not absolutely necessary (which is indeed the greatest of all objections), to be as strenously resisted as if they at once cut off a tenth of our income, or subjected our heads to a tribute.

But, independent of pecuniary considerations, we would fain hope that the love of our constitution, the attachment to those inestimable privileges which so nobly distinguish us among all the nations of Europe, and to which the enjoyment of every baser possession is also owing, would be a sufficient motive to keep alive the jealousy of royal encroachment, so absolutely essential to the conservation of liberty. Confidence in our rulers, whether arising from supineness or timidity, or personal predilection, is as foolish as it is unworthy of a free people. The task, indeed, which a sovereign is called to execute is the noblest which the mind can imagine,—the

security of a people's happiness by one man's pains, and, it may be, at the expense of his own. But it is also the most difficult of all offices to perform ; and we may rest assured that he will be but too apt to exchange it for another, which, as it is the very easiest, is also the basest of employments— the sacrifice of all a nation's interests to his own. The mechanism, even of our excellent government, furnishes him with but too many engines for the accomplishment of this object; nor can any thing effectually check his operations but the perpetual jealousy of the people, within and without parliament, in discerning and repressing even the smallest of his encroachments.

ON THE USES OF PARTY UNION.*

When a number of men associate themselves from a general agreement in political opinion, and pursue in one body a certain course of measures, it is extremely common to hear them accused of various crimes. If they attack the government of the day, they are by its friends stigmatised as disloyal, by aid of the established sophism which confounds the sovereign with his coun-cillors, the constitution with the ministry of the day. By the people, they are apt to be regarded as prosecuting their own interest; and only desirous of changing the present servants of the crown, to take their places. Even the more thinking classes of the community, unconnected with government, are apt to see something factious in a systematic opposition; it seems as if men, and not measures, were the criterion of praise or blame; as if the same persons would approve the same propositions, which they now most loudly condemn, were they but made by their own chiefs. The common question is, Are the ministers always in the wrong? And an inference is thus drawn by those who say they retain the unbiassed exercise of their own judgment, that there is almost as great a sacrifice of conscience in always agreeing with an opposition, as in constantly supporting a minister. It is the interest, and the never failing practice of the government, to encourage such notions;-the minister has no better friends than those who rail at all party as an interested and factious league of place-hunters or zealots-nor any more useful resources than in the number of well-meaning and not very clear-sighted persons, who from tender consciences, or perhaps from the vanity of always thinking for themselves, keep aloof from party connexion as unprincipled and degrading.

Another charge against party, arises out of the coalitions which, from time to time, are framed between men of different political connexions, who have once been opposed to each other. No more fruitful source can be assigned of the prejudices which have been conceived against various parties, and of the general disposition, which for a long while has existed, to question the purity of public men generally. As superficial observers cannot comprehend the principle which unites individuals together in political co-operation, or conceive how a man may, to promote a just cause, overlook slighter differences of opinion, and act with those of whom he does not in every particular approve so the same reasoners find it still more difficult to understand on what grounds persons, long inveterately hostile,

A Bill of Rights and Liberties. By Major Cartwright.—Vol. xxx. p. 181. June, 1818.

can unite when circumstances are changed: and as party union is termed a combination for power or place, and party hostility a factious scrambleso a coalition of parties is deemed a profligate abandonment of public principle for private advantage. The two most celebrated measures of this kind, in more modern times, have given rise to an infinity of such feelings in the public mind.

The last cause we shall here state, of the odium that has lately fallen upon party, is the conduct almost inevitably pursued by every opposition, upon its accession to power, and the disappointment arising from thence, both to the public and to individuals. How sparing soever an opposition may be of their promises to the country, far more will always be expected of them than any man can perform. Whatever has been done amiss by the former ministry, they are called upon to rectify, and instantly-for delay is held equal to non-performance. At all events, they are not suffered to continue for one moment in the steps which they had blamed their predecessors for pursuing; although it may be perfectly consistent in those who inveighed against a measure, to persevere in it, when once adopted, as the lesser evil; or, if resolved upon abandoning it, to do this cautiously and slowly. The heedless multitude however cry out, that the new men are just as bad as the old, and would always have acted like them, had they been in their place. And hence a new topic for those whose clamour is, that all public men are alike. In the mean time, the impossibility of satisfying the private claims of those who follow the party for the sake of its patronage, fills the ranks of the discontented; and the loss of power having disarmed the popular indignation against the fallen ministry, public censure is almost exclusively reserved for their successors. These, too, are for a long time regarded rather as an opposition, inexpertly converted into ministers, than as regular placemen; and the dislike excited by whatever they do, or leave undone, tinge the public opinion respecting opposition parties in general. These appear to us the principal sources of the unpopularity into which regular party has fallen.

We are very far indeed from denying, that there have been, in all times, abuses of the principle which justifies party union-or that most parties, in their turn, have had errors and crimes to answer for, which afford some colour to the charges indiscriminately made against them all. We may even admit, that, unless strictly watched, and controlled by the great check of public opinion, party association is apt to degenerate and produce serious evils, by its perversion to purposes of a private nature. Nevertheless, we conceive, that the plan of acting in parties has its foundation in the necessity of the case, and that it affords the only safe and practical means of carrying on the business of a free country not, as ignorant men imagine by a collusion between different juntos of men, but by a mode at once peaceful and effectual, of giving their full influence to different principles. Let us then attend to the ground upon which alone such associations are to be defended.

As long as men are ambitious, corrupt and servile, every sovereign will attempt to extend his power; he will easily find instruments wherewithal to carry on this bad work; if unresisted, his encroachments upon public liberty will go on with an accelerated swiftness, each step affording new facilities for making another stride, and furnishing additional confidence to attempt it. It requires no argument, then, to show the absolute necessity of strictly watching every administration at all times. But if any given set of minis