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is singular. It has at least an air of novelty, it may claim the praise of ingenuity. But beware, Sir, the experiment is hazardous. The people may, the people do accede to the proposition, that the misconduct of the minister has brought the country to the brink of ruin; but they will not permit him to apply the remedy which you propose. The people too demand imperatively, that the minister should do his duty; but on the important question, what is that duty?-the people differ, Sir, from you. The people charge the minister as the author of their miseries; not because the minister has been too timid and relaxed, not because the strong arm of power has not crushed the opponent of the minister, nor the lightnings of the law struck the miserable wretch who presumes to raise his voice against his conduct; but because the minister has already adopted too successfully in practice, the principles which you espouse; because he has already treated the great body of the British people as a mass of those materials of which you would fain persuade us they are composed-ignorance and credulityprejudice and passion-faction and sedition; because he has already suffered the people's voice to pass unheeded as the western breeze; and because, trusting to their supposed ignorance of the constitution, he has invaded their great constitutional rights; trusting to their ignorance of the laws, he has prostituted the laws to the purpose of supporting and extending his own political power; and trusting to their ignorance of the interests of the country, he has sacrificed those interests to state necessity and political expedien

"Were I the minister," you exclaim; God forbid that you should ever be the minister! Ignorant indeed of the first principles of the constitution must that minister be, who could hope to retain his place in spite of the opinion of the people! May England never know the man unprincipled enough to entertain, or bold enough to attempt the execution of so horrible a scheme; or should such a man appear, may he quickly meet the fate he justly merits! That the minister should yield to the clamor of the mob, I do not assert, but he must bow to the opinion of the people, or the constitution is gone. As well might you attempt to stop the progress of the lightning, as to check the expression of popular opinion. The voice of the people will, it must be heard. The minister must quit the helm, when he ceases to possess the confidence of the people, or he will inevitably involve his country in riot and confusion, and himself perish in the struggle.

You assert that there exist at present scarcely any natural causes of discontent. What, let me ask you, are natural causes of discontent? If an excessive and superabundant population, with its necessary attendants, deficiency of employment, deficiency of subsistence, poverty and want; if an immense load of debt, without the means of payment; if a revenue daily wasting, without a

proportionate diminution of expenditure; if a total stagnation of trade and commerce; if a system of taxation, burdensome, oppressive, and bearing most severely on the lower orders; if a standing army, numerous beyond all former precedent, recently enlarged in a manner the most unconstitutional, and preying on the vitals of the state; if a system of poor laws, tending rather to aggravate than alleviate the distresses of the poor; if a criminal code, disgustingly bloody and severe, but ineffectual to prevent the frequent repetition of crime; if an unblushing perseverance in a system of abuse, venality, and corruption; if a ministry which hears, but heeds not the murmurs of the people, and grasps at every opportunity of infringing the liberty of the subject, by new enactments, rather than put in execution the existing laws; if these be among the natural causes of discontent, then, alas! has England ample causes for complaint. Still however, with all these incentives to disaffection, we are not on the eve of a revolution; nor if the neutrality of the army could be depended on, would the lower orders rise to-morrow in one mass of rebellion, to overthrow the constitution. You have yourself shown the fallacy of such assertions. You have told us that the neutrality of the army, or rather its co-operation with the lower orders, may be depended on; and yet no rebellion exists. But in truth, you totally mistake the feelings of the lower orders: honest enthusiasm, and noble pride towards their king, their country, their religion, have not vanished. Loyalty to the throne, affection to the house of Brunswick, and attachment to the principles which placed that house upon the throne, are the sentiments which still glow within the hearts, and possess the minds of the great body of the people, as warmly, as strongly as at any former period. The error lies in attempting to identify the cause of the ministers, with the cause of the king and constitution. LOYALTY TO THE THRONE, AND AFFECTION TO THE KING,

ARE NOT INCONSISTENT WITH A HATRED OF HIS MINIS

TERS; nor is an attachment to the principles of the constitution incompatible with an abhorrence of principles and practices which tend to the restoration of unconstitutional prerogatives and arbitrary power. The great body of the people, comprising in itself all those classes, which by their rank, their wealth, and their collective force, could alone accomplish the revolution you anticipate, seeks no such revolution. It is attached to the constitution, to the government; it is hostile only to those ministers, who seek to bring the monarch and his government into contempt, by advising him to meet the supplications of his people with unmerited insult and neglect.

Amongst whom you may have been cradled, with whom educated, or what opportunities you may have had for forming a correct

opinion I am ignorant; but this I will assert, that in the observa tions you have made on the state of the lower orders, you have published as unfounded an aspersion on that large and respectable portion of the people, as any that ever issued from a licentious press. The higher orders too, that class of which (if incompetency to form an adequate conception of the condition of their inferiors be a characteristic attribute) I might conclude you to be a member, will no doubt feel gratified by the compliment you have paid them. They perhaps will esteem it an honor to be told, that they treat their inferiors with habitual reserve and haughtiness. In what corner of the Island have you discovered, that the lower orders are precluded from becoming acquainted with the habits and dispositions of their superiors, and are treated by them with reserve and haughtiness? Is there a nation upon earth, in which so free, so equal, so unreserved an intercourse, so open, so unrestricted a communication, subsists between every order of society, from the monarch on his throne to the peasant in his cottage, as in England? Are not the pursuits, the connexions, and the interests of every class, inseparably interwoven? The nobleman, and the commoner, the landlord and the tenant, the master and the servant, the rich man and the poor, in the exercise of every moral and religious duty, every act of charity, every friendly office, as neighbours, as brethren, as fellow countrymen, meet together.-In public and in private, in the sports of the field and the amusements of the city, they are side by side. In the exercise of their great constitutional rights and privileges they form one united phalanx. To whatever point pleasure or business, interest or inclination leads, the great man follows with the crowd. No pomp, no pageantry, no external evidence of superiority, attend his progress, to announce his elevated rank, to awe the gazing multitude, or extort a forced obeisance. No hired shouts proclaim his presence, none but the spontaneous effusions of those feelings of popular applause, or popular disapprobation, which his own conduct has called down upon him; and the frequent ebullitions of which sufficiently evince, that the lower orders have at least discernment to distinguish friends from foes. And is this the country of which you would assert that the lower orders are precluded from becoming acquainted with their superiors? that they regard them as a different race of beings, a worthless set of men, with whom they have no community of interest and feeling? The assertion bears within itself the evidence of its own absurdity, nor needs the aid of argument to refute it. Equally inconsistent, equally unfounded, are your statements with regard to the ignorance and credulity, the prejudice and passion, which you say pervade the great body of the lower orders equally untrue your assertion, that a very large

portion of the lower orders have embraced revolutionary doctrines. How men such as you describe, men who as their hatred is excited or their favor conciliated, reject the most damning proofs and swallow the most monstrous falsehoods, men who are the willing victims of prejudice and passion, could under any circumstances be an honor to their country and to human nature, I confess I am at a loss to discover. But in truth, when you come to speak of the lower orders, there seems to be a more than usual confusion in your ideas, or at least in the terms in which you endeavour to express them. Comprising as the term lower orders when applied to the motley community of the people necessarily must, several distinct and independent classes of the people, classes whose ideas, whose capacities, whose conditions, whose pursuits, and whose designs, are wholly separate, wholly unconnected, and even sometimes at variance with each other, you seem to confound them all in one common mass of ignorance, credulity, prejudice, and passion. That there is in England at this time, that there must be in every country, in the best of times, a numerous body of those abandoned, profligate, and miserable wretches, whom you describe, cannot be denied; but are we to believe, that there are no distinctions between the respective classes of the lower orders? Do prejudice and passion necessarily combine with poverty and ignorance? Are the honest and industrious working classes to be reduced to a common level with those men whose misfortune or whose crime it is, that they have nothing to lose, and every thing to gain by a revolution? or are the just complaints of the thousands and tens of thousands of poor and ignorant, yet honest and genuine Englishmen, of whom our country still may boast, to be disregarded; and are they themselves to waste away in want and misery, because, forsooth, their murmurs reach the ears of government mingled with the clamors of those crazy politicians, or those designing villains, whose frenzy, or whose criminal ambition, lead them to attack the constitution of their country? Sad indeed would be the situation of the country, were the picture which you have drawn a true and faithful portrait; deplorable its prospects, if the condition of that important body of the people, comprising as it does, the honest and industrious peasant who devotes his life to the pursuits of agriculture, no less than the equally honest and industrious mechanic and manufacturer, were such as you describe. The humble peasant may not perhaps enjoy the benefits of a liberal education, he may even be so ignorant that he scarcely can distinguish between a cabbage and a potatoe, he may be a stranger to the existence of most other countries, (though in what corner of the island it is that you have encountered such excessive ignorance, I stop not to enquire,) yet has Nature given to him those inestimable blessings, reason, common

sense, and a warm and generous heart. The daily laborer may not be competent to comprehend the scheme of government, he may not be able to satisfy himself, why a portion of his scanty pittance is wrested from him in the moment of fruition, to pamper "pensioned merit;" yet can he estimate the merits of a government by its effects. In the enjoyment of the fair produce of his labor in tranquil certainty, and uninterrupted security, he will feel and gratefully acknowledge the blessings of a mild, disinterested, prudent administration; in the continued existence, and increasing force, of many of those causes of discontent to which I have above referred you, he cannot fail to trace the vices of the government; nor, while he is smarting under the practical experience of the miseries to which he is exposed, will he require the aid of that knowledge, of which you suppose him destitute, to discover to him the authors of his sufferings.

But however great may be the existing causes for alarm, it is not from the lower orders in the country that danger can at present be justly apprehended. Scattered through a wide extent of country, they act without concert, without communication. They live in fact, notwithstanding your assertions to the contrary, under the influence of their superiors, who reside among them. Their habits, their connexions, and their occupations, render them naturally peaceful, and averse from riot and confusion. In no one of the late tumultuous proceedings have the country people borne an active part, nor do I believe that a single agricultural district, town, or village, throughout the island, has entertained one serious thought of rebellion or revolution. There is, I am ready to admit, a powerful spirit at work among them. They at this moment groan under a weight of miseries far more burdensome than their affluent superiors can conceive. They strongly feel the wrongs they suffer; they loudly seek redress, and they must be heard; but they demand it lawfully, constitutionally, temperately. Cato it seems has yet to learn, that it is the undoubted birthright of a Briton, an inheritance transmitted from our earliest ancestors to the meanest, the poorest, and the most ignorant man among us, to address, petition, and remonstrate. Ignorant, however, if the lower classes be on other subjects, they can well estimate the value of this important privilege, nor will they scruple to assert it. With respect to another class of the lower orders, the mechanics and manufacturers, their situation does, I confess, afford more ground for alarm; yet even here, the picture you have drawn is far too highly colored. Far the greater part even of this portion of the lower orders consists of men, whose moral, whose political, whose religious principles, no less than their individual interests, forbid them to renounce the wholesome doctrines of loyalty and religion,

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