1830.] Notes of the Month on Affairs in General. 223 



the Sinecure list the collection of the revenue and the perpetual 

 waste of public money in all departments of the state. And what has it 

 done ? It has reduced the pittance of the lower orders of clerks in the 

 public offices ; but it has spared all the great sinecurists and pensioners. 

 Lord Melville still enjoys his Scotch 3,000. a year; Lord Rosslyn 

 enjoys another 3,000. a year ; the privy council still share among them- 

 selves their 161,000. a year ; and the whole aifair goes on undisturbed 

 by the loss of ar single shilling the whole being sinecures ! Two young 

 gentlemen, Messrs. Dundas and Bathurst, sons of the man at the Admi- 

 ralty, and the man at the privy council, were cruelly stript of their little 

 sinecures to the amount of 800. a year each. But this was not done 

 by ministers, who have naturally some bowels of compassion for their 

 boys, but by the public, who have to pay those blooming sinecurists. 

 They however will not be the worse for the loss, it will be made up to 

 them in some quiet way, and they will be at once " suffering loyalists" 

 and snug pensioners. 



For all the valuable purposes of a Parliament, the last was perfectly 

 useless. It encouraged no part of the national industry, no arts, no 

 increase of public knowledge ; it gave no additional purity to the man- 

 ners of the people, no additional honour to religion ; it administered 

 nothing to loyalty, to literature, or virtue ; it diminished none of the 

 public difficulties, and none of the public debts ; it added nothing to 

 our celebrity abroad, or to our comforts at home ; it suffered English 

 influence on the Continent to decay, our friends to struggle for them- 

 selves, our Allies to be broken down, and our Enemies to be raised to the 

 summit of power. At home it suffered the rise of a faction hostile to 

 the constitution ; it suffered the growth of a mysterious power unrecog- 

 nized by the constitution ; it substituted for Protestant ascendancy a 

 military ascendancy ; it obeyed a cabinet in which there was but one 

 voice audible ; a cabinet of clerks, with no choice but that of submis- 

 sion. A cabinet in which sat Peel, Goulburn, Herries, and Lyndhurst, 

 all eminent only for swallowing their words, and all utterly dependent 

 on the will of their master ! 



But, in recompense for all these shames, the Parliament gave us a 

 police, a regular gendarmerie, communicating only with the Horse-Guards. 

 It abolished the constitutional defence of the state, the yeomanry and 

 militia, while it kept up an army of ninety thousand men, in the 

 midst of a profound peace, after a fifteen years peace, and with the 

 strongest assurances from the throne that the peace was in no danger of 

 being disturbed. 



Its grand effort was the Catholic question, by which, after the lapse 

 of one hundred and thirty years of British prosperity and British free- 

 dom, expressly founded upon the exclusion of the papist from making 

 laws for the coercion of the Protestant, the papist was brought into 

 the legislature a fierce faction which had perpetually threatened the 

 church and throne of England with ruin, and which was, for centuries, 

 openly leagued with its enemies, was thus empowered to perplex and 

 overthrow the constitution in whatever public exigency it shall suit the 

 purposes of a profligate party, prince, or minister, to purchase it, or of a 

 foreign papist throne to introduce confusion by its hired agency into 

 the legislature, or of its native fanaticism to rebel against the laws 

 and principles of the legislature. 



With those recollections of the services of the last Parliament, of its 

 having lost England her rank among nations, of its having alienated the 

 hearts of the people from all public men, and of its having at once dis- 

 gusted the Irish Protestants, the only strength of England in Ireland, 



