1830.] The Wellington and the Grey Administrations. 623 



his extravagant and monstrous dictum with a border of ridiculous 

 assertions, which every man in the house and out of the house must have 

 laughed at. He tells the members of the House of Commons, that their 

 mode of election is the most perfect conceivable by the human mind. This 

 he tells to the members for old Sarum, for Gatton Park, for the Cinque 

 Ports, and for the Cornish boroughs. No doubt the intelligence must have 

 found a delighted echo in the bosom of the Honourable Member Sir 

 Massah Manasseh Lopez, and his class of honourable representatives. 

 No doubt it must have been received with rapture in the whole circle of 

 rotten boroughs ; but by all men yet unstained with that traffic, it must 

 have been listened to with the deepest disdain of the assertion and the 

 assertor. Now let the ex-premier be tried by his acts. First, as to his 

 foreign policy. How did he receive England from the Canning cabinet; for 

 Lord Goderich was too short a time in power to make any change ? Eng- 

 land was then the great arbiter of Europe, the friend of rational because 

 necessary change, and offering to the nations the finest model of tem- 

 perate liberty. How did he leave it ? Is England now the arbiter of 

 Europe ? Do aggrieved nations look up to her for protection? Is she the 

 patroness of freedom in foreign lands, the interposer between the strong 

 and the week, the preserver of the European balance ? Ask the Portu- 

 guese exile, the Spanish, the German aspirant after a free constitution. 

 Is she the defender of the balance of Europe ? See Turkey on the point 

 of adding to the inordinate dominion of the Czar. See the whole Con- 

 tinent at this hour mustering its armies, and preparing for new violences 

 against the liberties of man, and new encroachments on the peace of 

 nations. 



Let us next look to our home policy. His trophies are, universal dis- 

 content among the people, poverty among the manufacturers, and dis- 

 orders, scarcely inferior to civil war, amongst the agriculturists, the 

 most important class of the entire population. His next trophies are 

 the Catholic Question, and the New Police. And, first, of the police. 

 He has raised, under that name, a force alien to the customs of England, 

 offensive to the public sense of freedom, and singularly burthensome to 

 the public purse. To keep down the pickpockets and casual offenders 

 of London, he has raised a. force, organized on military principles, 

 chiefly soldiers, commanded by a soldier, and already amounting in 

 number to seven regiments of the foot-guards ! Let the citizens of 

 London think of the strength of this new military levy ; and believe, 

 if they can, that its sole service was to clear the streets of petty larceny. 

 Or let the honest members of the House of Commons think what would 

 be their feelings, if a minister had stood up and moved for the te imme- 

 diate raising of seven additional regiments of guards !" Yet this has 

 been done. The numbers of the police amount to nearly four thousand 

 already, and it was the intention to augment them, and spread the 

 system through England. They are trained to military discipline, 

 barracked, inured to military habits, were appointed by the Horse 

 Guards, commanded by the Horse Guards, make their daily reports to 

 the minister, and were sedulously separated from all connection with the 

 safe and constitutional authority of the magistrates and the people. 

 They were, in all senses of the word, a new force, a French notion 

 imported into British institutions, a gendarmerie, and equal to all the 

 purposes of a gendarmerie. 



Against this police the public voice has been loudly and unremit- 



