THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMERS. 219 



We readily grant that it is the paramount duty of every true lover 

 of his country, to preserve inviolate the British Constitution j and 

 that the most religious caution should be exercised by a party in 

 power, or by a majority of the House of Commons, in advocating 

 any measure that may, in the slightest degree, be supposed to infringe 

 upon it. But it is because of that very love of the constitution, that 

 we are intolerant of those who attempt to intimidate the true 

 friends of their country from tearing away the unsightly and pernicious 

 growths that weaken and disfigure it. He is no Destructive who 

 would, without much unnecessary tenderness of handling, separate 

 the ivy from the oak, or remove the moss which has almost obli- 

 terated the tablet upon which the charter of our liberties is engraved 

 in imperishable letters. We are, we say, impatient, and justly so, of 

 those who, with an impudence of assertion rarely equalled, while 

 they cry out for the constitution, are only solicitous about it, because 

 it supplies the strength around which the monstrous abuses by which 

 they live, and move, and have their political being, may be permitted 

 to cling. They would conserve the constitution as a miser conserves 

 his gold it may be all safe, but it is never seen. 



It will not fail to be remembered that, during the passing of the 

 Reform Bill, the supporters of that measure were taxed with a most 

 culpable disregard of the wisdom of our ancestors, as handed down 

 to us in the page of history ; and with a perfect contempt for the 

 lessons which experience had been at great pains to set them. It 

 has, however, become the fashion of late to insist, on behalf of the 

 Tories, that we have nothing to do with the past, so far as they have 

 been implicated in supplying it with profitable materials, except to 

 forget it ; and that we are to make to ourselves te some sweet oblivious 

 antidote," by virtue of which we shall find ourselves in a becoming 

 state of mind to accord to them a fair trial. For our own part, 

 we are sensibly alive to the extremely profitable results to be 

 drawn from. experience ; and from a brief and hasty reference to the 

 proceedings of the Tories during the last twenty years, we have dis- 

 covered ample and just reasons for their utter condemnation. We 

 shall lay before our readers a few of the conservative acts of a Tory 

 administration, and leave it to them to decide whether our foreign 

 policy, our internal welfare whether our national honour and our 

 constitutional liberty, are in the hands best calculated to support and 

 maintain them. 



