222 THE CONSERVATIVE BKJb'OltMERS. 



encourage more liberal and independent principles. Were they 

 not too happy to recognise the claims of Don Miguel to' the 

 throne of Portugal, claims, founded upon the violation of the 

 most solemn oaths of allegiance to his Brother's successor? 

 and did they not make every possible occasion, after the Whigs 

 came into office, of taxing them with indirect support of the 

 cause of Donna Maria ? In short, has not their Foreign Policy 

 been at all times characterised by the most base and truckling 

 subserviency to Foreign Powers ? 



Nor let the manner be forgotten in which they have upheld the 

 constitution of England during their possession of place. Let us not 

 forgot the suspension of the Habeas Corpus act, and the atrocious in- 

 justice and tyranny that were perpetrated under it. Let us not forget 

 the employment of spies, who were schooled by their masters, first 

 to tempt and to excite the lower orders, and afterwards to betray them. 

 Nor can we do less than remember their Indemnity bill, by which 

 they shielded themselves from the consequences of their infernal acts, 

 and their vote of thanks to the magistrates who superintended the 

 massacre at Manchester. And how were these doings effected ? By 

 large majorities of a corrupt House of Commons ; a house to which, 

 by the constitutional exercise of nomination, more than half its members 

 were returned. 



And yet these Conservatives, during the progress of the Reform 

 bill, with an effrontery almost beyond belief, presumed to speak of it 

 as an invasion upon the Constitution as a bill which would effect 

 the destruction of the Lords, and must inevitably succeed in tearing 

 the crown from the head of the king. And at this moment we hear 

 them professing to resist encroachments upon the Constitution, and 

 at the same time threatening to dissolve an independent House of 

 Commons, because it exercises the privilege to which, by the Consti- 

 tution, it is entitled. Let the Tories have the manliness to avow 

 their belief that the prerogative of the crown is not sufficiently exten- 

 sive; that the privileges of the lords are not sufficient for their ob- 

 jects, and that the people are not entitled to continue one of the three 

 estates ; but let them beware how they insult the country by madly 

 persisting in a course by which they purpose to give up the people, 

 bound hand and foot to the aristocracy and prerogative, and this 

 under the monstrous fiction that they are preserving the Constitution. 



