606 GOVERNMENT NO GOVERNMENT. 



and comprehensive views of our home and foreign interests, its eyes 

 are riveted upon its slippery support: its mind knows no pause of 

 quiet, its judgment soars not above its position; arid it thus becomes 

 the blind instrument, not only of its own destruction, but of the 

 destruction of social order and of political existence. 



Whatever Government at this moment holds office, must be a 

 reforming Government; whether the Government be Tory, or Whig, 

 or Radical, the animus presiding in it must be Reform. The pressure 

 from without, the intelligence of a great people, and the force of cir- 

 cumstances, lead to this. This word Reform has become a sort of 

 political shibboleth; all men pronounce it, and yet few pronounce in 

 the same tone, and still fewer put the same signification upon it. 

 However varied its meaning may be, as used by different parties, its 

 real interpretation is the accommodating our institutions to the 

 existing state of things. Human laws and rules, and distributions of 

 property, and religious regulations, could never have been intended to 

 be immutable, inasmuch as they are intended to govern mankind ; and 

 thus in their very nature must be moulded and modified as mankind 

 progresses or retrogrades in the scale of civilisation. A law appli- 

 cable to the social institutions of the age of the Seventh Henry, and 

 beneficial in its operation, can hardly be supposed to be equally 

 applicable to our present social institutions, when the character of the 

 entire people has been changed ; and when we are, in point of fact, a 

 new race, having different wants, different feelings, and widely different 

 connexions from our forefathers. Reform then is the adaptation of 

 existing laws or customs to the exigencies of the present generation 

 and its immediate successors, when such laws or customs are capable 

 of being so modified, and if not, by the acknowledgment of new 

 ones, of a fit character and purpose. 



Jt matters not, as we have before said, what may be the abstract 

 opinions of a government it must progress, but it ought to progress 

 safely and cautiously. However healthy may be the basis of our 

 Constitution, many portions of its superstructure are ruinous, and 

 equally unsightly and troublesome. To know that there are such 

 portions, however, is not the only knowledge a political architect 

 should be possessed of. It is one thing to rush forward like a 

 madman in the midst of dangers, it is another to proceed with the 



