1831.] Ajg airs in General. 81 



compel the notice of the House of Commons. Or is there no member 

 of the House of Commons who will, on the plain knowledge of the case, 

 bring it forward, and demand that justice shall be done, that the 

 decency, at least, of election, if the purity is hopeless, shall be regarded ; 

 that the most precious interests of England and freedom shall not be at 

 the mercy of a set of electors, for whose conduct every man of sense can 

 find the name ; and that in a day when the governments of the earth 

 are about to undergo an ordeal of fire and sword, and when nothing will 

 be suffered to stand that has not the public good for its foundation ; 

 the constitution of the British empire shall not be sacrificed to the basest 

 and most repulsive venality. 



Of course we give the story as it has reached us. The statements 

 have been openly made, have passed without a denial, are still repeated 

 without the diminution of a single feature of the criminality ; and we 

 ask, is nothing further to be done? Again, we say, that upon an over- 

 sight of this kind has depended in other times the fate of an administra- 

 tion. Look to this, Lord Grey ! 



In our last number we laughed at the clamours of the little mathe- 

 maticians of the Royal Society and the largest of them is little for 

 ribbons and orders. The public agreed with us, as it always does with 

 the right side. We asked, in the first place, is there a man of eminent 

 science among the whole body ? We are not now talking of the com- 

 pilers, the hunters out of the old mathematical papers in the library, 

 the adders of a screw to this machine, or a pin to the other. But is 

 there among them all any individual who has made any serious and 

 actual addition to human knowledge? We care not for " correctors of 

 logarithms," balancers of " pendulums on a new principle," dry reckoners 

 of stars, polishers of the specula of telescopes, nor even for inventors of 

 a new method of baking tobacco pipes. We leave them to their record 

 to the ages to come. But, for our souls, we cannot prevail on ourselves 

 to worship them in the present generation. Is there any one of them 

 all in the class of Davy, or of Olbers, or even of Struve, or of any of the 

 men who either in the past generation or the present, have pushed us 

 forward a single step in the progress of the human mind ? Not one. 

 We are not to be answered by Cambridge reputations, those ephemera 

 which never survive a journey to London, and which seldom live 

 beyond the atmosphere of their own class-rooms. But we talk of those 

 vigorous acquisitions in science, which increase the permanent stock of 

 knowledge, and point the direct way to new command over the king- 

 doms of nature. We do not blame the living race of the Society's 

 mathematicians for not making those discoveries, for they are rare in 

 any age, and the men who make them must be rare. But we blame 

 them for being at once querulous, and assuming in their demand of 

 public distinctions, which, if they are to be given to science at all, are 

 due only to such men. Nothing is more fatal to the true honours of 

 science than lavishing puolic distinctions on mediocrity. But it is 

 a fallacy to suppose that such distinctions are in any case the natural 

 or advisable reward. What is a pension ? A bounty from the state 

 purse, often so ill applied among us, that a pensioner is generally con- 

 sidered as not much better than a state pauper ! Such things may be 

 necessary to keep the German or the Frenchman alive in countries 

 where there is no public. But in England, where every thing that can 



M.M. New Series- VOL. XI. No. 01. M 



