1831.] Notes of the Month on A fairs in General 319 



light and shade ? and would it not have been the same dependent and 

 tool of forty ? And is it by such a legislature that a great country was 

 to be governed with any hope of safety, that freedom was to be sustained 

 in its necessary purity, or that the favour of Providence, despised and 

 forgotten name ! was to be brought down upon a people ? 



We admit all the advantages that may be connected with the old 

 system. Rottenness itself has some conveniences. Men of talent might 

 have got into the house, who could not have got in without the rotten 

 boroughs. But we say that the first great qualification in a legislature, is 

 not orators, but honesty ! Who can touch pitch and not be defiled ? What 

 fruits has Corruption ever borne, but corrupt ones? Or who can doubt that 

 the man who in the teeth of the law thinks of makingno scruple in purchas- 

 ing a seat, will make no scruple of going as much further as interest, 

 avarice, or baseness may tempt him ? Can we have grapes of thorns, 

 or figs of thistles ? It ought to be enough, and it is enough, for men 

 of common sense to know, that dishonesty exists in the principles of 

 any transaction, to know that its consequences must be evil. A thou- 

 sand specious advantages from public vice, are not worth one single 

 result from public virtue ! This is the Reform which the true national 

 voice demands ; purity I Changes in members or location may be 

 trifles. It is not the " Three Days in Paris " that have roused the 

 national demand; though those three days were the direct con- 

 sequence of an act of the most punishable and unqualified falsehood 

 and treachery that ever disgraced the name of King, or can disgrace 

 the advocates of his foolish and tyrannical cause. The national 

 demand has arisen from disgust ; not from a desire that radicalism and 

 riot shall fill the legislature, but that the legislature shall be enabled 

 to fulfil the objects of its mission, not that the temple, which it still 

 venerates, should be overthrown, but that the money-changers should 

 be driven from the temple. 



Nothing can be more extraordinary than the continuance of our settle- 

 ment at Sierra Leone. For the last dozen years, all its promises of civil- 

 izing Africa, softening the rugged nature of his majesty of the Mandin- 

 goes, and pouring the ivory and gold dust of the Emperor of the Moun- 

 tains of the Moon into the British Exchequer, have been given up. The 

 mortality has been horrid, and as if for the purpose of quickening our 

 movements, has increased year by year. The John Bull gives the follow- 

 ing list of " casualties," as the latest produce of the settlement : 



" The Primrose, of 18 guns, commander W. Broughton, has arrived at 

 Plymouth. Invalids: the Kev. Mr. Becher, Chaplain of the Dryad; Mr. An- 

 derson, Clerk of the Plumper ; and six other expiring victims, and eight sick 

 soldiers from the African corps. Mr. Filmore, the acting Master, was not 

 expected to survive ; and the ship had thirty-eight men in hospital. In short, as 

 this horrible return says, ' the season, on the whole, had proved favourable !' 

 Because, besides Mr. Filmore, and twenty-two sailors, from the Plumper, 

 Mr. Stuart, the Assistant-Surgeon, and Mr. Hopkins, the Clerk, nobody 

 particular had died except, indeed, Lieutenant Forsyth, of the African 

 corps ; and Mrs. Salter, the wife of the Agent Victualler ! and, upon the 

 whole, the season had been favourable. Twenty-two sailors died out of one 

 ship thirty -eight, from another, were dying fifteen poor wretches sent home 

 a surgeon, and a clerk, a lieutenant of the army, and the lady of an agent 

 victualler all, since the last accounts, in their graves ! and this, upon the 

 whole, is a favourable season !" 



