364 Parliamentary Reform. ApniL, 



that the army as inevitably puts the power into the hands of its general. 

 When in England, we see Cromwell seizing the supreme power, and 

 Monk bartering it away ; and in France, Napoleon scourging and 

 chaining the fierceness of republicanism into the most submissive and 

 scandalous slavery ; we cannot plead ignorance of the natural result of 

 a democratic revolution." 



We are as hostile as the most hostile jacobin to the bribery and base- 

 ness practised at elections ; but those are the abuse, not the law. We 

 would punish in the severest manner all pecuniary means of entering 

 the House ; and send every elector who took a bribe, every representa- 

 tive who offered it, and every boroughdealer, for fourteen years to 

 New South Wales. There should be no pretence for any man's saying, 

 that seats were sold like bullock-stalls in Smithfield: and all those 

 odious bargains which the " Reformers" have so often flung into the 

 teeth of the aristocracy ; all that alleged scale of prices for the representa- 

 tion, should be abolished, under penalties equivalent to the loss of cha- 

 racter and fortune. But all this might be done, and will be done, and 

 is doing every day, without that desperate plunge into experiment 

 which makes the " Reform Bill" of Lord John Russell a terror to every 

 rational man in England. 



We demand what is to be the contemplated good of this measure, 

 supposing it succeeds to the fullest extent, and supposing that by a dis- 

 solution to-morrow, it should bring into the House a new assemblage of 

 men dear to the million ? Is it intended to lower the interest of the 

 national debt ? Is it intended to cut down the allowances necessary to 

 the decent subsistence of Royalty in the realm ? Is it intended to break 

 the church establishment into " the dust and powder of individuality/' 

 and send the religious community to learn their religion in the cheap 

 shops of methodism, or to embrace Presbyterianism and Republicanism 

 together ? If it does not those, we are at a loss to know what it is to do. 

 Those we are certain would be the most acceptable services to the new 

 constituents by which the new members will be sent to their new 

 House ; and if they began with these things how long would they 

 abstain from any object that might attract popular cupidity ? In 

 France, before the " reformed parliament" had sat three years, it had 

 voted monarchy a nuisance, religion a fable, and property a nonentity 

 it had exiled the whole body of the clergy and the nobles, and a vast 

 multitude of opulent and valuable members of the professions it had 

 confiscated the lands of the church, the corporations, and the charitable 

 institutions. After having covered the world with the exiles of France, 

 and France itself with beggary, it plunged, at the popular demand for 

 plunder, into a war of robbery on its feeblest neighbour, Holland, which 

 brought on a war with the whole of Europe. In this period it had 

 three successive constitutions, the guillotine in the streets of every city, 

 which cost it eighteen thousands of its chief people, and a civil war in 

 the provinces, which cost it four hundred thousand. But the services of 

 its regenerated parliament were not over it finally sold the people to a 

 dictator, who crushed even the remnant of liberty left by the guillo- 

 tine ; drove the population, by whole provinces, like sheep to the 

 slaughter, and after a waste of two millions of lives, brought ruin back 

 into 'the bowels of France, and gave up Paris twice to a foreign con- 

 queror. 



If those lessons had been of a remote age, we might have talked of 



