1831.] The Dissolution of Parliament. 479 



was idle for the fundholder to hope that his property would be secure 

 under the protection of a parliament which had been framed upon the 

 plan and suggestion of those ministers, who had already endeavoured to 

 assail that property; even if the new parliament were to be passive. Past 

 administrations were accused of having saddled the country with debts, 

 unjustly and unnecessarily, and how did the ministers propose to lower 

 those debts except by taxing the fu?ids themselves? It was of no use to at- 

 tempt to stand on forms at a time like that, and it could not be well ex- 

 pected that any one should speak immediately to the question before the 

 House. In fact, that question was, as to whether the parliament should 

 be dissolved or not whether they were to be dissolved because they had 

 voted the other evening that the English representation should not be 

 reduced?" 



Nothing can be truer. The tax on the transfer of stock was simply 

 the first step ; but it was a step, and we should have seen it followed up 

 with whig vigour. There is an idle clamour against fundholders, who are 

 all supposed to be immense porpoises of aldermen, or cunning sharks of 

 Jews arid brokers, to whom the nation is committed to pay thirty millions 

 a-year. Nothing can be further from the reality of the case. The funds 

 are scarcely more than a saving-bank on a large scale. They are the ac- 

 cumulation of the savings of trade, talent, and industry, exerted in a 

 thousand ways, and some of them in very small ways. In the funds the 

 widow and orphan deposit the little sum on whose interest they are to 

 live ; and any reduction of that interest would be not merely a gross 

 violation of faith, which in an individual would deserve to be marked 

 with perpetual infamy, but it would be the immediate ruin of thousands 

 and tens of thousands of the most meritorious, friendless, and helpless of 

 the human race. It is probable enough that even the infamous gain that 

 might be thus swindled out of the helpless would be but little after all, 

 for they must come, in innumerable instances, on the parish, and the 

 money which whiggism refused to pay as a debt must be paid as an alms. 



Sir Richard then adverted to another of the desperate illusions played 

 in the eyes of the people by the Bill : the seizure of church property, 

 which he justly designated as only the preliminary to the seizure of 

 rents, and of all other property. " But he would ask, upon what 

 ground did the ministers imagine their appeal to the agricultural 

 interest would result in a majority favourable to the measure? He 

 would tell the ministers the ground upon which they relied. There had 

 but recently existed a frightful excitement in the south-west provinces 

 of England ; that excitement had not yet subsided ; it had been so 

 strong that it exceeded every thing of the kind that had occurred since 

 the days of the going out of Sir R. Walpole's administration. The 

 farmers through circumstances had called for a Repeal of the Tithes, and 

 they had been told that the Reform Bill would lead to that result. 

 Such was the fact. The farmers, however, supposed that they were 

 to be benefited by that repeal that the tithes were to become their 

 property. They did not know that in this country at no period had the 

 tithes been taken away from the rightful possessors and given to the 

 occupiers of the land. The state, or some powerful and favoured mdi- 

 vidual, had, in all cases where the property of the Church was confis- 

 cated, seized upon that property, to the utter exclusion of the agri- 

 culturalist. From the state the farmer would enjoy but little leniency. 

 With the state for a collector, the farmer would not find matters so 



