126 The Year 1830. [FEB. 



exposed to insults and aggressions ; our only expedient is the trickery of 

 diplomacy ? That to rescue the naval supremacy of England from the 

 most desperate and inevitable hazard that has ever tried it, and that the 

 next quarter of a century will surely bring ; our only exertion should be 

 to outflank the Czar, by Lord Heytesbury, at Moscow, and Sir R. Gor- 

 don at Constantinople ? What would Oliver Cromwell have said to this ? 

 He who pronounced that " the best ambassador was an English man of 

 war." With what contempt for his coadjutor would Lord Chatham 

 have heard this expedient proposed in the Cabinet ! With what lofty 

 scorn Pitt, that man of British mind and British integrity, would have 

 frowned down the petty spirits, to whom such contrivances were 

 wisdom ! Pitt, who pronounced that the Russian attack on Oczakow, 

 the barbarian fortress of a barbarous shore, was enough to demand the 

 whole rising of the British empire in its might to crush the young ambi- 

 tion of Russia. 



To the Duke of Wellington, or the people about him, it is impossible 

 that we can have any personal prejudice. We desire to know nothing of 

 them but by their public acts. But, if we find those acts unsuccessful in 

 every instance ; marked by overweening confidence in their origin, and 

 miserable falling off in their close ; if looking through the whole course 

 of their policy, we look in vain for any one evidence of the foresight of 

 the statesman, the candour of the lover of liberty, or the dignity of the 

 legislator ; if we see all the great questions passed by, " till a more 

 convenient season ;" all the laws and regulations which carry on the 

 system of national strength, disturbed by childish tampering ; the boyish 

 reveries of pseudo-economists, adopted for the tried practice, that of a 

 narrow island made the commercial sovereign of the world; all the 

 great national interests in a state of decay the farmer, the artizan, the 

 miner, the merchant, sending up from all quarters of the land the same 

 voice of reproach and recrimination, yet not a single restorative mea- 

 sure offered by the wisdom of the Cabinet ; promises in abundance, 

 performance utterly negative ; thousands and tens of thousands of the 

 most dextrous and industrious workmen in the world wandering through 

 the highways, and glad to fight with the dogs for their food ; an enor- 

 mous increase of pauperism, that must be fed ; while the rents, profits, 

 and produce of all the higher classes are hourly sinking ten, fifteen, and 

 fifty per cent. ; while the old hospitality of the English noble is extin- 

 guished by the failure of his income ; and the country gentleman is flying 

 to hide his head in Bath and Brighton, or stooping to the deeper humilia- 

 tion of haunting the skirts of the Treasury for a government dole ; 

 while the very flower of our lower orders are hiring vessels to transfer 

 themselves and the remnants of their property to America, the Cape, 

 Canada, New South Wales, to any corner of the earth, where they 

 can escape the deadly incumbrances of existence in England ; while, in 

 spite of all official dexterity, the revenue is going down day by day, 

 and the truth is at last beyond the power of disguise, must we be 

 blamed, if we ask by what chance has this combination of evils been 

 heaped upon this peculiar time ? Unless we can be convinced that 

 something beyond human observation is the cause, and that we are 

 smote by an avenging miracle, we must look for the cause among earthly 

 things. We might as well believe that the laws of gravity would 

 change, as that the eternal connexion between imbecility and ill success 

 should be averted from an empire. 



