]830.] The Year 1830. 127 



We put the question upon this plain ground In the whole circle of 

 policy, what one great principle has the minister sustained? In the 

 midst of a hundred national diseases, what one remedy has he offered ? 

 Has he healed the circulation, the corn laws, the poor laws, or any of 

 the whole number of evils ? Not one. He has harangued, and writ- 

 ten billets, and tampered, and temporized. But what has he done? 

 Nothing ! 



For what then are we to give him the credit of statesmanship ? If he 

 had been hunting hogs in Hindostan, or shooting pheasants in the moun- 

 tains of the moon, he could not have done less. If he had been asleep 

 every hour during thelast two years of his uncontrolled supremacy, for 

 no minister had ever so jealously provided against all obstruction in his 

 coadjutors, he could not have done less. Nay, total negation would 

 have been better ; for the common course of things carries nations on 

 more fortunately than the miserable alternation of impotence and pre- 

 sumption, the consciousness that something is expected, with the hope- 

 lessness of discovering any thing effectual ; the determination to bustle 

 through at all hazards, with the conviction that all is going wrong, 

 all made only to puzzle the experimentalist into deeper and more inex- 

 tricable confusion. 



Are we to trust him with our foreign diplomacy? He has been 

 baffled in every negociation. He has been compelled to abandon every 

 project, he has seen the name and power of the country diminished in 

 his hands, and he has suffered the sudden exaltation of a rival empire, 

 which threatens Europe with rapid hostility. 



Are we to trust him with our domestic government ? Before his face 

 every calamity of our affairs has darkened and accumulated ; he has 

 proposed no alleviation, and affairs are growing worse and worse. 



Are we to trust him with our liberties, with the support of our esta- 

 blishments in Church and State, with our Free Press, that glory and Pal- 

 ladium of our liberties, and with the care of Protestantism, without 

 which England would be but a mighty corpse, a loathsome mass of 

 decay? Let those who remember beyond the moment, answer the 

 question. 



Yet we must not be supposed to join with those who cry out Despair. 

 We believe that there is a fund of vigour in the empire, that may stand 

 experiments, the least of which would shake the sickly frames of other 

 empires to dissolution. There is probably no dominion on earth that 

 has within itself so strong a repulsion of injury, or so vivid and 

 rapid a spring and force of restoration. Its strength is renewed like 

 that of the young eagle ; and it is this very faculty of self-restoration 

 that allows the empire to hold together, notwithstanding the infinite 

 speculations, tamperings, and absurdities of political quacks of all kinds. 

 No country " takes more ruining" to be ruined. But there is a time 

 for all things, and there is a time for the exhaustion of this faculty, 

 and the close of the national endurance of a system of miserable 

 charlatanism. 



Yet is it enough that England should be kept merely above bank- 

 ruptcy, that she should be floated merely with her chin above water, 

 while she has the original power of being the first, most vigorous, 

 richest, and happiest portion of the world ? when she should walk the 

 water, and triumph in those convulsions of the moral elements, that would 

 sink and swallow up every other country ? Where does the earth con- 

 tain a people so palpably marked out for superiority in all the means of 



