1829.] Affairs in General. 293 
poor as themselves—where to look for the necessaries of hourly exist- 
ence? Let the law take those infamous infractions of every obligation 
in hand, and grasp the villainous issuer of money without more substance 
than his own honesty ; let this privilege of coining to an unlimited 
amount be as penal as coining a farthing ; and, for once, every man of 
honour and humanity would rejoice in enlarging the hand of the law ; 
and the scaffold would be looked upon as the instrument, not of a national 
fondness for severity, but as the instrument of popular preservation. 
Let banks be established throughout the country in shares, of which 
every man may be the purchaser—or in large companies, of which every 
man is responsible. The system of private banking, as it is now carried 
on, must be extinguished. There may be, of course, individual bankers 
to whom these charges do not apply. We will not say even that they 
apply to the Brighton bankers in question, ef whose peculiar proceedings 
we know nothing but from the papers. They may be honest, for any 
thing that we can tell, though we are glad that we have not been dealing 
at their counter. It is the system that we execrate ; a system so palpa- 
bly hazardous to the people, so adverse to the common caution of the 
law against imposition, and offering so powerful a temptation to the 
fraudulent, that we cannot conceive under what pretext it ever existed. 
We live in a time of discovery. Mr. O’Connel has discovered that he 
has aright to be dubbed M.P., and has communicated his discovery in a 
letter, which, by Cobbett’s pocket-rule, measures two miles and a half, 
or,as Mr. O’Connel nationally rectifies him, measures two miles and a 
half and three-quarters. Hitherto all the world have been thinking that 
it was the actual intention of English law that Papists were not to sit 
in Parliament. But Mr.O’Connel has written lis columns to prove that an 
Irish Papist has nothing to do but to put on his hat, walk into the lobby, 
kick the repugnant serjeant-at-arms from the door, and take his seat at 
the elbow of his honourable friend, Mr. Peel. If this be the fact of the 
case, we must own that we think Mr. O’Connel has thrown away a vast 
deal of time and oratory in the Corn Exchange, and that his wiser plan 
would have been to have packed up his portmanteau for Whitehall 
twenty years ago, and taken his seat, with as many of his fellow-patriots 
as had the fear of duns before their eyes, which would have made a most 
voluminous addition to his ¢ail. 
As to his abuse of Mr. Sugden, we heartily ccincide with him. His 
calling the Chancery-man any name of contempt that fills his rich voca- 
bulary, will hurt no feeling of ours ; though to be fallen into the con- 
tempt of Mr. O’Connel, is of itself as deep a plunge into the mire of 
scorn as could easily happen to any one. Mr. Sugden has, forsooth, been 
suddenly enlightened: he too has made the brilliant discovery that all 
the conceptions of his learned life on the nature of the Constitution; nay, 
that all the principles which, six months ago, he so solemnly protested 
were as solidly imbedded in his brain as Westminster Abbey in its foun- 
dation, were absolute nonsense ; that he had beén dreaming all his life ; 
that, treating of the Constitution every day of his existence, and 
Seiving by his presumed knowledge of it—he knew nothing at all on 
e subject, and that he has received his new inspiration from Mr. Peel ; 
nay, that he has turned off all his old whims, and new clothed his inner 
man in realities from the broadcloth wardrobe of Mr. Peel. And the 
