THE 
MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 
New Series. 
Voz. VI.] DECEMBER, 1828. [ No. 36. 
THE BRUNSWICK CLUBS. 
In the spirit of Burke’s immortal language—“< when bad men con- 
spire, good men should combine”—we rejoice at the establishment of 
Brunswick Clubs. No measure could have been more essential, for 
treason was already stalking through the land ; and no measure could 
have been more suitable to the manliness of the Britig ,»nind, the dignity 
of the cause, or the secure triumph of reason, true polcy, and the uncor- 
rupted Constitution. We saw an insolent and ignorant gang of bigots 
assembling daily in open scorn of law, uttering sentiments unheard of 
since the reign of the French revolution ; and while their characters were 
as base, and their intentions as atrocious, as any that marked the blackest 
time of subversion, held up, on the one hand, as the public organs of 
the Irish nation, and, on the other, confidentially received and cherished 
by the public instruments of the ministry. 
Whether the Ivish government was capable of feeling the degradation 
of this pusillanimous and short-sighted policy, or adopted it in the mean 
and hypocritical deference to rabble clamour, which characterizes the 
tenth-rate minions of office—whether the familiar reception of individuals 
_ whom no Irish gentleman would permit to cross his threshold, were the 
natural impulse of manriers reared in early licence, and giving proof of . 
their origin by a career, whose description must be left to its associates 
and its victims—the fact was unquestionable: the reception, the gay 
confidence, the familiar conviviality were there, to the astonishment and 
alarm of every man capable of knowing right from wrong, or of estimating 
he irrecoverable depth into which public functionaries could be flung by 
the contamination of such names. 
But, whatever were the results to those who thus stooped their necks 
under the heel of the Popish Association, its results to the country have 
been of the most signal value. When the intellect, the property, the 
principle, and the religion of Ireland—all included in the single word 
-ProresTantism—found that they were cut off from their natural con« 
nexion with the source of British polity in Ireland, they remembered the 
strength that was in their own manliness, union, and knowledge. Those 
M.M. New Series.—Vou. VI. No. 36. 4 C 
