PUBLIC OPINION IN ENGLAND. 67 



aspects, is created for the elector, through which alone he is permitted 

 to view surrounding things. The terrors of bye-gone ages are brought 

 up like hosts of hobgoblins to scare him in his path.* Like the lover in 

 Der Freischutz, he is hemmed in by the magic circle of existing interests. 

 Bishops in their white wigs scowl on himjand flap their wings on one 

 hand — fat bulls of Basan enclose him on every side — the law, like an 

 alligator with open jaws, grins at him on the other. The blue devils of 

 penury, when a nobleman will do what he likes with his own, would 



" Hiss him into madness," 



and skeleton horses and skeleton riders are presented to him if he would 

 think on the corn laws ; and thus he is compelled to cast those magic 

 bullets which lead him on to irretrievable ruin and despair. 



To makeup for this, the Liberals are forced to be also ilUberal — to fight 

 the devil with his own weapons — to throw up at times, as was the case 

 with Mr. Hume some time since, principle itself to gain a point. He 

 was forced to vote luhite was black to save the cause of the people. There 

 is not, perhaps, a man of more steadiness of purpose than Mr. Hume ; 

 or of more upright and manly political conduct, or of greater political 

 consistency. But if the archangel Michael was to come down from 

 heaven, or Aristides, himself, to rise from the dead, so great, so ex- 

 tended, and so universal is the taint of this moral depravity, that they 

 would have to go with the stream, to fight with the same weapons, and 

 to own Satan's own creed as a standard of political faith. 



Now where is the remedy against this moral apostacy .? ten thousand 

 times more dangerous, to a people, than all the political apostacy that 

 ever existed. The one has its reward in the execution of millions, and 

 the everlasting perdition to his fame; but the other multiplies itself, and 

 throws its gorgon features on the community, till it turns them into its 

 own likeness, turning their hearts to stone against the finer and higher 

 calls of their better nature, and making them the bulwarks of that spe- 

 cies of depravity which ends, sooner or later, in the ruin of thrones and 

 dynasties, or in the subjugation of the people themselves to the most 

 odious and accursed tyranny. 



The remedy must come frum the people themselves ; it is they that 

 must be the morduant that will fix the fleecy colours of the patriot's prin- 

 ciple, and make him not only stick to his party but to that which is higher 

 than party, or even country — namely, to "moral consistency." No man, 



• At the late Northampton election one of those miserable tricks was i)layed to 

 frighten the people with Catholicism. A small map of England was exhibited, 

 wilii all the catholic chapels marked in it, which of course entirely covered the 

 map, and this made the people think that Catholicism was universal. 



