2-12 Domestic Politics. QSept. 



in " breaking down tlie Constitution," as was presumptuously announced 

 by his colleague — for once no hypocrite — he has cut down the bridge 

 between him and every Protestant statesman of England. No fancied 

 hope of undoing what has been done — no giddy contrivance for rescuing 

 what remains of the Constitution — even no generous enthusiasm for 

 arresting a progress, of which every man can see the aim, though none 

 can see the end — must be suffered to delude the true strength of the 

 English legislature, its sound Protestant part, into a Wellington coali- 

 tion. The name itself should be a sufficient v/arning. It has dragged to 

 a fathomless depth every party that ever suffered itself to be entangled in 

 its mesh. The powerful mind and unbounded popularity of Fox could 

 not give him buoyancy against it. The subtlety, indefatigable intrigue, 

 and parliamentary skill of Canning, only made his struggles against 

 public scorn the more hopeless. The whole inferior multitude — the 

 rabble of Greys, Grenvilles, and Wyndhams, the followers of their master's 

 steps into tergiversation — of course received no more acquittal than the 

 rabble of the Brownlows and Dawsons of our time. And so it >vill be, and 

 so it ought to be, with every man who joins the cabinet of the Duke of 

 Welhngton. He has brought Papists into the Protestant legislature : that 

 is his ground of exclusion ; on that, men of honour will stand, and firmly 

 reject every offer of connexion with him. All the water in the ocean will 

 not wash away the stain of that national homicide. By combining with 

 him, they will only share the tinge of the deed. By sternly refusing his 

 contact, thej^ will at once do justice to their own names and to their 

 principles, extinguish the miserable cabinet, and leave its head a monu- 

 ment of detected and blasted ambition. There never was a period in 

 the history of the British empire, wlien the career of true policy was less 

 obscured by the common clouds of public life. We have now to deal 

 with none of the intricate, though comparatively trivial questions, on 

 which good men may differ without a sacrifice of either understanding or 

 principle. It is not a complicated question of war or trade ; but whether 

 we shall, by an unanimous and resolute effort, resist and break down an 

 intrigue which has, in an imguarded hour, and by a course of almost 

 incredible duplicity, broken down the Constitution ; or shall, by a partial 

 junction, confirm that strength which is tottering at this hour, and which, 

 before the end of a single year, must be at our mercy .'' Who can hesitate 

 in giving the answer ? The present cabinet must ywt be sustained by the 

 addition of a single name that could stand between it and ruin. " Mea- 

 sures, and not men," was the old cry of hypocrisy. " Men and measures 

 both," is the cry of honour. Truth disdains the tender distinctions of 

 those public traffickers, who see nothing in public transgression but the 

 opportunity of making a better bargain with the transgressors. We 

 live in times when those experiments on national patience must be made 

 no more. We cannot separate the patronage of an idolatrous superstition 

 from its patrons. We know that the protestantism of the Constitution is 

 essential to its existence — that the introduction of Popery is its virtual 

 death-blow — that the presence of Papists in an English Parliament is the 

 presence of a class hostile by their earliest prejudices, by their individual 

 ambition, by their allegiance to their own blinded faith, by the fierce 

 antipathy of their personal recollections, and even by their obscure and 

 extravagant fancies of the means of propitiating Heaven, to the freedom 

 and safety of the Protestant religion. And with what feeling can Pro- 

 testants and free-born men think of the doers of this deed ? With what 

 solemn recollection of the horrors of triumphant Popery of old, and what 

 justified alarm at its incessant and incurable enmity for the time to come. 



