1829-3 England and Europe. 491 



But the remarkable feature of all those transactions is tlie perpetual 

 presence of the Catholic question. It would be idle to suppose that the 

 successive ministers were led to it by any personal affection ; they all 

 felt it an incumbrance ; they all would have rejoiced to fling it off; but 

 there it sat upon their shoulders ; the old dwarf in the Arabian tale was 

 not more hateful or inseparable from his unfortunate bearer. This was 

 their calamity. But to have adopted the evil ; to have made their use 

 of it on all occasions, when it could be turned to the most paltry personal 

 object ; to have inflicted the whole clinging mischief on their country for 

 the sake of the miserable distinctions of office, was their crime. 



We have said, that every advance of this guilty question was felt in 

 the increase of jjublic embarrassment ; and the maxim is so true, that on 

 looking at its state in any peculiar period, we might at once calculate on 

 the state of public good or evil. From the time when, under Lord Liver- 

 pool's decaying faculties, and Mr. Canning's ascending ambition, the 

 popish interest began to gain strength, we were assailed by a new enemy, 

 in the shape of visionary theories of commerce. The principles of poli- 

 tical economy — a science Avhich has hitherto only filled the brains of 

 charlatans, and drained the purses of fools — a collection of rambling and 

 conflicting dogmas, worthy only of the school of confusion and revolu- 

 tionary rashness from which they rose, were adopted into the settled 

 wisdom of English finance and trade. The propagation of those prin- 

 ciples in the cabinet was the gift of the same minister who had shrunk 

 from a Pitt dinner, through fear of bringing a shade on his allegiance to 

 popery ; and the man appointed to propagate them was the bosom 

 friend of that minister. No missionary of discord could have been 

 more fully furnished for his task. 



Mr. Huskisson had drank his economic lore fi-om no secondary source ; 

 he had not been condemned to swallow the raw theories of commercial 

 change from the receptacles of the Northern Athens^ nor coldly sip 

 them from the spiritless stores of the itinerant dealers in vapid para- 

 dox. He had stood by the parent stream; he had seen it when it 

 poured its tide of poison and blood fresh and full through the centre of 

 the great republic ; he had heard the shouts of living Jacobinism over 

 its borders ; and followed it with young, enthusiast eye, as it dashed 

 along, overthrowing and engulphing the old estabUshments of France 

 and Europe. 



The Free-trade system was tried — its instant result was the confusion 

 and misery of the whole commerce of England. The explosion from 

 the mouth of the cannon does not follow the touch of the trigger sooner 

 than the expeditious mischief of our national trade was let loose from the 

 hand of this accomplished theory. Turgot and Condorcet might have 

 envied the brilliant appHcation of their principles. Fifteen thousand 

 weavers in the single district of Spitalfields, imputing their starvation to 

 the Free-trade school ; capital to the amount of millions, lost or stag- 

 nant ; manufactories, by the hundred, suddenly closed ; the sea-ports 

 clogged with unfreighted ships ; bitter misery or furious indignation 

 sending up their voices, without number, from every quarter of the 

 emj)ire, were the sinister signs of that epoch which had figured so 

 showily in the right honourable economist's dreams. 



Of course we impute no intentional evil to Mr. Huskisson ; we believe 

 him even to have been utterly destitute of all suspicion that such con- 

 sequences could have followed. We acquit him of all conscious crimi- 



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