AGAINST THE MOTION.

England.

40 169

0

209

Counties,

Boroughs,

Universities,

Wales.

Counties,

2

10

29

60

308

By the above statement it will be seen, that England, Wales, and Scotland, give a majority in favour of the motion of TEN.

Thus it appears, that out of the members of Great Britain, a majority of ten of the Parliament created by themselves, under circumstances of unparalleled good fortune, voted against the Movement Ministry. And this is the manner in which the regeneration of the empire has restored the confidence of the people in the Commons' House of Parliament, and the Ministry whom the Reform tempest wafted into power!

Of whom, then, was the majority of twenty-one, who voted for Ministers, composed? Entirely of themselves, or of O'Connell's Tail. If you deduct the eight-and-thirty placemen, who were voting for their own offices, there will remain a majority of seventeen for Sir J. Yarde Buller's motion. If, from the forty-two Catholic members for Ireland, returned by O'Connell, you make the same deduction, there remains a majority of twenty-four who declared that they had no confidence in the Ministry. Had, then, either of these classes who composed the majority, the Ministry themselves, or O'Connell's Popish Tail, any confidence whatever in the present Administration? Their own acts and words will furnish the best answer to the question.

Has, then, the Government the confidence of the Member for all Ireland and his Popish Tail? Let his own words form the answer. He has told us, not once, but hundreds of times, that they are "base, bloody, and brutal Whigs;" that their government is worse than even that of the Tories; that he only supports them because he contrives to squeeze instalments of concession out of their hands; that he well knows that England is irrevocably hostile to the interests of Ireland; and that on that account he will never to his dying day cease to agitate for the repeal of the Union. And, suiting the action to the word, he has already renewed the repeal agitation in Dublin, and is laying the foundation of an extended agitation on that subject, which he tells us will erelong dismember the empire as effectually as a similar effort carried through Catholic emancipation. Here, then, we have the best possible evidence that O'Connell and the Popish Tail have no confidence in Ministers, viz. his own words, that they are base, bloody, and brutal" expressions not peculiarly characteristic of confidence _ and his own strenuous deeds, calculated to withdraw himself, his supporters, and country, for ever from their government.

66

And so much for the confidence whichtheir own darling Reform House of Commons has in the Government as at present constituted, and the real motives by which the majority of twentyone who support them are, by their own admission, actuated. If, then, Parliament as a whole has no confidence in

them, have any particular class or interest in the community that confidence;

or is there any one section of the community who really, and sincerely, think that their interests may be safely intrusted to their keeping ?

Do the Conservatives trust them? This question hardly needs an answer. If it did, it would be decisively replied to in the minority of 308, including pairs, who voted against them in the late division. And it is the constant complaint of the Ministry and their few remaining partisans in the press, that they have for years been the subject of a relentless and systematic opposition from the Tories, unparalleled even in the long annals of British faction.

Have they the confidence of the House of Peers and the aristocracy? This question is easily answered. There is a majority of ninety-one, which has been more than once recorded against them in that assembly, notwithstanding the creation of no less than fifty-two peers in the short space of nine years, or more than double the number that ever were created in a similar period before by any Tory administration. Indeed, so far from pretending that they possess the confidence of the Upper House, it is the unceasing complaint of Ministers that they are exposed to the utmost difficulty in maintaining their ground there; and they expressly admitted that the carrying of Lord Roden's motion for an enquiry into the administration of justice in Ireland, was felt by them to be a direct vote of censure upon their own conduct.

Have Government the confidence of the landed proprietors? This, too, is at once answered by the decisive majority of one hundred and ninety in the last Session of Parliament, against the now hardly-disguised project of abolishing the Corn-Laws. This project, indeed, Lord Melbourne, in the Upper House, justly styled "the most insane that ever yet entered into the mind of man; but, notwithstanding this, a large proportion of the Cabinet members in the Lower House not only strenuously argued for it in Parliament, but vigorously agitate for their total repeal, by striving to move the gigantic masses in the great towns; and Mr Poulett Thompson, the member for Manchester, as a reward for his long and great services in that career of

NO. CCXCIII, VOL. XLVII,

Anti-Corn-Law agitation, has been recently rewarded by the GovernorGeneralship of North America. And if any further proof were required, it would be found in the fact that no less than ninety-four county members in England alone voted against Ministers, and only forty-four with them, on the late division; while even in Scotland, a majority of the county members who voted against the Administration was nineteen, and for them only twelve. Indeed, so far are Ministers from themselves asserting that they possess the confidence of the landed interest, that it is their constant complaint that they do not; and that, what between Tory parsons and Tory squires, it has become al. most impossible to contest with ad. vantage a Tory seat in any county.

Does Government, then, possess the confidence of the old Whig aristocracy of that great party, so long celebrated in English history, to which Fox belonged, and which Burke adorned, and of which Lord Grey, when they came into office in 1830, was the acknowledged head? Here, also, a decisive answer is to be found in the words and actions of their own acknowledged leaders. Not only have the noblest and ablest of that party seceded from their ranks, with Lord Stanley, Sir James Graham, Lord Ripon, the Duke of Richmond, and a host of others, but a great part of whom are among their most determined and powerful opponents. And if any further evidence were wanting on this head, it has been furnished by the admission and acts of the son and representative of their own acknowledged leader; for Lord Howick emphatically stated in the House of Commons in the late debate, that he resigned his office in the Administration last May, because he saw clearly that Ministers were not strong enough to resist the downward progress of the Movement, and because he saw clearly that "the most respectable of their supporters were every week or month, by ones or twos," leaving their ranks, and slipping over to the benches of Opposition. After this admission from the son of the avowed leader of the old Whig party, it is unnecessary to say more as to Government as at present constituted having lost the interest and confidence of that party.

Have Ministers the confidence of

2 D

the commercial classes? So far as commercial wealth or property is concerned, unquestionably they have not. It is notorious, that at least threefourths, probably four-fifths, of the manufacturing wealth and property of the country is not only hostile, but decidedly hostile, to their measures; and that if a majority of the representatives of the mercantile towns still support them, it is because in these constituencies the men who have no property overbalance those who have any. Fortunately, here also, facts altogether decisive of the question put the matter beyond a doubt. In London, the great commercial metropolis of the empire, the customs of which amount to the stupendous sum of twelve millions a-year, they were received, no further back than last November, in the annual dinner given at Guildhall by the Liberal functionaries of the city to the leading merchants and bankers of all parties, but chiefly, of course, to those of their own way of thinking, with such a pitiless storm of indignation, that, according to the admission of their own journals, the like of it was never before witnessed in English history. Liverpool, the second greatest commercial town in Great Britain, whose customs amount to £4,500,000 a-year, has actually turned the corner, and returned two stanch Conservatives to Parliament; while in Glasgow, the most magnificent banquet ever witnessed in modern Europe was given by four thousand three hundred gentlemen of respectability to Sir Robert Peel-and a majority of the Reformed Town Council, elected by the Parliamentary constituency, is composed of Conservative gentlemen.

But, in fact, it is hardly possible to take up a newspaper from any part of the country, in which evidence will not be found of the utter want of confidence which even the liberal portion of the mercantile class-even their most strenuous liberal supporters, have in the capacity and judgment of Ministers. At all the meetings held by Mr Urquhart to discuss the commercial interests of the country, at Newcastle, at Glasgow, and Manchester, the strongest condemnation of the mercantile conduct of Government was pronounced by their own most decided political partizans. It did not require their pas

sive acquiescence in the blockade of Mexico and Buenos Ayres, so cruelly detrimental to British interests, or of their late disgraceful and inexplicable supineness in regard to the Chinese disaster, to convince the whole mercantile world, of whatever shade of political opinions, that their interests never were intrusted to such incapable hands. This is matter of universal notoriety throughout the empire-there is not a Liberal merchant in the united kingdom who does not know that it is the case, and hardly one that will not, in the confidence of private friendship, admit that it is so.

Have Ministers, then, the confidence of the operatives and the Chartists, since they have lost that of every other interest in the community? The insurrection at Newport the flames of Birmingham-the hardly suppressed conflagration of Sheffield-the attempts at burning of the metropolis itself, are a sufficient answer to the question. In truth, if there is any one class in society more than another to whom the present Government are an object of utter abhorrence, it is the Chartists; and the strength of this feeling of abhorrence itself has been one great cause of the spread of Chartism. The language with which their orators and journals constantly assail the conduct of Ministers is such, that we never have, and never will, pollute our pages with it. It is not surprising, however much it is to be lamented, that they should have fallen into these expressions of language and conduct. In their case, the violence of party has been inflamed with the virulence of disappointment. The Chartists say, that they have not only been disappointed by the Ministry, but deceived. They feel that they have been made the mere instruments for the ambitious designs of others, and that, when their passions and expectations had suited the purposes of the authors of the Movement, they were thrown aside as useless. Thence the rise and virulence of Chartism, and the awful fact, not only of millions of the community being united in support of an absolute democratic form of government, and of hundreds of thousands being leagued together in an infernal conspiracy for the destruction of life and property.

If the one extreme of society that of the ignorant Chartists-is decidedly

hostile to Ministers, is the opposite extreme that of the learned, the thoughtful, and the meditative_better disposed to their support? Are the clergy, the universities, the learned professions, more favourable to them than the incendiaries of the Bull-ring, or the conspirators of Newport? Confessedly they are, if possible, still more hostile; though their hostility, found ed on deeper feeling, and based on nobler principle, is more measured in its expression. The fact of the whole university members being returned by the Conservative interests, by immense majorities, and of the established clergy being every where, notwithstanding all the influence of Government, in decided hostility to them, is but a slight indication of the all but universal and profound feeling of indignation which pervades all the highly educated classes at the reckless and unprincipled system which Government have for ten years pursued. All the influence of Ministers, and of the Whig bishops whom they have appointed, has been unable to prevent an overwhelming majority of the Church from resolutely opposing their principles; and all the multiplication of commissions and endless Whig legal jobs, has been unable to hinder an overwhelming majority of the bar, both in England and Scotland, from passing over to the Conservative ranks. Decisive evidence of this has recently been afforded by the strong language in which the petition was drawn, signed by five hundred and fifty barristers, for the liberation of the Sheriffs of Middlesex, imprisoned by order of the House of Commons.

Destitute of support from any other interest in the community or class of politicians, it may perhaps be said that the conduct of Ministers is at least approved by their stanch friends, the low Radicals. Let the sentiments of this section, of which Mr Wakley and Mr Ward are the representatives, be judged of by their words. The former of these gentlemen said last autumn, that "the conduct of Ministers had excited one universal feeling through. out the country, which was that of disgust;" while the latter, in his ad"dress to his constituents in Sheffield, stigmatized in yet stronger terms the depth of pol political baseness to which they had descended. Observe, we use the language of the strongest supporters

of Ministers of that small section of the Liberal party which they have, par excellence, in a manner appropriated to themselves. We have no wish to stain the pages of honest independent warfare either by the application of such epithets, or the imputation of such motives.

Are the colonies more favourable to the Government as at present constituted? Let Canada answer, which has twice broken out into a fierce and fatal revolt, without material grievances of any kind, or any peculiar cause to have inflamed the present frightful spirit of discontent, but the supercilious haughtiness of the Colonial-Office, and the total disregard by Government of all the interests and remonstrances of the colonists. Let the West Indies answer, whose discontents, arising from their protracted injuries and sufferings, have long been so excessive, that nothing but the state of impotence to which they have been reduced by ten years of Whig legislation, has prevented them from breaking out into open revolt. The Cape of Good Hope, Australia, the Mauritius, are all convulsed with grievances of their own, for which they can get no redress from Government, and which have laid the foundation of a discontent which, when they become more powerful, will assuredly cause them to break off from the empire. The East India merchants are perfectly frantic at the enormous confiscation of their property which has taken place in the Chinese Seas, and the unpardonable tardiness of Government either to assert the dignity of the empire or prepare the means of resistance. It is notorious that such was the discontent excited in the Indian army by the Whig cry for economy, and the ruinous consequences of the reductions of Lord William Bentinck, that it shook our Indian empire to its foundation, and excited a spirit of discontent in the East which provoked the intrigues of Russia for our suppression, and rendered unavoidable the perilous chances of the Affghanistan expedition. Even the Ionian Islands have evinced such a refractory spirit, that the Lord High Commissioner was obliged suddenly to dissolve the House of Representatives; and the Maltese became so obstreperous, that the Governor of the island was obliged to suspend altogether the liberty of the press. In short, one of the Cabinet correctly described the condition of the colonies after nine years of Whig government, when he said that Heligoland was the only colony we had which was in a state of quiescence. Nor is it surprising that there should be such an universal feeling of contempt for the Whig Government through every party, interest, and colony of the British empire. There is not one of them which has not in turn been sacrificed by them to the Moloch of mob-popularity, or the cravings of revolutionary passion. The aristocracy they have bereaved of their just and necessary influence in the state, and in lieu of the ancient, self-poised, and admirably adjusted British constitution, substituted a strange compound of royalty and democracy, checked by an aristocratic veto, which they themselves confess is incapable of carrying on the business of the country, and under the government of which, useful legislation has for the last five years, by the admission of all parties, been brought to an absolute stand-still. They have taken every opportunity of degrading and insulting the Church, not merely by strenuously resisting every attempt at its enlargement to keep pace with the rapid increase, enormous spiritual destitution, and fearful augmentation of crime among the people; not merely by taking part on every occasion, both in and out of Parliament, with its enemies and maligners; not merely by supporting with the whole weight of Government a scheme of education avowedly framed for the purpose of confounding religious truth with falsehood, obliterating all the old landmarks on the subject, and leaving no possibility of avoiding the inference, that their principles are, in the words of Gibbon, that to the "vulgar all religions are equally true, to the philosopher all equally false, and to the legislator all equally useful;" but by having attacked religion in its very cradle, and social happiness in its birthplace. They have not only made no attempts to check, or discourage, the abominable licentious sect who have recently made such progress through the land under the name of Social

ists, whose leading principle is the irresponsibility of all men for crime, whose leading maxim the division of all property, and leading passion the promiscuous concubinage of all men with all women; but they have actually gone the length of patronizing and promoting this very sect, whose tenets are too well calculated to inflame the human heart, ever to want numerous and active supporters in every highly civilized and corrupted society. Their avowed head was ushered into the presence of the Queen by the Prime Minister, to present an address to the Virgin Princess from this band of " rational religionists;" while a leading member of the fraternity has been appointed by the Home Secretary to the important and responsible situation of Registrar of Marriages at Birmingham. Is it surprising that a Government evincing such a total disregard not merely of that faith which has hitherto proved the blessing and salvation of the empire, but of those institutions which all nations, even the most barbarous and uncivilized, have invariably regarded as the bond and cement of society, should have awakened the most intense feelings of alarm, not merely among all persons attached to the Church of their fathers, but all who feel an interest in the purity of manners, the salvation of property, or the existence of their country?

Turn to the landholders. Have they any more reason to feel confidence in the Ministry who have now for above nine years swayed the sceptre of the British empire? Truly, if they measure their attachment to, or interest in their welfare, by their deeds, they have little cause to repose with confidence on their exertions. Not only has the land been despoiled, by their organic change in the constitution, of its just share in the direction of government, by giving 364 members to the boroughs in Great Britain, while the counties have only 189, being nearly two to one, although the annual produce of the land is nearly double that of the whole commerce and manufactures of the united kingdom put together, and the hands employed in agriculture* are more nume

•

:

L.246,000,000 148,000,000 -Pebrer's Statist. Tables, 350.