GREAT changes in human affairs, or great alterations in human character, never take place from trivial causes. The most important events, indeed, are often apparently owing to inconsiderable springs; but the train has been laid in all such cases by a long course of previous events. A fit of passion in Mrs Masham arrested the course of Marlborough's victories, and preserved the tottering kingdom of France; a charge of a few squadrons of horse under Kellerman at Marengo fixed Napoleon on the consular throne, and another, under Sir Hussey Vivian, against the flank of the Old Guard at Waterloo, chained him to the rock at St Helena. Superficial observers lament the subjection of human affairs to the caprice of fortune, or the casualties of chance; but a more enlarged philosophy teaches us to recognise in these apparently trivial events the operation of general laws, and the last link in a chain of causes, which have all conspired to produce the general result. Mrs Masham's passion was the ultimate cause of Marlborough's overthrow; but that great event had been prepared by the accumulating jealousy of the na tion during the whole tide of his victories, and her indignation was but

VOL. XXXII, NO. CLXXXIX.

the drop which made the cup overflow: Kellerman's charge, indeed, fixed Napoleon on the throne; but it was the glories of the Italian campaigns, the triumphs of the Pyramids, which induced the nation to hail his usurpation with joy: the charge of the 10th hussars broke the last columns of the imperial army; but the foundation of the triumph of Wellington had been laid by the long course of the Peninsular victories, and the bloody catastrophe of the Moscow campaign.

It is the same with the Reform mania which now ravages the nation, and promises to inflict upon its inhabitants such a long series of disasters. The change of Ministers, the rashness and ambition of the Grey administration, was the exciting cause; but unless they had found the train laid by a long course of preceding events, even their reckless hands could not have ventured to fire it. Such prodigious innovations as they threatened-such demolition of ancient institutions as they proposed, would at once have hurled any preceding government from the helm, and consigned them to the dust amidst the applauses of the people. The voice of the nation would have been raised in execrations, loud,

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long, and irresistible; and the applause of the Jacobin mob drowned in the indignation of all the virtuous part of mankind.

Even if it were true, as the conservative party maintain, that the whole distractions and anarchy of the country are owing to the prodidigious and unnecessary addition which the government proposed to make to the political power of the lower class of householders, still that would only remove the difficulty a step farther back. For the question remains, how has it happened that twelve men were to be found in Great Britain of sufficient rank, talents, and character, to construct a cabinet, who would engage in a scheme of innovation so impetuous, and in the destruction of institutions sanctified by so long a train of recollections? That some of the Ministers are most able men, is evident from their speeches that many of them are amiable and good men, we can testify from personal intercourse: that most of them are possessed of great fortune is universally known: that they are all gentlemen is certain: that some of them are of old and dignified families, is evident from the classic names of Russell and Spencer which they bear. How, then, has it happened that a cabinet composed of such men should have launched out in so astonishing a manner upon the sea of innovation: that they should have engaged in measures which history will class, in point of rashness, with the visions of Mirabeau, and, in point of peril, with the conspiracy of Catiline: that they should have been blinded alike to the lessons of history, the dictates of wisdom, and the results of experience that they should have forgotten equally all that the sages of ancient wisdom had bequeathed, and all that the tears of modern suffering had taught that they should have implicitly followed the footsteps of the French innovators, and periled their lives and their estates, in a course which had brought their miserable forerunners to an untimely end?

This will appear still more extraordinary, if the principles and writings of these men themselves, who have urged on these disastrous measures, in early life, is taken into con

sideration. Such is the weight of the argument against them, that it will admit of almost any concession, and derives confirmation from the most vehement writings in favour of freedom prior to the fall of the Duke of Wellington's administration. No more emphatic condemnation of the Reform Bill is to be found than in the sayings of Mr Fox in 1797, or the speech of Earl Grey in 1817: no more profound exposition of the principles of the conservative party than in the History of Sir James Mackintosh, or the Whig writings of Mr Hallam. We have never yet heard the Lord Chancellor refute the masterly sketches of Henry Brougham on this subject: we have looked in vain to the Lord Advocate for an answer to the arguments so long and powerfully urged by Francis Jeffrey: we have listened in vain, in the speeches of the noble mover of the bill, for a reply to the observations of Lord John Russell on the constitution. So rapid, so fatally rapid, has been the progress of revolutionary ideas, since this firebrand was thrown into the bosom of the nation, that the conservative party require now to refer to no other authority but the arguments and principles of the authors of the bill a few years back, and they, in their turn, are driven to the doctrines of the Jacobin and revolutionary party, whom their abilities, till they came into office, were successfully exerted in refuting.

This moral phenomenon will appear still more extraordinary when the character of the people among whom this tempest has arisen is taken into consideration.—“ It is a remarkable fact," says Turgot, "that while England is the country in the world where the freedom of the press has existed for the longest time, and where discussion on public affairs has gone on for centuries in the most fearless manner, it is at the same time the country in which the people have the greatest reverence for antiquity, and are most obstinately attached to old institutions. I could alter fashions, laws, or ideas, ten times in a despotic monarchy, for once that they could be moved in the popular realm of England."The observation is perfectly just, and has been exemplified by the history

of England since the foundation of the monarchy. The rudiments of our present constitution, the institutions which still prevail, like Gothic castles amidst the ephemeral structures of modern times, are coeval with the union of the Heptarchy. The institutions of Aldermen, Hundreds, and Tithings; of County Courts, and regular Circuits for the administration of Justice; of Parliaments, Juries, and the Supreme Tribunals of Westminster Hall, date from the reign of Alfred. During all the severity of Norman rule, it was to the customary laws of Saxon freedom that the people of England looked back with fond and unavailing regret; and when the cup of national indignation was full, and the Barons rose in open revolt at Runnymede, it was not any imaginary system for which they contended, but the old laws of Edward the Confessor that they re-establish ed and confirmed by additional safeguards; tempering thus, even amidst the triumph of barbarous power, the excitement of feudal ambition, by the hereditary regard to old institutions. During the long and anxious struggle which prevailed between Saxon freedom and Norman severity, under the Plantagenet Kings, it was not any innovation for which they contended, but the ancient liberties of the people which they sought to re-establish, and instead of enacting new statutes, they two-and-thirty times ratified and re-enacted the Great Charter. When Papal ambition strove to obtain the mastery over British independence, the Barons of England at Mertoun refused to submit to the aggression; and their reply, Nolumus leges Anglia mutari, has been the watchword and glory of their descendants for seven hundred years. When the great earthquake of the sixteenth century convulsed the neighbouring states, the English tempered the fury even of religious discord, by the sacred reverence for antiquity; the Reformation, which levelled to the dust the ecclesiastical institutions of so many other nations, bent, but did not subvert the British hierarchy; the Church of England differed less in its precepts and its establishment from the Catholic

faith, than any other of the reformed churches, and its cathedrals still rise in grey magnificence through the realm, to overshadow the temples of modern sectarians, and testify the undecaying devotion of its rural inhabitants. When Stuart oppression combined with fanatical zeal to light the flames of civil warfare, and the sword of Cromwell stifled the fury of the great rebellion, the kingly power and the authority of the lords were alone subverted; the courts of law still continued to administer justice on the old precedents; the protectorate parliaments recognised all the statutes of the fallen dynasty; and, with the exception of a change in the family on the throne, the great body of the people perceived but little change in the system of government.*-When the tyranny of the Stuarts could no longer be borne, and the whole people revolted against the arbitrary measures of James II., it was not any new or experimental constitution which they formed, but the old and ancient rights of the people which they re-established; "the people have inherited this freedom," was the emphatic language of the Bill of Rights; and a dynasty was expelled from the throne, without the slightest change in the laws, institutions, or security of the insurgent people.-During the century and a half which has since elapsed, the attachment of the people to the constitution has increased with all the glories of which it was the parent; it withstood the rude shock of American independence, and the contagious poison of French democracy; and brought the country triumphantly through a struggle in which their minds were assailed by deadlier weapons than the sword of Napoleon, or the navies of Europe.

How, then, has it happened that so large a portion of the people should so suddenly and unexpectedly have changed their principles-that the affections, the habits, and the recollections of a thousand years, should at once have been abandoned; and that a revolution, which neither the tyranny of the Normans, nor the frenzy of the Covenant, nor the proscriptions of the Roses, could pro

duce, should have been all but accomplished during a period of profound peace, unexampled prosperity, and unprecedented glory?

The immense majority of the Reformers, indeed, are as unfit to judge of the questions on which they have decided, as they are to solve a question in Physical Astronomy, or follow the fluxionary calculus of La Grange. But still there are other men whose judgment is of a different stamp, who have been carried away by the innovating passion. While every man of sense and experience must perceive in ten minutes' conversation, that nine-tenths of the Reformers are destitute of all the information which is necessary to enable them to form an opinion on the subject, he must also have perceived that there are others, for whose aberrations no such apology can be found; who are possessed of ability, genius, and judgment, in their separate walks of life, and exhibit on this one question a rashness and precipitancy, which stand forth in painful contrast with the maturity and soundness of their general opinions. It is the delusion of such men which forms the real prodigy, and on which history will pause in anxious enquiry into

its cause.

A similar and much more universal delusion prevailed in France during the early years of the Revolution. All there, whether high or low, rich or poor, patrician or plebeian, were earnest in favour of some changes in the political system; and it was not till after the States-General were assembled, that a majority of the noblesse, perceiving the tendency of the current they had set in motion, strove to retard it. But in France a host of real grievances existed, which, if they did not require a revolution for their remedy, at least demanded far-spread changes: the political system was so rotten; the energies of the people so cramped by feudal restraints, that it was impossible to set them free without such fundamental changes as necessarily unhinged the frame of society, and unlocked the perilous torrent of democratic ambition. But in Great Britain, when the fever of innovation began, the reverse of all this was the case. The liberties of the people had not only never been

so great, but they were in a state of rapid and certain progression; the freedom of the press was unbounded; the democratic party was daily ac quiring additional strength in the House of Commons; the close boroughs were at every election yielding to the extended influence of liberal principles; and commercial wealth, doubled since the peace, had overspread the land with unheard of prosperity. The restrictions on the freedom of thought by the Test and Corporation Acts had been abandoned; Catholic Emancipation had been unwillingly conceded to the loud demands of the popular party; a new system of trade, founded on the recommendations of the Whigs, had been adopted; the severities of the criminal code were rapidly disappearing; the burden of taxation had been diminished by L.20,000,000 ayear since the general peace; and the legislature, occupied in plans of practical beneficence, more truly deserved the confidence of the people than it had ever done in any former period of English history. Every man of reflection saw, that so far from Reform being necessary to enable the people to withstand the increasing influence of the Crown and the aristocracy, some additional safeguard for them was loudly called for, to counterbalance the immense increase of democratic power.

For the existence of the Reform passion among any men of sense and information, in such circumstances, it is impossible to discover any satisfactory account on the ordinary principles of human thought. It won't do to say it is a mere mania, which is rapidly subsiding as the eyes of the country become opened to what was proposed to them. It is, no doubt, subsiding among the ignorant millions, who raised the cry for the bill at the late election; and among a vast majority of the men of property, who previously had no decided opinion on the subject, but now perceive the terrible consequences to which it is rapidly leading. But among the thorough-paced Reformers, whether with or without property, there neither has been, nor ever will be, any reaction whatever. Their minds seem differently constructed from those of the conservative party; arguments which appear