have shewn themselves unfit to rule. The Turk is a military tyrant, of all tyrants the worst. He is beyond the hope of improvement, and he will not suffer it to approach others. Turkey is a rock in the ocean of civilization, on which no seed will grow, and to which no keel dares draw near. The barbarism of the Caucasus lives at this hour fresh and grim within the walls of the Seraglio. As well might we desire to see the fairest district of the earth stript of men, and colonized by wolves, as desire to see the robbers of the Euxine the perpetual lords of Greece. But the English Government is bound by ancient treaties: It must not commit the national crime of a breach of faith for the most flattering views-it has not learned the revolutionary maxim, that the end can justify the means-and it must wait, and be content to wait, the wisdom by which Providence opens a guiltless way to the success of the righteous cause. Greece will be free: The barbarities which have sullied its cause will disappear with the few years that carry down this generation to the grave of their fathers. The slave has till now only felt that he has a sword. He fights in desperation, for he fights for life and revenge. The time may not be far off, when he will feel that revenge is unworthy of the successful soldier, and that the most glorious prize of man is Constitutional freedom. He will turn from revenge to rights-wild revolt will be matured and purified into generous resistancethe savage soil will teem with a noble moral fertility-and, as the desolation of war, worse than that old Ogygian flood, subsides, what was flung out stones, shall warm and soften into men. But all these prospects, that seemed enough to have roused a passion in the hearts of unsophisticated human beings, passed like the shows of a phantasmagoria before the lordly sitters on the party bench. No matter who might weep or rejoice, they had no relationship to the business." What's Hecuba to them, or they to Hecuba." If Hone had sounded his trumpet outside the doors, they would have felt it the last of derelictions to leave the mountebank to exhibit his ribaldry alone; the reluctant purses of Whiggism would have been opened to him, and Punch have been overwhelmed in a shower of their benevolence and their applause. But the Greek Manifesto contained nothing of the massacre of the priesthood, or the divine right of the mob to drag kings and nobles to the guillotine; it had unwittingly left out the necessary pledge to the abolition of all religious belief, and, with an unwise ignorance of men, had confined itself to a demand of national freedom. In the face of the subscription for Hone, for Carlisle, for Cobbet, for Wilson-for every real and presumed hater of the Constitution, the Greeks had the imprudence to present their claims to the Board. Their advocate was treated with contempt, and their petition flung under a table covered with compliments and contributions to afflicted riot, decrepit treason, and atheism, preparing for its transit to New South Wales. From the extent of this charge I exempt the higher leaders. What they have done, I believe they have done reluctantly, in bitter compliance with the subordi nate mischief-making activity-that under-current of low and subtle atrocity, which is, after all, the master of the stream. Their unfortunate determination to be at the head of a party, let that party be what it might, has compelled them to the heavy necessity of suffering their honour to be involved in the common disgrace of Jacobinism. They are objects, perhaps, as much of compassion as of blame. But they cannot now separate themselves from the ignominy of the cause. Having once resolved that it is "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," the portion and destiny of their diadem is henceforth, that it must be tarnished by the smoke of their dungeon for ever. The present Session has opened with prospects of considerable difficulty. But the difficulty is more parliamentary than national-more advantageous to the clamourers against administration than disastrous to the empire. I would not undervalue agriculture, nor doubt that a healthy and thriving farming population must make a mighty constituent of the strength of every enduring empire. But the great active wealth of nations, and eminently of England, must be raised from her arts and commerce. No country ever attained to a commanding opulence by the tillage of the ground. The earth is not an ungenerous mother, but she will not pamper her children. Farming is a trade, but it has been pronounced, upon the best authorities, to be a poor man's trade, in the ordinary circumstances of the world. The splendid superfluity that in old times made such fragments of territory as Tyre and Carthage equal to the vast uncommercial fields of the Asiatic and the Roman, and, in our day, has poured a strength to fight the world's battle into an island, was the overflowing of the golden horn of arts and commerce. The trade of the country has revived, and thus there is no actual danger of the national supremacy. But agricultural distress might be turned into a formidable weapon by an Opposition that had not altogether degraded its name. No ministry can despise the sincere demand of the County Members; and we may be perfectly assured that the scrupulousness of the present Opposition will not be deterred from using this ponderous instrument, through any delicacy as to the mischiefs which their awkwardness and violence may inflict on the general interests of the empire. The origin and nature of the agricultural distresses have been wrapped up in the common envelopes that ignorance, passion, and above all, party have ready for every thing. Like a consultation of quacks round the bed of a patient sick of nothing but their nostrums, every partizan presses forward his own panacea. The Whig finds the cure in the overthrow of Administration, and avows his faith in national bankruptcy. The Radical swears by Parliamentary Reform; and Mr Hume, in solitary grandeur, finds it through a chaos of financial blundering. But in this conflict one small voice has been heard, and it is, for honesty and truth, superior to them all-the voice of the farmer crying out for a reduction of his Rent. True suffering makes fools wise. The farmer feels where "his withers are wrung;" and willing as he may be to shake off all other burdens, however necessary to the state, he knows that the one resistless burden is the rent contracted for when corn was twice its present value, and which must still be paid up to the uttermost farthing. The causes of this pressure have been so perplexed by obscure or factious views, that I must be allowed to give their brief explanation. And first, to strike away the fictitious causes. It has not been produced by Mr Peel's bill, for it existed four years before the bill. It has not been produced by the depreciation of paper; because that depreciation, if it existed at all during the war, was next to nothing, and cannot have existed since cash payments. It has not originated in the taxes; for, during the war, agriculture flourished under taxes heavier by twenty millions. Nor has it arisen, (and here I speak with great deference to opposite opinions,) from the superabundant cultivation of the soil, aided by what we must then strangely and presumptuously call the cruel prodigality of the seasons. There is no such superabundance of food for the individual. The great leading cause is pronounced in one word, WAR. The different operations of this mighty minister of good and evil all run into one central channel-the increase of the national circulation. The closing of cash payments at the Bank allowed an issue of the countrynotes, boundless as the wants of the country, the eagerness of mercantile and agricultural speculation, and almost as the desperate and capricious gambling of men running all hazards for sudden opulence. The cargoes of the world flowed into the English ports, and every cargo discharged into the great reservoir, raised a cloud of its paper representatives, that flew to the extreme ends of the land. But there they stopped. England was surrounded by a wall of iron too high for their flights. The bank-note was worthless on the continent. The sullen Avernian stream between us and the French empire was not to be fluttered over on paper-wings. Thus, among ourselves, all was flow and no ebb; we had perpetual creation, but no mortality. The prices of all agricultural commodities, (the only field in which machinery cannot run the race against an accumulated currency, and vanquish it at last in cheapness,) rose, were doubled, tripled, quadrupled. If the circulation had been gold, equally prohibited from passing the flammantia mania of the continent, its accumulation would have produced the same result. The War (and if ever the arm of man was raised in a cause worthy the expenditure of his blood, and the hazard of all things but his honour, it was in that fearful invasion of the liberties of the earth,) was the origin of that increase, the diminution of which leaves agriculture to lean upon the broken staff of party. A hundred millions of circulation created in any country completely isolated, even though thatcirculation were sea-shells, or beads, or bits of leather,must increase the farming prices in a close proportion to its increase of the general currency. Corn must be bought, and when men have more coin, or its substitute, to give, they must give more. The landlord waits with a longing eye for the expiration of his lease, to pounce upon the profits of the farmer. The farmer himself often becomes a landlord, and is succeeded by the less lucky race who keep up the verity of the proverb, "that the poor will never be wanting in the land." The cessation of war breaks up the whole succession. No resumption of cash payments had time to mingle its shadow with the clouds that suddenly gathered over the head of the empire, even while it was in a blaze with the glories of triumph new risen. The return of commerce to the different harbours of Europe, the resumption of their own fabrics, the revival of credit among the closed and desolated Firms of the Continent, were the sources of our decayed trade. The fury of the inundation had subsided; and the group of Industry, Opulence, and National Spirit, which had been huddled together in that mountain of safety which England offered to the world, might now go down and take their several ways in hope to their own shattered homes. In this universal change, the evil shock fell upon two nations, the only two that had profited by the war. America, the carrier of Europe, saw her ships naturally abandoned for native bottoms; and unpressed as she is by the burdens which furnish the exhaustless topics of English Radical declamation, with her soil unsullied by an established religion, or a hereditary throne, scarcely touched by taxes, and poorly parsimonious in her allowances for the decency and comfort of her government,-was reduced to unheard-of distress. Had America been a fully settled territory, she must have been undone, for her habitual livelihood was extinguished. She had no manufactures to summon back the spirit of departed trade; and desperate and perpetual bankruptcy must have followed. But she has a world for the dispersion of her discontents. The ruined merchant abandons his counting-house, and colonizes the wilderness. In England, the first shock fell on the manufacturing and mercantile population. The purse of Europe dropped from their hands with its commerce. What they did not receive they could not give; and this vast population of seven millions! after listening to the rebellious whispers which told them that Revolution alone would give them bread, forced down the prices of the farmer, by his own necessity of taking what he could get. The return of peace had made the manufacturer peor; and when the buyer is poor, the seller cannot long keep up his old extortion. All prices were thus lowered. To this was added the cessation of the government contracts, acting equally on the manufacturer and the farmer. Thirty millions were thus deducted from the means of both. Lastly, came the return to cash payments, which extinguished another great sum of the circulation; and left, of the entire, not more than half. The issue of the country banks, at one period of the war, was thirty-three millions ;-a sum exceeding the rental of the two Houses of the Legislature. Of this, a vast quantity has gone into dust and air. In this diminution of the national apparent wealth, which, for all its temporary purposes, was as real as if it had been gold or diamonds, all incomes have been diminished but those of the landlord. His rent stands in the old characters of high prices and war. He must have the pound of flesh. It is so written in the bond. The grand remedy then must be, the reduction of the general rental. A wise government will, in the meantime, apply itself to all the reductions which can lighten taxation; and the abolition of the lazy encumbrances of useless Boards and idle pensioners, left hanging on them by the economy of the Fox administration. There are but two alternatives to the reduction of rents, the instant resumption of paper payments, and the abolition of the national debt. Whiggism, mad and monstrous as its theories have been, dares no more than glance at either. The first would overset commerce like the blast of a whirlwind, the other, beginning by infinite misery among ourselves, would scatter the wealth of England abroad, and destroy her moral reputation and physical means beyond hope of return. The newspapers are already overflowing with the Opposition energies on those topics. But a part of the secret history of those debates is, that Mr Hume, notwithstanding his private bureau of half a dozen clerks, has talked himself out of all credit with both sides. His ambi tion in taking the lead on the Address, has grievously offended the Elders of the Party; and he has been formally left to struggle his own puzzled way. Mr Brougham, another instance of luckless aspiration, has been, with similar disdain, left to exhibit his solitary figure in "dance uncouth," and go, without a partner, through the eternal minuet of his harangues on finance, those melancholy and antiquated paradings, which always leave the Artiste where they found him. Sir James Mackintosh, (for among such a set even HE is something) overwhelmed with disgust, indolence, and obvious contempt of his assistants, prefers the feeble dalliance of a Holland-house conversazione, to the dull garrulity of his friends in the Commons; and it is more than probable, that Mr Tierney, more tired of obscurity than even of Grey Bennet, or late sittings, will resume the abdicated throne." WORKS PREPARING FOR PUBLICATION. LONDON. Travels along the Mediterranean, and parts adjacent, extending as far as the second Cataract of the Nile, Jerusalem, Damascus, Balbec, Constantinople, Athens, Joannina, the Ionian Isles, Malta, Sicily, Naples, &c. performed in the years 1816, 1817, 1818, in company with the Earl of Belmore. By Robert Richardson, M. D. Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in London, 1822. Speedily will be published, in one vol. 8vo, Chinzica, a Poem, in Ten Cantos, founded on that part of the History of the Pisan Republic, in which is said to have originated the celebrated Triennial Festival, called the Battle of the Bridge. A System of Analytic Geometry, by the Rev. Dionysius Lardner, A. M. of the University of Dublin, and Member of the Royal Irish Academy. This work will contain, Part 1st, a complete system of Conic Sections, proved by the application of the principles of Algebra, according to the method of Des Cartes. Also the Theory of Curves, of the higher order, with the application of the Differential and Integral Calculus to them. The Second Part will contain the principles by which the properties of the Curved Surfaces may be investigated by the same method, and the investigation of the figures and properties of Curved Surfaces of the second order. Hellas; a Dramatic Poem, on the Greek model, in reference to the present state of affairs in Greece. By Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mr Barry Cornwall has in the press a volume of Poems, containing the Flood of Thessaly; the Girl of Provence; and the Letter of Boccaccio. The Temple of Romance, and other Poems. By Stannard Melmoth. The Principles of Practical Perspective, or Scenographic Projection. By Mr Robert Brown, in a royal 8vo volume, with 51 Engravings. Cotman's Antiquities, Part IV. and last. Far advanced at press, Public Men of all Nations, containing above 2000 lives of living public characters, with 150 engraved Portraits. To form three volumes, the size of Debrett's Peerage. The Beauties of Jeremy Taylor, with a Memoir of his life. By Mr Melmoth. Mr Children has in the press a Translation of Professor Bergelius's Work on the use of the Blow-pipe in Chemical Analysis, and Mineralogical Investigation. In octavo, with Engravings. Elements of Self-Knowledge; or a Familiar Introduction to Moral Philosophy. By Rev. Thomas Finch. The Orlando Inamorato of Berni, translated by William Stewart Rose. It will be followed by the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. The first number of a Literary Maga zine, in the French Language, will be pub lished on the 1st of March. To contain the useful and elegant Arts, Poetry, and Literature, Science, Criticism, &c. &c. Mr Overton has in the press, an Inquiry into the Truth and Use of the Book of Enoch, as it respects his Prophecies, Visions, and account of fallen Angels, such Book being at length found in the Ethiopic canon, and put into English by Dr Laurence. Mr Cochrane's Treatise on Chess will shortly appear. A Comparative View of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies. By Granville Penn. MrCrabb, author of English Synonymes, explained, has in the press a Technological Dictionary, containing Definitions of all Terms of Art or Science. To be published in monthly parts, and completed in 2 volumes, 4to. Observations on the Influence of Manners upon the Health of the Human Race -more particularly as it regards Females in the higher and middle classes of Society. 1 vol. demy, 8vo. By R. Palin, M. D. of Newport, Salop. A Critical and Analytical Dissertation on the Names of Persons. By John Henry Brady. Lieutenant Marshall is preparing for the Press a Naval Biography, to consist of Genealogical, Biographical, and Historical Memoirs of all the Flag-Officers, Captains, and Commanders of his Majesty's Fleet, living at the commencement of the Year 1822. In the Press, a Third Edition of Headlong-Hall. In the Press, Maid Marian, a Tale, in one volume. Memoirs and Select Remains of an Only Son. By Rev. Tho. Durant. Mr Bridgens's Work, containing coloured representations of the Customs and Manners of France and Italy, with a descriptive Account of the Plates, by the late Dr Polidori, is now complete. It forms an interesting volume of 50 coloured Plates, and is particularly illustrative of Italian Customs. Monarchy revived, being the personal History of Charles II. from his earliest youth to his Restoration, illustrated by numerous portraits of historical characters. In the Press, the Bridal of Caölchairn, and other Poems. By John Hay Allan. |
