"DOWN WITH THE TORIES!" RE-ECHOED FROM ABROAD.

Nuts, 7th January 1833. " Round aud around the sounds were cast, Till echo seemed an answering blast."

ELECTORS of Great Britain and Ireland ! you do not underrate the im- portance or misapprehend the nature of the present conflict with the old enemy of our country's peace and the inveterate cankerworm of our national prosperity. Your great voice is now to decide three fatal questions, on every one of which the liberty of the citizen, the welfare of society, and, it may be, the independence of the empire, is in danger of being cast away. The first is, whether you will allow yourselves to be involved in a Tory war for the maintenance of Aristocratical arid Church abuses at home, and of despotism and soldier-law abroad ; the second, whether the Union of Great Britain and Ireland shall be dissolved in blood—a process already, begun by the Tories at Rath- cormac—or the lesser of your two islands perpetuated as a seminary for despotical statesmen and as a field for the exercise of martial law ; the third, whether your own immediate destinies, your own weal or ‘vo, your own character, honour, and dignity, shall be in your own keeping, subject to your own control, or in the hands and subject to the caprice of the adversary. These are momentous questions ' • and that man is less than an Englishman—once datum et venerabik nomen- who is incapable of being raised by the consideration of them above the sordid interests to which the Tories appeal, and to whose influence over you alone they trust for the success of their machinations. I. For, to put the last first, and begin with what obviously touches you home—though in ever.- one of the three points you are mortally vulnerable—app.-Mend not Mat the present is a contest for merely material reforms, and the eradicating or prolongation of existing abuses : it is political, it is fundamental, it may be final : it is a great social battle for the foundation of all good government and all civil advan- tages—liberty. The Tories cannot maintain themselves on the slippery verge between the world reforming and the world unreformed: to make good their ground, they must back time vehicle, and oblige you to re- trograde. They can only construe the abuses on which they I-ax fat and wanton by disarming you who are bent on attack : they can only save them from extermination by exterminating your political influence. Consider a moment, and ask yourselves bow a Tory Government, though backed by a Tory majority in the House, can stand in the face of your meetings, your unions, your free press, your ten-pound suffrage, your erect and steadfast liberties, your downright British determination, your national, well-known, intractable obstinacy? Tory government and ten-pound voters !—the very words, to use the expression of a great French orator, howl at being coupled together. Tory govern- ment and I. free ;mess, daily and weekly laying bare the festering sores of the State, till the very peasant reekoris them up on his fingers as readily as a laundress the items of her weekly bill ! Tory government in the face of Political Unions, and musters of thousands and hundreds of thousands to protest against misrule ! Tory government in spite of British obstinacy and determination, armed with evely possible weapon of offence, and provided with a thousand denials by which to bear upon the adversary ! Tory government and British liberty, not slumbering as of old time, or proving its vitality only by parading a flag and beating a drum in a septennial uproar, but wide awake, active in reform, no longer enduring but attacking, and demonstrating its force by an irresistible pressure on Government ! Things incompatible cannot be reconciled ; principles so adverse must conflict together till one is de- stroyed ; you must quash your antagonist and deal him a political death, or be politically annihilated yourselves. Believe not that your newly-won political rights, or even your old political privileges, are so impregnably intrenehed in the State as to be unassailable by the sap and mining of Tory warfare. Bethink you what unrepealed acts slumber in your statute-book ; what venomous legislation lurks in the rubbish of your laws; what weapons of legal offence are possibly forgotten by you, be- cause for a moment they have ceased to be brandished in your faces. For example, you perhaps deem that—" lords of your persons though no land besides "—you are at liberty to lend your own strong arms to any free government you are willing to fight for: go forth, and an embargo shall arrest you at the mouth of the Thames, and that in the name of the law. You thought, it may be, that the Tithe question was to lie over till you were at leisure to arrange it a l'amiable : behold! blood is gushing forth by virtue of the law, and men's lives—the lives of your fellow-citizens—are valued at 10s. a head! It needed but a nod from the booted dragoon who has intruded into your Foreign Office to stop your crusade for liberty : but an intimation that the law should take its vigorous course, to open a spring of civil blood—of blood shed for the filthy lucre of a Church dignitary—of a professed minister of Him who shed his blood to save mankind ! You have not a political right, but some forgotten statute, some obsolete law of CHARLES the Second, some neglected morsel of PITT and CASTLEREAGH legislation, will coni strue the exercise of it into sedition, or libel, or breach of the King's peace, or treason, and yourselves into rioters, libellers, or traitors. On the event of this contest, it depends whether the ensuing sessions of Parliament are to be a series of legislative warfare against every right, privilege, or prerogative you possess, or of healing deliberation for the correction of evil and the propagation of good. Ten-pound electors, you must return a House that shall unmake the Tory Government, or the Tory Government will unmake you! You are fire and water in contact—you cannot exist together. Understand your enemy well. These Tories are no new customers: old acquaintance under different names, they have been the sappers of your freedom and the drags on your prosperity ever since the name of liberty was heard in our islands. Had the grand suit that for upwards of two centuries has been at issue therein, arisen in the bloody days of the She-bigot, under some denomination or other they would have been found bandying together as the champions of the fagot and the con- servators of Smithfield fires. Every age has its abomination: power stripped of its old rags will reinvest itself in a fresh suit of tatters; as fast as one abuse is wrested from the conservators of mischief, they will grasp at another. You defend your purses, your fathers bad to defend their mot. They who at this day irsiet on tithing and fleecing you, once asserted their right divine to slit your mews end incarcerate your

persons. In every age there is absese for which they up ; and

beaten out of that, they tithe poet in mother ; met even when the sub- stance is gone, they will worship the shadow. flow long svere angry faces turned to Bourbon France rind Papal Rome in fierce expectittion of the return of the Divine-right Royalty whith you had sent on its travels ? " By and by (said they) he come;" and when he came, the Highlander fought for C 11 A ltLI c, and the Tory drank hie health. Mule- tcoarent and traitors, while they hoped the restoration of their old divinity ; but, hope extinct, they faced about, became the tools of the Revoltitienary Royalty, and have ever einee done their utmost to trans- form it into the express image of the stupid tyranny they had been conlpelled to vomit up. Lnok to the late exercise of the prerogative, and tire audacity with which they have espoused and Mlle it their own. They have never wanted polite:ail boldness in a had cause; in future they will dare more, for then all is at stake. The talent of doing mis- teller, which wicked children manifest on every thing within their reach, gannet certainly be denied them ; " for the power inadequate to all other things, is often more than sufficient for this " Electors, cut short their career, or prepare for roil days to come! Weetid you let the wolf into the fold, because von may chance to turn him out again ? will you not smite him ere he flesh his tooth in a lamb ? Alas ! you cannot ; his tooth lute already drawn blood—the blood of thirteen citizens, massacred to feed a pastor of Christ's flock, is an essay already made by the Horse Gtards on the patience of the English People.

••••On mules and dogs the infi•etiqn first began. At last his vengeful arrows fixed in man."

It is not 'creditable to human nature, though a fact. that distance weakens men's sympathies with the sufferings of their kind ; and a clarinet Of the sea interrupts the current of cordiality that should run thierugh the 'breasts of fellow.citieens. If you will not stanch the blood Of Ireland, expect your own to follow: it is an experiment on your temper; and if you suffer it, a cry shall one day be heard from iGlirsgow, and Manchester shall rue it again in the blood of English- men. As you would transmit to your children the rights you enjoy,

d preserve your persons from civil butchery—Down with the Tories ! H. The British Islands are inhabited by men of a different race ; but slowed as they are, the lesser of them, not interposed between you and the Continent, hut lying on your Atlantic side, seems intended by Nature to be a dependency on her more spacious neighbour, though too great arid too populous to be her subject. It is not your interest that she should he so ; it is no interest of yours that she should be wretched and oppressed, the subject for clerical rapacity, the field for dragoon legislation. A people that will play the tyrant abroad cannot hope, as it certainly does not deserve, to be free at home. The army with which you oppress your neighbour is whetting a sword to cut your own throats. C/ESAR demanded the province of Gaul in order to discipline a _force for the subjugation of Rome : your countrymen, hired by the :Horse Guards with you: money, regimented and employed in thithe. bunting and peasant-slaeghter in Ireland, are in a fair way to ride you down in your own squares, and shoot you at your own door-steads. If your persons are in jeopardy from this dangerous game, your purses are drained by it. Ireland, exasperated by extortion practised on her in- digence, demands the presence of an army, which your enemy com- mands, and which you pay. Ireland, wretchedly poor, racked by the absentee, fleeced by the agent, tithed by the parson, is a burden on your hand, instead of being what Nature designed her, your co-mate and ally, your heckler in battle, your joyous companion in peace—to smooth down British austerity with Hibernian glee. Is it any interest, direct or indirect, of yours that the pastor of thirty-five Protestant souls should levy a thousand a year on an indignant Catholic popula- tion? Or is it your interest, as well as the interest of charity, of religion, of humanity, that the Protestant priest should be paid by the Protestant flock ; and the surplus, in the spirit of Christianity, devoted to the instruction of the poor and the ignorant ? The better your Irish fellow-citizens are educated, the more regularly they will give themselves to the works of peaceful industry, and the more advantageous their union with Britain will become both to them and to you. Remove the causes of exasperation, and you take away the necessity for that army which you pay to shoot your countrymen, at the risk of one day becoming its mark yourselves. You have been now some twenty years at peace ; an interval unusu- ally long, thanks to those who have made ware serious game, and played it in the capitals of war-loving kings. Do not believe, however, that peace is become the necessary condition of European society. A long repose from bloodshed followed the loss of America, yet the war came again ; the Tories had a second turn-out, and you were once more slaughtering and slaughtered all the world over. Has it never occurred to you, what would be your plight if these bigots of corruption, to save the abuses they fatten on, should pick a huge quarrel with France as heretofore, while Ireland remains in the temper wrought in her by par- ser)* rapacity and Orange-Tory police, and a wretchedness enhanced by every year of oppression and misery ? At any rate, whenever, or for whatever you go to war, you must fight as with one hand tied up ; for it is occupied in keeping down a strong man, that would be only too glad to combat by your side, if you would permit him to stand upright and equal with yourself. Ask the great soldier-statesman what Nuatoras replied to his representations, when the Muscovite was crossing the Balkans to reduce the "old ally" of great Britain into a dependency of the Ressian empire?" Look to Ireland." This Great Captain, First Lord oldie Treasury, at the head of the British empire, with a hundred thousand disciplined men and a fleet stronger than the combined fleets of the world, was too feeble to save even the 'Durk from the maw of the Bear. If India was to he defended and saved in European Turkey, then was India lost; and that under the nose of Lord WELLINGTON, who if good for aught as a Minister, should be at least good to clench an armed fist in the face of a foreign invader. But, impotent for good, he is strong only for mischief. He can govern Ireland with the sword, and yourselves too, if you take not heed ; and the Despots, chuckling to see Groat Britain mangling her own brood, while they applaud his administrutioa, will twit him with his impotence to interfere with their own schemes of spoliation. But you dislike foreign war : you are not concerned for the Heck Sea, that in the teeth of British seventy-fours ; or for India, menaced by Russian aggression in every point by which she is assailable. You have not forgotten at least, that a French army

has been in Ireland, and may he there again ;—a French army in Ireland,

N% heti her seven million Cutholits were not, as now, united as one man to stand tip in whatever cause shall promise to redeem them from tithe-

hunting and military ex.ecution. You are at wur, then, with France—a

maritime war—cond.ucted by Tories, with the old pretensions to naval supremacy, and the old arrogation of claims injurious to neutral flags.

How long do you think might this go on before the Tory devil on board your fleet had conjured up the devil in America, and brought Jonathan into the lists in, is third league against you into France ? A single naval disaster, and Ireland—my bones ache to think of it—Ireland lies

alongside of you as a gallant frigate by a stately man of war ; and her fire, if friendly, will gall the foe ; but, if hostile' will be poured into your own

flank—a broadside from your own ally ! Alas, for England ! crippled and maimed in the wing, drooping, dejected, a rankling thorn in her side, the British empire reduced to a single island, bound over to keep the peace by Fraece on the one hand and Ireland on the other, —such is the destiny reserved by Toryism for Great Britain ; such is the destiny she merits by lending her sword to shed the blood of her brethren, and, massacreing Catholics by dozens, to pamper a Protestant clergy out of their indigence. Blood has been shed in the old time, but never shed for cause like this. Citizens hot with civil broils, cooped up within the walls of the same town—an enemy, it may he, lying at anchor in the harbour—have been known to massacre each other without mercy, and to cut the throats of their countrymen to save perhaps their own : but in the annals of no people was it ever before written, that citizens shed citizens' biped for a few shillings per head, and that the ministers of a holy religion presided like officiating priests at the butchery ! " The sun of Douglas," says SCOTT of that feudal house, " set in blood : " in blood has the stun of Toryism risen ; but its por- tentous blaze shall soon sink into twilight ; a premature eclipse shall shear it of its beams ; clouds and thiek darkness shall blot it out from the face of Heaven ; for with your million-tongued voice, electors, you will cry—Douni with the'efories

III. But not only do your own political rights, the reform of abuses, the integrity of your empire' the bonds of brotherhood, hang upon your

suffrages : when you vote for a Representative in Parliament, you. vote, electors, for the peace of Europe or a general war—for a tran- quiliity in which your projected reforms may be brought to good end,.

or a universal uproar, in which they are certain to be frustrated. The Dutch K ng is waiting behind his dikes to see how it shall fare with his Tory allies, and ready to " let slip the dogs of war," if your vote in favour of the Tories shall cry ay. And not the Dutch King only,. but the gang of German Despots, great and small, are hiding the same signal to assert their claim over Luxemburg, Grand Dutchy of their Confederation, by the grace of the Congress at Vienna, and which the good understanding between France and Great Britain has hitherto• obliged them to forego. Is it any interest of yours that the Dutchman. should be master of Belgium by the sword ; and that the Holy Al- liance, intrenched within a three-days' march of Paris, should be daily and hourly provoking France to a breach of the peace of Eu- rope? The latter question needs no answer ; and to resolve the first, ask yourselves if it be your interest, as a free people, that a nation which has shaken off a foreign yoke, and established an independent government, should he made to resume its chains? that the self- delivered captive should be caught and imprisoned again and you free- born Britons appointed the gaolers? You cannot Play the despot abroad but at your own expense : an Englishman asserting arbitrary rule in any climate under the sun is a monstrous contradiction—gives the lie to every recollection that has made that Mime respectable, and commits a parricide on the principle that dignifies and embellishes hie social life. But the entire Netherlands and Luxemburg united under one sceptre, compose a strong barrier against the ambition of France ? How strong, the Revolution of Belgium and theThreeDays of Brussels have convincingly demonstrated. If Ireland is doomed by her position to follow your fortunes, it. is no less true that the fortune of Belgians is bound up with that of France : the largest, most active, intelligent, and intrepid part of her population, is French in lineage and language. You yoke then this alien and reluctant people to the Dutchman' whorl) they hate as cordially as the Tories, if permitted, would make Ireland hate you. How long would these diplomatic bonds hold together two populations so irreconcileably discordant ? Just so long as France' continued to acquiesce in the iron law of Holy Alliance despotism— just so long as thirty millions of ardent and intrepid souls could be cabined and confined within bounds prescribed by foreign dictation. The very first movement which France made to shake herself free— the very first time she stretched out so much as a finger—down would go the Dutch dynasty at Brussels, in spite of Europe in arms ; and a total fusion of the .Belgian with the French people would ensue, as necessarily and irremediably as the amalgamation of two globules of quicksilver rolling together in the bottom of the same basin. But the Belgians, thus driven to incorporate themselves with France, would, if left to themselves and the enjoyment of the independence they have wrought out for their country, most gladly remain a distinct people. An independent state, they will flourish more, win themselves more- trophies in art, science, and literature, than if merged in the em- pire of another people, and reduced to the condition of a depart- ment. As to escape the Dutch yoke they will throw them- selves into the arms of France so they would defend their inde- pendence against France, if the latter should be the aggressor. The neutrality too, with which the new people has been invested, if con- secrated by time, would be a great security. How many states, how many single cities, have stood forages, though etivironed by despots, and with no other protection than an habitual and time-sanctioned indepen. dence which even conquerors feared to violate ? Maintain the integrity and independence of Belgium, and you do your utmost to prevent her union with France ; or you induce France to take the weaker side, and put herself flagrantly in the wrong. Undo the work of your

Liberal Ministry, impose the Dutch yoke on ium, and you sanc- tion the aggressions of France before God an an. The entry of

the Dutch King into Brussels cannot and ought not to have any other ultimate consequence, than his eventual expulsion thence and the ex- tension of France to the banks of the Scheldt.. But the Tories say, no ; we will prevent it. Yee, as yot prevented it in 1794 when the Dttke of Yost, sent by you to gather laurels in Flanders, reaped only diessrnee upon the British arms. Answer then, erectors, before you give your votes, whether it be your interest to maintain the Orarme dynasty at Brussels, and to subject Holland uid Belgium, emedly averse to a union, to the yoke of a despotic royalty ? to hazard all your own home interests, liberty, good government, extended commerce, in the cause of your enemies, and for perpetuating the tyranny abroad

n

which they are beat o setting up at -home? If uot, let your votes sprees this sentiment—Down with the Tories! Turn your eyes now, electors, to the South, and fix them on Spain. A Libel-A Cortes is there struggling, under unparalleled difficulties, to remleern their country, by a healing legislation, from the abyss in which centuries of monarchical and priestly oppression have sunk her. There, too, a kind of lethig Ministry, well-intentioned on the whole, shows a front less bold and erect than a nation looks for in those who administer in its name, and whom it is prepared to fence round with its sympathy, or, if need be, with its arms. There Toryism, resumed in the person of a banished Pretender, is endeavouring with tbe aid of the Basque population—the Highlanders of Spain—to establish once more despo- tion and the Inquisition at Madrid. The game your Tories will play, is marked out by the very posture of things there, which with deeper shedes and more prominent features represents your own Position at home. The game is already begun • the sic nolo, sic jubeo of the dra- goon-Dictator, is already making null and void the convention entered into with France for the pacification of the Peninsula, by the main- tenance of the existing Liberateonstitutions. Yet, considering what the Tories have always professed to be the prime object of their fo- reirn policy—the prevention of French ascendancy in Europe—you will find them here, as well as on the Belgian frontier, playing the game of their enemies, and cutting the throat of their own cause. Spain free, Spain well-governed, her resources developed by a Liberal Administration, is a powerful state' and the best equipoise that Call be established in Western Europe to the preponderance which the Tories profess to dread. Spain, free and Liberal too, is by her position as naturally your friend and ally, as she is averse to a connexion over in- timate with France. Border countries are proverbial for etsliking each other; Spain is no exception to the rule; and this natural aversion has been immeasurably aggravated by hostile and political intervention. Lotus the Fourteenth, in the exultation of his heart, declared on the accession of his grandson to the Spanish throne, " Qu'il n'y avait plus de Pyrenees;" but the affinity of the crowns has, perhaps, only widened the breach between the nations. From you, oil the contrary, Spain has nothing to fear, but every thing to hope. She has no longer any colonies to tempt your cupidity, and you are too old to be lured any longer by the Tory bait of a sugar island or tobacco plantation. You can best supply her with what she wants and at the cheapest rate; and if overborne by her powerful neighbour, it is your sword that, thrown into her scale, will turn the balance in her favour. Your interest is in her freedom and good government, not merely on the narrow principle of jealousy towards France, but on the more liberal ground of sym- pathy in freedom and of extended commerce. Spain, developing her resources by the activity of freedom, becomes a great customer at your market. You know that the custom of nations, like that of indivi- duals, is valuable only in proportion to their means of purchase. The custom of a poor man is worth but little to his neighbour, though he buy of him and of none other. A despotism that fleeces its subjects, and keeps them quiet by keeping them poor, is as unprofitable to your industry as offensive to your principles. Yet this barren and soul-sub- duing regime is what the Torres are bent on bringing back to Madrid in the person of a stupid and priest-beridden Bourbon and this, although they well know that despotism at Madrid renders Spain an appanage of the French monarchy, and condemns her to follow the fortunes of her neighbour. This imbecile Pretender, esta- blished by foreign intrigues and foreign gold on the Spanish throne, and reigning by the fagot of the priest and the sword of the executioner, finds no longer a sure or natural ally in the British Government, even though swayed by Tories. England can never be so despotically drilled as to become a safe confederate to despotism and the Inquisition. The Bourbon of Spain will hang by the Bourbon of France, whether of the elder or younger branch, and the duration of the one dynasty will mea- sure that of the ther. The cries, therefore, are preparing to restore Spain not only to bondage and the Inquisition—not only to her old condition of helpless poverty and stupor—not only to the feebleness which ntakes her weigh as dust in the balance against France—but to the trammels of French diplomacy ; and they tbus manifest an abhorrence of good government strong enough to make them swallow a gross con- tradiction. However, they know their game: they hate France ; but they love Church, Corporate and Government abuses; they delight in dragormades, tithe-slaughter, and a perpetual scuffle between power and the people ; they are wedded to despotism wheresoever ; and by espous- ing its cause in Spain and Belgium, they are fighting you, the electors of Great Britain and Ireland, on foreign ground ; they are combating Reform, though it be a reform of Smithfield fires--of autos dafe ; they are putting doun a dangerous example; they are precluding good government everywhere, to shut it out from your sight, and make you submit the more readily to misrule. They would combat a revolution in Japan, if by any chance a vessel of yours touching thereat could bring home one idea more in favour of reform, or tincture a single bosom with a deeper shade of hatred for abuse.

Let us do the Tories justice : inconsistency is the vice with which they are least chargeable. Ever since their existence as a party, they have been lovers of despotism ; driven from one shrine, they have worshipped it at another, and returned like dogs to their vomit. There was no liberty to take offence at in the days of ELIZABETH, or they 'Would have made a faction against her ; caballed for the gloomy bigot of Spain—married to the late she-bigot at borne—and s'oad out for the prerogative of fire and fagot. They would hove represented the extinction of the abuses in Smithfield as dangerous to the Con- stitution, and called the humane people who formed associations to put them out, Destructives. That this inference is no libel upon their political temper, is proved by invariable and subsequent experience. They clung to the nose-slitting, ear-croppieg dynasty, as twig as a hope Of its restoration existed. They were cordial unto France, and haters of Holland, as long as France was priest-ridden and despotical, and WNW a name dear to freedom. I mnce, presuming to govern her- self and eradicate the abuses of the old time, has become the especial object of their detestation ; and Holland, brought under the yoke of dynimty, finds herself their darling. As they can no longer toast the Grand Mormarque, supported by the mitre, and reigning by dragonnadea and levees de cdehet, , they have transferred their affections to Berlin, to Vienna, and found the prime object of their adoration at St. Peters.. burg. Should the Russian slave ever break his chains, their pilgrim- age will be extended to Pekin. Wherever despotism retreats, they will smell it out, and fawn upon it. Mien the States of Sweden remonstrated with the mad King of Bem- der, Citentels the Twelfth swore he would send one of his jack-boots to preside over their meetings. The jack-boot is installed in your Foreign Office. 'rake it down, electors, or suffer the worst of mortal hardships—injuria cum contuwelia. You must not look for a precipi- tate, much lees it voluntary retreat. Its only merit is, its toughness and obduracy. It has taken up its post, and will wait till the fourth hour in hopes of the Prussians. But it is a flit cry to Berlin and Petersburg: you will beat it back into the wood, which cuts off its retreat, avid where, though its infantry may escape by throwing away their arms, its cavalry, its ordnance, all that makes time strength of an army, is yours. " I p, electors, and at him !" let your battle cry be- " Dowu with the Tories ! '' and all the Continent shall answer and say AMEN.