WHIGS OVERDRAWING THEIR POLITICAL CREDIT.
MINISTERS, professing as they do to claim the national support to their financial and commercial measures, would do well to refrain from demanding, on the credit of those contemplated reforms, support to more questionable items of their policy. When Lord Joust ResseLe says, "Forget for a time our differences of opinion, and help us to raise the additional revenue required without im- posing additional taxes," he meets with a ready response. But when he says, " Because we have devised a plan to raise the addi- tional revenue without imposing additional taxes, approve of our policy in Syria, Afghanistan, and China ; agree with me that further organic reforms are unnecessary ; and admit that we treated Lovett and Collins with exemplary lenity," he forces honest men, who would have cooperated with him, to stand aloof. He disgusts men by insisting upon their expressing approbation of his pet opinions at the very moment he calls upon them to hold their own in abeyance. Lord JOHN did this in his speech at the London Tavern ; and his Whiglings are imitating him in every quarter— and they will call those " impracticables ' whom they thus wan- tonly drive from their side. When the Whigs insist upon our swallowing every niaiserie of which they have been guilty for the last ten years, along with their nibble at the Corn-laws, they remind us of Falstaff's " one halfpenny-worth of bread to this intolerable quantity of sack." They are like a man drawing on a banker for a thousand pounds on the strength of a deposit of twenty pounds.
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