THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE AND THE SPIRIT OF LORD

LONDONDERRY.

I should hold myself obliged to conform to the temper I found universally in mg ow a day.' " I propose. by removing the ground of' the differenee, to be permanent satisfaction- to your people."—Burke to the House 4V. COMM(Mq. in 1775.

PARIS, February 1835. Tim past experience of Great Britain will be vainly consulted for a Parliament opening under more critical circumstances, or preparing to legislate on more important interests, than the one whose first act has demonstrated its intention to take its own course and be guided by its own judgment. Though the matter in debate affected only the House,. yet the whole empire and even foreign nations hung upon its first vote, to draw from it an augury of the future and an indication of its spirit.

So far good : the country smiles on its Representatives, and the na- tions abroad respire again. Berne Vorort feels confidence rallying at its So far good : the country smiles on its Representatives, and the na- tions abroad respire again. Berne Vorort feels confidence rallying at its

heart, and Carlism blasphemes at Paris and Madrid. Ex pede Herculent —the Commons stand pledged by their first move not to allow another session to pass over without decisive results, and the solution of long- pending problems. Whether they act or only talk, whether they legis- late for nations or for mousetraps, they cannot evade the fatality of their position. Their activity will have long-descending consequences, and their strenua inertia will not retard events coming fast and faster

on in the fulness of time.

The great national interest, at this moment, is the consolidation of the British Union, by the removal of whatever injustices, inherited from past ages, contribute to propagate discord among classes of

citizens, and between portions of the empire. The great national-suit now pending is pacific amelioration in favour of the People, against the conservation of abuses in favour of persons and classes. The ad- vocates on the national side are every honest Reformer in the House; the advocates on the side of abuse are the Tory Ministers and adhe- rents. The Country is itself at once plaintiff, audience, and judge. The Nation, which possesses itself, and is possessed by none, conde- scends to plead against minute fractions of its own body ; but when the verdict has been pronounced, it still remains for the Nation to ratify or

annul it. It will hear what its particles have to say in support of their claim to possess the whole ; but when all is said and done, it can no more be divested of its power over its own members, than a man can be disinherited of the use of his limbs. It will submit to treat where

it could command, because it loves itself, and is tender even of its peccant parts ; but if the terms sought to be imposed are aught but Just, it will take measures to force the rebellious particles to cry peccavi. This is the ultimo ratio populorwm which a Reformed Parlia- ment has again assembled to preclude; and it can be precluded only by the full and absolute satisfaction which prudence exhorts and justice demands. Respice finem : we wait the issue. The English People, that are politically one, are theologically speak- ing twos and that is no trifling distinction in a land where God is worshipped with the fervour of men who look forward with religious awe to the long hereafter. This fact, which scepticism cannot pro- perly estimate, is one that has led HUME the historian, among others, into much ill-placed sarcasm on ceremonial punctilios, and miscalcula- tion of the weight of the respective causes which brought on our civil commotions. He saw only the outward sign—frivolous enough, it is true ; the mighty thing signified, an Atheistical philosophy could not appreciate. Some people here have made a similar mistake in their estimate of the matter lately debated by the English press. Un Sutton on an Abercromby—Peter or Paul—niais, c'est tine misere I And the National thereupon to put out a string of sarcasms at a "great nation" reduced to the discussion of such-like puerilities ! But what? the great nation has just been delivered, not without throes, of a House of Commons, and hung with the interest of a mother on the first accents of its offspring. It desired to be fully satisfied of its strength and vitality. The babe has spoken, and that lustily; and the great nation, which feels mcv sensibly th in the National can be supposed to do, the vital importance of a lusty representation at this crisis, was justified in being interested as to what would be the strength of its first cry. In fact, the great nation ingloriously proposes, if not obstructed by Toryism, to settle its differences by Parliamenty debates, as a civilized community in the nineteenth century ought to do. Its pike and gun work has been done three hundred years. The National, who looks forward to no such solution, and laughs at all who dream of its

possibility, makes a mock of the matter, because it sees only Peter and Paul, the outward and visible sign, and has no faith in the reality of the thing signified.

But theological differences are only politically important when made the grounds of civil distinctions and disabilities ; which, indefensible enough in themselves, are beyond measure galling, when connected with the dogmas of religious creeds. One man feels the salvation of his soul more assured by this mode of worship than by that; and atones for the exercise of his judgment in a matter of eternal interest, by temporal inferiority and exclusions. His belief is commanded by one set of articles more imperatively than by another, and he is sentenced to pay for the propagation of tenets which he holds least salutary to his immortal part. The pretensions of the soi.disant Church of .England to exclusive privileges, and to a maintenance at the expense of those who dissent from, equally as of those who embrace her doctrines, are a source of irreconcileable difference between the two great portions of the English People ; and the history of the past, and the nature of man, make it obvious to all who have any knowledge of either, that time can only widen the breach. Certainly, if in time past heartburnings and intestine troubles have been perpetuated by such injustices, experience tells with additional force against them at the present day, and gives no prospect of fairer weather to-morrow; inasmuch as the disposition to remove inequalities, originally founded in ignorance, fanaticism, and violence, grows more confirmed in proportion as the sense of justice, natural to men, is quickened by knowledge and reflection. Therefore, in opposition to the great end wise Lord LONDONDERRY (Durham Dinner), it may be 1 eld, that if the " spirit of the Constitution" be to perpetuate a gross inju.tice, like that of taxing men for the dissemina- von of doctrines to which they don't adhere, and founding civil or rational inequalities on religious differences, it must either "succumb" (the great and wise lord's own word) to the " spirit of the age," or be confounded by it. The Constitution is here tnken as understood by the great and wise lord, and the party he represents, to mean a conibina- tion of means for living at the expense of the community. The real Constitution is, in theory at least, a scheme for protecting rights and justice ; and the spirit of that Constitution is in perfect harmony with the spirit of an age w.hich wills right and justice. The question at issue is between Lord LONDONDERRY'S spirit and the spirit of Englishmen ; between the spirit of the Constitution, as understood by Tories, and the same spirit as conceived by reason and humanity ; and whether the meeting of these two hostile spirits—for hostile they are, even to the degree of irreconcileable enmity—be a violent collision, in which justice and mercy may flee up to heaven, or a gradual but irresistible pressure of the one upon the other, till the peccant spirit is evaporated, depends on the ability of the Reformers in the Hou,e of Commons to displace the friends of the great and wise lord now intruded into office, and to substitute prudent statesmen, disposed to " conform to the temper universally prevalent in their own day." Among the principles of a departed statesman, lately appealed to by a Tory Magazine as furnish- ing a rule for the conduct of the Whigs, there is not one so con- vincingly inculcated as the necessity of legislating in the spirit of the age ; and his writings testify to nothing more pointedly and solemnly than the" abhorrence" of the Tories for "governing in concurrence with the will of the People." Is the House of Commons, then, inspired with the spirit of Mr. BURKE, Of the spirit of Lord LONDONDERRY? which will it cast out as unclean, the spirit of amelioration, or the spirit of resistance and violence? That is the question ; and as it shall be answered, our children and our children's children will bless or execrate its memory.. The Commons of the Nation are met in Parliament, not to prosely. tize in favour of any religion, but to consult for the maintenance of peace among them all. Their mission is to put down whatever causes of disagreement exist, and te preclude all that threaten to arise. Some nineteen or twenty years ago, the restoration of the legitimate and most Christian Bourbons rekindled fanaticism in France, to a degree that the Catholic populaces of the South, by the number of assassinations perpe- trated on the persons of their Protestant fellow citizens, appeared to be preluding a second St. Barthelemy. The Chambers of Deputies which have succeeded each other during the interval, though some deplorable, and all illiberal, have, upon the whole, dealt so evenly with the parties, whom gross partiality would have rendered irreconcileable, that among the afflictions reserved by Providence for the scourge of Christian com- munities, France seems at length to he secured at least against the re- currence of religious broils. From the Chamber of Deputies down to a chamber of commerce, the Protestant sits by the Catholic and a man's creed is known only to his neighbour and his God. The State pro- tects, indifferently, all religions, and allows none to domineer over and practise extortion upon another. What a happy repose from strife, in a land which has been visited with a St. Barthelemy, the dragoonades of Louis the Fourteenth, and the more recent massacres of Nismes ! And this blessing the land owes to a moderately impartial and reasonably intelligent legislation. What a contrast is here offered to a state of

things where the Churchmen, on the one hand, tithes and taxes the Dissenter, and, on the other, sponges a Catholic population and shoots

all who resist his extortions. A system like this would have set France in.a blaze, and kindled a religious war, to be sopited only in the blood of myriads. Let the Anglican Clergy thank the superior longanimity of

an oppressed people, whom their journals insult daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, with an exhaustless variety of abuse, if Catholics in Ire-

land discover a forbearance which populations of their creed have in no age or country ever before exemplified. Their Prime Alinister talks of extending" the legitimate influence" of the Protestant Church ; and the iniquitous system he upholds is one by which Catholicism flourishes like cucumbers on a hotbed.

The Commons will remember that they are statesmen and legislators, not diviaes ; and that the object of their labours is not the salvation of

men's souls by one faith more than another' but the salvation of the great temporal interest of peace and union by justice and impartiality. They will not endure, as BURKE says, a leader in their House, whose

Church Reform consists in regularizing injustice and consolidating wrong ; whose aim is not to deal equitably between rival religions, but to "extend the influence" of one at the cost of another ; who puts forth, by the medium of his journals, an ultimately expensive scheme of pro- selytizing, under the oily denomination of a " schemeof religious instruc- tion," to be "completed " by "a liberal addition" to the income of a Church already exceeding in amount the ecclesiastical revenues of the rest of Europe; and who insults the common sense of the country by appointing bigoted Churchmen to inquire into Church abuses, and prelates to retrench their own pluralities—and of the Dissenting com- munity by proffering them the grievance complained of for the remedy, at the same time that he rekindles whatever embers of fanaticism lurk in its bosom, by the prospect of an active warfare against its tenets, to be carried on, in part, at its own expense. The House of Commons, consisting of citizens and lawmakers, will see in a bill to this effect only the emanation of a priest, and not the plan of a statesman anxious to eradicate distinction and compose differences that needlessly distract the community. They will take their own course, pursue their own mis- sion, which is religious and political amelioration. They will not in the nineteenth century, and in the birthplace of liberty and toleration, suffer the existence of unjust and oppressive inequalities, perpetuating distrac- tion and often leading to bloodshed, which have disappeared from every part of Europe, where religion is aught better than gross superstition, and where there is any thing like freedom and civilization. The spirit with which they treat religious grievances they will carry into all other extant abuses and unjustifiable inequalities. They are

the Representatives of the People ; and Mr. BURKE has laid it down as a first principle, that" the government of a country should be cones- pondent to its legislature." This principle is at once conclusive against the administration of a party whose practically-exemplified and everaivowed maxim is, to "govern without the concurrence of the People ;" which, by the mouth of its intended Ambassador to a foreign power, declares its purpose to be, to force the spirit of the age into conformity with its own narrow and selfish spirit ; which already, by its printed organs, and in obvious anticipation of au apprcaching dis- comfiture, announces its intention to obtain this conformity by re- peated dissolutions of Parliament (encore une fois, gore le pot de fir!); and which, finally, by the tongue of the rejected candidate for Aliddle- sex and lieutenant of dragoons, avows its uhinta ratio—its last resource against acquiescence in the verdict of the People—to be the Army; which it has preserved in so pure a spirit, and flogged with so much tenderness. 'this fundamental principle of Toryism, this ultimate appeal to the sword, if persuasion is unavailing, which grey heads and goose-quills darkly hint in types and qualify as " moral energy,"- "just and powerful government," and so forth, has at length, in sheer nakedness and native ugliness, proceeded out of the mouth of babes. and sucklings. The House of Commons, in the year of Grace 1835,. deputed by nearly a million electors, two centuries after the declaration of rights forced on a British Monarch—a century and a half of free discussion under a Revolutionary dynasty—after the example of America, taxed and dragooned into independence—and the treinendous. warning of the French Revolution, exasperated into horrible excesses by men who stiekled for their privileges and vapoured about" moral energy —are expected to endure a Government which, by every mouthpiece, organ, and channel, announces the fatal spirit that in every age and country has provoked a sanguinary resistance and induced a final catastrophe. " Whom God would destroy," says an old poet, " he first bereaves of understanding :" the Tories are struck with spiritual blindness, to the degree of not knowing that this is the nine- teenth century, and that those to whom they speak and write are Englishmen ; that their fiction is a minority composed of every class, corporation, and individual, that has a corrupt interest, and that it is opposed to a community which has no interest but the everlasting, and, in the long run, invariably triumphant one, of right and justice; To this community the Commons belong. The Faction has done its worst in the way of corruption and intimidation, and is yet "found wanting ;" it may perpetrate much michisf, but will r.ever make itself

a majority ; and if the Commons tolerate its administration, they doom the country—for a time at least—to the worst evil that can befal a state —the government of a jealous and vindictive minority. But they will condemn it out of its own mouth, which runs over with anticipations of violence. Their mission is not to coerce, suppress, gag, suspend, shoot, and dragoon, for the conservation of mischief; but to heal, redress, emancipate, reconcile, and compose, for the preservation of union and peace. They will not let a single occasion pass of recording their deter.. mination to legislate in the spirit of the age, and not in the spirit of

LONDONDERRY; and to endure no Government whose maxim is to rule in defiance of the People. They will remember that a vast constituency,

whose ears yet tingle with the promises and pledges of their candidates, and the great British community, await justice and redress at their hands; and will not pardon the least tampering with a Ministry which insults the Nation by sending Lord LONDONDERRY to represent it in any country under the sun.